Where Does All This Dust Come From?

ScienceDaily (Oct. 29, 2009) — Where does it come from? Scientists in Arizona are reporting a surprising answer to that question, which has puzzled and perplexed generations of men and women confronted with layers of dust on furniture and floors. Most of indoor dust comes from outdoors.

In the study, David Layton and Paloma Beamer point out that household dust consists of a potpourri that includes dead skin shed by people, fibers from carpets and upholstered furniture, and tracked-in soil and airborne particles blown in from outdoors. It can include lead, arsenic and other potentially harmful substances that migrate indoors from outside air and soil. That can be a special concern for children, who consume those substances by putting dust-contaminated toys and other objects into their mouths.

The scientists describe development and use on homes in the Midwest of a computer model that can track distribution of contaminated soil and airborne particulates into residences from outdoors. They found that over 60 percent of house dust originates outdoors. They estimated that nearly 60 percent of the arsenic in floor dust could come from arsenic in the surrounding air, with the remainder derived from tracked-in soil. The researchers point out the model could be used to evaluate methods for reducing contaminants in dust and associated human exposures.

Whole story here

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Why 'Sleeping on It' Helps

We're often told, "You should sleep on it" before you make an important decision. Why is that? How does "sleeping on it" help your decision-making process?
Conventional wisdom suggests that by "sleeping on it," we clear our minds and relieve ourselves of the immediacy (and accompanying stress) of making a decision. Sleep also helps organize our memories, process the information of the day, and solve problems. Such wisdom also suggests that conscious deliberation helps decision making in
general. But new research (Dijksterhuis et al., 2009) suggests something else might also be at work - our unconscious.

Previous research suggests that sometimes the more consciously we think about a decision, the worse the decision made. Sometimes what's needed is a period of unconscious thought - equivalent to "sleeping on it" according to the researchers - in order to make better decisions.

Here's how they study this phenomenon:
"[... In a] typical experiment demonstrating this effect, participants choose between a few objects (e.g., apartments), each described by multiple aspects. The objects differ in desirability, and after reading the descriptions, participants are asked to make their choice following an additional period of conscious thought or unconscious thought. In the original experiments, unconscious thinkers made better decisions than conscious thinkers when the decisions were complex."

The researchers suggest that unconscious thought, contrary to the way many of us think about it, is an active, goal-directed thought process. The primary difference is that in unconscious thought, the usual biases that are a part of our conscious thinking are absent. In unconscious thought, we weigh the importance of the components that make up our decision more equally, leaving our preconceptions at the door of consciousness.


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Mega-star explosion most distant object ever seen

PARIS (AFP) – It took 13 billion years to reach Earth, but astronomers have seen the light of an exploding mega-star that is the most distant object ever detected, two studies published Thursday reported.

The stunning gamma-ray burst (GRB) was observed by two teams of researchers in April, and opens a window onto a poorly known period when the Universe was in its infancy.

GRBs are the most violent explosions known to exist, and can be 10 million times more luminous than the brightest of galaxies.
They accompany the catastrophic death of a massive star, and are probably triggered by the collapse of the star's centre into a black hole.

Dubbed GRB 090423, the new discovery was first spotted by the NASA satellite Swift.
Astronomers alerted to the find trained several of Earth's largest telescopes skyward just in time to see the gamma-ray burst's fading afterglow.

The discovery is especially exciting for scientists because the explosion occurred during the so-called "cosmic dark ages", which started a mere 400,000 years after the Big Bang set the Universe in motion some 13.7 billion years ago.

During this period, free electrons and protons combined to form neutral atoms with the same number of positive and negative charges, resulting in an opaque -- or "dark" -- universe.
Not until 800 to 900 million years after the Big Bang were atoms and molecules "re-ionised", or electrically charged, resulting in the relatively transluscent inter-galactic medium we see today.


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Curry spice 'kills cancer cells'

An extract found in the bright yellow curry spice turmeric can kill off cancer cells, scientists have shown.

The chemical - curcumin - has long been thought to have healing powers and is already being tested as a treatment for arthritis and even dementia.

Now tests by a team at the Cork Cancer Research Centre show it can destroy gullet cancer cells in the lab.

Cancer experts said the findings in the British Journal of Cancer could help doctors find new treatments.

Dr Sharon McKenna and her team found that curcumin started to kill cancer cells within 24 hours.

'Natural' remedy

The cells also began to digest themselves, after the curcumin triggered lethal cell death signals.

