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Animals point to ancient seaway in Antarctica

Pamela Rutherford
BBC News
Tue, 31 Aug 2010 20:33 UTC
Image
© British Antarctic Survey
The locations of tiny Bryozoans provide clues to Antarctica's past
Scientists have found evidence for an ancient sea passage linking currently isolated areas of Antarctica. The evidence comes from a study of tiny marine animals living either side of the 2km thick Western Antarctic ice sheet.

Reseachers think their spread was due to the collapse of the ice sheet as recently as 125,000 years ago allowing water flow between different regions. Their findings are published in the journal, Global Change Biology.

Bryozoans are tiny, filter feeding marine animals which in their adult form are immobile, living glued to the sides of boulders, rocks or other surfaces.

As part of the Census of Antarctic Marine Life scientists from the British Antarctic Survey have revealed striking similarities between the Bryozoans living in the Ross and Weddell seas. These are 1,500 miles apart and separated by the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), the third largest ice mass on the planet.
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Blackbox

Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Telegraph UK
Sun, 29 Aug 2010 19:26 UTC
If Barack Obama were to marshal America's vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project, he might reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years.
Telegraph thorium
© Unknown
Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal

We could then stop arguing about wind mills, deepwater drilling, IPCC hockey sticks, or strategic reliance on the Kremlin. History will move on fast.

Muddling on with the status quo is not a grown-up policy. The International Energy Agency says the world must invest $26 trillion (£16.7 trillion) over the next 20 years to avert an energy shock. The scramble for scarce fuel is already leading to friction between China, India, and the West.

There is no certain bet in nuclear physics but work by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors may be the magic bullet we have all been hoping for, though we have barely begun to crack the potential of solar power.

Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal - named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor's day or Thursday - produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.
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Saturn

Are We Living in a Designer Universe?

John Gribbin
The Telegraph, UK
Tue, 31 Aug 2010 02:35 UTC
Image
© Wales News Service
The argument over whether the universe has a creator, and who that might be, is among the oldest in human history.
The creators of the world were closer to men than to gods, argues John Gribbin.

Amateur astronomer Peter Shah who has taken astonishing shots of the universe from his garden shed

The argument over whether the universe has a creator, and who that might be, is among the oldest in human history. But amid the raging arguments between believers and skeptics, one possibility has been almost ignored - the idea that the universe around us was created by people very much like ourselves, using devices not too dissimilar to those available to scientists today.

As with much else in modern physics, the idea involves particle acceleration, the kind of thing that goes on in the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Before the LHC began operating, a few alarmists worried that it might create a black hole which would destroy the world. That was never on the cards: although it is just possible that the device could generate an artificial black hole, it would be too small to swallow an atom, let alone the Earth.
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Info

Big eats from a 12,000-year-old burial

Bruce Bower
ScienceNews
Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:41 UTC
Image
© Naftali Hilger
Researchers say that at least 35 people held a ceremonial feast in this cave around 12,000 years ago.
Communal feasting may have existed prior to farming's invention.

Nacho-fueled Super Bowl bashes and multi-course wedding banquets may hark back to a time when preagricultural people devoured wild animal meat at their comrades' gravesides.

That's what happened 12,000 years ago at Hilazon Tachtit cave in Israel, say zooarchaeologist Natalie Munro of the University of Connecticut in Storrs and archaeologist Leore Grosman of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. At least 35 members of the Natufian culture gathered there to chow down on wild tortoise meat at the burial pit of an elderly woman who probably had been a shaman, the researchers report in a paper scheduled to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Info

New view of tectonic plates

Kathy Svitil
California Institute of Technology
Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:28 UTC
Image
© Georg Stadler, Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences, UT Austin
This cross section shows the adaptively refined mesh with a finest resolution of about 1 km in the region from the New Hebrides to Tonga in the SW Pacific. The refinement occurs both around plate boundaries and dynamically in response to the nonlinear rheology.
Computational scientists and geophysicists at the University of Texas at Austin and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed new computer algorithms that for the first time allow for the simultaneous modeling of the earth's Earth's mantle flow, large-scale tectonic plate motions, and the behavior of individual fault zones, to produce an unprecedented view of plate tectonics and the forces that drive it.

A paper describing the whole-earth model and its underlying algorithms will be published in the August 27 issue of the journal Science and also featured on the cover.
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Info

KwaZulu-Natal's Ancient Tool Find


iAfrica
Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:13 UTC
Ancient Arrows
© juliaf, sxc.hu
A set of ancient arrows.
A team of South African researchers and scientists have found 64 000-year-old stone tools in northern KwaZulu-Natal which may help explain how the process of thought developed in humans, the University of Johannesburg (UJ) announced on Friday.

