Science & TechnologyS


Ice Cube

Russian team takes ice from biggest Antarctic sub-glacial lake, searching for life


RT.com
Thu, 10 Jan 2013 18:33 UTC
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© Reuters / HandoutA man stands near drilling apparatus at the Vostok (Lake) research camp in Antarctica
Nearly a year after Russian researchers reached the unique sub-glacial Lake Vostok, the first sample of transparent ice from its water has been taken. The finding is of great value as it could reveal if the lake harbors life.

The Lake Vostok, isolated by 4-meter layer of ice for around the past 20 million years, has been of great interest to scientists since it was first discovered in the 1990s. Locating it became one of the major finds in modern geography.

If it turns out that some primitive bacteria or even more complex life-forms survived in the lake's waters it could offer an earth-shattering insight into our planet's past.

Scientists managed to reach the fresh ice only on the depth of 3383 meters and took samples at 3,406 meters.

"The first core of transparent lake ice, 2 meters long, was obtained on January 10 at a depth of 3,406 meters. Inside it was a vertical channel filled with white bubble-rich ice," the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute said in its statement.
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Network

Experts urge PC users to disable Java, cite security flaw

Jim Finkle
Reuters
Thu, 10 Jan 2013 17:51 UTC
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Computer users are being advised by security experts to disable Oracle Corp's widely used Java software after a security flaw was discovered in the past day that they say hackers are exploiting to attack computers.

"Java is a mess. It's not secure," said Jaime Blasco, Labs Manager with AlienVault Labs. "You have to disable it."

Java, which is installed on hundreds of millions of PCs around the globe, is a computer language that enables programmers to write software using just one set of code that will run on virtually any type of computer.

It is used so that Web developers can make sites accessible from browsers running on Microsoft Corp Windows PCs or Macs from Apple Inc.
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Sun

How solar variability affects our planet


Red Orbit
Thu, 10 Jan 2013 16:46 UTC
SDO sun images
© NASA Science These six images from SDO, chosen to show a representative image about every six months, track the rising level of solar activity since the mission first began to produce consistent images in May, 2010. The period of solar maximum is expected in 2013. The images were taken in the 171 Angstrom wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light.
In the galactic scheme of things, the Sun is a remarkably constant star. While some stars exhibit dramatic pulsations, wildly yo-yoing in size and brightness, and sometimes even exploding, the luminosity of our own sun varies a measly 0.1% over the course of the 11-year solar cycle.

There is, however, a dawning realization among researchers that even these apparently tiny variations can have a significant effect on terrestrial climate. A new report issued by the National Research Council (NRC), The Effects of Solar Variability on Earth's Climate, lays out some of the surprisingly complex ways that solar activity can make itself felt on our planet.

Understanding the sun-climate connection requires a breadth of expertise in fields such as plasma physics, solar activity, atmospheric chemistry and fluid dynamics, energetic particle physics, and even terrestrial history. No single researcher has the full range of knowledge required to solve the problem. To make progress, the NRC had to assemble dozens of experts from many fields at a single workshop. The report summarizes their combined efforts to frame the problem in a truly multi-disciplinary context.
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Airplane

NASA chases climate change clues in the stratosphere


PhysOrg
Thu, 10 Jan 2013 16:39 UTC
Clouds and Sunlight
© Physics World
Starting this month, NASA will send a remotely piloted research aircraft as high as 65,000 feet over the tropical Pacific Ocean to probe unexplored regions of the upper atmosphere for answers to how a warming climate is changing Earth.

The first flights of the Airborne Tropical Tropopause Experiment (ATTREX), a multi-year airborne science campaign with a heavily instrumented Global Hawk aircraft, will take off from and be operated by NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The Global Hawk is able to make 30-hour flights.

Water vapor and ozone in the stratosphere can have a large impact on Earth's climate. The processes that drive the rise and fall of these compounds, especially water vapor, are not well understood. This limits scientists' ability to predict how these changes will influence global climate in the future. ATTREX will study moisture and chemical composition in the upper regions of the troposphere, the lowest layer of Earth's atmosphere. The tropopause layer between the troposphere and stratosphere, 8 miles to 11 miles above Earth's surface, is the point where water vapor, ozone and other gases enter the stratosphere.
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Info

Arizona professor challenges popular dark energy theory


RedOrbit
Thu, 10 Jan 2013 14:12 UTC
Dark Energy
© NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 Team The accelerating expansion of the galaxies observed in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field may conform more to Albert Einstein’s “cosmological constant” than a popular alternative theory of dark energy.
A popular theory that relies on dark energy, thought to be the main contributor to the accelerating expansion of the Universe does not fit newly obtained data with regards to one fundamental constant - the proton to electron mass ratio.

Rodger Thompson, a University of Arizona astronomy professor, disclosed his findings Wednesday at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Long Beach, California. He argues that dark energy theories, which have emerged as variations on Einstein's theory of general relativity, do not support newly obtained results on the relative masses of protons and electrons during the earliest stages of the Universe.

He computed the ratio predicted by dark energy models, a hypothetical form of energy believed to be found throughout space, and found that these theories (which add a scalar field to Einstien's equations to account for the acceleration o the Universe) did not fit the new data. Thompson's findings "impact our understanding of the universe and point to a new direction for the further study of its accelerating expansion," the university said in a recent statement.

In work that was honored with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, researchers demonstrated that the expansion of the universe was speeding up, not slowing down, as had previously been thought. That acceleration could be accounted for by reinstating the "cosmological constant" into Einstein's theory of General Relativity - originally introduced by Einstein to balance the expansion predicted by his original equations, as he believed at the time that the Universe was static.
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Info

Did mega-drought kill ancient Aboriginal culture?