Dr McKenna said: "Scientists have known for a long time that natural compounds have the potential to treat faulty cells that have become cancerous and we suspected that curcumin might have therapeutic value."

Dr Lesley Walker, director of cancer information at Cancer Research UK, said: "This is interesting research which opens up the possibility that natural chemicals found in turmeric could be developed into new treatments for oesophageal cancer.

"Rates of oesophageal cancer have gone up by more than a half since the 70s and this is thought to be linked to rising rates of obesity, alcohol intake and reflux disease so finding ways to prevent this disease is important too."

Each year around 7,800 people are diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in the UK. It is the sixth most common cause of cancer death and accounts for around five percent of all UK cancer deaths

Source http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8328377.stm

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An Ancient Greek Computer?

In 1901 divers working off the isle of Antikythera found the remains of a clocklike mechanism 2,000 years old. The mechanism now appears to have been a device for calculating the motions of stars and planets by Derek J. de Solla Price.

Among the treasures of the Greek National Archaeological Museum in Athens are the remains of the most complex scientific object that has been preserved from antiquity. Corroded and crumbling from 2,000 years under the sea, its dials, gear wheels and inscribed plates present the historian with a tantalizing problem. Because of them we may have to revise many of our estimates of Greek science. By studying them we may find vital clues to the true origins of that high scientific technology which hitherto has seemed peculiar to our modern civilization, setting it apart from all cultures of the past.

 From the evidence of the fragments one can get a good idea of the appearance of the original object. Consisting of a box with dials on the outside and a very complex assembly of gear wheels mounted within, it must have resembled a well- made 18ih-century clock. Doors hinged to the box served to protect the dials, and on all available surfaces of box, doors and dials there were long Greek inscriptions describing the operation and construction of the instrument. At least 20 gear wheels of the mechanism have been preserved, including a very sophisticated assembly of gears that were mounted eccentrically on a turntable and probably functioned as a sort of epicyclic or differential, gear-system.





More : here

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Researchers create portable black hole

Physicists have created a black hole for light that can fit in your coat pocket. Their device, which measures just 22 centimetres across, can suck up microwave light and convert it into heat.

The hole is the latest clever device to use 'metamaterials', specially engineered materials that can bend light in unusual ways. Previously, scientists have used such metamaterials to build 'invisibility carpets' and super-clear lenses. This latest black hole was made by Qiang Chen and Tie Jun Cui of Southeast University in Nanjing, China, and is described in a paper on the preprint server ArXiv1.

Black holes are normally too massive to be carried around. The black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, for example, has a mass around 3.6 million times that of the Sun and warps the very space around it. Light that travels too close to it can become trapped forever.

The new meta-black hole also bends light, but in a very different way. Rather than relying on gravity, the black hole uses a series of metallic 'resonators' arranged in 60 concentric circles. The resonators affect the electric and magnetic fields of a passing light wave, causing it to bend towards the centre of the hole. It spirals closer and closer to the black hole's 'core' until it reaches the 20 innermost layers. Those layers are made of another set of resonators that convert light into heat. The result: what goes in cannot come out. "The light into the core is totally absorbed," Cui says.

"I am very impressed," says John Pendry, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London. Pendry says that the black hole is yet the latest example of the many strange devices that can be built with metamaterials. But, he adds, it is not a perfect black-hole analogy. The enormous gravity of real black holes causes them to emit an eerie quantum glow, known as Hawking radiation. "The optical device reported in this paper has no internal source of energy and therefore cannot emit Hawking radiation," Pendry says.

Nevertheless, Cui says that the hole could prove useful. By the end of the year his team hopes to have a version of the device that will suck up light of optical frequencies. If it works, it could be used in applications such as solar cells.


Source <http://www.nature.com>

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Alien Visitation

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3


Part 4

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New robotic hand 'can feel'

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'Magnetic' stem cells for hearts

Heart attacks and other vascular injuries could eventually be treated using regular injections of magnetised stem cells, experts say.

In animal trials, the cutting-edge treatment delivered the healing cells to the precise site of damage where their help was needed.

Although human tests are needed, a similar magnetic approach has been used to guide cancer therapies.

The expert US journal Cardiovascular Interventions reports the findings.

Targeted treatment

The idea behind the targeted therapy is to get as many of the reparative stem cells as possible to the area of damage.

To achieve this the UK scientists coated the stem cells with minute magnetic particles.

When these stem cells were injected into the blood stream it was then possible to control their movement using a magnet.

In trials, the magnetic targeting led to a five-fold increase in cell localisation at a site of vascular injury in rats.

