Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Scientists See Water Ice In Fresh Meteorite Craters On Mars


ScienceDaily
Fri, 25 Sep 2009 01:08 UTC
mars crater ice
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of ArizonaEarlier and later HiRISE images of a fresh meteorite crater 12 meters, or 40 feet, across located within Arcadia Planitia on Mars show how water ice excavated at the crater faded with time. The images, each 35 meters, or 115 feet across, were taken in November 2008 and January 2009.
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has revealed frozen water hiding just below the surface of mid-latitude Mars. The spacecraft's observations were obtained from orbit after meteorites excavated fresh craters on the Red Planet.

Scientists controlling instruments on the orbiter found bright ice exposed at five Martian sites with new craters that range in depth from approximately half a meter to 2.5 meters (1.5 feet to 8 feet). The craters did not exist in earlier images of the same sites. Some of the craters show a thin layer of bright ice atop darker underlying material. The bright patches darkened in the weeks following initial observations, as the freshly exposed ice vaporized into the thin Martian atmosphere. One of the new craters had a bright patch of material large enough for one of the orbiter's instruments to confirm it is water-ice.
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Life Preserver

India's lunar mission finds evidence of water on the Moon

Jeremy Page
Times Online
Thu, 24 Sep 2009 22:33 UTC
moon
Dreams of establishing a manned Moon base could become reality within two decades after India's first lunar mission found evidence of large quantities of water on its surface.

Data from Chandrayaan-1 also suggests that water is still being formed on the Moon. Scientists said the breakthrough - to be announced by Nasa at a press conference today - would change the face of lunar exploration.

The discovery is a significant boost for India in its space race against China. Dr Mylswamy Annadurai, the mission's project director at the Indian Space Research Organisation in Bangalore, said: "It's very satisfying."
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Telescope

NASA Goddard Shoots the Moon to Track LRO

Bill Steigerwald
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:52 UTC
Image
© Tom Zagwodzki/Goddard Space Flight Center Goddard's Laser Ranging Facility directing a laser (green beam) toward the LRO spacecraft in orbit around the moon (white disk). The moon has been deliberately over-exposed to show the laser
On certain nights, an arresting green line pierces the sky above NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. It's a laser directed at the moon, visible when the air is humid. No, we're not repelling an invasion. Instead, we're tracking our own spacecraft.

28 times per second, engineers at NASA Goddard fire a laser that travels about 250,000 miles to hit the minivan-sized Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft moving at nearly 3,600 miles per hour as it orbits the moon.
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Bell

British fortune hunter finds largest Anglo-Saxon treasure trove


RIA Novosti
Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:47 UTC
anglo-saxon treasure
© Jeff Belmonte
An amateur treasure hunter has stumbled across the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver ever found buried in a Staffordshire field in central England, local media said on Thursday.

Terry Herbert from the town of Burntwood, who lives on disablement benefit, discovered the haul with his metal detector on farmland belonging to a friend. The 1,500 pieces made of gold and silver date back to the 7th century and comprise 5 kg of gold and 2.5 kg of silver.

"I have this phrase that I say sometimes; "spirits of yesteryear take me where the coins appear", but on that day I changed coins to gold," Herbert was quoted on the Telegraph website as saying. "I don't know why I said it that day, but I think somebody was listening and directed me to it."
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Magnify

Genomic Research Shows Indians Descended from Two Groups


PhysOrg
Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:00 UTC
Map
© D. Reich, K. Thangaraj, N. Patterson, A. Price and L. SinghA map showing the groups across India included in the Nature study.
In a study published in the September 24th issue of Nature, an international team describes how they harnessed modern genomic technology to explore the ancient history of India, the world's second most populous nation.

The new research reveals that nearly all Indians carry genomic contributions from two distinct ancestral populations. Following this ancient mixture, many groups experienced periods of genetic isolation from each other for thousands of years. The study, which has medical implications for people of Indian descent, was led by scientists at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad, India together with US researchers at Harvard Medical School, the Harvard School of Public Health and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

"This work is an outstanding example of the power of international collaboration," said Lalji Singh, senior author of the Nature paper, who is a Bhatnagar Fellow and the former director of CCMB. "Scientists in India and the United States have together made discoveries that would have been impossible for either group working alone."
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Fish

Mutations Make Evolution Irreversible: By Resurrecting Ancient Proteins, Researchers Find That Evolution Can Only Go Forward


ScienceDaily
Thu, 24 Sep 2009 08:00 UTC
Fish
© iStockphotoFish fossil.
A University of Oregon research team has found that evolution can never go backwards, because the paths to the genes once present in our ancestors are forever blocked. The findings -- the result of the first rigorous study of reverse evolution at the molecular level -- appear in the Sept. 24 issue of Nature.

The team used computational reconstruction of ancestral gene sequences, DNA synthesis, protein engineering and X-ray crystallography to resurrect and manipulate the gene for a key hormone receptor as it existed in our earliest vertebrate ancestors more than 400 million years ago. They found that over a rapid period of time, five random mutations made subtle modifications in the protein's structure that were utterly incompatible with the receptor's primordial form.

