Science & TechnologyS


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Ancient fossil find may change human history in Philippines

Barbara Mae Dacanay
gulfnews.com
Tue, 03 Aug 2010 18:28 UTC
Image
© AFP * Dr Armand Mijares, an archaeologist from the University of the Philippines, shows a 67,000-year-old foot bone which was unearthed from an extensive cave network in the northern Philippines in 2007.
Manila: A team of archaeologists have found a 67,000-year-old foot bone in northern Luzon, and hailed it as the oldest fossil found in the Asia-Pacific region, a television news report said.

"So far this could be the earliest human fossil found in the Asia-Pacific region. The presence of humans in Luzon shows these early humans already possessed knowledge of seacraft-making in this early period," Dr Armand Mijares, leader of a team of archaeologists from the University of the Philippines that found the fossil in Callao Cave in Cagayan Province, northern Luzon, told GMA-7.

The bone, found in an extensive cave network, predates the 47,000-year-old Tabon Man that is previously known as the first human to have lived in the country, said Taj Vitales, a researcher with the Philippina national museum's archaeology section.

"This would make it the oldest human remains ever found in the Philippines," Vitales told AFP.
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Sun

Sunspot Sunrise


Space Weather
Tue, 03 Aug 2010 18:19 UTC
Sunspot 1092, a key player in the Earth-directed eruptions of August 1st, is big enough to see without the aid of a solar telescope. Oleg Toumilovitch "spotted" it on July 31st rising over Blairgowrie, South Africa:

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© Oleg Toumilovitch
"During the first few minutes of sunrise only a fraction of the sunlight makes it's way to the observer - mostly from the red part of visible spectrum," notes Toumilovitch. "During this time large sunspots can be seen without a special solar filter." Be careful, though! Even when dimmed by clouds and haze, direct sunlight can hurt your eyes. "If you try to take a picture like this," advises Toumilovitch, "look only at the screen of your digital camera, not the optical viewfinder."
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Magnet

Ultracold Atoms Outline Microwave Field Like Iron Fillings


TechNewsDaily
Tue, 03 Aug 2010 18:13 UTC
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© Max Riedel/Pascal Böhi/Philipp Treutlein, MPQ and LMU MünchenAtoms as sensors for microwave fields.
Many grade school students perform a simple physics experiment by using iron fillings to outline a magnetic field. Seizing on their inner-child, physicists at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, recently performed the same experiment. Except, being high-level research scientists and all, they replaced the iron fillings with ultra-cold atoms, and used them to trace a normally invisible microwave field.

A microwave field is the same electromagnetic energy field that causes attraction in magnets, but with more powerful more powerful energy waves.
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Igloo

Boffins: Arctic cooled to pre-industrial levels from 1950-1990

Lewis Page
The Register
Mon, 02 Aug 2010 04:05 UTC
Late 20th century saw polar chill as CO2 rose

New research by German and Russian scientists indicates that summer temperatures in the Arctic actually fell for much of the later 20th century, plunging to the levels seen at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

The new results are said by their authors to indicate that solar activity exerted a powerful influence over Arctic climate until the 1990s, an assertion which will cause some irritation among academics who contend that atmospheric carbon is the main factor in climate change.

The latest analysis was done using the rings of Scots pines (Pinus sylvestris) from the Khibiny Mountains on the Kola Peninsula, situated between the Arctic Circle and the port of Murmansk. The tree rings were probed by specialist ring boffins at Institut für Botanik at the Universität Hohenheim in Stuttgart, cooperating with colleagues in Russia and at the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Umweltforschung (UFZ).
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Sun

Department Of Outlandish Ideas: Build Solar Roadways

Erick Schonfeld
TechCrunch
Mon, 02 Aug 2010 19:28 UTC
solarroad
© TechCrunch
If you want to change the world, you have to think big. Say what you want about the feasibility of Scott Brusaw's idea to replace asphalt roads with miles of solar ribbons that cars and trucks can drive on, it is a very ambitious idea. Brusaw is the co-founder and CEO of Solar Roadways, a bootstrapped startup in Idaho. He is an engineer, and is building prototypes of solar panels that could be used as roads.

Brusaw wants to create solar panels strong enough to support the weight of cars and trucks driving at 80 miles per hour. There is so much road surface in America, that the collected energy could replace other forms of fossil fuel energy, even with really inefficient solar panels. Even better, since roads go to each home and business, the roads themselves would not only collect the energy, but distribute it. The energy wouldn't power cars themselves, except maybe electric vehicles juicing up at roadside charging stations. LEDs could be built into the roadways and used as signs. The concept is explained in the video below, which is part of a larger film project called YERT (Your Environmental Roadtrip).
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Info

Hot Times Ahead?


