Science & TechnologyS


Saturn

Are We Living in a Designer Universe?

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© Wales News ServiceThe argument over whether the universe has a creator, and who that might be, is among the oldest in human history.
The creators of the world were closer to men than to gods, argues John Gribbin.

Amateur astronomer Peter Shah who has taken astonishing shots of the universe from his garden shed

The argument over whether the universe has a creator, and who that might be, is among the oldest in human history. But amid the raging arguments between believers and skeptics, one possibility has been almost ignored - the idea that the universe around us was created by people very much like ourselves, using devices not too dissimilar to those available to scientists today.

As with much else in modern physics, the idea involves particle acceleration, the kind of thing that goes on in the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Before the LHC began operating, a few alarmists worried that it might create a black hole which would destroy the world. That was never on the cards: although it is just possible that the device could generate an artificial black hole, it would be too small to swallow an atom, let alone the Earth.

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Big eats from a 12,000-year-old burial

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© Naftali HilgerResearchers say that at least 35 people held a ceremonial feast in this cave around 12,000 years ago.
Communal feasting may have existed prior to farming's invention.

Nacho-fueled Super Bowl bashes and multi-course wedding banquets may hark back to a time when preagricultural people devoured wild animal meat at their comrades' gravesides.

That's what happened 12,000 years ago at Hilazon Tachtit cave in Israel, say zooarchaeologist Natalie Munro of the University of Connecticut in Storrs and archaeologist Leore Grosman of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. At least 35 members of the Natufian culture gathered there to chow down on wild tortoise meat at the burial pit of an elderly woman who probably had been a shaman, the researchers report in a paper scheduled to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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New view of tectonic plates

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© Georg Stadler, Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences, UT AustinThis cross section shows the adaptively refined mesh with a finest resolution of about 1 km in the region from the New Hebrides to Tonga in the SW Pacific. The refinement occurs both around plate boundaries and dynamically in response to the nonlinear rheology.
Computational scientists and geophysicists at the University of Texas at Austin and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed new computer algorithms that for the first time allow for the simultaneous modeling of the earth's Earth's mantle flow, large-scale tectonic plate motions, and the behavior of individual fault zones, to produce an unprecedented view of plate tectonics and the forces that drive it.

A paper describing the whole-earth model and its underlying algorithms will be published in the August 27 issue of the journal Science and also featured on the cover.

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KwaZulu-Natal's Ancient Tool Find

Ancient Arrows
© juliaf, sxc.huA set of ancient arrows.
A team of South African researchers and scientists have found 64 000-year-old stone tools in northern KwaZulu-Natal which may help explain how the process of thought developed in humans, the University of Johannesburg (UJ) announced on Friday.

The team which was led by University of the Witwatersrand professor Lyn Wadley and included UJ lecturer Dr Marlize Lombard, believed it could be the earliest direct evidence of human-made, stone-tipped arrows.

The tools were excavated from layers of old sediment in Sibudu Cave, a sandstone cliff cave in northern KwaZulu-Natal.

"Closer inspection of the stone tools revealed remnants of blood, bone and other use-traces, that provided clues about how it was used," Lombard said in a statement.

The shape of the geometric pieces indicated where they had been impacted and damaged, and how they were joined to the handle or strap.

Researchers also detected traces of glue, made of a plant-based resin, which may have been used to fasten the pieces to a wooden or reed shaft.

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Google Turns Millions into Accidental Spammers

As many as 4.25 million Gmail users were turned into unintentional spammers due to a glitch in Gmail's system.

Despite assurances from Google team members that the problem has been fixed, Gmail users continue to post reports to the contrary.

Gmail user reports of messages being resent many times and other mail errors began trickling into the Gmail Help Forum as early as last Saturday, reaching a peak on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Google alerted its customers that the company was experiencing an issue affecting less than 2.5 percent of the Google Mail user base

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Nasca Lines May be Map of Underground Water Sources: Expert

A new research has found that Nasca lines which are a series of ancient geoglyphs located in the Nazca Desert of Peru, may be a giant map of the underground water sources traced on the land, says expert.

The Nasca Lines are located in the Peruvian desert, about 200 miles south of Lima.

The assortment of perfectly straight lines lies in an area measuring 37 miles long and 1-mile wide.

American researcher David Johnson started his research in 1995. He became aware of the scarcity of water in the region and the effect that this had on agricultural production and the quality of life.

While looking for sources of water, he noticed that ancient aqueducts, called puquios, seemed to be connected with some of the lines.

