Science & TechnologyS


Fireball

Big meteorite discovered in Antarctica

Becky Oskin
OurAmazingPlanet
Thu, 28 Feb 2013 12:53 UTC
Antarctica Meteorite_1
© International Polar FoundationThe fifth largest meteorite ever found in East Antarctica was discovered Jan. 28 by an international team of meteorite hunters.
Meteorite hunters at the bottom of the world bagged a rare find this southern summer: a 40-pound (18 kilogram) chunk of extraterrestrial rock.

A team from Belgium and Japan discovered the hefty meteorite as the members drove across the East Antarctic plateau on snowmobiles. Initial tests show it is an ordinary chondrite, the most common type of meteorite found on Earth, Vinciane Debaille, a geologist from Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, said in a statement.

"This is the biggest meteorite found in East Antarctica for 25 years," Debaille said. "This is something very exceptional. When you find such a meteorite on Earth, it means that when it was in the sky, it was much larger."
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Alarm Clock

Where does our sense of time come from?

Deborah Byrd
EarthSky Org
Thu, 28 Feb 2013 11:19 UTC
Time
© Wikimedia CommonsThe Past, oil painting on linen by Anastasiya Markovich.
In 1905, Albert Einstein published his theory of Special Relativity - showing that wristwatches of two observers in motion relative to one another will measure time differently. Since then, our human concept of time has gotten slippery. It's no longer possible to think of time as ticking along at a constant rate since the universe was born, separate from our own human perceptions.

Studies have borne out the idea that we all perceive time differently. For example, in 2001, two scientists at University College London conducted research showing that our internal clocks don't always match either. My internal clock doesn't tick at the same rate as yours. Everyone's sense of time is different and, at least in part, dependent on what our senses are telling us about the external world.

The UCL scientists - Misha B. Ahrens and Maneesh Sahani - wanted to answer the question, "Where does our sense of time come from?" Their research indicated that we humans use our senses - for example, the sense of sight - to help keep track of short intervals of time.

According to Ahrens and Sahani, we humans have learned to expect our sensory inputs to change at a particular average rate. They said that comparing the change we see to this average value helps us judge how much time has passed, and refines our internal timekeeping.
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Top Secret

Pandora's Boxes: Inside nanotechnology's little universe of big unknowns

Heather Millar
Orion Magazine
Sun, 27 Jan 2013 16:15 UTC
Image
© ru.wikipedia.org
A pair of scientists, sporting white clean-suits complete with helmets and face masks, approach a prefab agricultural greenhouse in a clearing at Duke University's Research Forest. Inside are two long rows of wooden boxes the size of large horse troughs, which hold samples of the natural world that surrounds them - the pine groves and rhododendron thickets of North Carolina's piedmont, which at this moment are alive with bird song.

Looking a lot like the government bad guys in E.T., the two men cautiously hover over a row of boxes containing native sedges, water grasses, and Zebra fish to spray a fine mist of silver nanoparticles over them. Their goal: to investigate how the world inside the boxes is altered by these essentially invisible and notoriously unpredictable particles.

The researchers are part of a multidisciplinary coalition of scientists from Duke, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Howard, Virginia Tech, and the University of Kentucky, headquartered at Duke's Center for the Environmental Implications of NanoTechnology (CEINT), that represents one of the most comprehensive efforts yet to measure how nanoparticles affect ecosystems and biological systems.
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Cassiopaea

White dwarf supernovae are discovered in Virgo cluster galaxy and in sky area 'Anonymous'


ScienceDaily
Wed, 27 Feb 2013 14:01 UTC
Supernova
© HETDiscovery of Supernova 2012ha, the bright spot in the image at the edge of a galaxy in the Virgo Cluster, was confirmed by a spectrogram obtained with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory. The Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams of the International Astronomical Union officially designated the Type 1a discovery as Supernova 2012ha.
Light from two massive stars that exploded hundreds of millions of years ago recently reached Earth, and each event was identified as a supernova.

A supernova discovered Feb. 6 exploded about 450 million years ago, said Farley Ferrante, a graduate student at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, who made the initial observation.

The exploding star is in a relatively empty portion of the sky labeled "anonymous" in the faint constellation Canes Venatici. Home to a handful of galaxies, Canes Venatici is near the constellation Ursa Major, best known for the Big Dipper.

