Monday, October 13, 2014
Rats and Their Alarming Bugs of animals If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that our well-being is intimately linked to the health of animals. The current Ebola epidemic probably got its start when someone came into contact with an infected animal, perhaps a monkey or a fruit bat. The virus causing Middle East respiratory syndrome appears to spread from camels to humans.
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A 58-Foot Long Fin Whale With Huge Bite Marks Has Washed Up On Long Island A whale washed ashore on Long Island on Oct. 9, with bite marks "bigger than a Chihuahua," Kim Durham of the Riverhead Foundation told Newsday. Gothamist reports that the 58-foot fin whale was discovered around 8 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 9, near the campgrounds at Smith County Park in Shirley, NY. For reference, that's about 77 miles from New York City.
Space cloud may hold clue to life's origins chemical found in a distant space cloud looks a lot like a building block of life on Earth. The cloud sits about 26,000 light-years away in interstellar space, a term for the gap between stars. Called Sagittarius B2, the cloud contains dust and gas — the stuff that makes up planets and stars. Scientists had identified other interesting molecules there before. But those molecules tended to have a ring shape or consisted of a straight string of atoms. The newfound isopropyl cyanide (EYE-so-PRO-ul SIGH-ah-neid) is different. Its structure is branched. That means its atoms don't line up straight, one after another. Instead, a single atom may connect to two or three others. These chains form branches, like in a tree, astronomers reported September 26 in Science. Branching is a big deal to scientists. Most amino acids have a branched structure. Those molecules are the basic building block for larger molecules called proteins. And proteins are crucial to life. Finding isopropyl cyanide suggests interstellar space may hold clues to how life started. The discovery also supports the idea that meteorites (rocks from space that land on the ground) might have helped bring life to Earth. In the past 40 years, researchers have found dozens of amino acids in meteorites. Those molecules may form on rocks as they hurtle through space. They also may form in distant gas clouds and then hitchhike across space. If that's the case, then the ingredients for life aren't unique to Earth — or even the solar system. Gas clouds may forge those ingredients. Passing space rocks may then ferry the molecules to other planets in the Milky Way — or even to other galaxies. Finding complex molecules like isopropyl cyanide in space is tricky astronomy. As molecules vibrate and move in space, they give off energy. That energy may take the form of radio waves. Scientists on Earth can pick up those signals and identify where they came from using radio telescopes. Arnaud Belloche and his colleagues didn't use just one telescope when they studied Sagittarius B2. They used a whole network. Called ALMA — for Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array — it is made up of 66 radio dishes. They stare at the sky from mountains in Chile. Only 20 were running when Belloche collected data. Still, those were enough to get a good signal. Belloche is an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany. The new study doesn't prove that molecules necessary for life form in interstellar clouds, he told Science News. However, finding evidence that chemicals with a branched structure can form there is exciting, he says. Eric Herbst agrees. An astronomer at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, he was not involved in the study. He told Science News, “This bodes well for the presence of amino acids.” Power Words amino acids Simple molecules that occur naturally in plant and animal tissues and that are the basic constituents of proteins. astronomy The area of science that deals with celestial objects, space and the physical universe as a whole. People who work in this field are called astronomers. atom The basic unit of a chemical element. Atoms are made up of a dense nucleus that contains positively charged protons and neutrally charged neutrons. The nucleus is orbited by a cloud of negatively charged electrons. chemical A substance formed from two or more atoms that unite (become bonded together) in a fixed proportion and structure. For example, water is a chemical made of two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen atom. Its chemical symbol is H2O. galaxy A massive group of stars bound together by gravity. Galaxies, which each typically include between 10 million and 100 trillion stars, also include clouds of gas, dust and the remnants of exploded stars. interstellar Between stars. isopropyl cyanide Also known as isobutyronitrile, it has a chemical formula of (CH3)2CHCN. It is very toxic. On Earth, it forms during an intermediate stage of the production of some chemicals, including some insecticides. light-year The distance light travels in a year, about 9.48 trillion kilometers (almost 6 trillion miles). To get some idea of this length, imagine a rope long enough to wrap around the Earth. It would be a little over 40,000 kilometers (24,900 miles) long. Lay it out straight. Now lay another 236 more that are the same length, end-to-end, right after the first. The total distance they now span would equal one light-year. meteor A lump of rock or metal from space that hits the atmosphere of Earth. In space it is known as a meteoroid. When you see it in the sky it is a meteor. And when it hits the ground it is called a meteorite. Milky Way The galaxy in which Earth’s solar system resides. molecule An electrically neutral group of atoms that represents the smallest possible amount of a chemical compound. Molecules can be made of single types of atoms or of different types. For example, the oxygen in the air is made of two oxygen atoms (O2), but water is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom (H2O)
