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Notificação de Remoção de Blogue do Blogger

2011-10-20T13:08:00.001-07:00

O Blogger foi notificado, nos termos do Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), de que determinado conteúdo existente no seu blogue viola, alegadamente, direitos de autor de outras pessoas. Como consequência, repusemos o estado da(s) mensagem(ns) para "rascunho". (Se não procedêssemos assim, ficaríamos sujeitos a uma reivindicação por violação de direitos de autor, independentemente do fundamento da mesma. Poderá encontrar o(s) URL(s) da(s) mensagem(ns) alegadamente infratoras no final desta mensagem) o que significa que a sua mensagem - bem como quaisquer imagens, links ou outros conteúdos - não desapareceram. Pode editar a mensagem para remover o conteúdo em questão e voltar a publicá-la.
Informação contextual: o DMCA é uma lei de direitos de autor dos Estados Unidos que contém diretrizes sobre responsabilidade dos fornecedores de serviços on-line em caso de violação de direitos de autor. Se acha que possui o direito de publicar o conteúdo em questão, pode enviar a sua contra-notificação. Para obter mais informações sobre as políticas DMCA, incluindo como enviar a sua contra-notificação, consulte o link http://www.google.com/dmca.html.
O aviso que recebemos será publicado on-line, sem qualquer informação de identificação pessoal, por um serviço denominado Chilling Effects em http://www.chillingeffects.org. Atuamos em conformidade com o Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Pode pesquisar o aviso DMCA associado à remoção do seu conteúdo acedendo à página de pesquisa do Chilling Effects, em http://www.chillingeffects.org/search.cgi e introduzindo o URL da mensagem que foi removida.
Se tomarmos conhecimento de que voltou a publicar a mensagem sem remover o conteúdo/link em questão, procederemos à eliminação da sua mensagem e consideraremos a sua ação como uma violação adicional da sua conta. As violações repetidas dos nossos Termos de Utilização podem resultar em ações corretivas adicionais relativamente à sua conta do Blogger, incluindo a eliminação do blogue e/ou o encerramento da sua conta. Se tiver dúvidas de carácter jurídico acerca desta notificação, deverá contactar o seu próprio consultor jurídico.
Atenciosamente,
A Equipa do Blogger
URLs referidos:
[http://gadgets-and-technology-devices.blogspot.com/2009/09/samsung-galaxy-vs-htc-hero-difference.html, http://gadgets-and-technology-devices.blogspot.com/2009/08/qlocktwo-is-not-round-no-hands-clock.html, http://gadgets-and-technology-devices.blogspot.com/2009/08/sony-ericssons-slick-new-xperia-x5.html, http://gadgets-and-technology-devices.blogspot.com/2009/07/monsterpod-is-sticky-camera-mount.html, http://gadgets-and-technology-devices.blogspot.com/2009/07/review-sony-ericsson-hbh-is800.html, http://gadgets-and-technology-devices.blogspot.com/2009/07/orb-is-ring-cum-bluetooth-headset.html]

95-Million Year Old Amber Deposits Discovered in Africa Yield New Insights into Evolution

2010-04-06T07:09:00.000-07:00

95-Million Year Old Amber Deposits Discovered in Africa Yield New Insights into Evolution

In the first major discovery of its kind on the African continent, a 95-million-year-old amber deposit, formed from the sap of an unknown tree, is adding new fungus, insects, spiders, nematodes, and even bacteria to a Cretaceous ecosystem -a warm…

95-Million Year Old Amber Deposits Discovered in Africa Providing New Insights into Planet's Evolution

2010-04-06T02:09:00.000-07:00

95-Million Year Old Amber Deposits Discovered in Africa Providing New Insights into Planet's Evolution

"The Milky Way Strain": Researchers Study Keeping Human Cells Healthy During Space Travel

2010-04-05T03:09:00.000-07:00

"The Milky Way Strain": Researchers Study Keeping Human Cells Healthy During Space Travel

At 3:21 a.m. PDT on April 5, ASU Biodesign Institute researchers Cheryl Nickerson and her team, including Jennifer Barrila and Shameema Sarker, will see their latest experiment launched into low earth orbit aboard the space shuttle Discovery on mission STS-131….

NASA Mars Technology To Help Find Water Beneath Vast Middle East Deserts

2010-04-04T12:09:00.000-07:00

NASA Mars Technology To Help Find Water Beneath Vast Middle East Deserts

NASA technology used to hunt for water on Mars could be used detect water up to more than half a mile beneath the massive deserts that cover much of the Middle East and North Africa. NASA planetary scientist Essam Heggy,…

NASA Mars Technology Can Help Find Water Beneath Vast Middle East Deserts

2010-04-04T02:08:00.000-07:00

NASA Mars Technology Can Help Find Water Beneath Vast Middle East Deserts

NASA technology used to hunt for water on Mars could be used detect water up to more than half a mile beneath the massive deserts that cover much of the Middle East and North Africa , a NASA scientist says….

James Cameron's "Lost Tomb of Jesus" (VIDEO Weekend Feature)

2010-04-03T11:08:00.000-07:00

James Cameron's "Lost Tomb of Jesus" (VIDEO Weekend Feature)

Easter weekend offers a perfect opportunity to take another look at this fascinating Discovery Channel video of The Lost Tomb of Jesus. Since the 1970s, hundreds of tombs and thousands of ossuaries, which served as coffins in first-century Jerusalem, have…

Buried Lakes of Antarctica Harbor New, Unknown Viruses (A Galaxy Classic)

2010-04-02T06:08:00.000-07:00

Buried Lakes of Antarctica Harbor New, Unknown Viruses (A Galaxy Classic)

Like a modern, micro version of The Thing, Antarctica’s icy lakes have been discovered to house a surprisingly diverse community of viruses, including some that were previously unidentified. The finding could shed light on whether microbial life evolved independently in…

Get Your Daily Dose of Awe @The Daily Galaxy Facebook Page

2010-04-02T01:08:00.000-07:00

Get Your Daily Dose of Awe @The Daily Galaxy Facebook Page

Link & Share The Daily Galaxy Facebook Page

3D Alien View of the Supernova Explosion that Reached Earth 300 Years Ago (VIDEO)

2010-04-01T05:08:00.000-07:00

3D Alien View of the Supernova Explosion that Reached Earth 300 Years Ago (VIDEO)

The planet’s great telescopes show the Milky Way galaxy only as it appears from the vantage point of our solar system. Now, using a simple but powerful technique, a group of astronomers led by Armin Rest of Harvard University has…

Prehistoric Fossils Point to Future Climate Change

2010-03-31T04:08:00.000-07:00

Prehistoric Fossils Point to Future Climate Change

The first comprehensive reconstruction of an extreme warm period shows the sensitivity of the climate system to changes in carbon dioxide (CO2) levels as well as the strong influence of ocean temperatures, heat transport from equatorial regions, and greenhouse gases…

Large Hadron Atom Smasher Reaches Near Speed of Light

2010-03-30T08:08:00.000-07:00

Large Hadron Atom Smasher Reaches Near Speed of Light

Scientists celebrated at the world’s biggest atom smasher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva on Tuesday as they started colliding particles at record energy levels mimicking conditions close to the Big Bang, opening a new era…

Does The Earth Harbors a Huge, Natural Nuclear Reactor at its Core -Discovery of One of the Rarest Particles in Universe Proves "No"

2010-03-30T03:08:00.000-07:00

Does The Earth Harbors a Huge, Natural Nuclear Reactor at its Core -Discovery of One of the Rarest Particles in Universe Proves "No"

Using a delicate instrument located under a mountain in central Italy, two University of Massachusetts Amherst physicists are measuring some of the faintest and rarest particles ever detected, geo-neutrinos, with the greatest precision yet achieved. The data reveal, for the…

Stephen Hawking: Humans are "Entering a Stage of Self-Designed Evolution"

2010-03-29T03:08:00.000-07:00

Stephen Hawking: Humans are "Entering a Stage of Self-Designed Evolution"

In the past decade, we've examined our Solar System's orbit through the Milky Way to ask whether there may be clues to periodic mass extinctions on our planet. We’ve launched missions seeking out habitable Alien Earths and the existence of…

Engadget Podcast 189 - 03.27.2010

2010-03-28T17:08:00.000-07:00

Engadget Podcast 189 - 03.27.2010

Josh and Paul use the Engadget Podcast as a platform for coping with Nilay’s deportation earlier this week. Grab a box of tissues and click the PLAY button.

Hosts: Joshua Topolsky, Paul Miller
Producer: Trent Wolbe
Music: Sultans of Swing

Hear the podcast

02:45 - HTC EVO 4G is Sprint’s Android-powered knight in superphone armor, we go hands-on
21:00 - MetroPCS bringing LTE to Las Vegas this year, Samsung doing infrastructure and first LTE handset: the SCH-r900
21:15 - Verizon talks commercial LTE deployment details: data devices first, smartphones in ‘1H 2011′
21:38 - AT&T says Verizon’s first LTE phone is ‘going to be a fat brick’
25:55 - Samsung announces Galaxy S Android smartphone
27:00 - Samsung Galaxy S hands-on with video
28:05 - Samsung’s Galaxy S has four times the polygon power of Snapdragon
30:52 - Dell Aero is ‘the lightest’ Android phone yet, poses for pictures
31:38 - Nintendo announces 3DS — the glasses-free 3D successor to the DS
36:10 - Microsoft Courier existence confirmed on the company’s JobsBlog?
42:38 - LG X300’s slack-jawed hands-on
43:02 - TiVo Premiere review

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Contact the podcast

1-888-ENGADGET or podcast (at) engadget (dot) com.

Twitter: @joshuatopolsky @futurepaul @reckless @zpower @engadget

Filed under: Podcasts

Engadget Podcast 189 - 03.27.2010 originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 28 Mar 2010 19:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Undetectable Extraterrestrials? World-Leading Physicist Says "They Could Exist in Forms We Can't Conceive" (A Weekend Classic)

2010-03-28T12:08:00.000-07:00

Undetectable Extraterrestrials? World-Leading Physicist Says "They Could Exist in Forms We Can't Conceive" (A Weekend Classic)

FOOTBALL: watch live match of LA Galaxy vs New England Revol

2010-03-27T23:08:00.000-07:00

FOOTBALL: watch live match of LA Galaxy vs New England Revol

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Earth's Arctic -A NASA Test Ground for Missions to Jupiter's Europa

2010-03-26T03:08:00.000-07:00

Earth's Arctic -A NASA Test Ground for Missions to Jupiter's Europa

Cracks in the icy shell of Jupiter's moon Europa contain sulfur-rich material and may reflect the composition of the subsurface ocean. An expedition this past summer to a sulfur spring in the Arctic could help solve some mysteries about Europa…

"X-Woman" Discovered -Shared Ancestry with Neanderthals and Modern Humans

2010-03-25T03:08:00.000-07:00

"X-Woman" Discovered -Shared Ancestry with Neanderthals and Modern Humans

Scientists say a third hominin group may have co-existed with early Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. A DNA sample taken from an ancient pinky bone that belonged to a child who died between 48,000 and 30,000 years ago.suggests that a previously…

Has the World Seriously Underestimated Climate-Change Effects?

2010-03-24T09:08:00.000-07:00

Has the World Seriously Underestimated Climate-Change Effects?

Cornell University professor of earth and atmospheric sciences, Charles Greene, one of the authors of “A Very Inconvenient Truth,” published in the peer-reviewed journal Oceanography (March 2010), said that he and his co-authors conclude that the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel…

"There Was No Big Bang" - We Live in a Universe that Endlessly Expands & Contracts (VIDEO)

2010-03-24T03:08:00.000-07:00

"There Was No Big Bang" - We Live in a Universe that Endlessly Expands & Contracts (VIDEO)

Does the universe repeat itse;f every trillion years? A new cosmological model appears to demonstrate that the universe can endlessly expand and contract, providing a rival to Big Bang theories and solving a thorny modern physics problem, according to University…

Odd, Unknown Structures of the Whirlpool Galaxy

2010-03-23T09:08:00.000-07:00

Odd, Unknown Structures of the Whirlpool Galaxy

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has captured these infrared images of the “Whirlpool Galaxy,” revealing strange structures bridging the gaps between the dust-rich spiral arms, and tracing the dust, gas and stellar populations in both the bright spiral galaxy and its…

Stalking Dark Objects of the Milky Way

2010-03-23T03:08:00.000-07:00

Stalking Dark Objects of the Milky Way

“Forty years ago a visionary astronomer named Dr. Sjur Refsdal theorized that dark bodies could be located using parallax and a space telescope,” says Andrew Gould of Ohio State University. “It is truly remarkable that we have been able to…

14-Million-Year-Old Living Antarctica Climate-Change Lab

2010-03-22T03:08:00.000-07:00

14-Million-Year-Old Living Antarctica Climate-Change Lab

“The fossil finds allow us to examine Antarctica as it existed just prior to climate cooling at 13.9 million years ago. It is a unique window into the past. To study these deposits is akin to strolling across the Dry…

Is There a "Moore's Law" for Cities? (A Galaxy Classic)

2010-03-21T11:08:00.000-07:00

Is There a "Moore's Law" for Cities? (A Galaxy Classic)

Several thousand years ago the evolution of social organizations in the form of cities brought a new dynamic to the planet that seems to be uniquely human: People actually do walk on average faster in larger cities whereas heart rates…

Life on Saturn's Titan: Could It be Methane Based? (Weekend Feature)

2010-03-20T23:08:00.000-07:00

Life on Saturn's Titan: Could It be Methane Based? (Weekend Feature)

Saturn's giant moon Titan has water frozen as hard as granite and Great Lakes-sized bodies of fed by a complete liquid cycle, much like the hydrological cycle on Earth, but made up of methane and ethane rather than on water….

LHC Smashes World Record -Will It Ultimately Reveal Signals from Another Universe? (Weekend Feature)

2010-03-20T17:08:00.000-07:00

LHC Smashes World Record -Will It Ultimately Reveal Signals from Another Universe? (Weekend Feature)

The Large Hadron Collider set a new record for the creation of energetic particle beams this past week. The particle accelerator, which surpassed Fermilab's Tevatron in December, smashed its own record, charging particles to 3.48 trillion electron volts, or three…

LHC Smashes World Record -Will It Reveal Signals from Another Universe? (Weekend Feature)

2010-03-20T07:07:00.000-07:00

LHC Smashes World Record -Will It Reveal Signals from Another Universe? (Weekend Feature)

The New Weird & Violent Saturn: Gigantic Polar Vortex & Rings as High as the Rocky Mountains

2010-03-19T02:07:00.000-07:00

The New Weird & Violent Saturn: Gigantic Polar Vortex & Rings as High as the Rocky Mountains

The image of a classical serene zen-like Saturn is an illusion: new findings by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft show a gas giant with extraordinary patterns of charged particles and violent roller derbies for rings. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has been shadowing the…

Lost Antarctica "Alps" Hint at Hyper-Speed Global Warming

2010-03-18T02:07:00.000-07:00

Lost Antarctica "Alps" Hint at Hyper-Speed Global Warming

An international team of experts have mapped a huge, incredibly old location, mentioned in the notes of a Russian explorer from half a century ago, buried under hundreds of meters of ice. In an amazing break with tradition this process…

Unlocking the Secrets of Jupiter's Giant Red Spot

2010-03-17T03:19:00.000-07:00

Unlocking the Secrets of Jupiter's Giant Red Spot

New thermal images from powerful ground-based telescopes show swirls of warmer air and cooler regions never seen before within Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, which has persisted for as long as 200 to 350 years, based on early telescopic observations, enabling…

Hubble: The New 3D Movie -"A Religious Experience" (3D VIDEO PREVIEW)

2010-03-16T06:19:00.000-07:00

Hubble: The New 3D Movie -"A Religious Experience" (3D VIDEO PREVIEW)

"Hubble 3D" offers an inspiring and unique look into the legacy of the Hubble Space Telescope and how it has changed our view of the universe and ourselves. Hubble 3D is a pretty simple movie. It’s also one of the…

Beckham operado com "êxito" ao tendão de Aquiles - SIC Notícias

2010-03-15T15:19:00.000-07:00

UOL Esporte

Beckham operado com "êxito" ao tendão de Aquiles
SIC Notícias
O médio emprestado pelos LA Galaxy ao AC Milan lesionou-se domingo no jogo com o Chievo (1-0), da Liga italiana. O jogador corre sérios riscos de falhar o campeonato do Mundo de 2010, na África do Sul, de 11 de junho a 11 de julho, embora não seja …
David Beckham sofre lesão graveDiário de Notícias – Lisboa
Capello: «Lesão de Beckham é um duro revés»Record
Médio sofreu uma rotura total do tendão de AquilesCorreio da Manhã
Gazeta Esportiva -i Informação -AFP
todos os 285 artigos de notícias »

Black-Hole Powered Blobs -The Most Massive Objects in Space

2010-03-15T07:19:00.000-07:00

Black-Hole Powered Blobs -The Most Massive Objects in Space

“Blobs” might sound as scientific as an astrologer at a NASCAR rally, but it’s a real astrophysical term - in fact, it’s a giant one. Blobs are immense clouds of gas -some stretch for tens of thousands of light years-…

Exploring the 10 Billion Neurons of the Cerebral Cortex - Everything You Think of as "You"

2010-03-15T01:19:00.000-07:00

Exploring the 10 Billion Neurons of the Cerebral Cortex - Everything You Think of as "You"

The study of the human brain is one of the most fascinating, and incredibly meta, subjects in existence. The almost Escherian experiments of one brain studying another brain (which is thinking about being studied by the first) have up to…

Richard Dawkins: "The Stroke of Luck that Led to Life on Earth Exists Elsewhere in the Universe" (Weekend Feature)

2010-03-13T02:18:00.000-08:00

Richard Dawkins: "The Stroke of Luck that Led to Life on Earth Exists Elsewhere in the Universe" (Weekend Feature)

It’s no accident that we see stars in the sky, says famed Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins: they are a vital part of any universe capable of generating us. But, as Dawkins emphasizes, that does not mean that stars exists in…

"Dark Flow" of Billions of Stars Racing Away from Earth Towards Edge of Observable Universe (New JPL Discovery)

2010-03-12T08:18:00.000-08:00

"Dark Flow" of Billions of Stars Racing Away from Earth Towards Edge of Observable Universe (New JPL Discovery)

“Dark Flow” sounds like a new SciFi Channel series. It’s not! Back in the Middle Ages, maps showed terrifying images of sea dragons at the boundaries of the known world. Today, scientists have observed strange new motion at the very…

"Dark Flow" of Billions of Stars Racing Away from Earth Towards Edge of Observable Universe (New JPL Research)

2010-03-12T03:18:00.000-08:00

"Dark Flow" of Billions of Stars Racing Away from Earth Towards Edge of Observable Universe (New JPL Research)

Will "Intelligence" be an Evolutionary Constant Throughout the Universe?

2010-03-11T06:18:00.000-08:00

Will "Intelligence" be an Evolutionary Constant Throughout the Universe?

Charley Lineweaver, a cosmologist with The Australian National University, believes the “Planet of the Apes Hypothesis” -a theory subscribed to by Carl Sagan and the astronomers involved with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), that human-like intelligence is a convergent…

Chandra X-Ray Space Telescope Pierces Secrets of Galaxies

2010-03-10T07:17:00.000-08:00

Chandra X-Ray Space Telescope Pierces Secrets of Galaxies

When NASA launched its Chandra X-ray observing telescope into orbit in 1999, astronomers didn't know that the galactic winds made of wispy, multi-million-degree gas clouds that stream out from normal galaxies exert a very powerful feedback force on the surroundings,…

Infinite Galaxies: Giordano Bruno's Heresy

2010-03-10T01:17:00.000-08:00

Infinite Galaxies: Giordano Bruno's Heresy

Smack in the center of the Rome’s fashionable Campo de Fiori is a statue of Giordano Bruno, philosopher. Bruno held that God was present in nature and that the universe and life was infinite. The Catholic Church burned him at…

"Seeing" the Dark Matter of the Universe -Will New Technology Provide the 1st Glimpse?

2010-03-09T08:17:00.000-08:00

"Seeing" the Dark Matter of the Universe -Will New Technology Provide the 1st Glimpse?

“Dark matter is one of the last great frontiers in science,” said David B. Cline, UCLA professor of physics, high-energy astrophysicist. “Once we know what it really is, we will break through into a new realm of nature. It’s going…

Tumbleweed Ball Could Be Key to Exploring Mars

2010-03-09T02:17:00.000-08:00

Tumbleweed Ball Could Be Key to Exploring Mars

No more retro Mars Rovers getting stuck in sand! Presto! NASA’s new army of tumbleweed beach ball robots will roll across the Red Planet surveying vast tracts of exotic Martian landcsape surface. Tt’s a big, lightweight, two-story tall beach ball…

The Monster at the Center of Galaxies: Destroyer of Stars

2010-03-08T20:17:00.000-08:00

The Monster at the Center of Galaxies: Destroyer of Stars

In this extraordinary image, Spiral Galaxy NGC 1068 (50 million light years from Earth) also well known as M77, is hiding a central powerful source of x-rays — likely a supermassive black hole — from direct view. X-rays are still…

The Monsters at the Center of Galaxies: Destroyers of Stars

2010-03-08T02:17:00.000-08:00

The Monsters at the Center of Galaxies: Destroyers of Stars

Stephen Hawking: The Future of Space -Manned vs Robotic Missions? (A Weekend Feature)

2010-03-07T08:17:00.000-08:00

Stephen Hawking: The Future of Space -Manned vs Robotic Missions? (A Weekend Feature)

“Robotic missions are much cheaper and may provide more scientific information, but they don’t catch the public imagination in the same way, and they don’t spread the human race into space, which I’m arguing should be our long-term strategy. If…

Relic Star Almost as Old as the Universe Discovered in Dwarf Galaxy

2010-03-05T02:16:00.000-08:00

Relic Star Almost as Old as the Universe Discovered in Dwarf Galaxy

“This star likely is almost as old as the universe itself,” Anna Frebel, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Astronomers have discovered a relic from the early universe — a star that may have been among the second generation…

Has Human Culture Replaced Biological Evolution? (A Galaxy Classic)

2010-03-04T08:16:00.000-08:00

Has Human Culture Replaced Biological Evolution? (A Galaxy Classic)

Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over. The epoch of species competition came to an end about 10 thousand years ago when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the planet. Since that…

Has Human Culture Replaced Biological Evolution? (A Galaxy Classic/Updated)

2010-03-04T02:16:00.000-08:00

Has Human Culture Replaced Biological Evolution? (A Galaxy Classic/Updated)

The Billion-Year Technology Gap: Implications for the Search for Extraterrestrial Life (A Galaxy Classic)

2010-03-03T08:16:00.000-08:00

The Billion-Year Technology Gap: Implications for the Search for Extraterrestrial Life (A Galaxy Classic)

Are we the lone sentient life in the universe? So far, we have no evidence to the contrary, and yet the odds that not one single other planet has evolved intelligent life would appear, from a statistical standpoint, to be…

Spectacular 3D Video of Mars Mojave -The Red Planet's 'Rosetta Stone'

2010-03-03T02:15:00.000-08:00

Spectacular 3D Video of Mars Mojave -The Red Planet's 'Rosetta Stone'

A dramatic 3D Mars view above is based on terrain modeling from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter data shows “highs and lows” of Mojave Crater. The Mojave is one of the freshest large craters on Mars. A survey of its features…

Millions of Tons of Water Ice Found at Moon’s North Pole (But Could You Drink It?)

