Science & TechnologyS


Camera

The Science Of Memory: An Infinite Loop in the Brain


Spiegel International
Sun, 23 Nov 2008 19:25 UTC
Wouldn't it be great to be able to remember everything? To see all our most important moments, all the priceless encounters, adventures and triumphs? What if memory never faded, but instead could be retrieved at any time, as reliably as films in a video store?

"No one can imagine what it's really like," says Jill Price, 42, "not even the scientists who are studying me."

The Californian, who has an almost perfect memory, is trying to describe how it feels. She starts with a small demonstration of her ability. "When were you born?" she asks.

She hears the date and says: "Oh, that was a Wednesday. There was a cold snap in Los Angeles two days later, and my mother and I made soup."
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Telescope

Planet imaged closer to star than ever before?

Maggie McKee
New Scientist
Sun, 23 Nov 2008 04:05 UTC
A planet may have been imaged closer to its star than any photographed previously, astronomers say. The candidate planet, which might still turn out to be a foreground or background object, appears to lie at about the orbital distance of Saturn around the well-studied star Beta Pictoris.

Astronomers have long suspected that the young, 12-million-year-old star hosts a massive planet, since it is surrounded by a dusty disc of debris thought to be created by the collision of rocky bodies and infalling comets.
star Beta Pictoris
© ESO/A-M Lagrange et al.The light from the star Beta Pictoris (which has been blocked out in this near-infrared image) is 1000 times brighter than the bluish-white dot left of centre, which may be a planet. The possible planet is thought to be less than 12 million years old, and still retains the heat of its birth, boasting a temperature of around 1200° Celsius.

Evidence for such a planet grew stronger in 2006, when astronomers reported finding what appeared to be a second, smaller dusty disc around the star that was tilted slightly with respect to the main disc. It may have formed after a planet between 1 and 20 times the mass of Jupiter was thrown out of the main disc by gravitational interactions with other bodies there.
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Telescope

Remains of devoured planet discovered


New Scientist
Sun, 23 Nov 2008 03:54 UTC
A dust cloud around a dead star may be all that's left of a planet that was eaten like a peach.

Observations of the cloud around the white dwarf G29-38 by a team led by William Reach of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena suggest it is most likely to be the shredded core of a gas-giant planet like Jupiter (The Astrophysical Journal, in press).
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Magnify

Buried Glaciers Found on Mars

Andrea Thompson
Space.com
Thu, 20 Nov 2008 01:05 UTC
Mars has vast glaciers hidden under aprons of rocky debris near mid-latitude mountains, a new study confirms, pointing to a new and large potential reservoir of life-supporting water on the planet.

These mounds of ice exist at much lower latitudes than any ice previously found on the red planet.

"Altogether, these glaciers almost certainly represent the largest reservoir of water ice on Mars that's not in the polar caps," said John Holt of the University of Texas at Austin and the main author of the study. "Just one of the features we examined is three times larger than the city of Los Angeles and up to one-half-mile thick, and there are many more."
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Bulb

Colossus of Rhodes to be rebuilt as giant light sculpture

Helena Smith
Guardian
Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:40 UTC
The Colossus of Rhodes
© Bridgeman Art LibraryDetails from The Colossus of Rhodes, an 18th century engrvaing by George Balthasar Probst, from the Stapleton Collection
It may not straddle the port as its predecessor once did, but in terms of sheer luminosity and eye-catching height the new Colossus of Rhodes will not disappoint. Nor will it fall short of the symbolism that once imbued the ancient monument.

Twenty-three centuries after craftsmen carved the legendary statue that has inspired legions of painters, poets, playwrights and politicians, a new world wonder, built in the spirit of the original Colossus, is about to be born on the Aegean island.

After decades of dashed hopes, the people of Rhodes will fulfil a long-held dream to revive one of the world's seven ancient wonders - thanks to the promise of international funding and the East German artist Gert Hof.
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X

Scientists self-censor after political attack

Ashley Yeager
Nature News
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:44 UTC
Scientists
© GettyScientists may censor themselves if their work proves politically controversial.
Researchers avoid contentious language and issues in grants and papers.