Tia Ghose
LiveScience
Thu, 10 Jan 2013 11:51 UTC
Rock Painting_1
© Jbenwell | Flickr.comAfter a 1500-year drought, rock art changed from an earlier style called Gwion and the Wandjina paintings emerged. The Wandjina figures have round faces with big eyes.
A 1,500-year drought in Australia may have led to the demise of an ancient aboriginal culture, a new study suggests.

The results, published Nov. 28 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, show that geological traces of a mega-drought in the northwest Kimberley region of Western Australia coincide with a gap and transition in the region's rock art style. The finding suggests that the people who lived prior to the drought, called the Gwion, either left the region or dramatically altered their culture as a result of the drought, and a new culture called the Wanjinda eventually took its place.

"There is this significant gap in rock art. A possible reason for that is that the climate at that time changed so markedly that the artists who produced the Gwion Gwion art moved on from the Kimberley region," said study co-author Hamish McGowan, a climatologist at the University of Queensland in Australia.

But not everyone agrees with that interpretation. While the evidence for a drought is very convincing, archaeological sites show continuous occupation during that time, said Peter Veth, an archaeologist at the University of Western Australia who is an expert in the Kimberley's rock art and was not involved in the study.

"They reconfigure themselves on the land and often do portray things quite differently, but I don't see it as a different people," Veth told LiveScience.
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Comet 2

'Comet water' ions found in bacterial protein


PhysOrg
Thu, 10 Jan 2013 11:54 UTC
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Developments arising from new science techniques at Keele University in the UK, the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL), the flagship centre for neutron science, and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), have confirmed the presence of hydronium ions in the protein rubredoxin. Rubredoxin is a light weight iron-sulphur protein found in some of the earliest, most basic forms of life, notably bacteria and archaea. These ions, commonly found in comet tails or interstellar space clouds, have been found to be involved in crucial interactions with the protein.

The new results, reported in Angewandte Chemie, combine the use of one of the world's most sophisticated diffractometers with a novel sample preparation process whereby the protein's hydrogen atoms are replaced with the heavier isotope, deuterium, greatly enhancing the visualisation of hydronium ions.
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2 + 2 = 4

The human ear generates sounds as well as detects them


Sciencedaily.com
Thu, 10 Jan 2013 10:47 UTC
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© PTBCombined stimulation of otoacoustic emissions: the first tone is transmitted via air conduction (probe speaker in the ear), the second tone is conveyed via bone conduction (bone vibrator behind the ear).
Not only can the human ear detect sounds, it can also generate them. If the ear hears the two upper tones of a major triad, it produces the fundamental of the chord which can then be measured. This phenomenon, called "otoacoustic emission" (OAE), is used by otologists for objective audiometric tests, e.g. in newborns. Investigations at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) have shown that an OAE audiometric test becomes even more reliable if the two sounds are transmitted to the ear not via a loudspeaker, but by bone conduction.

Regardless of where people come from, whether they are Europeans or Asians, the human ear is always tuned to a major scale. If the ear hears the two upper tones of a major triad, the ear itself produces the third, lowest, tone of the chord. This tone is called "distortion product otoacoustic emission (OAE)" and is generated due to anatomic and physical laws: if the hair cells in the inner ear are healthy and sound, they are stimulated by the two matching tones to vibrate at a third frequency. This lower tone comes out of the ear again and can be measured by means of a highly sensitive microphone. With the aid of this phenomenon, it is possible to check objectively whether the hearing of newborns or infants is intact.
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Meteor

Asteroid Apophis more massive than first thought

Iain Thompson
The Register
Wed, 09 Jan 2013 15:19 UTC
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© msnbc.msn.com
Astronomers following the so-called doomsday asteroid Apophis, which will be whizzing past Earth on Thursday morning, have found the rock is much larger than had previously been assumed. Since the asteroid could hit Earth in 2036, that's a problem.

The asteroid, named after an Egyptian god of death, had been thought to be around 885 feet (270 meters) wide, plus or minus a couple of hundred feet (60 meters). But as Apophis approached last weekend, astronomers at the Herschel Space Observatory took new observations and have concluded that astronomers have seriously underestimated both its size and its mass.

"The 20 per cent increase in diameter, from 270 to 325m, translates into a 75 per cent increase in our estimates of the asteroid's volume or mass," said Thomas Müller of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany.

"These numbers are first estimates based on the Herschel measurements alone, and other ongoing ground-based campaigns might produce additional pieces of information which will allow us to improve our results."
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Laptop

Corporate fraudsters beware! Software now can find you

Alan Farnham
ABC News
Wed, 09 Jan 2013 17:09 UTC
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© ABC News
Crooks, when committing crime, leave trails - some verbal, some numerical. Now a new generation of super-snooper software adapted from the military gives employers the power to detect documents, transactions or emails that smell fishy.

David Remnitz, head of Ernst & Young's forensic technology business and fraud investigation services in North and South America, says the technology is so new to the private sector that it has has come into use only in the past 18 months. Until now, fraud-hunters have had to rely on their own perspicacity - or on the kindness of whistleblowers. Now, however, wrongdoers can be fingered electronically and automatically, with computer programs scanning vast quantities of data in seconds.

Predicts industry information source Compliance Week, "Catching fraudsters may soon become more a matter of learning how to properly interrogate a computer program rather than putting gumshoes on the case." It goes on to say that while fraud-detection software is not new, it previously has lacked the ability to sift through non-numerical, unstructured data - such as text documents, social media and email.
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