Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Galactic recluse has friends after all

An apparently isolated galaxy whose frenetic rate of star birth had puzzled astronomers actually lies 1.5 times as far away as previously thought, a new study reveals. The new distance measurement suggests the galaxy may be falling into a crowd of about 10 other galaxies, whose gravitational tugs could explain its stellar baby boom.
galaxy NGC 1569
© NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage/STScI/AURA/A AloisiThe core of the dwarf galaxy NGC 1569 glitters with stars.

Ground-based telescopes had previously gauged the distance to the dwarf galaxy, called NGC 1569, to be about 7 million light years from Earth. At that distance, the galaxy appeared to lie in a region of space devoid of other galaxies.

Most such galactic loners tend to evolve slowly, eking out stars at a relatively modest rate because they lack neighbours whose gravitational tugs can trigger the galaxies' own gas clouds to collapse into stars.

Chalkboard

Mysterious Source Of High-Energy Cosmic Radiation Discovered: Nearby Exotic Object?

Scientists announced Wednesday the discovery of a previously unidentified nearby source of high-energy cosmic rays. The finding was made with a NASA-funded balloon-borne instrument high over Antarctica.

Stratospheric balloon
© Louisiana State UniversityStratospheric balloon launched on 12/19/2005 from Williams Field, McMurdo Station, Antarctica for ATIC (Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter).

Researchers from the Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter (ATIC) collaboration, led by scientists at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, published the results in the Nov. 20 issue of the journal Nature. The new results show an unexpected surplus of cosmic ray electrons at very high energy -- 300-800 billion electron volts -- that must come from a previously unidentified source or from the annihilation of very exotic theoretical particles used to explain dark matter.

Meteor

Canada: Northern Alberta meteor crater identified

Image
© Alexandra PopeChris Herd, a professor in the University of Alberta's department of earth and atmospheric sciences, photographs a crowd of local officials gathered in the basin of a 1,000-year-old meteorite crater located on Whitecourt's east mountain.
What local hunters in Whitecourt thought for years was a sinkhole is actually the crater left behind by a meteor that fell to earth 1,000 years ago and is now attracting international attention from researchers.

George VanderBurg, MLA for Whitecourt-Ste. Anne, said he was very surprised to learn about the crater. He recalled going hunting with his father and using the site as a meeting point. Deer could often be found drinking rainwater that collected in the bottom of the crater, he said.

"All of us that have grown up here have known about it, but we didn't know it was the big scientific thing that it is," he said.

Einstein

e=mc2: 103 years later, Einstein's proven right

Paris - It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.
giant sculpture featuring Albert Einstein's formula
© AFP/File/John MacdougallPeople walk past a giant sculpture featuring Albert Einstein's formula "E=mc2" in front of Berlin's Altes Museum in 2006. It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.

A brainpower consortium led by Laurent Lellouch of France's Centre for Theoretical Physics, using some of the world's mightiest supercomputers, have set down the calculations for estimating the mass of protons and neutrons, the particles at the nucleus of atoms.

According to the conventional model of particle physics, protons and neutrons comprise smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are bound by gluons.

Info

£350,000 gold collar hailed as best Iron Age find in 50 years

An iron age gold collar worth more than £350,000 that was found by an amateur metal detectorist in a muddy field in Nottinghamshire was described yesterday as the best find of its kind in half a century.
Iron age gold collar
© Oli Scarff/GettyFabulous ... Iron age gold collar.

"I was only in the field because a customer kept me late," Maurice Richardson, a tree surgeon from Newark, said yesterday. "Normally I'd never want to go into this field because a plane crashed there in the last war, and the whole place is littered with bits of metal."

The first beep from his detector was indeed a chunk of wartime scrap metal, but as he bent down to discard it, his machine gave a louder signal. Expecting to find a bigger chunk of fuselage, he instead discovered the 2,200-year-old collar.

Info

Removing Part Of Brain Controls Girl's Epilepsy

Surgeons at the University of Chicago Comer Children's Hospital told Jessica Nelson one of the scariest things she will ever hear as a parent: they wanted to treat her daughter's epilepsy by cutting out or disconnecting half of her brain. Then something extraordinary happened: it worked.

