Science & TechnologyS


Crusader

Flashback Did a meteor over central Italy in AD 312 change the course of Roman and Christian history?

Dr David Whitehouse
BBC
Mon, 23 Jun 2003 14:57 UTC
A team of geologists believes it has found the incoming space rock's impact crater, and dating suggests its formation coincided with the celestial vision said to have converted a future Roman emperor to Christianity.

It was just before a decisive battle for control of Rome and the empire that Constantine saw a blazing light cross the sky and attributed his subsequent victory to divine help from a Christian God.

©Unknown

Constantine went on to consolidate his grip on power and ordered that persecution of Christians cease and their religion receive official status.

Civil war

In the fourth century AD, the fragmented Roman Empire was being further torn apart by civil war. Constantine and Maxentius were bitterly fighting to be the sole emperor.

Constantine was the son of the western emperor Constantius Chlorus. When he died in 306, his father's troops proclaimed Constantine emperor.

" ...a most marvellous sign appeared to him from heaven... " Eusebius
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Info

Strange New Creature: Giant Shrew or Tiny Elephant?

Jeanna Bryner
livescience.com
Thu, 31 Jan 2008 23:00 UTC
Sporting a trunk-like nose and a jet-black rump, a new species of a bizarre furry mammal was caught on film as it scuttled along a forest floor in Tanzania.

Researchers first sighted the elephant-shrew (Rhynchocyon udzungwensis) in 2005, but not until recently did they confirm the animal as a new species of giant sengi. They filmed the cat-size creature in March 2006 as it twitched its slender snout while searching for insect snacks in the Ndundulu Forest in Tanzania.

©Francesco Rover / Trento Museum of Natural Sciences
The new elephant-shrew species is confined to two high-altitude forests in the mountains of Tanzania.
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Document

Mining Site Predates Incan Empire


livescience.com
Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:54 UTC
An ancient iron ore mine discovered in Peru reveals civilizations in the Andes mined the valuable rock before the Inca Empire.

Archaeologists have known that people in the Old and New Worlds have dug for ore for millennia, but there is little evidence for such mines in the ancient Americas.

"What we found is the only hematite mine - a type of iron also known as ochre - recorded in South America prior to the Spanish conquest," said researcher Kevin Vaughn, an archaeologist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. "This discovery demonstrates that iron ores were important to ancient Andean civilizations."

©Purdue News Service photo/David Umberger
Kevin J. Vaughn, a Purdue assistant professor of anthropology, holds a pottery fragment he discovered at an excavation site in Nasca, Peru. The piece of pottery is from about the 5th century A.D., the same time period as other artifacts he uncovered at an ancient mine. Vaughn conjectures the mine was the source of some of the iron ore pigments used to produce the vibrant colors as seen on this pottery.
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Info

Scientists warn of looming water supply crisis


terradaily.com
Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:28 UTC
We might think we control the climate but unless we harness the powers of our microbial co-habitants on this planet we might be fighting a losing battle, according to an article in the February 2008 issue of Microbiology Today. Humans are continually altering the atmosphere.

"Arrogant organisms that we are, it is easy to view this as something entirely novel in Earth's history," says Dr Dave Reay from the University of Edinburgh. "In truth of course, micro-organisms have been at it for billions of years."

©Unknown
90 billion tonnes of carbon a year is absorbed from the atmosphere by the oceans, and almost as much is released; microbes play a key role in both.
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Question

Dark Matter and Dark Energy: The end to a mystery?


Science and Technology Facilities Council
Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:49 UTC
Astronomers at the University of St Andrews believe they can "simplify the dark side of the universe" by shedding new light on two of its mysterious constituents.

Dr HongSheng Zhao, of the University's School of Physics and Astronomy, has shown that the puzzling dark matter and its counterpart dark energy may be more closely linked than was previously thought.

Only 4% of the universe is made of known material - the other 96% is traditionally labelled into two sectors, dark matter and dark energy.

A British astrophysicist and Advanced Fellow of the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council, Dr Zhao points out, "Both dark matter and dark energy could be two faces of the same coin.

"As astronomers gain understanding of the subtle effects of dark energy in galaxies in the future, we will solve the mystery of astronomical dark matter at the same time. "
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Bulb

Towards a better understanding of hot spot volcanism


Institut de Recherche Pour le Développement
Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:47 UTC
Most of the Earth's listed active volcanoes are located at the borders between two tectonic plates, where upsurge of magma from the mantle is facilitated. When these magmatic uprisings occur at a subduction zone, where one tectonic plate plunges under another, they give rise to volcanic massifs such as the Andes cordillera. Other volcanic chains are formed along oceanic ridges, submarine regions of ocean-floor extension. However, some volcanoes are governed by a completely different mechanism: intraplate volcanism. As their name suggests, these volcanic constructions appear in the very centre of tectonic plates.

