The Daily Galaxy: Great Discoveries Channel

"Spaceship Earth" - A Status Update

2009-11-10T01:00:00-08:00

One of the leading experts on planet Earth, James Lovelock, believes that there is very little we can do to stave off global warming catastrophes. Lovelock is the man who created the Gaia theory – that the earth is essentially a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism.

Lovelock developed the Gaia hypothesis as an outgrowth of his work for NASA on methods of detecting life on Mars, which he popularized with his 1979 book Gaia: A new look at life on Earth. He named this self-regulating living system after the Greek goddess Gaia, using a suggestion from the novelist William Golding, who was living in the same English village as Lovelock. The theory drew withering criticism from many in the scientific establishment, drawing the comparison with the resistance to the introduction of the idea of plate tectonics within geology, which took about 30 years before it became universally accepted as true.

It was Lovelock and his colleague Lynn Margulis who, in the early 1970s, developed a testable scientific hypothesis aimed at investigating Earth's lifelike properties. Known as the Gaia hypothesis, it states that life on Earth works to keep conditions at the planet's surface favorable to life itself. In 2006, Lovelock joined Louis Agassiz and Charles Darwin in receiving geology's most prestigious prize—the Geological Society's Wollaston Medal.

In 2001 scientists from four international climate research programs reasserted the hypothesis's basic tenets: (1) Earth "behaves as a single, self-regulating system"; (2) "human activities are significantly influencing Earth's environment"; (3) Earth's system is complex and difficult to predict, and "surprises abound"; (4) the system is characterized by "critical thresholds and abrupt changes"; and (5) Earth's system has "moved well outside the range of natural variability exhibited over the last half million years at least."

Lovelock's task at NASA was to develop instruments for the analysis of extraterrestrial atmospheres and planetary surfaces for the Viking program that visited in the late-1970s was motivated in part to determining whether supported life. Lovelock's work on the composition of the Martian atmosphere, led him to believe hat many life forms on would be obliged to make use of it and, in return, alter it. However, the atmosphere was found to be in a stable condition close to its chemical equilibrium, with very little oxygen, methane, or hydrogen, but with an overwhelming abundance of carbon dioxide. This stark contrast between the Martian atmosphere and chemically-dynamic mixture of that of our Earth's was strongly indicative of the absence of life on the planet.

Today, Lovelock believes that a rapid drop in carbon in the atmosphere could actually do more damage than good. He believes that the global warming that we are currently experiencing is offset by a cooling of 2-3ºC, caused by Global Dimming -essentially, the reduction of direct irradiance at the earth’s atmosphere as a result of industrial pollution, known to others as aerosol particles.

It’s a horrible catch 22 situation that leaves only a very small gap for any joy at all. If we continue to do nothing (note the use of the word continue), then we will doom ourselves. If we do do something, like a massive cut back in the emission of carbon in to our atmosphere, Lovelock believes that we would further damage Earth.

"Any economic downturn or planned cutback in fossil fuel use, which lessened aerosol density, would intensify the heating,” Lovelock will say, in a lecture to the Royal Society today. “If there were a 100 per cent cut in fossil fuel combustion it might get hotter not cooler. We live in a fool's climate. We are damned if we continue to burn fuel and damned if we stop too suddenly."

What’s worse is that Lovelock believes that the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are underestimating the severity of climate change. He has labeled a report issued by the IPCC earlier this year as "properly cautious", adding that he believes the report leaves a tone of “we can fix this”, when there is none. He continues and adds that a possibly six to eight billion people will suffer food and water shortages, intolerable climates, and the extinction of entire ecosystems.

"We are at war with the Earth and as in a blitzkrieg, events proceed faster than we can respond." In his speech to the Royal Society, he will argue that when a model includes the whole Earth system it shows that "…when the carbon dioxide in the air exceeds 500 parts per million the global temperature suddenly rises 6ºC and becomes stable again despite further increases or decreases of atmospheric carbon dioxide. This contrasts with the IPCC models that predict that temperature rises and falls smoothly with increasing or decreasing carbon dioxide."

The man who has come under criticism by the Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, is not solely alarmist. He believes that we should attempt to lower greenhouse gases, and minimize the destruction of forests; but he believes that that will simply not be enough.

The bottom line, according to Lovelock, is that we will simply have to adapt.

Posted by Josh Hill with Casey Kazan.

The Largest Impact Crater in Solar System Sparks Intense Interest

2009-11-10T00:58:00-08:00

Recent analysis of the Red Planet's terrain using NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Global Surveyor spacecraft observations revealed what appeared to be by far the largest impact crater ever found in the solar system. The image left shows how the Earth might look with a similar sized crater, 5,300 miles wide and 6,600 miles long, embedded in it

NASA’s Viking orbiters observed in the 1970s that the bottom two-thirds of Mars was about two miles higher in altitude than its top third. Planetary scientists have since bandied about two hypotheses to explain the dichotomy: either some odd internal dynamics of Mars generated a thicker planetary crust in the south, or the northern surface was blown away by a mega-meteor impact.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Global Surveyor have provided detailed information about the elevations and gravity of the Red Planet's northern and southern hemispheres. A new study using this information may solve one of the biggest remaining mysteries in the solar system: Why does Mars have two strikingly different kinds of terrain in its northern and southern hemispheres? The huge crater is creating intense scientific interest.

The mystery of the two-faced nature of Mars has perplexed scientists since the first comprehensive images of the surface were beamed home by NASA spacecraft in the 1970s. A giant northern basin that covers about 40 percent of Mars' surface, sometimes called the Borealis basin, is the remains of a colossal impact early in the solar system's formation, the new analysis suggests. At 8,500 kilometers (5,300 miles) across, it is about four times wider than the next-biggest impact basin known, the Hellas basin on southern Mars. An accompanying report calculates that the impacting object that produced the Borealis basin must have been about 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) across.

That's larger than Pluto. The impact gouged out a crater the size of the combined areas of Asia, Europe and Australia, researchers reported in the journal Nature. It appears to have held an ocean in the early days of the planet, before Mars lost so much of its atmosphere and the water either sublimated away or froze beneath the surface.

"This is an impressive result that has implications not only for the evolution of early Mars, but also for early Earth's formation," said Michael Meyer, the Mars chief scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. When the solar system was just maturing 4 billion years ago, big objects often smashed into one another. The formation of the Earth's Moon is attributed to a giant impact on the Earth by a Mars-sized body.

"We haven't proved the giant-impact hypothesis, but I think we've shifted the tide," said Jeffrey Andrews-Hanna, a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Andrews-Hanna and co-authors Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Bruce Banerdt of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., report the new findings in the journal Nature this week.

This northern-hemisphere basin on Mars is one of the smoothest surfaces found in the solar system. The southern hemisphere is high, rough, heavily cratered terrain, which ranges from 4 to 8 kilometers (2.5 to 5 miles) higher in elevation than the basin floor.

Other giant impact basins have been discovered that are elliptical rather than circular. But an analysis of the Martian surface from NASA's two Mars orbiters to reveal the clear elliptical shape of Borealis basin, which is consistent with being an impact crater.