2010-03-02T08:15:00.000-08:00

Millions of Tons of Water Ice Found at Moon's North Pole (But Could You Drink It?)

Scientists have detected more than 40 ice-filled craters in the moon’s North Pole using data from a NASA radar that flew aboard India’s Chandrayaan-I. NASA’s Mini-SAR instrument, lightweight, synthetic aperture radar, found more than 40 small craters with water ice….

Galaxies Now Used as Gigantic Lenses to Explore Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe

2010-03-02T03:15:00.000-08:00

Galaxies Now Used as Gigantic Lenses to Explore Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe

Astronomers are now using entire galaxies as lenses to look at other galaxies, providing them with precise tool to measure the size and age of the universe and how rapidly it is expanding. The measurement determines a value for the…

Will the Massive Iceberg that Broke Off From Antarctic Glacier Change Our World?

2010-03-01T11:15:00.000-08:00

Will the Massive Iceberg that Broke Off From Antarctic Glacier Change Our World?

The massive iceberg that recently split off from Antarctica’s Mertz Glacier in the Australian Antarctic Territory might be a driver of future climate change. The Luxembourg-size iceberg broke off from the larger glacier, which is a massive floating ice tongue…

Antarctica Yields Relics of a Dwarf Planet from Creation of Solar System

2010-03-01T06:15:00.000-08:00

Antarctica Yields Relics of a Dwarf Planet from Creation of Solar System

Rocks can be many things: they were probably our earliest weapons, they’ve been ballast on our journeys of exploration, even modern-art pieces. But a pair recovered from Antarctica may be the grandest application yet - tombstones for an entire world….

Searching at Milky Way's Core for Origins of Life (Weekend Feature)

2010-02-28T08:15:00.000-08:00

Searching at Milky Way's Core for Origins of Life (Weekend Feature)

Scientists are using the giant Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to prospect in Sagittarius B2(N), a giant molecular cloud near the center of our Galaxy, some 25,000 light-years from Earth for new, complex molecules in interstellar space that…

Chile Earthquake from the ISS (International Space Station)

2010-02-27T20:15:00.000-08:00

Chile Earthquake from the ISS (International Space Station)

Here’s the first satellite images from the ISS of the earthquake off the coast of Chile taken by Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, who is currently aboard the International Space Station. It’s not high-res, but they’re still quite stunning. In the…

"The Great Silence" -Stephen Hawking & Others Look At Why Life Has Yet to be Discovered Beyond Earth (Weekend Feature)

2010-02-27T08:14:00.000-08:00

"The Great Silence" -Stephen Hawking & Others Look At Why Life Has Yet to be Discovered Beyond Earth (Weekend Feature)

“The idea that we are the only intelligent creatures in a cosmos of a hundred billion galaxies is so preposterous that there are very few astronomers today who would take it seriously. It is safest to assume therefore, that they…

"The Spacecraft Flyby Mystery" - Is There a New Physics Waiting to be Discovered?

2010-02-26T02:14:00.000-08:00

"The Spacecraft Flyby Mystery" - Is There a New Physics Waiting to be Discovered?

When scientists send their spacecraft across the universe, they save fuel by performing "slingshot fly-bys". This is where, rather than firing up the thrusters, the craft changes its trajectory by harnessing the enormous gravitational pull of a planet. However, this…

Viewing the Universe Through "Alien Eyes"

2010-02-25T02:14:00.000-08:00

Viewing the Universe Through "Alien Eyes"

“Our human window on the Universe is terribly small within a stunningly small range of wavelengths. With our eyes we see wavelengths between 0.00004
and 0.00008 of a centimeter (where, not so oddly, the Sun and stars
emit most of their energy). The human visual spectrum from violet to
red is but one octave on an imaginary electromagnetic piano with a
keyboard hundreds of kilometers long.”

James
Kaler, astronomer and author of “Heavens Gate: From Killer Stars to the
Seeds of Life, How We are Connected to the Universe.”

The
image below is an infrared photo of M82 is a remarkable galaxy of
peculiar type in constellation Ursa Major. It is usually classified as
irregular, though probably a distorted disk galaxy, and famous for its
heavy star-forming activity, thus a prototype member of the class of
starbursting galaxies. In the infrared light, M82 is the brightest
galaxy in the sky; it exhibits a so-called infrared excess, being much
brighter at infrared wavelengths than in the visible part of the
spectrum. Over 100 young globular clusters have been discovered in M82
with the Hubble Space Telescope. Their formation is probably another
effect triggered by a tidal encounter with M81 between 50 and several
100 million years ago.

Much of what you see above is outside our human visual band, our eyes
cannot register wave photons no matter how powerful they may be. Longer
that the visual wavelength limit -up to about a millimeter-lies the
infrared. At the short end is violet, with orange, yellow, green, blue
and hundreds of overlapping shades. Longer waves, into
kilometer-wavelengths toward the unknown end are what we call “radio.”

Shorter
than the visual limit are the ultrviolet -all running in the vacuum at
the speed of light. At less than a percent of the wavelength of visual
light are X rays, and at a factor of 100 smaller are the deadly gamma
rays.

One of the great acheivements of modern astronomy
is the entersion of “human sight” -opening the electromagnetic spectrum
to our view and discovery beginning in the 1930s with radio estronomy
and ending with NASA’s great fleet of space observatories and the Fermi
Gamma-ray Space Telescope (FGST, formerly GLAST), working to unveil the
mysteries of the high-energy universe. Launched into orbit on June 11,
FGST studies the most energetic particles of light, observing physical
processes far beyond the capabilities of earthbound laboratories..

A
composite of our Milky Way’s core is compsed of images from the Hubble
Space Telescope in near-infrared light, the Spitzer Space Telescope in
infrared light, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory in X-ray light. A
mosaic of vast star fields is visible, along with dense star clusters,
long filaments of gas and dust, expanding supernova remnants, and the
energetic surroundings of what likely is our Galaxy’s central black
hole.

You Create the Caption

2010-02-24T20:14:00.000-08:00

You Create the Caption

MIT Team Offers 'Snapshot' of Life in Other Universes

2010-02-24T08:14:00.000-08:00

MIT Team Offers 'Snapshot' of Life in Other Universes

Modern cosmology theory holds that our universe may be just one in a vast collection of universes known as the multiverse. MIT physicist Alan Guth has suggested that new universes (known as "pocket universes") are constantly being created, but they cannot be seen from our universe.

In this view, "nature gets a lot of tries — the universe is an experiment that's repeated over and over again, each time with slightly different physical laws, or even vastly different physical laws," says Jaffe.

Some of these universes would collapse instants after forming; in others, the forces between particles would be so weak they could not give rise to atoms or molecules. However, if conditions were suitable, matter would coalesce into galaxies and planets, and if the right elements were present in those worlds, intelligent life could evolve.

Some physicists have theorized that only universes in which the laws of physics are "just so" could support life, and that if things were even a little bit different from our world, intelligent life would be impossible. In that case, our physical laws might be explained "anthropically," meaning that they are as they are because if they were otherwise, no one would be around to notice them.

MIT physics professor Robert Jaffe and his collaborators felt that this proposed anthropic explanation should be subjected to more careful scrutiny, and decided to explore whether universes with different physical laws could support life.

The MIT physicists have showed that universes quite different from ours still have elements similar to carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and could therefore evolve life forms quite similar to us, even when the masses of elementary particles called quarks are dramatically altered.

Jaffe and his collaborators felt that this proposed anthropic explanation should be subjected to more careful scrutiny, so they decided to explore whether universes with different physical laws could support life. Unlike most other studies, in which varying only one constant usually produces an inhospitable universe, they examined more than one constant.

Whether life exists elsewhere in our universe is a longstanding mystery. But for some scientists, there's another interesting question: could there be life in a universe significantly different from our own?

In work recently featured in a cover story in Scientific American, Jaffe, former MIT postdoc, Alejandro Jenkins, and recent MIT graduate Itamar Kimchi showed that universes quite different from ours still have elements similar to carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and could therefore evolve life forms quite similar to us. Even when the masses of the elementary particles are dramatically altered, life may find a way.

"You could change them by significant amounts without eliminating the possibility of organic chemistry in the universe," says Jenkins.

Although bizarre life forms might exist in universes different from ours, Jaffe and his collaborators decided to focus on life based on carbon chemistry. They defined as "congenial to life" those universes in which stable forms of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen would exist.

"If you don't have a stable entity with the chemistry of hydrogen, you're not going to have hydrocarbons, or complex carbohydrates, and you're not going to have life," says Jaffe. "The same goes for carbon and oxygen. Beyond those three we felt the rest is detail.”

They set out to see what might happen to those elements if they altered the masses of elementary particles called quarks. There are six types of quarks, which are the building blocks of protons, neutrons and electrons. The MIT team focused on "up", "down" and "strange" quarks, the most common and lightest quarks, which join together to form protons and neutrons and closely related particles called "hyperons."

In our universe, the down quark is about twice as heavy as the up quark, resulting in neutrons that are 0.1 percent heavier than protons. Jaffe and his colleagues modeled one family of universes in which the down quark was lighter than the up quark, and protons were up to a percent heavier than neutrons. In this scenario, hydrogen would no longer be stable, but its slightly heavier isotopes deuterium or tritium could be. An isotope of carbon known as carbon-14 would also be stable, as would a form of oxygen, so the organic reactions necessary for life would be possible.

The team found a few other congenial universes, including a family where the up and strange quarks have roughly the same mass (in our universe, strange quarks are much heavier and can only be produced in high-energy collisions), while the down quark would be much lighter. In such a universe, atomic nuclei would be made of neutrons and a hyperon called the "sigma minus," which would replace protons. They published their findings in the journal Physical Review D last year.

Jaffe and his collaborators focused on quarks because they know enough about quark interactions to predict what will happen when their masses change. However, "any attempt to address the problem in a broader context is going to be very difficult," says Jaffe, because physicists are limited in their ability to predict the consequences of changing most other physical laws and constants.

A group of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has done related studies examining whether congenial universes could arise even while lacking one of the four fundamental forces of our universe — the weak nuclear force, which enables the reactions that turn neutrons into protons, and vice versa. The researchers showed that tweaking the other three fundamental forces could compensate for the missing weak nuclear force and still allow stable elements to be formed.

That study and the MIT work are different from most other studies in this area in that they examined more than one constant. "Usually people vary one constant and look at the results, which is different than if you vary multiple constants," says Mark Wise, professor of physics at Caltech, who was not involved in the research. Varying only one constant usually produces an inhospitable universe, which can lead to the erroneous conclusion that any other congenial universes are impossible.

One physical parameter that does appear to be extremely finely tuned is the cosmological constant — a measure of the pressure exerted by empty space, which causes the universe to expand or contract. When the constant is positive, space expands, when negative, the universe collapses on itself. In our universe, the cosmological constant is positive but very small — any larger value would cause the universe to expand too rapidly for galaxies to form. However, Wise and his colleagues have shown that it is theoretically possible that changes in primordial cosmological density perturbations could compensate at least for small changes to the value of the cosmological constant.

In the end, there is no way to know for sure what other universes are out there, or what life they may hold. But that will likely not stop physicists from exploring the possibilities, and in the process learning more about our own universe.

Casey Kazan via MIT News Office

Robotic Probes Poised to Explore Milky Way by 2020 -A Galaxy Insight

2010-02-24T02:14:00.000-08:00

Robotic Probes Poised to Explore Milky Way by 2020 -A Galaxy Insight

Before the year 2020, scientists are expected to launch intelligent space robots that will venture out to explore the universe for us.

“Robotic exploration probably will always be the trail blazer for human exploration of far space,” says Wolfgang Fink, physicist and researcher at Caltech. “We haven’t yet landed a human being on Mars but we have a robot there now. In that sense, it’s much easier to send a robotic explorer. When you can take the human out of the loop, that is becoming very exciting.”

While Fink is encouraged by the progress made by missions such as the Mars Phoenix and its robotic arm, he emphasizes that the link between human and robot needs to be eliminated, allowing robots to make their own decisions on what science needs to be carried out. In reference to the Phoenix’s robotic arm he said, “The arms are the tools, but it’s about the intent to move the arms. That’s what we’re after. To have the robot know that something there is interesting and that’s where it needs to go and then to go get a sample from it. That’s what we’ve after. You want to get rid of the joystick, in other words. You want the system to take control of itself and then basically use its own tools to explore.”

The physicist said he envisions a time when humans send out intelligent probes to explore the far reaches of the universe and send information back to Earth - without having to send people on excruciatingly long and dangerous space missions.

“In the old Star Wars movies, especially in the Empire Strikes Back, the empire was sending out probes or floating robots,” said Fink. “Those were ideal robotic explorers because they floated over planets and had sensors and communication capabilities. Once you venture out to other planets, you need something that can operate on its own. You can’t monitor and supervise every single step. You want to deploy something that, on its own, can start a reconnaissance of the area and report back.”

The key attribute robots need to possess is the ability to recognize something of interest, such as a rock or crater, something that a human mind would see as a scientific opportunity. At Caltech, Fink and others are working on programs that use images for robots to distinguish colors, textures, shapes and obstacles. Once artificial intelligence has the ability to do this, if the programming is complex enough, the robot can notice something that is out of place, or a region worth investigating (such as a strangely coloured patch of Mars regolith that a Mars robot will decide to dig into).

The researchers also are working on a wish list of sorts for the spacecraft. The list would include things that NASA and university scientists would like the robot to investigate. “It’s very difficult to teach a spacecraft,” said Fink. “When a geologist goes into the field, they can tell you if they see something that sparks their interest. Based on that interest, it triggers more refined research. But the problem is if you encounter something that scientists had not foreseen, then you run the risk of not detecting it We’ll equip it with a database and a wish list, along with the ability to flag an anomaly.”

Fink said NASA has shown some interest in their work. And that makes sense since NASA is planning an unmanned mission to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, around 2017. The CalTech physicist explained that an orbiter would most likely release a balloon-type vehicle that would float above the surface of the moon and send its findings back to Earth.

“It takes more than hour to send communications back and forth to a space probe at Saturn or Titan,” said Fink. “It is not a problem so much if you are dealing with a Lander, which is immobile, or when you’re dealing with a rover which is not moving too fast. It becomes a significant problem if you deploy a balloon or air ship on Titan, let’s say. They are floating so you need a much quicker reaction time. If there’s a mountain or hill coming up, you need to make a decision right there and then.

The main question is will robotic missions trump our basic human desire to explore space via manned missions?

Posted by Casey Kazan.

http://www.universetoday.com/2008/07/28/by-2020-droids-will-explore-space-for-us/

Invisible Extraterrestrials? One of World's Leading Physicist Says "They Could Exist in Forms We Can't Conceive"

2010-02-23T08:13:00.000-08:00

Invisible Extraterrestrials? One of World's Leading Physicist Says "They Could Exist in Forms We Can't Conceive"

The intriguing remark was made by Lord Martin Rees, a leading cosmologist and astrophysicist who is the president of Britain's Royal Society and astronomer to the Queen of England. Rees, who last month hosted the National Science Academy's first conference on the possibility of alien life, said he believes the existence of extra terrestrial life may be beyond human understanding.

"They could be staring us in the face and we just don't recognize them. The problem is that we're looking for something very much like us, assuming that they at least have something like the same mathematics and technology.”

"I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can't conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can't understand quantum theory, it could be there as aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains."

During the conference entitled 'The Detection of Extra-terrestrial Life and the Consequences for Science and Society', Rees asked whether the discovery of aliens would cause terror or delight on earth, the Telegraph reported.

However, Frank Drake, the founder of SETI and Drake’s Equation, told the conference that satellite TV and the "digital revolution" was making humanity invisible to aliens by cutting the transmission of TV and radio signals into space. The earth is currently surrounded by a 50 light year-wide "shell" of radiation from analogue TV, radio and radar transmissions. According to Drake, digital TV signals would look like white noise to a race of observing aliens.

Although the signals have spread far enough to reach many nearby star systems, they are rapidly vanishing in the wake of digital technology, said Drake. In the 1960s, Drake spearheaded the conversion of the Arecibo Observatory to a radio astronomy center. As a researcher, Drake was involved in the early work on pulsars. Drake also designed the Pioneer plaque with Carl Sagan in 1972, the first physical message sent into space. The plaque was designed to be understandable by extraterrestrials should they encounter it.

Casey Kazan via The Telegraph

Does Google Make Us Smarter? The World Says Resoundingly, "Yes" (See Why Below)

2010-02-23T02:13:00.000-08:00

Does Google Make Us Smarter? The World Says Resoundingly, "Yes" (See Why Below)

The smartest person in the world could well be behind a plow in China or India. Providing universal access to information will allow such people to realize their full potential, providing benefits to the entire world.”

Hal Varian, Google, chief economist

Respondents to the fourth “Future of the Internet” survey , conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project were asked to consider the future of the internet-connected world between now and 2020 and the likely innovations that will occur.

Among the issues addressed in the survey was the provocative question raised by eminent tech scholar Nicholas Carr in a cover story for the Atlantic Monthly magazine in the summer of 2009: “Is Google Making us Stupid?”

Carr argued that the ease of online searching and distractions of browsing through the web were possibly limiting his capacity to concentrate.

“I’m not thinking the way I used to,” he wrote, in part because he is becoming a skimming, browsing reader, rather than a deep and engaged reader. “The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas…. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with 'content,’ we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.”

Jamais Cascio, an affiliate at the Institute for the Future and senior fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, challenged Carr in a subsequent article in the Atlantic Monthly. Cascio made the case that the array of problems facing humanity - the end of the fossil-fuel era, the fragility of the global food web, growing population density, and the spread of pandemics, among others - will force us to get smarter if we are to survive.

“Most people don’t realize that this process is already under way,” he wrote. “In fact, it’s happening all around us, across the full spectrum of how we understand intelligence. It’s visible in the hive mind of the Internet, in the powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines, and in the development of drugs that some people (myself included) have discovered let them study harder, focus better, and stay awake longer with full clarity.”

Cascio argued that while the proliferation of technology and media can challenge humans’ capacity to concentrate there were signs that we are developing “fluid intelligence-the ability to find meaning in confusion and solve new problems, independent of acquired knowledge.” He also expressed hope that geeks will develop tools to help people find and assess information smartly.

With that as backdrop, respondents were asked to indicate which of two statements best reflected their view on Google’s effect on intelligence. As shown, 76% of the experts agreed with the statement, “By 2020, people’s use of the internet has enhanced human intelligence; as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information they become smarter and make better choices. Nicholas Carr was wrong: Google does not make us stupid.”

Respondents were also asked to “share your view of the internet’s influence on the future of human intelligence in 2020 — what is likely to stay the same and what will be different in the way human intellect evolves?” What follows is a selection of the hundreds of written elaborations and some of the recurring themes in those answers:

Nicholas Carr and Google staffers have their say:

• “I feel compelled to agree with myself. But I would add that the Net’s effect on our intellectual lives will not be measured simply by average IQ scores. What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.”– Nicholas Carr

• ”My conclusion is that when the only information on a topic is a handful of essays or books, the best strategy is to read these works with total concentration. But when you have access to thousands of articles, blogs, videos, and people with expertise on the topic, a good strategy is to skim first to get an overview. Skimming and concentrating can and should coexist. I would also like to say that Carr has it mostly backwards when he says that Google is built on the principles of Taylorism [the institution of time-management and worker-activity standards in industrial settings]. Taylorism shifts responsibility from worker to management, institutes a standard method for each job, and selects workers with skills unique for a specific job. Google does the opposite, shifting responsibility from management to the worker, encouraging creativity in each job, and encouraging workers to shift among many different roles in their career….Carr is of course right that Google thrives on understanding data. But making sense of data (both for Google internally and for its users) is not like building the same artifact over and over on an assembly line; rather it requires creativity, a mix of broad and deep knowledge, and a host of connections to other people. That is what Google is trying to facilitate.” — Peter Norvig, Google Research Director

• ”Google will make us more informed. The smartest person in the world could well be behind a plow in China or India. Providing universal access to information will allow such people to realize their full potential, providing benefits to the entire world.” - Hal Varian, Google, chief economist

The resources of the internet and search engines will shift cognitive capacities. We won’t have to remember as much, but we’ll have to think harder and have better critical thinking and analytical skills. Less time devoted to memorization gives people more time to master those new skills.

• ”Google allows us to be more creative in approaching problems and more integrative in our thinking. We spend less time trying to recall and more time generating solutions.” — Paul Jones, ibiblio, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• “Google will make us stupid and intelligent at the same time. In the future, we will live in a transparent 3D mobile media cloud that surrounds us everywhere. In this cloud, we will use intelligent machines, to whom we delegate both simple and complex tasks. Therefore, we will lose the skills we needed in the old days (e.g., reading paper maps while driving a car). But we will gain the skill to make better choices (e.g., knowing to choose the mortgage that is best for you instead of best for the bank). All in all, I think the gains outweigh the losses.” — Marcel Bullinga, Dutch Futurist at futurecheck.com

• ”I think that certain tasks will be ‘offloaded’ to Google or other Internet services rather than performed in the mind, especially remembering minor details. But really, that is a role that paper has taken over many centuries: did Gutenberg make us stupid? On the other hand, the Internet is likely to be front-and-centre in any developments related to improvements in neuroscience and human cognition research.” — Dean Bubley, wireless industry consultant

• “What the internet (here subsumed tongue-in-cheek under “Google”) does is to support SOME parts of human intelligence, such as analysis, by REPLACING other parts such as memory. Thus, people will be more intelligent about, say, the logistics of moving around a geography because “Google” will remember the facts and relationships of various locations on their behalf. People will be better able to compare the revolutions of 1848 and 1789 because “Google” will remind them of all the details as needed. This is the continuation ad infinitum of the process launched by abacuses and calculators: we have become more “stupid” by losing our arithmetic skills but more intelligent at evaluating numbers.” — Andreas Kluth, writer, Economist magazine

• “It’s a mistake to treat intelligence as an undifferentiated whole. No doubt we will become worse at doing some things (’more stupid’) requiring rote memory of information that is now available though Google. But with this capacity freed, we may (and probably will) be capable of more advanced integration and evaluation of information (’more intelligent’).” — Stephen Downes, National Research Council, Canada

• “The new learning system, more informal perhaps than formal, will eventually win since we must use technology to cause everyone to learn more, more economically and faster if everyone is to be economically productive and prosperous. Maintaining the status quo will only continue the existing win/lose society that we have with those who can learn in present school structure doing ok, while more and more students drop out, learn less, and fail to find a productive niche in the future.” — Ed Lyell, former member of the Colorado State Board of Education and Telecommunication Advisory Commission

• “The question is flawed: Google will make intelligence different. As Carr himself suggests, Plato argued that reading and writing would make us stupid, and from the perspective of a preliterate, he was correct. Holding in your head information that is easily discoverable on Google will no longer be a mark of intelligence, but a side-show act. Being able to quickly and effectively discover information and solve problems, rather than do it “in your head,” will be the metric we use.” — Alex Halavais, vice president, Association of Internet Researchers

• ”What Google does do is simply to enable us to shift certain tasks to the network — we no longer need to rote-learn certain seldomly-used facts (the periodic table, the post code of Ballarat) if they’re only a search away, for example. That’s problematic, of course — we put an awful amount of trust in places such as Wikipedia where such information is stored, and in search engines like Google through which we retrieve it — but it doesn’t make us stupid, any more than having access to a library (or in fact, access to writing) makes us stupid. That said, I don’t know that the reverse is true, either: Google and the Net also don’t automatically make us smarter. By 2020, we will have even more access to even more information, using even more sophisticated search and retrieval tools — but how smartly we can make use of this potential depends on whether our media literacies and capacities have caught up, too.” — Axel Bruns, Associate Professor, Queensland University of Technology

• “My ability to do mental arithmetic is worse than my grandfather’s because I grew up in an era with pervasive personal calculators…. I am not stupid compared to my grandfather, but I believe the development of my brain has been changed by the availability of technology. The same will happen (or is happening) as a result of the Googleization of knowledge. People are becoming used to bite sized chunks of information that are compiled and sorted by an algorithm. This must be having an impact on our brains, but it is too simplistic to say that we are becoming stupid as a result of Google.” — Robert Acklund, Australian National University

• “We become adept at using useful tools, and hence perfect new skills. Other skills may diminish. I agree with Carr that we may on the average become less patient, less willing to read through a long, linear text, but we may also become more adept at dealing with multiple factors…. Note that I said 'less patient,’ which is not the same as 'lower IQ.’ I suspect that emotional and personality changes will probably more marked than 'intelligence’ changes.” — Larry Press, California State University, Dominguz Hills

Technology isn’t the problem here. It is people’s inherent character traits. The internet and search engines just enable people to be more of what they already are. If they are motivated to learn and shrewd, they will use new tools to explore in exciting new ways. If they are lazy or incapable of concentrating, they will find new ways to be distracted and goof off.