Scientists now know that some of them, such as the Hawaii-Emperor archipelago or Reunion Island, result from magmatic upsurges generated at the boundary between the Earth's core and mantle situated 2 900 km deep. Others, such as those of the central Pacific, display different characteristics. They are anomalous, in their simultaneously high number, unusually high concentration and short life-span and prompt scientists to look for hypotheses other than a deep-mantle plume to explain the causes of intraplate volcanism.
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Bulb

Inherited individual variations influence patterns of gene shuffling


University of Chicago Medical Center
Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:45 UTC
The first large-scale, high-resolution study of human genetic recombination has found remarkably high levels of individual variation in genetic exchange, the process by which parents pass on a mosaic-like mixture of their genes.

In an article appearing February 1, 2008, in Science Express, the online version of Science, researchers from the University of Chicago locate nearly 25,000 recombination events that occurred in the transmission of the parental genomes to 364 offspring. The high-resolution of their maps allows them to provide the precise location of where these genetic exchanges occur, and to assess the differences in recombination rates between individuals.

"Genetic recombination is a fundamental process, at the core of reproduction and evolution," said study author Graham Coop, PhD, post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago, "yet we know very little about where it occurs or why there is so much variation among individuals in this important process."
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Eye 1

Blue eyes result of ancient genetic 'mutation'

Roger Highfield
The Telegraph
Wed, 30 Jan 2008 13:45 UTC
Frank Sinatra, Stephen Hawking, Marie Curie and Stephen Fry all owe their blue eyes to a genetic mutation that likely occurred between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, researchers say. Scientists believe they have tracked down the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans on the planet today.

"Originally, we all had brown eyes", said Prof Hans Eiberg from the University of Copenhagen, who led the team.

Blue eye colour most likely originated from the near east area or northwest part of the Black Sea region, where the great agriculture migration to the northern part of Europe took place in the Neolithic periods about six - 10,000 years ago.
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Telescope

Mercury Is Shrinking, Volcanic

Seth Borenstein
Associated Press
Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:44 UTC
Washington - The first pictures from the unseen side of Mercury reveal the wrinkles of a shrinking, aging planet with scars from volcanic eruptions and a birthmark shaped like a spider.

©AP Photo/NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
This image provided by NASA shows: The Spider Radial Troughs within Caloris. The Narrow Angle Camera of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) on the MESSENGER spacecraft obtained high-resolution images of the floor of the Caloris basin on January 14, 2008. Near the center of the basin, an area unseen by Mariner 10, this remarkable feature nicknamed the spider by the science team was revealed. A set of troughs radiates outward in a geometry unlike anything seen by Mariner 10. The radial troughs are interpreted to be the result of extension (breaking apart) of the floor materials that filled the Caloris basin after its formation. Other troughs near the center form a polygonal pattern. This type of polygonal pattern of troughs is also seen along the interior margin of the Caloris basin. An impact crater appears to be centered on the spider. The straight-line segments of the crater walls may have been influenced by preexisting extensional troughs, but some of the troughs may have formed at the time that the crater was excavated.
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Bizarro Earth

Battlefield Earth: A Misguided Missile?

Jamais Cascio
Foreign Policy
Wed, 30 Jan 2008 18:12 UTC
It may sound like science fiction, but it's only a matter of time before the world's militaries learn to wield the planet itself as a weapon.

Preventing global warming from becoming a planetary catastrophe may take something even more drastic than renewable energy, superefficient urban design, and global carbon taxes. Such innovations remain critical, and yet disruptions to the Earth's climate could overwhelm these relatively slow, incremental changes in how we live. As reports of faster-than-expected climate changes mount, a growing number of experts worry that we might ultimately be forced to try something quite radical: geoengineering.

Geoengineering involves humans making intentional, large-scale modifications to the Earth's geophysical systems in order to change the environment. These can include sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide in the oceans, changing the reflectivity of the Earth's surface, and pumping particles into the stratosphere to block a fraction of incoming sunlight. Many of these proposals mimic natural events, so we know that - in principle - they can work, although there is insufficient understanding of their potential side effects. Unsurprisingly, geoengineering is highly controversial, and even proponents view it as a "Hail Mary" pass, to be considered only after all other options have failed.

©NASA

Comment: The prospect of geoengineering is far more worrying when one considers the psychopathic destructively short-sighted and self-interested nature of those in power who would direct such measures; and also the massive extent of the misconceptions and falsehoods that currently masquerade as scientific knowledge of the planet we inhabit - a lack of objectivity which could cause such measures to fail catastrophically.
"The following question thus suggests itself: what happens if the network of understandings among psychopaths achieves power in leadership positions with international exposure? This can happen, especially during the later phases of the [ponerization] phenomenon. Goaded by their character, such people thirst for just that even though it would conflict with their own life interest... They do not understand that a catastrophe would ensue. Germs are not aware that they will be burned alive or buried deep in the ground along with the human body whose death they are causing." - Andrew Lobaczewski
"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)


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