Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Spectacular Photo-Op On Saturn: Lunar convergence

Dr Tony Philips
Saturn Daily
Fri, 20 Feb 2009 12:37 UTC
Image
© E. Karkoschka & G. BaconA Hubble photo of Titan and Tethys transiting Saturn in 1995.
Something is about to happen on Saturn that's so pretty, even Hubble will pause to take a look. "On Feb. 24th, there's going to be a quadruple transit of Saturn's moons," says Keith Noll of the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute.

"Titan, Mimas, Dione and Enceladus will pass directly in front of Saturn and we'll see their silhouettes crossing Saturn's cloudtops-all four at the same time."

Hubble won't be the only one looking. Amateur astronomers will be able to see it, too. The timing favors observers along the Pacific coast of North America, Alaska, Hawaii, Australia and east Asia. "I woke up at one o'clock in the morning to photograph Titan's passage across the disk of Saturn," says Go. "The sky was overcast, but I was fortunate to see the end of the transit through a break in the clouds. The emergence of Titan was really stunning because it gave the moon a 3D appearance!"
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Telescope

Virtual Telescope Sees Stars


Daily Astronomy
Fri, 20 Feb 2009 01:19 UTC
Image
© ESO/J.-B. Le BouquinThis image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer is one of the sharpest color images ever made. It shows the Mira-like star T Leporis in great detail. The central disc is the surface of the star, which is surrounded by a spherical shell of molecular material expelled from the star.

Garching, Germany - Interferometry is a technique that combines the light from several telescopes, resulting in a vision as sharp as that of a giant telescope with a diameter equal to the largest separation between the telescopes used.

Achieving this requires the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) system components to be positioned to an accuracy of a fraction of a micrometer over about 100 meters and maintained so throughout the observations - a formidable technical challenge.
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Robot

Scientists make advances on "nano" electronics

Julie Steenhuysen
Reuters
Fri, 20 Feb 2009 01:05 UTC
Chicago - Two U.S. teams have developed new materials that may pave the way for ever smaller, faster and more powerful electronics as current semiconductor technology begins to reach the limits of miniaturization.

One team has made tiny transistors -- the building block of computer processors -- a fraction of the size of those used on advanced silicon chips.

Another has made a film material capable of storing data from 250 DVDs onto a surface the size of a coin.
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Telescope

NASA's Fermi telescope sees most extreme gamma-ray blast yet

Francis Reddy
EurekAlert
Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:33 UTC
Image
© NASA/Swift/Stefan ImmlerGRB 080916C's X-ray afterglow appears orange and yellow in this view that merges images from Swift's UltraViolet/Optical and X-ray telescopes.

The first gamma-ray burst to be seen in high-resolution from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is one for the record books. The blast had the greatest total energy, the fastest motions and the highest-energy initial emissions ever seen.

"We were waiting for this one," said Peter Michelson, the principal investigator on Fermi's Large Area Telescope at Stanford University. "Burst emissions at these energies are still poorly understood, and Fermi is giving us the tools to understand them."

Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's most luminous explosions. Astronomers believe most occur when exotic massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As a star's core collapses into a black hole, jets of material -- powered by processes not yet fully understood -- blast outward at nearly the speed of light. The jets bore all the way through the collapsing star and continue into space, where they interact with gas previously shed by the star and generate bright afterglows that fade with time.
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Sherlock

Best of the Web: Did Germany Commit Their First Holocaust Decades Before Hitler Came to Power?

Sean Thomas
Mail Online
Fri, 06 Feb 2009 22:04 UTC
This must be the most God-forsaken place on Earth. I'm standing on a dusty desert road in a desolate country on the south-west coast of Africa.

In front of me is an unspoken border. Summoning the courage, I prepare to step across.

