Science & TechnologyS


Magic Wand

Galaxy Zoo's Blue Mystery - Voorwerp

Janet Raloff
Science News
Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:10 UTC
The blue mystery object that I wrote about yesterday may be considerably stranger than I'd first been led to believe. For starters, it's actually green. But there's so much more.

"As far as we can tell," Bill Keel told me this morning, "it's an unprecedented thing." Throughout the known universe "there is nothing else that's quite like it," according to the University of Alabama astronomer.

For want of something better, Hanny's Voorwerp is what the research community has taken to calling the mystery cloud (Voorwerp being Dutch for object, apparently, and Hanny is the name of the science teacher who found it while participating in the Galaxy Zoo project). The enigmatic thing radiates a huge amount of light from a cloud of stars, Keel says. The mystery is why.
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Magic Wand

Bizarre Properties of Glass Revealed

Robin Lloyd
Live Science
Mon, 23 Jun 2008 20:32 UTC
Scientists have made a breakthrough discovery in the bizarre properties of glass, which behaves at times like both a solid and a liquid.

The finding could lead to aircraft that look like Wonder Woman's plane. Such planes could have wings of glass or something called metallic glass, rather than being totally invisible.

Image
©Paddy Royall, Univeristy of Bristol, UK
Colloidal particles, that mimic atoms, form a gel with the structure of glass.

The breakthrough involved solving the decades-old problem of just what glass is. It has been known that that despite its solid appearance, glass and gels are actually in a "jammed" state of matter - somewhere between liquid and solid - that moves very slowly. Like cars in a traffic jam, atoms in a glass are in something like suspended animation, unable to reach their destination because the route is blocked by their neighbors. So even though glass is a hard substance, it never quite becomes a proper solid, according to chemists and materials scientists.
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Network

'Shake-up' for internet proposed

Darren Waters
BBC News
Mon, 23 Jun 2008 07:26 UTC
The net could see its biggest transformation in decades if plans to open up the address system are passed.

The net's regulators will vote on Thursday to decide if the strict rules on so-called top level domain names, such as .com or .uk, can be relaxed.

If approved, it could allow companies to turn their brands into domain names while individuals could also carve out their own corner of the net.
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Better Earth

New Computerized System Estimates Geographic Location Of Photos


Science Daily
Sat, 21 Jun 2008 13:46 UTC
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have devised the first computerized method that can analyze a single photograph and determine where in the world the image likely was taken. It's a feat made possible by searching through millions of GPS-tagged images in the Flickr online photo collection.

world photos
© James Hays/Carnegie Mellon University
A method developed by Carnegie Mellon University researchers can estimate where a photo was taken by matching it to similar, GPS-tagged photos in the Flickr online photo collection

The IM2GPS algorithm developed by computer science graduate student James Hays and Alexei A. Efros, assistant professor of computer science and robotics, doesn't attempt to scan a photo for location clues, such as types of clothing, the language on street signs, or specific types of vegetation, as a person might do. Rather, it analyzes the composition of the photo, notes how textures and colors are distributed and records the number and orientation of lines in the photo. It then searches Flickr for photos that are similar in appearance.
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Star

Newly Born Twin Stars Are Far From Identical


Science Daily
Sun, 22 Jun 2008 12:55 UTC
The analysis of the youngest pair of identical twin stars yet discovered has revealed surprising differences in brightness, surface temperature and possibly even the size of the two.

twin stars
©NASA/JPL, HST, David James
The arrow points to the location of the identical twin stars in the Orion Nebula, the stellar nursery that is closest to Earth. The pair are in such a close orbit that they appear as a single point of light.

The study, which is published in the June 19 issue of the journal Nature, suggests that one of the stars formed significantly earlier than its twin. Because astrophysicists have assumed that binary stars form simultaneously, the discovery provides an important new test for successful star formation theories, forcing theorists back to the drawing board to determine if their models can produce binaries with stars that form at different times.
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Cow Skull

Britain's last Neanderthals were more sophisticated than we thought


UCL
Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:38 UTC
An archaeological excavation at a site near Pulborough, West Sussex, has thrown remarkable new light on the life of northern Europe's last Neanderthals. It provides a snapshot of a thriving, developing population - rather than communities on the verge of extinction.