“ We await further research to find out if, as well as increasing the chances of these cells getting to where they are needed, this strategy can actually speed up the repair process ”
The British Heart Foundation's Professor Peter Weissberg

These same magnetic nanoparticles are already approved in the US where they are routinely used as an agent to make MRI scans clearer to read.

Senior author of the study Dr Mark Lythgoe, of University College London, said this meant human trials could begin within the next few years.

Whole story here

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'Magnetic electricity' discovered

Researchers have discovered a magnetic equivalent to electricity: single magnetic charges that can behave and interact like electrical ones.

The work is the first to make use of the magnetic monopoles that exist in special crystals known as spin ice.

Writing in Nature journal, a team showed that monopoles gather to form a "magnetic current" like electricity.

The phenomenon, dubbed "magnetricity", could be used in magnetic storage or in computing.

Magnetic monopoles were first predicted to exist over a century ago, as a perfect analogue to electric charges.

Although there are protons and electrons with net positive and negative electric charges, there were no particles in existence which carry magnetic charges. Rather, every magnet has a "north" and "south" pole.

.

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32 New Exoplanets Found

Today, at an international ESO/CAUP exoplanet conference in Porto, the team who built the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, better known as HARPS, the spectrograph for ESO's 3.6-metre telescope, reports on the incredible discovery of some 32 new exoplanets, cementing HARPS's position as the world’s foremost exoplanet hunter. This result also increases the number of known low-mass planets by an impressive 30%. Over the past five years HARPS has spotted more than 75 of the roughly 400 or so exoplanets now known.

"HARPS is a unique, extremely high precision instrument that is ideal for discovering alien worlds," says Stéphane Udry, who made the announcement. “We have now completed our initial five-year programme, which has succeeded well beyond our expectations.”

The latest batch of exoplanets announced today comprises no less than 32 new discoveries. Including these new results, data from HARPS have led to the discovery of more than 75 exoplanets in 30 different planetary systems. In particular, thanks to its amazing precision, the search for small planets, those with a mass of a few times that of the Earth — known as super-Earths and Neptune-like planets — has been given a dramatic boost. HARPS has facilitated the discovery of 24 of the 28 planets known with masses below 20 Earth masses. As with the previously detected super-Earths, most of the new low-mass candidates reside in multi-planet systems, with up to five planets per system.

Whole story here

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The sound of Earth from space

Compare it with Jupiter

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ASIMOs new artificial intelligence. (ASIMO is learning!)

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Will Wright: Toys that make worlds

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Comfort Food: Chocolate, Water Reduce Pain Response To Heat

People often eat food to feel better, but researchers have found that eating chocolate or drinking water can blunt pain, reducing a rat's response to a hot stimulus. This natural form of pain relief may help animals in the wild avoid distraction while eating scarce food, but in modern humans with readily available food, the effect may contribute to overeating and obesity.

The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience by authors Peggy Mason, PhD, professor of neurobiology, and Hayley Foo, PhD, research associate professor of neurobiology at the University of Chicago, is the first to demonstrate that this powerful painkilling effect occurs while the animals are ingesting food or liquid even in the absence of appetite.

"It's a strong, strong effect, but it's not about hunger or appetite," Mason said. "If you have all this food in front of you that's easily available to reach out and get, you're not going to stop eating, for basically almost any reason."

Whole story here

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Glimpses of Solar System's edge

The first results from Nasa's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (Ibex) spacecraft have shown unexpected features at our Solar System's edge.

Ibex was launched nearly one year ago to map the heliosphere, the region of space defined by the extent of our Sun's solar wind.

Ibex's first glimpses show that the heliosphere is not shaped as many astronomers have believed.

A series of papers in the journal Science outlines the results.

Our Solar System is whipping around the centre of the galaxy. Just like a hand held out of a moving car, the Solar System feels a "wind" of particles from the region between our star and its nearest neighbours.

At the same time, the solar wind - a constant stream of fast-moving particles in all directions - blows outwards from the Sun.

The boundary at which the incoming and outgoing particles are at equivalent pressures, known as the heliopause, defines the heliosphere - the "bubble" in space generated by our own Sun's exhalations.

Whole story here

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Interesting Real Facts (Strange but True)

1

Look at your zipper. See the initials YKK? It stands for Yoshida Kogyo Kabushibibaisha, the world's largest zipper manufacturer.

2

40 percent of McDonald's profits come from the sales of Happy Meals.

3

315 entries in Webster's 1996 Dictionary were misspelled.

4

On the average, 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily.

