Science & Technology
Dutch ecologist Roxina Soler and her colleagues have discovered that subterranean and aboveground herbivorous insects can communicate with each other by using plants as telephones. Subterranean insects issue chemical warning signals via the leaves of the plant. This way, aboveground insects are alerted that the plant is already 'occupied'.
Aboveground, leaf-eating insects prefer plants that have not yet been occupied by subterranean root-eating insects. Subterranean insects emit chemical signals via the leaves of the plant, which warn the aboveground insects about their presence. This messaging enables spatially-separated insects to avoid each other, so that they do not unintentionally compete for the same plant.
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| ©Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research
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| Illustration of communication between subterranean and aboveground herbivorous insects.
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Interacting galaxies are found throughout the Universe, sometimes as dramatic collisions that trigger bursts of star formation, on other occasions as stealthy mergers that result in new galaxies. A series of 59 new images of colliding galaxies has been released from the several terabytes of archived raw images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to mark the 18th anniversary of the telescope's launch. This is the largest collection of Hubble images ever released to the public simultaneously.
Galaxy mergers, which were more common in the early Universe than they are today, are thought to be one of the main driving forces for cosmic evolution, turning on quasars, sparking frenetic star births and explosive stellar deaths. Even apparently isolated galaxies will show signs in their internal structure that they have experienced one or more mergers in their past. Each of the various merging galaxies in this series of images is a snapshot of a different instant in the long interaction process.
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| ©NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University), K. Noll (STScI), and J. Westphal (Caltech))
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| The best 12 images in the collection.
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No sunspots? No problem. Yesterday the blank sun unleashed a solar flare without the usual aid of a sunspot. At 1408 UT on April 26th, Earth-orbiting satellites detected a surge of X-rays registering B3.8 on the Richter scale of solar flares. Shortly thereafter, SOHO coronagraphs photographed a coronal mass ejection (CME) billowing away from the sun:
The expanding cloud could deliver a glancing blow to Earth's magnetic field late on April 28th or 29th. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras when it arrives.
The Korean customs service has unveiled a group of seven cloned Labrador retrievers that are being trained to sniff out explosives and drugs at ports and airports.
Seoul - The world's first cloned dog will become a father next month in the first breeding of cloned canines, South Korean researchers said Friday.
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| ©AFP
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| Snuppy -- an Afghan hound -- was the world's first cloned dog
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A team of scientists from Princeton University has found that one of the most intriguing phenomena in condensed-matter physics -- known as the quantum Hall effect -- can occur in nature in a way that no one has ever before seen.
Writing in the April 24 issue of Nature, the scientists report that they have recorded this exotic behavior of electrons in a bulk crystal of bismuth-antimony without any external magnetic field being present. The work, while significant in a fundamental way, could also lead to advances in new kinds of fast quantum or "spintronic" computing devices, of potential use in future electronic technologies, the authors said.
"We had the right tool and the right set of ideas," said Zahid Hasan, an assistant professor of physics who led the research and propelled X-ray photons at the surface of the crystal to find the effect. The team used a high-energy, accelerator-based technique called "synchrotron photo-electron spectroscopy."
And, Hasan added, "We had the right material."
An historical approach detailing how over the last thirty years scientists have begun to intermingle scientific and political claims.
My topic today sounds humorous but unfortunately I am serious. I am going to argue that extraterrestrials lie behind global warming. Or to speak more precisely, I will argue that a belief in extraterrestrials has paved the way, in a progression of steps, to a belief in global warming. Charting this progression of belief will be my task today.
Imagine a world where roads don't exist, old-style cars are a distant memory and you can zip over 450 kilometres in one hour. A Russian designer believes aerocars are not far away. Aleksandr Begak has successfully tested a prototype more than 100 times.
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| ©Unknown
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In a matter of days, the first dead human will be put out to rot in the North Carolina mountains, all in the name of science.
Dr. John Williams runs the Forensic Anthropology Lab at Western Carolina University, he says, "I want to have them smell it, see it and if they can handle it great."
Tal Levy
HaaretzSat, 26 Apr 2008 09:22 UTC
Hackers commandeered the Bank of Israel Web site early Friday and filled it with virtual graffiti in Arabic defaming Israel.
Web surfers who attempted to access the site Friday morning were met with Arabic scrawlings that the anonymous vandals placed on the site. The Bank of Israel has taken down the site until the glitch could be fixed.