One complicating factor in revealing the elliptical shape of the basin was that after the time of the impact, which must have been at least 3.9 billion years ago, giant volcanoes formed along one part of the basin rim in the Tharsis region (image left) -a region that is only 2 million years old -very recent in geological terms -a huge region of high, rough terrain that obscures the basin's outlines. It took a combination of gravity data, which tend to reveal underlying structure, with data on current surface elevations to reconstruct a map of Mars elevations as they existed before the volcanoes erupted.

"In addition to the elliptical boundary of the basin, there are signs of a possible second, outer ring -- a typical characteristic of large impact basins," Banerdt said.

In a second report, Margarita Marinova and colleagues at the California Institute of Technology say they made three-dimensional simulations of the impact.

"The impact would have to be big enough to blast the crust off half of the planet, but not so big that it melts everything. We showed that you really can form the dichotomy that way," said Francis Nimmo of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

He said shock waves from the impact would have traveled through the planet and disrupted the crust on the other side, causing changes in the magnetic field. In a third report, Nimmo and colleagues said such magnetic anomalies have been measured in Mars' southern hemisphere.

"We haven't proved the giant-impact hypothesis, but I think we've shifted the tide. The majority of the evidence is now in favor of the giant impact," Andrews-Hanna said in a statement.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

"BioFingerprints" -New Tech in the Search for Earth's Twin

2009-11-10T00:42:00-08:00

"Detecting Earth in reflected light is like searching for a firefly from a searchlight that is 2,400 miles distant," according to a panel of astronomers describing the challenges facing the search for other planets in the universe.

With a dramatic new advance, however, astronomers have confirmed an effective way to search the atmospheres of planets for signs of life, vastly improving our chances of finding alien life outside our solar system. Think of it as the method to discover the Earth's "fingerprint" -information about the chemical composition of the Earth’s atmosphere from sunlight that has passed through it.

A team from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias used the William Herschel Telescope on La Palma and the Nordic Optical Telescope to take the first transmission spectrum of the Earth.

When a planet passes in front of its parent star, part of the starlight passes through the planet’s atmosphere and contains information about the constituents of the atmosphere. Even though astronomers can’t use exactly the same method to look at the Earth’s atmosphere, the team was able for the first time ever to gain a spectrum of our planet by observing light reflected from the Moon towards the Earth during a lunar eclipse.

The spectrum not only contained signs of life but these signs were unmistakably strong. It also contained unexpected molecular bands and the signature of the earth ionosphere.

“Now we know what the transmission spectrum of a inhabited planet looks like, we have a much better idea of how to find and recognize Earth like planets outside our solar system where life may be thriving," said Enric Palle, of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias. "The information in this spectrum shows us that this is a very effective way to gather information about the biological processes that may be taking place on a planet.”

“Many discoveries of Earth-size planets are expected in the next decades and some will orbit in the habitable zone of their parent stars. Obtaining their atmospheric properties will be highly challenging; the greatest reward will happen when one of those planets shows a spectrum like that of our Earth,” added Pilar Montañes-Rodriguez, of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

http://www.scitech.ac.uk/PMC/PRel/STFC/transmissionspectrum.aspx

“Longevity Genes” -Why Some of Us Live Longer

2009-11-10T00:20:00-08:00

Scientists have long been baffled as to why some people live so much longer than others. Diet and exercise account for some of it, but researchers have found that genetics also factor heavily into the equation, and that long life is somewhat hereditary as it is with living bristlecone pine that were alive when Caesar ruled Rome.

However, centenarians are known to have just as many—and sometimes even more—harmful gene variants compared with those who die much younger. So what is the secret advantage? That’s a question the experts have been eager to find an answer to.

Scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have finally unlocked the secret behind the paradox. They were able to identify specific favorable “longevity genes” that offer protection from the harmful effects of “bad genes”. The discovery could lead to new drugs that protect against age related diseases.

“We hypothesized that people living to 100 and beyond must be buffered by genes that interact with disease-causing genes to negate their effects,” says Dr. Aviv Bergman, a professor in the departments of pathology and neuroscience at Einstein and senior author of the study.

To test the hypothesis, Dr. Bergman and his colleagues examined individuals enrolled in Einstein’s Longevity Genes Project, initiated in 1998 to investigate longevity genes in a selected population: Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jews. They are descended from a founder group of just 30,000 or so people. So they are relatively genetically homogeneous, which makes it easier to associate traits (in this case, age-related diseases and longevity) with the genes that determine them.

Participating in the study were 305 Ashkenazi Jews more than 95 years old and a control group of 408 unrelated Ashkenazi Jews. (Centenarians are so rare in any human population—only one in 10,000 people live to be 100—that “longevity” genes probably wouldn’t turn up in a typical control group.)

All participants were grouped into cohorts representing each decade of lifespan from the 50’s on up. Using DNA samples, the researchers determined the prevalence in each cohort of 66 genetic markers present in 36 genes associated with aging.

As expected, some disease-related gene variants were as prevalent or even more prevalent in the oldest cohorts of Ashkenazi Jews than in the younger ones. And as Dr. Bergman had predicted, genes associated with longevity also became more common in each succeeding cohort.

“These results indicate that the frequency of deleterious genotypes may increase among people who live to extremely old ages because their protective genes allow these disease-related genes to accumulate,” says Dr. Bergman.

The Einstein researchers were able to construct a network of gene interactions that contributes to the understanding of longevity. In particular, they found that the favorable variant of the gene CETP acts to buffer the harmful effects of the disease-causing gene Lp(a).

If future research confirms that a single longevity gene can buffers against multiple disease-causing genes, then drugs that mimic the action of the gene could protect against a variety of cardiovascular disease and other age-related ailments.

Posted by Rebecca Sato

NASA Creates Key Building Block of Life in Lab

2009-11-10T00:10:00-08:00

NASA scientists have reproduced uracil, a key component of the hereditary material, RNA. The uracil was created by exposing an ice sample containing the molecule pyrimidine to ultraviolet radiation under space-like conditions. The research may help astrobiologists understand how molecules for the origin of life were first made.

Pyrimidine is a ring-shaped molecule made up of carbon and nitrogen and is the basic structure for uracil, part of a genetic code found in ribonucleic acid (RNA). RNA is central to protein synthesis, but has many other roles.

"We have demonstrated for the first time that we can make uracil, a component of RNA, non-biologically in a laboratory under conditions found in space," said Michel Nuevo, research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "We are showing that these laboratory processes, which simulate occurrences in outer space, can make a fundamental building block used by living organisms on Earth."

NASA Ames scientists have been simulating the environments found in interstellar space and the outer solar system for years. During this time, they have studied a class of carbon-rich compounds, called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which have been identified in meteorites, and are the most common carbon-rich compound observed in the universe. PAHs typically are six-carbon ringed structures that resemble fused hexagons, or a piece of chicken wire.

Pyrimidine also is found in meteorites, although scientists still do not know its origin. It may be similar to the carbon-rich PAHs, in that it may be produced in the final outbursts of dying, giant red stars, or formed in dense clouds of interstellar gas and dust.

