Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

The powerful Hubble Space Telescope already has a successor

Mark
The Breaking News
Sat, 24 Apr 2010 15:48 UTC
James Webb
© The Breaking News
Washington (DPA). The successor to the Hubble Space Telescope will be the James Webb, but is expected to become operational in 2014. The U.S. space agency NASA promises wonders with this new device.

The infrared telescope mirror will be twice as large as the Hubble and will capture six times more light. James Webb, as well as other telescopes, will be scrutinizing the past and shed light on those dark periods in which there were still no stars or galaxies.

This new telescope costs at least U.S. $ 4,500 million and is named after the former director of NASA's James Webb, who led the organization between 1961 and 1968.

The James Webb will be placed in an orbit more than 1.5 million miles from Earth.

Protection, the size of a tennis court, will capture the sun's rays and infrared radiation from the Earth and Moon, for at least possible that irritate the eyes powerful telescope, so that it can take a look at the beginning the universe, dating back to 200 million years after the Big Bang, Big Bang.
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Info

Pseudo-Scientific Defense of GMO Safety is Smoke and Mirrors

Jeffrey M. Smith
Huffington Post
Wed, 07 Apr 2010 23:25 UTC
Three years after I wrote Genetic Roulette, pro-GM scientists have finally taken me up on my challenge to supply evidence that counters any of the 65 risks highlighted in the book. So, it will be a great pleasure for me to respond to the 65 arguments recently posted on a new attack - Jeffrey website. Their effort offers a priceless opportunity to not only revisit each health risk, but also to show more precisely where and how the biotech industry comes up short in its defense.

In my initial challenge to the GMO industry, I sought rigorous, independent scientific data that would enrich the global discussion and better characterize GMO risks. But the posts written by biotech apologists Bruce Chassy and David Tribe demonstrate without doubt how flimsy and unsupported the industry's claim is that GMOs are safe. Their evidence is neither independent nor rigorous. Instead, Chassy and Tribe merely dust off the same old false assumptions and blatant fabrications that have long been exposed as hollow and even shameless. GMWatch describes it as "disinformation and ad hominem attack dressed up as 'the open-minded search for truth.'"
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Telescope

Hubble Telescope Spies Majestic Space Mountains


SPACE.com
Fri, 23 Apr 2010 21:47 UTC
Image
© NASA/ESA/M. Livio & Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)This turbulent cosmic pinnacle lies within a tempestuous stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, some 7500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina. Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 observed the pillar on 1-2 February 2010.
The prolific Hubble Space Telescope will hit an important milestone this weekend - the 20th anniversary of its launch. Hubble scientists are celebrating the iconic space telescope's milestone with a stunning new photo of pillar-like mountains of dust in a well-known nebula.

The stunning Hubble photo shows just a small part of the Carina Nebula, one of the largest seen star-birth regions in our galaxy. It captures the top of a 3 light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars.

The pillar is also being pushed apart from within, as infant stars buried inside emit jets of gas that can be seen streaming from the towering peaks.

The scene is reminiscent of Hubble's classic "Pillars of Creation" photo from 1995, but is even more striking in appearance. [More Hubble photos.]

The Hubble Space Telescope launched on April 24, 1990, aboard the space shuttle Discovery during the STS-31 mission. Hubble's discoveries and evocative images were revolutionary in a number of areas of astronomical research, ranging from planetary science to cosmology.
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Pharoah

Egypt finds hoard of 2,000-year-old bronze coins


Associated Press
Fri, 23 Apr 2010 12:43 UTC
Image
© Associated Press
Archaeologists unearthed 383 bronze coins dating back to King Ptolemy III who ruled Egypt in the 3rd century B.C. and was an ancestor of the famed Cleopatra, the Egyptian antiquities authority announced Thursday.

The statement said one side of the coins were inscribed with hybrid Greek-Egyptian god Amun-Zeus, while the other side showed an eagle and the words Ptolemy and king in Greek.

Founded by one of Alexander the Great's generals, the Ptolemaic Dynasty ruled Egypt for some 300 years, fusing Greek and ancient Egyptian cultures.

The coins were found north of Qarun lake in Fayoum Oasis 50 miles (80 kilometers) southwest of Cairo.

Other artifacts were unearthed in the area included three necklaces made of ostrich egg shell dated back to the 4th millennium B.C. and a pot of kohl eyeliner from the Ottoman Empire.
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Telescope

Warped stars feed black holes to fatten them up

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Fri, 23 Apr 2010 12:17 UTC
Image
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/ULCAPurveyor of hole food
Why are supermassive black holes so, well, supermassive? It has long been a mystery how enough matter can reach these cosmic gluttons to swell them to such large sizes. Now it seems the answer could be connected to a starry disc at the heart of the Andromeda galaxy. Although they may be hard to see, such discs may be common.

