Science & TechnologyS


Meteor

Mysterious Flash on Jupiter Left No Debris Cloud


HubbleSite.org
Wed, 16 Jun 2010 22:37 UTC
Image
© NASA
Detailed observations made by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found an answer to the flash of light seen June 3 on Jupiter. It came from a giant meteor burning up high above Jupiter's cloud tops. The space visitor did not plunge deep enough into the atmosphere to explode and leave behind any telltale cloud of debris, as seen in previous Jupiter collisions.

Astronomers around the world knew that something must have hit the giant planet to unleash a flash of energy bright enough to be seen 400 million miles away. But they didn't know how deeply it penetrated into the atmosphere. There have been ongoing searches for the "black-eye" pattern of a deep direct hit.

The sharp vision and ultraviolet sensitivity of Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 were brought to bear on seeking out any trace evidence of the aftermath of the cosmic collision. Images taken on June 7 - just over three days after the flash was sighted - show no sign of debris above Jupiter's cloud tops. This means that the object didn't descend beneath the clouds and explode as a fireball. "If it did, dark sooty blast debris would have been ejected and would have rained down onto the cloud tops, and the impact site would have appeared dark in the ultraviolet and visible images due to debris from an explosion," says team member Heidi Hammel of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. "We see no feature that has those distinguishing characteristics in the known vicinity of the impact, suggesting there was no major explosion and fireball."

Dark smudges marred Jupiter's atmosphere when a series of comet fragments hit Jupiter in July 1994. A similar phenomenon occurred in July 2009 when a suspected asteroid slammed into Jupiter. The latest intruder is estimated to be only a fraction the size of these previous impactors.
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Magnify

Researchers predict human visual attention using computer intelligence for the first time

Katrina Norfleet
Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology
Wed, 16 Jun 2010 19:51 UTC
In a computerized game of 'spot the difference,' people are more likely to notice additions, removals than color changes.

Scientists have just come several steps closer to understanding change blindness - the well studied failure of humans to detect seemingly obvious changes to scenes around them - with new research that used a computer-based model to predict what types of changes people are more likely to notice.
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Meteor

NASA Prepares for Potentially Damaging 2011 Meteor Shower

Leonard David
Space.com
Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:20 UTC
Leonid Storm
© Shinsuke Abe and Hajime Yano, ISAS 1999 Leonid storm as seen from high-altitude aircraft
NASA is assessing the risk to spacecraft posed by the upcoming 2011 Draconid meteor shower, a seven-hour storm of tiny space rocks that has the potential to ding major Earth-orbiting spacecraft like the crewed International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope.

The meteor shower risk assessment is actually more art than science, and there has been some variation in the projected intensity levels of the 2011 Draconids by meteoroid forecasters. But spacecraft operators are already being notified to weigh defensive steps.

Current meteor forecast models project a strong Draconid outburst, possibly a full-blown storm, on Oct. 8, 2011, according to William Cooke of the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

The Draconids do present some risk to spacecraft, Cooke confirmed. They could potentially become the next significant event in low-Earth orbit as far as meteoroids are concerned, he added.

Cooke and Danielle Moser of Stanley, Inc., also of Huntsville, presented their Draconid data at Meteoroids 2010 - an international conference on minor bodies in the solar system held May 24-28 in Breckenridge, Colo. The conference was sponsored in part by NorthWest Research Associates/CoRADivision, NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Office of Naval Research.
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Meteor

Giant Meteor Caused Jupiter Fireball, Scientists Say


Space.com
Wed, 16 Jun 2010 12:27 UTC
Jupiter
© NASA, ESA, M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley), H.B. Hammel (Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.), A.A. Simon-Miller (Goddard Space Flight Center), and the Jupiter Impact Science Team.Detailed observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope have found that the flash of light seen June 3 on Jupiter came from a giant meteor burning up high above the planet's cloud tops. The space visitor did not plunge deep enough into the atmosphere to explode and leave behind any telltale cloud of debris, as seen in previous Jupiter collisions.
The mystery fireball that smacked into Jupiter on June 3 has been identified as a giant meteor that plunged into the planet's atmosphere and burned up high above its cloud tops, according to new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope.

The cosmic intruder did not dive deep enough into Jupiter's atmosphere to explode, which explains the lack of any telltale cloud of debris, as was seen in previous Jupiter collisions, said Hubble astronomers, who described the meteor's size as "giant" in a Wednesday announcement.

"We suspected for this 2010 impact there might be no big explosion driving a giant plume, and hence no resulting debris field to be imaged," said Heidi Hammel, a veteran Jupiter observer at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., in a statement. "There was just the meteor, and Hubble confirmed this."

The meteor was huge, but not as large as the object that struck Jupiter in July 2009, or the shattered comet fragments that hit the gas giant planet in 1994, researchers said. [Gallery: Jupiter's 2009 crash.]