Scientists whose work came under scrutiny during a political debate about work funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, censored their own later work, a new study has found. [1]

In July 2003, former congressman Patrick Toomey (Republican, Pennsylvania) argued that NIH grants funding studies on certain types of sexual behaviour were less worthy of taxpayer dollars than those on devastating diseases. He proposed an amendment to the 2004 NIH appropriations bill to revoke funding for five grants - four of which examined sexual behaviour.

Comment: Those ultra-right Christians infiltrated all spectrums of life in America: politics, the media, education and now obviously, science. Which other group will consider words such as 'bisexual', 'lesbian' and 'sexual intercourse' as "red flag language" in scientific research papers, and criticise research on teenage sexual abstinence?

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Telescope

Galactic recluse has friends after all

Maggie McKee
New Scientist
Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:41 UTC
An apparently isolated galaxy whose frenetic rate of star birth had puzzled astronomers actually lies 1.5 times as far away as previously thought, a new study reveals. The new distance measurement suggests the galaxy may be falling into a crowd of about 10 other galaxies, whose gravitational tugs could explain its stellar baby boom.
galaxy NGC 1569
© NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage/STScI/AURA/A AloisiThe core of the dwarf galaxy NGC 1569 glitters with stars.

Ground-based telescopes had previously gauged the distance to the dwarf galaxy, called NGC 1569, to be about 7 million light years from Earth. At that distance, the galaxy appeared to lie in a region of space devoid of other galaxies.

Most such galactic loners tend to evolve slowly, eking out stars at a relatively modest rate because they lack neighbours whose gravitational tugs can trigger the galaxies' own gas clouds to collapse into stars.
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Chalkboard

Mysterious Source Of High-Energy Cosmic Radiation Discovered: Nearby Exotic Object?


ScienceDaily
Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:38 UTC
Scientists announced Wednesday the discovery of a previously unidentified nearby source of high-energy cosmic rays. The finding was made with a NASA-funded balloon-borne instrument high over Antarctica.

Stratospheric balloon
© Louisiana State UniversityStratospheric balloon launched on 12/19/2005 from Williams Field, McMurdo Station, Antarctica for ATIC (Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter).

Researchers from the Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter (ATIC) collaboration, led by scientists at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, published the results in the Nov. 20 issue of the journal Nature. The new results show an unexpected surplus of cosmic ray electrons at very high energy -- 300-800 billion electron volts -- that must come from a previously unidentified source or from the annihilation of very exotic theoretical particles used to explain dark matter.
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Meteor

Canada: Northern Alberta meteor crater identified

Alexandra Pope
Whitecourt Star
Wed, 05 Nov 2008 04:30 UTC
Image
© Alexandra PopeChris Herd, a professor in the University of Alberta's department of earth and atmospheric sciences, photographs a crowd of local officials gathered in the basin of a 1,000-year-old meteorite crater located on Whitecourt's east mountain.
What local hunters in Whitecourt thought for years was a sinkhole is actually the crater left behind by a meteor that fell to earth 1,000 years ago and is now attracting international attention from researchers.

George VanderBurg, MLA for Whitecourt-Ste. Anne, said he was very surprised to learn about the crater. He recalled going hunting with his father and using the site as a meeting point. Deer could often be found drinking rainwater that collected in the bottom of the crater, he said.

"All of us that have grown up here have known about it, but we didn't know it was the big scientific thing that it is," he said.
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Einstein

e=mc2: 103 years later, Einstein's proven right


Agence France-Presse
Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:33 UTC
Paris - It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.
giant sculpture featuring Albert Einstein's formula
© AFP/File/John MacdougallPeople walk past a giant sculpture featuring Albert Einstein's formula "E=mc2" in front of Berlin's Altes Museum in 2006. It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.

A brainpower consortium led by Laurent Lellouch of France's Centre for Theoretical Physics, using some of the world's mightiest supercomputers, have set down the calculations for estimating the mass of protons and neutrons, the particles at the nucleus of atoms.

According to the conventional model of particle physics, protons and neutrons comprise smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are bound by gluons.
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