Science & TechnologyS


Clock

Study confirms ancient Chile settlement is 14,000 years old


Agence France-Presse
Fri, 09 May 2008 17:18 UTC
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.
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Telescope

Merging Antennae Galaxies Move Closer


Science Daily
Fri, 09 May 2008 15:10 UTC
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.

Antennae Galaxies
©NASA, ESA & Ivo Saviane (European Southern Observatory)/Robert Gendler
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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Frog

High School freshman unearths asteroid, cometary evidence for mammoth extinction

Peter Johnson
Great Falls Tribune
Thu, 01 May 2008 14:16 UTC
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.
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Einstein

'Missing link' memristor created: Rewrite the textbooks?

R. Colin Johnson
EE Times
Wed, 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.
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Magnify

When Genes Go Retro


The New York Times
Tue, 06 May 2008 00:10 UTC


DNA
©Alfred Pasieka
DNA

Pssst! I'm going on a tour of the genome - want to come?

I'm going to walk among the coiled spirals of DNA, and ponder the different histories of the different segments. For one of the most remarkable discoveries of recent decades is that genomes are not static, fixed entities that evolve as one; instead, they are highly dynamic. From one generation to the next, stretches of DNA may appear or disappear, or move from one location to another. From time to time, entire new genes appear and become established, thus expanding the organisms' genetic repertoire.
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Telescope

Saturn Does The Wave In Upper Atmosphere


Saturn Daily
Thu, 08 May 2008 23:43 UTC
Two decades of scrutinizing Saturn are finally paying off, as scientists have discovered a wave pattern, or oscillation, in Saturn's atmosphere only visible from Earth every 15 years.

The discovery of the wave pattern is the result of a 22-year campaign observing Saturn from Earth (the longest study of temperature outside Earth ever recorded), and the Cassini spacecraft's observations of temperature changes in the giant planet's atmosphere over time.

Saturn
©Unknown
"You could only make this discovery by observing Saturn over a long period of time," said Orton, lead author of the ground-based study. "It's like putting together 22 years worth of puzzle pieces, collected by a hugely rewarding collaboration of students and scientists from around the world on various telescopes."

The Cassini infrared results, which appear in the same issue of Nature as the data from the 22-year ground-based observing campaign, indicate that Saturn's wave pattern is similar to a pattern found in Earth's upper atmosphere. The earthly oscillation takes about two years. A similar pattern on Jupiter takes more than four Earth years. The new Saturn findings add a common link to the three planets.
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Telescope

SETI scientists get a new tool in search for extraterrestrial life

Julie Sevrens Lyons
Mercury News
Thu, 08 May 2008 22:49 UTC
In a meadow of one of Northern California's pristine national forests, 2,000-pound radio telescopes are popping up like mushrooms.

Made of aluminum and resembling something out of the movie "Contact," they point to the heavens and wait in silent attention. Scientists hope they will one day detect radio waves sent from a faraway planet.

obsvSETI
©Gary Reyes / Mercury News
Forty-two radio dishes of the Allen Telescope Array at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Hat Creek, Calif. point to the skies collecting scientific data in the search for signs of intelligent life in the universe on April 29, 2008. Each dish is about 20-feet in diameter.
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Telescope

X-ray observatory discovers part of missing matter in the universe

Gregory Mone
European Space Agency
Tue, 06 May 2008 19:33 UTC
ESA's orbiting X-ray observatory XMM-Newton has been used by a team of international astronomers to uncover part of the missing matter in the universe.

10 years ago, scientists predicted that about half of the 'ordinary' or normal matter made of atoms exists in the form of low-density gas, filling vast spaces between galaxies.

All the matter in the universe is distributed in a web-like structure. At dense nodes of the cosmic web are clusters of galaxies, the largest objects in the universe. Astronomers suspected that the low-density gas permeates the filaments of the web.
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Telescope

Canada to launch asteroid-hunting satellite


Thetechherald.com
Thu, 08 May 2008 19:24 UTC


CSA Logo
©CSA
The CSA is to launch a suitcase-sized satellite to detect Near Earth Objects.

A team led by the Canadian Space Agency is set to launch a microsatellite designed to detect near-Earth asteroids from space.
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Better Earth

Ancient seaweed chews confirm age of Chilean site

Maggie Fox
News Daily
Thu, 08 May 2008 18:56 UTC
WASHINGTON - Bits of chewed-up or burned seaweed discarded more than 14,000 years ago confirm that people were in Chile at least that long ago and shed light on what their culture was like, researchers reported on Thursday.

The findings at a site 10,000 miles from the Bering Strait add to an almost overwhelming pile of evidence that people were well distributed across the western Americas long before the so-called Clovis culture 13,000 years ago.

And the seaweed picked up at the Monte Verde site provide a direct link to people living in the area today, some of whom also use some of the seaweed species medicinally.
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