The new Hubble observations also allowed scientists to get a close-up look at changes in Jupiter's atmosphere, following the disappearance of the dark Southern Equatorial Belt (SEB) several months ago.

In the latest Hubble view, a slightly higher altitude layer of white ammonia ice crystal clouds appears to obscure the deeper, darker belt clouds.

"Weather forecast for Jupiter's South Equatorial Belt: cloudy with a chance of ammonia," Hammel said.

The researchers predict that these ammonia clouds will likely clear out in a few months, as it has typically done in the past.
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Sherlock

Researchers Find World's Oldest Leather Shoe And More


Terra Daily / SPX
Wed, 16 Jun 2010 11:37 UTC
Image
© AFP
A perfectly preserved shoe, 1,000 years older than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt and 400 years older than Stonehenge in the UK, has been found in a cave in Armenia.

The 5,500 year old shoe, the oldest leather shoe in the world, was discovered by a team of international archaeologists and their findings will publish on June 9th in the online scientific journal PLoS ONE.

The cow-hide shoe dates back to ~ 3,500 BC (the Chalcolithic period) and is in perfect condition. It was made of a single piece of leather and was shaped to fit the wearer's foot. It contained grass, although the archaeologists were uncertain as to whether this was to keep the foot warm or to maintain the shape of the shoe, a precursor to the modern shoe-tree perhaps?

"It is not known whether the shoe belonged to a man or woman," said lead author of the research, Dr Ron Pinhasi, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland "as while small (European size 37; US size 7 women), the shoe could well have fitted a man from that era." The cave is situated in the Vayotz Dzor province of Armenia, on the Armenian, Iranian, Nackhichevanian and Turkish borders, and was known to regional archaeologists due to its visibility from the highway below.
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Network

BT signs first smart meter deal

Chris Williams
The Register
Wed, 16 Jun 2010 08:07 UTC
Everywhere by 2020

BT has joined the gathering feeding frenzy around smart metering of utilities with its first ever deal to provide the necessary internet connectivity, to a minimum of 10,000 meters.

The firm's BT Redcare division, which operates a network for security devices including alarms and CCTV, has signed a deal to connect up smart meters for IMServ, an energy management firm.
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Bug

Legionnaire's Disease linked to driving, screenwash

John Oates
The Register
Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:21 UTC
Killer pneumonia hiding in your car

The Health Protection Agency is calling for more research to see if Legionnaire's Disease is connected to not using screenwash in your windscreen water reservoir.

An HPA spokeswoman said: "This preliminary HPA study suggests a strong association between a lack of screen wash in wiper fluid and the incidence of Legionnaires' disease. Further studies are now needed to determine whether the use of screen wash in wiper fluid could play a role in preventing this disease."
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Laptop

Critical and unpatched, Windows XP bug is under attack

Dan Goodin
The Register
Tue, 15 Jun 2010 02:29 UTC
Red meat for full disclosure critics

Five days after it was disclosed in a highly controversial advisory, a critical vulnerability in Microsoft's Windows XP operating system is being exploited by criminal hackers, researchers from anti-virus provider Sophos said on Tuesday.

The flaw in the Windows Help and Support Center was disclosed on Thursday by researcher Tavis Ormandy. His public advisory came just five days after he privately informed Microsoft of the defect, prompting fierce criticism from some circles that he hadn't given the software giant adequate time to fix the hole. That made it easier for attackers to target the bug, which allows attackers to take complete control of vulnerable machines when a user views a specially designed webpage, the critics howled.
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Network

Researchers probe net's most blighted darknet

Dan Goodin
The Register
Tue, 15 Jun 2010 02:24 UTC
150 Mbps of sustained garbage

Researchers probing a previously unused swath of internet addresses say they've stumbled onto the net's most blighted neighborhoods, with at least four times as much pollution as any they've ever seen.

The huge chuck of more than 16.7 million addresses had never before been allocated and yet the so-called darknet was the dumping ground sustained barrages of misdirected data as high as 150 Mbps, with a peak as high as 870 Mbps, said Manish Karir, director of research and development at the non-profit group Merit Network. That was about four times higher than most darknets and 20 times higher than a previously unallocated address block of addresses set up as a control group.
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Laptop

Microsoft Rejects Porn, iPad Protesters Fake It

Bill Ray
The Register
Fri, 11 Jun 2010 12:25 UTC
Who's got the cleanest screen?

Applications for Windows Phone 7 won't contain porn or decapitation - but while the rules may be limiting they are public, unlike Apple's.

Microsoft has published complete details of the application submission process for apps developed for Windows Mobile 7 (pdf), and porn is definitely out along with big nasty violence. But what's lacking is the Apple clause that lets companies change the rules on a whim which has rankled with so many, including these protesters who took their demand for iPad porn to the streets:
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