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| ©Siim Sepp/Creative Commons ShareAlike
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| Some magnetite is produced by bacteria on Earth
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A miniature detector could pick out magnetic rocks on Mars that might harbour telltale signs of ancient life.
The instrument could select rocks that contain a magnetic compound - magnetite - that is also produced by bacteria on Earth. The rocks could then be brought back to Earth for closer examination.
Alan Boyle
MSNBCThu, 08 May 2008 14:49 UTC
Images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are providing an advance peek at what the
Phoenix Mars Lander will be running up against when it lands near the planet's north pole later this month: The spacecraft will be coming down in the middle of a spring thaw, and based on the
pictures released this week, there just might be some Martian mini-tornadoes swirling through the scene.
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| ©NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
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Arrows highlight two dust devils whirling
across the landing area for the Phoenix
Mars Lander, as seen from above by the
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Click on
the image for a larger version.
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Bacteria that cause the bubonic plague may be more virulent than their close relatives because of a single genetic mutation, according to research published in the May issue of the journal Microbiology.
"The plague bacterium Yersinia pestis needs calcium in order to grow at body temperature. When there is no calcium available, it produces a large amount of an amino acid called aspartic acid," said Professor Brubaker from the University of Chicago, USA. "We found that this is because Y. pestis is missing an important enzyme."
Bubonic plague has killed over 200 million people during the course of history and is thus the most devastating acute infectious disease known to man. Despite this, we are still uncertain about the molecular basis of its extraordinary virulence.
Comment: There is another take on what caused "Black Death", which is backed up by substantial evidence, considering serious problems with original explanations of the disease spreading rate.
From
New Light on the Black Death: The Cosmic Connection[T]he Black Death, one of the most deadly pandemics in human history, said to have killed possibly two thirds of the entire population of Europe, not to mention millions all over the planet, probably wasn't Bubonic Plague but was rather Death By Comet(s)!
Oh yeah! That's far out, isn't it?
Maybe not. Baillie has the scientific evidence to support his theory and his evidence actually supports - and is supported by - what the people of the time were saying: earthquakes, comets, rains of death and fire, corrupted atmosphere, and death on a scale that is almost unimaginable.[...]
Baillie sums up the problem as follows:
The Black Death of 1347 was believed to be the third great outbreak of bubonic plague; a plague that is traditionally spread by rats and fleas. The previous instances were the Plague of Athens in 430 BC and the plague at the time of Justinian which arrived into Constantinople in AD 542. The Plague of Athens was described by Thucydides, while the Justinian plague was described by Procopius, among others. [...]
It is generally believed that the plague hit an already weakened population in Europe. [...]
At its most basic, the problem is with those rats and fleas. For the conventional wisdom to work there have to be hosts of infected rats and they have to be moving at alarming speed - you would almost have to imagine infected rats scuttling every onward (mostly northward) delivering, as they died, loads of infected fleas. The snags with this scenario are legion. For example, there are no descriptions of dead rats lying everywhere (this is explained by suggesting that either the rats were indoors, or people were so used to dead rats that they were not worth mentioning; though if they were indoors how did they travel so fast?) It did not seem to matter whether you were a rural shepherd or cleric or a town dweller, both were infected. Yet strangely with this very infectious disease some cities across Europe were spared. Moreover, these rats must have been happy to move to cool northern areas even though bubonic plague is a disease that requires relatively warm temperatures. Then, when there are water barriers, these rats board ships to keep the momentum going. (Baillie)
According to researchers from the Universities of Exeter, UK and Wollongong, Australia, the collapse of the North American Laurentide Ice Sheet 8000 years ago resulted in a catastrophic rise in global sea level and caused dramatic social change across Europe. This research takes the view that Noah was affected by flooding in the Black Sea. This is an odd theory since biblical and anthropological data is fairly conclusive that Noah was living in central Africa, but this is still interesting research, from
here.