More evidence of late volcanism on the moon, from @LRO_NASA The feature called Maskelyne is one of many newly discovered young volcanic deposits on the Moon. Called irregular mare patches, these areas are thought to be remnants of small basaltic eruptions that occurred much later than the commonly accepted end of lunar volcanism, 1 to 1.5 billion years ago NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has provided researchers strong evidence the moon’s volcanic activity slowed gradually instead of stopping abruptly a billion years ago. Scores of distinctive rock deposits observed by LRO are estimated to be less than 100 million years old. This time period corresponds to Earth’s Cretaceous period, the heyday of dinosaurs. Some areas may be less than 50 million years old. Details of the study are published online in Sunday’s edition of Nature Geoscience. “This finding is the kind of science that is literally going to make geologists rewrite the textbooks about the moon,” said John Keller, LRO project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The deposits are scattered across the moon’s dark volcanic plains and are characterized by a mixture of smooth, rounded, shallow mounds next to patches of rough, blocky terrain. Because of this combination of textures, the researchers refer to these unusual areas as irregular mare patches. The features are too small to be seen from Earth, averaging less than a third of a mile (500 meters) across in their largest dimension. One of the largest, a well-studied area called Ina, was imaged from lunar orbit by Apollo 15 astronauts. Ina appeared to be a one-of-a-kind feature until researchers from Arizona State University in Tempe and Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster in Germany spotted many similar regions in high-resolution images taken by the two Narrow Angle Cameras that are part of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC. The team identified a total of 70 irregular mare patches on the near side of the moon. The large number of these features and their wide distribution strongly suggest that late-stage volcanic activity was not an anomaly but an important part of the moon's geologic history. The numbers and sizes of the craters within these areas indicate the deposits are relatively recent. Based on a technique that links such crater measurements to the ages of Apollo and Luna samples, three of the irregular mare patches are thought to be less than 100 million years old, and perhaps less than 50 million years old in the case of Ina. The steep slopes leading down from the smooth rock layers to the rough terrain are consistent with the young age estimates. In contrast, the volcanic plains surrounding these distinctive regions are attributed to volcanic activity that started about 3 1/2 billion years ago and ended roughly 1 billion years ago. At that point, all volcanic activity on the moon was thought to cease. Several earlier studies suggested that Ina was quite young and might have formed due to localized volcanic activity. However, in the absence of other similar features, Ina was not considered an indication of widespread volcanism. The findings have major implications for how warm the moon’s interior is thought to be. “The existence and age of the irregular mare patches tell us that the lunar mantle had to remain hot enough to provide magma for the small-volume eruptions that created these unusual young features,” said Sarah Braden, a recent Arizona State University graduate and the lead author of the study. The new information is hard to reconcile with what currently is thought about the temperature of the interior of the moon. “These young volcanic features are prime targets for future exploration, both robotic and human,” said Mark Robinson, LROC principal investigator at Arizona State University. LRO is managed by Goddard for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. LROC, a system of three cameras, was designed and built by Malin Space Science Systems and is operated by Arizona State University
Gather round - a new generation of artificial minds wants to tell you a story Goggles that warp your vision might be the key to understanding the redness of red, the softness of velvet and the nature of consciousness itself A MAN walks confidently towards an open gate but instead of going straight through he raises his knee very high as if he were stepping over a low wall. He strides forward, reaching out to shake a friend's hand. But again he misjudges, and his friend draws back in alarm to avoid being punched in the nose. This is Innsbruck, Austria, in the 1950s, and no, the man hasn't been drinking too much schnapps. He is psychologist Ivo Kohler, and he is wearing a pair of goggles with a built-in mirror that turns his world upside down. In a grainy black-and-white film that records his stumblings, the eternally surprised Kohler dives to catch a child's balloon drifting skywards and turns a teacup upside down
model black hole that traps sound instead of light has been caught emitting quantum particles, thought to be the analogue of the theoretical Hawking radiation. The effect may be the first time that a lab-based black hole has created Hawking particles in the same way expected from real black holes. Black holes are ultra-dense concentrations of matter left behind when a star or other massive body collapses. Their gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape from their edge – a boundary called the event horizon. Given that, physicists expected that black holes would be, well, black. But in 1974, Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge predicted they should emit a faint glow of particles now known as Hawking radiation. An oddity of quantum theory that says that the vacuum of space is not truly empty, but fizzes with pairs of particles and their antimatter counterparts. Normally, these pairs annihilate each other and disappear. But if one gets caught inside a black hole's event horizon, the other is free to escape and becomes observable as Hawking radiation. The glow from real-life black holes would be too faint to see so, to confirm Hawking's prediction, physicists have built artificial black holes that mimic the event horizon.
Swollen rivers may be the unexpected fallout of billowing smog. By intercepting sunshine and shading the Earth, polluting particles can stifle evaporation, leaving extra water to flood local waterways. Dirty air can load rivers with up to 25 percent more water than they would have under cleaner skies, researchers report October 5 in Nature Geoscience. “In a way, it makes sense,” says coauthor Peter Cox, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter in England. But many other factors also alter how water loops through the environment, including rainfall, large-scale irrigation and humidity, he says. “We weren’t sure —until we did this —on the overall impact,” of air pollution, he says
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