Science & TechnologyS


Coffee

Archaeologists find mysterious neolithic structure in Orkney dig

Caroline Lewis
24hourmuseum
Thu, 20 Dec 2007 07:46 UTC
The sands of time have been rapidly eroding at the Orkney Bronze Age site, the Links of Noltland. Before everything is lost to the sea around the island of Westray, Historic Scotland have been carrying out a thorough excavation to learn everything they can.

The dig at the ancient dune-protected houses has now turned up an unexpected and impressive discovery dating to Neolithic times, archaeologists have announced following the conclusion of their work.
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Coffee

Huge Newfound Part of Milky Way Rotates Backward

Robert Roy Britt
Live Science
Wed, 12 Dec 2007 00:47 UTC
Our Milky Way Galaxy has two distinct parts in its outer reaches that rotate in opposite directions, astronomers announced today.

©SDSS-II, Masashi Chiba, Tohoku University, Japan
The new study finds an inner halo (orange area) that is more flattened and dominates the population of stars up to 50,000 light years from the Milky Way's center. The outer halo (blue) is more spherical, and dominates the population beyond 65,000 light years from the galactic center. It may extend out to more than 300,000 light years. The red plus symbols represent stars and the brown burst-like symbols are star clusters.
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Telescope

Baffling Cosmic Explosion Comes Out of Nowhere

Andrea Thompson
Live Science
Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:24 UTC
A cosmic explosion that seems to have come out of nowhere--thousands of light-years from the nearest collection of stars--has left astronomers baffled.

©B. Cenko, et al. and the W. M. Keck Observatory
The robotic Palomar 60-inch telescope imaged the afterglow of GRB 070125 on January 26, 2007. Right: An image taken of the same field on February 16 with the 10-meter Keck I telescope reveals no trace of an afterglow, or a host galaxy. The white cross in this zoom-in view marks the GRB's location. The two nearest galaxies, and their distances, are marked with arrows.
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Bulb

"Granddaddy of Kangaroos" Found in Aussie Fossil

Dave Hansford
National Geographic
Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:11 UTC
A 25-million-year-old fossilized skeleton of a kangaroo is shedding new light on the evolution of the iconic Australian animal, scientists say.

The nearly complete specimen reveals a creature that once plucked fruit from Australian rain forests and bounded on all fours like a modern-day possum.

©La Trobe University
A 25-million-year-old skull is part of what scientists say is one of the oldest and most complete kangaroo fossils ever found.
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Coffee

Uranus, Neptune Swapped Spots, New Model Says

Anne Minard
National Geographic
Wed, 19 Dec 2007 23:15 UTC
Like children growing up and moving away from home, the gas giant planets of our solar system took shape twice as close to the sun as they are now and slowly moved outward.

©Uranus image courtesy NASA/Space Telescope Science Institute; Neptune image courtesy NASA/JPL
The gas giant planets of our solar system took shape twice as close to the sun as they are now and slowly moved outward, according to a new theory that challenges established ideas for how the gas giants formed. But for this theory to work, the lead author says, Uranus (left) and Neptune (right) had to have switched orbital positions up to four billion years ago.
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Binoculars

Sandia supercomputers offer new explanation of Tunguska disaster


Sandia National Laboratories
Mon, 17 Dec 2007 22:04 UTC


INCINERATION POSSIBLE - Fine points of the "fireball" that might be expected from an asteroid exploding in Earth's atmosphere are indicated in a supercomputer simulation devised by a team led by Sandia researcher Mark Boslough. (Photo by Randy Montoya)

The stunning amount of forest devastation at Tunguska a century ago in Siberia may have been caused by an asteroid only a fraction as large as previously published estimates, Sandia National Laboratories supercomputer simulations suggest.

"The asteroid that caused the extensive damage was much smaller than we had thought," says Sandia principal investigator Mark Boslough of the impact that occurred June 30, 1908. "That such a small object can do this kind of destruction suggests that smaller asteroids are something to consider. Their smaller size indicates such collisions are not as improbable as we had believed."

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Einstein

Brain Cells More Powerful Than You Think

E.J. Mundell
livescience.com
Wed, 19 Dec 2007 20:19 UTC
The human brain constantly sorts through its 1 trillion cells, looking for perhaps only one or a handful of neurons to carry out a particular action, a trio of new studies says.

The research, conducted with rodents and published in the Dec. 20 issue of Nature, could rewrite the textbooks on just how important individual brain cells or cell clusters are to the working mind.

Before these insights, "The thinking was that very large ensembles of neurons [brain cells] had to be activated at some point for the animal to feel or perceive" a stimulus, explained the senior researcher of two of the studies, Karel Svoboda, a group leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Va.
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Fish

Why Deep-Diving Mammals Don't Black Out

Jeanna Bryner,
livescience.com
Wed, 19 Dec 2007 20:13 UTC
Some seals and dolphins can hold their breath underwater for a cheek-popping hour or more without passing out from lack of oxygen.

Definitely don't try this at home. Humans can't make it more than a few minutes without breathing (at least without some sci-fi device).

The secret to the superhero animal feat is elevated levels of special oxygen-carrying proteins found in their brains, a new study reveals. But the research leaves puzzles.

Scientists have long wondered why marine mammals, such as dolphins, whales, Weddell seals and sea otters, are so tolerant of such low oxygen conditions. The simplest explanation had been that they evolved adaptations to boost oxygen delivery to the brain. But studies have shown that the oxygen levels in their blood vessels plummeted within minutes of dipping beneath the water's surface.

©T. M. Williams/UCSC
Beau Richter monitors the breath-holding cabability of Puka, a bottlenose dolphin at UC Santa Cruz's Long Marine Laboratory. Researchers found some marine mammals may be able to endure low oxygen levels due to enhanced amounts of proteins called globins in their brains.
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House

Bamboo road bridge can support 16-tonne trucks

Mason Inman
newscientist.com
Wed, 19 Dec 2007 19:42 UTC
Bridges built from bamboo instead of steel could provide a cheaper, more environmentally sustainable engineering solution in China, a recent experiment suggests.

A novel type of bridge with horizontal beams made from a bamboo composite proved strong enough to support even heavy trucks in tests. The bamboo beams are cheaper and more environmentally friendly to make than steel or concrete, yet offer comparable structural strength.

Yan Xiao, who works at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, US, and at Hunan University in China, led the development of the bamboo beams used to make the bridge.

Instead of using round, pole-like pieces of unprocessed bamboo, which have been used as building material for many thousands of years, he came up with a way of assembling timber-like beams from many smaller strips of bamboo.

©University of Southern California
The novel bridge with horizontal beams made from a bamboo composite proved strong enough to support even heavy trucks
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Fish

Deer-like fossil is a missing link in whale evolution

Jason Palmer
newscientist.com
Wed, 19 Dec 2007 19:34 UTC
A racoon-sized mammal which lived in India about 48 million years ago, may represent one of the missing links in whale evolution, suggests a new fossil study.

The research also challenges the idea that cetaceans - the order that includes whales, dolphins, and porpoises - split from their land-dwelling forebears and returned to the water to hunt aquatic prey.

Researchers studying 48-million-year-old fossils of Indohyus, an extinct animal which may have looked like a small deer, from ancient riverbeds in Kashmir suggest that the fossils represent a likely ancestor of the cetaceans.

Indohyus belongs to a family known as raoellids and would have lived around the same time as early cetaceans, both having descended from a common ancestor, they suggest.

©Carl Buell
Evidence shows that Indohyus was at least in part an eater of vegetation and did not return to a watery life to hunt
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