• “The question is all about people’s choices. If we value introspection as a road to insight, if we believe that long experience with issues contributes to good judgment on those issues, if we (in short) want knowledge that search engines don’t give us, we’ll maintain our depth of thinking and Google will only enhance it. There is a trend, of course, toward instant analysis and knee-jerk responses to events that degrades a lot of writing and discussion. We can’t blame search engines for that…. What search engines do is provide more information, which we can use either to become dilettantes (Carr’s worry) or to bolster our knowledge around the edges and do fact-checking while we rely mostly on information we’ve gained in more robust ways for our core analyses. Google frees the time we used to spend pulling together the last 10% of facts we need to complete our research. I read Carr’s article when The Atlantic first published it, but I used a web search to pull it back up and review it before writing this response. Google is my friend.” — Andy Oram, editor and blogger, O’Reilly Media

• ”Google isn’t making us stupid — but it is making many of us intellectually lazy. This has already become a big problem in university classrooms. For my undergrad majors in Communication Studies, Google may take over the hard work involved in finding good source material for written assignments. Unless pushed in the right direction, students will opt for the top 10 or 15 hits as their research strategy. And it’s the students most in need of research training who are the least likely to avail themselves of more sophisticated tools like Google Scholar. Like other major technologies, Google’s search functionality won’t push the human intellect in one predetermined direction. It will reinforce certain dispositions in the end-user: stronger intellects will use Google as a creative tool, while others will let Google do the thinking for them.” — David Ellis, York University, Toronto

• ”For people who are readers and who are willing to explore new sources and new arguments, we can only be made better by the kinds of searches we will be able to do. Of course, the kind of Googled future that I am concerned about is the one in which my every desire is anticipated, and my every fear avoided by my guardian Google. Even then, I might not be stupid, just not terribly interesting.” — Oscar Gandy, emeritus professor, University of Pennsylvania

• “I don’t think having access to information can ever make anyone stupider. I don’t think an adult’s IQ can be influenced much either way by reading anything and I would guess that smart people will use the Internet for smart things and stupid people will use it for stupid things in the same way that smart people read literature and stupid people read crap fiction. On the whole, having easy access to more information will make society as a group smarter though.” — Sandra Kelly, market researcher, 3M Corporation

• ”The story of humankind is that of work substitution and human enhancement. The Neolithic revolution brought the substitution of some human physical work by animal work. The Industrial revolution brought more substitution of human physical work by machine work. The Digital revolution is implying a significant substitution of human brain work by computers and ICTs in general. Whenever a substitution has taken place, men have been able to focus on more qualitative tasks, entering a virtuous cycle: the more qualitative the tasks, the more his intelligence develops; and the more intelligent he gets, more qualitative tasks he can perform…. As obesity might be the side-effect of physical work substitution by machines, mental laziness can become the watermark of mental work substitution by computers, thus having a negative effect instead of a positive one.” — Ismael Peña-Lopez, lecturer at the Open University of Catalonia, School of Law and Political Science

• “Well, of course, it depends on what one means by 'stupid’ — I imagine that Google, and its as yet unimaginable new features and capabilities will both improve and decrease some of our human capabilities. Certainly it’s much easier to find out stuff, including historical, accurate, and true stuff, as well as entertaining, ironic, and creative stuff. It’s also making some folks lazier, less concerned about investing in the time and energy to arrive at conclusions, etc.” — Ron Rice, University of California, Santa Barbara

• ”Nick [Carr] says, 'Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.’ Besides finding that a little hard to believe (I know Nick to be a deep diver, still), there is nothing about Google, or the Net, to keep anyone from diving — and to depths that were not reachable before the Net came along.”– Doc Searls, co-author of “The Cluetrain Manifesto”

It’s not Google’s fault if users create stupid queries.

• ”To be more precise, unthinking use of the Internet, and in particular untutored use of Google, has the ability to make us stupid, but that is not a foregone conclusion. More and more of us experience attention deficit, like Bruce Friedman in the Nicholas Carr article, but that alone does not stop us making good choices provided that the ‘factoids’ of information are sound that we use to make out decisions. The potential for stupidity comes where we rely on Google (or Yahoo, or Bing, or any engine) to provide relevant information in response to poorly constructed queries, frequently one-word queries, and then base decisions or conclusions on those returned items.” — Peter Griffiths, former Head of Information at the Home Office within the Office of the Chief Information Officer, United Kingdom

• “The problem isn’t Google; it’s what Google helps us find. For some, Google will let them find useless content that does not challenge their minds. But for others, Google will lead them to expect answers to questions, to explore the world, to see and think for themselves.” — Esther Dyson, longtime internet expert and investor

• ”People are already using Google as an adjunct to their own memory. For example, I have a hunch about something, need facts to support, and Google comes through for me. Sometimes, I see I’m wrong, and I appreciate finding that out before I open my mouth.” — Craig Newmark, founder Craig’s List

• “Google is a data access tool. Not all of that data is useful or correct. I suspect the amount of misleading data is increasing faster than the amount of correct data. There should also be a distinction made between data and information. Data is meaningless in the absence of an organizing context. That means that different people looking at the same data are likely to come to different conclusions. There is a big difference with what a world class artist can do with a paint brush as opposed to a monkey. In other words, the value of Google will depend on what the user brings to the game. The value of data is highly dependent on the quality of the question being asked.” — Robert Lunn, consultant, FocalPoint Analytics

The big struggle is over what kind of information Google and other search engines kick back to users. In the age of social media where users can be their own content creators it might get harder and harder to separate high-quality material from junk.

• “Access to more information isn’t enough — the information needs to be correct, timely, and presented in a manner that enables the reader to learn from it. The current network is full of inaccurate, misleading, and biased information that often crowds out the valid information. People have not learned that 'popular’ or 'available’ information is not necessarily valid.”– Gene Spafford, Purdue University CERIAS, Association for Computing Machinery U.S. Public Policy Council

• ”If we take ‘Google’ to mean the complex social, economic and cultural phenomenon that is a massively interactive search and retrieval information system used by people and yet also using them to generate its data, I think Google will, at the very least, not make us smarter and probably will make us more stupid in the sense of being reliant on crude, generalised approximations of truth and information finding. Where the questions are easy, Google will therefore help; where the questions are complex, we will flounder.” — Matt Allen, former president of the Association of Internet Researchers and associate professor of internet studies at Curtin University in Australia

• ”The challenge is in separating that wheat from the chaff, as it always has been with any other source of mass information, which has been the case all the way back to ancient institutions like libraries. Those users (of Google, cable TV, or libraries) who can do so efficiently will beat the odds, becoming 'smarter’ and making better choices. However, the unfortunately majority will continue to remain, as Carr says, stupid.” — Christopher Saunders, managing editor, internetnews.com

• “The problem with Google that is lurking just under the clean design home page is the “tragedy of the commons”: the link quality seems to go down every year. The link quality may actually not be going down but the signal to noise is getting worse as commercial schemes lead to more and more junk links.” — Glen Edens, former senior vice president and director at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, chief scientist Hewlett Packard

Literary intelligence is very much under threat.

• ”If one defines — or partially defines — IQ as literary intelligence, the ability to sit with a piece of textual material and analyze it for complex meaning and retain derived knowledge, then we are indeed in trouble. Literary culture is in trouble…. We are spending less time reading books, but the amount of pure information that we produce as a civilization continues to expand exponentially. That these trends are linked, that the rise of the latter is causing the decline of the former, is not impossible…. One could draw reassurance from today’s vibrant Web culture if the general surfing public, which is becoming more at home in this new medium, displayed a growing propensity for literate, critical thought. But take a careful look at the many blogs, post comments, Facebook pages, and online conversations that characterize today’s Web 2.0 environment…. This type of content generation, this method of 'writing,’ is not only sub-literate, it may actually undermine the literary impulse…. Hours spent texting and e-mailing, according to this view, do not translate into improved writing or reading skills.” — Patrick Tucker, senior editor, The Futurist magazine

New literacies will be required to function in this world. In fact, the internet might change the very notion of what it means to be smart. Retrieval of good information will be prized. Maybe a race of “extreme Googlers” will come into being.

• ”The critical uncertainty here is whether people will learn and be taught the essential literacies necessary for thriving in the current infosphere: attention, participation, collaboration, crap detection, and network awareness are the ones I’m concentrating on. I have no reason to believe that people will be any less credulous, gullible, lazy, or prejudiced in ten years, and am not optimistic about the rate of change in our education systems, but it is clear to me that people are not going to be smarter without learning the ropes.” — Howard Rheingold, author of several prominent books on technology, teacher at Stanford University and University of California-Berkeley

• ”Google makes us simultaneously smarter and stupider. Got a question? With instant access to practically every piece of information ever known to humankind, we take for granted we’re only a quick web search away from the answer. Of course, that doesn’t mean we understand it. In the coming years we will have to continue to teach people to think critically so they can better understand the wealth of information available to them.” — Jeska Dzwigalski, Linden Lab

• ”We might imagine that in ten years, our definition of intelligence will look very different. By then, we might agree on ’smart’ as something like a ‘networked’ or ‘distributed’ intelligence where knowledge is our ability to piece together various and disparate bits of information into coherent and novel forms.” — Christine Greenhow, educational researcher, University of Minnesota and Yale Information and Society Project

• ”Human intellect will shift from the ability to retain knowledge towards the skills to discover the information i.e. a race of extreme Googlers (or whatever discovery tools come next). The world of information technology will be dominated by the algorithm designers and their librarian cohorts. Of course, the information they’re searching has to be right in the first place. And who decides that?” — Sam Michel, founder Chinwag, community for digital media practitioners in the United Kingdom

One new “literacy” that might help is the capacity to build and use social networks to help people solve problems.

• “There’s no doubt that the internet is an extension of human intelligence, both individual and collective. But the extent to which it’s able to augment intelligence depends on how much people are able to make it conform to their needs. Being able to look up who starred in the 2nd season of the Tracey Ullman show on Wikipedia is the lowest form of intelligence augmentation; being able to build social networks and interactive software that helps you answer specific questions or enrich your intellectual life is much more powerful. This will matter even more as the internet becomes more pervasive. Already my iPhone functions as the external, silicon lobe of my brain. For it to help me become even smarter, it will need to be even more effective and flexible than it already is. What worries me is that device manufacturers and internet developers are more concerned with lock-in than they are with making people smarter. That means it will be a constant struggle for individuals to reclaim their intelligence from the networks they increasingly depend upon.” — Dylan Tweney, senior editor, Wired magazine

Nothing can be bad that delivers more information to people, more efficiently. It might be that some people lose their way in this world, but overall, societies will be substantially smarter.

• ”The Internet has facilitated orders of magnitude improvements in access to information. People now answer questions in a few moments that a couple of decades back they would not have bothered to ask, since getting the answer would have been impossibly difficult.” — John Pike, Director, globalsecurity.org

• “Google is simply one step, albeit a major one, in the continuing continuum of how technology changes our generation and use of data, information, and knowledge that has been evolving for decades. As the data and information goes digital and new information is created, which is at an ever increasing rate, the resultant ability to evaluate, distill, coordinate, collaborate, problem solve only increases along a similar line. Where it may appear a 'dumbing down’ has occurred on one hand, it is offset (I believe in multiples) by how we learn in new ways to learn, generate new knowledge, problem solve, and innovate.” — Mario Morino, Chairman, Venture Philanthropy Partners

Google itself and other search technologies will get better over time and that will help solve problems created by too-much-information and too-much-distraction.

• “I’m optimistic that Google will get smarter by 2020 or will be replaced by a utility that is far better than Google. That tool will allow queries to trigger chains of high-quality information — much closer to knowledge than flood. Humans who are able to access these chains in high-speed, immersive ways will have more patters available to them that will aid decision-making. All of this optimism will only work out if the battle for the soul of the Internet is won by the right people — the people who believe that open, fast, networks are good for all of us.” — Susan Crawford, former member of President Obama’s National Economic Council, now on the law faculty at the University of Michigan

• ”If I am using Google to find an answer, it is very likely the answer I find will be on a message board in which other humans are collaboratively debating answers to questions. I will have to choose between the answer I like the best. Or it will force me to do more research to find more information. Google never breeds passivity or stupidity in me: It catalyzes me to explore further. And along the way I bump into more humans, more ideas and more answers.” — Joshua Fouts, Senior Fellow for Digital Media & Public Policy at the Center for the Study of the Presidency

The more we use the internet and search, the more dependent on it we will become.

• ”As the Internet gets more sophisticated it will enable a greater sense of empowerment among users. We will not be more stupid, but we will probably be more dependent upon it.” — Bernie Hogan, Oxford Internet Institute

Even in little ways, including in dinner table chitchat, Google can make people smarter.

• “[Family dinner conversations] have changed markedly because we can now look things up at will. That’s just one small piece of evidence I see that having Google at hand is great for civilization.” — Jerry Michalski, president, Sociate

'We know more than ever, and this makes us crazy.’

• “The answer is really: both. Google has already made us smarter, able to make faster choices from more information. Children, to say nothing of adults, scientists and professionals in virtually every field, can seek and discover knowledge in ways and with scope and scale that was unfathomable before Google. Google has undoubtedly expanded our access to knowledge that can be experienced on a screen, or even processed through algorithms, or mapped. Yet Google has also made us careless too, or stupid when, for instance, Google driving directions don’t get us to the right place. It has confused and overwhelmed us with choices, and with sources that are not easily differentiated or verified. Perhaps it’s even alienated us from the physical world itself — from knowledge and intelligence that comes from seeing, touching, hearing, breathing and tasting life. From looking into someone’s eyes and having them look back into ours. Perhaps it’s made us impatient, or shortened our attention spans, or diminished our ability to understand long thoughts. It’s enlightened anxiety. We know more than ever, and this makes us crazy.” — Andrew Nachison, co-founder, We Media

A final thought: Maybe Google won’t make us more stupid, but it should make us more modest.

• ”There is and will be lots more to think about, and a lot more are thinking. No, not more stupid. Maybe more humble.” — Sheizaf Rafaeli, Center for the Study of the Information Society, University of Haifa

Read more about responses to other “tension pairs” tested in the survey as well as a more complete description of the survey methodology and respondents at pewinternet.org.

"Global Warming, Not Asteroids Caused Planet's Mass Extinction Events" - Leading Climate-Change Experts

2010-02-22T02:13:00.000-08:00

"Global Warming, Not Asteroids Caused Planet's Mass Extinction Events" - Leading Climate-Change Experts

"If
you look at the fossil record, it is just littered with dead bodies
from past catastrophes," observes University of Washington
paleontologist Peter Ward. Ward says that only one extinction in
Earth's past was caused by an asteroid impact – the event 65 million
years ago that ended the age of the dinosaurs. All the rest, he claims,
were caused by global warming.

Ward’s Under a Green Sky explores extinctions in Earth's past and predicts extinctions to come in the future.

Ward
demonstrates that the ancient past is not just of academic concern.
Everyone has heard about how an asteroid did in the dinosaurs, and NASA
and other agencies now track Near Earth objects. Unfortunately, we may
not be protecting ourselves against the likeliest cause of our species’
demise. Ward explains how those extinctions happened, and then applies
those chilling lessons to the modern day: expect drought, superstorms,
poison–belching oceans, mass extinction of much life, and sickly green
skies.

The significant points Ward stresses are geologically
rapid climate change has been the underlying cause of most great
“extinction” events. Those events have been, observed Harvard
evolutionary biologist Stephen Gould, major drivers of evolution.
Drastic climate change has not always been gradual; there is solid
empirical evidence of catastrophic warming events taking place in
centuries, perhaps even decades. The impact of atmospheric warming is
most potent in its modification of ocean chemistry and of circulating
currents; warming inevitably leads to non-mixing anoxic dead seas. We
are already in the middle, not the beginning, of an anthropogenic
global warming, caused by agriculture and deforestation, which began
some 10,000 years ago but which is now accelerating exponentially;
though the earliest wave of anthropogenic warming has been stabilizing
and beneficial to human development, it appears to have the potential
for catastrophic effects within a lifetime or two.

Looking
at the ancient evidence, Ward notes that ice caps began to shrink.
“Melting all the ice caps causes a 75-meter increase in sea level will
remove every coastal city on our planet.” It will also cover earth’s
most productive farmland, the author warns, adding, “It will happen if
we do not somehow control CO2 rise in the atmosphere.”

A new analysis of the geological record of
the Earth’s sea level, carried out by scientists at Princeton and
Harvard universities supports Ward using a novel statistical approach that reveals the
planet’s polar ice sheets are vulnerable to large-scale melting even
under moderate global warming scenarios. Such melting would lead to a
large and relatively rapid rise in global sea level.

According to the analysis, an additional 2 degrees of global warming
could commit the planet to 6 to 9 meters (20 to 30 feet) of long-term
sea level rise. This rise would inundate low-lying coastal areas where
hundreds of millions of people now reside. It would permanently
submerge New Orleans and other parts of southern Louisiana, much of
southern Florida and other parts of the U.S. East Coast, much of
Bangladesh, and most of the Netherlands, unless unprecedented and
expensive coastal protection were undertaken. And while the
researchers’ findings indicate that such a rise would likely take
centuries to complete, if emissions of greenhouse gases are not abated,
the planet could be committed during this century to a level of warming
sufficient to trigger this outcome.

The last interglacial stage
provides a historical analog for futures with a fairly moderate amount
of warming; the high sea levels during the stage suggest that
significant chunks of major ice sheets could disappear over a period of
centuries in such futures.

Previous geological studies of sea
level benchmarks such as coral reefs and beaches had shown that, at
many localities, local sea levels during the last interglacial stage
were higher than today. But local sea levels differ from those in this
earlier stage; one major contributing factor is that the changing
masses of the ice sheets alter the planet’s gravitational field and
deform the solid Earth. As a consequence, inferring global sea level
from local geological sea level markers requires a geographically broad
data set, a model of the physics of sea level, and a means to integrate
the two. The study’s authors provide all three, integrating the data
and the physics with a statistical approach that allows them to assess
the probability distribution of past global sea level and its rate of
change.

The findings indicate that sea level during the last
interglacial stage rose for centuries at least two to three times
faster than the recent rate, and that both the Greenland and West
Antarctic ice sheet likely shrank significantly and made important
contributions to sea level rise. However, the relative timing of
temperature change and sea level change during the last interglacial
stage is fairly uncertain, so it is not possible to infer from the
analysis how long an exposure to peak temperatures during this stage
was needed to commit the planet to peak sea levels.

A similar
study by a team of scientists from Bristol, Cardiff and Texas A&M
universities braved the lions and hyenas of a small East African
village to extract microfossils from rocks which have revealed the
level of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere at the time of the formation of
the ice-cap. New carbon dioxide data confirm that formation of the
Antarctic ice-cap some 33.5 million years ago was due to declining
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Professor Paul Pearson from
Cardiff University's School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, who led the
mission to the remote East Africa village of Stakishari said: "About 34
million years ago the Earth experienced a mysterious cooling trend.
Glaciers and small ice sheets developed in Antarctica, sea levels fell
and temperate forests began to displace tropical-type vegetation in
many areas.

"The period culminated in the rapid development of a
continental-scale ice sheet on Antarctica, which has been there ever
since. We therefore set out to establish whether there was a
substantial decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels as the
Antarctic ice sheet began to grow."

Co-author Dr Bridget Wade
from Texas A&M University Department of Geology and Geophysics
added: "This was the biggest climate switch since the extinction of the
dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Our study is the first to provide a
direct link between the establishment of an ice sheet on Antarctica and
atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and therefore confirms the
relationship between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and global
climate."

Geologists have long speculated that the formation of
the Antarctic ice-cap was caused by a gradually diminishing natural
greenhouse effect. The study's findings, published in Nature online,
confirm that atmospheric CO2 started to decline about 34 million years
ago, during the period known to geologists as the Eocene - Oligocene
climate transition, and that the ice sheet began to form about 33.5
million years ago when CO2 in the atmosphere reached a tipping point of
around 760 parts per million.

The team mapped large expanses of
bush and wilderness and pieced together the underlying local rock
formations using occasional outcrops of rocks and stream beds.
Eventually they discovered sediments of the right age near a
traditional African village called Stakishari. By assembling a drilling
rig and extracting hundreds of meters of samples from under the ground
they were able to obtain exactly the piece of Earth’s history they had
been searching for.

Ward is encouraged that we are
beginning to make changes in their daily lives and demanding action
from their leaders -”that we are on a planet that has violent
convulsions, and that we humans are playing with nature in such a way
that we could recreate what were some really awful times in earth’s
history, that we really tinker with the earth’s atmosphere at our
peril.”

Posted by Casey Kazan from material provided by Princeton University and Bristol University

http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2009/6546.html

The World's Largest Tropical Ice Field is Vanishing

2010-02-20T18:12:00.000-08:00

The World's Largest Tropical Ice Field is Vanishing

The Quelccaya Ice Cap in the heart of the Peruvian Andres, is the
largest
tropical body of ice in the world. The ice cap is at an average
altitude of 5,470 meters (18,600 ft) and spans an area of 44 square
kilometers (17 miles). As the ice cap is retreating, it is exposing
almost perfectly preserved plant specimens dating back 5,200 year,
indicating that it has been more than 50 centuries since the ice cap
was smaller than it is today.

According to recent research, one of the glaciers in this ice cap, the
Peruvian Qori Kalis, like the snowfields of Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro,
is rapidly melting and could soon vanish completely (comparisons with
previous mapping showed 33% of Mount Kilimanjaro’s ice had disappeared in
the last two decades - 82% since 1912).

The icecap has lost approximately 20% of its area since 1978, and
the current rate of retreat is increasing. Ice cores taken from Upper
Fremont Glacier in Wyoming show an oxygen isotope profile similar to
that of the Quelccaya ice cores at the end of the Little Ice Age, a
period of cooler global temperatures between the years 1550 and 1850.
The sudden alterations in the oxygen isotope ratio found in ice core
samples from these two remotely located glaciers, provide evidence of a
sudden global climate change in the mid-latitude regions of the planet.

“I would not be surprised to see half of it disappear in this coming
year,” said climatologist Lonnie Thompson, from Ohio State University.
Thompson has been studying the Qori Kalis glacier since 1978.

