Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Mysterious New Object Discovered in Space

Charles Q. Choi
Space.com
Mon, 19 Apr 2010 09:17 UTC
Micro-Quasar
© Jodrell Bank ObservatoryThis image taken by radio astronomers at the Jodrell Bank Observatory shows the location of a weird object, called a micro-quasar, in the galaxy Messier 82.
A strange and mysterious new object in space may the brightest and long-lasting "micro-quasar" seen thus far, a miniature version of the brightest objects in the universe.

The object suddenly began pumping out radio waves last year in the relatively nearby galaxy M82, some 10 million light-years away. Its discovery was announced Tuesday.

"The new object, which appeared in May 2009, has left us scratching our heads - we've never seen anything quite like this before," said researcher Tom Muxlow, a radio astronomer at the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory in England.
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Meteor

Obama WISE-ing up, reflects NASA attention towards asteroids


Associated Press
Sat, 17 Apr 2010 11:45 UTC
Image
Cape Canaveral, Florida - Landing a man on the moon was a towering achievement. Now the president has given NASA an even harder job, one with a certain Hollywood quality: sending astronauts to an asteroid, a giant speeding rock, just 15 years from now.

Space experts say such a voyage could take several months longer than a journey to the moon and entail far greater dangers.

"It is really the hardest thing we can do," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said.

Going to an asteroid could provide vital training for an eventual mission to Mars. It might help unlock the secrets of how our solar system formed. And it could give mankind the know-how to do something that has been accomplished only in the movies by a few square-jawed, squinty-eyed heroes: saving the Earth from a collision with a killer asteroid.

"You could be saving humankind. That's worthy, isn't it?" said Bill Nye, TV's Science Guy and vice president of the Planetary Society.

President Barack Obama outlined NASA's new path during a visit to the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday.

"By 2025, we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first-ever crewed missions beyond the moon into deep space," he said. "We'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history."
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Info

Real source of CO2 increase: Erupting volcanic vent field discovered in Caribbean Sea

Raphael G. Satter
San Francisco Chronicle
Sun, 18 Apr 2010 04:00 UTC
Volcanic vent
© Associated PressThe volcanic vent more than 3 miles beneath the surface of the Caribbean is the deepest ever discovered, according to a British scientific expedition.
Scientists using a remote-controlled submarine have discovered the deepest known volcanic vent and say the superheated waters inside could contain undiscovered marine species and perhaps even clues to the origin of life on earth.

Experts aboard the RRS James Cook said they found the underwater volcanic vent more than 3 miles beneath the surface of the Caribbean Sea in an area known as the Cayman Trough, a deep-sea canyon that served as the setting for James Cameron's underwater thriller The Abyss.

Geologist Bramley Murton, the submersible's pilot, said exploring the area was "like wandering across the surface of another world," complete with spires of multicolored mineral deposits and thick collections of fluorescent blue microorganisms thriving in the slightly cooler waters around the chimneys.

The scenes "were like nothing I had ever seen before," Murton said.
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Info

'Ocean Census' Scientists Taken Aback by Diversity

Frank Pope
Times Online
Sun, 18 Apr 2010 20:00 UTC
Protozoa
© TimesOnlineRadiolaria. Light micrograph of an assortment of radiolaria, a type of marine protozoa
Oceanographers hoping to create a comprehensive census of marine life are deciding that their task is far bigger than imagined.

During some 300 voyages scientists of the 10-year Census of Marine Life have been sampling plankton, microbes and sediment-dwellers, but the rate at which they made new discoveries - including a bacterial community the size of Greece on the seabed near Chile - is forcing them to reappraise their estimates of how much they know.

"There are many more species than we thought there were," Dr Ann Bucklin, head of the University of Connecticut Marine Sciences Department, who headed up the team investigating zooplankton, told The Times. "It turns out the ocean food web is much more complex than we thought it was, in terms of the number of different species."

The team used DNA-sampling techniques to catalogue the life they found, but other techniques have not changed much since the first oceanographic expedition, conducted by HMS Challenger in 1872. Huge nets were dragged through the deep sea between one and five kilometres beneath the surface. Some samples were kept for taxonomic study, while others were probed for their DNA. Now, as then, new species and genera were found with every trawl.
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Rocket

Rare Shuttle Re-Entry


Space Weather
Sun, 18 Apr 2010 18:41 UTC
Image
© NASA
On Monday morning, April 19th, space shuttle Discovery will make a rare "descending node" overflight of the continental United States en route to landing in Florida. Many towns and cities in the country's heartland are near the ground track.

Landing is scheduled for 8:48 am EDT, and it takes the shuttle about 35 minutes to traverse the path shown above. Observers in the northwestern USA will see the shuttle shortly after 5 am PDT blazing like a meteoritic fireball through the dawn sky. As Discovery makes its way east, it will enter daylight and fade into the bright blue background. If you can't see the shuttle, however, you might be able to hear it. The shuttle produces a sonic double-boom that reaches the ground about a minute and a half after passing overhead.
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Info

42,000-year-old baby mammoth on display in Chicago

Caryn Rousseau
Associated Press
Sun, 18 Apr 2010 18:20 UTC
Baby Mammoth
© M. Spencer Green/Associated PressLyuba, the most complete woolly mammoth specimen, is part of an exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago.
About 42,000 years after scientists say she fell into mud near a river and suffocated, an intact baby woolly mammoth from the Ice Age is on display for the first time in the U.S. at the Field Museum.

