Science & TechnologyS


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Flashback Beyond Mesopotamia: A New View Of The Dawn Of Civilization


Science Daily
Fri, 03 Aug 2007 16:46 UTC
For decades, school children have learned that human civilization emerged about 5000 years ago along the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia, along the Nile, and along the Indus River.

But archaeologists working in a broad arc from the Russian steppes through Iran and onto the Arabian Peninsula are finding evidence that a complex network of cities may have thrived across the region in roughly the same era, suggesting a dramatic new view of the emergence of human civilization.

In a feature in the 3 August issue of Science, news writer Andrew Lawler details the discoveries by teams of researchers and the emerging multinational effort to piece together the array of new evidence into a unified understanding.

Image
©Map by Science
Archaeologists working in a broad arc from the Russian steppes through Iran and onto the Arabian Peninsula are finding evidence that a complex network of cities may have thrived across the region in roughly the same era as Mesopotamia.
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Info

Process Produces Plastics That Are 10 Times More Stretchable


Science Daily
Sun, 08 Jun 2008 16:48 UTC
Move over, Rumplestiltskin. Researchers in China report the first successful "electrospinning" of a type of plastic widely used in automobiles and electronics. The high-tech process, which uses an electric charge to turn polymers into thin fibers in the presence of electricity, produced plastic mats that can stretch 10 times more without breaking than the original material and could lead to new uses for the plastic, they say.

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©American Chemical Society
Scientists report development of a plastic that is 10 times more stretchable than that of the original material. Above is a micrograph of the electrospun nano-sized fibers.
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Telescope

White Dwarf Lost In Planetary Nebula


Science Daily
Sun, 08 Jun 2008 16:44 UTC
Call it the case of the missing dwarf. A team of stellar astronomers is engaged in an interstellar CSI (crime scene investigation). They have two suspects, traces of assault and battery, but no corpse. The southern planetary nebula SuWt 2 is the scene of the crime, some 6,500 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Centaurus.

planetary nebula SuWt 2
©NASA, NOAO, H. Bond and K. Exter (STScI/AURA)
This image of the planetary nebula SuWt 2 reveals a bright ring-like structure encircling a bright central star. The central star is actually a close binary system where two stars completely circle each other every five days. The interaction of these stars and the more massive star that sheds material to create the nebula formed the ring structure. The burned-out core of the massive companion has yet to be found inside the nebula. The nebula is located 6,500 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Centaurus. This color image was taken on Jan. 31, 1995 with the National Science Foundation's 1.5-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. CTIO is part of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, which has its headquarters in Tucson, Ariz.
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Telescope

Astronomers Weigh The Coldest Brown Dwarfs With Astronomy's Sharpest Eyes


Science Daily
Sun, 08 Jun 2008 16:38 UTC
Astronomers have used ultrasharp images obtained with the Keck Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope to determine for the first time the masses of the coldest class of "failed stars," a.k.a. brown dwarfs. With masses as light as 3 percent the mass of the sun, these are the lowest mass free-floating objects ever weighed outside the solar system.

binary 2MASS 1534-2952AB
©Dr. Michael Liu (Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii)
Infrared image of the very low-temperature binary 2MASS 1534-2952AB, composed of two methane brown dwarfs.

The observations are a major step in testing the theoretical predictions of objects that cannot generate their own internal energy, both brown dwarfs and gas-giant planets. The new findings, which are being presented June 2 at the American Astronomical Society meeting in St. Louis, show that the predictions may have some problems.
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Bulb

Origins of the brain


Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
Sun, 08 Jun 2008 16:15 UTC
One of the great scientific challenges is to understand the design principles and origins of the human brain. New research has shed light on the evolutionary origins of the brain and how it evolved into the remarkably complex structure found in humans.

The research suggests that it is not size alone that gives more brain power, but that, during evolution, increasingly sophisticated molecular processing of nerve impulses allowed development of animals with more complex behaviours.