The Nasca plain is one of the driest places on Earth, getting less than one inch of rain a year.

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Dinosaurs 'Wiped Out by Meteor Shower Lasting Thousands of Years'

Dinosaur
© Telegraph, UKDinosaurs could have been wiped out by a meteor shower lasting thousands of years.

Scientists had previously identified the a giant Chicxulub crater in the Gulf of Mexico as the site of a single meteor strike thought to have obliterated prehistoric life on Earth.

But evidence for a second impact in Ukraine, dating back thousands of years before the Chicxulub impact, has raised the possibility that the dinosaurs may have been blitzed with a shower of meteorites.

The Boltysh Crater in Ukraine was first discovered in 2002. But scientists have now unearthed a second cavity within the crater which they believe was caused by the aftermath of the Chicxulub impact - suggesting that the two meteor strikes occurred years apart as part of a wider "shower".

Scientists dated the two Boltysh impact zones by examining the pollen and spores of fossil plants in the layers of mud within.

Ferns are among the first plants to colonise a devastated landscape after a catastrophe, leaving layers of spores - dubbed "fern spikes" - which are considered good markers of past impact events.

The researchers found a second "fern spike" one meter above the first in the Boltysh crater - suggesting that two separate strikes occurred thousands of years apart.

Chalkboard

Scheme to 'pull electricity from the air' sparks debate

electroworld
© BBCThe claim of electricity from the air as a renewable resource is controversial
Tiny charges gathered directly from humid air could be harnessed to generate electricity, researchers say.

Dr Fernando Galembeck told the American Chemical Society meeting in Boston that the technique exploited a little-known atmospheric effect.

Tests had shown that metals could be used to gather the charges, he said, opening up a potential energy source in humid climates.

However, experts disagree about the mechanism and the scale of the effect.

"The basic idea is that when you have any solid or liquid in a humid environment, you have absorption of water at the surface," Dr Galembeck, from the University of Campinas in Brazil, told BBC News

"The work I'm presenting here shows that metals placed under a wet environment actually become charged."

Dr Galembeck and his colleagues isolated various metals and pairs of metals separated by a non-conducting separator - a capacitor, in effect - and allowed nitrogen gas with varying amounts of water vapour to pass over them.

What the team found was that charge built up on the metals - in varying amounts, and either positive or negative. Such charge could be connected to a circuit periodically to create useful electricity.

The effect is incredibly small - gathering an amount of charge 100 million times smaller over a given area than a solar cell produces - but seems to represent a means of charge accumulation that has been overlooked until now.

Dr Galembeck suggests that with further development, the principle could be extended to become a renewable energy resource in humid parts of the world, such as the tropics.

Better Earth

The Face Of The Earth

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© DLRMount Teide, Tenerife. 3D view of a TanDEM-X digital elevation model combined with radar intensity data.
For a month now, we have been acquiring altitude models with the TanDEM-X and TerraSAR-X satellite pair. Already, over 1000 products have come out of our operational processing chain. Alongside many test images, some of the data also give an insight into how humankind has shaped the surface of the Earth - and how the highs and lows around them have determined the course of their lives.

Many of the interferometric images created over the last few weeks have used test data acquired over flat areas to enable us to test the stability and precision of our imaging and processing chains with minimal altitude changes. Some of the images, on the other hand, have been of exceptionally complicated terrain, in order to test the transformation of interferograms into altitude data.

The satellites are still not flying in close formation with synchronous data acquisition, so the ultimate altitude precision cannot yet been achieved. Also, the final steps for calibrating the processing chain have not yet been performed. Nevertheless, the images are already of impressive quality and are showing us details that were not previously visible from space.

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Japan's 1st Touchable 3D TV Screen

Touchable 3D TV
© FFOG Net
Japanese researchers have developed the world's first 3D TV system where you can touch and feel the images that pop out from the screen. The technology allows users to manipulate the 3D images, giving them the sensation of moving, squashing or stretching them.

Six motion-detector cameras are used to monitor the viewer's fingers and tiny clips attached to their index digits vibrate when they 'touch' an image. The multiple cameras are angled so that there are no blind spots. The breakthrough i3Space device was developed by scientists at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology or what is so called AIST, in Japan.

A spokesman said that this system recognises the user's behaviour and offers tactile feedback and the illusion of using the tactile sense of force. It is the first time where you can feel images in the air. That sounds so amazing to happen. In a demonstration given on Wednesday, a 3D image of the Earth was squished like a soft rubber ball and then stretched wide across the screen.