Scientists say the mammoth calf named Lyuba is the best preserved and most complete mammoth specimen known.

She was found in 2007 by a reindeer herder in northern Siberia's remote Yamal-Nenets autonomous region and named for his wife.

"Her preservation, her really lifelike qualities allow you to form a better impression of what the past was really like," said Dan Fisher, a University of Michigan paleontologist and the museum's exhibit curator. "It becomes more immediate. It's real."

In the exhibit, visitors can see the folds and creases in Lyuba's (pronounced lee-OO-bah) skin, the bottom of her foot and small patches of hair on her ear and leg. At 45 inches long, Lyuba weighs about 92 pounds and if fully grown could have measured 8 feet tall at her shoulder and weighed between three and four tons, Fisher said.
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Sherlock

Row of Ancient Stones Found in Dartmoor "Are Older than Stonehenge"


The Daily Mail
Sun, 18 Apr 2010 00:22 UTC
Image
© Press AssociationMysterious: A row of ancient stones which mirror the path of the sun like Stonehenge have been discovered in Dartmoor and may 1,000 years older than the famous site.
A row of ancient stones that mirrors the path of the sun like Stonehenge but is up to 1,000 years older has been unearthed on Dartmoor.

The discovery of the megaliths has thrilled archaeologists and once again raised debate about the purpose of Stonehenge, which is 120 miles away on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire.

The nine stones at Cut Hill, one of the highest points on Dartmoor in Devon, have been carbon-dated to around 3,500BC.

It means they pre-date Stonehenge, which was not begun before 3,000BC.

Both monuments appear to be clearly aligned to mark the rising of the midsummer sun and the setting of the midwinter sun, suggesting they had religious or astronomical associations.

Archaeologists are debating whether the find adds credence to the theory that Stonehenge was linked to prehistoric death rituals or whether it was seen by ancient Britons as a centre of healing.
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Blackbox

Empathetic mirror neurons found in humans at last

Helen Thomson
New Scientist
Sat, 17 Apr 2010 20:57 UTC
Image
© Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/GettyEliciting a reaction
Brain cells that may underlie our ability to empathise with others have been detected directly in people for the first time.

Monkey brains have been shown to contain so-called "mirror" neurons, which fire both when the animal performs an action and when it observes others performing that action. Until now, the only evidence that our brains contain similar neurons has been indirect, derived from functional MRI scans.

Now Roy Mukamel at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues have observed mirror neurons directly in humans. They used electrodes to record brain activity in the medial frontal and temporal cortices of 21 people awaiting surgery to treat epilepsy, while they made - or observed others making - grasping actions and facial expressions.

The majority of these neurons responded only to the observation or execution of an action, but 8 per cent of the cells responded to both (Current Biology, DOI: link). These areas of the brain are involved in planning and controlling actions, abstract thinking and memory.
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Telescope

When black holes go rogue, they kill galaxies

Stephen Battersby
New Scientist
Sat, 17 Apr 2010 20:54 UTC
Image
© NASA/CXC/CfA/D.Evans et al.; Optical/UV: NASA/STScI; Radio: NSF/VLA/CfA/D.Evans et al., STFC/JBO/MERLINA powerful jet from a supermassive black hole is blasting a nearby galaxy in the system known as 3C321
Massive black holes may be kicking the life out of galaxies by ripping out their vital gaseous essence, leaving reddened galactic victims scattered throughout the universe. While the case is not yet closed, new research shows that these black holes have at least the means to commit the violent crime.

It was already known that "supermassive" black holes at the centre of most galaxies sometimes emit vast amounts of radiation. But nobody had a good idea how common such violence is. A snapshot of the universe doesn't give enough information to judge this because the activity of the black holes is thought to be intermittent, depending on how much nearby matter they have to feed on.

Now a team of astronomers have compiled a chronicle of activity going back deep into cosmic history, using the orbiting Chandra telescope to spot X-rays emitted by the black holes together with images from Hubble to look at their host galaxies. Previous surveys with less sensitive instruments were unable to spot the distant faint sources picked up by Chandra and Hubble. The team now have a set of galaxies reaching 13 billion light years.
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Question

What the heck is a WePad?

Juergen Baetz
The Christian Science Monitor
Fri, 16 Apr 2010 00:00 UTC
WePad
© NEWSCOMThe CEO of 'Neofonie Technologieentwicklung und Informationsmanagement GmbH', Helmut Hoffer von Ankershoffen, presents the company's new tablet pc WePad in Berlin, Germany on April 12, 2010.
The German maker of a new tablet PC is setting out to rival Apple's iPad with the promise of even more technology such as a bigger screen, a webcam and USB ports.

It is not, however, an "iPad killer" as it has been dubbed by some blogs but an alternative to its bigger rival, Neofonie GmbH's founder and managing director Helmut Hoffer von Ankershoffen told reporters on Monday in Berlin.

Ankershoffen stressed the system's openness: Two USB ports allow users to connect all kinds of devices with the WePad, from external keyboards to data sticks.

People who want to put music on their WePad do not have to have any particular software, Ankershoffen said - a blow at Apple's devices that require particular Apple software like iTunes.

The WePad's basic version, which comes with Wi-Fi and 16-gigabyte storage, is set to cost €449 ($600), the larger 32-gigabyte version with a fast 3G modem is €569.

Ankershoffen claimed that given its technological superiority and greater openness, "that's a bargain compared with the iPad."
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