Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Mars Radar Instruments Work Together To Discover Hidden Martian Secrets


Science Daily
Mon, 21 Apr 2008 16:24 UTC
A radar instrument co-sponsored by NASA on the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter has looked beneath the surface of Mars and opened up a new dimension for planetary exploration.

The technique's success is prompting scientists to think of other places in the solar system where they would like to use radar sounders. The radar sounder on Mars Express is the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Imaging, or MARSIS. It was built to map the distribution of liquid and frozen water in upper portions of the planet's crust.

A complementary radar sounder, the Shallow Subsurface Radar on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, uses a different radio frequency to see greater detail but to a lesser depth.

Mars radar sounder
©NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/University of Rome/Washington Universtiy in St. Louis
Two complementary radar sounder instruments work together to discover hidden Martian secrets.
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Bulb

Flashback Car Powered By Water A Reality

Eric Flack
Wave 3
Wed, 06 Sep 2006 14:16 UTC
Louisville -- Along Florida's Gulf Coast, water is everywhere. From the bay to the beach to the town of Clearwater, that is where we found Denny Klein. A man driven by water, literally.

Klein has invented the world's first water powered car. It runs on what he calls "Aquygen." Aquygen is water or H2O, broken down and turned into HHO gas, something scientists once thought impossible.
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Telescope

Moon Gets A Lashing From Earth's Magnetotail


Science Daily
Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:56 UTC
Behold the full moon. Ancient craters and frozen lava seas lie motionless under an airless sky of profound quiet. It's a serene, slow-motion world where even a human footprint may last millions of years. Nothing ever seems to happen there, right? Wrong.

NASA-supported scientists have realized that something happens every month when the moon gets a lashing from Earth's magnetic tail.

"Earth's magnetotail extends well beyond the orbit of the moon and, once a month, the moon orbits through it," says Tim Stubbs, a University of Maryland scientist working at the Goddard Space Flight Center. "This can have consequences ranging from lunar 'dust storms' to electrostatic discharges."

Earths magnetic field
©NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center- Conceptual Image Lab
Earth's magnetic field responds to the solar wind much like an airport wind sock: It stretches out with its tail pointing downwind.
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Telescope

Could There Be Life On Saturn's Moon Enceladus?


Science Daily
Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:43 UTC
Could microbial life exist inside Enceladus, where no sunlight reaches, photosynthesis is impossible and no oxygen is available? To answer that question, we need look no farther than our own planet to find examples of the types of exotic ecosystems that could make life possible on Saturn's geyser moon. The answer appears to be, yes, it could be possible. It is this tantalizing potential that brings us back to Enceladus for further study.

fracture zone (white area)
©Li-Hung Lin. Image courtesy of NASA
About two miles below the ground in a South African gold mine, scientist Duane Moser stands next to the fracture zone (white area) where he and Li-Hung Lin found bacteria that live in an ecosystem driven by radioactive decay with no oxygen, no light and no organic input.
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Newspaper

Slowly-developing primates definitely not dim-witted

Monte Basgall
Duke University
Wed, 16 Apr 2008 02:58 UTC
Some primates have evolved big brains because their extra brainpower helps them live and reproduce longer, an advantage that outweighs the demands of extra years of growth and development they spend reaching adulthood, anthropologists from Duke University and the University of Zurich have concluded in a new study.

The four investigators compared key benchmarks in the development of 28 different primate species, ranging from humans living free of modern trappings in South American jungles to lemurs living in wild settings in Madagascar.
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Pumpkin

Ballmer: Vista - A Work In Progress, But Bigger Than XP

Dee Chisamera
eFluxMedia
Sat, 19 Apr 2008 02:10 UTC
During Microsoft's Most Valuable Professionals in Seattle, CEO Steve Ballmer had one thing to say about Windows Vista, one year after its release: it's "a work in progress." Just one month ago, Microsoft released Service Pack 1, fixing a number of issues that have emerged during the past year through quality improvements, improvements to the administration experience and support for emerging hardware and standards.

As Ballmer said at the conference, there's still work to be done on Vista: "A very important piece of work, and I think we did a lot of things right, and I think we have a lot of things we need to learn from," he said. "Vista is bigger than XP. It's going to stay bigger than XP."
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Telephone

I'm Listening -- Conversations With Computers


ScienceDaily
Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:13 UTC
A computer system that can carry on a discussion with a human being by reacting to signals such as tone of voice and facial expression, is being developed by an international team including Queen's University Belfast.
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Bulb

New research shows slight of hand is not so slight


Purdue University
Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:25 UTC
Typing on a keyboard or scribbling on paper may be similar activities, but there is a significant difference in how the body moves, according to new motor development research.

"In language we start with letters that lead to syllables that lead to words, and we use grammar to put everything together," said Howard N. Zelaznik, a Purdue University professor of health and kinesiology. "One of the fundamental questions in motor control is whether there is an alphabet that guides movement.

"We wanted to know if discrete skills, which have a definite beginning and end, such as typing, are controlled identically to continuous skills, such as scribbling, which do not have such a clear beginning and end. Or, are continuous movements composed of a series of discrete movements that are knotted together? On both accounts, the answer is no."
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Bulb

What happens when you pop a quantum balloon?


University of Southern California
Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:22 UTC
Study in this week's Nature journal finds striking similarities and differences between quantum and classical chaos.

When a tiny, quantum-scale, hypothetical balloon is popped in a vacuum, do the particles inside spread out all over the place as predicted by classical mechanics"

The question is deceptively complex, since quantum particles do not look or act like air molecules in a real balloon. Matter at the infinitesimally small quantum scale is both a wave and a particle, and its location cannot be fixed precisely because measurement alters the system.

Now, theoretical physicists at the University of Southern California and the University of Massachusetts Boston have proven a long-standing hypothesis that quantum-scale chaos exists ... sort of.
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Fish

'Babelfish' to translate alien tongues could be built

Michael Reilly
New Scientist
Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:30 UTC
Santa Clara -- If we ever make contact with intelligent aliens, we should be able to build a universal translator to communicate with them, according to a linguist and anthropologist in the US.
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