5

Chocolate kills dogs! True, chocolate affects a dog's heart and nervous system. A few ounces is enough to kill a small sized dog.

6

Ketchup was sold in the 1830's as a medicine.

7

Leonardo da Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other at the same time.

8

Because metal was scarce, the Oscars given out during World War II were made of wood.

9

There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos.

10

Leonardo da Vinci invented scissors. Also, it took him 10 years to paint Mona Lisa's lips.

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Thousands See UFO Live On British TV

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Dancing black hole twins spotted

Researchers have seen the best evidence yet for a pair of black holes orbiting each other within the same galaxy.

While such "binary systems" have been postulated before, none has ever been conclusively shown to exist.

The new black hole pair is dancing significantly closer than the prior best binary system candidate.

The work, published in the journal Nature, is in line with the theory of the growth of galaxies, each with a black hole at their centre.

The theory has it that as galaxies near one another, their central black holes should orbit each other until merging together.

But evidence for black holes nearing and orbiting has so far been scant.

Dancing cheek-to-cheek

As matter falls into black holes, it emits light of a characteristic colour that in turn gives information about the direction in which the black hole is moving.

In a binary system, two beams should be emitted, each a slightly different colour.


Whole story here

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Galaxy's 'cannibalism' revealed

The vast Andromeda galaxy appears to have expanded by digesting stars from other galaxies, research has shown.

When an international team of scientists mapped Andromeda, they discovered stars that they said were "remnants of dwarf galaxies".

The astronomers report their findings in the journal Nature.

This consumption of stars has been suggested previously, but the team's ultra-deep survey has provided detailed images to show that it took place.

This shows the "hierarchical model" of galaxy formation in action.

The model predicts that large galaxies should be surrounded by relics of smaller galaxies they have consumed.


Whole story here

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New flying reptile fossils found

Researchers in China and the UK say they have discovered the fossils of a new type of flying reptile that lived more than 160 million years ago.

The find is named Darwinopterus, after famous naturalist Charles Darwin.
Experts say it provides the first clear evidence of a controversial type of evolution called modular evolution.
The 20 new fossils found in north-east China show similarities to both primitive and more advanced pterosaurs, or flying reptiles.
The research is published in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Missing link
Pterosaurs, sometimes called pterodactyls, were flying reptiles that flourished between 65 and 220 million years ago.

Until now, scientists had known about two distinct groups of these creatures - primitive, long-tailed pterosaurs and more advanced short-tailed ones, separated by a huge gap in the fossil record.
But the discovery of more than 20 new fossil skeletons in north-east China could be the missing link in this evolutionary chain.

Darwinopterus is a hawk-like reptile with a head and neck just like advanced pterosaurs - but the rest of the skeleton is similar to more primitive forms.
Researchers say that this could be evidence of what they call modular evolution - where natural selection forces a whole series of traits to change rapidly rather than just one.
With its long jaws and rows of sharp-pointed teeth, these creatures were very well suited to catching and killing other flying species.
The fossils were found in rocks that are 160 million years old, making them 10 million years older than the first bird, Archaeopteryx.

Source: here 

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Robot and AI developments continue

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Juggling Boosts Brain Connections

Researchers the UK found that learning to juggle boosts brain connections by making structural changes in the white matter of the brain. They hope the study will help develop new treatments for diseases such as multiple sclerosis where central nervous system pathways have become degraded.

The study was led by Dr Heidi Johansen-Berg, a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow at the University of Oxford and was published online ahead of print on 11 October in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Johansen-Berg told the media that:

"We tend to think of the brain as being static, or even beginning to degenerate, once we reach adulthood."

"In fact we find the structure of the brain is ripe for change. We've shown that it is possible for the brain to condition its own wiring system to operate more efficiently," she added.

Our brains' white matter contains bundles of long fibres that carry electrical impulses from nerve cell to nerve cell. It is a massive and dense network of lines and junctions. In contrast our brains' grey matter comprises mostly nerve cell bodies and busies itself with processing and computation.

Full story: here

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Robots with a mind of their own

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Jaw bone created from stem cells

Scientists have created part of the jaw joint in the lab using human adult stem cells.

They say it is the first time a complex, anatomically-sized bone has been accurately created in this way.

It is hoped the technique could be used not only to treat disorders of the specific joint, but more widely to correct problems with other bones too.

