SOTT
SIGNS
OF THE
TIMES
OF THE
TIMES
Welcome to Sott.net
The World for People who Think
Science & TechnologyS
Want to make your baby smarter?
New research by the Johns Hopkins University has found that it may be as simple as throwing some surprises his or her way.
All babies are born with some natural smarts, but youngsters learn more about the world when this innate intelligence is challenged, cognitive psychologists Aimee E. Stahl and Lisa Feigenson discovered in a study that will be published Friday in the journal Science.
© tva.com
A segment on Canada's CBC Radio show "The Current" takes a closer look at the use of electric cars and their actual impact on the earth.
Citing programs that offer incentives to anyone who wants to ditch a gas-powered car for an electric one in Canada, the report says that if everyone switched to the "greener" electric cars, the overall emissions might not be any less than what they are now.
The disconnect lies where the power that fuels electric cars comes from. Electric charging stations are not always green themselves, according to the report, depending on which part of Canada they're in.
© David McNew/Getty Images
For the third time in less than a year, the moon will dip into Earth's shadow, turning its bright white globe a deep coppery red in a matter of minutes.
The action begins at 3:16 a.m. PST on the morning of April 4 when the edge of the moon first enters the amber core of Earth's shadow.
For the next hour and 45 minutes, Earth's shadow will move across the lunar disk, ultimately covering the entire moon at 4:58 a.m. PST.
The total phase of the lunar eclipse will only last about 5 minutes, making it the shortest lunar eclipse of the century on the morning of Easter Vigil, traditionally observed as the period between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The eclipse also falls within the first night of Passover, observed by Jews worldwide beginning Friday at sunset.
© Screenshot from youtube.com video
The day after her blue-and-pink colored 'robohand' rolled off a 3D printer at the Build It Workplace on Tuesday in Orange County, California, Faith Lennox was already pedaling a bicycle around the company's parking lot with apparent ease.
The 3D hand "has made it easier for her to balance," her mother, Nicole Lennox, told AP. "She can distribute her weight more evenly without having to lean so far" when attempting to steer with just one hand.
The company that produced the hand, Build It Workspace, was founded less than a year ago by mechanical engineer Mark Lengsfeld. He told AP he has used 3D printers to create a number of products, "from pumps for oil and gas companies to parts for unmanned aerial vehicles," but this was the first time his company worked with prosthetics.
Lengsfeld admitted to reporters he was nervous about how the hand would work.
"But she did fine with it," he said, laughing.
© Thinkstock
But now, according to a new study in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, researchers believe the rise of complex language took place relatively rapidly, not as a series of gradual changes as has been described previously.
The Big Bang of language
Some scholars have argued that we first started using a kind of "proto-language" before developing a language that included syntax, or rules that organized word and sentence structures. In the new study, researchers said some words show signs that they descended from a syntax-laden system, not just a collection of simple grunts and sounds.
Study author Shigeru Miyagawa, a linguistics professor at MIT, told redOrbit via email that cognitive developments in the brain allowed for the quick rise of complex language.
"One way to think about this is that the brain, which had been growing ever larger for over a million years, at some point 75,000 to 100,000 years ago, hit a critical point, and all the resources that nature had provided came together in a Big Bang and language emerged pretty much as we know it today," Miyagawa wrote. "It looks counterintuitive given how enormously complex language is, but when one considers that the brain was getting ready for it for more than million years, it isn't too far-fetched."
"This is also around the time that you see other higher-cognitive achievements, such as painted and carved art, refined tools, and sophisticated weapons," he noted.
Blackpoll Warbler
Researchers from University of Guelph, Acadia University, Bird Studies Canada, the University of Massachusetts, the Vermont Centre for Ecostudies and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute tracked the birds' flight by equipping them with tracking devices. They were attached to birds in Nova Scotia and Vermont in the summer. Researches also put coloured plastic bands for identification when they return. The geo-locators tracked the birds' flight path, but, because of their small size, they were not able to transmit the data remotely.
"We waited for them to return in the spring and then searched the forest to find the blackpolls with geo-locators," said William DeLuca, a research fellow at the University of Massachusetts, who led the Vermont part of the study.
Mysterious radio wave flashes from far outside the galaxy are proving tough for astronomers to explain. Is it pulsars? A spy satellite? Or an alien message? 
Bursts of radio waves flashing across the sky seem to follow a mathematical pattern. If the pattern is real, either some strange celestial physics is going on, or the bursts are artificial, produced by human - or alien - technology.
Telescopes have been picking up so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs) since 2001. They last just a few milliseconds and erupt with about as much energy as the sun releases in a month. Ten have been detected so far, most recently in 2014, when the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, caught a burst in action for the first time. The others were found by sifting through data after the bursts had arrived at Earth. No one knows what causes them, but the brevity of the bursts means their source has to be small - hundreds of kilometres across at most - so they can't be from ordinary stars. And they seem to come from far outside the galaxy.
The weird part is that they all fit a pattern that doesn't match what we know about cosmic physics.
To calculate how far the bursts have come, astronomers use a concept called the dispersion measure. Each burst covers a range of radio frequencies, as if the whole FM band were playing the same song. But electrons in space scatter and delay the radiation, so that higher frequency waves make it across space faster than lower frequency waves. The more space the signal crosses, the bigger the difference, or dispersion measure, between the arrival time of high and low frequencies - and the further the signal has travelled.
