Science & Technology

Life-friendly worlds may snap, crackle and pop

New Scientist
Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:19 UTC

Alien worlds that are friendly to life could reveal themselves by radio signals crackling from their magnetic fields.

When struck by high energy particles in the solar wind, an exoplanet's magnetic field may produce radio signals from auroras in the planet's atmosphere. While current telescopes have yet to pick up these crackles, it's an area worth exploring, argue Joseph Lazio at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC and colleagues in a paper submitted to Astro2010.

Because a magnetic field helps to preserve atmospheres and oceans, a magnetosphere may signify that a planet has complex surface life. "This is something we think is worth studying at a modest level," says Lazio, "the payoff could be immense."

Moon shadows on Saturn rings are a sign of spring

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:06 UTC

The Cassini spacecraft has captured its first snapshots of moon shadows on Saturn's rings. The shadows are a sign that the Sun will soon cross Saturn's equator, bringing spring to the planet's northern hemisphere for the first time in almost 30 years.

What will the Sun look like when it dies?

Lucy Dodwell
New Scientist
Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:02 UTC

© NASA/ESA/HEIC/Hubble Heritage/STScI/AURA
Sun-like stars end their lives as shimmering planetary nebula, such as the Cat's Eye Nebula.

Planetary nebulae are the final butterfly-like state that heralds the end of a Sun-like star's energy-generating life. They form when stars up to eight times the mass of the Sun begin to die, bloating into red giants before shedding as much as half their mass as gas and dust nebulae.

The Sun itself will begin its death throes in about 5 billion years, when it starts to swell into a red giant star. Though it's not clear exactly what its planetary nebula will look like - its shape will likely be sculpted by factors such as the Sun's future magnetic field - observations of the 1600 or so known planetary nebulae suggest our star will go out in a blaze of glory.

Physicists finally create 'textbook' atom

New Scientist
Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:58 UTC

© NASA/WMAP Science Team
The technique to create the textbook atom was inspired by Lagrange points (pictured) - regions of space where gravity from different sources cancels out.

Think of an atom, and chances are you'll picture something that looks like a tiny solar system. You'd be wrong, but never fear: researchers have engineered an atom that looks just like you think it should.

When the atomic nucleus was discovered a century ago, the solar system analogy was obvious. The nucleus's mass and charge would force electrons to circle it, just as the sun's gravity holds orbiting planets. But quantum mechanics pooped the party, maintaining that electrons would smear out over large areas of space.

Now Tom Gallagher's team at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville have trapped electrons and made them parade around a nucleus. Their inspiration came from Lagrange points - regions of space where gravity from different sources cancels out. They achieved a similar effect with an electron by using microwaves to counteract the force of the nucleus. This created an electron pocket like a Lagrange point, which they guided around the nucleus by rotating the microwave source (Physical Review Letters, vol 102, p 103001).

Internet Could Become Environmental Watchdog

Alister Doyle
Reuters
Thu, 19 Mar 2009 05:59 UTC

Oslo - The Internet could provide an early warning system for environmental damage, imitating an online watchdog that gives alerts about outbreaks of disease, scientists said on Thursday.

An automated trawl of blogs, videos, online news and other sources could yield bits of information to fill in a bigger picture of problems such as global warming, pollution, deforestation or over-fishing, they said.

Navy scientist announces possible cold fusion reactions

Eric Berger
Houston Chronicle
Wed, 25 Mar 2009 01:21 UTC

A U.S. Navy researcher announced today that her lab has produced "significant" new results that indicate cold fusion-like reactions.

If the work by analytical chemist Pamela Mosier-Boss and her colleagues is confirmed, it could open the door to a cheap, near-limitless reservoir of energy.

That's a big if, however.

Today's announcement at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society comes in the same location - Salt Lake City - as one of science's most infamous episodes, the announcement 20 years ago by chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann that they had produced cold fusion.

Study: brain switches off rationality when given 'expert advice'

Rebecca O'Connor
Times On Line
Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:10 UTC

Financial advice can make us take leave of our senses, according to research that shows how the brain sets aside rationality when it gets the benefit of supposedly expert opinion.

