Science & TechnologyS


Comet

Upcoming meteor shower in May could rival The Perseids

Brett Smith
RedOrbit
Tue, 06 May 2014 13:49 UTC
Fireball
© Thinkstock
May isn't exactly known for its meteor showers. In fact, this month's Camelopardalid meteor shower, caused by dust from periodic comet 209P/LINEAR, has technically never even been seen before. However, astronomers have predicted that May 2014 could see a Camelopardalid meteor shower that rivals the year's biggest display - the Perseids of August.

This year could be such a historic display, NASA's head of its Meteoroid Environment Office, Bill Cooke, said, adding that he plans to head out and see the display with his own two eyes, instead of simply reviewing images of the meteor shower captured by the space agency's nationwide network of fireball cameras.

"There could be a new meteor shower, and I want to see it with my own eyes," Cooke said. "Some forecasters have predicted more than 200 meteors per hour."

When a comet crosses Earth's orbit as it circles the Sun, it leaves behind streams of debris for the Earth to plow through around the same time every year. The relatively faint comet behind the Camelopardalids, Comet 209P/LINEAR, was discovered in 2004 and was found to orbit the Sun once every five years.
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Comet

Comet Jacques brightens: How to see it in May

David Dickinson
Universe Today
Mon, 05 May 2014 14:41 UTC
Comet Jacques_6
© Efrain Morales RiveraComet Jacques as imaged on March 18th, shortly after discovery.
A recently discovered comet is headed northward and is set to put on one of two fine performances for binocular observers in 2014 starting this week.

Comet C/2014 E2 Jacques was discovered on March 13th 2014 by Cristóvão Jacques, Eduardo Pimentel and João Ribeiro de Barros while observing from the Southern Observatory for Near Earth Asteroids Research (SONEAR) facility located near Oliveira, Brazil.

The comet was just about at +15th magnitude at the time of discovery as it glided across the southern hemisphere constellation of Centaurus.

While a majority of comet discoveries are destined to remain small and faint, Comet Jacques was immediately shown to be something special. Upon discovery of any new comet, the first task is to gain several observations hours or nights apart to accurately gauge its distance and orbit. Are astronomers looking at a small, garden variety comet close up, or a large, active one far away?
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Arrow Down

Mouse study reveals that young blood rejuvenates older mice, will it work on humans?

Meeri Kim
Washington Post
Sun, 04 May 2014 12:00 UTC
young mouse old mouse
© Tony Wyss-CorayAn old mouse, left, and a young mouse together. A recent study suggests that young blood rejuvenates the brain.
The rodent fountain of youth may not be filled with water, but with blood. A trio of new studies has discovered that the blood of young mice appears to reverse some of the effects of aging when put into the circulatory systems of elderly mice.

After combining the blood circulations of two mice by conjoining them - one old, the other young - researchers found dramatic improvements in the older mouse's muscle and brain. After four weeks, stem cells in both those areas got a boost of activity and were better able to produce new neurons and muscle tissue.

They later discovered that injections of a special protein found abundantly in young blood - or even transfusions of whole young blood - gives the same advantages as sharing a blood supply.
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Laptop

F.C.C. reverts to fast lanes for web traffic - only the wealthy will qualify

Edward Wyatt
The New York Times
Wed, 23 Apr 2014 13:04 UTC
Image
© Daniel Rosenbaum/New York TimesThe proposed rules, drafted by Tom Wheeler, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and his staff, would allow Internet service providers to charge companies different rates for faster connection speeds.
The principle that all Internet content should be treated equally as it flows through cables and pipes to consumers looks all but dead.

The Federal Communications Commission said on Wednesday that it would propose new rules that allow companies like Disney, Google or Netflix to pay Internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon for special, faster lanes to send video and other content to their customers.

The proposed changes would affect what is known as net neutrality - the idea that no providers of legal Internet content should face discrimination in providing offerings to consumers, and that users should have equal access to see any legal content they choose.

The proposal comes three months after a federal appeals court struck down, for the second time, agency rules intended to guarantee a free and open Internet.
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Robot

Stephen Hawking warns of possible dire threat to mankind from artificial intelligence

David Ferguson
Raw Story
Sat, 03 May 2014 10:08 UTC
Stephen Hawking
© Featureflash/ShutterstockStephen Hawking.
Author, physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking co-wrote a dire warning to the human race about the danger of unintended consequences from our current fascination with artificial intelligence (AI).

In an open letter with three other scientists published in The Independent, Hawking contended that dismissing "the notion of highly intelligent machines as science fiction" could be "our worst mistake in history."

Consumers use AI each day in the form of the iPhone's personal assistant Siri, Google Now and other programs.

Breakthroughs like newly developed self-driving cars herald a generation of products and services to come as computers become more and more adept at solving problems quickly.

"The potential benefits are huge," wrote Hawking. "Everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools that AI may provide, but the eradication of war, disease, and poverty would be high on anyone's list. Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history."
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Info

New super-heavy element 117 confirmed

Denise Chow
Live Science
Thu, 01 May 2014 17:12 UTC
Periodic Table
© Discovery News
Atoms of a new super-heavy element - the as-yet-unnamed element 117 - have reportedly been created by scientists in Germany, moving it closer to being officially recognized as part of the standard periodic table.