© Roger Ressmeyer/CorbisThe Parkes telescope: tuned in.
Telescopes have been picking up so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs) since 2001. They last just a few milliseconds and erupt with about as much energy as the sun releases in a month. Ten have been detected so far, most recently in 2014, when the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, caught a burst in action for the first time. The others were found by sifting through data after the bursts had arrived at Earth. No one knows what causes them, but the brevity of the bursts means their source has to be small - hundreds of kilometres across at most - so they can't be from ordinary stars. And they seem to come from far outside the galaxy.
The weird part is that they all fit a pattern that doesn't match what we know about cosmic physics.
To calculate how far the bursts have come, astronomers use a concept called the dispersion measure. Each burst covers a range of radio frequencies, as if the whole FM band were playing the same song. But electrons in space scatter and delay the radiation, so that higher frequency waves make it across space faster than lower frequency waves. The more space the signal crosses, the bigger the difference, or dispersion measure, between the arrival time of high and low frequencies - and the further the signal has travelled.
CBET nr. 4085, issued on 2015, March 31, announces the discovery of a comet (magnitude ~16) by C. Jacques on CCD images taken on 2015, March 27.2 by C. Jacques, E. Pimentel and J. Barros with a 0.28-m f/2.2 astrograph at the SONEAR Observatory (Oliveira, Brazil). The new comet has been designated C/2015 F4 (JACQUES).
We performed follow-up measurements of this object, while it was still on the neocp. Stacking of 14 unfiltered exposures, 60-sec each, obtained remotely on 2015, March 27.7 from Q62 (iTelescope network - Siding Spring) through a 0.43-m f/6.8 astrograph + CCD, shows that this object is a comet with a sharp central condensation surrounded by a coma about 8" in diameter and a tail about 15" long in PA 237.
Our confirmation image (click on it for a bigger version)
We performed follow-up measurements of this object, while it was still on the neocp. Stacking of 14 unfiltered exposures, 60-sec each, obtained remotely on 2015, March 27.7 from Q62 (iTelescope network - Siding Spring) through a 0.43-m f/6.8 astrograph + CCD, shows that this object is a comet with a sharp central condensation surrounded by a coma about 8" in diameter and a tail about 15" long in PA 237.
Our confirmation image (click on it for a bigger version)
© Remanzacco Observatory
© NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
Mercury's dark surface has long been a mystery to scientists. On average, Mercury is much darker than its closest airless neighbour, our Moon. Airless bodies are known to be darkened by micrometeorite impacts and bombardment of solar wind, processes that create a thin coating of dark iron nanoparticles on the surface. But spectral data from Mercury suggests its surface contains very little nanophase iron, certainly not enough to account for its dim appearance.
"It's long been hypothesised that there's a mystery darkening agent that's contributing to Mercury's low reflectance," said Megan Bruck Syal, a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who performed this research while a graduate student at Brown University. "One thing that hadn't been considered was that Mercury gets dumped on by a lot of material derived from comets."
As comets approach Mercury's neighbourhood near the Sun, they often start to break apart. Cometary dust is composed of as much as 25 percent carbon by weight, so Mercury would be exposed to a steady bombardment of carbon from these crumbling comets. Using a model of impact delivery and a known estimate of micrometeorite flux at Mercury, Bruck Syal was able to estimate how often cometary material would impact Mercury, how much carbon would stick to Mercury's surface, and how much would be thrown back into space. Her calculations suggest that after billions of years of bombardment, Mercury's surface should be anywhere from 3 to 6 percent carbon.
The next part of the work was to find out how much darkening could be expected from all that impacting carbon. For that, the researchers turned to the NASA Ames Vertical Gun Range. The 14-foot canon simulates celestial impacts by firing projectiles at up to 16,000 miles per hour.
© YoutubeExtinguishing fire with sound
That vision of the future could be possible thanks to a small, sound-powered fire extinguisher developed by two college seniors, Viet Tran and Seth Robertson, both at George Mason University in Virginia. Tran was searching for an idea for a class project when he stumbled upon an old DARPA project that used sound waves to put out a small fire. The device was rather large—a person certainly couldn't hold it. So he and Robertson set out to make it more practical.
Their extinguisher resembles an antique milk can connected to a well-ventilated amp. A bass speaker sits atop the barrel, which amplifies and directs the sound waves. Tom Jackman, reporting for the Washington Post, has more details:
They placed flaming rubbing alcohol next to a large subwoofer and found that it wasn't necessarily all about that bass, musically speaking, at least. "Music isn't really good," Robertson said, "because it doesn't stay consistent."The extinguisher works by pulsing air across the base of the flame, the boundary layer at which the combusted material produces the flame itself. The deep sound produces successive blasts of air which disrupt the process of combustion. Eventually, the flame peters out.
They tried ultra-high frequencies, such as 20,000 or 30,000 hertz, and could see the flames vibrating but not going out. They took it down low, and at the range of 30 to 60 hertz, the fires began to extinguish.
"I honestly didn't think it would work as well as it did," Tran said.
Comment: Babies raised in bilingual homes learn new words differently than infants learning one language