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Aramaic: Technology brings new insights to ancient language


The University of Chicago
Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:40 UTC
Image
© Oriental Institute, University of Chicago
Tablets uncovered at Persepolis in Iran are covered with writing in Aramaic. The archive, being studied at the University of Chicago, provides new insights on the language, which has been written and spoken in the Middle East continuously since ancient times.
New technologies and academic collaborations are helping scholars at the University of Chicago analyze hundreds of ancient documents in Aramaic, one of the Middle East's oldest continuously spoken and written languages.

Members of the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California are helping the University's Oriental Institute make very high-quality electronic images of nearly 700 Aramaic administrative documents. The Aramaic texts were incised in the surfaces of clay tablets with styluses or inked on the tablets with brushes or pens. Some tablets have both incised and inked texts.
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Meteor

Mars Rover Spots Another Meteorite


Space.com
Mon, 12 Oct 2009 17:10 UTC
NASA's intrepid Mars rover Opportunity has found yet another meteorite on the surface of the red planet.

Opportunity stumbled upon this new meteorite, dubbed "Shelter Island," less than three weeks after driving away from a larger meteorite that the rover examined for six weeks.

The rover began its approach to the meteorite with a 92-foot (28-meter) backwards drive on Oct. 1, the rover's 2,022nd day on Mars.

Opportunity and its twin rover Spirit - which is currently embedded in a soft spot of soil called Troy - have been on the Martian surface for more than five years.
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Telescope

NASA Spacecraft Provides Our First View of Our Place in the Galaxy


SpaceRef.com
Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:00 UTC
Image
© NASA
NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, spacecraft has made it possible for scientists to construct the first comprehensive sky map of our solar system and its location in the Milky Way galaxy. The new view will change the way researchers view and study the interaction between our galaxy and sun.

The sky map was produced with data that two detectors on the spacecraft collected during six months of observations. The detectors measured and counted particles scientists refer to as energetic neutral atoms.

The energetic neutral atoms are created in an area of our solar system known as the interstellar boundary region. This region is where charged particles from the sun, called the solar wind, flow outward far beyond the orbits of the planets and collide with material between stars. The energetic neutral atoms travel inward toward the sun from interstellar space at velocities ranging from 100,000 mph to more than 2.4 million mph. This interstellar boundary emits no light that can be collected by conventional telescopes.

The new map reveals the region that separates the nearest reaches of our galaxy, called the local interstellar medium, from our heliosphere -- a protective bubble that shields and protects our solar system from most of the dangerous cosmic radiation traveling through space.
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Bulb

Object Permanence: An intriguing connection between dogs and humans

Meg Marquardt
Examiner
Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:27 UTC
Your canine may not be so different from your infant. A famous psychological experiment showed that infants will almost always look for an object in its initial hiding place even if they've seen it moved somewhere new. A recent experiment shows dogs make the same bizarre mistake.

In the experiment, published this week in Science, an adult talks to the infant or dog as they hide the object. After a few trials, the adult moves the object. Both subjects will continue to search for the object in the first location even though they've seen it hidden somewhere new. The vocal interactions are key, for if they are not present, both babies and dogs make fewer mistakes.
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Meteor

Giant Impact Near India - Not Mexico - May Have Doomed Dinosaurs


ScienceDaily
Thu, 15 Oct 2009 05:00 UTC
A mysterious basin off the coast of India could be the largest, multi-ringed impact crater the world has ever seen. And if a new study is right, it may have been responsible for killing the dinosaurs off 65 million years ago.

Mumbai Offshore Basin
© Geological Society Of America
Three-dimensional reconstruction of the submerged Shiva crater (~500 km diameter) at the Mumbai Offshore Basin, western shelf of India from different cross-sectional and geophysical data.
Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and a team of researchers took a close look at the massive Shiva basin, a submerged depression west of India that is intensely mined for its oil and gas resources. Some complex craters are among the most productive hydrocarbon sites on the planet. Chatterjee will present his research at this month's Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Oregon.

"If we are right, this is the largest crater known on our planet," Chatterjee said. "A bolide of this size, perhaps 40 kilometers (25 miles) in diameter creates its own tectonics."

By contrast, the object that struck the Yucatan Peninsula, and is commonly thought to have killed the dinosaurs was between 8 and 10 kilometers (5 and 6.2 miles) wide.
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Telescope

How the Moon Produces its Own Water


ScienceDaily
Thu, 15 Oct 2009 07:00 UTC
Moon
© Wieser et al.
Chandrayaan-1 SARA measurements of hydrogen flux recorded on the Moon on 6 February 2009.
The Moon is a big sponge that absorbs electrically charged particles given out by the Sun. These particles interact with the oxygen present in some dust grains on the lunar surface, producing water. This discovery, made by the ESA-ISRO instrument SARA onboard the Indian Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, confirms how water is likely being created on the lunar surface.