The Warsaw Voice
Mon, 02 Aug 2010 18:42 UTC
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© Space ribbon data from IBEX
The Sun and the rest of the solar system are heading toward a cloud of interstellar matter that has a mind-boggling temperature of 1 million degrees Kelvin; the encounter may take place some 100 years from now, but this does not mean that life on Earth will be destroyed, according to scientists from the Polish Academy of Sciences' Space Research Center in Warsaw.

The scientists published their theory in a peer-reviewed scientific journal entitled Astrophysical Journal Letters. Some experts say the theory may help explain the nature of the so-called Space Ribbon, a ring-shaped formation that cuts across the sky and was discovered by the American Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) probe last year.

The probe has provided data pointing to the existence of a baffling formation in the sky, a gigantic strip shaped like an open ring, experts say. The United States' National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) called the Space Ribbon one of the most important discoveries in space research in 2009. While all previous hypotheses involved phenomena on the boundaries of our solar system, the latest hypothesis provides a different explanation, says the Space Research Center's Prof. Stanisław Grzędzielski.
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Info

With a Glimmer of a Chance, Stardust Is Identified

Kenneth Chang
New York Times
Mon, 02 Aug 2010 17:56 UTC
Three specks of matter captured by the NASA spacecraft Stardust may be stardust that has just entered our solar system.

Stardust_1
© JPL/NASASPECKS - As a spacecraft completed its ride through the solar system, it swung past Earth and detached a capsule, above, containing the collected particles.
"They have all the hallmarks of interstellar dust," said Andrew Westphal of the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Westphal reported the first speck in March, and he described the second and third on Friday at a meeting of the Meteoritical Society in Manhattan. Each speck is about one-25,000th of an inch across.

The third is particularly intriguing. It is rich in carbon, raising the possibility that it is full of the molecules that could serve as the building blocks for life.

The Stardust's primary mission was to bring back bits of a comet that it passed in 2004, but scientists also hoped that it would also trap some interstellar particles within a wispy concoction known as aerogel that served as a cosmic dust collector.
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Sun

Solar cycle may drive Venice's floods


New Scientist
Mon, 02 Aug 2010 16:31 UTC
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© Jodi Cobb/NGS/GettySpots on the sun? You're risking a wet one
If you want to see Venice while keeping your feet dry, don't go when the sun has lots of spots. Peaks in solar activity cause the city to flood more often, apparently by changing the paths of storms over Europe.

Several times a year, but most commonly between October and December, Venice is hit by an exceptional tide called the acqua alta. David Barriopedro at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, and colleagues were intrigued by studies showing the tides followed an 11-year cycle, just like the sun, showing peaks when the sunspots were most abundant. They looked at hourly observations of sea level between 1948 and 2008, which confirmed that the number of extreme tides followed peaks in the solar cycle (Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, DOI: link).

Records of air pressure over Europe over the same period revealed "acqua alta years" saw a lot of low-pressure systems over the north Adriatic Sea, while in quiet years these systems were further south.
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Sun

Nasa says large CME on Sun headed for Earth: Expected Arrival August 3rd

Freedomist
Real News
Mon, 02 Aug 2010 12:53 UTC
Image
On Sunday, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory detected a complex magnetic eruption on the sun. The NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) also spotted a large coronal mass ejection (CME) The eruption happened around (3:50 am EST), the SDO detected a C3 class solar flare originating from a group of sunspots (called sunspot 1092). The flare itself was not that large, but the filament located about 70,000 miles away erupted at the same time.

A filament is a large, bright feature extending outward from the Sun's surface, often in a loop shape. Filament is anchored to the Sun's surface in the photosphere, and extends outward into the Sun's corona. It is a long magnetic structure rising above the surface of the sun, filled with cool plasma. The flare and filament erupted at the same time, this suggests they are connected by long-range magnetic field lines. Some believe the flare may have accelerated the eruption of the filament. Eventually, a giant magnetic bubble of plasma broke and blasted out into space.
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Sun

Complex Eruption on the Sun Sends Coronal Mass Ejection toward Earth


Space Weather
Sun, 01 Aug 2010 17:17 UTC
This morning around 0855 UT, Earth orbiting satellites detected a C3-class solar flare. The origin of the blast was sunspot 1092. At about the same time, an enormous magnetic filament stretching across the sun's northern hemisphere erupted. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the action:
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© SOHO

The timing of these events suggest they are connected, and a review of SDO movies strengthens that conclusion. Despite the ~400,000 km distance between them, the sunspot and filament seem to erupt together; they are probably connected by long-range magnetic fields. In this movie (171 Å), a shadowy shock wave (a "solar tsunami") can be seen emerging from the flare site and rippling across the northern hemisphere into the filament's eruption zone. That may have helped propel the filament into space.

In short, we have just witnessed a complex global eruption involving almost the entire Earth-facing side of the sun.
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