Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Cornell telescope lacks funding despite rare asteroid discovery

Clara Eisinger
The Ithacan Online
Thu, 06 Mar 2008 15:25 UTC
Scientists at Puerto Rico's Arecibo Telescope, run by Cornell University, found a rare asteroid last month with two moons only seven million miles from Earth - a breakthrough for a facility in the midst of serious budget woes.

Michael Nolan, research associate and head of radar astronomy at Arecibo, said the facility was the first in the world to find extrasolar planets and to develop a three dimensional map of how galaxies are distributed in the universe. Still, NASA completely cut off funding to the facility in 2004, and the National Science Foundation has refused to step up its funding in the meantime.
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Bug

Language of a fly proves surprising: Insect's sensory data tells a new story about neural networks


DOE/Los Alamos National Laboratory
Sat, 08 Mar 2008 13:30 UTC
A group of researchers has developed a novel way to view the world through the eyes of a common fly and partially decode the insect's reactions to changes in the world around it. The research fundamentally alters earlier beliefs about how neural networks function and could provide the basis for intelligent computers that mimic biological processes.

In an article published in the Public Library of Science Computational Biology Journal, Los Alamos physicist Ilya Nemenman joins Geoffrey Lewen, William Bialek and Rob de Ruyter van Steveninck of the Hun School of Princeton, Princeton University and Indiana University, respectively, in describing the research.
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Magnify

Special seismic studies of deep tremor - Cascadia Arrays for Earthscope (CAFE)

Steve Malone
The Pacific Northwest Seismic Network
Sat, 08 Mar 2008 11:32 UTC
The University of Washington seismic group began studying deep tremor associated with Episodic Tremor and Slip (ETS) events in 2003 using both the regional PNSN and small aperture arrays. With NSF funding we installed Cascadia Arrays for Earthscope (CAFE) for both structural and tremor studies. The CAFE experiment is still installed as of winter, 2008; however the transportable array stations (TA) of earthscope are starting to be pulled out of western Oregon and many will be pulled out of western Washington in February ....... just before the next ETS. Too bad. Some of the more critical stations are being left longer as well as some stations that the PNSN is taking over by purchasing the equipment from IRIS using funds supplied by the Murdock Chairtable Foundation.
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Cow Skull

Giant Fossil Bats Out Of Africa, 35 Million Years Old


Science Daily
Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:13 UTC
When most of us think of Ancient Egypt, visions of pyramids and mummies fill our imaginations. For a team of paleontologists interested in fossil mammals, the Fayum district of Egypt summons an even older and equally impressive history that extends much further back in time than the Sphinx.

In a recent issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, scientists report on the discovery of six new bat species dating to around 35 million years ago, which sheds new light on the early evolution of bats.

It took over 25 years of fieldwork to collect the 33 specimens that form the basis of the new study. "That translates to a little over one specimen per year - a lot of effort for a single fossil," said Erik Seiffert, a paleontologist at Stony Brook University. "But it shows just how important patience and long term field programs are to science. Our long-term commitment to field work certainly paid off in this case." Among the new species is "a giant among bats; though weighing in at less than a half-pound, it is one of the largest fossil bats ever discovered," said Greg Gunnell, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan.

Image
©Drawing by Bonnie Miljour
Reconstruction of Witwatia schlosseri, a new species of very large bat from the Fayum distric of Egypt.
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Bulb

Artificial black hole created in lab


PhysicsWorld
Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:58 UTC
Everyone knows the score with black holes: even if light strays too close, the immense gravity will drag it inside, never to be seen again. They are thought to be created when large stars finally spend all their fuel and collapse. It might come as a surprise, therefore, to find that physicists in the UK have now managed to create an "artificial" black hole in the lab.

Originally, theorists studying black holes focused almost exclusively on applying Einstein's theory of general relativity, which describes how the gravity of massive objects arises from the curvature of space - time. Then, in 1974, the Cambridge University physicist Stephen Hawking, building on the work of Jacob Bekenstein, showed that quantum mechanics should also be thrown into the mix.
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Telescope

NEAR-EARTH OBJECTS:Preparing for Doomsday

Richard Stone
Science
Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:01 UTC
Over the next several years, new telescopes will spot thousands of near-Earth asteroids and comets. If one is headed our way, will world leaders be ready to respond?

