Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Remains of devoured planet discovered


New Scientist
Sun, 23 Nov 2008 03:54 UTC
A dust cloud around a dead star may be all that's left of a planet that was eaten like a peach.

Observations of the cloud around the white dwarf G29-38 by a team led by William Reach of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena suggest it is most likely to be the shredded core of a gas-giant planet like Jupiter (The Astrophysical Journal, in press).
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Magnify

Buried Glaciers Found on Mars

Andrea Thompson
Space.com
Thu, 20 Nov 2008 01:05 UTC
Mars has vast glaciers hidden under aprons of rocky debris near mid-latitude mountains, a new study confirms, pointing to a new and large potential reservoir of life-supporting water on the planet.

These mounds of ice exist at much lower latitudes than any ice previously found on the red planet.

"Altogether, these glaciers almost certainly represent the largest reservoir of water ice on Mars that's not in the polar caps," said John Holt of the University of Texas at Austin and the main author of the study. "Just one of the features we examined is three times larger than the city of Los Angeles and up to one-half-mile thick, and there are many more."
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Bulb

Colossus of Rhodes to be rebuilt as giant light sculpture

Helena Smith
Guardian
Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:40 UTC
The Colossus of Rhodes
© Bridgeman Art LibraryDetails from The Colossus of Rhodes, an 18th century engrvaing by George Balthasar Probst, from the Stapleton Collection
It may not straddle the port as its predecessor once did, but in terms of sheer luminosity and eye-catching height the new Colossus of Rhodes will not disappoint. Nor will it fall short of the symbolism that once imbued the ancient monument.

Twenty-three centuries after craftsmen carved the legendary statue that has inspired legions of painters, poets, playwrights and politicians, a new world wonder, built in the spirit of the original Colossus, is about to be born on the Aegean island.

After decades of dashed hopes, the people of Rhodes will fulfil a long-held dream to revive one of the world's seven ancient wonders - thanks to the promise of international funding and the East German artist Gert Hof.
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X

Scientists self-censor after political attack

Ashley Yeager
Nature News
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:44 UTC
Scientists
© GettyScientists may censor themselves if their work proves politically controversial.
Researchers avoid contentious language and issues in grants and papers.

Scientists whose work came under scrutiny during a political debate about work funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, censored their own later work, a new study has found. [1]

In July 2003, former congressman Patrick Toomey (Republican, Pennsylvania) argued that NIH grants funding studies on certain types of sexual behaviour were less worthy of taxpayer dollars than those on devastating diseases. He proposed an amendment to the 2004 NIH appropriations bill to revoke funding for five grants - four of which examined sexual behaviour.

Comment: Those ultra-right Christians infiltrated all spectrums of life in America: politics, the media, education and now obviously, science. Which other group will consider words such as 'bisexual', 'lesbian' and 'sexual intercourse' as "red flag language" in scientific research papers, and criticise research on teenage sexual abstinence?

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Telescope

Galactic recluse has friends after all

Maggie McKee
New Scientist
Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:41 UTC
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.
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Chalkboard

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


ScienceDaily
Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:38 UTC
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.
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Meteor

Canada: Northern Alberta meteor crater identified

Alexandra Pope
Whitecourt Star
Wed, 05 Nov 2008 04:30 UTC
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.
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Einstein

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


Agence France-Presse
Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:33 UTC
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.
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Info

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


Guardian UK
Fri, 21 Nov 2008 01:36 UTC
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.
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Info

Removing Part Of Brain Controls Girl's Epilepsy


Science Daily
Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:04 UTC
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.
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