The study shows that two waves of increased sophistication in the structure of nerve junctions could have been the force that allowed complex brains - including our own - to evolve. The big building blocks evolved before big brains.
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Video

Film content, editing, and directing style affect brain activity, NYU neuroscientists show

James Devitt
New York University
Sun, 08 Jun 2008 13:14 UTC
Using advanced functional imaging methods, New York University neuroscientists have found that certain motion pictures can exert considerable control over brain activity. Moreover, the impact of films varies according to movie content, editing, and directing style. Because the study, which appears in Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, offers a quantitative neuroscientific assessment of the impact of different styles of filmmaking on viewers' brains, it may serve as a valuable method for the film industry to better assess its products and offer a new method for exploring how the brain works.

Comment: Did that say exploring or exploiting how the brain works? Consider the following excerpts from the Laurel Canyon series:
"The facility retained as many as 250 producers, directors, technicians, editors, animators, etc., both civilian and military, all with top security clearances - and all reporting to work in a secluded corner of Laurel Canyon.[...]

There are indications that Lookout Mountain Laboratory had an advanced research and development department that was on the cutting edge of new film technologies.[...]

The existence of the facility remained unknown to the general public until the early 1990s, though it had long been rumored that the CIA operated a secret movie studio somewhere in or near Hollywood. Filmmaker Peter Kuran was the first to learn of its existence, through classified documents he obtained while researching his 1995 documentary, Trinity and Beyond. And yet even today, some 15 years after its public disclosure, one would have trouble finding even a single mention of this secret military/intelligence facility anywhere in the 'conspiracy' literature."


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HAL9000

IBM aims to cool chips with water


BBC News
Sat, 07 Jun 2008 18:29 UTC


IBM water chip
©BBC News
The tiny pipes are sandwiched in a layer 100 microns (millionths of a metre) thick between stacked circuits. The tubes are hermetically sealed to prevent leaks and short circuits.

A network of tiny pipes of water could be used to cool next-generation PC chips, researchers at IBM have said.

Scientists at the firm have shown off a prototype device layered with thousands of "hair-width" cooling arteries.

They believe it could be a solution to the increasing amount of heat pumped out by chips as they become smaller and more densely packed with components.
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Telescope

Star "Fireworks" Expected From Strange Eclipsing System

Ker Than
National Geographic News
Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:18 UTC
A celestial threesome seems poised to create a stellar light show that should be visible from Earth within a few decades, astronomers announced this week.

At the heart of the drama sits Epsilon Aurigae, a supergiant F-type star that is considered one of the most unusual objects in the sky.

Even though it is about 242 million miles (389 million kilometers) wide, Epsilon Aurigae is totally eclipsed every 27 years by an even bigger disk-shaped neighbor.
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Cowboy Hat

Egypt uncovers 'missing' pyramid of a pharaoh

Katarina Kratovac
Yahoo News / AP
Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:20 UTC


Image
©AP Photo / Nasser
Workers are seen at the site of a so-called 'missing' pyramid, currently only a heap of rocks at the bottom of a dugout pit shown to media Thursday, June 5, 2008, at Saqqara, south of Cairo, Egypt.

Egyptian archaeologists unveiled on Thursday a 4,000-year-old "missing pyramid" that is believed to have been discovered by an archaeologist almost 200 years ago and never seen again.

Zahi Hawass, Egypt's antiquities chief, said the pyramid appears to have been built by King Menkauhor, an obscure pharaoh who ruled for only eight years.

In 1842, German archaeologist Karl Richard Lepsius mentioned it among his finds at Saqqara, referring to it as number 29 and calling it the "Headless Pyramid" because only its base remains. But the desert sands covered the discovery, and no archaeologist since has been able to find Menkauhor's resting place.
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Cow

Eight 'clone farm' cows born in Britain; meat could be on sale in months


This is London
Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:58 UTC
Eight 'clone farm' cows have been born in the UK, the Daily Mail can reveal.

Their mother is a clone - created in a U.S. laboratory with cells taken from the ear of a prize-winning animal.

Meat or milk from the calves, flown into Britain as frozen embryos and implanted into a surrogate, could be on sale here within months. Though food from clones is barred from the food chain, there are no legal safeguards over their offspring.

Cloned cows
©Unknown
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