For the past 100 years, this simple act would have got me arrested, beaten or shot. Because the region I am about to enter is the Sperrgebiet, or the 'Forbidden Zone' - a place whose savage emptiness conceals the terrible secrets of a Nazi past, adorned with the tainted beauty of blood diamonds. I pause. A Lanner falcon wheels above me in the silence of the African wilderness. Then I walk into the unknown.
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Telescope

Milky Way 'Ringing' Caused by Galaxy Crash

Darren Osborne
Discovery News
Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:00 UTC
Milky Way
© NASAArtist's concept of the Milky Way galaxy, with the "galactic bar" visible in the center. Like a stone dropping into a pond, a galactic collision almost two billion years ago resulted in vibrations that caused stars to clump together.
The effects of a small galaxy colliding with our own almost two billion years ago are still being felt, say an international team of astronomers.

Their findings, which appear on the pre-press physics Web site arXiv, explain why the Milky Way is vibrating, or "ringing," and why stars in it are clustering together.

Astronomers have known for almost a decade that the Milky Way is ringing, said Ken Freeman of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University.

They have suspected the ringing was caused by a bar-like structure in the center of the galaxy.

"In the center of our galaxy is a bar-like structure that is quite massive," he said. "Because it's not round its gravitational field is not round, so you get a certain kind of resonance between the bar and the stars that are moving."
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Sun

No-brainer: Astronomer devises giant sun shield to reverse 'global warming'

Jessica Salter
Telegraph.co.uk
Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:39 UTC
Professor Roger Angel thinks he can diffract the power of the sun by placing trillions of lenses in space and creating a 100,000-square-mile sunshade.

Each lens will have a diffraction pattern etched onto it which will cause the sun's rays to change direction.

He intends to use electromagnetic propulsion to get the lenses into space.

If work was started immediately Prof Angel thinks the sunshield could be operation by 2040.

He said: "Things that take a few decades are not that futuristic."

Comment: Climate change can happen quickly, but the mechanism for it is entirely misunderstood by those with access to unlimited funding to implement crack-pot ideas that interfere with nature's way.

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R2-D2

Child-like robots only a few years away

Adam Hartley
Tech Radar
Thu, 19 Feb 2009 18:23 UTC
Image
© UnknownBirth of the Machines: in the words of one journalist "iCub robot, like a human child, is unsightly, but deserving of our love"

The iCub robot, modelled on a human child, made its first appearance in Britain this week - the latest result of cutting edge robotics research funded by the European Commission.

iCub is capable of human style eye, head and leg movement as well as basic object recognition and a realistic hand grasping movement.

The mini humanoid robot has been modelled on a three-and-a-half-year-old child and is the result of a five-year £7.5m project is to develop a fully functioning child-like robot.

"Scientists want to give it the ability to crawl on all fours and sit up, to handle objects with precision and to have head and eye movements that echo those of humans," reports PA News.
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Sherlock

WWI French Battleship Found in Deep Water

Jonathan Amos
BBC News
Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:33 UTC
A French battleship sunk in 1917 by a German submarine has been discovered in remarkable condition on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea.

The Danton, with many of its gun turrets still intact, is sitting upright in over 1,000m of water.

Danton
© Galsi/FugroThe ship dug out the sediment as it hit the seafloor.
It was found by the Fugro geosciences company during a survey for a gas pipeline between Algeria and Italy.

The Danton, which sank with 296 sailors still onboard, lies 35km southwest of the island of Sardinia.

Naval historians record that the Danton's Captain Delage stood on the bridge with his officers and made no attempt to leave the ship as it went down.
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Chalkboard

'iTunes university' better than the real thing

Ewen Callaway
New Scientist
Thu, 19 Feb 2009 17:33 UTC
Image
© Charles Platiau / Reuters

Students have been handed another excuse to skip class from an unusual quarter. New psychological research suggests that university students who download a podcast lecture achieve substantially higher exam results than those who attend the lecture in person.

Podcasted lectures offer students the chance to replay difficult parts of a lecture and therefore take better notes, says Dani McKinney, a psychologist at the State University of New York in Fredonia, who led the study.

"It isn't so much that you have a podcast, it's what you do with it," she says.
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