When a bank manager or investment adviser recommends a financial decision, the brain tends to abdicate responsibility and defer to their authority with little independent thought, a study has suggested.

Such expert advice suppresses activity in a neural circuit that is critical to sound decision-making and value judgments, scientists in the US have found.

Their results may explain why people are so apt to follow experts' recommendations blindly, when a little reflection might be sufficient to suggest an alternative course of action.

People are likely to be especially susceptible to uncritical trust of experts in times of economic uncertainty, such as during the current recession, the scientists said.

The human brain is on the edge of chaos

Physorg
Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:21 UTC

Cambridge-based researchers provide new evidence that the human brain lives "on the edge of chaos", at a critical transition point between randomness and order. The study, published March 20 in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology, provides experimental data on an idea previously fraught with theoretical speculation.

Self-organized criticality (where systems spontaneously organize themselves to operate at a critical point between order and randomness), can emerge from complex interactions in many different physical systems, including avalanches, forest fires, earthquakes, and heartbeat rhythms.

According to this study, conducted by a team from the University of Cambridge, the Medical Research Council Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit, and the GlaxoSmithKline Clinical Unit Cambridge, the dynamics of human brain networks have something important in common with some superficially very different systems in nature. Computational networks showing these characteristics have also been shown to have optimal memory (data storage) and information-processing capacity. In particular, critical systems are able to respond very rapidly and extensively to minor changes in their inputs.

"Due to these characteristics, self-organized criticality is intuitively attractive as a model for brain functions such as perception and action, because it would allow us to switch quickly between mental states in order to respond to changing environmental conditions," says co-author Manfred Kitzbichler.

Sagas reveal Vikings were 'first oceanographers'

Eric Scigliano
New Scientist
Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:28 UTC

© Bridgeman Art Library/Getty
Norse pioneers chose where to settle by following signs from the god Thor, but the practice was based on sound science too.

When Hallstein son of Thorolf Mostbeard found a suitable homestead on Iceland, he sacrificed to Thor, imploring the god to provide the ceremonial high seat posts he needed to complete his great hall. Evidently Thor heard: a mighty log washed ashore, big enough to supply seat posts for all the settlers round about. Years earlier, when Hallstein's father and other Norse pioneers sailed for Iceland, they had found themselves in the opposite fix. They had brought seat posts from home but needed a good place to settle. As they approached Iceland, they tossed their precious posts overboard and followed them to the places Thor supposedly chose for them. But the two prayers had something in common: the same sound ocean science underlay them both.

Old Kveldulf knew it was time to get out of Norway. He had pushed his luck by refusing to swear allegiance to Harald Tanglehair - a king not to be trifled with. When the king slew his son Thorolf, Kveldulf went berserk. He and his surviving son Skallagrim ambushed two of the king's emissaries, killing them and 50 companions, and fled to sea.

Scientists Discover a Hidden "Memory" Switch in Our Brains

Luke McKinney
Daily Galaxy
Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:34 UTC

If you've ever been educated, and the fact that you're reading this means that you either have or are extremely good at guessing, you've tried to find a way to enhance your memory. Reading things ten times, flash cards, enough coffee to accelerate an elephant to eighty-eight miles an hour - and none of them work. Now scientists may have found an all-purpose "memory on" switch hiding in your head.

A team of German an UK researchers have applied magnetoencephalographic techniques to look inside the very living brain of dozens of people, and if that fact doesn't impress you chalk one up to "humans can get used to anything." These people have machines that can scan your mind and draw maps! Sure, those maps are like urban planners trying to document a computer chip, not really sure of which does what or how to represent it, but we can still see some general functions from all the data acquired.

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Science & Technology

Life-friendly worlds may snap, crackle and pop

Moon shadows on Saturn rings are a sign of spring

What will the Sun look like when it dies?

Physicists finally create 'textbook' atom

Internet Could Become Environmental Watchdog

Navy scientist announces possible cold fusion reactions

Study: brain switches off rationality when given 'expert advice'

The human brain is on the edge of chaos

Sagas reveal Vikings were 'first oceanographers'

Scientists Discover a Hidden "Memory" Switch in Our Brains

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