Science & TechnologyS


Einstein

Out Of This World

Vicky Flores
The Battalion Online
Tue, 06 Apr 2010 01:53 UTC
Hawking
© Jeremy NorthumRenowned physicist professor Stephen Hawking delivers a lecture, “Out of a Black Hole” Monday in Rudder Auditorium.
Stephen Hawking speaks to students about recent discoveries concerning black holes.

What once was a concept of science fiction, the mystery of black holes are slowly being uncovered, said Professor Steven Hawking Monday in Rudder Auditorium in his lecture "Out of a Black Hole."

In an introduction Chris Pope, professor of physics at Texas A&M and astronomy and holder of the Stephen Hawking chair in fundamental physics, said he had been working with Hawking ever since he studied under him.

"I think it is safe to say that Stephen requires no introduction. I would, however, like to add words of my own as I have had the very great privilege to know him," Pope said.

"Stephen's research has been in some of the most challenging questions in physics, where did we come from? How will it end up?"

Because Hawking stumped the physics community in 1975 by showing that black holes are not black at all, but they emit radiation, Pope said, he created the problem concerned with the apparent loss of information inside the black hole. It is something Hawking has been worried about ever since.
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Robot

Innovative New Robot Smiles When You Smile

David Bois
Tonic
Mon, 05 Apr 2010 01:48 UTC
Robot
© Geminoid TMFGeminoid-F
Japanese researchers develop a machine capable of astonishingly realistic facial expressions.

There is, in all likelihood, a firm limit of two reactions that one can possibly have to a robotics development coming out of Japan's Osaka University. You're certain to find it either to be super cool, or indescribably creepy. Researchers assure the public that their innovation is testing well in hospital settings as a method for calming and reassuring patients in their care. Well, we will invite you to be the judge, but I for one would love to read the details of that particular study.

Presenting: Geminoid TMF. AFP reports that the remarkably realistic humanoid robot mimics the full spectrum of human facial expressions. Through electronic signals it receives from an actual human, Geminoid TMF changes the expression on its face as its human counterpart does the same. Last year, Tonic wrote of developments at The University of California San Diego, where researchers have constructed a robot resembling Albert Einstein who, through an iterative process, learns and remembers various expressions, associating with each expression specific meanings and associations. It's quite impressive indeed, particularly in light of robo-Al not receiving direct expression cues and signals in real time, but we're not sure that he'd be quite the hit on the cardiac ward compared to Geminoid TMF.
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Sherlock

In Syria, a Prologue for Cities

John Noble Wilford
The New York Times
Mon, 05 Apr 2010 15:00 UTC
Image
© Gil Stein/Oriental Institute, University of ChicagoAmerican and Syrian investigators at the site known as Tell Zeidan have already uncovered a tantalizing sampling of Ubaid artifacts, including painted pot fragments. The site could yield discoveries for decades.
Archaeologists have embarked on excavations in northern Syria expected to widen and deepen understanding of a prehistoric culture in Mesopotamia that set the stage for the rise of the world's first cities and states and the invention of writing.

In two seasons of preliminary surveying and digging at the site known as Tell Zeidan, American and Syrian investigators have already uncovered a tantalizing sampling of artifacts from what had been a robust pre-urban settlement on the upper Euphrates River. People occupied the site for two millenniums, until 4000 B.C. - a little-known but fateful period of human cultural evolution.

Scholars of antiquity say that Zeidan should reveal insights into life in a time called the Ubaid period, 5500 to 4000 B.C. In those poorly studied centuries, irrigation agriculture became widespread, long-distance trade grew in influence socially and economically, powerful political leaders came to the fore and communities gradually divided into social classes of wealthy elites and poorer commoners.
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Satellite

Flying By Titan And Dione Makes For Some Nice Views


Space Mart / JPL
Mon, 05 Apr 2010 22:12 UTC
Image
© NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/Space Science InstituteComposite of two images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft of Saturn's moons Titan (left) and Dione (right).
In a special double flyby early next week, NASA's Cassini spacecraft will visit Saturn's moons Titan and Dione within a period of about a day and a half, with no maneuvers in between. A fortuitous cosmic alignment allows Cassini to attempt this doubleheader, and the interest in swinging by Dione influenced the design of its extended mission.