The Columbia University study appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The bone which has been created in the lab is known as the temporomandibular joint (TMJ)

Whole story here

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Sugar-coating nanoparticles to tempt cancer cells

An iron-centered nanoparticle (left) has a coating of the sugar dextran, whose tendrils prevent groups of the particles from clumping. When tumor cells ingest them (right), the particles still congregate closely enough to share heat, killing the cells. White arrow indicates a red blood cell (Image: NIST)

Article Summary
Researchers believe nanoparticles hold the promise of battling cancer without the damaging side effects of chemotherapy or radiation treatment. They have discovered that coating minuscule balls of iron oxide with sugar molecules not only makes them particularly attractive to resource-hungry cancer cells, it also makes them more effective by allowing them to get close to each other, but not too close to render treatment ineffective.

Full Story HERE

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Light-Switched Drug Delivery

Drugs could be slipped into living cells using a light-sensitive capsule.

 Targeted drug delivery is a hot topic of research. Scientists around the world are working on different ways to get drugs into specific cells without negatively impacting the rest of the body.

Now researchers in England and Germany have created gold-studded polymer microcapsules that release compounds into cells by rupturing when exposed to ultraviolet light. The capsules could be useful for researchers studying the effects of drugs on cells, and eventually they could perhaps serve as a clinical tool for administering medication.
"You can keep the capsules in the body for a while, and then you switch [on] the light to release them," says Gleb Sukhorukov, professor of biomaterials at Queen Mary University of London and a researcher on the project.

Sukhorukov says the capsules could be used for administering drugs at the site of surgery a few weeks after an operation, without having to open up the patient again. They could also prove useful for gene therapy, although a method for directing the capsules to the right cells has yet to be developed.

To create the capsules, polymer layers are wound around tiny silica particles. Gold nanoparticles are added to the walls of the capsule during this process, and the silica particles are later dissolved in acid, leaving hollow capsules behind. Sukhorukov says the capsules can be made anywhere from 200 nanometers to 10 microns in size. Once they have been produced, they are heated in a solution containing the compound that is to be delivered to cells. The capsules shrink as they are heated, trapping some of the compound inside. In experiments, the researchers put peptides inside the capsules, but in the future they hope to use drugs.

Whole story here

Source: www.technologyreview.com

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Golden spacecrafts landed on the Moon?

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Ardi's Secret: Did Early Humans Start Walking for Sex?

Jamie Shreeve Science editor, National Geographic magazine

October 1, 2009

The big news from the journal Science today is the discovery of the oldest human skeleton—a small-brained, 110-pound (50-kilogram) female of the species Ardipithecus ramidus, nicknamed "Ardi." She lived in what is now Ethiopia 4.4 million years ago, which makes her over a million years older than the famous Lucy fossil, found in the same region 35 years ago. (Full story: "Oldest 'Human' Skeleton Found—Disproves 'Missing Link.'") Buried among the slew of papers about the new find is one about the creature's sex life. It makes fascinating reading, especially if you like learning why human females don't know when they are ovulating, and men lack the clacker-sized testicles and bristly penises sported by chimpanzees. (See pictures of Ardipithecus ramidus.) One of the defining attributes of Lucy and all other hominids—members of our evolutionary lineage, including ourselves—is that they walk upright on two legs. While Ardi also walked on two legs on the ground, the species also clambered about on four legs in the trees. Ardi thus offers a fascinating glimpse of an ape caught in the act of becoming human. (Interactive: Ardi's key features.) The problem is it is doing it in the wrong place at the wrong time—at least according to conventional wisdom, which says our kind first stood up on two legs when they moved out of the forest and onto open savanna grasslands. At the time Ardi lived, her environment was a woodland, much cooler and wetter than the desert there today. So why did her species become bipedal while it was still living partly in the trees, especially since walking on two legs is a much less efficient way of getting about? According to Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University, it all comes down to food, and sex. Full Story HERE

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Hellish Exoplanet Rains Hot Pebbles, Has Lava Oceans

Ker Than for National Geographic News

October 6, 2009

The first rocky planet ever discovered outside our solar system has a hellish environment where hot pebbles rain down on oceans of lava, a new study suggests. Located about 500 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros, CoRoT-7b was first discovered in February by the French and European space agencies' CoRoT space telescope. The exoplanet was recently confirmed to be a rocky, Earth-like world—but that's where the similarities with our planet end. CoRoT-7b is about twice the size and five times the mass of Earth, and it's separated from its star by only 1.5 million miles (2.5 million kilometers)—that's about 23 times closer than Mercury is to our sun. On CoRoT-7b a year lasts only 20.4 hours. "It's actually the closest orbit of any exoplanet that's been discovered," said study team member Laura Schaefer, an astronomer at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Full Story HERE

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How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect

By BENEDICT CAREY

In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.

