Science & Technology
Washington: An asteroid that has a one in 20 chance of striking Mars on January 30, might just fly past, which would probably make it target Earth at some point in future.
Asteroid impacts or massive volcanic flows might have occurred around the time dinosaurs became extinct, but a new argument is that the mightiest creatures the world has ever known may have been brought down by a tiny, much less dramatic force -- biting, disease-carrying insects.
|
| ©Image courtesy of Oregon State University |
| Tick found in Burmese amber. |
Four years ago, NASA's Stardust spacecraft chased down a comet and collected grains of dust blowing off its nucleus. When the spacecraft Comet Wild-2 returned, comet dust was shipped to scientists all over the world, including University of Minnesota physics professor Bob Pepin. After testing helium and neon trapped in the dust specks, Pepin and his colleagues report that while the comet formed in the icy fringes of the solar system, the dust appears to have been born close to the infant sun and bombarded by intense radiation from these and other gases before being flung out beyond Neptune and trapped in the comet. The research appears in the Jan. 4 issue of the journal Science.
Mammoth fossils around the Yukon are offering evidence that ancient meteor explosions may have wiped out entire species there thousands of years ago, a California-based researcher says.
A team led by Richard Firestone, a nuclear scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., made the discovery while testing thousands of samples of fossilized Alaskan mammoth ivory from a suspected meteor impact that occurred about 13,000 years ago.
A team led by Richard Firestone, a nuclear scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., made the discovery while testing thousands of samples of fossilized Alaskan mammoth ivory from a suspected meteor impact that occurred about 13,000 years ago.
Berkeley -- The longest-running search for radio signals from alien civilizations is getting a burst of new data from an upgraded Arecibo telescope, which means the SETI@home project needs more desktop computers to help crunch the data.
A team of astronomers has discovered a cosmic explosion that seems to have come from the middle of nowhere - thousands of light-years from the nearest galaxy-sized collection of stars, gas, and dust. This "shot in the dark" is surprising because the type of explosion, a long-duration gamma-ray burst (GRB), is thought to be powered by the death of a massive star.
GREENBELT, Md. - New observations from Suzaku, a joint Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NASA X-ray observatory, have challenged scientists' conventional understanding of white dwarfs. Observers had believed white dwarfs were inert stellar corpses that slowly cool and fade away, but the new data tell a completely different story.
The crystal structure of a molecule from a primitive fungus has served as a time machine to show researchers more about the evolution of life from the simple to the complex.
Despite more than a decade of winter darkness, Saturn's north pole is home to an unexpected hot spot remarkably similar to one at the planet's sunny south pole. The source of its heat is a mystery. Now, the first detailed views of the gas giant's high latitudes from the Cassini spacecraft reveal a matched set of hot cyclonic vortices, one at each pole.
|
| ©John Debes |
| Red and near infrared wavelengths from the dust disk surrounding the star HR 4796A (masked in false-color image to make fainter disk visible) suggest the presence of complex organic molecules. The inner "hole" of the ring-shaped disk is big enough to fit our entire solar system and may have been swept clean of dust by orbiting planets. |
Astronomers at the Carnegie Institution have found the first indications of highly complex organic molecules in the disk of red dust surrounding a distant star. The eight-million-year-old star, known as HR 4796A, is inferred to be in the late stages of planet formation, suggesting that the basic building blocks of life may be common in planetary systems.
Comment: From the information available, it is evident that we are not prepared nor have the knowledge on how to divert such a thread. It was only this last year that the mainstream media began even talking about the possibility of a strike. Nope, no matter how reassuring the last sentence of the article, it just ain't true folks!