Science & TechnologyS


Better Earth

Oceans clearing greenhouse gases faster than expected

Ian Sample
Guardian
Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:00 UTC
Greenhouse gases over the tropical Atlantic are disappearing faster than expected, according to the first comprehensive measurements taken in the region.

British scientists working at the Cape Verde Observatory on the volcanic island of São Vicente believe chemicals produced by sea spray and tiny marine organisms are speeding up natural processes that destroy the gases.
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Hourglass

Greek style architecture found in ancient Iranian City


Asian News International
Thu, 26 Jun 2008 02:34 UTC
Tehran - Archaeologists have used geological surveys in the south of Iran to reveal rectangular formations inspired by Greek architecture dating to the Sassanid era.

According to a report by CHN (Cultural Heritage News Agency), archeologists have said that the structures, located in Fars Province, are part of the urban planning of the ancient Achaemenid city of Istakhr during the Sassanid period (226-651 CE).
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Telescope

Astronomers on Verge of Finding Earth's Twin

Jeanna Bryner
SPACE.com
Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:27 UTC
Planet hunters say it's just a matter of time before they lasso Earth's twin, which almost surely is hiding somewhere in our star-studded galaxy.

Momentum is building: Just last week, astronomers announced they had discovered three super-Earths - worlds more massive than ours but small enough to most likely be rocky - orbiting a single star. And dozens of other worlds suspected of having masses in that same range were found around other stars.
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Magnify

The Minerva Consortium: Controlling Social Science Research in the US Through Directed Funding

David Price
CounterPunch
Wed, 25 Jun 2008 19:25 UTC
"In Paracelsus's time the energy of universities resided in the conflict between humanism and theology; the energy of the modern university lives in the love-affair between government and science, and sometimes the two are so close it makes you shudder." -- Robertson Davies The Rebel Angels
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Bulb

Numbers beyond words: A Brazilian tribe may grasp exact quantities without naming them

Bruce Bower
Science News
Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:33 UTC
One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do, especially if you don't even have a word for it. That's the situation of the Pirahã people, denizens of Brazil's Amazon rainforest who have no term for the number one or for any other exact quantity, a new study finds.

Until now, researchers have not demonstrated the absence of a way to express the number one in any language, according to a team led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology cognitive scientist Edward Gibson.

Yet Pirahã individuals can still identify the number of items that an experimenter places in front of them, Gibson's team reports. The new findings challenge the longstanding idea that number words enable people to think about and recognize exact quantities of items.

Image
©Edward Gibson
A Pirahã man participates in a new experiment that, researchers say, indicates that his language contains no number words, even for the number one.
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Pharoah

700,000 yr old Qatar settlement may be oldest organised human community ever found


ANI
Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:21 UTC
Danish archaeologists have discovered a prehistoric settlement in Qatar, which they believe may be over 700,000 years old, making it the oldest organised human community ever found.

According to a report in The Peninsula, the archaeological team has uncovered the ancient settlement in the desert region of Qatar, which may confirm alternative theories on how early humans emigrated from the African continent.

Eight dwellings in the desert region of Qatar indicate that an early human species crossed what is now the Red Sea to leave their origins in Africa, according to the scientists.

Comment: Caveat Lector.

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Target

Almighty smash left record crater on mars

David Shiga
New Scientist Magazine
Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:06 UTC
EVERY scar tells a story, yet a huge gash on Mars has long proven very hard to read. Now a peek beneath the planet's surface reveals that the scar is the largest known impact structure in the solar system - gouged out by a collision that reshaped the Red Planet.
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Telescope

Galaxy map hints at fractal universe

Amanda Gefter
New Scientist Magazine
Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:35 UTC
Is the matter in the universe arranged in a fractal pattern? A new study of nearly a million galaxies suggests it is - though there are no well-accepted theories to explain why that would be so.

Fractal Universe?
©New Scientist
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Bulb

Laser Fluorescence Could Find Life On Mars


Science Daily
Wed, 25 Jun 2008 09:08 UTC
A team of scientists from the United States and the United Kingdom has developed a technique using ultraviolet light to identify organic matter in soils that they say could be used to document the existence of life on Mars.

Image
©M. Storrie-Lombardi
Three examples of PAH ultraviolet fluorescence with anthracene (blue), pyrene (blue-green) and pyrelene (yellow). From left to right, the fluorescence is apparent on glass slides, on PAH-doped peridotite granular targets on glass slides, and on a rock sample of peridotite.

The researchers' proposed instrumentation could operate on any Mars lander or rover, they say, such as the current Phoenix mission or NASA's Mars Science Laboratory scheduled for launch in 2009 -- both of which are looking at habitability -- or the European Space Agency's ExoMars mission in 2013 that will look directly at the past or present existence of life on the red planet.

Their research was just published in the American Geophysical Union's journal, Geophysical Research Letters.
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Health

Human genome changes with age


Agence France-Presse
Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:26 UTC
WASHINGTON - Individual human genomes change throughout a person's life influenced by environmental or nutritional factors which may explain why illnesses such as cancer come with age, a study said Tuesday.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that the so-called epigenetic marks on the sequence of a person's DNA modify over the course of their life and the extent of such changes is similar among family members.
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