An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”

At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.

Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.

“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science. “We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.”

Full Story HERE

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nasa moon mission last minute before impact

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Latest Updates on LCROSS

The mission operations team has initiated power-up of the LCROSS science payload and is evaluating the health of the spacecraft instruments. Spacecraft data being transmitted to LCROSS mission control at NASA Ames at 1.5 Mbps via the Goldstone Deep Space Network Facility in California. Spacecraft and science instrument data are relayed in real-time. More info here Live feed here

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Nasa discovers huge ring of ice orbiting Saturn

A giant ring so faint it is all but invisible to conventional light telescopes has been discovered around Saturn by the infra-red imaging instruments on board Nasa's Spitzer space telescope.

The ring extends much further out than Saturn's other rings, and is tilted at a different angle to the rest in relation to the planet's axis of rotation.

Saturn's rings are known to be composed of dust, ice and other debris caught up in orbit around the planet.

Scientists believe the newly discovered ring is so tenuous because its particles of ice and dust are thinly dispersed in space. This means they do not reflect much light, making the ring hard to see.

Spitzer's infra-red camera was able to detect the "glow" of the band's cool dust, which only manages to reach a temperature of minus 193C. Even at such low temperatures, the dust gives off enough infra-red light to be picked up by Spitzer, the $800m space observatory launched in 2003. "By focusing on the glow of the ring's cool dust, Spitzer made it easy to find," said Anne Verbiscer, an astronomer at the University of Virginia. "[But] the particles are so far apart that if you were to stand in the ring, you wouldn't even know it. This is one supersized ring. If you could see [it], it would span the width of two full-moons' worth of sky, one on either side of Saturn."

Whole story

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk

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Nasa prepares moon smashing satellite

 Nasa's attempt to smash two probes into the moon's surface could prove the presence of water and hint at a faster, cheaper future for space exploration

As Britain tucks into its lunch on Friday, hundreds of scientists, engineers and astronomers on the other side of the planet will be nervously watching the skies. Across California and Hawaii, hundreds of eyes will be trained on the moon, watching for the moment when a hi-tech orbiter – weighing more than 2 tonnes and travelling at 5,600mph – plunges headlong into the lunar surface. The collision will throw a massive cloud of dust and debris up into space before, just a few minutes later, another, smaller, spacecraft follows suit and plummets to its doom.

For most people, it sounds like the stuff of nightmares. But when the impact takes place, the scientists working on the LCROSS mission will not be weeping but cheering – because this crash is happening on purpose.

Indeed, smashing into the moon's surface is the primary objective of LCROSS (the name stands for Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite). The basic idea behind the project, which launched into space in June, is to try to find out where water might exist in the darkest recesses of the moon's south pole. The best way to do that, apparently, is to throw a spacecraft at it and then examine the debris thrown up by the impact.

Whole story
Source: www.guardian.co.uk

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NASA , UFO files

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Is life a transitory phenomenon?

We don't mean just life on earth, where it has hung on for a couple billion years, but life anywhere in the universe. 

Many cosmologists advance the socalled Anthropic Principle, which states that the physical constants of nature are honed to just the right values to make life possible. If the charge on the electron were a little less or the properties of carbon a bit different, life could not exist. The Anthropic Principle seems to imply that the universe was designed for earth life.

But "design" is a bad word these days. It is redolent of purpose and a supernatural being. Suppose, though, that the Anthropic Principle is correct but only in our part of the cosmos and only for a little while. If the constants of nature are not really constant, life could be just a transitory phenomenon, flaring up here and there wherever conditions are ripe and the Anthropic Principle reigns. The cosmos as-a-whole might be lurching toward other goals or, perhaps, toward nowhere in particular. 

Enough philosophy! A team of Australian astronomers, led by J.K. Webb, has been trying to determine if the famous fine-structure constant of physics has really remained constant throughout the 12-billion years or so of the universe's history. The fine-structure constant is dimensionless and almost exactly equal to 1/137. (Why 137?

That's another question!) Anyway, the Australians got a good fix on the constant's value 2 billion years ago by measuring the composition of the nuclear waste produced by the Olko natural nuclear reactors in Gabon, Africa. It hasn't changed since then. The spectra of distant quasars 7 billion years old also signaled no change. 

But more-distant and, therefore, supposedly older, gas clouds have suggested that a slightly smaller fine-structure constant held sway then. No known experimental error can account for this difference.

 

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