Researchers at the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research, an accelerator laboratory located in Darmstadt, Germany, say they have created and observed several atoms of element 117, which is temporarily named ununseptium.

Element 117 - so-called because it is an atom with 117 protons in its nucleus - was previously one of the missing items on the periodic table of elements. These super-heavy elements, which include all the elements beyond atomic number 104, are not found naturally on Earth, and thus have to be created synthetically within a laboratory.

Uranium, which has 92 protons, is the heaviest element commonly found in nature, but scientists can artificially create heavier elements by adding protons into an atomic nucleus through nuclear fusion reactions.
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Powertool

Michelangelo's statue of David in danger of collapsing


RT.com
Fri, 02 May 2014 16:20 UTC
Image
© Rico Heil from wikipedia.orgMichelangelo's David (original statue).
Michaelangelo's 'David' statue is in danger of collapsing due to its weak ankles and the structure's great weight, scientists have confirmed following new tests. The famous sculpture of the boy warrior is housed in Florence's Galleria dell'Accademia.

The statue of David, the biblical hero who killed Goliath with just one stone, dates back to the 1500s and is the one of the world's most famous works of art. It has come to represent the Renaissance ideal of the male physique. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni spent three years making it.
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Fireball 5

Bus-size asteroid buzzes Earth, comes closer than the Moon

Tariq Malik
SPACE.com
Sat, 03 May 2014 07:34 UTC
HL129
© NASA/JPL-Caltech This NASA graphic shows the orbit of asteroid 2014 HL129. Discoveryed on April 28, 2014, the asteroid passed close by Earth on May 3, coming within 186,000 miles of the planet.
A small asteroid about the size of a city bus zipped by Earth at a range closer than the moon early Saturday (May 3), but posed no threat to our planet.

The newly discovered asteroid 2014 HL129 came within 186,000 miles (299,338 kilometers) of Earth when it made its closest approach on Saturday morning, which is close enough to pass between the planet and the orbit of the moon. The average distance between the Earth and moon is about 238,855 miles (384,400 km).

You can watch a video animation of asteroid 2014 HL129's orbit around the sun on Space.com. The asteroid is about 25 feet (7.6 meters) wide, according to NASA's Asteroid Watch project based at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. It made its closest approach to Earth at 4:13 a.m. EDT (0813 GMT).

Saturday's close shave by asteroid 2014 HL129 came just days after its discovery on Wednesday, April 28, by astronomers with the Mt. Lemmon Survey team, according to an alert by the Minor Planet Center, an arm of the International Astronomical Union that chronicles asteroid discoveries. The Mt. Lemmon Survey team scans the night sky with a telescope at the Steward Observatory atop Mt. Lemmon in Arizona's Catalina Mountains.

NASA scientists and researchers around the world constantly monitor the sky for potentially dangerous asteroids that could pose a risk of impacting the Earth.
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Binoculars

Asphalt volcano in the Gulf of Mexico

Liz Klimas
The Blaze
Thu, 01 May 2014 00:00 UTC
Scientists searching for what they thought to be a shipwreck found something entirely unexpected in the Gulf of Mexico instead.

"It looked like a shipwreck," Thomas Heathman, a Texas A&M-Galveston marine biology student, told KHOU-TV of the image that was first seen on an acoustic survey. "And then once we get down there, we see this structure that we've never seen before. Never seen anything like it in the northern Gulf of Mexico."

A robotic vehicle tethered to the Okeanos Explorer, a vessel owned by the National and Atmospheric Administration, was on its 12th dive last week as part of the expedition in the Gulf. At a depth of more than 1,900 meters, the robot picked up images of bacterial mats, bamboo corals, shrimp and other sea life.

Approaching the area of the suspected shipwreck though, the researchers saw not a man-made object but a natural phenomenon, according to NOAA's dive report.
Tar_Lily_1
© NOAA video
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Snowflake Cold

Piers Corbyn: The Reality of Long Range Weather and Climate Forecasting - EU2014

Piers Corbyn
Thunderbolts Project
Fri, 02 May 2014 16:00 UTC
piers corbyn
In his talk, Piers Corbyn described the failure of standard meteorology (SM) in outlook, theory, and practice. He included: signals in real meteorology data unexplained by SM; real role of jet stream, stratosphere, electro-jets, magnetosphere, solar wind, solar corona, and the Moon; the total inability of SM to explain: sudden stratospheric warmings and its consequences, tropical storm intensifications, angular momentum concentration in tornadoes; and the need for something else such as electromagnetic plasma explanations; the theoretical basis of non-standard long range weather forecasting on a real planet; a summary on his WeatherAction forecasting skill and examples; and the future of forecasting and meteorology, climate 'science' and science in general.

Piers Corbyn began recording weather and climate patterns at the age of five, constructing his own observation equipment. He obtained a first-class honors degree in physics at Imperial College London. In 1969, he became the first president of the Imperial College Students' Union to be directly elected by the student body. He later studied astrophysics in 1979 at Queen Mary College, London, and then began examining the relationship between Earth's weather and climate and solar activity. Following many years of weather prediction as an occupation, Piers formed WeatherAction in 1995, where he sells web-accessible long-range monthly forecasts for Britain and Ireland, Europe, and the USA plus special forecasts of 'Red Weather periods' and related increases in thunder/tornado and earthquake risk.

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