“In the first 10 years [that] we observed the glacier, it was
retreating 6 meters (19.7 feet) every year,” Thompson said. “In the
last few years, it has started retreating 60 meters (197 feet) every
year - a 10-fold increase. On top of that you will have natural
phenomena like El Nino, which release heat into the lower atmosphere,”
he predicted.

“The combination of those two things will have a big impact on glaciers
throughout the tropics,” said Thompson. “No matter what we do, we are
going to lose the glaciers on Kilimanjaro and the lower elevation
glaciers in the Andes.”

“Kilimanjaro could be gone by 2020,” he suggested. “In the Andes, some
of the glaciers are bigger, but I think we are talking 30 to 50 years.”

This will cause many problems for some of the poorest people on earth
since they depend upon annual glacial melt to sustain their crops. Loss
of these glaciers will cause a huge drought and crop failure.

“These changes are going to take place and these people will be impacted,” observed Thompson. “They have to find ways to adapt.”

Posted by Jason McManus.

Related Galaxy posts:

Monitoring Climate Change -Expert Says We Need Lunar Observatories

Source Link

James Cameron on "Avatar": The Message for Spaceship Earth (VIDEO)

2010-02-20T01:12:00.000-08:00

James Cameron on "Avatar": The Message for Spaceship Earth (VIDEO)

In his new blockbuster Avatar, director James Cameron places his bet squarely on the “life as carbon-based DNA” camp. With NASA’s Kepler mission showing the potential to detect Earth-sized objects, habitable moons may soon become science fact. If we find them nearby, a new paper by Smithsonian astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger shows that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be able to study their atmospheres and detect key gases like carbon dioxide, oxygen, and water vapor.

“If Pandora existed, we potentially could detect it and study its atmosphere in the next decade,” said Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

So far, planet searches have spotted hundreds of Jupiter-sized objects in a range of orbits. Gas giants, while easier to detect, could not serve as homes for life as we know it. However, scientists have speculated whether a rocky moon orbiting a gas giant could be life-friendly, if that planet
orbited within the star’s habitable zone (the region warm enough for liquid
water to exist).

“All of the gas giant planets in our solar system have rocky and icy moons,” said Kaltenegger. “That raises the possibility that alien Jupiters will also have moons. Some of those may be Earth-sized and able to hold onto an atmosphere.”

Kepler looks for planets that cross in front of their host stars, which creates a mini-eclipse and dims the star by a small but detectable amount. Such a transit lasts only hours and requires exact alignment of star and planet along our line of sight. Kepler will examine thousands of stars to
find a few with transiting worlds.

Once they have found an alien Jupiter, astronomers can look for orbiting moons, or exomoons. A moon’s gravity would tug on the planet and either speed or slow its transit, depending on whether the moon leads or trails the planet. The resulting transit duration variations would indicate the moon’s existence.

Once a moon is found, the next obvious question would be: Does it have an atmosphere? If it does, those gases will absorb a fraction of the star’s light during the transit, leaving a tiny, telltale fingerprint to the atmosphere’s composition.

The signal is strongest for large worlds with hot, puffy atmospheres, but an Earth-sized moon could be studied if conditions are just right. For example, the separation of moon and planet needs to be large enough that we could catch just the moon in transit, while its planet is off to one side of the star.

Kaltenegger calculated what conditions are best for examining the atmospheres of alien moons. She found that alpha Centauri A, the system featured in Avatar, would be an excellent target.

“Alpha Centauri A is a bright, nearby star very similar to our Sun, so it gives us a strong signal” Kaltenegger explained. “You would only need a handful of transits to find water, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and methane on an Earth-like moon such as Pandora.”

“If the Avatar movie is right in its vision, we could characterize that moon with the James Webb Space Telescope in the near future,” she added.

While Alpha Centauri A offers tantalizing possibilities, small, dim, red dwarf stars are better targets in the hunt for habitable planets or moons. The habitable zone for a red dwarf is closer to the star, which increases the probability of a transit.

Astronomers have debated whether tidal locking could be a problem for red dwarfs. A planet close enough to be in the habitable zone would also be close enough for the star’s gravity to slow it until one side always faces the star. (The same process keeps one side of the Moon always facing Earth.) One side of the planet then would be baked in constant sunlight, while the
other side would freeze in constant darkness.

An exomoon in the habitable zone wouldn’t face this dilemma. The moon would be tidally locked to its planet, not to the star, and therefore would have regular day-night cycles just like Earth. Its atmosphere would moderate temperatures, and plant life would have a source of energy moon-wide.

“Alien moons orbiting gas giant planets may be more likely to be habitable than tidally locked Earth-sized planets or super-Earths,” said Kaltenegger. “We should certainly keep them in mind as we work toward the ultimate goal of finding alien life.”

So what about Cameron’s Na’vi? Will our first discovery of life beyond Earth be DNA and carbon-based? At once humanoid and tantalizingly exotic, the 10-foot, blue-skinned Na'vi come with supermodel dimensions; long articulated digits, the better to grip with; and the slanted eyes and ears of a cat.

In his famous lecture, “Life in the Universe,” Stephen Hawking observed that what we normally think of as ‘life’ is based on chains of carbon atoms, with a few other atoms, such as nitrogen or phosphorous. We can imagine that one might have life with some other chemical basis, such as silicon, “but carbon seems the most favorable case, because it has the richest chemistry.”

Several eminent scientists think otherwise, that life in the universe could have a myriad of possible biochemical foundations ranging from life in ammonia to life in hydrocarbons and silicon. Silicates have a rich chemistry with a propensity for forming chains, rings, and sheets.

One of the founders on modern genetics, Cairn-Smith, argued that layers of crystalline silicates functioned as a primitive form of life on early Earth, before they evolved into carbon-based life forms.

The Earth (and we’re assuming, Pandora) was formed largely out of the heavier elements, including carbon and oxygen.

Somehow, Hawking observes, “some of these atoms came to be arranged in the form of molecules of DNA. One possibility is that the formation of something like DNA, which could reproduce itself, is extremely unlikely. However, in a universe with a very large, or infinite, number of stars, one would expect it to occur in a few stellar systems, but they would be very widely separated.”

Other prominent scientists have warned that we humans may be blinded by our familiarity with carbon and Earth-like conditions. In other words, what we're looking for may not even lie in our version of a "sweet spot" in the Galactic Habitable Zone. After all, even here on Earth, one species "sweet spot" is another species worst nightmare.

In any case, it is not beyond the realm of feasibility that our first encounter with extraterrestrial life will not be a solely carbon-based fete.

Alternative biochemists speculate that there are several atoms and solvents that could potentially spawn life. Because carbon has worked for the conditions on Earth, we speculate that the same must be true throughout the universe. In reality, there are many elements that could potentially do the trick. Even counter-intuitive elements such as arsenic may be capable of supporting life under the right conditions.

Even on Earth some marine algae incorporate arsenic into complex organic molecules such as arsenosugars and arsenobetaines.

Several other small life forms use arsenic to generate energy and facilitate growth. Chlorine and sulfur are also possible elemental replacements for carbon. Sulfur is capably of forming long-chain molecules like carbon. Some terrestrial bacteria have already been discovered to survive on sulfur rather than oxygen, by reducing sulfur to hydrogen sulfide.

Nitrogen and phosphorus could also potentially form biochemical molecules. Phosphorus is similar to carbon in that it can form long chain molecules on its own, which would conceivably allow for formation of complex macromolecules. When combined with nitrogen, it can create quite a wide range of molecules, including rings.

So what about water? Isn't at least water essential to life?

Not necessarily. Ammonia, for example, as we mentioned above has many of the same properties as water. An ammonia or ammonia-water mixture stays liquid at much colder temperatures than plain water. Such biochemistries may exist outside the conventional water-based “habitability zone”.

One example of such a location would be right here in our own solar system on Saturn’s largest moon Titan.

Hydrogen fluoride methanol, hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen chloride, and formamide have all been suggested as suitable solvents that could theoretically support alternative biochemistry. All of these "water replacements" have pros and cons when considered in our terrestrial environment. What needs to be considered is that with a radically different environment, comes radically different reactions. Water and carbon might be the very last things capable of supporting life in some extreme planetary conditions.

While some of these scenarios may seem the stuff of science finction, it’s important to keep in mind that the foundations of life on Earth, the association of a protein with a nucleic acid when view abstractly, does little to convey the endgame wonders such as blue whales and Mozart’s operas.

A billion years from now our descendants may have discovered other systems of physical life such as plasma within stars which would be based on the reciprocal influence of patterns of magnetic force and the ordered motion of charged particles. In fact, such life may well exists within our Sun.

Another form would be based on radiation emitted by isolated atoms and molecules in a dense interstellar cloud similar to the one physicist Fred Hoyle described in his scifi thriller, The Black Cloud. Such clouds can have a long lifetime lasting millions of years before they collapse.

Our personal favorite at The Daily Galaxy is the possibility of life in Neutron stars which would be based on the properties of polymeric atoms which which could form chains that could store and transmit information in a way that bears an uncanny similarity to the functions of nucleic acids -the molecules that carry genetic information or form structures within cells.

In the meantime, you can be sure I’ll be dreaming of the exotic and very sexy carbon-based Neytiri, the slinky Na’vi heroine -tail and all.

Casey Kazan - sourced from materials provided by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics (CfA) and New York Times article by Manhola Dargis

WOW! or HISS: Have Scientists Detected Dark Matter or Background Noise?

2010-02-19T04:12:00.000-08:00

WOW! or HISS: Have Scientists Detected Dark Matter or Background Noise?

Scientists may have glimpsed a particle that is a leading candidate for mysterious dark matter but say conclusive evidence remains elusive. A nine-year search from a unique observatory in an old iron mine 2,000 feet underground has yielded two possible detections of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. But physicists, who include two University of Florida researchers, say there is about a one in four chance that the detections were merely background noise — meaning that a worldwide hunt involving at least two dozen different observatories and hundreds of scientists will continue.

“With one or two events, it’s tough. The numbers are too small,” said Tarek Saab, a UF assistant professor and one of dozens of physicists participating in the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search II, or CDMS II, experiment based in the Soudan mine in Northern Minnesota.

A scientific system buried deep below the Earth, constructed of ultrapure materials held hovering over absolute zero, has finally stirred. This isn’t an attack by misbegotten monsters but an encouraging clue to the main mystery of the universe: dark matter.

The kind of matter with which we are familiar — atoms and molecules, and indeed every particle we have ever created in a laboratory known as baryonic– only makes up about 5% of the universe. Another 25% is dark matter, a kind of particle that is massive and weakly interacting. The remaining 70% is dark energy, which is not even a particle — it’s a smoothly-distributed energy field that remains persistent in density even as the universe expands. The ongoing effort to understand dark matter and dark energy is the most important task of twenty-first century cosmology.

The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search II (CDMS II) does exactly what it says - it’s cryogenically cooled, it’s searching for dark matter, and this is the second time they’ve done it. High purity low temperature crystals of germanium and silicon vibrate are disturbed by anything impacting on them, and they’re buried under seven hundred meters of iron mine to make sure most of “anything” can’t make it. One thing that could conceivably come down and stir things up is a WIMP, a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle - one of the options for dark matter.

The system is so shielded that over an entire year users only expect 0.8 events, and in 2008 they saw two. This is a tantalising taste of data: analysis indicates that the event energy matches the model for dark matter WIMPs, but even after screening out as much noise as possible it simply isn’t enough signal to be sure. Scientists, you see, double-check and confirm things before shouting about them (unlike others who - for example - might hack unprocessed e-mails, strip random sentences out of context, then start screaming about all kinds of nonsense.

This excitement is motivating instead of mob-making: the research team are upgrading the equipment with Super-CDMS stacks of crystal which will triple its efficiency. Space satellites, subterranean sensors, and that little LHC thing: we want this dark matter stuff.

The bulk of the dark matter that makes up 75% of the universe is believed to be nonbaryonic, which means that it contains no atoms and that it does not interact with ordinary matter via electromagnetic forces and includes neutrinos, and possibly hypothetical entities such as axions, or supersymmetric particles. Unlike baryonic dark matter, nonbaryonic dark matter did not contribute to the formation of the elements in the early universe, so its presence is detected only by its gravitational attraction.

Scientists recognized decades ago that the rotational speed of galaxies and the behavior of galaxy clusters could not be explained by the traditional forces of gravity due to the mass of visible stars alone. Something else — something invisible, undetectable yet extremely powerful — had to exert the force required to cause the galaxies’ more-rapid-than-expected rotational speed and similar anomalous observations.

What came to be known as “dark matter” – dark because it neither reflects nor absorbs light in any form, visible or other – is now estimated to comprise as much as 23 percent of the universe. But despite abundant evidence for its influence, no one has ever observed dark matter directly.

There are several possibilities for the composition of this mysterious, omnipresent matter. Particle physics theory points toward WIMPs as one of the most likely candidates.

WIMPs are “weakly interacting” because, although their masses are thought to be comparable to the masses of standard atomic nuclei, they have little or no effect on ordinary matter, and among other things, that makes them extremely difficult to detect. However, scientists believe WIMPs should occasionally “kick” or bounce off standard atomic nuclei, leaving behind a small amount of energy that should be possible to detect.

The CDMS II observatory is located a half-mile underground beneath rock that blocks most particles, such as those accompanying cosmic rays. At the observatory’s heart are 30 hockey-puck-sized germanium and silicon detectors cryogenically frozen to negative 459.58 Fahrenheit, just shy of absolute zero. In theory, WIMPs would be among the few particles that make it all the way through the earth and rock. They would then occasionally kick the atoms on these detectors, generating a tiny amount of heat, a signal that would be observed and recorded on the experiment’s computers.

Observers recorded the two possible WIMP events in 2007, one on Aug. 8 and the second on Oct. 27. Scientists had estimated that five detections would be sufficient to confirm WIMPs — meaning that the two fell short, according to the CDMS. But while the two detections may not be conclusive, they do help to set more stringent values on the WIMPs’ interaction with subatomic particles.

At the very least, the finding helps to eliminate some theories about dark matter — raising the profile of the WIMP and potentially accelerating the race to detect it.

Most experts agree that in the next five years or so, someone will see a clear signal.

Casey Kazan with Luke McKinney via University of Florida

Image at top: Dark Matter ring in Galaxy Cluster CI 0024+17 Hubble Space Telescope

The Ghostly Neutron Star of a Supernova Remnant -1st Ever View

2010-02-18T23:12:00.000-08:00

The Ghostly Neutron Star of a Supernova Remnant -1st Ever View

This image gives the first clear view of the faint boundary of the Crab Nebula’s X-ray-emitting pulsar wind nebula. The nebula is powered by a rapidly rotating, highly magnetized neutron star, or pulsar (white dot near the center). The combination of rapid rotating and strong magnetic field generates an intense electromagnetic field that creates jets of matter and anti-matter moving away from the north and south poles of the pulsar, and an intense wind flowing out in the equatorial direction.

The inner X-ray ring is thought to be a shock wave that marks the boundary between the surrounding nebula and the flow of matter and antimatter particles from the pulsar. Energetic electrons and positrons (antielectrons) move outward from this ring to brighten the outer ring and produce an extended X-ray glow.

The fingers, loops, and bays in the image all indicate that the magnetic field of the nebula and filaments of cooler matter are controlling the motion of the electrons and positrons. The particles can move rapidly along the magnetic field and travel several light years before radiating away their energy. In contrast, they move much more slowly perpendicular to the magnetic field, and travel only a short distance before losing their energy.

The Daily Galaxy via Chandra Space Telescope

Most Ancient Stars in Observable Universe Unveiled -Hidden in Dwarf Galaxies

2010-02-18T06:12:00.000-08:00

Most Ancient Stars in Observable Universe Unveiled -Hidden in Dwarf Galaxies

New observations using ESO's Very Large Telescope have been used to solve an important astrophysical puzzle concerning the oldest stars in our galactic neighborhood hidden until recently in dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. In comparison to the Milky Way, most dwarf galaxies are blob-like, 85% smaller (around 6700 vs 100,000 light-years across), containing around 30 billion stars.

When the Universe was just a fraction of its current age, and galaxies
such as the one we inhabit were nowhere to be seen, stars formed inside odd structures, that have long since disappeared. These
structures are called dwarf irregulars, and the scientist believes that
the peculiar type of stellar formation processes they display may
resemble the original one and may provide clues as to how stars
appeared shortly after the Big Bang.

Unlike massive galaxies,
such as the Milky Way, with highly-defined central regions, spiral arms
and so on, dwarf irregulars are very small and diffuse groups of stars,
which are the last thing to spring to mind when thinking of the word
"galaxy". Star formation in dwarfs today is similar to star formation
right after the Big Bang.

"We have, in effect, found a flaw in the forensic methods used until now," says Else Starkenburg, lead author of the paper reporting the study. "Our improved approach allows us to uncover the primitive stars hidden among all the other, more common stars."

Primitive stars are thought to have formed from material forged shortly after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago. They typically have less than one thousandth the amount of chemical elements heavier than hydrogen and helium found in the Sun and are called "extremely metal-poor stars.” They belong to one of the first generations of stars in the nearby Universe. Such stars are extremely rare and mainly observed in the Milky Way.

Cosmologists think that larger galaxies like the Milky Way formed from the merger of smaller galaxies. Our Milky Way's population of extremely metal-poor or "primitive" stars should already have been present in the dwarf galaxies from which it formed, and similar populations should be present in other dwarf galaxies. Metals" are all the elements other than hydrogen and helium. Such
metals, except for a very few minor light chemical elements, have all
been created by the various generations of stars.

"So far, evidence for them has been scarce," says co-author Giuseppina Battaglia. "Large surveys conducted in the last few years kept showing that the most ancient populations of stars in the Milky Way and dwarf galaxies did not match, which was not at all expected from cosmological models."

Element abundances are measured from spectra, which provide the chemical fingerprints of stars . Since the dwarf galaxies are typically 300 000 light years away — which is about three times the size of our Milky Way — only strong features in the spectrum could be measured, like a vague, smeared fingerprint. The team found that none of their large collection of spectral fingerprints actually seemed to belong to the class of stars they were after, the rare, extremely metal-poor stars found in the Milky Way.

The team of astronomers around Starkenburg has now shed new light on the problem through careful comparison of spectra to computer-based models. They found that only subtle differences distinguish the chemical fingerprint of a normal metal-poor star from that of an extremely metal-poor star, explaining why previous methods did not succeed in making the identification.

The astronomers also confirmed the almost pristine status of several extremely metal-poor stars thanks to much more detailed spectra obtained with the UVES instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope. "Compared to the vague fingerprints we had before, this would be as if we looked at the fingerprint through a microscope," explains team member Vanessa Hill. "Unfortunately, just a small number of stars can be observed this way because it is very time consuming."

"Among the new extremely metal-poor stars discovered in these dwarf galaxies, three have a relative amount of heavy chemical elements between only 1/3000 and 1/10 000 of what is observed in our Sun, including the current record holder of the most primitive star found outside the Milky Way," says team member Martin Tafelmeyer.

"Not only has our work revealed some of the very interesting, first stars in these galaxies, but it also provides a new, powerful technique to uncover more such stars," concludes Starkenburg. "From now on there is no place left to hide!"

Casey Kazan via ESO

Is the World's Largest & Deepest Lake, 25-million-Years Old, Threatened? - A Galaxy Update

2010-02-17T04:11:00.000-08:00

Is the World's Largest & Deepest Lake, 25-million-Years Old, Threatened? - A Galaxy Update

As the oldest, largest and deepest lake on planet Earth, ancient Lake
Baikal is known as the "grand dame" of all lakes. UNESCO declared it a
World Heritage due to its stunning bio-diversity. Most of its 2500 some
odd plant and animal species, including the freshwater seal, evolved in
pristine isolation and are found nowhere else on the planet.

In late January, Russian police raided the offices of the Baikal Environmental Wave group after it criticized a plan to reopen a paper mill next to Lake Baikal in Siberia that had been closed since 2008 due to pollution fears. Russian PM Vladimir Putin decreed that the mill could reopen. The Baikalsk Paper and Pulp Mill is the biggest employer in Baikalsk, a town of 17,000. The mill is owned by Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska.

Environmentalists have fought for years to keep the mill shut, arguing that it threatens the lake’s fragile ecosystem.

The
Siberian lake contains 20 percent of the entire world’s
freshwater, and is large enough to hold all the water in the Great
Lakes combined and then some. The lake has yielded many exciting
aquatic wonders and likely holds many more undiscovered marvels in its
incredibly deep waters. The 25 million year old lake predates the
emergence of humans, but its splendor may not outlive us.

Stephanie Hampton, the Deputy Director of the National Center for
Ecological Analysis & Synthesis (NCEAS) who has been studying the
lake shared with The Daily Galaxy what makes Baikal so exquisite.

"Lake Baikal probably the most beautiful place I’ve ever been - I’m
thinking especially right now of the day I spent on Olkhon Island when
the wildflowers were spectacular and the serenity was awe-inspiring. It
is the world’s most ancient lake with a proliferation of biodiversity
that is breathtaking," describes Hampton affectionately.

"Where I would usually see 2 species of a particular type of crustacean
(amphipods, in this case), instead, I see 344 species in all shapes and
colors and sizes. Many of the unique fish in Baikal resemble deep-sea
fishes rather than other freshwater fish that are more closely related
to them - with big eyes and spindly bodies. Also, sponge forests are
common. If you are surprised that I’m mentioning a sponge forest in a
lake, it’s for a good reason: they are not that common in lakes!"
Hampton notes with enthusiasm, "So here you are in this incredibly cold
lake at fairly high latitude, and underwater, this sponge forest looks
more like the Caribbean than the subarctic! It is really like a
freshwater Galapagos in the midst of Siberia."

It doesn't take much prodding to get information out of Hampton when it
comes to the lake! Her abounding awe and reverence for one of Mother
Nature's most unique wonders is completely apparent. Unfortunately,
according to Hampton and other experts, all this is about to change
forever. Global warming has had a strong impact on the lake, and is
threatening its incredibly unique life forms that evolved to live only
in extreme cold. A multi-generational study involving careful and
repeated sampling over six decades was recently reported in the journal
Global Change Biology showing that the lake's temperatures is rising
dangerously fast. Hampton, who participated in the study, notes that
the lake was expected to be among those most resistant to climate
change, due to its tremendous volume and unique water circulation. But
unfortunately, that does not appear to be the case.

"So many organisms in and around Lake Baikal have evolved only in Lake
Baikal, and they are very well-adapted to an extremely cold environment
that is covered by ice for much of the year. More than half of the
animals in Baikal are not found anywhere else! Lake Baikal has been
around for 25 million years, so there has been plenty of time for
organisms to evolve to its special environment - the warming associated
with climate change is very abrupt, and it’s not clear whether or how
these special organisms can adapt to a rapidly warming lake," Hampton
explains.

Already there has been a rise in more common water organisms in the
lake—a sight that does not bode well for the lakes original inhabitants.

"We know that Siberia is one of the most rapidly warming regions of the
world - the air temperature in Siberia has warmed at a rate that is
about twice that of the average global rate of temperature increase. So
when we approached this work with the Lake Baikal temperature data, we
knew that the lake would have been exposed to a greater ambient
temperature increase than lakes in other regions, but I certainly will
admit to being surprised that the lake had warmed so rapidly since
1946. Why is it warming so much faster than the air? The answer
probably involves ice," Hampton explains.