“Molecules like pyrimidine have nitrogen atoms in their ring structures, which makes them somewhat whimpy. As a less stable molecule, it is more susceptible to destruction by radiation, compared to its counterparts that don’t have nitrogen,” said Scott Sandford, a space science researcher at Ames. “We wanted to test whether pyrimidine can survive in space, and whether it can undergo reactions that turn it into more complicated organic species, such as the nucleobase uracil.”

In theory, the researchers thought that if molecules of pyrimidine could survive long enough to migrate into interstellar dust clouds, they might be able to shield themselves from radiation destruction. Once in the clouds, most molecules freeze onto dust grains (much like moisture in your breath condenses on a cold window during winter).

These clouds are dense enough to screen out much of the surrounding outside radiation of space, thereby providing some protection to the molecules inside the clouds.

Scientists tested their hypotheses in the Ames Astrochemistry Laboratory. During their experiment, they exposed the ice sample containing pyrimidine to ultraviolet radiation under space-like conditions, including a very high vacuum, extremely low temperatures (approximately - 340 degrees Fahrenheit), and harsh radiation.

They found that when pyrimidine is frozen in water ice, it is much less vulnerable to destruction by radiation. Instead of being destroyed, many of the molecules took on new forms, such as the RNA component uracil, which is found in the genetic make-up of all living organisms on Earth.

“We are trying to address the mechanisms in space that are forming these molecules. Considering what we produced in the laboratory, the chemistry of ice exposed to ultraviolet radiation may be an important linking step between what goes on in space and what fell to Earth early in its development,” said Stefanie Milam, a researcher at NASA Ames and a co-author of the research paper.

“Nobody really understands how life got started on Earth. Our experiments demonstrate that once the Earth formed, many of the building blocks of life were likely present from the beginning. Since we are simulating universal astrophysical conditions, the same is likely wherever planets are formed,” explained Sandford.

Casey Kazan

Source: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/uracil.html

US Navy Ordered to Listen for Martian Radio Broadcasts in 1924

2009-11-10T00:09:00-08:00

It seems that a SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) experiment happened decades before Project Ozma -a pioneering SETI project started in 1960 by Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake (left), at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia. The object of the experiment was to search for signs of life in distant solar systems through interstellar radio waves.The historians at the blog "Letters of Note" uncovered a telegram sent in 1924 by the Chief of Naval Operations, Edward W. Eberle instructing the United States Navy to listen for radio transmissions from the planet Mars.

The telegram read:

“NAVY DESIRES COOPERATE ASTRONOMERS WHO BELIEVE POSSIBLE THAT MARS MAY ATTEMPT COMMUNICATION BY RADIO WAVES WITH THIS PLANET WHILE THEY ARE NEAR TOGETHER THIS END ALL SHORE RADIO STATIONS WILL ESPECIALLY NOTE AND REPORT ANY ELECTRICAL PHENOMENON UNUSUAL CHARACTER AND WILL COVER AS WIDE BAND FREQUENCIES AS POSSIBLE FROM 2400 AUGUST TWENTY FIRST TO 2400 AUGUST TWENTY FOURTH WITHOUT INTERFERRING WITH TRAFFIC”

During the three day period, during which Mars was in opposition to Earth, nothing but static was detected by Navy radio stations.

Casey Kazan

Source: http://www.examiner.com/x-21670-Houston-Space-News-Examiner~y2009m11d8-US-Navy-Ordered-to-Listen-for-Martian-Radio-Broadcasts-in-1924

Collapse Of Berlin Wall Recreated With 1,000 Giant Dominoes (VIDEO)

2009-11-10T00:08:00-08:00

Casey Kazan Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff

Image of the Day: A Cosmic Circle of Light

2009-11-10T00:06:00-08:00

The center of the magnificent barred spiral galaxy NGC 1512 reveals a stunning 2,400 light-year-wide circle of infant star clusters. Astronomers generally believe that the giant bar, which is too faint to be seen in this image, funnels the gas to the inner ring, where massive stars are formed within numerous star clusters. NGC 1512 Located 30 million light-years away, is a neighbor of our Milky Way galaxy.

Courtesy: Hubble/NASA

The Daily Flash -Eco, Space, Tech (11/10)

2009-11-10T00:04:00-08:00

Spitzer Observes A Chaotic Planetary System

Before our planets found their way to the stable orbits they circle in today, they wiggled and jostled about like unsettled children. Now, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has found a young star with evidence for the same kind of orbital hyperactivity.

Antarctica glacier retreat creates new carbon dioxide store

Large blooms of tiny marine plants called phytoplankton are flourishing in areas of open water left exposed by the recent and rapid melting of ice shelves and glaciers around the Antarctic Peninsula. This remarkable colonisation is having a beneficial impact on climate change. As the blooms die back phytoplankton sinks to the sea-bed where it can store carbon for thousands or millions of years

Augmented Reality Is Both a Fad and the Future -- Here's Why

You wouldn't immediately suspect that Yelp's iPhone app might be a gift bestowed upon us by a benevolent superhero from the future. Load it up and the program's in its Clark Kent garb -- a useful-enough guide to local restaurants, bars, and merchants. Then you notice a button labeled MONOCLE in the right-hand corner. Hit it and the screen displays a live feed from the phone's camera, showing exactly what's in front of you -- with one big difference. Aim the camera at a local storefront and Yelp superimposes a star rating on the image

Abandoned Mines New Energy Algae Source!

Algae is one of the hottest new biofuel materials, with over a dozen companies attempting to make the slimy stuff a viable feedstock. Most of them rely on the natural simplicity of the organism--sun and water turn CO2 from algae into fuel--and a few, including OriginOil, use LEDs to grow algae in the dark. Now a group of researchers from the Missouri University of Science and Technology wants to take OriginOil's technique a step further and grow algae in abandoned mines.

Thousands cheer 20 years since fall of Berlin Wall

"It was like a prison," said Mr. Sauff, 73, who lived on the Western side of the wall. "For us 'Wessis,' the few kilometers from our old home to our new home (in the East) was unthinkable."

Singularity University, Day Two: Ralph Merkle on Hyperdrive

How do physics change at nanoscale? Merkle ticks off a list. Length scales down linearly. Area scales down by a factor of a 2 — it gets exponentially smaller — and volume by a factor of 3. Frequency gets faster. Time changes (a nanosecond is a sensible interval for a molecular machine). And so on. Interesting points: Speed doesn’t change; a walking pace is reasonable for us and for a nanomachine. Gravity disappears Magnetism drops off. Stiff things become floppier and more subject to thermal noise.

You Create the Caption

2009-11-10T00:03:00-08:00

Casey Kazan Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff

Were There Once "Dark Stars" Powered by Antimatter?

2009-11-09T01:00:00-08:00

Dark matter stars: not an attempt to destroy the rebels in Star Wars IX, but gigantic stars fueled by the annihilation of dark matter. That's the theory put forward by a team of scientists, with measurable effects which might offer more evidence for what often seems to be the Emperor's New Matter.

"Dark Matter" is the invisible, undetectable and utterly transparent mystery matter which apparently has to exist all over the universe for current cosmological theories to not be totally off the mark. Inventing a magic omnipresence to explain the way things are might sound suspiciously religious, but with scientists like Stephen Hawking pursuing proof it might not be nothing.

The "dark star" hypothesis proposes that the very first stars, formed when the universe was far smaller than it is now, had a greater dark matter density to play with. Of all the incredibly odd properties dark matter has, one of the most interesting is how it acts as its own antiparticle - if two dark particles hit they'll explode into pure energy. Why doesn't this cause the entire universe to explode? Because dark particles are thought to be WIMPs, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles - they find it very hard to even interact with each other, never mind anything else.

Dark stars forming in a very dense dark matter region would thus be powered by antimatter annihilation, which converts 100% of the available mass into energy. Compare this to the wimpy hydrogen fusion which powers the Sun and all life on Earth: a mere 0.7% of the available mass energy, and that's the glorious ideal which we're working towards and dreaming of harnessing. These dark stars could thus reach sizes millions of times larger than our Sun, and despite their name they'd emit visible light.

You have to admit it's a fantastic idea: for something almost terminally lacking direct evidence, what more could a dark matterologist dream of than an entire star made of the stuff, glowing brightly (and observably!) and orders of magnitude bigger than even our own Sun! Even better, it's not just an 'idea', it's backed up by real - if still unsupported - science!

The scientists say such stars could still exist in the further reaches of the universe (albeit with their light doppler-shifted into infrared), or evidence of their passing could be marked by the distribution of supernova-formed elements throughout the universe. Future observations will tell us if a dark stars really existed, or if it'll remain a little-known John Carpenter movie (with the absolute best conversation with a bomb ever filmed).

Luke McKinney

Stars Fueled by Dark Matter http://www.physorg.com/news176457990.html/topic:Physics/

The World's Search for Elusive Dark Matter -A Galaxy Insight

2009-11-09T00:24:00-08:00

The hunt for dark matter continues, with an awesome array of interstellar-range sensors being brought to bear on the search for this amazing, mysterious, missing (and maybe not there) matter. A lot of people really, really want to find some sign of its existence, but that's okay: boiling personal bias out of information is exactly why we invented science. Unfortunately it's not why we invented media, with recent headlines surging past "optimistic" and into invention.

Some sites have grabbed attention with recent headlines like "Ray of hope in dark matter hunt", implying that something important has been discovered. Then the article details data which is more "there might or might not be dark matter" - which you might recognize as exactly as much data we'd have sitting in a locked cupboard - before quoting the actual investigating scientist, who pretty much says "it's probably not dark matter."

It's important to note that there's nothing wrong with the real science. Signals from the Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-Nuclei Astrophysics (PAMELA) satellite and FERMI telescope observed spikes in the gamma ray spectrum from the inner-galaxy. These high-energy photons result from electron-positron collisions, also known as "Holy hell that's matter and antimatter blowing up", and the ultimate source is an extremely interesting question.

But it's probably not dark matter. Sure, it could be since the spikes do fit some dark matter theoretical models, but they also fit predictions from pulsars. You know, those things we know exist and are all over the place. This leads to two conclusions

a) Don't assume the incredibly advanced solution when the regular, well-known one is much more likely.
b) We've reached the point where something like pulsars - massively magnetic high speed rotating neutron stars - are the "regular" option. Science is awesome.

We'll definitely look forward to further study of these signals, and would love to be wrong, but for now anything other than "That's interesting" would by Crying Dark Wolf.

Which would be a great name for a band.

Luke McKinney.

Gamma Ray Signal http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090724/full/news.2009.730.html?s=news_rss

Where Will We Find Life in the Solar System: Daily Galaxy Poll Results

2009-11-09T00:20:00-08:00

"One lifeforms deadly radiation may be another lifeforms lunch."

David Grinspoon, member of the science team for NASA's Mars rover, and interdisciplinary scientist for the European Space Agency's Venus Express mission.

Prominent astrobiologists 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”. 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 occasion.

Here's our editorial team's selection of what the participants in the Daily Galaxy "Life in the Solar System" poll think are the most likely candidates for the first discovery of life in our little corner of the Milky Way.

Life, here on our own little rocky, wet ball of planet, it turns out is quite adaptable to any number of hostile environments! As we find more, and varied extremophiles, I see that our Solar System could possibly host some form of life as well. My romantic vote would go to Mars, especially under the polar ice caps. And honestly, I think that we'll have the politics, and money (sorry to have to introduce those topics into an otherwise polite conversation) to do the kinds of explorations there, that will then yield other discoveries elsewhere in our Solar System.

Posted by: jamerz

I think that all those worlds are equally probable to host life. As the first comment says, life can be found in extremely 'hostile' environments in our own blue planet. Now, the question I have around in my head is: if we find life out there, will we find an isolated species or a whole ecosystem with several species and different environments just like on Earth? I guess it depends of how long ago the life was originated.

Anyways, my vote goes to Europa due to my love for "2001: A space odyssey"

While Titan is a dynamic world with abundant organics, I would still put my money on Europa instead. Europa has tidal heating and a potentially VAST subsurface ocean. If life never did get started in the oceans of Europa I would interpret that to mean that life, even microbial life, must be far rarer than we might like to think.

Posted by: Sagan

I think the possibility of airborne life forms on Venus is too much of a stretch -- at least for me. However, based on our growing knowledge of extremeophile life on earth, the possibility or probability of finding life in one or more of the other settings you described seems reasonably good.

The best bet, it seems to me, would be subterranean bacteria of some sort on Mars, probably near some geothermal vents where water can still be liquid and deep enough below the surface to protect them from the the other hazards of the Martian planetary surface. Certain moons of Jupiter and Saturn also present interesting possibilities.

Regarding substances that can form the basis of life -- while ammonia is intriguing, for the time being lets stick with water.

Last point -- would we recognize alien life if we found it? I think this might be one of the strongest reasons for sending humans on these exploratory missions. The robot sensors we have sent up to this point are just too limited in terms of sensors and capabilities to handle the vast number of possibilities that need to be considered/explored in an exhaustive search for life on a planet like Mars. Time to get off our collective butts and get some people up there to take a look around.

Posted by: stargazer

Life is waiting in seemingly every nook and cranny of the cosmos. However, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and our limited understanding of life and the cosmos will filter our findings. Initially we will find life similar to our planets own developments even if only in ancient preservations. As we progress in our understanding of this omniverse we will learn to recognize life in forms not previously imagined outside of paperbacks. Though we may only find superior life forms when they decide to find us as our destructive nature and limited understanding have us still riding the shortbus of the galaxy.

Posted by: SiliconJon

Mars looks surprisingly Terrestrial, but I'm almost willing to put my money on Europa, Titan & Enceladus to win, place & show. The 3 moons have tidal pull from larger bodies ( Jupiter & Saturn ) possible sources of heating from same, & Titan has a substantial atmosphere. Europa possibly has sub - surface liquid seas or lakes where life could take hold, & ice to shield life from the radiation of Jupiter's belts. Enceladus appears to have equal conditions.

We might find life on Mars, but it would be micro - fossils, I would be sure.

Posted by: EvilCosmicMonkeyfrom Knoxville

Ceres is where it's at! For some reason everyone has overlooked this miniplanet between Mars and Jupiter... but I have a hunch life is lurking there! (Lots of water there.) It's kinda like a mini version of Mars, but with water all over the place, supposedly.

And if it doesn't have life, then it would be an ideal spot for a first human colony. (It's a better choice than Mars given that Ceres has lower gravity than Mars, and would not trap the first explorers in a difficult to exit gravity well).

From Ceres you could launch new missions to nearby Mars or Europa, since Ceres is between those 2 points.

Europa is the obvious second choice for me, in terms of probability for life.

Posted by: Velocity Wave

To me it seems inevitable that extra-terrestrial life will first be discovered on Mars. There have been so very many asteroidal impacts on earth, after life was well established, that it would seem neglectful to think that microbial organisms did not ride a stone rocket from our planet to Mars. I feel certain we'll find life forms on Mars that had their origins on earth.

Posted by: Vernon Goins

I give Europa and Enceledas maybe a 25% chance each of having microbial life, and maybe 10% for having multicellular life. I think it's a safe bet that humans are the most advanced lifeforms in the solar system, certainly the only life that uses a high degree of technology.

Life in the clouds of Venus or any of the gas giants is just too problematic in too many ways. High radiation levels, scarcity of resources, extremely high or low temperatures & pressures, high turbulence, etc. Perhaps an extremely rugged bacteria could pull it off (I doubt even any extremophiles could though), but even then, evolving to that point would require a much more stable environment for the hundreds of millions of years to reach that point. Venus' surface is just way too hot, the gas giants have no surface to speak of at all, and none of them has any meaningful amounts of water vapor, never mind liquid water.

As for life on Mars, I suppose it's possible, but probably not very likely. It would certainly have to be subterranean, which would probably limit it to being microbial, or at most simple multicellular. It would of course be very cool to find life on Mars, but I'm not holding my breath.

Posted by: Andrew T

Ancient Viruses Spurred Human Evolution - A Galaxy Classic

2009-11-09T00:18:00-08:00

When the mapping of the human genome was completed in 2003, researchers discovered a shocking fact: our bodies are littered with the shards of retroviruses, fragments of the chemical code from which all genetic material is made. This discovery has created a new discipline, paleovirology, which seeks to better understand the impact of modern diseases by studying the genetic history of ancient viruses.

Highly infectious viral diseases -including the Plague, yellow fever, measles, smallpox and he Spanish Flu, which killed 50 million people at the end of the First World War, moving from one cell to the next, transforming each new host into a factory that makes even more virus. In this way, one infected cell soon becomes billion -that die when the host dies.

Endogenous retroviruses, however, once they infect the DNA of a species they become part of that species: they reside within each of us, carrying a record that goes back millions of years. Molecular battles of endogenous retroviruses that raged for thousands of generations, have been defeated by evolution.

These viral fragments are fossils that reside within each of us, carrying a record that goes back millions of years. Because they no longer seem to serve a purpose or cause harm, these remnants have often been referred to as “junk DNA.” Although many of these evolutionary relics still manage to generate proteins, scientists have never found one that functions properly in humans or that could make us sick.

That is until Thierry Heidmann who runs the laboratory at the Institut Gustave Roussy, on the southern edge of Paris, brought one to life. Heidmann long suspected that if a retrovirus happens to infect a human sperm cell or egg, which is rare, and if that embryo survives—which is rarer still—the retrovirus could have the evolutionary power to influence humans as a species becoming part of the genetic blueprint, passed from mother to child, and from one generation to the next, much like a gene for eye color or asthma.

In a brilliant essay in The New Yorker, author Michael Specter brought Heidmann's discovery to life, showing how by "combining the tools of genomics, virology, and evolutionary biology, he and his colleagues took a virus that had been extinct for hundreds of thousands of years, figured out how the broken parts were originally aligned, and then pieced them together. After resurrecting the virus, the team placed it in human cells and found that their creation did indeed insert itself into the DNA of those cells. They also mixed the virus with cells taken from hamsters and cats. It quickly infected them all, offering the first evidence that the broken parts could once again be made infectious. The experiment could provide vital clues about how viruses like H.I.V. work. Inevitably, though, it also conjures images of Frankenstein’s monster and Jurassic Park."

Heidmann named the virus Phoenix, after the mythical bird that rises from the ashes, because he is convinced that this virus and others like it have much to tell about the origins and the evolution of humanity.

“This is something not to fear but to celebrate,’’ Heidmann told Specter one day as they sat in his office at the institute, which is dedicated to the treatment and eradication of cancer.“What is remarkable here, and unique, is the fact that endogenous retroviruses are two things at once: genes and viruses. And those viruses helped make us who we are today just as surely as other genes did. I am not certain that we would have survived as a species without them. The Phoenix virus sheds light on how H.I.V. operates, but, more than that, on how we operate, and how we evolved. Many people study other aspects of human evolution—how we came to walk, or the meaning of domesticated animals. But I would argue that equally important is the role of pathogens in shaping the way we are today. Look, for instance, at the process of pregnancy and birth.’’

Heidmann believes that without endogenous retroviruses mammals might never have developed a placenta, which protects the fetus and gives it time to mature, which eventually led to live birth, one of the hallmarks of human evolutionary success over birds, reptiles, and fish. Eggs cannot eliminate waste or draw the maternal nutrients required to develop the large brains that have made mammals so versatile. “These viruses made those changes possible. It is quite possible that, without them, human beings would still be laying eggs.”

Posted by Casey Kazan. New Yorker Article Link: Darwin's Surprise

Beyond H20 -New Types of Water Discovered

2009-11-09T00:18:00-08:00

Scientists are arguing about two new types of water, and we don't mean Dasani or Perrier - we're talking about entirely new phases like "liquid" and "solid." Which proves that researchers get to fight about far better things than regular humans.

Simulations show two new types of supercooled water existing below minus seventy five degrees Celsius (around two hundred Velvin), and if you just pointed out that water freezes before that then you aren't quite the smartass as you think you are. Changing the pressure can change the phase transition points of water (for example, boiling water can be safely drunk at the top of Mount Everest), and applying large pressures to water can prevent it freezing - and perhaps lead to something else.

The key is the hydrogen bonds of water: H20 contains two hydrogen atoms, which we sincerely hope isn't news to you, but the hydrogen atoms are also attracted to oxygen atoms of other molecules - leading to a constant creation and destruction of weak hydrogen bonds between the molecules in a liquid (it's also this weak attraction that causes DNA to twist around itself in a helical shape!) Under extreme conditions, simulations show these hydrogen bonds radically rearranging: either in an open network, creating a Low Density Liquid, or sacrificing some of themselves to crush the water molecules together closer, creating a High Density Liquid.

Now a team of Indian and Italian scientists say they've seen the supercool fluids. The problem is that it's extremely hard to make water change this way and still get in to look at it. In these experiments, the researchers tagged the liquid with an organic probe molecule - so they can't actually see the water (as it's in a tiny region crushed between super-cold crystals of ice) but the probe. Their analysis of the probe's motion matches predictions of the new fluids' properties, but not everyone is convinced. Some say there may be a smooth transition rather than two distinct states, while others claim the odd observations are due to impurities instead of supercooled states.

It's an active area of discussion, but more important, the fact that this is water should be an important reminder for you: there is amazing new science in places you'd never expect.

Luke McKinney

New Types Of Water

Artificial DNA -An Immortal Library of Human Knowledge?

2009-11-09T00:12:00-08:00

A million years from now, will our descendants still read works like Beowulf, Shakespearean plays, or even the Bible? Will they study any of the same mathematical concepts or scientific theories? If so, how will our data reach those future generations? It will likely be stored and continually transferred to the most advanced computer chip, right?

Wrong. Try bacteria.

Professor Masaru Tomita and his team of researchers at Keio University, Japan, have developed artificial DNA with encoded information that can be added to the genome of common bacteria. The four characters used in genetic coding (A's, T's, G's and C's) work much like digital data. If coded in a particular way, different character combinations can represent specific letters and symbols which can then be translated to produce music, text, video and other content.

But why use bacteria as a storage method in the first place? Because while books may crumble apart and computers may malfunction, bacterial information will last for millions of years - as long, in fact, as the species stays alive. Genetic coding is so massive that information can be stashed away somewhere in the gene without affecting an organism's overall appearance and other traits.

And forget about a zip drive or usb plug. According to researchers, up to 100 bits of data can be attached to each organism. Additionally, bacteria can create new copies of the data every time it reproduces itself, as well as insert itself into different places in the genome, essentially "saving" and "backing up" the code.

Recently, scientists successfully inserted Einstein's equation "e=mc2" and the year he published the theory, "1905" into a common soil bacteria. Of course, in order to translate bacterial code, it must first be solved - a tricky feat for the average untrained eye. But scientists like Tomita are delighted to imagine a day when a species of superior intelligence will read the code as easily as a primer.

In the meantime, scientists are happy to find more practical and mainstream solutions for this method of storage. Some pharmaceutical companies are already interested in entering this brave new world to utilize the code for tracking authentic medicines versus artificial knock-offs.

Alison Kentta

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18702604/

The Daily Flash -Eco, Space, Tech (11/9)

2009-11-09T00:04:00-08:00

4 Ways Live and Digital Music Are Teaming Up to Rock Your World

Music fans are increasingly watching live concerts without gassing up cars, driving to venues, or paying for expensive tickets and convenience fees. Music webcasting has shown promise for over a decade, but the stage is being set now for an online live-music renaissance. YouTube webcast its first-ever live full-length concert last Sunday: U2 at the Pasadena Rose Bowl. It brought in 10 million viewers worldwide in addition to the 100,000 who attended in person. A spokesman said that makes it the biggest event in the site’s history.

Singularity University, Day One: Infinite, In All Directions

technology is changing exponentially — in all fields, in all eras. It’s a compelling presentation that leaves the audience slack-jawed. Some are resistant, though. What happens when terrorists have the same capability to re-engineer viruses that makes it possible for medical science to disable them? Won’t politics and economics to derail technology? What about capital — does it grow exponentially as well?

Mon Dieu! Apple Store Coming the Louvre

There's a price for everything, even in the Louvre: Tomorrow, Apple will be opening up their very first Parisian Apple Store, and it'll sit in the concourse right below I.M. Pei's glass pyramid.
According to Bloomberg, this'll be Apple's 277th store, worldwide. It's set to be slightly smaller than the one on Oxford Circus in London. But it's not tiny: The bilevel store will employ 150 people. You can expect the place to be mobbed. The Louvre concourse is one of the most heavily trafficked places in Paris. It links all of the wings of the Louvre, and visitors to the museum have to pass by before entering the museum.

Roland Emmerich's 8 Rules For Ending The World

Director Roland Emmerich knows how to blow humanity to smithereens. He did it in Independence Day, Day After Tomorrow and now 2012. We talked to the apocalypse-master himself, who explained that there are 8 simple rules for ending the world.

Image of the Day

2009-11-09T00:02:00-08:00

Lightning strikes a tower near the space shuttle Endeavour resting atop launch pad 39A during thunderstorms at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida on July 10, 2009. NASA canceled the July 11, 2009 launch attempt of the Endeavour to assess possible damage from the nearby lightning strikes.

Credit: (REUTERS/Gene Blevins)
Source: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/07/lightning.html

The Universe 800 Million Years After the Big Bang: An Epoch of Massive Stars (3-D VIDEO)

2009-11-08T07:43:36-08:00

Astronomers have completed conducting the broadest survey to date of galaxies from about 800 million years after the Big Bang. They found 22 early galaxies and confirmed the age of one by its characteristic hydrogen signature at 787 million years post Big Bang. The finding is the first age-confirmation of a so-called dropout galaxy at that distant time and pinpoints when an era called the reionization epoch likely began.

Astronomers have long wondered whether the universe underwent reionization instantaneously or gradually over time, but more importantly, they have tried to isolate when the universe began reionization. Galaxy density and brightness measurements are key to calculating star-formation rates, which tell a lot about what happened when. The astronomers looked at star-formation rates and the rate at which hydrogen was ionized.

Using data from their study and others, they determined that the star-formation rates were dramatically lower from 800 million years to about one billion years after the Big Bang, than thereafter. Accordingly, they calculated that the rate of ionization would be very slow during this early time, because of this low star-formation rate.

“We were really surprised that the rate of ionization seems so low, which would constitute a contradiction with the claim of NASA’s WMAP satellite. It concluded that reionization started no later than 600 million years after the Big Bang,” remarked Ouchi. “We think this riddle might be explained by more efficient ionizing photon production rates in early galaxies. The formation of massive stars may have been much more vigorous then than in today’s galaxies. Fewer, massive stars produce more ionizing photons than many smaller stars,” he explained.

With recent technological advancements, such as the Wide-Field Camera 3 on the Hubble Space Telescope, there has been an explosion of research of the reionization period, the farthest back in time that astronomers can observe.

The Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, created a hot, murky universe. Some 400,000 years later, temperatures cooled, electrons and protons joined to form neutral hydrogen, and the murk cleared. Some time before 1 billion years after the Big Bang, neutral hydrogen began to form stars in the first galaxies, which radiated energy and changed the hydrogen back to being ionized. Although not the thick plasma soup of the earlier period just after the Big Bang, this star formation started the reionization epoch. Astronomers know that this era ended about 1 billion years after the Big Bang, but when it began has eluded them and intrigued researchers like lead author Masami Ouchi of the Carnegie Observatories.

The U.S. and Japanese team led by Ouchi used a technique for finding these extremely distant galaxies. “We look for ‘dropout’ galaxies,” explained Ouchi. “We use progressively redder filters that reveal increasing wavelengths of light and watch which galaxies disappear from or ‘dropout’ of images made using those filters. Older, more distant galaxies ‘dropout’ of progressively redder filters and the specific wavelengths can tell us the galaxies’ distance and age. What makes this study different is that we surveyed an area that is over 100 times larger than previous ones and, as a result, had a larger sample of early galaxies (22) than past surveys. Plus, we were able to confirm one galaxy’s age,” he continued. “Since all the galaxies were found using the same dropout technique, they are likely to be the same age.”

It helps to put things in perspective here on our frenetic little planet with a look at this extraordinarily powerful and moving video of the Hubble Space Telescope mapping of the Universe, whose known size is 78 billion light years across.

The video of the images is the equivalent of using a "time machine" to look into the past to witness the early formation of galaxies, perhaps less than one billion years after the universe's birth in the Big Bang.

The Hubble Deep Field video below video includes mankind's deepest, most detailed optical view of the universe. One of the stunning images was assembled from 342 separate exposures taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) for ten consecutive days.

Representing a narrow "keyhole" view stretching to the visible horizon of the universe, the HDF image covers a speck of the sky only about the width of a dime located 75 feet away. Though the field is a very small sample of the heavens, it is considered representative of the typical distribution of galaxies in space because the universe, statistically, looks largely the same in all directions. Gazing into this small field, Hubble uncovered a bewildering assortment of at least 1,500 galaxies at various stages of evolution.

Most of the galaxies are so faint (nearly 30th magnitude or about four-billion times fainter than can be seen by the human eye) they have never before been seen by even the largest telescopes. Some fraction of the galaxies in this menagerie probably date back to nearly the beginning of the universe.

"The variety of galaxies we see is amazing. In time these Hubble data could turn out to be the double helix of galaxy formation. We are clearly seeing some of the galaxies as they were more than ten billion years ago, in the process of formation," said Robert Williams, Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute Baltimore, Maryland. "As the images have come up on our screens, we have not been able to keep from wondering if we might somehow be seeing our own origins in all of this."

Essentially a narrow, deep "core sample" of sky, the HDF is analogous to a geologic core sample of the Earth's crust. Just as a terrestrial core sample is a history of events which took place as Earth's surface evolved, the HDF image contains information about the universe at many different stages in time. Unlike a geologic sample though, it is not clear what galaxies are nearby and therefore old, and what fraction are very distant and therefore existed when the universe was newborn. "It's like looking down a long tube and seeing all the galaxies along that line of sight. They're all stacked up against one another in this picture and the challenge now is to disentangle them," said Mark Dickinson of the HDF team.

Nearly a year of preparation preceded the observation. The HDF team selected a piece of sky near the handle of the Big Dipper (part of the northern circumpolar constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear). The field is far from the plane of our Galaxy and so is "uncluttered" of nearby objects, such as foreground stars. The field provides a "peephole" out of the galaxy that allows for a clear view all the way to the horizon of the universe.

You may have asked, "How can the universe be 78 billion light years across when the age of the universe is only about 13 billion years?"

How can something be larger than then distance travelled at the speed of light? Since light from the beginning of the universe has only had 13 billion years to travel (not 78 billion), then shouldn't the universe be only 13 billion light years across? That's a pretty intuitive thought.

But it doesn't take into account that the entire universe itself is also expanding. When a photon of light leaves it's point of origin, it does so at the speed of light, so in a universe that doesn't expand, a photon traveling for 13 billion years traverses 13 billion light years.

In a universe that does expand, all of the distance covered by the photon gets increased by a scale factor equal to the rate of expansion of the universe.

Casey Kazan via The Carnegie Institution

http://www.ciw.edu/news/dropouts_pinpoint_earliest_galaxies

The Vatican -Embracing the Probability of Extraterrestrial Life?

2009-11-08T06:12:08-08:00

This week the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding its first major conference on astrobiology, convened on private Vatican grounds in the elegant Casina Pio IV, formerly the pope's villa. The gathering of prominent scientists and religious leaders from around the world suggests that some of the most tradition-bound faiths are seriously contemplating the possibility that life exists in many forms beyond Earth.

The five-day conference is chaired by the religious leader of the highly regarded Academy, Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo. Scientists including atheists are offering presentations on subjects as varied as how life might have begun on Earth; what newly found "extremophile" microbes living in the most challenging habitats on our planet might tell us about possible life on others; and how life forms might be detected in our solar system, or how their bio-signatures might be found on and around the many distant exoplanets.

The Vatican's new initiative was signaled this summer by its chief astronomer who says there is no conflict between believing in God and in the possibility of extraterrestrial civilizations perhaps more evolved than humans.

"In my opinion this possibility exists," said the Reverend José Gabriel Funes, head of the Vatican Observatory and a scientific adviser to Pope Benedict XVI, referring to life on other planets.

"How can we exclude that life has developed elsewhere," he said in an interview with the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano. The large number of galaxies with their own planets makes this possible, he noted.

Asked if he was referring to beings similar to humans or even more evolved than humans, he said: "Certainly, in a universe this big you can't exclude this hypothesis."

In the interview headlined, "The extraterrestrial is my brother," Funes said he saw no conflict between belief in such beings and faith in God.

"Just as there is a multiplicity of creatures on earth, there can be other beings, even intelligent, created by God. This is not in contrast with our faith because we can't put limits on God's creative freedom. Why can't we speak of a 'brother extraterrestrial'? It would still be part of creation."

Funes, who runs the observatory that is based south of Rome and in Arizona, held out the possibility that the human race might actually be the "lost sheep" of the universe. There could be other beings "who remained in full friendship with their creator," he said.

Funes commentary is a giant step away from the historical record that includes the Inquisition, which condemned Galileo in the 17th century for insisting that the Earth revolved around the Sun. The Roman Catholic Church did not rehabilitate him until 1992.

Funes said he believed as an astronomer that the most likely explanation for the start of the universe was "the big bang," the theory that it sprang into existence from dense matter billions of years ago. But he said this was not in conflict with faith in God as creator. "God is the creator," he said. "There is a sense to creation. We are not children of an accident."

He added: "As an astronomer, I continue to believe that God is the creator of the universe and that we are not the product of something casual but children of a good father who has a project of love in mind for us."

Posted by Casey Kazan.

World-Famous Photo of JFK Assassin Not a Forgery

2009-11-07T19:40:31-08:00

"The human brain, while remarkable in many aspects, also has its weaknesses.The visual system can be quite inept at making judgments regarding 3-D geometry, lighting, and shadows."

Hany Farid, Dartmouth College Computer Scientist

Next to the famed Zapruder film segment, the most famous image of John F. Kennedy assassination was iconic image of Lee Harvey Oswald pictured in a backyard setting holding a rifle in one hand and Marxist newspapers in the other. Oswald and others claimed that the incriminating photo was a fake, noting the seemingly inconsistent lighting and shadows. After analyzing the photo with modern-day forensic tools, Hany Farid, a pioneer in the field of digital forensics at Dartmouth says the photo almost certainly was not altered.

"If we had found evidence of photo tampering, then it would have suggested a broader plot to kill JFK," said Farid, who is also the director of the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth. "Those who believe that there was a broader conspiracy can no longer point to this photo as possible evidence."

Farid added that federal officials long ago said that this image had not been tampered with, but a surprising number of skeptics still assert that there was a conspiracy.

