Science & TechnologyS


Cow Skull

Scientists find complete baby dinosaur fossil

Mari Yamaguchi
Associated Press
Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:56 UTC
Japanese and Mongolian scientists have successfully recovered the complete skeleton of a 70-million-year-old young dinosaur, a nature museum announced Thursday.

The scientists uncovered a Tarbosaurus - related to the giant carnivorous Tyrannosaurus - from a chunk of sandstone they dug up in August, 2006 in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, said Takuji Yokoyama, a spokesman for the Hayashibara Museum of Natural Sciences, a co-organizer of the joint research project.

"We were so lucky to have found remains that turned out to be a complete set of all the important parts," he said.
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Telescope

Stellar nursery found near Milky Way's violent heart

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:38 UTC


The neighborhood around a black hole seems like no place to raise a star. Violent gravitational forces can rip gas clouds apart, making it hard for stars to condense. But astronomers have spotted evidence of very young stars in a ring of gas close to the heart of the Milky Way, where a massive black hole is thought to reside.

Image
©Unknown

These protostars, 6 to 20 light years from the galaxy's centre, are shrouded by so much gas and dust that they can't be seen with telescopes. Instead, Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and colleagues found them through their radio signals.
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Question

Flashback Is the eclipse in the Odyssey actually an historical account?

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:20 UTC


Image
©CNES

A solar eclipse that occurred more than 3000 years ago may be mentioned in the Odyssey, an ancient poem based on Greek mythology, a new study suggests.

The poem, attributed to the poet Homer, describes the 10-year journey that its hero, Odysseus, took to return home to Ithaca, a Greek island in the Ionian Sea, after the end of the Trojan War. The war was waged over the beautiful Helen of Troy, a daughter of the god Zeus.

Days before Odysseus returned home to kill the 108 suitors courting his wife, a prophet predicted the men's doom. "The Sun is blotted out of heaven, and a blighting gloom is over all the land," the sage said.

In fact, a total solar eclipse - in which the disc of the Sun was blocked by the Moon - is calculated to have taken place on 16 April 1178 BCE over the Ionian Islands.

That is around the estimated end of the Trojan War, which despite its appearance in mythology may represent an actual conflict or series of conflicts in the city of Troy in the 12th century BCE.
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Info

Total Solar Eclipse to Pass Over China and Siberia


New Scientist
Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:44 UTC


Image
©Fred Espenak/NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
On 1 August, a total solar eclipse will be visible from Canada to China. The path is shown in blue

Researchers and sky watchers are en route to remote regions of the Earth to catch a glimpse of a total solar eclipse.

On 1 August, the Moon will pass in front of the Sun, casting a shadow across the Earth. Much of the northern hemisphere will see a partial eclipse, but the total eclipse will only be visible in a narrow band as the shadow tracks from Canada to China.

Totality is expected to be relatively short, lasting at most about two and a half minutes. In contrast, a total eclipse in 2009 will last more than six and a half minutes in some places.

Despite the short duration of this year's event, expeditions are underway to Russia and China to see it. Several aircraft will aim to observe the eclipse from above the clouds, and an icebreaker will bring watchers to the Svalbard Islands in the Arctic.
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Telescope

Astronomers See Disks Surrounding Black Holes, Strengthened Evidence For Current Explanation Of Quasars


Science Daily
Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:39 UTC
For the first time, a team of international researchers has found a way to view the accretion disks surrounding black holes and verify that their true electromagnetic spectra match what astronomers have long predicted they would be.

quasar
©Makoto Kishimoto, with cloud image by Schartmann
A polarizing filter attached to a telescope suppresses the light emitted by dust particles and ionized gas clouds around the quasar so its true electromagnetic spectrum can be revealed.

A black hole and its bright accretion disk have been thought to form a quasar, the powerful light source at the center of some distant galaxies. Using a polarizing filter, the research team, which included Robert Antonucci and Omer Blaes, professors of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, isolated the light emitted by the accretion disk from that produced by other matter in the vicinity of the black hole.

"This work has greatly strengthened the evidence for the accepted explanation of quasars," said Antonucci.
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Robot

Scientists: Humans and machines will merge in future

Lara Farrar
CNN
Mon, 14 Jul 2008 07:17 UTC


Robot Hand
©Getty Images
Some experts say humans will merge with machines before the end of this century.

LONDON, England -- A group of experts from around the world will Thursday hold a first of its kind conference on global catastrophic risks.
Dr. Nick Bostrom says superintelligent beings could pose an existential risk to human life.

Comment: This, of course, assumes that human civilization survives long enough to disseminate such technologies publicly.

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Nuke

Trouble comes in threes: New contamination incident at French nuclear site

Francois Murphy
Reuters
Thu, 24 Jul 2008 07:58 UTC
Around 100 staff at a nuclear power plant in southern France were contaminated with a low dose of radiation on Wednesday, power firm EDF said, the latest incident there after a case of uranium spillage two weeks ago.

Unknown
©Unknown
The large Tricastin enrichment facility includes four nuclear reactors that provide over 3000 MWe power for the plant.
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Magnify

Planting Ideology

Reviewed by Anne Applebaum
Washington Post
Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:46 UTC
How Soviet leaders resisted the study of genetics and destroyed a great scientist.

Comment: Did you catch that last remark? Although the Soviet Union destroyed a great scientist, they saved his life's work. Strange that. It reminds one of article like this and this.

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Meteor

Small Satellite Designed to Spot Big Bad Asteroids

Jeremy Hsu
Space.com
Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:43 UTC


small satellite
©Unknown

A tiny Canadian satellite is gearing up for a mission to hunt wayward space rocks that may pose a threat to Earth.

Only the size of a suitcase, the Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite (NEOSSat) has a 5.9-inch (15-cm) telescope and weighs about 143 pounds (65 kg). But it's designed to hunt for threatening space rocks from Earth orbit, where the telescope can avoid interference from the planet's atmosphere.
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Bulb

Study suggests human visual system could make powerful computer


Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:30 UTC
Since the idea of using DNA to create faster, smaller, and more powerful computers originated in 1994, scientists have been scrambling to develop successful ways to use genetic code for computation. Now, new research from a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute suggests that if we want to carry out artificial computations, all we have to do is literally look around.

Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science Mark Changizi has begun to develop a technique to turn our eyes and visual system into a programmable computer. His findings are reported in the latest issue of the journal Perception.

Harnessing the computing power of our visual system, according to Changizi, requires visually representing a computer program in such a way that when an individual views the representation, the visual system naturally carries out the computation and generates a perception.

Image
©Rensselaer/Changizi
To actually get your visual system to carry out this computation requires "perceptually walking through the circuit" from the inputs downward to the output.
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