The discovery of evolutionary bridge burning implies that today's versions of life on Earth may be neither ideal nor inevitable, said Joe Thornton, a professor in the UO's Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

"Evolutionary biologists have long been fascinated by whether evolution can go backwards," Thornton said, "but the issue has remained unresolved because we seldom know exactly what features our ancestors had, or the mechanisms by which they evolved into their modern forms. We solved those problems by studying the problem at the molecular level, where we can resurrect ancestral proteins as they existed long ago and use molecular manipulations to dissect the evolutionary process in both forward and reverse directions."
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Sun

The Sun could be heading into period of extended calm

James Dacey
Physics World
Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:04 UTC
Researchers in the US may have discovered further evidence that the Sun is heading towards an extended period of quiet activity, the like of which has not been seen since the 17th century. The impact this may have on climate is poorly understood but it would be good news for satellite communications, which would continue to avoid the harsher impacts of space weather.

Scientists have long known that the Sun's magnetic activity varies over a cycle of approximately 11 years. Greater magnetic activity leads to more "sunspots", or darker patches visible on the solar surface. These sunspots are regions where the magnetic field lines have become twisted due to differential rotation in the outer layers of the Sun.
Image
© Physics WorldSolar hosepipe Sun continues to spray Earth even during the "quiet times"
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Control Panel

Oil Industry Sets a Brisk Pace of New Discoveries

Jad Mouawad
The New York Times
Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:07 UTC
Oil rig
© Ken Childress/TransoceanAn off-shore oil rig, shown here off Brest, France, and now under contract to BP off the coast of Angola. More than 200 oil discoveries have been reported so far in 2009 in dozens of countries.
The oil industry has been on a hot streak this year, thanks to a series of major discoveries that have rekindled a sense of excitement across the petroleum sector, despite falling prices and a tough economy.

These discoveries, spanning five continents, are the result of hefty investments that began earlier in the decade when oil prices rose, and of new technologies that allow explorers to drill at greater depths and break tougher rocks.

"That's the wonderful thing about price signals in a free market - it puts people in a better position to take more exploration risk," said James T. Hackett, chairman and chief executive of Anadarko Petroleum.

More than 200 discoveries have been reported so far this year in dozens of countries, including northern Iraq's Kurdish region, Australia, Israel, Iran, Brazil, Norway, Ghana and Russia. They have been made by international giants, like Exxon Mobil, but also by industry minnows, like Tullow Oil.

Just this month, BP said that it found a giant deepwater field that might turn out to be the biggest oil discovery ever in the Gulf of Mexico, while Anadarko announced a large find in an "exciting and highly prospective" region off Sierra Leone.
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Sherlock

Archaeologists Find Suspected Trojan War-Era Couple

Ibon Villelabeitia
Reuters
Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:14 UTC
Couple
© Reuters/Project TroyAn undated handout picture shows the remains of a man and a woman believed to have died in 1,200 B.C. in the ancient city of Troy in northwestern Turkey.
Archaeologists in the ancient city of Troy in Turkey have found the remains of a man and a woman believed to have died in 1,200 B.C., the time of the legendary war chronicled by Homer, a leading German professor said on Tuesday.

Ernst Pernicka, a University of Tubingen professor of archaeometry who is leading excavations on the site in northwestern Turkey, said the bodies were found near a defense line within the city built in the late Bronze age.

The discovery could add to evidence that Troy's lower area was bigger in the late Bronze Age than previously thought, changing scholars' perceptions about the city of the "Iliad."

"If the remains are confirmed to be from 1,200 B.C. it would coincide with the Trojan war period. These people were buried near a mote. We are conducting radiocarbon testing, but the finding is electrifying," Pernicka told Reuters in a telephone interview.
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Sun

New Code Gives Astrophysicists First Full Simulation Of Star's Final Hours


Space Daily / SPX
Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:04 UTC
Image
© UnknownUsing Maestro, researchers simulate the radial velocity surfaces of a Type 1a Supernova as it approaches the point of ignition. Only the inner (1000 km)3 are shown in this image.
The precise conditions inside a white dwarf star in the hours leading up to its explosive end as a Type Ia supernova are one of the mysteries confronting astrophysicists studying these massive stellar
explosions. But now, a team of researchers, composed of three applied mathematicians at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and two astrophysicists, has created the first full-star simulation of the hours preceding the largest thermonuclear explosions in the universe.

In a paper to be published in the October issue of Astrophysical Journal, Ann Almgren, John Bell and Andy Nonaka of Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division, with Mike Zingale of Stony Brook University and Stan Woosley of University of California, Santa Cruz, describe the first-ever three-dimensional, full-star simulations of convection in a white dwarf leading up to ignition of a Type Ia supernova. The project was funded by the DOE Office of Science.
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