NEO Figure
©IMAGES COURTESY OF SCOTT MANLEY/ARMAGH OBSERVATORY
Aswarm with asteroids. In 2000, there were more than 86,000 known asteroids. By 2007, there were nearly 380,000, including main-belt objects that don't approach Earth (green); objects that approach but do not cross Earth's orbit (yellow); and objects that cross Earth's orbit (red).

TIESHAN TEMPLE NATIONAL FOREST, CHINA--In the control room of XuYi Observatory, Zhao Haibin sits at a computer and loads the night sky over Jiangsu Province. A faint white dot streaks across a backdrop of pulsating stars. "That's a satellite," Zhao says. Elsewhere on the screen, a larger white dot lumbers from east to west. It's a main-belt asteroid, circling the sun between Mars and Jupiter.
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Magnify

Damage Control: Experts Find No Evidence for a Mammoth-Killer Impact

Richard A. Kerr
Science
Fri, 07 Mar 2008 11:21 UTC
A devastating cosmic collision 13,000 years ago continues to play well in the media, but specialists are challenging the grounds for thinking it happened

Mammoths
©GIANNI DAGLI ORTI/CORBIS
Victims of a hit? Published evidence that an impact triggered the mammoths' disappearance is falling far short of proof.

Comment: The American uniformatarianist school of climate change is clearly on the defense. What's missing from this critique is the complete lack of attention to obvious secondary impact craters dating to 12,900 years BP: the Carolina Bays.

As for Gabrielli's comment, one can judge the data from his paper for oneself (click image to enlarge):

Depositional Fluxes
©Nature

Clearly, there is a spike around 12,900 years (first peak from the left in the shaded area. The graph is log-linear). Note also the increased depositional flux throughout the ice age and recall astronomer Victor Clube's talk:
You first take the modern sky accessible to science, especially during the Space Age, and you look at its' darker debris with a view to relating its behavior to the more accessible human history which we can, in principle, really understand. And by this approach you discover from the dynamics of the material in space which I'm talking about that a huge comet must have settled in a Taurid orbit some 20,000 years ago, whose dense meteor stream for 10,000 years almost certainly produced the last Ice Age.


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Telescope

Saturn Moon Rhea May Have Rings


Associated Press
Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:08 UTC
PASADENA, Calif. - New observations by a spacecraft suggest Saturn's second-largest moon may be surrounded by rings. If confirmed, it would the first time a ring system has been found around a moon.
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Phoenix

On the Trail of the Dragon: The European 'Dark Age' And Welsh Oral Tradition


The Morien Institute
Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:59 UTC


Wales flag
©Unknown
The flag of Wales

The mystery of the origins of the red dragon symbol, now on the flag of Wales, has perplexed many historians, writers and romanticists, and the archaeological community generally has refrained from commenting on this most unusual emblem, claiming it does not concern them. In the ancient Welsh language it is known as 'Draig Goch' - 'red dragon', and in "Y Geiriadur Cymraeg Prifysgol Cymru", the "University of Wales Welsh Dictionary", (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1967, p. 1082) there are translations for the various uses of the Welsh word 'draig'. Amongst them are common uses of the word, which is today taken just to mean a 'dragon', but in times past it has also been used to refer to 'Mellt Distaw' - (sheet lightning), and also 'Mellt Didaranau' - (lightning unaccompanied by thunder).
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Robot

Robotic Bird Makes First Flight

Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience
Wed, 05 Mar 2008 13:40 UTC
A micro-aircraft with feathered, morphing wings showed off its stuff yesterday when the bird-like craft lifted off for its first flight. And its landing was just as dramatic: the RoboSwift crashed into a tree.

RoboSwift
©Wageningen University/Guy Ackermans
RoboSwift, a micro-aircraft inspired by the common swift bird, made its first flight in the Netherlands.
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