A second supernova discovered Nov. 20 exploded about 230 million years ago, said Ferrante, who made the initial observation. That exploding star is in one of the many galaxies of the Virgo constellation.

Both supernovae were spotted with the Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment's robotic telescope ROTSE3b, which is now operated by SMU graduate students. ROTSE3b is at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of West Texas near Fort Davis.

The supernova that exploded about 450 million years ago is officially designated Supernova 2013X. It occurred when life on Earth consisted of creatures in the seas and oceans and along coastlines. Following naming conventions for supernova, Supernova 2013X was nicknamed "Everest" by Govinda Dhungana, an SMU graduate student who participated in the discovery.

The supernova that exploded about 230 million years ago is officially designated Supernova 2012ha. The light from that explosion has been en route to Earth since the Triassic geologic period, when dinosaurs roamed the planet. "That's fairly recent as these explosions go," Ferrante said. Dhungana gave the nickname "Sherpa" to Supernova 2012ha.
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Saturn

Hidden moons lurk in Saturn's rings

Jason Major
Discovery News
Wed, 27 Feb 2013 06:00 UTC
Saturn's Rings
© NASA/JPL/SSIContact! The short, bright streaks of a propeller called “Bleriot” show the location of a mini-moon.
Like Jupiter, Saturn is orbited by a large extended family of moons - 62, at last count - ranging in size from the gigantic 3,200-mile-wide Titan, wrapped in thick clouds, to the barely 2-mile-wide Methone, smooth as a river rock. But there are even more moons in the ringed planet's retinue, tiny worlds embedded inside the icy rings themselves. Even with the Cassini spacecraft they are nearly impossible to see... until they give themselves away with their shining "propellers."

In the image above we get a view across 9,000 miles of Saturn's A ring, the outermost of the main ring structures, with Saturn itself well off frame to the left. Inside one of the darker segments of the rings, at lower left center, are two short, bright streaks - one pointing up, one pointing down. This is what the Cassini science team calls a "propeller," a clumping of ring particles in front of and behind a tiny moonlet located between the two "blades."
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Robot

HAL robotic suit gets international safety certificate

Colin Lecher
PopSci
Wed, 27 Feb 2013 11:59 UTC
HAL Suit
© CyberdyneHal Suit.
We've been following the HAL robotic suit for a while now, and for good reason: Look at that thing! That looks like the future right there. And now it's gotten a worldwide stamp of safety approval.

This is how HAL works in a nutshell: Hop in, move an appendage slightly, and the suit detects the movement. After that, it guides your natural movement, but with robotic efficiency. So if you're a senior citizen that has trouble getting around, you can move your arm slightly and let HAL help you reach the top shelf. It's powered by a 22-pound battery attached to the waist, and the leg braces can help the wearer walk, and even climb stairs.
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Gear

Misleading? Longevity has improved so rapidly that scientists claim 72 is the new 30

Norma Cohen
CNBC
Tue, 26 Feb 2013 12:55 UTC
Image
© GM Visuals | Blend Images | Getty Images
Human longevity has improved so rapidly over the past century that 72 is the new 30, scientists say.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, said progress in lowering the odds of death at all ages has been so rapid since 1900 that life expectancy has risen faster than it did in the previous 200 millennia since modern man began to evolve from hominid species.

The pace of increase in life expectancy has left industrialized economies unprepared for the cost of providing retirement income to so many for so long.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, looked at Swedish and Japanese men - two countries with the longest life expectancy today. It concluded that their counterparts in 1800 would have had lifespans that were closer to those of the earliest hunter-gatherer humans than they would to adult men in both countries today.

Comment: It appears the authors are trying to argue that the advent of modern diets and medicine has improved life expectancy and health, but this may be far from the truth.

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
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Historical Data Shows Vaccines are Not what Saved Us

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Fireball 5

Astronomers calculate Russian meteorite's orbit, find it has 80 million cousins

Rebecca Boyle
PopSci
Tue, 26 Feb 2013 17:02 UTC
Asteroid Orbits
© NASAAsteroid Orbits - Both the asteroid 2012DA14 and the Chelyabinsk meteorite came from the asteroid belt, but from different orbits. Earth's orbit is shown in green.
Thanks to dozens of video reports, scientists are getting a pretty good handle on the life history of the massive meteorite that exploded above Russia earlier this month. They know it is rocky and a common type, and now they know where it probably came from. Scientists are scrambling to publish papers describing its origins in the middle of the solar system.