The Titan flyby, planned for Monday, April 5, will take Cassini to within about 7,500 kilometers (4,700 miles) of the moon's surface. The distance is relatively long as far as encounters go, but it works to the advantage of Cassini's imaging science subsystem.

Cassini's cameras will be able to stare at Titan's haze-shrouded surface for a longer time and capture high-resolution pictures of the Belet and Senkyo areas, dark regions around the equator that ripple with sand dunes.

In the early morning of Wednesday, April 7 in UTC time zones, which is around 9 p.m. on Tuesday, April 6 in California, Cassini will make its closest approach to the medium-sized icy moon Dione. Cassini will plunge to within about 500 kilometers (300 miles) of Dione's surface.
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Telescope

Fermi Maps An Active Galactic Smokestack Plume


Space Mart / SPX
Mon, 05 Apr 2010 22:08 UTC
Image
© NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration, Capella ObservatoryThe gamma-ray output from Cen A's lobes exceeds their radio output by more than ten times. High-energy gamma rays detected by Fermi's Large Area Telescope are depicted as purple in this gamma ray/optical composite of the galaxy.
If our eyes could see radio waves, the nearby galaxy Centaurus A (Cen A) would be one of the biggest and brightest objects in the sky, nearly 20 times the apparent size of a full moon. What we can't see when looking at the galaxy in visible light is that it lies nestled between a pair of giant radio-emitting gas plumes ejected by its supersized black hole. Each plume is nearly a million light-years long.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope maps gamma rays, radiation that typically packs 100 billion times the energy of radio waves. Nevertheless, and to the surprise of many astrophysicists, Cen A's plumes show up clearly in the satellite's first 10 months of data. The study appears in Thursday's edition of Science Express.

"This is something we've never seen before in gamma rays," said Teddy Cheung, a Fermi team member at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. "Not only do we see the extended radio lobes, but their gamma-ray output is more than ten times greater than their radio output." If gamma-ray telescopes had matured before their radio counterparts, astronomers would have instead classified Cen A as a "gamma-ray galaxy."
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Better Earth

The Most Isolated Island In The World Easter Island


Space Mart / SPX
Mon, 05 Apr 2010 22:03 UTC
Image
© DLRSome 3600 kilometres from the Chilean mainland and over 4000 kilometres from Tahiti, Easter Island, which spans an area of 160 square kilometres, is probably the most isolated island in the world. The island was formed when lava flows from three volcanoes joined to form a landmass between them.
Seen from space, Easter Island looks anything but egg-shaped. The German Earth observation satellite TerraSAR-X flew over this small and remote volcanic island, acquiring snapshots that show that man-made structures can be seen easily even from space. This image shows the principle town of Hanga Roa, on the northwestern coast (in yellow), and the airport, in the western part of the island (black line).

The island is has an area of just 160 square kilometres and owes its name to the Christian festival of Easter. The Dutchman Jakob Roggeveen landed on its shore on Easter Sunday, 5 April 1722, and chose the rather unimaginative name. Located about 3600 kilometres from the mainland of Chile and more then 4000 kilometres from Tahiti, Easter Island can justifiably be described as the most isolated island in the world.

The nearest neighbours - about 50 descendants of the mutineers on the British naval vessel HMS Bounty - live 2000 kilometres away on the small island of Pitcairn.

James Cook, who stopped at Easter Island in 1774 during his second expedition to the South Seas, was less than delighted with the island. He wrote in his journal: "No Nation will ever contend for the honour of the discovery of Easter Island as there is hardly an island in this sea offering less refreshments, and conveniences for Shiping than it does." This is no surprise: the island was formed when lava flows from three volcanoes joined to form a landmass between them.
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Info

Indian, U.S. Scientists Question Big Bang Theory


Hindustan Times
Mon, 05 Apr 2010 20:02 UTC
An Indian and an American scientist have questioned the Big Bang theory, saying it does not serve as a viable explanation for the origin of the universe.

The research papers of Ashwini Kumar Lal of India's Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation and Rhawn Joseph of Northern California's Brain Research Laboratory have been accepted for publication in the April issue of the peer-reviewed Harvard journal, Journal of Cosmology.

The research papers come even as scientists at Geneva's European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) are in the midst of experiments on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) recreating conditions of the beginning of the universe.

