Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Cosmic Ray 'Hot Spots' Bombarding Earth With Cosmic Rays


Science Daily
Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:55 UTC
A Los Alamos National Laboratory cosmic-ray observatory has seen for the first time two distinct hot spots that appear to be bombarding Earth with an excess of cosmic rays. The research calls into question nearly a century of understanding about galactic magnetic fields near our solar system.

Joining an international team of collaborators, Los Alamos researchers Brenda Dingus, Gus Sinnis, Gary Walker, Petra Hüntemeyer and John Pretz published the findings November 25 in Physical Review Letters.
hot spots in orion
© John Pretz, P-23An international team of researchers, using Los Alamos National Laboratory's Milagro observatory, has seen for the first time two distinct hot spots that appear to be bombarding Earth with an excess of cosmic rays. The hot spots were identified in the two red-colored regions near the constellation Orion.

"The source of cosmic rays has been a 100-year-old problem for astrophysicists," Pretz said. "With the Milagro observatory, we identified two distinct regions with an excess of cosmic rays. These regions are relatively tiny bumps on the background of cosmic rays, which is why they were missed for so long. This discovery calls into question our understanding of cosmic rays and raises the possibility that an unknown source or magnetic effect near our solar system is responsible for these observations."
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Info

Amoeba tracks prompt rethink over early life

Devin Powell
New Scientist
Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:08 UTC
Fossil tracks on the seabed could be the handiwork of oversized amoebas that roamed the ocean 1.8 billion years ago, if their modern counterpart is anything to go by.

While exploring the Bahamas, Mikhail Matzof the University of Texas at Austin discovered a new species of giant amoeba called Gromia sphaerica.
giant amoeba
© Mikhail Matz/University of Texas at AustinThe ancestors of a giant amoeba that roams the seabed today (inset) may have left fossil tracks 1.8 billion years ago.

As the grape-sized protozoan rolls along the ocean floor, it sucks up and spits out sediment, leaving behind long grooves and ridges.
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Better Earth

The eco machine that makes water out of thin air

Ed Pilkington
Guardian.co.uk
Mon, 24 Nov 2008 05:08 UTC
Water, Water, everywhere; nor any drop to drink. The plight of the Ancient Mariner is about to be alleviated thanks to a firm of eco-inventors from Canada who claim to have found the solution to the world's worsening water shortages by drawing the liquid of life from an unlimited and untapped source - the air.

The company, Element Four, has developed a machine that it hopes will become the first mainstream household appliance to have been invented since the microwave. Their creation, the WaterMill, uses the electricity of about three light bulbs to condense moisture from the air and purify it into clean drinking water.

The machine went on display this weekend in the Flatiron district of Manhattan, hosted by Wired magazine at its annual showcase of the latest gizmos its editors believe could change the world. From the outside, the mill looks like a giant golf ball that has been chopped in half: it is about 3ft in diameter, made of white plastic, and is attached to the wall.
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Camera

The Science Of Memory: An Infinite Loop in the Brain


Spiegel International
Sun, 23 Nov 2008 19:25 UTC
Wouldn't it be great to be able to remember everything? To see all our most important moments, all the priceless encounters, adventures and triumphs? What if memory never faded, but instead could be retrieved at any time, as reliably as films in a video store?

"No one can imagine what it's really like," says Jill Price, 42, "not even the scientists who are studying me."

The Californian, who has an almost perfect memory, is trying to describe how it feels. She starts with a small demonstration of her ability. "When were you born?" she asks.

She hears the date and says: "Oh, that was a Wednesday. There was a cold snap in Los Angeles two days later, and my mother and I made soup."
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Telescope

Planet imaged closer to star than ever before?

Maggie McKee
New Scientist
Sun, 23 Nov 2008 04:05 UTC
A planet may have been imaged closer to its star than any photographed previously, astronomers say. The candidate planet, which might still turn out to be a foreground or background object, appears to lie at about the orbital distance of Saturn around the well-studied star Beta Pictoris.

Astronomers have long suspected that the young, 12-million-year-old star hosts a massive planet, since it is surrounded by a dusty disc of debris thought to be created by the collision of rocky bodies and infalling comets.
star Beta Pictoris
© ESO/A-M Lagrange et al.The light from the star Beta Pictoris (which has been blocked out in this near-infrared image) is 1000 times brighter than the bluish-white dot left of centre, which may be a planet. The possible planet is thought to be less than 12 million years old, and still retains the heat of its birth, boasting a temperature of around 1200° Celsius.