The team which was led by University of the Witwatersrand professor Lyn Wadley and included UJ lecturer Dr Marlize Lombard, believed it could be the earliest direct evidence of human-made, stone-tipped arrows.

The tools were excavated from layers of old sediment in Sibudu Cave, a sandstone cliff cave in northern KwaZulu-Natal.

"Closer inspection of the stone tools revealed remnants of blood, bone and other use-traces, that provided clues about how it was used," Lombard said in a statement.

The shape of the geometric pieces indicated where they had been impacted and damaged, and how they were joined to the handle or strap.

Researchers also detected traces of glue, made of a plant-based resin, which may have been used to fasten the pieces to a wooden or reed shaft.
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Display

Google Turns Millions into Accidental Spammers

Leslie Meredith
TechNews Daily
Mon, 30 Aug 2010 13:18 UTC
As many as 4.25 million Gmail users were turned into unintentional spammers due to a glitch in Gmail's system.

Despite assurances from Google team members that the problem has been fixed, Gmail users continue to post reports to the contrary.

Gmail user reports of messages being resent many times and other mail errors began trickling into the Gmail Help Forum as early as last Saturday, reaching a peak on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Google alerted its customers that the company was experiencing an issue affecting less than 2.5 percent of the Google Mail user base
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Info

Nasca Lines May be Map of Underground Water Sources: Expert


Sify News
Mon, 30 Aug 2010 04:01 UTC
A new research has found that Nasca lines which are a series of ancient geoglyphs located in the Nazca Desert of Peru, may be a giant map of the underground water sources traced on the land, says expert.

The Nasca Lines are located in the Peruvian desert, about 200 miles south of Lima.

The assortment of perfectly straight lines lies in an area measuring 37 miles long and 1-mile wide.

American researcher David Johnson started his research in 1995. He became aware of the scarcity of water in the region and the effect that this had on agricultural production and the quality of life.

While looking for sources of water, he noticed that ancient aqueducts, called puquios, seemed to be connected with some of the lines.

The Nasca plain is one of the driest places on Earth, getting less than one inch of rain a year.
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Info

Dinosaurs 'Wiped Out by Meteor Shower Lasting Thousands of Years'

Heidi Blake
The Telegraph, UK
Mon, 30 Aug 2010 03:49 UTC
Dinosaur
© Telegraph, UK
Dinosaurs could have been wiped out by a meteor shower lasting thousands of years.

Scientists had previously identified the a giant Chicxulub crater in the Gulf of Mexico as the site of a single meteor strike thought to have obliterated prehistoric life on Earth.

But evidence for a second impact in Ukraine, dating back thousands of years before the Chicxulub impact, has raised the possibility that the dinosaurs may have been blitzed with a shower of meteorites.

The Boltysh Crater in Ukraine was first discovered in 2002. But scientists have now unearthed a second cavity within the crater which they believe was caused by the aftermath of the Chicxulub impact - suggesting that the two meteor strikes occurred years apart as part of a wider "shower".

Scientists dated the two Boltysh impact zones by examining the pollen and spores of fossil plants in the layers of mud within.

Ferns are among the first plants to colonise a devastated landscape after a catastrophe, leaving layers of spores - dubbed "fern spikes" - which are considered good markers of past impact events.

The researchers found a second "fern spike" one meter above the first in the Boltysh crater - suggesting that two separate strikes occurred thousands of years apart.
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Chalkboard

Scheme to 'pull electricity from the air' sparks debate

Jason Palmer
BBC
Fri, 27 Aug 2010 03:17 UTC
electroworld
© BBC
The claim of electricity from the air as a renewable resource is controversial
Tiny charges gathered directly from humid air could be harnessed to generate electricity, researchers say.

Dr Fernando Galembeck told the American Chemical Society meeting in Boston that the technique exploited a little-known atmospheric effect.

Tests had shown that metals could be used to gather the charges, he said, opening up a potential energy source in humid climates.

However, experts disagree about the mechanism and the scale of the effect.

"The basic idea is that when you have any solid or liquid in a humid environment, you have absorption of water at the surface," Dr Galembeck, from the University of Campinas in Brazil, told BBC News

"The work I'm presenting here shows that metals placed under a wet environment actually become charged."

Dr Galembeck and his colleagues isolated various metals and pairs of metals separated by a non-conducting separator - a capacitor, in effect - and allowed nitrogen gas with varying amounts of water vapour to pass over them.

What the team found was that charge built up on the metals - in varying amounts, and either positive or negative. Such charge could be connected to a circuit periodically to create useful electricity.

The effect is incredibly small - gathering an amount of charge 100 million times smaller over a given area than a solar cell produces - but seems to represent a means of charge accumulation that has been overlooked until now.

Dr Galembeck suggests that with further development, the principle could be extended to become a renewable energy resource in humid parts of the world, such as the tropics.
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