Black holes millions or billions times as massive as the sun reside at the heart of most galaxies, including our own. These black holes have been fattened up by huge amounts of gas. But astronomers don't know how that gas makes it through a final hurdle, migrating the last dozens or hundreds of light years to be eaten.

Philip Hopkins and Eliot Quataert of the University of California, Berkeley, suggest that the formation of a skewed ring of stars facilitates the flow of gas, by sapping its momentum so that it spirals in towards the black hole.
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Info

Dream a Little Dream of Recall

Bruce Bower
ScienceNews
Thu, 22 Apr 2010 10:00 UTC
Nap-time reveries may show that sleeping brain is making memories

People who have nap-time dreams about a task that they've just practiced get a big memory boost on the task upon awakening, Harvard researchers report.

Those who dream about anything else have no such enhanced recall, the team reports in a paper published online April 22 in Current Biology. Neither do those who stay awake, even if they think about the task.

"I was startled by this finding," says study coauthor Robert Stickgold, a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School. "Task-related dreams may get triggered by the sleeping brain's attempt to consolidate challenging new information and to figure out how to use it.
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Saturn

Craters on Titan Offer Glimpse Into Saturn Moon's Past

Anuradha K. Herath
Space.com
Thu, 22 Apr 2010 19:49 UTC
Image
© Unknown
A new study in the journal Icarus provides the latest round-up of the number of impact craters found on Saturn's moon Titan.

Between 2004 and December 2007, Cassini had surveyed 22 percent of Titan's surface. Scientists analyzed images taken by the spacecraft's high-resolution Radar Mapper instrument, and found 49 impact craters.

"Impact craters are created on every planet because of asteroids, comets and other debris that collide with their surfaces," said Charles Wood, senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Az, and lead author of the study. "Analyzing impact craters is a standard technique to tell you the history of the world."
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Info

Phylogeography of Deep European Genetic History

Razib Khan
Discover Blog
Thu, 22 Apr 2010 15:19 UTC
Cromag
© Discover
There's a lot of circumstantial evident that mtDNA haplogroup U5 was brought to Europe by the first anatomically modern populations. Though this haplogroup is extant around frequencies of ~10% in modern European populations, with the highest proportions in northern Fenno-Scandinavia and the east Baltic region, extractions of DNA from hunter-gatherer remains in northern Europe yield very high proportions of this lineage.

This is not totally surprising, in the early aughts Bryan Sykes wrote a book, The Seven Daughters of Eve, and correctly pointed out that the coalescence for the U5 lineages is very deep in Europe, suggesting that it has had a lot of time to diversify. Sykes' main thesis though was that most of the genetic heritage of Europe predates the expansion of Neolithic farmers within the last 10,000 years. The rough implication was that ~80% of the ancestry of modern Europeans could be derived from people who were resident within the modern boundaries of the continent of Europe during the last Ice Age.
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Saturn

VISTA Captures Celestial Cat's Hidden Secrets


European Southern Observatory
Wed, 21 Apr 2010 19:37 UTC
Image
© ESA
The Cat's Paw Nebula, NGC 6334, is a huge stellar nursery, the birthplace of hundreds of massive stars. In a magnificent new ESO image taken with the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, the glowing gas and dust clouds obscuring the view are penetrated by infrared light and some of the Cat's hidden young stars are revealed.

Towards the heart of the Milky Way, 5500 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Scorpius (the Scorpion), the Cat's Paw Nebula stretches across 50 light-years. In visible light, gas and dust are illuminated by hot young stars, creating strange reddish shapes that give the object its nickname. A recent image by ESO's Wide Field Imager (WFI) at the La Silla Observatory (eso1003) captured this visible light view in great detail. NGC 6334 is one of the most active nurseries of massive stars in our galaxy.
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Light Sabers

Caltech Researchers Create "Sound Bullets"

Kathy Svitil
California Institute of Technology
Wed, 21 Apr 2010 19:28 UTC
Highly focused acoustic pulses could produce superior acoustic images, be used as sonic scalpels, and probe for damage in bridges, boat hulls, and other opaque materials.

Taking inspiration from a popular executive toy ("Newton's cradle"), researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have built a device - called a nonlinear acoustic lens - that produces highly focused, high-amplitude acoustic signals dubbed "sound bullets."

The acoustic lens and its sound bullets (which can exist in fluids - like air and water - as well as in solids) have "the potential to revolutionize applications from medical imaging and therapy to the nondestructive evaluation of materials and engineering systems," says Chiara Daraio, assistant professor of aeronautics and applied physics at Caltech and corresponding author of a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) describing the development.
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