Evidence for such a planet grew stronger in 2006, when astronomers reported finding what appeared to be a second, smaller dusty disc around the star that was tilted slightly with respect to the main disc. It may have formed after a planet between 1 and 20 times the mass of Jupiter was thrown out of the main disc by gravitational interactions with other bodies there.
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Telescope

Remains of devoured planet discovered


New Scientist
Sun, 23 Nov 2008 03:54 UTC
A dust cloud around a dead star may be all that's left of a planet that was eaten like a peach.

Observations of the cloud around the white dwarf G29-38 by a team led by William Reach of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena suggest it is most likely to be the shredded core of a gas-giant planet like Jupiter (The Astrophysical Journal, in press).
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Magnify

Buried Glaciers Found on Mars

Andrea Thompson
Space.com
Thu, 20 Nov 2008 01:05 UTC
Mars has vast glaciers hidden under aprons of rocky debris near mid-latitude mountains, a new study confirms, pointing to a new and large potential reservoir of life-supporting water on the planet.

These mounds of ice exist at much lower latitudes than any ice previously found on the red planet.

"Altogether, these glaciers almost certainly represent the largest reservoir of water ice on Mars that's not in the polar caps," said John Holt of the University of Texas at Austin and the main author of the study. "Just one of the features we examined is three times larger than the city of Los Angeles and up to one-half-mile thick, and there are many more."
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Bulb

Colossus of Rhodes to be rebuilt as giant light sculpture

Helena Smith
Guardian
Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:40 UTC
The Colossus of Rhodes
© Bridgeman Art LibraryDetails from The Colossus of Rhodes, an 18th century engrvaing by George Balthasar Probst, from the Stapleton Collection
It may not straddle the port as its predecessor once did, but in terms of sheer luminosity and eye-catching height the new Colossus of Rhodes will not disappoint. Nor will it fall short of the symbolism that once imbued the ancient monument.

Twenty-three centuries after craftsmen carved the legendary statue that has inspired legions of painters, poets, playwrights and politicians, a new world wonder, built in the spirit of the original Colossus, is about to be born on the Aegean island.

After decades of dashed hopes, the people of Rhodes will fulfil a long-held dream to revive one of the world's seven ancient wonders - thanks to the promise of international funding and the East German artist Gert Hof.
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X

Scientists self-censor after political attack

Ashley Yeager
Nature News
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:44 UTC
Scientists
© GettyScientists may censor themselves if their work proves politically controversial.
Researchers avoid contentious language and issues in grants and papers.

Scientists whose work came under scrutiny during a political debate about work funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, censored their own later work, a new study has found. [1]

In July 2003, former congressman Patrick Toomey (Republican, Pennsylvania) argued that NIH grants funding studies on certain types of sexual behaviour were less worthy of taxpayer dollars than those on devastating diseases. He proposed an amendment to the 2004 NIH appropriations bill to revoke funding for five grants - four of which examined sexual behaviour.

Comment: Those ultra-right Christians infiltrated all spectrums of life in America: politics, the media, education and now obviously, science. Which other group will consider words such as 'bisexual', 'lesbian' and 'sexual intercourse' as "red flag language" in scientific research papers, and criticise research on teenage sexual abstinence?

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Telescope

Galactic recluse has friends after all

Maggie McKee
New Scientist
Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:41 UTC
An apparently isolated galaxy whose frenetic rate of star birth had puzzled astronomers actually lies 1.5 times as far away as previously thought, a new study reveals. The new distance measurement suggests the galaxy may be falling into a crowd of about 10 other galaxies, whose gravitational tugs could explain its stellar baby boom.
galaxy NGC 1569
© NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage/STScI/AURA/A AloisiThe core of the dwarf galaxy NGC 1569 glitters with stars.

Ground-based telescopes had previously gauged the distance to the dwarf galaxy, called NGC 1569, to be about 7 million light years from Earth. At that distance, the galaxy appeared to lie in a region of space devoid of other galaxies.

Most such galactic loners tend to evolve slowly, eking out stars at a relatively modest rate because they lack neighbours whose gravitational tugs can trigger the galaxies' own gas clouds to collapse into stars.
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