Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Rare meteor shower to shed light on dangerous comets

A rare meteor shower predicted to hit Earth on 1 September should give astronomers only their second chance to study an ancient comet's crust. It could also help them develop a warning system against an otherwise insidious threat - a comet aimed at Earth from the dark fringes of the solar system.

Star

Israeli company makes solar energy viable

The afternoon Negev sun shone brightly on the solar panels at the National Center for Solar Energy near Sde Boker. The center's director, physicist Prof. David Feiman, squinted into the light. "After 30 years of research on solar energy, my life's work of experiments in how to produce electricity from the sun, I can say this year that I know how to manufacture solar energy that will compete with conventional energy," he says.

Info

Scientists debunk comet ice life theory

For the first time, there is solid data to refute a popular theory that life came to Earth aboard a comet, Rutgers researchers say.

Deteriorated DNA from microbes, frozen for millions of years in the Antarctic ice, shows that organisms could not have survived the bombardment of cosmic radiation during deep space travel from outside the solar system, said Paul Falkowski, a Rutgers biologist and oceanographer.

Better Earth

Probing Question: Why does the Earth rotate?

We spend our lives on a spinning globe -- it takes only 24 hours to notice that, as night follows day and the cycle repeats. But what causes Earth to rotate on its axis?

The answer starts with the forces that formed our solar system.

A fledgling star gathers a disk of dust and gas around itself, said Kevin Luhman, an assistant professor of astronomy at Penn State. As things coalesce, the star's gravitational orbit sets that dust and gas to spinning. "Any clump that forms within that disk is going to naturally have some sort of rotation," Luhman said.

Clock

First Europeans Came From Asia, Not Africa, Tooth Study Suggests

Europe's first early human colonizers were from Asia, not Africa, a new analysis of more than 5,000 ancient teeth suggests.

Researchers had traditionally assumed that Europe was settled in waves starting around two million years ago, as our ancient ancestors-collectively known as hominids-came over from Africa.

But the shapes of teeth from a number of hominid species suggest that arrivals from Asia played a greater role in colonizing Europe than hominids direct from Africa.

Telescope

Scientists Discover Largest-Known Planet

PHOENIX - Scientists have discovered the universe's largest known planet, a giant ball made of mostly hydrogen that is 20 times larger than Earth and circling a star 1,400 light-years away.

Bulb

The World's Most Advanced Bionic Arm

Jonathan Kuniholm's right arm terminates in a carbon-fiber sleeve trailing cables connected to a PC. He has no right hand, unless you count the virtual one on a display in front of him. The CG hand, programmed to look like silvery stainless steel, moves through a sequence of motions: spherical grasp, cylindrical grasp, thumb to forefinger -- all in response to signals from Kuniholm's muscles picked up by electrodes in the sleeve.

© Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
The device pictured above is the second prototype in the U.S. military's ambitious prosthetics project to build a bionic arm.

Display

Happy Birthday World Wide Web

1991: The world wide web becomes publicly available on the internet for the first time.

©Corbis
Tim Berners-Lee, an inventor of the internet, sits outside his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000.

Bulb

New Quantum Secrets of Photosynthesis

Like the peeling of an onion, the secrets of photosynthesis are being revealed layer by layer. Early in 2007 a team of Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley researchers identified quantum mechanical effects as the key to the astonishing ability of photosynthesis to utilize nearly all the photons absorbed by the leaves of green plants. Now a different team has found new evidence that points to a closely packed pigment-protein complex of the photosystem as the key to those quantum mechanical effects.

©Berkerley Labs
In this depiction of a pigment-protein complex in a reaction center from the purple photosynthetic bacteria Rhodobacter sphaeroides, the white fog indicates quantum coherence between the excitations of two pigment molecules, accessory bateriochlorophyll (BChl) and bacteriopheophytin (Bphy), which promotes efficient energy transfer to the protein (P).

Rocket

NASA Developing Asteroid Interceptor to Fend off Armageddon

On Friday Wired News profiled a "lonely" former astronaut, Rusty Schweickart, who is leading a campaign to protect the earth from the possibility of an asteroid crashing into Earth and killing millions of people.

Turns out he wasn't so lonely. While we said in the Q&A that NASA was doing little to protect us from an asteroid crash, it turns out the agency's been working on an anti-asteroid nuclear missile.

©Flight