It also gives scientists an ingenious new way to take images of the Moon and any other airless body in the Solar System.

The lunar surface is a loose collection of irregular dust grains, known as regolith. Incoming particles should be trapped in the spaces between the grains and absorbed. When this happens to protons they are expected to interact with the oxygen in the lunar regolith to produce hydroxyl and water. The signature for these molecules was recently found and reported by Chandrayaan-1's Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument team.

The SARA results confirm that solar hydrogen nuclei are indeed being absorbed by the lunar regolith but also highlight a mystery: not every proton is absorbed. One out of every five rebounds into space. In the process, the proton joins with an electron to become an atom of hydrogen. "We didn't expect to see this at all," says Stas Barabash, Swedish Institute of Space Physics, who is the European Principal Investigator for the Sub-keV Atom Reflecting Analyzer (SARA) instrument, which made the discovery.
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Telescope

The Milky Way's tiny but tough galactic neighbor

Dr. Henri Boffin
European Southern Observatory
Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:02 UTC
Image
© ESO
In the new ESO image, Barnard's Galaxy glows beneath a sea of foreground stars in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer). At the relatively close distance of about 1.6 million light-years, Barnard's Galaxy is a member of the Local Group (ESO 11/96), the archipelago of galaxies that includes our home, the Milky Way. The nickname of NGC 6822 comes from its discoverer, the American astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard, who first spied this visually elusive cosmic islet using a 125-millimetre aperture refractor in 1884.
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Question

What Shook Up Saturn's Rings in 1984?

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:07 UTC
Image
© NASA/JPL/SSI
Inscrutable but not immutable
Saturn's rings seem almost immutable. These planetary jewels, carved by moonlets and shaped by gravity, could well have looked much the same now as they did billions of years ago - but only from afar.

Now it is emerging that an event around 25 years ago dramatically disrupted the rings - and all our telescopes and spacecraft missed it. This mysterious event suddenly warped the planet's innermost rings into a ridged spiral pattern, like the grooves on a vinyl record. The latest images reveal that the perturbation is so vast that only a profound change to the planet can have caused it.

The first hint that Saturn's rings had been perturbed came in 2006 from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which took pictures of the planet's innermost ring, a tenuous, icy band called the D ring. Cassini found alternating light and dark bands that suggested the ring was not perfectly flat, but was composed of grooves, about a kilometre in amplitude.
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What Drives Our Genes? Researchers Map The First Complete Human Epigenome


Science Daily
Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:13 UTC
Although the human genome sequence faithfully lists (almost) every single DNA base of the roughly 3 billion bases that make up a human genome, it doesn't tell biologists much about how its function is regulated. Now, researchers at the Salk Institute provide the first detailed map of the human epigenome, the layer of genetic control beyond the regulation inherent in the sequence of the genes themselves.

"In the past we've been limited to viewing small snippets of the epigenome," says senior author Joseph Ecker, Ph.D., professor and director of the Genomic Analysis Laboratory at the Salk Institute and a member of the San Diego Epigenome Center. "Being able to study the epigenome in its entirety will lead to a better understanding of how genome function is regulated in health and disease but also how gene expression is influenced by diet and the environment."
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Binoculars

Hunting Arctic Asteroid Impact With Hovercraft

Alexis Madrigal
Wired
Mon, 12 Oct 2009 17:43 UTC
Two polar scientists hot on the trail of an arctic mystery have a new tool for exploration: a hovercraft, specially outfitted for week-long trips over the ice with scientific instruments and solar panels.

Hovercraft
© Hall and Kristofferson
The hovercraft
Their quarry is a nearly 22,000 square-mile patch of disturbed Arctic sea floor that could be evidence of a massive asteroid strike. John Hall, a now-retired geoscientist, discovered the anomaly during his late-'60s graduate work aboard Fletcher's Ice Island, a huge berg U.S. scientists inhabited for several decades.

Since then, no scientific vessel has been back over the area to collect more data. The massive icebreakers that have crunched through the Arctic since the 1990s can't reach the spot, said Yngve Kristofferson, a scientist and explorer at the University of Bergen in Norway.

Kristofferson became intrigued with Hall's data and in 2004, the two of them met in Bergen to talk Arctic science from eight in the morning to 10 in the evening. At the end of their time together, they came to a decision: They needed a hovercraft.
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