"The tools we've found at the site are technologically advanced and potentially older than tools in Britain belonging to our own species, Homo sapiens," says Dr Matthew Pope of Archaeology South East based at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. "It's exciting to think that there's a real possibility these were left by some of the last Neanderthal hunting groups to occupy northern Europe. The impression they give is of a population in complete command of both landscape and natural raw materials with a flourishing technology - not a people on the edge of extinction."

The team, led by Dr Pope and funded by English Heritage, is undertaking the first modern, scientific investigation of the site since its original discovery in 1900. During the construction of a monumental house known as 'Beedings' some 2,300 perfectly preserved stone tools were removed from fissures encountered in the foundation trenches.
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Bulb

Photos: Summer Solstice Marked With Fire, Magic, More


National Geographic
Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:51 UTC


Image
©Reuters

Flames illuminate thousands of revelers in a cave in Zugarramurdi, Spain, during a 1998 Aquelarre, or Witch Coven.

Held on or near the summer solstice, the festival commemorates the alleged witches who used the cave in centuries past--many of whom died by fire during the Basque witch trials of the 1600s.

For millennia the summer solstice has been embraced as a time of rebirth and hope, and as a herald of abundant food and warm temperatures to come (summer solstice facts).

Falling this year on Friday, June 20, in the Northern Hemisphere, the longest day of the year is still regarded by many as a day of mystical and religious significance--and the cause for many a celebration.
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Magnify

Flashback Geophysical Research Abstracts: A unique ground-truth infrasound source with signals

K. Koc
European Geosciences Union
Thu, 21 Jun 2007 03:26 UTC
A unique ground-truth infrasound source with signals observed at IMS station IS26 in Southern Germany

Infrasound monitoring is one of the technologies used for verification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), aiming at the detection, location and identification of atmospheric nuclear explosions. The most common sources observed with the IMS infrasound network include meteorites, supersonic aircraft including rocket launches and re-entering spacecraft, volcanic eruptions and non-nuclear explosions, such as mining and quarry blasts, some of them accidental but well recorded. Although these sources may be unambiguously identified, for quantitative monitoring with the infrasound technology, these sources often do not provide accurate source characteristics, in particular ground-truth data. Ground-truth data include precise information on the source time and location, but may include additional information such as source strength.
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Telescope

Flashback Meteoroids 2001 - Conference at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics

J. Borovicka et al
IRF
Mon, 06 Aug 2001 08:04 UTC
Session 8: "Fireballs, Bolides and Meteorites"

The Moravka Meteorite Fall: Fireball Trajectory, Orbit and Fragmentation

J. Borovicka, P. Spurny and Z. Ceplecha (Astronomical Institute, Academy of Sciences, 251 65 Ondrejov, Czech Republic)

The Moravka meteorite fall of May 6, 2000, is only the sixth case in history, when the pre-fall trajectory could be determined from instrumental records. A very bright fireball appeared during broad daylight at 11:51:52 UT and was seen by thousands of people. Fortunately, three casual witnesses captured the fireball on video. The fireball was also detected by satellite-based infrared and visible sensors. Sonic booms were recorded by a local seismic network and an infrasound array located in Germany recorded signals from this event.
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Info

Flashback Global Infrasonic Monitoring of Large Meteoroids

Douglas O. ReVelle
The Acoustical Society of America
Sun, 01 Jul 2001 08:08 UTC
Networks of low-frequency acoustic detectors, originally built for other purposes, are now finding a new and unexpected use in detecting objects that enter our atmosphere. The orbit of Earth through the solar system passes through much solid particle debris, including pieces of material from both comets and asteroids. We call these arriving particles "meteoroids." The asteroidal and cometary sources have a wide variety of properties, so meteoroids can arrive from very different orbits and belong to one of several types of observed materials. They can be iron, rocky stones, very weak stones (Carbonaceous chondrites) or there are two brands of very weak cometary material as well. This debris can be either very small or very large or have a large range of possible sizes, depending on the source and how long the material has been orbiting in space free from its source and other factors. This material can also have a large range of possible entry speeds and densities.
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