The asteroid chip that became the recent meteorite came from a spot in the asteroid belt near Jupiter, about 2.5 times further from the sun than Earth is, according to NASA.

At the University of Antioquia in Colombia, astronomers Jorge I. Zuluaga and Ignacio Ferrin produced a preliminary reconstruction of its orbit around the sun. It came from a well-known group of asteroids that frequently cross paths with Earth, known as the Apollo asteroids. Astronomers have seen about 240 that are larger than a kilometer in diameter, but speculate that about 2,000 similarly sized space rocks exist. As for rocks of Chelyabinsk size? There could be 80 million.
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Info

Scientists spot possible remains of "Rodinia," ancient lost microcontinent

Rebecca Boyle
PopSci
Tue, 26 Feb 2013 14:59 UTC
Supercontinent Rodinia
© United States Antarctic Program/Wikipedia Supercontinent Rodinia This map of supercontinent Rodinia shows the ancient locations of the continents. "Mauritia" is sandwiched between what is now India and Madagascar.
Tourists vacationing on the sunny isles of Reunion and Mauritius have no idea what secrets those sandy beaches hold. The islands could be hiding the remains of an ancient micro-continent, quietly torn apart between 50 and 100 million years ago, according to a new study. Scientists think they have spotted a fragment of a continent known as Mauritia.

The small strip of continent was once tucked tightly between the lands now known as India and Madagascar, back when those areas were packed into a supercontinent known as Rodinia. (It's the older and less-famous relative of supercontinent Pangaea.) Evidence of this sandwiched continent came from sand grains on Mauritius beaches, according to Trond Torsvik of the University of Oslo in Norway and colleagues.

Rodinia would have existed from the Precambrian era, about 2 billion years ago, to around 85 million years ago when plate tectonics broke it apart. Continental breakup is usually a mantle plume's doing--hot rock from within the Earth softens up tectonic plates, which eventually split. This is how the land masses now known as Madagascar, India, Australia and Antarctica broke up and migrated to their current locations on the planet. As this took place and the Indian Ocean formed, small fragments located on the edges of the rupture zone broke off--this is how the Seychelles came to be. Mini-continent Mauritius just wasn't so lucky, and it slipped beneath the waves, disappearing with time.
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Arrow Down

NRL scientists produce densest artificial ionospheric plasma clouds using HAARP


e! Science News
Mon, 25 Feb 2013 21:02 UTC
Plasma Cloud
© SRI International/Elizabeth KendallSequence of images of the glow plasma discharge produced with transmissions at the third electron gyro harmonic using the HAARP HF transmitter, Gakona, Alaska. The third harmonic artificial glow plasma clouds were obtained with HAARP using transmissions at 4.34 megahertz (MHz). The resonant frequency yielded green line (557.7 nanometer emission) with HF on November 12, 2012, between the times of 02:26:15 to 02:26:45 GMT.
U.S. Naval Research Laboratory research physicists and engineers from the Plasma Physics Division, working at the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) transmitter facility, Gakona, Alaska, successfully produced a sustained high density plasma cloud in Earth's upper atmosphere. "Previous artificial plasma density clouds have lifetimes of only ten minutes or less," said Paul Bernhardt, Ph.D., NRL Space Use and Plasma Section. "This higher density plasma 'ball' was sustained over one hour by the HAARP transmissions and was extinguished only after termination of the HAARP radio beam."

These glow discharges in the upper atmosphere were generated as a part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored Basic Research on Ionospheric Characteristics and Effects (BRIOCHE) campaign to explore ionospheric phenomena and its impact on communications and space weather.

Using the 3.6-megawatt high-frequency (HF) HAARP transmitter, the plasma clouds, or balls of plasma, are being studied for use as artificial mirrors at altitudes 50 kilometers below the natural ionosphere and are to be used for reflection of HF radar and communications signals.
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