"Ice is a very prominent feature of life on Lake Baikal. Ice normally
starts taking over the lake in January and it doesn’t leave until May
or June - so, life goes on in Lake Baikal under ice for nearly half the
year! The top predator in the lake, the Baikal seal, raises its pups
on ice in the winter in snow caves, fishing for food in the lake water
by using holes in the ice. Under the ice, algae (the microscopic
plants at the base of the food web) that are found only in Lake Baikal,
are well-adapted to achieve their greatest productivity while there is
still thick, but clear, spring ice on the lake. So, both the top and
the bottom of the food web in Baikal are very well adapted to long icy
winters - this dependence on ice by the top and bottom of the food web
is not common in lakes."

She continues, "We know from previous work, published by other
researchers, that the ice is staying on the lake for a shorter time
period now than it used to. When ice lasted longer in the past, it kept
the lake insulated from air temperature changes for a longer portion of
the year. Now that there is less ice, the water is warming faster. This
is what other researchers also found on Lake Superior just last year.
So, we can expect the lake to get warmer and warmer, as the ice lasts
for a shorter time each year."

But what about the humans in the region? Even if the aquatic resident's
of Lake Baikal can't thrive in the warmer weather, aren't the nearby
human settlements looking forward to a respite from the bitter cold
that global warming may offer? Again, Hampton explains that the issue
is a lot more complicated than most of us realize.

"Some of the harshest winters of the century occurred within living
memory for many Siberians, and it is easy to understand why Russians
might welcome a longer growing season in Siberia. However, one big
concern, as the air temperature increases, will be the deterioration of
infrastructure as permafrost melts and the ground shifts under
buildings and around pipes or other structures laid in the ground," she
explains, "Also, there are villages around Lake Baikal that can only be
reached by water during the summer and by travel over the ice in winter
- when ice is too thin for travel, but too thick for a boat, those
villages are cut off from each other and from the main roads, so there
will be societal impacts for some of these isolated villages where
winter is already a pretty tough time of year."

In other words, climate change will likely have a negative impact on
the human population as well. As far as the lake itself goes, Hampton
points out that she's not alone in her concern.

"Russia, and many people are concerned for its welfare. A conservation
organization called the Baikal Environmental Wave received a
prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize this year, and there has been
good community involvement in environmental issues surrounding the lake
in recent years."

But awareness alone can't save the grand dame's biodiversity, nor other
fragile habitats around the globe. It will take action too. But what
can we ordinary people do to make any kind of real difference? Climate
change expert Thomas Reichler, who was not involved in the study, told
The Daily Galaxy that combating global warming starts with simple daily
choices that everyone makes. You don't have to change the world all by
yourself, just change your own actions and let your example inspire
other to do the same, he says. Things as simple as choosing to "drive
smaller cars, drive less, and insulate your house well. Things like
this can make a difference."

Posted by Rebecca Sato.

If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on Digg, Reddit, or StumbleUpon.Thanks!

Related Galaxy posts:

The Crisis is Coming: How Peak Water Could Reshape Civilization
The "Little Ice Age" Argument Makes a Comeback: Abrupt Climate Change Goes Both Ways, Warns Scientist
Ancient Antarctic Lake Exploration
Reports Warn that Climate Change & Eco-migration Could Lead to Increased Warfare
Are Global Warming Models Accurately Predicting Our Future? New Study Reveals the Answer—A Galaxy Interview
World’s Oldest Living Microbes May Cast Light on Aging & Life on Mars
Ancient Antarctic Microbes Revived in Lab
“Hunt for the Red October” Revives -Russia Challenges West Under Arctic Ice

National Science Foundation Link:
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=111511&org=olpa&from=news

Are Our Oceans Endangered? Acid Rate Now Highest in 65 Million Years

2010-02-16T02:11:00.000-08:00

Are Our Oceans Endangered? Acid Rate Now Highest in 65 Million Years

A new model developed at the University of Bristol (England) shows that changes in the carbonate chemistry of the deep ocean may exceed anything seen in the past 65 million year, predicting much higher rates of environmental change at the ocean's surface in the future than have occurred in the past, potentially exceeding the rate at which plankton can adapt.The team applied a model that compared current rates of ocean acidification with the greenhouse event at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary, about 55 million years ago when surface ocean temperatures rose by around 5-6°C over a few thousand years. During this event, no catastrophe is seen in surface ecosystems, such as plankton, yet bottom-dwelling organisms in the deep ocean experienced a major extinction.

"Unlike surface plankton dwelling in a variable habitat, organisms living deep down on the ocean floor are adapted to much more stable conditions. A rapid and severe geochemical change in their environment would make their survival precarious,” according to Dr Andy Ridgwell. "The widespread extinction of these ocean floor organisms during the Paleocene-Eocene greenhouse warming and acidification event tells us that similar extinctions in the future are possible.

The oceans are currently absorbing about a quarter of the CO2 released into the atmosphere, forcing the pH of the surface ocean lower in a process called 'ocean acidification'.

Laboratory experiments suggest that if the pH continues to fall, we may start to see impacts such as the dissolution of carbonate shells of marine organisms, slower growth, muscle wastage, dwarfism or reduced activity, with knock-on effects throughout the ecosystem.

"Therefore, a lot of attention has recently focussed on looking at known ocean acidification and biotic reactions in the geological record. Various types of geological evidence - the spread of warm water organisms towards the poles and the dissolution of carbonate sediments on the sea-floor tell us there was simultaneously both extreme warming and acidification at this time - the hallmark of a massive greenhouse gas release,” according to Dr Daniela Schmidt, a member of the Bristol team.

On the basis of their approach of comparing model simulations of past and future marine geochemical changes, the authors infer a future rate of surface-ocean acidification and environmental pressure on marine calcifiers, such as corals, unprecedented in the past 65 million years, and one that challenges the potential for plankton to adapt.

Jason McManus via University of Bristol

NASA's New Mission: Will It Launch Space-Age "Microsofts & Googles"?

2010-02-15T02:11:00.000-08:00

NASA's New Mission: Will It Launch Space-Age "Microsofts & Googles"?

If the Obama’s new NASA plan survives the congressional wringer of hearings, markups, amendments and votes in anything like its present form, it will mark a radical transformation of the our space program from the emphasis on the development and operations of launch vehicles and spacecraft, focused on traveling to specific destinations to the development of capabilities and technologies needed for future exploration to a variety of destinations, while also supporting the development of a commercial infrastructure to handle more routine operations.

In short, the new Obama NASA strategy will do for space what the shift from a DARPA-funded government-centric computer industry of the 70s and early 80’s to an entrepreurial private sector strategy did for the computer industry, spawning the WWW, Apple, Intel, Google, and Microsoft. The shift from government-funded to private launched the US as the world’s innovation leader.

In supporting this radical shift, the Augustine committee pointed out that they would require at least $50 billion more over the next 10 years in order for NASA to get back to the moon. And then we would get there about a decade late, and all the money was going into one massive effort.

“Events such as the flight of "SpaceShipOne" and current work on commercial human suborbital/orbital flight systems herald a 'New Space' era,” said Dr Charles Lurio, publisher of “The Lurio Report” which covers the new private space sector. “Commercial activities could expand to produce economic benefits in rivalry to the IT/web revolution.

“The Cold War era 'moon race' linked space to a government framework and a public mindset that effectively prohibited developing practical spaceflight abilities for people and cargo. Only comsat - type space businesses could succeed, since radio signals provide their own transportation to and from orbit.”

This is exactly why the rise of the US private space sector is so vital and so timely. While critics and status-quo members of congress are lining up to attack the program, US entrepreneurs from Jeff Bezos to Tesla and Space X’s Elon Musk to Microsoft’s Paul Allen, are heading at full steam into our space future. With international partners in abundance including the space programs in Canada, Japan, Europe and India along with other countries, the US space program is preparing for an exciting dynamic future.

“The US space program is not atrophying, quite the opposite. The newly proposed NASA budget and program will create the opportunity for the private sector to do for space what it did for computers: massively reduce costs and similarly increase capabilities,” said Dr Charles Lurio, publisher of “The Lurio Report” which covers the new private space sector.

The money flows from the vast stimulus effort that the US government has activated over the past few months and is part of the US $6 billion, five-year effort to make sustained commercial spaceflight a reality.

“New and small companies will benefit enormously in the process, like Colorado-based Sierra Nevada Corp, which alone was awarded $20 million to continue development of its “Dream Chaser” manned space capsule, and Washington State-based Blue Origin which was awarded almost $4 million for various projects, including research on the use of composite materials in space,” writes Peter J. Brown in Asia Times.” Another small company on the list is Arizona-based Paragon Space Development Corp, which is pursuing various space mission support systems and receiving $1.4 million to do so.

“Boeing, a veteran contractor for NASA, received $18 million to create a seven-person space capsule and a joint venture involving Boeing and Lockheed Martin known as the United Launch Alliance will use almost $7 million for systems in support of future Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rocket flights.

“It is important to note that two pioneering US private space sector companies, California-based Space Exploration Technologies and Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp, are moving ahead rapidly thanks to the $3.5 billion that they have already been awarded for International Space Station support missions,” Brown added.

“Is the private sector likely to have failures? Yes. Will lives be lost? Most regrettably, that may happen at some time or other. But NASA has had tragic losses for decades, without substantially overcoming fundamental safety issues - just as they haven’t reduced cost,” wrote Lurio in his most recent report. “The private sector would pursue multiple paths to orbit in parallel, respond more quickly to fix system flaws, and must strive constantly towards making space flight ever-safer to enable and expand its own new, private markets.”

“The proposed R&D work has several sections which themselves appear geared to both benefit from and encourage ‘a thousand flowers blooming’ in the New Space industry,” wrote Lurio, who added, “The fight for changes at NASA has barely begun.”

Casey Kazan via Asia Times

Image Credit: Thanks to our friends at freakingnews.com

VIDEO Tour of the Milk Way: From NASA's Super Fleet of Space Observatories

2010-02-14T20:11:00.000-08:00

VIDEO Tour of the Milk Way: From NASA's Super Fleet of Space Observatories

Africa's Endangered Desert Elephants Ravaged by Severe Drought - A Galaxy Insight

2010-02-14T09:11:00.000-08:00

Africa's Endangered Desert Elephants Ravaged by Severe Drought - A Galaxy Insight

A rare herd of desert elephants in Mali has been ravaged by one of the worst droughts in living memory, which has left water sources at lowest level in the past quarter of a century.

The 350 to 450 elephants of Gourma, the northernmost herds still alive in Africa, were forced to trek extreme distances across the fringes of the Sahara to find scarce water. Juveniles are the most affected, as (unlike the bigger bulls) their trunks are not long enough to reach deep into wells - one of the only remaining water sources.

This past year the water levels were extremely low in the Gourma region due to uneven rainfall in 2008. The most important of these lakes, Banzena, is the lowest it has been since 1983 when it dried completely.

On the 16th of May, 2009 Jake Wall, a scientist with Save the Elephants, returned from Banzena; he found it almost dry. Very few options now exist for finding water and we are witnessing erratic movements further and further afield as they desperately search for water and forage.

Over the last few years, The WILD Foundation and Save the Elephants (STE), in collaboration with the Malian Environment Ministry directorate for conservation - Direction Nationale de la Conservation de la Nature (DNCN), have monitored these last rare desert elephants using 9 collars fitted with Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers. The collars transmit the hourly positions of the elephants three times daily via satellite link and give real-time information about the activities of the elephant herds.

Dr Iain Douglas-Hamilton of Save the Elephants has been monitoring their range since the mid 1970s. He says: "In the Gourma region of Mali are the last elephants living in the Sahel and they are northernmost in Africa. Their range has shrunk drastically since the 1970's due to climate change and overstocking of livestock which has degraded the habitat. These elephants have the longest migration route of any in Africa and move in a counterclockwise circle of about 700 km. At the height of the dry season there are only a handful of shallow lakes left to them until recharged by rains in July and August." Our group of NGOs is launching an emergency appeal to save this unique herd.

Many elephants are now surviving with very limited and hard to access water supplies. At a dry lake bed 50 km to the east of Banzena, 6 bull elephants are surviving by getting on their knees and reaching for water with their trunks that is 3 meters beneath ground level and through a hole dug by the Touareg people. Younger elephants who are not as big or as skilled cannot possibly reach these hard to get at water points. The long distances, high temperatures and weakened condition will also take a heavy toll on the younger elephants.

Is Mars Between Ice Ages? (A Weekend Feature)

2010-02-14T04:11:00.000-08:00

Is Mars Between Ice Ages? (A Weekend Feature)

“is not a dead planet -it undergoes climate changes that are even more pronounced than on Earth.”

James Head of Brown University

The prevailing thinking is that is a planet whose active climate has been confined to the distant past. About 3.5 billion years ago, the Red Planet had extensive flowing water and then fell quiet - deadly quiet. It didn’t seem the climate had changed much since. Recent studies however show that Mars’ climate has been much more dynamic than previously believed.

After examining stunning high-resolution images taken last year by the Reconnaissance Orbiter, researchers at Brown University documented for the first time that ice packs at least 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) thick and perhaps 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) thick existed along Mars’ mid-latitude belt as recently as 100 million years ago. In addition, the team believes other images tell them that glaciers flowed in localized areas in the last 10 to 100 million years - a blink of the eye in Mars’s geological timeline.

This evidence of recent activity means the Martian climate may change again and could bolster speculation about whether the Red Planet can, or did, support life.

“We’ve gone from seeing as a dead planet for three-plus billion years to one that has been alive in recent times,” said Jay Dickson, a research analyst in the Department of Geological Sciences at Brown and lead author. “[The finding] has changed our perspective from a planet that has been dry and dead to one that is icy and active.”

In fact, Dickson and his co-authors, James Head, a planetary geologist, and David Marchant, an associate professor at Boston University, believe the images show that Mars has gone through multiple Ice Ages - episodes in its recent past in which the planet’s mid-latitudes were covered by glaciers that disappeared with changes in the Red Planet’s obliquity, which changes the climate by altering the amount of sunlight falling on different areas.

NASA’s Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions provided evidence of a relatively recent ice age on Mars. In contrast to Earth’s ice ages, a Martian ice age expands when the poles warm, and water vapor is transported toward lower latitudes. Martian ice ages wane when the poles cool and lock water into polar icecaps.

The catalysts of ice ages on appear to be much more extreme than the comparable drivers of climate change on Earth. Variations in the planet’s orbit and tilt produce remarkable changes in the distribution of water ice from Polar Regions down to latitudes equivalent to Houston or Egypt. Researchers, using NASA spacecraft data and analogies to Earth’s Antarctic Dry Valleys, reported their findings in the journal Nature.

“Of all the solar system planets, has the climate most like that of Earth. Both are sensitive to small changes in orbital parameters,” said planetary scientist Dr. James Head of Brown University. “Now we’re seeing that Mars, like Earth, is in a period between ice ages,” he said. This evidence of recent activity means the Martian climate may change again and could bolster speculation about whether the Red Planet can, or did, support life.

Head and his team examined global patterns of landscape shapes and near-surface water ice Nasa’s orbiters mapped. They concluded a covering of water ice mixed with dust mantled the surface of to latitudes as low as 30 degrees, and is degrading and retreating. By observing the small number of impact craters in those features and by backtracking the known patterns of changes in Mars’ orbit and tilt, they estimated the most recent ice age occurred just 400 thousand to 2.1 million years ago.

Marchant, a glacial geologist who spent 17 field seasons in the Mars-like Antarctic Dry Valleys, said, “These extreme changes on Mars provide perspective for interpreting what we see on Earth. Landforms on that appear to be related to climate changes help us calibrate and understand similar landforms on Earth. Furthermore, the range of microenvironments in the Antarctic Dry Valleys helps us read the Mars record.”

According to the researchers, during a Martian ice age, polar warming drives water vapor from polar ice into the atmosphere. The water comes back to ground at lower latitudes as deposits of frost or snow mixed generously with dust. This ice-rich mantle, a few meters thick, smooths the contours of the land. It locally develops a bumpy texture at human scales, resembling the surface of a basketball, and also seen in some Antarctic icy terrains. When ice at the top of the mantling layer sublimes back into the atmosphere, it leaves behind dust, which forms an insulating layer over remaining ice. On Earth, by contrast, ice ages are periods of polar cooling. The buildup of ice sheets draws water from liquid-water oceans, which lacks.

Dickson and the other researchers focused on an area called Protonilus Mensae-Coloe Fossae. The region is located in Mars’s mid-latitude and is marked by splotches of mesas, massifs and steep-walled valleys that separate the lowlands in the north from the highlands in the south.

The team looked in particular at a box canyon set in a low-lying plain. Images show the canyon has moraines - deposits of rocks that mark the limits of a glacier’s advance or the path of its retreat. The rock deposit lines appear to show a glacier that flowed up the box canyon, which “physically cannot happen,” Dickson said.

Instead, the team deduced the ice in the surrounding plain grew higher than the canyon’s walls and then flowed downward onto the top of the canyon, which had become the lowest point on the ice-laden terrain. The team calculated the ice pack must have been one kilometer thick by past measurements of height between the plain and the lip of the canyon. Based on the ice flow patterns, the ice pack could have reached 2.5 kilometers at peak thickness during a period known as the late Amazonian, the authors said.

The finding could have implications for the life-on-argument by strengthening the case for liquid water. Ice can melt two ways: by temperature or by pressure. As currently understood, the Martian climate is dominated by sublimation, the process by which solid substances are transformed directly to vapor. But ice packs can exert such strong pressure at the base to produce liquid water, which makes the thickness of past glaciers on its surface so intriguing.

Dickson also looked at a lobe across the valley from the box canyon site. There, he saw a clear, semi-circular moraine that had spilled from an ancient tributary on to the surrounding plain. The lobe is superimposed on a past ice deposit and appears to be evidence of more recent glaciation. Although geologists can’t date either event, the landscape appears to show at least two periods in which glaciation occurred, bolstering their theory that the Martian climate has undergone past Ice Ages.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

Sources:

http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2008/04/martian-glaciers
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2003/dec/HQ_03415_ice_age.html

The Once-Green Sahara Slowly Morphed into Planet's Largest Desert (A Galaxy Classic)

2010-02-13T08:10:00.000-08:00

The Once-Green Sahara Slowly Morphed into Planet's Largest Desert (A Galaxy Classic)

The world's largest hot desert (seeing as technically Antarctica is the largest desert, though cold), the Sahara measures in at over 9 million square kilometers, and covers the majority of northern Africa. With an intermittent history that some believe may go back as far as 3 million years, recent research questions how it made its transition from lush greenery to hot sandy desert.

According to the European-US-Canadian team of scientists behind the study, the Sahara finished a slow transition 2,700 years ago to become the desert that we know today. This is in direct contrast to previously held thoughts that the desertification of the Sahara came abruptly.

Six thousand years ago we know that the massive northern area of Africa was very green; an area filled with trees, savannas and lakes.

Sadly, most of the physical elements from that period of time though have been lost, and thus for a long time the exact tale of the Sahara's geographic evolution has too been lost. However the scientists looked at layers of sediment in one of the largest remaining Saharan lakes, Yoa, located in Chad. This sediment managed to take them back through six millennia of climate history for the region.

Their findings – upon conducting soil tests and reviewing biological indicators in the sediment – contradict previous modeling that showed a rapid collapse of vegetation in the region some 5,500 years ago. This according to Stefan Kropelin, a geologist at the Prehistoric Archaeology Institute of the University of Cologne who took part in the new study.

Peter de Menocal of Columbia University published a study in 2000, where he reviewed sediments in the west of Mauritania, and found a sudden increase in wind-carried dust blown off the Sahara region, suggesting what he believed to be a swift climate change. However Kropelin believes that the data was misinterpreted.

Posted by Josh Hill. Image credit: Jeff Malon.

Source link:

http://www.physorg.com/news129617309.html

The Once-Green Sahara Slowly Transformed into Planet's Largest Desert (A Galaxy Classic)

2010-02-13T02:10:00.000-08:00

The Once-Green Sahara Slowly Transformed into Planet's Largest Desert (A Galaxy Classic)

Six thousand years ago we know that the massive northern area of Africa was very green; an area filled with trees, savannas and lakes.

Posted by Josh Hill. Image credit: Jeff Malon.

Source link:

http://www.physorg.com/news129617309.html

Is an Imminent "Little Ice Age" Possible? -Some Experts Say "Yes"

2010-02-12T08:10:00.000-08:00

Is an Imminent "Little Ice Age" Possible? -Some Experts Say "Yes"

Evidence has mounted that global warming began in the last century and that humans are, at least in part, responsible. The concern is that the warming of our climate will greatly affect its habitability for many species, including humans. Both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences concur that this is the case. But some argue that this thinking is too limited. They say that too many scientists are either ignoring, or don't understand, the well-established fact that Earth's climate has changed rapidly in the past and could change rapidly in the future—in either direction.

Evidence for abrupt climate change is readily found in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica. One of the best known examples of such an event is the Younger Dryas cooling of about 12,000 years ago, named after the arctic wildflower found in northern European sediments. This event began and ended rather abruptly, and for its entire 1000 year duration the North Atlantic region was about 5°C colder. Could something like this happen again? It sure could, and because the changes can happen all within one decade—we might not even see it coming.

The Younger Dryas occurred at a time when orbital forcing should have continued to drive climate to the present warm state. The unexplained phenomenon has been the topic of much intense scientific debate, as well as other millennial scale events.

The period of these shifts are related to changes in the tilt of Earth's rotational axis every 41,000 years, changes in the orientation of Earth's elliptical orbit around the sun, called the "precession of the equinoxes" (23,000 years), and to changes in the shape of the elliptical orbit, which occurs every 100,000 years.

The theory that orbital shifts caused the waxing and waning of ice ages was first pointed out by James Croll in the 19th Century and developed by Milutin Milankovitch in 1938. Milankovitch dedicated his career to developing a mathematical theory of climate based on the seasonal and latitudinal variations of solar radiation received by the Earth. Now known as the Milankovitch Theory, it states that as the Earth travels through space around the sun, cyclical variations in three elements of Earth-sun geometry combine to produce variations in the amount of solar energy that reaches Earth.

Ice age conditions generally occur when all of the above conspire to create a minimum of summer sunlight on the arctic regions of the earth, although the Ice Age cycle is global in nature and occurs in phase in both hemispheres. It profoundly affects distribution of ice over lands and ocean, atmospheric temperatures and circulation, and ocean temperatures and circulation at the surface and at great depth.

Since the end of the present interglacial and the slow march to the next Ice Age may be several millennia away, why should we care? In fact, won't the build-up of carbon dioxide (CO²) and other greenhouse gasses possibly mitigate future changes?

Much of the current thinking about global warming is flawed according to Terrence Joyce, Senior Scientist, Physical Oceanography and Lloyd Keigwin, Geology & Geophysics at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute: It ignores the well-established fact that Earth's climate has changed rapidly in the past and could change rapidly in the future. The issue centers around the paradox that global warming could instigate a new Little Ice Age in the northern hemisphere.

The Daily Galaxy asked climate expert Thomas Reichler, Department of Meteorology at the University of Utah, what he has to say about it. According to him, anyone claiming that the Earth isn't getting warmer, or that it's perhaps even getting colder, simply isn't looking at the actual data.

"There is absolutely no doubt that the world is in a warming phase," Reichler told the Daily Galaxy, "and that conclusion is supported by 99% of all serious scientists, so I'm certainly not alone in that certainty."