The research team argues that, in the face of rising sea levels driven by contemporary climate change, we can learn important lessons from the past.
In an attack that seems motivated more by malice than by money, the Epilepsy Foundation's Web site has been bombarded with hundreds of pictures and links using rapidly flashing images, reports an Associated Press story on MSNBC. Such lights and motion can trigger seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy.
Apparently the hackers did not try to commandeer the site or take control of users' PCs.
Fresno, Calif. - The sheriff of the remote region where Charles Manson hid after a killing spree in the summer of 1969 said Friday that he will allow researchers to begin digging into the sandy soil in search of possible human remains.
Scientists have confirmed that the famed Monte Verde archaeological site in southern Chile is about 14,000 years old, making it the earliest known human settlement in the Americas, the journal Science reported Thursday.
The age of Monte Verde has been the subject of controversy over the years, since estimates appeared to conflict with other archaeological evidence related to the settlement of North America.
The new findings support not only the age of the Monte Verde site, but also the coastal migration theory currently ascribed to by most scholars, which hypothesizes that people first entered the New World through the Bering land bridge more than 16,000 years ago.
New research on the Antennae Galaxies using the Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows that this benchmark pair of interacting galaxies is in fact much closer than previously thought - 45 million light-years instead of 65 million light-years.
The Antennae Galaxies are among the closest known merging galaxies. The two galaxies, also known as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, began interacting a few hundred million years ago, creating one of the most impressive sights in the night sky. They are considered by scientists as the archetypal merging galaxy system and are used as a standard against which to validate theories about galaxy evolution.
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| ©NASA, ESA & Ivo Saviane (European Southern Observatory)/Robert Gendler
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| The Antennae Galaxies are among the closest known merging galaxies. The two galaxies, also known as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, started to interact a few hundred million years ago, creating one of the most impressive sights in the night sky. The ground-based image (left) is taken by Robert Gendler and shows the two merging galaxies and their impressive long tidal tails. The Hubble Advanced Camera for Surveys image (right) shows a portion of the southern tidal tail.
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After working countless hours digging soil samples and analyzing them with sophisticated microscopes, Great Falls High School freshman Katelyn Gibbs has come up with evidence that a comet or meteorite crashed to Earth in Montana 13,000 years ago and had major impact on animals living here at the time.
"Bing! She nailed it!" said David Baker of Monarch, a veteran earth science research scientist who mentored Gibbs on the project. "Katelyn found definitive proof - nanodiamonds and iron micrometeorites - for the extraterrestrial impact event that killed the mammoths in Montana.
R. Colin Johnson
EE TimesWed, 30 Apr 2008 13:00 UTC
Portland, Oregon -- The long-sought after memristor -- the "missing link" in electronic circuit theory -- has been invented by Hewlett Packard Senior Fellow R. Stanley Williams at HP Labs (Palo Alto, Calif.) Memristors -- the fourth passive component type after resistors, capacitors and inductors -- were postulated in a seminal 1971 paper in the IEEE Transactions on Circuit Theory by professor Leon Chua at the University of California (Berkeley), but their first realization was just announced today by HP. According to Williams and Chua, now virtually every electronics textbook will have to be revised to include the memristor and the new paradigm it represents for electronic circuit theory.
Comment: There is another take on what caused "Black Death", which is backed up by substantial evidence, considering serious problems with original explanations of the disease spreading rate.
From New Light on the Black Death: The Cosmic Connection
[T]he Black Death, one of the most deadly pandemics in human history, said to have killed possibly two thirds of the entire population of Europe, not to mention millions all over the planet, probably wasn't Bubonic Plague but was rather Death By Comet(s)!
Oh yeah! That's far out, isn't it?
Maybe not. Baillie has the scientific evidence to support his theory and his evidence actually supports - and is supported by - what the people of the time were saying: earthquakes, comets, rains of death and fire, corrupted atmosphere, and death on a scale that is almost unimaginable.[...]
Baillie sums up the problem as follows: