Science & TechnologyS


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Babylon's Future Written in its Ruins

Khalid al-Ansary
Reuters
Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:04 UTC
For a site whose historical importance ranks with Egypt's Pyramids, the ancient Mesopotamian city of Babylon has suffered some rough treatment.

In recent times, U.S. troops and allied armies have parked tanks and weapons on the site in southern Iraq and used earth containing ancient fragments to fill their sandbags.

Looters ransacked its treasures, and before that Saddam Hussein "restored" parts of it using new bricks bearing his name and built a kitsch palace overlooking it.

Now officials hope Babylon can be revived and made ready for a rich future of tourism, with help from experts at the World Monuments Fund (WMF) and the U.S. embassy.
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Sheeple

First Extinct-Animal Clone Created

Charles Q. Choi
National Geographic News
Tue, 10 Feb 2009 22:51 UTC
Bucardo Clone
© Enrique Aguirre/Getty Images The Spanish ibex, above, is the closest living relative to the bucardo, an extinct species resurrected by cloning in 2003.
An extinct animal has been resurrected by cloning for the first time - though the clone died minutes after birth.

Findings revealed January 23 in the journal Theriogenology describe the use of frozen skin in 2003 to clone a bucardo, or Pyrenean ibex, a subspecies of Spanish ibex that went extinct in 2000.

Scientists had cloned endangered species before, but not one that had officially died out.

Study co-author Jose Folch, of the Center for Agro-Nutrition Research and Technology in Aragon, Spain, said his team plans to try cloning another this ibex this year or next.
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Telephone

"Skip Valentine, Where's My Cell Phone?"


United Press International
Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:48 UTC
A survey of Canadian cell phone users found 56 percent of them would rather hold their cell phone than a special person on Valentine's Day.

Last week, Angus Reid Strategies polled 1,000 mobile phone users over the age of 18 across Canada and asked about their attitudes towards the devices and special people in their lives in advance of Feb. 14.

The Virgin Mobile survey found 52 percent saying their phone is with them all day, every day, and if push came to shove, almost 40 percent would rather spend a week without their special partner than be without the phone for a week.

Comment: This might be similar to choosing a cell phone over any loved ones in the event of emergency, such as a big fire in the house. It is certainly disturbing to see people can be highly attached to a device that are damaging to their health (see here and here).

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Bug

New Antibiotics Would Silence Bugs, Not Kill Them

Colin Barras
New Scientist
Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:33 UTC
In future, the most effective antibiotics might be those that don't kill any bacteria. Instead the drugs will simply prevent the bacteria from talking with one another.

Drug-resistant bugs are winning the war against standard antibiotics as they evolve resistance to even the most lethal drugs. It happens because a dose of antibiotics strongly selects for resistance by killing the most susceptible bacteria first.

If, however, researchers can identify antibiotics that neutralise dangerous bacteria without killing them, the pressure to evolve resistance can be reduced. One way to do that is to target the constant stream of chatter that passes between bacteria as molecular signals.
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Satellite

Fermi, Swift Spy Outburst from Gamma-Ray Star

Anne Minard
Universe Today
Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:11 UTC
Fermi Swift Magnetar
© NASAGamma-ray flares from SGR J1550-5418 may arise when the magnetar's surface suddenly cracks, releasing energy stored within its powerful magnetic field.

NASA's Swift satellite and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have keyed in on a rowdy stellar remnant 30,000 light-years away. The object, already known as a source of pulsing radio and X-ray signals, lies in the southern constellation Norma. It kicked out some moderate eruptions in October, but then it settled down again. Late last month, it roared to life.

"At times, this remarkable object has erupted with more than a hundred flares in as little as 20 minutes," said Loredana Vetere, who is coordinating the Swift observations at Pennsylvania State University. "The most intense flares emitted more total energy than the sun does in 20 years."

The new object has been cataloged as SGR J1550-5418. Because of the recent outbursts, astronomers will classify it as a soft-gamma-ray repeater. Only six such objects are known to science, and they share the trait that they unpredictably send out a series of X-ray and gamma-ray flares. In 2004, a giant flare from another soft-gamma-ray repeater was so intense it measurably affected Earth's upper atmosphere from 50,000 light-years away.
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Clock

Super clocks: More accurate than time itself

Matthew Chalmers
New Scientist
Mon, 09 Feb 2009 14:58 UTC
Image
© Unknown

For those physicists and philosophers puzzled by nature's fourth dimension, Patrick Gill has a wry response. "Time," he says, "is what you measure in seconds."

For Gill, that is a statement of professional pride. He is what you might call Britain's top timekeeper. Within the windowless - and largely clockless - cream-brick confines of the UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL), near London, Gill and his colleagues are busy developing the next, staggeringly accurate generation of atomic clocks. These tiny timepieces are the devices that ensure radio, television and mobile-phone transmissions stay in sync, prevent the internet from turning into a mess of missing data packets, make GPS accurate enough to navigate by, and safeguard electricity grids from blackout. They are, in short, the heartbeat of modern life.

These are momentous times for Gill and others like him in timekeeping laboratories around the world. A new generation of atomic tickers, known as optical clocks, have just wrested the record for accuracy from the ensembles of oscillating caesium atoms that held it for half a century. Soon, the new technology will be so refined that if such a clock had ticked away every second since the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, it would not yet have missed a beat. That is an awesome accomplishment - but it's also a problem. At this astonishing precision, we might have to rethink not only how we measure time, but also our concept of time.
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Info

Squid symbiosis may shed light on disease

Debora MacKenzie
New Scientist
Tue, 10 Feb 2009 14:52 UTC
The Japanese bobtail squid and luminescent marine bacteria live in blissful harmony: the bacteria have a home in the squid's light organ while producing for the squid rippling patterns of light to confuse prey or predators. The way bacteria form this symbiotic relationship may now shed light of another kind, on human disease.

Only some strains of the bacterium Vibrio fischeri will colonise squid, while other bacteria of the same species live happily in fish but avoid squid. Mark Mandel and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin in Madison report this week that a single gene makes all the difference: fish bacteria will colonise squid if given a gene carried by their squid-friendly kin (Nature, DOI: link).
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Rocket

NASA plans to take the boom out of supersonic flight

Jeff Hecht
New Scientist
Tue, 10 Feb 2009 14:51 UTC
NASA has completed a delicate set of flight tests to measure how modifications to an F-15 jet can affect the way shock waves form. The results could help turn sonic booms into distant rumbles.

The measurements will be used to calibrate a computer model of shock wave propagation which will be a crucial aid for engineers designing a new generation of quieter supersonic aircraft. "We're pretty close to being able to control sonic booms," says Peter Cohen of NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia, principal investigator for the agency's supersonic research programme.

Shock waves form at the front and back of supersonic aircraft as they shove air out of the way. When these shock waves hit the ground, observers hear them as a single boom. Public opposition to booms has led to a ban on civilian supersonic flight over US land, and this key factor has discouraged further development of supersonic planes.
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Info

Conflict brews over science in US stimulus package

Peter Aldhous
New Scientist
Tue, 10 Feb 2009 14:49 UTC
Biomedical research is among the big winners, and physics among the losers, in the latest deal-making over the mammoth US economic stimulus bill.

The US Senate is today expected to pass an amended version of the stimulus package (pdf format), which is expected to cost an estimated $838 billion (pdf format).

Overall, science fared well in the Senate. According to an analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Senate bill includes $17.8 billion for research and development, including $2 billion for new facilities and equipment - compared to $13.2 billion in the version previously passed by the House of Representatives.
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Vertebrates, Including Humans, Share Teeth Genes

Laura Sanders
Science News
Mon, 09 Feb 2009 18:43 UTC
The same molecular toolkit may control tooth formation in cichlid fish and humans.

Teeth
© Fraser et al., PLoS BiologyTwo different species of cichlids (Dimidiochromis compressiceps on the left and Labeotropheus fuelleborni on the right) have species-specific patterns and numbers of teeth in the mouth (top) and throat (bottom).
The small teeth lining cichlid fishes' throats won't make it into any baby scrapbooks, but the nubs have helped researchers figure out how vertebrates got their chompers. Research has uncovered what may be a shared toolkit of genes "common to the first tooth and all of its descendents," a team reports online February 10 in PLoS Biology. Tooth formation is likely controlled similarly in cichlids and in humans, the study suggests.

"The genes in fish are the genes that make teeth in humans," says coauthor Gareth Fraser of Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Vertebrates cut their teeth about half a billion years ago in the seas. Pearly whites first showed up in ancient eel-like fish called conodonts, described by Fraser as "jawless beasts that roamed the seas with rows and rows of teeth in their throats."
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