Reichler is probably right, but it wouldn't be the first time if the fringe opinion turned out to be onto something. But from a broader perspective, does it really matter who's "right" as far as preparations go? Whether the climate gets cooler or warmer, or does nothing at all, people will still need massive amounts of energy. Even if we were to take the reverse approach and intentionally increase greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in order to stave off cooling, it would likely have little effect other than to further pollute the environment with standard energy consumption's many toxic byproducts.

Are humans the major factor in the current warming trend? Maybe, maybe not. But what can't be disputed is that humans are polluting the planet. Current and future weather conditions do not change the fact that using oil and coal for energy isn't a good long-term idea. The need for cleaner energy, cleaner air and cleaner water has never been greater. The widespread call for better handling of resources, and habitat protection doesn't change with the thermometer.

Our commitment to stop polluting our water systems with pesticides and other dangerous chemicals should be as great as ever, with or without climate change considerations. Dismal air quality now poses significant health risks, especially in urban areas. Those who equate their global warming skepticism with an "anything goes" attitude regarding the environment are seriously jeopardizing the health of our planet and their own health along with it. If we prepare for global warming in ways that help protect the environment—we'll still be a lot better off—even on the off chance that we end up with a mini Ice Age instead.

Casey Kazan with Rebecca Sato.

Supermassive Black Holes Discovered to Play a Critical Role in the Evolution of Galaxies

2010-02-12T02:10:00.000-08:00

Supermassive Black Holes Discovered to Play a Critical Role in the Evolution of Galaxies

Do black holes hold the key that could unlock the secrets of our patch of the universe? Some of the world’s leading physicists believe that in the event that quantum effects allow time to extend indefinitely into the past that it could be possible that beyond the event horizon of a black hole is the beginning of another universe.

Embedded in the heart of each of the universe’s one trillion galaxies is a supermassive black hole that is roughly one million to one billion times the mass of the sun. About 10 percent of these giant black holes feature jets of plasma, or highly ionized gas, that extend in opposite directions of the black hole. By spewing huge amounts of mostly kinetic energy from the black holes into the universe, the jets affect how stars and other bodies form, and play a crucial role in the evolution of clusters of galaxies, the largest structures in the universe.

"This black hole in the center of the cluster is affecting everything else in that cluster," said Dan Evans, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. Because a jet gently heats the gas it carries throughout a galaxy cluster, it can slow and even prevent stars, which are created by the condensation and collapse of cool molecular gas, from forming, thereby affecting the growth of galaxies, Evans explained. "Without these jets, clusters of galaxies would look very different."
How these jets form remains one of the most important unsolved mysteries in extragalactic astrophysics. Now Evans may be one step closer to unlocking that mystery.

For two years, Evans has been comparing several dozen galaxies whose black holes host powerful jets (known as radio-loud active galactic nuclei, or AGN -like the image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way shown above) to those galaxies with supermassive black holes that do not eject jets. All black holes — those with and without jets — feature accretion disks, the clumps of dust and gas rotating just outside their event horizon.

By examining the light reflected in the accretion disk of an AGN black hole, Evans has concluded that jets may form right outside black holes that have a retrograde spin — or which spin in the opposite direction from their accretion disk. Although Evans and a colleague recently hypothesized that the gravitational effects of black hole spin may have something to do with why some have jets.

While researchers know that the mass of a black hole is intimately linked to the galaxy in which it is located, they have, until now, known little about the role of its second fundamental property — spin. Evans asserts that spin is crucial to understanding the dynamics of a black hole's host galaxy because it may actually create the jet that regulates the growth of that galaxy and the universe.

Although Evans has suspected for nearly five years that retrograde black holes with jets are missing the innermost portion of their accretion disk, it wasn't until last year that computational advances meant that he could analyze data collected between late 2007 and early 2008 by the Suzaku observatory, a Japanese satellite launched in 2005 with collaboration from NASA, to provide an example to support the theory. With these data, Evans and colleagues from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Yale University, Keele University and the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom analyzed the spectra of a supermassive black hole with a jet located about 800 million light years away in an AGN named 3C 33.

Astrophysicists can see the signatures of X-ray emission from the inner regions of the accretion disk, which is located close to the edge of a black hole, as a result of a super hot atmospheric ring called a corona that lies above the disk and emits light that an observatory like Suzaku can detect. In addition to this direct light, a fraction of light passes down from the corona onto the black hole's accretion disk and is reflected from the disk's surface, resulting in a spectral signature pattern called the Compton reflection hump, also detected by Suzaku.

But Evans' team never found a Compton reflection hump in the X-ray emission given off by 3C 33, a finding the researchers believe provides crucial evidence that the accretion disk for a black hole with a jet is truncated, meaning it doesn't extend as close to the center of the black hole with a jet as it does for a black hole that does not have a jet. The absence of this innermost portion of the disk means that nothing can reflect the light from the corona, which explains why observers only see a direct spectrum of X-ray light.

The researchers believe the absence may result from retrograde spin, which pushes out the orbit of the innermost portion of accretion material as a result of general relativity, or the gravitational pull between masses. This absence creates a gap between the disk and the center of the black hole that leads to the piling of magnetic fields that provide the force to fuel a jet.

The field of research will expand considerably in August 2011 with the planned launch of NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) satellite, which is 10 to 50 times more sensitive to spectra and the Compton reflection hump than current technology.

NuSTAR will help researchers conduct a "giant census" of supermassive black holes that "will absolutely revolutionize the way we look at X-ray spectra of AGN," Evans explained. He plans to spend another two years comparing black holes with and without jets, hoping to learn more about the properties of AGN. His goal over the next decade is to determine how the spin of a supermassive black hole evolves over time.

Casey Kazan via Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"The Secret Galaxy" of Centaurus A

2010-02-11T03:10:00.000-08:00

"The Secret Galaxy" of Centaurus A

Deep inside Centaurus A, the closest active galaxy to Earth, about 1,000 light-years across, is a twisted cosmic dust cloud shaped like a parallelogram -likely the result of a smaller spiral galaxy falling into the giant Centaurus A. The Spitzer Space Telescope’s penetrating infrared cameras recorded this startling vista in February 2004.

The parallelogram lies along the active galaxy’s central band of dust and stars. Astronomers believe that the striking geometric shape represents an approximately edge-on view of the infalling spiral galaxy’s disk in the process of being twisted and warped by the interaction. Ultimately, debris from the ill-fated spiral galaxy should provide fuel for the supermassive black hole lurking at the center of Centaurus A.

Credit: NASA Images

Posted at 12:08 AM | Permalink

Real-Life Unobtanium? The "Project X" Super Element

2010-02-10T06:09:00.000-08:00

Real-Life Unobtanium? The "Project X" Super Element

Scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are working with a metallic element called niobium to create the next generation of high-energy physics experiments that could solve the mysteries of dark matter, spacetime, and quantum gravity. The result could open new frontiers in physics without the need for accelerators that would have to span the planet in size.

In his epic 3D scifi adventure Avatar, James Cameron tell's the story of the world's first low-temperature superconductor, which was created in the late twentieth century but proved to be useless because of inherent instabilities.

Further efforts proved futile, and researchers finally termed their goal "Unobtainium," until the first unmanned exploration vehicle reached Alpha Centauri System and discovered deposits of a room temperature superconducting substance on an Earth-like moon named Pandora - Unobtanium had been found at last.

Unobtanium proved to be the most baffling of scientific discoveries in the area of superconductors as it had an extremely strong magnetic field, reversing prior knowledge that all superconductors repel magnetic fields. Unobtanium had a unique magnetic field and properties of superconductivity, causing it to levitate in magnetic fields under the Meissner Effect. The unique magnetic properties of Unobtanium were used to contain and direct the energy of the matter-antimatter annihilation which propels ships like ISV Venture Star.

Like Avatar's Unobtanium, the real-world Niobium has assumed huge importance in plans for the next round of linear colliders that may soon unlock some of the most profound secrets of the Universe and spacetime. The current generation of ring colliders, including Fermilab's Tevatron and Europe's newly operating Large Hadron Collider, use thousands of niobium-titanium superconducting magnets to steer and focus their beams of charged particles, which travel in great loops before being steered into collisions that can reveal fundamental properties of matter. Cavities are a small part of these machines, providing a momentary push to the particles each time they orbit the ring.

But linear colliders, including Stanford's current linear accelerator, Fermilab's proposed Project X, and the proposed ILC, string together thousands of cavities into one long line. The resulting linear accelerator creates an immense electric field to push the particle beams toward their collision in a single pass, without any need for steering and recirculating them.

Will niobium and the success of Project X and CERN's LHC lead to profound advances in 21st Century physics and our understanding of the universe?

Cameron's fictional Unobtanium was not only the key to Earth's energy needs in the 22nd century, but was the enabler of interstellar travel and the establishment of a truly spacefaring civilization.

Casey Kazan via University of Chicago

Saturn's Enceladus Joins Earth & Titan With Discovery of Water

2010-02-09T02:09:00.000-08:00

Saturn's Enceladus Joins Earth & Titan With Discovery of Water

Detecting salty ice and negatively charged water ions in the ice plume of Saturn’s
moon Enceladus, which primarily replenishes Saturn’s ring with material from
discharging jets, hints that it could harbor a reservoir of liquid water — perhaps
an ocean — beneath its surface. And, where’s there’s an ocean of liquid water, there’s
a higher probability of finding some form of life.

“The original picture of the plumes as violently erupting
Yellowstone-like geysers is changing,” said Frank Postberg, Cassini
scientist for the cosmic dust analyzer at the Max Planck Institute for
Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany. “They seem more like steady
jets of vapor and ice fed by a large water reservoir. However, we
cannot decide yet if the water is currently ‘trapped’ within huge
pockets in Enceladus’ thick ice crust or still connected to a large
ocean in contact with the rocky core.”

Scientists working on the Cassini space mission have found negatively charged water ions in the ice plume. Their findings, based on analysis from data taken in plume fly-throughs in 2008 provide evidence for the presence of liquid water. The Cassini plasma spectrometer, used to gather this data, also found other species of negatively charged ions including hydrocarbons.

"While it's no surprise that there is water there, these short-lived ions are extra evidence for sub-surface water and where there's water, carbon and energy, some of the major ingredients for life are present," said lead author Andrew Coates from University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory.

"The surprise for us was to look at the mass of these ions. There were several peaks in the spectrum, and when we analysed them we saw the effect of water molecules clustering together one after the other." The measurements were made as Cassini plunged through Enceladus' plume on March 12, 2008.

Enceladus thus joins Earth, Titan and comets where negatively charged ions are known to exist in the solar system. Negative oxygen ions were discovered in Earth's ionosphere at the dawn of the space age. At Earth's surface, negative water ions are present where liquid water is in motion, such as waterfalls or crashing ocean waves.

The Cassini plasma spectrometer, originally designed to take data in Saturn's magnetic environment, measures the density, flow velocity and temperature of ions and electrons that enter the instrument. But since the discovery of Enceladus' water ice plume, the instrument has also successfully captured and analysed samples of material in the jets.

Early in its mission, Cassini discovered the plume that fountains water vapour and ice particles above Enceladus. Since then, scientists have found that these water products dominate Saturn's magnetic environment and create Saturn's huge E-ring.

At Titan, the same instrument detected extremely large negative hydrocarbon ions with masses up to 13,800 times that of hydrogen. Titan, the largest hydrocarbon or nitrile ions are seen at the lowest altitudes of the atmosphere that Cassini flew (950 kilometers (590 miles). They suggest these large ions are the source of the smog-like haze that blocks most of Titan's surface from view and may be representative of the organic mix called "tholins" by Carl Sagan when he produced the reddish brew of prebiotic chemicals in the lab from gases that were known to be present in Titan's atmosphere. Tholins that may be produced in Titan's atmosphere could fall to the moon's surface and may even make up the sand grains of the dunes that dominate part of Titan's equatorial region.

Cassini discovered the water-ice jets in 2005 on Enceladus. These
jets expel tiny ice grains and vapor, some of which escape the moon’s
gravity and form Saturn’s outermost ring. Cassini’s cosmic dust
analyzer has examined the composition of those grains and found salt
within them. Cassini was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in 1997
and has been orbiting Saturn since July 2004.

“We believe that the salty minerals deep inside Enceladus washed out from rock at the bottom of a liquid layer,” said Postberg.

Scientists
on Cassini’s cosmic dust detector team conclude that liquid water must
be present because it is the only way to dissolve the significant
amounts of minerals that would account for the levels of salt detected.
The process of sublimation, the mechanism by which vapor is released
directly from solid ice in the crust, cannot account for the presence
of salt.

“Potential plume sources on Enceladus are an active area
of research with evidence continuing to converge on a possible salt
water ocean,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini deputy project scientist at
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Our next
opportunity to gather data on Enceladus will come during two flybys in
November.”

The makeup of the outermost ring grains, determined when thousands of
high-speed particle hits were registered by Cassini, provides indirect
information about the composition of the plume material and what is
inside Enceladus. The outermost ring particles are almost pure water
ice, but nearly every time the dust analyzer has checked for the
composition, it has found at least some sodium within the particles.

“Our
measurements imply that besides table salt, the grains also contain
carbonates like soda. Both components are in concentrations that match
the predicted composition of an Enceladus ocean,” Postberg said. “The
carbonates also provide a slightly alkaline pH value. If the liquid
source is an ocean, it could provide a suitable environment on
Enceladus for the formation of life precursors when coupled with the
heat measured near the moon’s south pole and the organic compounds
found within the plumes.”

However, in another study published in
Nature, researchers doing ground-based observations did not see sodium,
an important salt component. That team notes that the amount of sodium
being expelled from Enceladus is actually less than observed around
many other planetary bodies. These scientists were looking for sodium
in the plume vapor and could not see it in the expelled ice grains.
They argue that if the plume vapor does come from ocean water, the
evaporation must happen slowly deep underground, rather than as a
violent geyser erupting into space.

“Finding salt in the plume
gives evidence for liquid water below the surface,” said Sascha Kempf,
also a Cassini scientist for the cosmic dust analyzer from the Max
Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics. “The lack of detection of sodium
vapor in the plume gives hints about what the water reservoir might
look like.”

Determining the nature and origin of the plume
material is a top priority for Cassini during its extended tour, called
the Cassini Equinox Mission.

Scientists at Jet Propulsion Lab in
California, the University of Colorado and the University of Central
Florida in Orlando teamed up to analyze the plumes of water vapor and
ice particles spewing from Saturn’s Moon, Enceladus. They used data
collected by the Cassini spacecraft’s Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph
(UVIS).

The team, including, found that the source of plumes
may be vents on the moon that channel water vapor from a warm, probably
liquid source to the surface at supersonic speeds.

“There are
only three places in the solar system we know or suspect to have liquid
water near the surface,” said UCF Assistant Professor Joshua Colwell.
“Earth, Jupiter’s moon Europa and now Saturn’s Enceladus. Water is a
basic ingredient for life, and there are certainly implications there.
If we find that the tidal heating that we believe causes these geysers
is a common planetary systems phenomenon, then it gets really
interesting.”

The team’s findings support a theory that the
plumes observed are caused by a water source deep inside Enceladus.
This is not a foreign concept. On earth, liquid water exists beneath
the 15-million year-old ice at Lake Vostok, in Antarctica.

Scientists
suggest that in Enceladus's case, the ice grains would condense from
the vapor escaping from the water source and stream through the cracks
in the ice crust before heading into space. That's likely what
Cassini's instruments detected in 2005 and 2007, the basis for the
team's investigation.

The team’s work also suggests that another
hypothesis is unlikely. That theory predicts that the plumes of gas and
dust observed are caused by evaporation of volatile ice freshly exposed
to space when Saturn's tidal forces open vents in the south pole. But
the team found more water vapor coming from the vents in 2007 at a time
when the theory predicted there should have been less.

“Our
observations do not agree with the predicted timing of the faults
opening and closing due to tidal tension and compression,” said Candice
Hansen, the lead author on the project. “We don't rule it out entirely
. . . but we also definitely do not substantiate this hypothesis.”

Instead,
their results suggest that the behavior of the geysers supports a
mathematical model that treats the vents as nozzles that channel water
vapor from a liquid reservoir to the surface of the moon. By observing
the flickering light of a star as the geysers blocked it out, the team
found that the water vapor forms narrow jets. The authors theorize that
only high temperatures close to the melting point of water ice could
account for the high speed of the water vapor jets.

Although
there is no solid conclusion yet, there may be one soon. Enceladus is a
prime target of Cassini during its extended Equinox Mission, underway
now through September 2010.

“We still have a lot to discover and
learn about how this all works on Enceladus,” Colwell said. “But this
is a good step in figuring it all out.”

Until the two Voyager
spacecraft passed near Enceladus, the sixth-largest moon of Saturn, in
the early 1980s, very little was known about this small moon except for
the identification of water ice on its surface. The Voyager missions
showed that Enceladus is only 500 km in diameter and reflects almost
100% of the sunlight that strikes it. Voyager 1 found that Enceladus
orbited in the densest part of Saturn’s diffuse E ring, indicating a
possible link between the two, while Voyager 2 revealed that despite
the moon’s small size, it had a wide range of terrains ranging from
ancient, heavily cratered surfaces to young, tectonically deformed
terrain, with some regions with surface ages as young as 100 million
years old.

The Cassini spacecraft performed several close flybys
of Enceladus in 2005, revealing the moon’s surface and environment in
greater detail. In particular, the probe discovered a water-rich plume
venting from the moon’s south polar region. This discovery, along with
the presence of escaping internal heat and very few (if any) impact
craters in the south polar region, shows that Enceladus is geologically
active today.

Given the level of tectonic resurfacing found on
Enceladus, a critical factor in the evolution of life on Earth, has
been an important driver of geology on this small moon. Enceladus the
fourth body in the solar system to have confirmed volcanic activity,
along with Earth, Neptune’s Triton, and Jupiter’s Io.

There are
three ecosystems discovered on Earth that could mirror possible
lifeforms on Enceladus. Two are based on methanogens, which belong to
an ancient group related to bacteria, called the archaea — the hardy
survivalists of bacteria that thrive in harsh environments without
oxygen. Deep volcanic rocks along the Columbia River and in Idaho Falls
host two of these ecosystems, which pull their energy from the chemical
interaction of different rocks. The third ecosystem is powered by the
energy produced in the radioactive decay in rocks, and was found deep
below the surface in a mine in South Africa.

NASA’s Cassini
spacecraft discovered a surprising organic brew erupting in geyser-like
fashion from Saturn’s moon Enceladus during a close flyby on March 12,
2008. Scientists were stunned that this tiny moon is so active, “hot”
and teeming with water vapor and organic chemicals.

“Enceladus
has got warmth, water and organic chemicals, some of the essential
building blocks needed for life,” said Dennis Matson, Cassini project
scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “We
have quite a recipe for life on our hands, but we have yet to find the
final ingredient, liquid water, but Enceladus is only whetting our
appetites for more.”

“A completely unexpected surprise is that
the chemistry of Enceladus, what’s coming out from inside, resembles
that of a comet,” said Hunter Waite, principal investigator at the
Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “To have primordial
material coming out from inside a Saturn moon raises many questions on
the formation of the Saturn system.”

“Enceladus is by no means a
comet. Comets have tails and orbit the sun, and Enceladus’ activity is
powered by internal heat while comet activity is powered by sunlight.
Enceladus’ brew is like carbonated water with an essence of natural
gas,” said Waite.

The Casssini Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer
saw a much higher density of volatile gases, water vapor, carbon
dioxide and carbon monoxide, as well as organic materials, some 20
times denser than expected. This dramatic increase in density was
evident as the spacecraft flew over the area of the plumes.

New
high-resolution heat maps of the south pole by Cassini’s Composite
Infrared Spectrometer show that the so-called tiger stripes, giant
fissures that are the source of the geysers, are warm along almost
their entire lengths, and reveal other warm fissures nearby. The
warmest regions along the tiger stripes correspond to two of the jet
locations seen in Cassini images.

“These spectacular new data
will really help us understand what powers the geysers. The
surprisingly high temperatures make it more likely that there’s liquid
water not far below the surface,” said John Spencer, Cassini scientist
on the Composite Infrared Spectrometer team at the Southwest Research
Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Previous ultraviolet observations
showed four jet sources, matching the locations of the plumes seen in
previous images. This indicates that gas in the plume blasts off the
surface into space, blending to form the larger plume.

At closest
approach, Cassini was only 30 miles from Enceladus. When it flew
through the plumes it was 120 miles from the moon’s surface. Cassini’s
next flyby of Enceladus is in August.

The first step toward
answering the question of whether life exists inside the subsurface
aquifer of Enceladus is to analyze the organic compounds in the plume.
Cassini’s March 12 passage through the plume provided some measurements
that help us move toward an answer, and preliminary plans call for
Cassini to fly through the plume again for more measurements in the
future. Ultimately, another mission in the future could conceivably
land near the plume or even return plume material to Earth for
laboratory analysis.

Organic chemicals were part of the raw
material from which Enceladus and Saturn’s other moons formed. The
origin of Enceladus’ heat is less clear, but there are several
possibilities that could have given Enceladus a layer of liquid water
that persists today. Early on, it could have been heated by decay of
short-lived radioactivity in rocks, with the heating prolonged by tidal
influences.

Or perhaps an earlier oblong orbit could have brought
more tidal heating than exists there today. A past tidal relationship
with another moon could have caused the heat. Another theory says the
heat could have been produced from a process called serpentization,
where chemical binding of water and silicate rock could occur at the
upper layer of the moon’s core. This increases the volume of the rock
and creates energy in the form of heat.

Any of these heating
mechanisms might have created a liquid subsurface aquifer solution rich
in organics, allowing Enceladus to serve up a suitable prebiotic soup.

The
deep sea vent theory for the origin of life on Earth might apply to
Enceladus as well. In this scenario, life on Earth began at the
interface where chemically rich fluids, heated by tidal or other
mechanisms, emerge from below the sea floor. Chemical energy is derived
from the reduced gases, such as hydrogen-sulfide and hydrogen coming
out from the vent in contact with a suitable oxidant, such as carbon
dioxide. Hot spots on an Enceladus sea floor could be locales for this
type of process.

We don’t know how long it takes for life to
start when the ingredients are there and the environment is suitable,
but it appears to have happened quickly on Earth. So maybe it was
possible that on Enceladus, life started in a “warm little pond” below
the icy surface occurring over the last few tens of millions of years.

Edited and posted by Casey Kazan from materials provided by NASA.

Related Galaxy posts:

Links:

For images and more information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/cassini or http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/ .
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080420122601.htm

Source: http://news.ucf.edu/UCFnews/index?page=article&id=00240041e030fdf011daaca44450078d1.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-20090624.html

More information: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm

Did Dark Matter Destroy Universe 1.0? (VIDEO - A Galaxy Classic)

2010-02-08T08:09:00.000-08:00

Did Dark Matter Destroy Universe 1.0? (VIDEO - A Galaxy Classic)

No galaxies have been seen before at such early epochs as that seen in this deepest images of the universe ever taken in near-infrared light by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (see video below). The faintest and reddest objects in the image are galaxies that correspond to “look-back times” of approximately 12.9 billion years to 13.1 billion years ago.

A longstanding enigma is that it still appears that these early galaxies did not emit enough radiation to “reionise” the early Universe by stripping electrons from the neutral hydrogen that cooled after the Big Bang. This “reionisation” event occurred between about 400 million and 900 million years after the Big Bang, but astronomers still don’t know which light sources caused it to happen. These newly discovered galaxies date from this important epoch in the evolution of the Universe.

It took about the first billion years to completely ionize the Universe; before that, the Universe was opaque to light, with neutral atoms acting like dust. As the Universe reionizes, it becomes easier to see the light from whatever objects are behind it. The youngest object ever discovered in the universe, Gamma Ray Burst GRB 090423, born when the Universe was under 0.7 billion years old. This thing is so far away that no visible light actually got out; we can only see the X-rays from it

These early Hubble galaxies are much smaller than the Milky Way and other spiral galaxies and have populations of stars that are intrinsically very blue. This may indicate the galaxies are so primordial that they are deficient in heavier elements, and as a result, are quite free of the dust that reddens light through scattering.

Ross McLure of the Institute for Astronomy at Edinburgh University and his team detected 29 galaxy candidates, of which twelve lie beyond redshift 6.3 and four lie beyond redshift 7 (where the redshifts correspond to 890 million years and 780 million years after the Big Bang respectively). He notes that “the unique infrared sensitivity of Wide Field Camera 3 means that these are the best images yet for providing detailed information about the first galaxies as they formed in the early Universe”.

“These galaxies could have roots stretching into an earlier population of stars. There must be a substantial component of galaxies beyond Hubble’s detection limit,” according to James Dunlop of the University of Edinburgh.

“These ancient galaxies are only one twentieth of the Milky Way’s diameter,” reports HUDF09 team member Pascal Oesch of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. “Yet they must be the seeds from which the great galaxies of today were formed,” adds HUDF09 team member Marcella Carollo of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

“The masses are just 1 percent of those of the Milky Way. To our surprise, the results show that these galaxies at 700 million years after the Big Bang must have started forming stars hundreds of millions of years earlier, pushing back the time of the earliest star formation in the Universe,” explains team member Ivo Labbe of the Carnegie Institute of Washington,

“This is about as far as we can go to do detailed science with the new HUDF09 image. It shows just how much the James Webb Space Telescope is needed to unearth the secrets of the first galaxies,” says Illingworth. The challenge is that spectroscopy is needed to provide definitive redshift values, but the objects are too faint for spectroscopic observations (until JWST is launched), and the redshifts have to be inferred from the apparent colours of the galaxies.

Perhaps the density of very faint galaxies below the current detection limit is so high that there may be enough of them to support reionisation. Or there was an earlier wave of galaxy formation that decayed and then was “rebooted” by a second wave of galaxy formation. Or, possibly the early galaxies were extraordinarily efficient at reionising the Universe.

Due to these uncertainties it is not clear which type of object or evolutionary process did the “heavy lifting” by ionising the young Universe. The calculations are inconclusive, and so galaxies may do more than currently expected, or astronomers may need to invoke other phenomena such as mini-quasars (active supermassive black holes in the cores of galaxies) — current estimates suggest that quasars are even less likely than galaxies to be the cause of reionisation. This is an enigma that still challenges astronomers and the very best telescopes.

“We know the gas between galaxies in the Universe was ionised early in history, but the total light from these new galaxies may not be sufficient to achieve this.” said Andrew Bunker of the University of Oxford, a researcher on one of the European teams.

Did dark matter destroy this early universe? You might be looking around at the way things “exist” and thinking “No”, but we’re talking about ancient history. Three hundred million years after the start of the universe, things had finally cooled down enough to form hydrogen atoms out of all the protons and electrons that were zipping around - only to have them all ripped up again around the one billion year mark. Why?

Most believe that the first quasars, active galaxies whose central black holes are the cosmic-ray equivalent of a firehose, provided the breakup energy, but some Fermilab scientists have another idea. Dan Hooper and Alexander Belikov posit that invisible, self-destructing dark matter may have blown up every atom in the universe. At least it’s plausible in that if we wanted to ionize an entire universe, we’d want something that sounded that awesome.

Dark matter is a candidate for providing ionizing radiation because, if it exists at all, it’s its own antiparticle: if two dark matter particles hit each other they can blow up. Insane as it sounds, the theory predicts that despite making up most of everything the particles themselves are so tiny, and so terribly fussy about colliding, that they can form huge structures without destroying themselves. Positron emissions which may be an indication of exactly this kind of self-destruction have been observed by the European PAMELA satellite currently orbiting the Earth.

As theories go, this one is more awesome than accepted. The quasar hypothesis has wide support, and crediting something we’ve never even seen with reshaping the universe may be going a little far. Then again, that’s what modern cosmology is doing with dark matter anyway, so maybe this idea will fit right in. With the launch of the James Webb Space Observatory, perhaps we’ll find out for certain.

Posted by Casey Kazan with Luke McKinney

Source material provided by ESA/Hubble Information Center.

Image Credit: Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory and University of California, Santa Cruz), and the HUDF09 Team

Did Dark Matter Destroy the Universe 1.0? (A Galaxy Classic)

2010-02-08T03:09:00.000-08:00

Did Dark Matter Destroy the Universe 1.0? (A Galaxy Classic)

No galaxies have been seen before at such early epochs as that seen in this deepest image of the universe ever taken in near-infrared light by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The faintest and reddest objects (left inset) in the image are galaxies that correspond to “look-back times” of approximately 12.9 billion years to 13.1 billion years ago.

The challenge is that spectroscopy is needed to provide definitive redshift values, but the objects are too faint for spectroscopic observations (until JWST is launched), and the redshifts have to be inferred from the apparent colours of the galaxies.

Posted by Casey Kazan with Luke McKinney

Source material provided by ESA/Hubble Information Center.

Image Credit: Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory and University of California, Santa Cruz), and the HUDF09 Team

Will It Soon Be Possible to Teleport Energy? World's Leading Experts Say "Yes"

2010-02-07T12:09:00.000-08:00

Will It Soon Be Possible to Teleport Energy? World's Leading Experts Say "Yes"

There is an increasing awareness among the world’s scientific community that the properties of the universe are best described not by the laws that govern matter but by the laws that govern information, which appears to be true for the quantum world, is true for special relativity, and is now being explored for general relativity.

Using the same quantum principles that enable the teleportation of information, a new proposal by Japanese physicist Masahiro Hotta of Tohoku University shows how it may be possible to teleport energy. By exploiting the quantum energy fluctuations in entangled particles, physicists may be able to inject energy in one particle, and extract it in another particle located light-years away. The proposal could lead to new developments in energy distribution, as well as a better understanding of the relationship between quantum information and quantum energy.

Previously, physicists have demonstrated how to teleport the quantum states of several different entities, including photons, atoms, and ions. Researchers predict that the principles of teleportation could also extend to molecules, viruses, and other more complex objects. Over the past year, physicists have also been exploring quantum energy teleportation, and Hotta's latest paper builds on these studies.

As in previous examples of teleportation, the actual particles aren't teleported since they're basically identical at the quantum level. Rather, the information they carry is the important part. For this reason, physicists can simply send the information within a particle and not the particle itself. A receiving particle accepts the information from a sending particle, taking on the identity of the sending particle.

Hotta's paper marks the first example of the energy-entanglement relation for the smallest kind of quantum energy teleportation model. As he explains, the findings could enable scientists to explore the foundations of physics: specifically, the relationship between quantum information and quantum energy.

Casey Kazan via MIT Technology Review

What Came 'Before' the Big Bang? Leading Physicists Present a Radical Theory (Weekend Feature)

2010-02-06T13:08:00.000-08:00

What Came 'Before' the Big Bang? Leading Physicists Present a Radical Theory (Weekend Feature)

String theorists Neil Turok of Cambridge University and Paul Steinhardt, Albert Einstein Professor in Science and Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton believe that the cosmos we live in was actually created by the cyclical trillion-year collision of two universes (which they define as three-dimensional branes plus time) that were attracted toward each other by the leaking of gravity out of one of the universes.

In their view of the universe the complexities of an inflating universe after a Big Bang are replaced by a universe that was already large. flat, and uniform with dark energy as the effect of the other universe constantly leaking gravity into our own and driving its acceleration.

According to this theory, the Big Bang was not the beginning of time but the bridge to a past filled with endlessly repeating cycles of evolution, each accompanied by the creation of new matter and the formation of new galaxies, stars, and planets.

Turok and Steinhardt were inspired by a lecture given by Burt Ovrut who imagined two branes, universes like ours, separated by a tiny gap as tiny as 10-32 meters. There would be no communictaion between the two universes except for our parallel sister universe’s gravitational pull, which could cross the tiny gap.

Orvut’s theory could explain the effect of dark matter where areas of the universe are heavier than they should be given everything that’s present.

With their theory, the nagging problems surrounding the Big Bang (beginning from what, and caused how?) are replaced by an eternal cosmic cycle where dark energy is no longer a mysterious unknown quantity, but rather the very extra gravitational force that drives the universe to universe (brane-brane) interaction.

Casey Kazan

VIDEO

Source:

http://endlessuniverse.net/
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/ngt1000/

What Came "Before" the Big Bang? Two of the World's Leading Physicists Present a Radical Theory (Weekend Feature)

2010-02-06T07:08:00.000-08:00

What Came "Before" the Big Bang? Two of the World's Leading Physicists Present a Radical Theory (Weekend Feature)

Orvut’s theory could explain the effect of dark matter where areas of the universe are heavier than they should be given everything that’s present.

Casey Kazan

VIDEO

Source:

http://endlessuniverse.net/
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/ngt1000/

Will Saturn's Titan Yield 1st Evidence of Life Beyond Earth?

2010-02-05T03:08:00.000-08:00

Will Saturn's Titan Yield 1st Evidence of Life Beyond Earth?

Saturn’s Titan has been
considered a "unique world in the solar system" since 1908 when, the
Spanish astronomer, José Comas y Solá, discovered that it had an
atmosphere, something non-existent on other moons. This week’s announcement of NASA’s extension of the Cassini mission probes of Saturn and its moons may solve fascinating mysteries, including the strong possibility of life on Saturn’s largest moon,Titan.

It seems perfectly appropriate that one of the prime candidates for
life in our solar system, Titan, should have
surface lakes, lightning, shorelines, relatively thick nitrogen
atmosphere -and seasons. Titan can be viewed as an early-model Earth.
And 100% of all known Earths have awesome life on them. The
significantly lower temperature is a bit of a stumbling block (it’s ten
times as far from the sun as us), but there’s a strong possibility of
subterranean microbial life - or even a prebiotic “Life could happen!”
environment.

If a space traveler ever visits Titan, they will find a world where
temperatures plunge to minus 274 degrees Fahrenheit, methane rains from
the sky and dunes of ice or tar cover the planet’s most arid regions -a
cold mirror image of Earth’s tropical climate, according to scientists
at the University of Chicago.

Titan’s
ice is stronger than most bedrock found on earth, yet it is more
brittle, causing it to erode more easily, according to new research by
San Francisco State University Assistant Professor Leonard Sklar. Sklar
and his team developed new measurements from tests on ice as cold as
minus 170 degrees Celcius which demonstrate that ice gets stronger as
temperature decreases. Understanding ice and its resistance to erosion
is critical to answering how Titan’s earth-like landscape formed. Titan
has lakes, rivers and dunes, but its bedrock is made of ice as cold as
minus 180 degrees Celcius, eroded by rivers of liquid methane.

“You have all these things that
are analogous to Earth. At the same time, it’s foreign and unfamiliar,”
said Ray Pierrehumbert, the Louis Block Professor in Geophysical
Sciences at Chicago.

Titan, one of Saturn’s 60 moons, is the
only moon in the solar system large enough to support an atmosphere.
Pierrehumbert and colleague Jonathan Mitchell, have been comparing
observations of Titan collected by the Cassini space probe and the
Hubble Space Telescope with their own computer simulations of the
moon’s atmosphere.

“One of the things that attracts me about
Titan is that it has a lot of the same circulation features as Earth,
but done with completely different substances that work at different
temperatures,” Pierrehumbert said. On Earth, for example, water forms
liquid and is relatively active as a vapor in the atmosphere. But on
Titan, water is a rock. “It’s not more volatile on Titan than sand is
on Earth.”

Methane-natural gas-assumes an Earth-like role of
water on Titan. It exists in enough abundance to condense into rain and
form puddles on the surface within the range of temperatures that occur
on Titan.

“The ironic thing on Titan is that although it’s much
colder than Earth, it actually acts like a super-hot Earth rather than
a snowball Earth, because at Titan temperatures, methane is more
volatile than water vapor is at Earth temperatures,” Pierrehumbert said.

Pierrehumbert
and Mitchell even go so far as to call Titan’s climate tropical, even
though it sounds odd for a moon that orbits Saturn more than nine times
farther from the sun than Earth. Along with the behavior of methane,
Titan’s slow rotation rate also contributes to its tropical nature.
Earth’s tropical weather systems extend only to plus or minus 30
degrees of latitude from the equator. But on Titan, which rotates only
once every 16 days, “the tropical weather system extends to the entire
planet,” Pierrehumbert said.

Titan’s dense, nitrogen-methane atmosphere responds much more slowly
than Earth’s atmosphere, as it receives about 100 times less sunlight than Earth. Seasons on Titan last more
than seven Earth years. Its clouds form and move much like those on Earth, but in a much slower, more lingering fashion.

Physicists
from the University of Granada and University of Valencia, analyzing
data sent by the Cassini-Huygens probe from Titan, have "unequivocally"
proved that there is natural electrical activity on Titan. The world
scientist community believes that the probability of organic molecules,
precursors of life, being formed is higher on planets or moons which
have an atmosphere with electrical storms.

Scientists
with NASA’s Cassini mission have monitored Titan’s atmosphere for
three-and-a-half years, between July 2004 and December 2007, and
observed more than 200 clouds. They found that the way these clouds are
distributed around Titan matches scientists’ global circulation models.
The only exception is timing — clouds are still noticeable in the
southern hemisphere while fall is approaching.

“Titan’s clouds
don’t move with the seasons exactly as we expected,” said Sebastien
Rodriguez of the University of Paris Diderot, in collaboration with
Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team members at the
University of Nantes, France. “We see lots of clouds during the summer
in the southern hemisphere, and this summer weather seems to last into
the early fall. It looks like Indian summer on Earth, even if the
mechanisms are radically different on Titan from those on Earth. Titan
may then experience a warmer and wetter early autumn than forecasted by
the models.”

On Earth, abnormally warm, dry weather periods in
late autumn occur when low-pressure systems are blocked in the winter
hemisphere. By contrast, scientists think the sluggishness of
temperature changes at the surface and low atmosphere on Titan may be
responsible for its unexpected warm and wet, hence cloudy, late summer.

Scientists will continue to observe the long-term changes during Cassini’s extended mission, which runs until the fall of 2010,
which will offer plenty of opportunities to monitor climate change on
Titan — the spacecraft makes its next flyby of the moon on June 6.
We’ll learn if the sluggish weather is the result of a slow rate of
temperature change at the surface.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.

Titan’s South Polar Cloud Burst The infrared image of Saturn’s moon
Titan shows a large burst of clouds in the moon’s south polar region.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/University of Nantes

Posted by Casey Kazan.

Image
Top: Titan’s vast dune fields may act like weather vanes to determine
general wind direction, have been mapped by scientists who compiled
four years of radar data collected by the Cassini spacecraft.

Adapted from materials provided by the University of Chicago and the following sources:

http://www1.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-20090603.html

Adapted from materials provided by Plataforma SINC, via AlphaGalileo.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080729075117.htm
http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_releases/confirmed_electrical_activity_on_titan

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=8105

New infrared images showing the global cloud pattern are available at: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and
http://www.nasa.gov/cassini .

NASA Extends Cassini's Fly-bys of Saturn to Focus on Seasons & Climate Change

2010-02-04T06:08:00.000-08:00

NASA Extends Cassini's Fly-bys of Saturn to Focus on Seasons & Climate Change

NASA will extend the international Cassini-Huygens mission to explore Saturn and its moons to 2017. “This is a mission that never stops providing us surprising scientific results and showing us eye popping new vistas,” said Jim Green, director of NASA’s planetary science division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The historic traveler’s stunning discoveries and images have revolutionized our knowledge of Saturn and its moons.”

This NASA image of Saturn above shows a clear indication of an abruptly warmer polar cap and bright hot spot at Saturn’s south pole. The warm south pole and hot spot (a sweltering 91 Kelvin -296 degrees Fahrenheit at the pole) may be unique in the solar system and a further exploration of the region is planned using instruments on the Cassini spacecraft.

Cassini launched in October 1997 with the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe. The spacecraft arrived at Saturn in 2004. The probe was equipped with six instruments to study Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Cassini’s 12 instruments have returned a daily stream of data from Saturn’s system for nearly six years. The project was scheduled to end in 2008, but the mission received a 27-month extension to Sept. 2010.

“The extension presents a unique opportunity to follow seasonal changes of an outer planet system all the way from its winter to its summer,” said Bob Pappalardo, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Some of Cassini’s most exciting discoveries still lie ahead.”

This second extension, called the Cassini Solstice Mission, enables scientists to study seasonal and other long-term weather changes on the planet and its moons. Cassini arrived just after Saturn’s northern winter solstice, and this extension continues until a few months past northern summer solstice in May 2017. The northern summer solstice marks the beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere and winter in the southern hemisphere.

A complete seasonal period on Saturn has never been studied at this level of detail. The Solstice mission schedule calls for an additional 155 orbits around the planet, 54 flybys of Titan and 11 flybys of the icy moon Enceladus.

The mission extension also will allow scientists to continue observations of Saturn’s rings and the magnetic bubble around the planet known as the magnetosphere. The spacecraft will make repeated dives between Saturn and its rings to obtain in depth knowledge of the gas giant. During these dives, the spacecraft will study the internal structure of Saturn, its magnetic fluctuations and ring mass.

“The spacecraft is doing remarkably well, even as we endure the expected effects of age after logging 2.6 billion miles on its odometer,” said Bob Mitchell, Cassini program manager at JPL. “This extension is important because there is so much still to be learned at Saturn. The planet is full of secrets, and it doesn’t give them up easily.”

Cassini’s travel scrapbook includes more than 210,000 images, information gathered during more than 125 revolutions around Saturn; 67 flybys of Titan and eight close flybys of Enceladus. Cassini has revealed unexpected details in the planet’s signature rings, and observations of Titan have given scientists a glimpse of what Earth might have been like before life evolved. Titan is covered in carbon-bearing material — it’s a giant factory of organic chemicals. We are carbon-based life, and understanding how far along the chain of complexity towards life that chemistry can go in an environment like Titan will be important in understanding the origins of life throughout the universe.

Scientists hope to learn answers to many questions that have developed during the course of the mission, including why Saturn seems to have an inconsistent rotation rate and how a probable subsurface ocean feeds the Enceladus’ jets.

Casey Kazan via NASA/JPL

Image Credit: G. S. Orton & P. A. Yanamandra-Fisher (JPL), Keck Observatory, NASA. Image is from the Keck I telescope on Mauna Kea, the sharp, ground-based picture of Saturn’s southern hemisphere is a mosaic of 35 images

World's Experts Nuke 'GeoReactor' Theory of Moon's Creation

2010-02-03T02:07:00.000-08:00

World's Experts Nuke 'GeoReactor' Theory of Moon's Creation

The moon was created by an explosion of matter from of the Earth’s interior, where it formed in a runaway uranium fission georeactor at the boundary between the core and mantle according to a radical new theory by Rob de Meijer of the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and Wim van Westrenem of VU University Amsterdam. The georeactor is a theory by Marvin Hendron that a nuclear fission reactor may exist at the Earth’s core and serves as the energy source for the geomagnetic field. Hendron earlier proposed the existence of fission reactors at the core of the large gas planets -Jupiter and Saturn.

Expert’s around the world savaged the theory ranging from failing to realize that a georeactor would melt itself down to the Earth’s core to questioning how they really know a georeactor explosion would create a thin jet of matter?

If the georeactor hypothesis is right, Ricard Gott, professor of astrophysics at Princeton questions why Venus did not form a moon in the same process, since Venus has a similar mass and composition to the Earth. “OK, it might have just been a fluke it happened to the Earth but not Venus,” he told New Scientists. “But how do you explain Charon, the big icy moon of Pluto? That would require an ‘ice-reactor’, which is a nonsensical idea!”

But the biggest hole in the idea is not that it fails Occam’s Razor -it lacks simplicity and is unnecessarily complicated. In the standard “Theia Impact theory of the moon’s origin, the infant Earth was struck by a Mars-sized object. Some of the impactor, along with the Earth’s mantle, formed a ring around the Earth that eventually coalesced to form the moon.

But why are composition of the moon and the Earth’s mantle are identical when the moon should have been contaminated by material from the impactor?

“The simple answer is that the impactor formed from material at the same distance from the sun as the Earth, and therefore had the same composition,” says Princeton’s Gott. “The impact scenario, with the impactor coming from a Lagrange point, fits pretty much all the observations.”

Casey Kazan via New Scientist

"The First Trillionth of a Second of Time": Will the LHC Reveal a "Dark Side" of the Universe?

2010-02-02T11:07:00.000-08:00

"The First Trillionth of a Second of Time": Will the LHC Reveal a "Dark Side" of the Universe?

One
of the most fascinating discoveries of our new century may be imminent
if the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva produces nano-blackholes. According to the best current physics, such
nano blackholes could not be produced with the energy levels
the LHC can generate, but coud only come into being if a parallel
universe were providing extra gravitational input. Versions of
multiverse theory suggest that there is at least one other universe
very close to our own, perhaps only a millimeter away. This makes it
possible that some of the effects, especially gravity, “leak through,”
which could be responsible for the production of dark energy and dark
matter that make up 96% of the universe.

At a recent CalTech roundtable conference on the possible impact of the LHC on physics, Neal Weiner of
New York University, who is a proponent of the existence of forces as well
as particles on the dark side, said that until recently our theories about
dark matter were driven by ideas about particle theory rather than
data. "Ultimately we learn that perhaps it has very little to do with
us at all," Dr. Weiner said. "Who knows what we will find in the dark
sector?"

A huge volume of space that includes the Milky Way and
super-clusters of galaxies is flowing towards a mysterious, gigantic unseen mass named mass astronomers have dubbed “The Great
Attractor,” some 250 million light years from our Solar System.

The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are the dominant structures in
a galaxy cluster called the Local Group which is, in turn, an outlying
member of the Virgo supercluster. Andromeda–about 2.2 million
light-years from the Milky Way–is speeding toward our galaxy at
200,000 miles per hour.

This motion can only be accounted for by
gravitational attraction, even though the mass that we can observe is
not nearly great enough to exert that kind of pull. The only thing that
could explain the movement of Andromeda is the gravitational pull of a
lot of unseen mass–perhaps the equivalent of 10 Milky Way-size
galaxies–lying between the two galaxies.

Meanwhile,
our entire Local Group is hurtling toward the center of the Virgo
Cluster (image above) at one million miles per hour.

The Milky Way and its neighboring Andromeda galaxy, along with some
30 smaller ones, form what is known as the Local Group, which lies on
the outskirts of a "super cluster"—a grouping
of thousands of galaxies—known as Virgo, which is also pulled toward
the Great Attractor. Based on the velocities at these scales, the
unseen mass inhabiting the voids between the galaxies and clusters of
galaxies amounts to perhaps 10 times more than the visible matter.

Even
so, adding this invisible material to luminous matter brings the
average mass density of the universe still to within only 10-30 percent
of the critical density needed to “close” the universe. This phenomena
suggests that the universe be “open.” Cosmologists continue to debate
this question, just as they are also trying to figure out the nature of
the missing mass, or “dark matter.”

It is believed that this dark matter dictates the structure of the
Universe on the grandest of scales. Dark matter gravitationally
attracts normal matter, and it is this normal matter that astronomers
see forming long thin walls of super-galactic clusters.