"The two scientific papers cast shadows of suspicion over the efficacy of the Big Bang model. The scientific community may have to ponder afresh over the issue relating to the origin of the universe," Lal told IANS in New Delhi.

He also noted that CERN scientists "are trying to jigsaw a theory which fits the conditions of the Big Bang model".

"The Big Bang is said to have occurred 13.75 billion years. But there is evidence, as I have written in my paper, that there were fully formed distant galaxies that must have already been billions of years old at the time," he added.
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Info

Precise simulations for future gravitational wave detectors

Robert E. Spero
American Physical Society (APS)
Mon, 05 Apr 2010 19:30 UTC
New simulations of merging binary neutron stars include details of the gravitational wave signature that should in coming years help us understand another mysterious process - short gamma-ray bursts.

The emerging science of gravitational wave astronomy is optimistically named. Astronomy depends ultimately on observations, yet the only output of gravitational wave detectors has so far been noise generated within the instruments. There is good reason, based on experimental and theoretical progress, to believe that things are about to change. As an example of progress on the theoretical side, Kenta Kiuchi of Waseda University, Yuichiro Sekiguchi of the National Astronomical Observatory, Masaru Shibata of Kyoto University (all in Japan), and Keisuke Taniguchi of the University of Wisconsin, US, report in Physical Review Letters simulations of neutron star mergers that reveal new details of the gravitational waves they are expected to emit.[1]

Wave
© (Top) NASA; (Center, Bottom) Alan Stonebraker, adapted from [1]Figure 1: Gravitational wave signals from a neutron star merger (top) in the time (center) and frequency (bottom) domains. The chirping in the gravitational wave is evident in the increased oscillation frequency toward the end of the time signal, which peaks in the frequency plot at about 6000 Hz. Such signals carry information about neutron star equation of state, binary coalesence, and black hole formation.
The effort to detect gravitational waves started humbly fifty years ago with Joe Weber's bar detectors.[2] Today the field is a thriving example of Big Science, including large facilities[3] in the US (LIGO) and Italy (VIRGO), smaller installations in Germany (GEO 600) and Japan (TAMA, LCGT), and potential future detectors in Australia (AIGO) and India (INDIGO). LIGO, the best funded and so far the most sensitive of these instruments, is preparing a major upgrade called Advanced LIGO.
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Meteor

Did a comet trigger a mini Ice Age?

Richard Ingham
Agence France-Presse
Mon, 05 Apr 2010 19:45 UTC
Image
© U.S. Geological SurveyA sudden plunge of global temperatures 12,900 years ago may have been caused by a comet impact, a British researcher argues.
Paris- A sudden plunge of global temperatures at the dawn of human civilisation may have been caused by a comet impact, a British researcher argues.

Known as 'the Younger Dryas', it has been also called the Big Freeze and the Last Blast of the Ice Age - but for researchers trying to understand the Earth's ancient climate, it's one of the big mysteries of the field.

Around 12,900 years ago, Earth was on a steadily warming trend after almost 100,000 years of harsh glaciation, during which ice sheets placed a swathe of the northern hemisphere under a dead hand, extending their thrall as far as south as New England and Wales.
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Magnify

UM digs find 10,000-year-old Native oasis

Brett French
Billings Gazette
Mon, 05 Apr 2010 19:30 UTC
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© Douglas H. MacDonaldElaine Hale, Yellowstone National Park archaeologist, helps Montana-Yellowstone Archaeological Project students Andrew Bowen of Kent State University and Ryan Sherburne of the University of Montana excavate a feature at the Fishing Bridge Point Site. The large volcanic boulder was likely used as a table or work area about 3,000 years ago.
Thousands of years before Euro-Americans "discovered" the bubbling mudpots and eruptive geysers of what is now Yellowstone National Park, early Americans were spending part of their summer camping in the Yellowstone Lake area.

"It's always been a destination resort," said Elaine Hale, park archaeologist. "For at least 10,000 years people have been using the lake area."

Thanks to archaeological digs around Yellowstone Lake last summer by University of Montana assistant archaeology professor Douglas MacDonald and 13 graduate and undergrad students, park officials are now getting a broader picture of early human use of the lake area.

"The lake may have served as a crossroads of sorts for Native Americans from multiple regions," MacDonald said.
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