Suffering from seizures, her daughter, Brooklyn Bauer, had undergone different treatments and tried different medications for more than three years with no success. Her speech and motor skills were extremely delayed. She walked on her knees and spoke in two-word phrases.
Brooklyn Bauer and her mom, Jessica Nelson
© University of Chicago Medical CenterBrooklyn Bauer and her mom, Jessica Nelson.

Now after surgery and recovery, Brooklyn is in kindergarten. She has come a long way from the time when she was heavily medicated and lethargic, and has even become a spokesperson for the Epilepsy Foundation's Northern Illinois region.

Info

Floppy-footed Gibbons Help Us Understand How Early Humans May Have Walked

The human foot is a miracle of evolution. We can keep striding for miles on our well-sprung feet. There is nothing else like them, not even amongst our closest living relatives. According to Evie Vereecke, from the University of Liverpool, the modern human foot first appeared about 1.8 million years ago, but our ape-like ancestors probably took to walking several million years earlier, even though their feet were more 'floppy' and ape like than ours.
Gibbon
© iStockphoto/Chanyut Sribua-rawdGibbon. The modern human foot first appeared about 1.8 million years ago, but our ape-like ancestors probably took to walking several million years earlier, even though their feet were more 'floppy' and ape like than ours.

Vereecke explains that modern ape feet have a flexible joint midway along the foot (we retain this joint, but have lost the flexibility), which made her wonder how well our predecessors may have walked on two feet. Lacking a time machine, Vereecke and Peter Aerts from the University of Antwerp decided to look at the flexible feet of modern gibbons to find out more about how they walk.

Info

Bugzilla used to build shuttle bug-tracking package

Space shuttle
© Unknown
NASA has built a new software package to track problems with the Space Shuttle using open source tools from Mozilla. The Space Shuttle Endeavor launched successfully last night, so the new system is being used today to track any problems which may crop up in the current mission. The system is available to both the astronauts on the shuttle and the technicians at mission control, giving them wide interactive problem reporting and solving capabilities.

The software package is known as the Problem Reporting Analysis and Corrective Action system, or PRACA for short, and is getting its first live usage on this shuttle mission. It was developed by the Human-Computer Interaction Group at NASA's Ames Research Center. Equally important, the system is replacing a complex set of forty database systems that have been used to track problems in the past.

Telescope

Black Holes Are The Rhythm At The Heart Of Galaxies

The powerful black holes at the center of massive galaxies and galaxy clusters act as hearts to the systems, pumping energy out at regular intervals to regulate the growth of the black holes themselves, as well as star formation, according to new data from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory.
Virgo Elliptical Galaxy M84
© X-ray: NASA/CXC/MPE/A.Finoguenov et al.); Radio (NSF/NRAO/VLA/ESO/R.A.Laing et al); Optical: (SDSS)Virgo Elliptical Galaxy M84. The powerful black holes at the center of massive galaxies and galaxy clusters act as hearts to the systems, pumping energy out at regular intervals to regulate the growth of the black holes themselves, as well as star formation, according to new data from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

The gravitational pull of black holes is so strong that not even light can escape from them. Supermassive black holes with masses of more than a billion suns have been detected at the center of large galaxies. The material falling on the black holes causes sporadic or isolated bursts of energy, by which black holes are capable of influencing the fate of their host galaxies. The insight gained by this new research shows that black holes can pump energy in a gentler and rhythmic fashion, rather then violently.

Einstein

Matter is merely vacuum fluctuations

Matter is built on flaky foundations. Physicists have now confirmed that the apparently substantial stuff is actually no more than fluctuations in the quantum vacuum.

The researchers simulated the frantic activity that goes on inside protons and neutrons. These particles provide almost all the mass of ordinary matter.

Each proton (or neutron) is made of three quarks - but the individual masses of these quarks only add up to about 1% of the proton's mass. So what accounts for the rest of it?
Each proton is made of three quarks
© Forschungszentrum Julich/Seitenplan/NASA/ESA/AURA-CaltechEach proton is made of three quarks, but the individual masses of these quarks only add up to about 1% of the proton's mass.

Theory says it is created by the force that binds quarks together, called the strong nuclear force. In quantum terms, the strong force is carried by a field of virtual particles called gluons, randomly popping into existence and disappearing again. The energy of these vacuum fluctuations has to be included in the total mass of the proton and neutron.