Recent measurements with telescopes and space probes of the
distribution of mass in M31 -the largest galaxy in the neighborhood of
the Milky Way- and other galaxies led to the recognition that galaxies
are filled with dark matter and have shown that a mysterious force—a
dark energy—fills the vacuum of empty space, accelerating the
universe’s expansion.

Astronomers now recognize that the
eventual fate of the universe is inextricably tied to the presence of
dark energy and dark matter.The current standard model for cosmology
describes a universe that is 70 percent dark energy, 25 percent dark
matter, and only 5 percent normal matter.

We don’t know what
dark energy is, or why it exists, or if it even does exist. On the other hand, particle theory
tells us that, at the microscopic level, even a perfect vacuum bubbles
with quantum particles that are a natural source of dark energy. But a
naïve calculation of the dark energy generated from the vacuum yields a
value 10120 times larger than the amount we observe. Some unknown
physical process is required to eliminate most, but not all, of the
vacuum energy, leaving enough left to drive the accelerating expansion
of the universe.

A new theory of particle physics is required to explain this physical process.

The
universe as we see it contains only the stable relics and leftovers of
the big bang: unstable particles have decayed away with time, and the
perfect symmetries have been broken as the universe has cooled, but the
structure of space remembers all the particles and forces we can no
longer see around us.

Discovering what it is that makes up the heart of the Great Attractor –
will surely rank as one of the greatest discoveries in the history of
science.

Last month, CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator
ever built, has begun colliding protons and generating sparks of
primordial fire in an effort to recreate conditions that ruled the
universe in the first trillionth of a second of time after the Big Bang. Physicists have been speculating for 30 years what they will see.

A major hope is an explanation for why gravity is so weak compared with the other forces of nature. How is it that a refrigerator magnet can hold itself up against the pull of the entire Earth? Perhaps they will discover what physicists call the "wimp miracle," previously undiscovered particles — known collectively as wimps, for weakly interacting massive particles, that supersymmetry predicts could explain the mysterious dark matter that astronomers believe makes up 25 percent of the universe.

Casey Kazan

Source

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/science/26essay.html

"The First Trillionth of a Second of Time": Is There a "Dark Side" of the Universe the LHC Will Reveal?

2010-02-02T06:07:00.000-08:00

"The First Trillionth of a Second of Time": Is There a "Dark Side" of the Universe the LHC Will Reveal?

At a recent CalTech roundtable conference on the LHC, Neal Weiner of
New York University, who has suggested the existence of forces as well
as particles on the dark side, said that until recently ideas about
dark matter were driven by ideas about particle theory rather than
data. "Ultimately we learn that perhaps it has very little to do with
us at all," Dr. Weiner said. "Who knows what we will find in the dark
sector?"

Meanwhile,
our entire Local Group is hurtling toward the center of the Virgo
Cluster (image above) at one million miles per hour.

A new theory of particle physics is required to explain this physical process.

Discovering what it is that makes up the heart of the Great Attractor –
will surely rank as one of the greatest discoveries in the history of
science.

Casey Kazan

Source

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/science/26essay.html

The Solar System's Best Bet for Earth-like Life? Jupiter's Europa (VIDEO)

2010-02-01T03:07:00.000-08:00

The Solar System's Best Bet for Earth-like Life? Jupiter's Europa (VIDEO)

“There’s nothing saying there is life there now. But we do know there are the physical conditions to support it.”

Richard Greenberg, University of Arizona. world’s leading expert on Europa.

New research suggests that there is enough oxygen available in the subsurface ocean of Europa to support oxygen-based metabolic processes for life similar to that on Earth. In fact, there may be enough oxygen to support complex, animal-like organisms with greater oxygen demands than microorganisms.

Based on what we know about the Jovian moon, parts of Europa’s seafloor could resemble the environments around Earth’s deep-ocean hydrothermal vents.The chances for life there have been uncertain, because Europa's ocean lies beneath several miles of ice, which separates it from the production of oxygen at the surface by energetic charged particles (similar to cosmic rays). Without oxygen, life could conceivably exist at hot springs in the ocean floor using exotic metabolic chemistries, based on sulfur or the production of methane. However, it is not certain whether the ocean floor actually would provide the conditions for such life.

Its geology and the paucity of impact craters suggests that the top of the ice is continually reformed such that the current surface is only about 50 million years old, roughly 1% of the age of the solar system.

Richard Greenberg of the University of Arizona has considered three generic resurfacing processes: gradually laying fresh material on the surface; opening cracks which fill with fresh ice from below; and disrupting patches of surface in place and replacing them with fresh material. Using estimates for the production of oxidizers at the surface, he finds that the delivery rate into the ocean is so fast that the oxygen concentration could exceed that of the Earth's oceans in only a few million years.

Oxygen, generated by charged particles striking water molecules on the moon's surface, would take 1 to 2 billion years to begin seeping into the ocean.That delay would have been critical for supporting life because it would have allowed time for primitive organisms to develop the ability to use oxygen.

The most fascinating part of Europa’s evolution, says Greenberg, is Europa's youthful, nearly crater-free appearance, which indicates that the crust is continually resurfaced. Today's crust is only 50 million years old, even though the moon formed soon after the solar system's birth 4.56 billion years ago.

Over a period of about 50 million years, a layer of ice 300 meters thick slowly rose from below, gradually covering the moon's surface and erasing old craters. As a result of this facelift, Europa's oxygenated layer grew increasingly thick, until after about 1 to 2 billion years the entire ice layer was oxygen-rich. At that point, Greenberg suggests, ice melting at the bottom of the frozen layer began delivering oxygen into the proposed buried ocean at a faster rate than previously estimated, resulting in about 100 times more oxygen in the ocean.

Greenberg says that the concentrations of oxygen would be great enough to support not only microorganisms, but also "macrofauna", that is, more complex animal-like organisms which have greater oxygen demands. The continual supply of oxygen could support roughly 3 billion kilograms of macrofauna, assuming similar oxygen demands to terrestrial fish.

The best evidence for the question of the origin of life is that there would be a delay of a couple of billion years before the first surface oxygen reached the ocean. Without that time lapse, the first pre-biotic chemistry and the first primitive organic structures would be disrupted by oxidation. Oxidation is a hazard unless organisms have evolved protection from its damaging effects. A similar delay in the production of oxygen on Earth was probably essential for allowing life to get started here.

Casey Kazan

Sources:

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/48322/title/Europas_proposed_ocean_could_be_rich_in_oxygen

http://www.physorg.com/news174918239.html

http://www.oceanleadership.org/2009/could-jupiter-moon-harbor-fish-size-life/

NASA's "ET Eyes" - Piercing the Mysteries of the Universe (A Weekend Feature)

2010-01-31T02:06:00.000-08:00

NASA's "ET Eyes" - Piercing the Mysteries of the Universe (A Weekend Feature)

“Our personal window on the Universe is terribly small within a stunnng range of wavelengths. With our eyes we see wavelengths between 0.00004 and 0.00008 of a centimeter (where, not so oddly, the Sun and stars emit most of their energy). The human visual spectrum from violet to red is but one octave on an imaginary electromagnetic piano with a keyboard hundreds of kilometers long.”

James Kaler, astronomer and author of “Heavens Gate: From Killer Stars to the Seeds of Life, How We are Connected to the Universe.”

The image below is an infrared photo of M82 is a remarkable galaxy of peculiar type in constellation Ursa Major. It is usually classified as irregular, though probably a distorted disk galaxy, and famous for its heavy star-forming activity, thus a prototype member of the class of starbursting galaxies. In the infrared light, M82 is the brightest galaxy in the sky; it exhibits a so-called infrared excess, being much brighter at infrared wavelengths than in the visible part of the spectrum. Over 100 young globular clusters have been discovered in M82 with the Hubble Space Telescope. Their formation is probably another effect triggered by a tidal encounter with M81 between 50 and several 100 million years ago.

Much of what you see above is outside our human visual band, our eyes cannot register wave photons no matter how powerful they may be. Longer that the visual wavelength limit -up to about a millimeter-lies the infrared. At the short end is violet, with orange, yellow, green, blue and hundreds of overlapping shades. Longer waves, into kilometer-wavelengths toward the unknown end are what we call “radio.”

Shorter than the visual limit are the ultrviolet -all running in the vacuum at the speed of light. At less than a percent of the wavelength of visual light are X rays, and at a factor of 100 smaller are the deadly gamma rays.

One of the great acheivements of modern astronomy is the entersion of “human sight” -opening the electromagnetic spectrum to our view and discovery beginning in the 1930s with radio estronomy and ending with NASA’s great fleet of space observatories and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (FGST, formerly GLAST), working to unveil the mysteries of the high-energy universe. Launched into orbit on June 11, FGST studies the most energetic particles of light, observing physical processes far beyond the capabilities of earthbound laboratories..

A composite of our Milky Way’s core is compsed of images from the Hubble Space Telescope in near-infrared light, the Spitzer Space Telescope in infrared light, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory in X-ray light. A mosaic of vast star fields is visible, along with dense star clusters, long filaments of gas and dust, expanding supernova remnants, and the energetic surroundings of what likely is our Galaxy’s central black hole.

Casey Kazan

Source: NASA/Hubble

The Eerie Silence: Should We Be Sending Messages Into Space? (A Weekend Feature)

2010-01-30T02:06:00.000-08:00

The Eerie Silence: Should We Be Sending Messages Into Space? (A Weekend Feature)

If we should pick up signals
from alien civilizations, Stephen Hawking, our century’s Einstein, warns: “we should have be wary of
answering back, until we have evolved” a bit further. Meeting a more
advanced civilization, at our present stage,’ Hawking says “might be a
bit like the original inhabitants of America meeting Columbus. I don’t
think they were better off for it.”

Mankind has always been driven by
contradictory drives. The relentless curiosity that pushes us forward
and is directly responsible for our progress from caves to cities.
The fear of change that tells us “hang on, these caves/cities are
really nice, we don’t want to risk losing them.” There isn’t any
greater potential threat to the status quo than the discovery of
extraterrestrial life, which is why some people would prefer we didn’t
try.

After a half-century of scanning the skies for intelligent extraterrestrial life, astronomers have little to report but an eerie silence, eerie because many scientists are convinced that the universe is teeming with life. The problem could be that we’ve been looking in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and in the wrong way. At this week’s conference at London’s prestigious Royal Society, Paul Davies, astrophysicist and Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and Co-Director of the Cosmology Initiative at Arizona State University, discussed a new roadmap for the future of SETI, arguing that we need to be far more expansive in our efforts, by questioning existing ideas of what form an alien intelligence might take, how it might try to communicate with us, and how we should respond if we ever do make contact.

There has also been controversy recently over attempts to contact
intelligent aliens, where instead of hiding in the corner and listening
real hard, some astronomers beamed intense directional messages up up
and away. Critics decried these actions as dangerous, though their
fears reveal more about us than any eventual ETs. They assume that
they would be similar to humanity, so their first response to finding a
more primitive culture would be to exploit the hell out of it. While
such a fate might be pleasingly ironic (for anyone who isn’t human, at
least), others contend that any species that can make the journey here
has advanced to a point where their goals are rather higher-minded than
“Shoot us”.

Dr Alexander Zaitzev, of the Institute of Radio Engineering and
Electronics at the Russian Academy of Sciences, doesn’t think much of
these worries either way. A proponent of METI (Messaging to
Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), in a recent paper he shows that the
odds of one of the METI messages being detected is a millionth of that
due to powerful radar pulses regularly used in astronomical
investigation. Though whether writing a paper saying “This METI thing
we’re doing has only a tiny chance of working” is overall a good idea
remains to be seen. An important point is that METI represents an
intentional will to make contact, rather than the accidental alien
interception of some random radiation from Earth - the difference
between saying “Hello!” and just being a suspicious strange noise late
at night.

Most of the objections to contacting aliens are weak under close
examination. We can’t suddenly decide to hide after fifty years of
pumping electromagnetic radiation into space without rhyme or reason -
in fact, we’d better hope that an advanced civilization doesn’t catch
an episode of “American Idol” and just vaporize us outright.

Then there’s the assumption that aliens would have the same kind of
technology we do - despite the extremely obvious fact that our
technology can’t actually get to other exo planets. Any attempt to mask
radio emissions will likely look like cavemen closing their eyes to
hide from satellite imaging.

The simple fact is that certain people have always opposed progress
while other, better people have driven it. “Experts” decried boiled
water as unhealthy compared the vital stuff straight from the river,
cursed antibiotics as a temporary placebo, and confidently declared
that computers were nothing but expensive toys. As an intelligent
species we must make every effort to contact anyone (or thing) we can.

Edited and Reposted for commentary by Luke McKinney.

Related Galaxy posts:

Stephen Hawking: Why Isn’t the Milky Way “Crawling With Self-Designing Mechanical or Biological Life?”

Stephen Hawking: “Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution”
Stephen Hawking: “Asteroid Impacts Biggest Threat to Intelligent Life in the Galaxy”

"The Human Camera" -Scientists Explore One of the World's Most Extraordinary Brains

2010-01-29T02:06:00.000-08:00

"The Human Camera" -Scientists Explore One of the World's Most Extraordinary Brains

A Daily Galaxy post, The Importance of Being Forgetful,
featured the built-in neural process of forgetting, which discussed why
the average human brain is equipped with the ability to filter through
seemingly irrelevant details. While the average person may not have
vast memory resources, it appears to be an evolutionary trade-off that
allows the majority of us to focus on the most relevant facts.

However,
some of the most incredible minds on Earth lack this ability to filter
irrelevant facts, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that to a
savant, the irrelevant IS relevant, and incredibly so. Somehow their
brains are able to store and access incredible loads of information,
even perceiving and relating to this information in an entirely
different way.

Stephen
Wiltshire is considered an autistic savant. He has an ability which can
certainly be described as a "super power". Sometimes referred to as the
"human camera", Wilshire has the unnerving ability to draw exact
replicas of intricate structures, buildings and landscapes—virtually
anything he lays eyes on—after a quick glance. Without taking notes or
drawing rough sketches, Wiltshire methodically replicates what his eyes
have seen down to the exact number of windows in tall skyscrapers.

While
watching a video (see link below) of Stephen drawing Rome, it almost
seems as if he is a character straight from NBC's popular TV series
Heroes—born with a superhuman ability. Like many other savants,
Wiltshire's mind is a mystery. He did not speak his first words,
"pencil" and "paper" until he was five years old. Savants like
Wiltshire seem to have been born fundamentally different.

Imagine
being able to learn one of the most difficult languages on Earth,
Icelandic, in just 7 days. Well known Savant, Daniel Tammet, makes is
look easy. His extraordinary abilities are linked to synesthesia. He
"feels" numbers in terms of texture, shape and color. Some scientists
believe that the epileptic seizures he suffered as a small child, which
nearly ended his life, somehow unlocked the door to an incredible
ability that may be inherent in all humans.

Individuals
have been known to develop extraordinary abilities much later in life,
or after severe brain trauma. Alonzo Clemons, for example, developed an
incredible talent, which appears to have emerged directly following a
head injury as a child. He can see a fleeting image (on a television
screen for example) of any animal, and in less than 20 minutes sculpt a
perfect replica of that animal in three-dimensional accuracy. The wax
animal is correct in each and every detail, down to each fiber and
muscle.

Similarly,
Orlando Serrell did not possess any unusual skills until he was struck
by a baseball on the left side of his head on August 17, 1979 when he
was ten years old. Serrell suffered from a long headache, but after the
headache ended, Orlando inexplicably had the ability to perform
calendrical calculations of amazing complexity. He can also recall
details of his life, like the weather, where he was, and what he was
doing every day since the day that baseball hit his head.

Because
of cases like these, some scientists believe that the potential to
express multiple super-abilities is a universal trait, but is obscured
by the normal functioning intellect. In the case of some savants, it is
believed that damage to the brain has somehow disrupted normal
functioning and therefore allows the brain to express these incredible
skills and abilities. Various researchers have noted how many
"disabled" individuals are simultaneously "superabled" through some
little understood phenomenon.

Mind
expert Allan Snyder of the University of Sydney and director of Centre
for the Mind, is certain that all people have these latent super
abilities, but only some are able to express them through
"malfunctions" of overriding brain functions.

“They are exceptional in that they can tap in and somehow we can’t. They have privileged access,” said Snyder.

So,
if all of us have latent super-abilities, is it possible to activate
them permanently, or at least periodically, without compromising normal
brain functioning? Probably, say the Australian scientists who used
transcranial magnetic stimulation to temporarily switch off the frontal
temporal lobe of volunteers. Afterwards the subjects showed an
immediate improvement in calendar calculating, naming the day of the
week of any recent history event, and in their artistic abilities. Of
course these were just the abilities tested. Scientists do not know all
of the latent abilities that humans may possess.

It
has been predicted that more advanced neurological studies may someday
discover how to allow "Regular" people to tap into the incredible
latent powers of their own mind, and thereby unleashing some of the
"superhuman" potential in all of us.

Posted by Rebecca Sato.

Videos:

Stephen Wiltshire draws Rome
Stephen draws Tokyo

David Tammet
Video: Tammet demonstrates his mathematical genius
David Tammet interview with David Letterman

Related post: The Importance of Being Forgetful
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/06/the_importance_.html

Is DNA a Fossil of the Origin of Life? Two Leading Scientists Say "Yes"

2010-01-28T02:06:00.000-08:00

Is DNA a Fossil of the Origin of Life? Two Leading Scientists Say "Yes"

“In some sense, the genetic code is a fossil or perhaps an echo of the origin of life, just as the cosmic microwave background is a sort of echo of the Big Bang. And its form points to a process very different from today’s Darwinian evolution.”

Carl Woese -Microbiologist

What if a process Darwin never wrote about, and never even dreamed ofl, has been controlling the evolution of life throughout most of the Earth’s history and altered the evolutionary process itself? What if it turns out that there is a “time machine” that biologists can use to look back towards the origin of life?

Microbiologist Carl Woese and physicist Nigel Goldenfeld both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, argue that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection applies only to a recent phase of life on Earth; that a process of horizontal evolution led to the rise of the genetic code.

In 1977, Woese took the world of evolutionary biology by storm when his analysis of the genetic machinery involved in gene expression revealed an entirely new limb of the tree of life -the archaea, a group of single-celled microbes as distinct from bacteria genetically as both archaea and bacteria are from eukaryotes. Archaea saw an unprecedented amount of study since Woese's revolutionary discovery, especially because of their ability to live in extreme habitats. Such "extremophiles" are often found in at deep undersea vents and living in geysers with temperatures frequently rising up to 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit) .

Horizontal evolution is already known to play a huge role in the evolution of microbial genomes, but its consequences have hardly been explored, which according to Woese and Goldenfeld, are profound. Since micro-organisms represented the majority of life on Earth for the billions of years that life has existed, the most ancient and prevalent form of evolution probably wasn’t Darwinian at all.

According to Woese, evolutionary biology took its modern form in the early 20th century with the establishment of the genetic basis of inheritance: Mendel’s genetics combined with Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Biologists call this as the “modern synthesis”, and it has been the basis for all subsequent developments in molecular biology and genetics.

Woese believes that along the way biologists were seduced into thinking they had found the final truth about all evolution. “Biology built up a facade of mathematics around the juxtaposition of Mendelian genetics with Darwinism. And as a result it neglected to study the most important problem in science - the nature of the evolutionary process.”

Woese argues that nothing in the modern synthesis explains how evolution could have produced the genetic code and the basic genetic machinery used by all organisms, especially the enzymes and structures involved in translating genetic information into proteins. Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA, presumed that the code was just some “frozen accident”, inherited by all organisms from an early form of life. Goldenfeld and Kalin Vetsigian, now at Harvard, however, discovered that it is possible for codes and organisms to evolve together cooperatively, especially effectively through horizontal gene transfer.

As the name suggests, horizontal gene transfer involves cells providing genes with each other, rather than having genes develop in distinct lines unique to each organism. Present day microbes, and presumably early organisms too, use horizontal gene transfer pervasively, in place of sex to mix genes, thereby creating novel combinations of genes that can generate new functionality. Now it appears that the genetic code evolved this way, very early on in life’s history, even before the root of the tree of life. In some sense, then, the genetic code is a fossil or perhaps an echo of the origin of life, just as the cosmic microwave background, as Woese points out, is a sort of echo of the Big Bang.

In the past few years, genome studies have demonstrated that DNA flows readily between the chromosomes of microbes and the external world, so an individual microbe may have access to the genes found in the entire microbial population around it, including those of other microbe species.

On the basis of their research, they argue that horizontal gene transfer had to be a dominant factor in the original form of evolution. Evidence for this lies in the genetic code. Though it was discovered in the 1960s, no one had been able to explain how evolution could have made it so exquisitely tuned to resisting errors. Mutations happen in DNA coding all the time, and yet the proteins it produces often remain unaffected by these errors. Darwinian evolution simply cannot explain how such a code could arise. But horizontal gene transfer can, say Woese and Goldenfeld.

“With vertical, Darwinian evolution,” says Goldenfeld, “we found that the code evolution gets stuck and does not find the true optimum.”

For the researchers the conclusion is inescapable: the genetic code must have arisen in an earlier evolutionary phase dominated by horizontal gene transfer.

“It would have acted as an innovation-sharing protocol,” says Goldenfeld, “greatly enhancing the ability of organisms to share genetic innovations that were beneficial.” Following this, a second stage of evolution would have involved rampant horizontal gene transfer, made possible by the shared genetic machinery, and leading to a rapid, exponential rise in the complexity of organisms. This, in turn, would eventually have given way to a third stage of evolution in which genetic transfer became mostly vertical, perhaps because the complexity of organisms reached a threshold requiring a more circumscribed flow of genes to preserve correct function.

Woese can’t put a date on when the transition to Darwinian evolution happened, but he suspects it occurred at different times in each of the three main branches of the tree of life, with bacteria likely to have changed first.

Early evolution may have proceeded through a series of stages before the Darwinian form emerged. Today, at least in multicellular organisms, Darwinian evolution is dominant but we may still be in for some surprises. “Most of life - the microbial world - is still strongly taking advantage of horizontal gene transfer, but we also know, from studies in the past year, that multicellular organisms do this too,” says Goldenfeld.

As more genomes are sequenced, ever more incongruous sequences of DNA are turning up. Comparisons of the genomes of various species including a frog, lizard, mouse and bushbaby, for example, indicate that one particular chunk of DNA found in each must have been acquired independently by horizontal gene transfer (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 105, p 17023). “The importance of this for evolution has yet to be seriously considered.”

How did life on Earth evolve so quickly from from early geochemistry. What were the key physical processes that led to self-organization of early metabolism and self-reproducing molecules?

In taking this approach to the origin of life, the characteristics of the earliest organisms become very important: do they contain clues about the origin of life that we have not yet teased out? Astronomers have long understood that by studying the farthest galaxies and stars, they are effectively looking back the beginning of time, receiving photons that have been traveling for billions of years.

If the genetic code has its origins so early on in the evolution of life, then working backwards from the genetic code might make connections with the chemical reactions that must have been important for early life. Many biologists consider the deep sea vents the most plausible location for the origin of life. Furthermore, there is the exciting prospect that similar vents on other worlds, such as the oceans of Jupiter’s moon, Europa, may be the host to extra-terrestrial microbial life.

Casey Kazan via material provided by:

The Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois.

Additional source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527441.500-horizontal-and-vertical-the-evolution-of-evolution.html?full=true&print=true

http://guava.physics.uiuc.edu/projects/FIBR_overview.html