Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Dwarf planet near Pluto named for Polynesian god

Maggie Fox
Reuters
Sat, 19 Jul 2008 19:50 UTC
A dwarf planet orbiting beyond Neptune has been designated the third plutoid in the solar system and given the name Makemake, the International Astronomical Union said on Saturday.

The red methane-covered dwarf planet formerly known as 2005 FY9 or "Easterbunny" is named after a Polynesian creator of humanity and god of fertility.

Just last month the IAU, which names planets and other heavenly bodies, decided to create a new class of sub-planets called plutoids.

Pluto, demoted from planet status, and Eris are the other two plutoids. A fourth dwarf planet named Ceres has been excluded from the plutoid club because it orbits in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
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Rocket

NASA used cadavers in Orion landing tests

Mark Carreau
Houston Chronicle
Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:59 UTC
Personnel working under contract for NASA used cadavers in tests to develop landing systems, spacesuits and seats in the new Orion moonship, space agency officials said Friday. Three human bodies were used in the tests at Ohio State University Medical Center last summer and fall.
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People

Understanding the false consensus effect

Praveen Aggarwal & Rajiv Vaidyanathan
livemint.com
Sun, 20 Jul 2008 16:31 UTC
Research has shown that people tend to believe that most others are similar to them in their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviour.

Comment: It's unfortunate that the authors didn't think to include - maybe because of the very effect under discussion - a far more crucial example: the destructive effect of pathological deviants in our society.

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Info

New Photonic Integrated Circuit sends Internet speeds through the roof

Stevie Smith
The Tech Herald
Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:12 UTC


University of Sydney
©SeaBob/Flickr
Scientists at the University of Sydney claim increased Internet speeds 100 times greater than current networks.

Bemoaning the poor load speed of Web pages or the crawl of media downloads could soon become a thing of the past following news that a team of Australian scientists have developed a technology capable of making the Internet up to 100 times faster than the current top-end performance offered by leading network providers.
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Cloud Lightning

Researchers question lightning's link to X-rays


Xinhuanet
Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:20 UTC
Beijing -- Many of the basics of lightning have been revealed, but scientists admit they don't really understand how lighting gets from one place to another and lightning link to X-rays is still a mystery.

"Nobody understands how lightning makes X-rays," says Martin Uman, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Florida. "Despite reaching temperatures five times hotter than the surface of the sun, the temperature of lightning is still thousands of times too cold to account for the X-rays observed.

"It's obviously happening. And we have put limits on how it's happening and where it's happening."

As lightning comes down from a cloud, it moves in steps, each 30 to 160 feet long. In this "step leader" process, X-rays shoot out just below each step millionths of a second after the step completes, the researchers learned.
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Meteor

Tunguska catastrophe: Evidence of acid rain supports meteorite theory


Science Centric
Sat, 19 Jul 2008 18:17 UTC
The Tunguska catastrophe in 1908 evidently led to high levels of acid rain. This is the conclusion reached by Russian, Italian and German researchers based on the results of analyses of peat profiles taken from the disaster region.
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Fish

Human Speech Traced to Talking Fish


Live Science
Sat, 19 Jul 2008 16:47 UTC
From Don Knotts' portrayle of "Mr. Limpet" to the children's favorite "Nemo" and the tuna-pitching character in the "Sorry, Charlie" commercials, we all have seen fish that can talk. But that's just fiction, right? Well ...

Researchers say real fish can communicate with sound, too. And they say (the researchers, that is) that your speech skills and, in fact, all sound production in vertebrates can be traced back to this ability in fish. (You got your ears from fish, too.)

The new study was led by Andrew Bass (we did not make this up) of Cornell University.

The scientists mapped developing brain cells in newly hatched midshipman fish larvae and compared them to those of other species. They found that the chirp of a bird, the bark of a dog and all the other sounds that come out of animals' mouths are the products of the neural circuitry likely laid down hundreds of millions of years ago with the hums and grunts of fish.

"Fish have all the same parts of the brain that you do," Bass explained.
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Einstein

Distribution Of Creatures Great And Small Can Be Predicted Mathematically


Science Daily
Sat, 19 Jul 2008 16:17 UTC
In studying how animals change size as they evolve, biologists have unearthed several interesting patterns. For instance, most species are small, but the largest members of a taxonomic group -- such as the great white shark, the Komodo dragon, or the African elephant -- are often thousands or millions of times bigger than the typical species.

Elephant matriarch cow
©iStockphoto/Jonathan Heger
Elephant matriarch cow leading a herd. Most species are small, but the largest members of a taxonomic group -- such as the great white shark, the Komodo dragon, or the African elephant -- are often thousands or millions of times bigger than the typical species.

Now for the first time two SFI researchers explain these patterns within an elegant statistical framework.

"The agreement between our model and real-world data is surprisingly close," says SFI Postdoctoral Fellow Aaron Clauset, who, along with SFI Professor Douglas Erwin, presented the findings in a July 18 Science paper.
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Info

Single Boulder May Prove That Antarctica And North America Were Once Connected


Science Daily
Thu, 17 Jul 2008 15:34 UTC
A lone granite boulder found against all odds high atop a glacier in Antarctica may provide additional key evidence to support a theory that parts of the southernmost continent once were connected to North America hundreds of millions of years ago.

Writing in the July 11 edition of the journal Science, an international team of U.S. and Australian investigators describe their findings, which were made in the Transantarctic Mountains, and their significance to the problem of piecing together what an ancient supercontinent, called Rodinia, looked like. The U.S. investigators were funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Image
©John Goodge / University of Minnesota-Duluth
John Goodge and a colleague collecting specimens in the Transantarctic Mountains.
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Pharoah

Ancient Egyptian boat to be excavated, reassembled

Jason Keyser
Associated Press
Sat, 19 Jul 2008 10:59 UTC
CAIRO - Archaeologists will excavate hundreds of fragments of an ancient Egyptian wooden boat entombed in an underground chamber next to Giza's Great Pyramid and try to reassemble the craft, Egyptologists announced Saturday.

The 4,500-year-old vessel is the sister ship of a similar boat removed in pieces from another pit in 1954 and painstakingly reconstructed. Experts believe the boats were meant to ferry the pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid in the afterlife.

Zahi Hawas
©Amr Nabil
Zahi Hawas, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), right, and Japanese Egyptologist Sakuji Yoshimura, left, from Waseda Universty in Japan, display for the first time the Pharaoh Cheops' second solar boat through a camera put inside the boat pit at the Pyramids site in Giza, Egypt, Saturday, July 19, 2008 which tourists will be able to see for the first time without the pit having to be uncovered again.

Starting Saturday, tourists were allowed to view images of the inside of the second boat pit from a camera inserted through the a hole in the chamber's limestone ceiling. The video image, transmitted onto a small TV monitor at the site, showed layers of crisscrossing beams and planks on the floor of the dark pit.

"You can smell the past," said Zahi Hawass, director of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.
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