Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

NASA probe sends first pictures from Martian arctic

Paul Handley
news.yahoo.com
Mon, 26 May 2008 17:12 UTC
WASHINGTON - A NASA probe sent back never-seen pictures of Mars' north pole Monday after a near perfect landing in the most ambitious mission to date to find life-sustaining minerals on the Red Planet.

Pictures from the Phoenix probe provided the first glimpse of the planet's Arctic plains -- a desolate landscape of stony, frozen ground.

Phoenix Mars Lander
©AFP/NASA
Artist's illustration obtained from NASA shows the Phoenix Mars Lander. A NASA probe has sent back never-seen pictures of Mars' north pole after a near perfect landing in the most ambitious mission to date to find life-sustaining minerals on the Red Planet.
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Cow Skull

Australia: Landmark new fossil discovery at Burra


Northern Argus
Wed, 21 May 2008 16:20 UTC


Marsupial lion skeleton
©SA Museum
Marsupial lion (thylacoleo carnifex) skeleton

New evidence at Redbanks Conservation Park near Burra has confirmed that large marsupial lions roamed the area during the Ice Age.
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Ark

Stonehenge builders had geometry skills to rival Pythagoras

David Keys
Independent
Mon, 26 May 2008 13:06 UTC
Stone Age Britons had a sophisticated knowledge of geometry to rival Pythagoras - 2,000 years before the Greek "father of numbers" was born, according to a new study of Stonehenge.

Five years of detailed research, carried out by the Oxford University landscape archaeologist Anthony Johnson, claims that Stonehenge was designed and built using advanced geometry.

stonehenge
©Dan Chung/Reuters
The Stone Age Britons who built Stonehenge had a knowledge of advanced geometry, 2,000 years before Pythagoras
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Binoculars

Scientists begin hunt for mysterious "God particle"


ANI
Sun, 25 May 2008 12:08 UTC
Washington -- Scientists are hoping that the Atlas detector, which is one of six particle physics experiments part of the Large Hadron Collider, will help unlock some deep scientific mysteries and perhaps even lead to discovery of the Higgs boson, dubbed as "the God particle".

The Large Hadron Collider is located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.
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Laptop

Internet to run out of addresses 'within 3 years'


New Scientist
Sat, 24 May 2008 12:20 UTC
If you thought it was hard finding the email address that some other john.smith hasn't already bagged, that's nothing compared with the difficulty you'll have getting an internet connection for your computer after 2011.
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Bizarro Earth

Earthquake prediction from space is more accurate

Yuri Zaitsev
hindu.com
Mon, 26 May 2008 12:11 UTC
Space-based predictions have been correct for 44 of 47 registered quakes. It has the ability to survey huge territories for seismically hazardous areas. Harbingers of powerful quakes appear around five days before the main shock.

China's deadly earthquake in the Sichuan province has again showed that ground-based earthquake prediction methods and systems are not reliable.

Traditional seismology does its best, sometimes succeeding, but more often only saying something like, "California will be destroyed in the next 30 years."

Remote sensing from space can provide more accurate data about locations, and even dates of expected disasters.

The majority of earthquakes happen in two long narrow stripes, one around the Pacific and the other running from the Azores to southeast Asia. There are several other earthquake-prone regions.

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Display

Apple takes delivery of 188 mysterious ocean containers


Fortune Magazine
Tue, 20 May 2008 18:46 UTC
Here's an intriguing report from ImportGenius, a search engine that gathers "competitive intelligence" by monitoring U.S. Customs records of ocean containers entering American ports.

Searching for shipments to Apple, Inc. (AAPL), employees at the Scottsdale, Ariz., company reported on Friday that they've spotted a "major spike" since mid March in ocean containers marked with a mysterious new label: "electric computers"
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Ark

Archaeologists find medieval feeding bottles in northwest Russia


RIA Novosti
Mon, 26 May 2008 11:52 UTC
VELIKY NOVGOROD - Archaeologists have made a rare find of a number of medieval baby bottles at excavations in Veliky Novgorod, an ancient city in northwest Russia, a scientist said on Monday.

"Similar bottles are rarely found in excavations, and here we have already discovered... three of them,"
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Telescope

Cosmic Supermagnet Spreads Mysterious 'Morse Code'


ScienceDaily
Thu, 22 May 2008 11:52 UTC
Astronomers from SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research have discovered mysterious pulses that are being emitted by an extremely magnetic star. The magnetic star, a magnetar, emits the pulses as very high energy X-rays. The astronomers made their observations using the ESA space telescopes INTEGRAL and XMM-Newton and the NASA satellite RXTE.
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Bomb

The Food Chain - World's Poor Pay Price as Crop Research Is Cut

Keith Bradsher and Andrew Martin
New York Times
Sun, 18 May 2008 23:01 UTC
LOS BAÑOS, Philippines - The brown plant hopper, an insect no bigger than a gnat, is multiplying by the billions and chewing through rice paddies in East Asia, threatening the diets of many poor people.

The damage to rice crops, occurring at a time of scarcity and high prices, could have been prevented. Researchers at the International Rice Research Institute here say that they know how to create rice varieties resistant to the insects but that budget cuts have prevented them from doing so.

Luis Liwanag
©New York Times
Researchers at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, the world's main repository of information about rice, are trying to deal with problems like the rice hopper, which destroys plants, by developing stronger varieties of rice.
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