Farid and his team have developed a number of digital forensic tools used to determine whether digital photos have been manipulated, and his research is often used by law enforcement officials and in legal proceedings. The tools can measure statistical inconsistencies in the underlying image pixels, improbable lighting and shadow, physically impossible perspective distortion, and other artifacts introduced by photo manipulators. The play of light and shadow was fundamental in the Oswald photo analysis.

At a casual glance, the lighting and shadows in the Oswald photo appear to many to be incongruous with the outdoor lighting. To determine if this was the case, Farid constructed a 3-D model of Oswald's head and portions of the backyard scene, from which he was able to determine that a single light source, the sun, could explain all of the shadows in the photo.

"It is highly improbable that anyone could have created such a perfect forgery with the technology available in 1963," said Farid. With no evidence of tampering, he concluded that the incriminating photo was authentic.

"As our digital forensic tools become more sophisticated, we increasingly have the ability to apply them to historic photos in an attempt to resolve some long-standing mysteries," said Farid.

Casey Kazan

Source: Dartmouth College

Will a "Space Fence" Solve the Orbiting Litter Crisis

2009-11-07T15:53:10-08:00

Man has made it to the moon, hurled equipment to the edges of the solar system, even examined the very beginning of time, but our true achievements are even more important (if less awe-inspiring): we've raised litter above and beyond the surface of the Earth! So much so that with some 300,000 objects orbiting our little blue dot, we need a new detection grid if we're ever to get off-planet without having our heads bashed in by a ball of old trash.

There's an entire ring of old, broken, or blasted to pieces bits and bobs in near Earth orbit, each with enough energy to permanently ruin an astronauts entire day (at least until the explosive decompression sets in). With twenty thousand objects already tracked, and hundreds of thousands more still in orbit, the International Space Station has already had to make emergency maneuvers to avoid collisions twice - and an Iridium satellite famously didn't make such maneuvers, colliding with a Cosmos-2511 colleague and exploding both (producing a storm of extra debris in what could be the world's most expensive, if slow, chain reaction.)

The new tracking system has been contracted to Northrop Grumman, who were handed thirty million dollars, pointed up and told "Keep track of all that stuff." The new system builds on previous technology and is called a "Space Fence" because it projects constant radio beams up from a few points on Earth - as Earth rotates, the radio region sweeps across all the objects in orbit.

The interesting note is that this strategy is still observation and avoidance - you need careful timing or maneuvering systems to actually evade any identified impact-possible pieces, otherwise you just get a countdown to space explosion. Awesome for Michael Bay, sucks for everyone else. It's pretty tricky to get garbage collectors into low Earth orbit but we're going to have to do something soon - or literally become penned into our own home by all the trash we threw out the front door. And then wonder why nobody's coming to visit.

Note: there was one attempt to bring down trash, the student-project SNAP satellite. Ironically, it failed and became space-trash itself.

Luke McKinney.

Space Fence System

SNAP http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/SSC/research/astrodynamics/rendezvous

'Earth Explorer' Mapping Planet Inside Out From Space

2009-11-07T15:31:00-08:00

The most accurate gravity map of Earth ever is being recorded - from space, of course. The Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Explorer (GOCE) was launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) this fall to explore Earth inside and out like never before.

GOCE is equipped with a triple-accelerometer gradiometer, accurate to within one part in one hundred trillion of standard Earth gravity. Don't pretend you understand that - a one hundred trillionth is beyond the human minds ability to usefully picture. For reference, it's the size of a virus compared to a sixteen wheeler truck.

The GOCE is the first in a series of Earth Exploring satellites - it's companions will be CRYOSAT, SMOS, AEOLUS and the excellently-named SWARM. Five satellites in orbit with names like that - the ESA have not confirmed that the quintuplet will merge to form a giant alien-battling robot in times of distress, but only because it's so obvious it doesn't need to be said.

The image above provides a global model of the Earth's gravity field and of the geoid. The geoid (the surface of equal gravitational potential of a hypothetical ocean at rest) serves as the classical reference for all topographical features -important for studies of Earth interior processes, ocean circulation, ice motion and sea-level change.

The five hundred million dollar satellite is expected to survive for 20 months - at twenty-five million a month that makes it even higher maintenance than Paris Hilton, but infinitely more useful. Data provided by the satellite will map everything from ocean depths to the magma core of the planet, providing data of unprecedented accuracy for everything from climate physics to geophysics.

In an interesting coincidence, GOCE was launched on the same day the Large Hadron Collider was supposed to power up. Project leader Kal-El urges readers not to pay too much attention to this, nor ask why the nose cone seems to be full of diapers and a red cape.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

GOCE homepage http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/GOCE/index.html

The Lost World of Antarctica's Lake Vostok - NASA's Prelude to Exploring Jupiter's Europa

2009-11-07T06:25:54-08:00

Casey Kazan Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff

Lakes of Antarctica Isolated for Millions of Years Discovered with New, Unknown Viruses

2009-11-07T06:01:00-08:00

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 Antarctica, which has been isolated for millions of years, or they were introduced there more recently.

Some of these lakes which are frozen nine months of the year, have little animal life and are dominated by microorganisms, including algae, bacteria, protozoans and viruses. A virus is little more than a package of DNA surrounded by a capsule structure. To survive, viruses must hijack, or infect, living cells and use the host's equipment to replicate.

Antonio Alcami, a researcher from the Spanish Research Council and his colleagues analyzed DNA from viruses found in water samples collected from Antarctica's Lake Limnopolar, a surface lake on Livingston Island. They found nearly 10,000 species, including some small DNA viruses that had never before been identified. In total, the viruses were from 12 different families, some of which may be completely new to science, the researchers suggest.

With few animal and microbial predators around, viruses likely play an important role in controlling the abundance of other microorganisms, the researcher say. However, these viruses have been historically hard to study since many cannot be grown in a laboratory. But thanks to new genome sequencing technology, scientists can identify viruses without needing to grow them in a lab.

"We are just starting to uncover the world of viruses, and this is changing the way we think about viruses and the role they play in microbial ecosystems," said Antonio Alcami, a researcher from the Spanish Research Council.

The results reveal this Antarctic lake supports a virus community that's more diverse than most aquatic environments studied in the world so far - a surprising find considering that the polar region is generally thought to have low biological diversity due to the extreme environmental conditions. The scientists speculate the newly discovered viruses may have adapted specifically to thrive in such harsh conditions.

The team also found the community of viruses changed dramatically depending on the season. When the lake was ice-covered in the spring, the liquid water under the ice was inhabited by mostly small viruses, but in the summer months when the ice melted, the lake was home to mostly larger viruses.

"It looks like a completely different lake in summer," Alcami said. The scientists think the shift might be due to an increase in algae in the summertime, which the larger viruses infect.

The paper was published in the Nov. 6 issue of the journal Science.

Casey Kazan

Image of the Day: A Spectacular Starburst Galaxy

2009-11-07T05:41:00-08:00

N 2403 is a showy face-on spiral starburst galaxy in Camelopardalis- The Giraffe, with numerous many bright emission nebulae which can be seen as bright pink regions in the spiral arms. This galaxy is estimated to be around 12 million light years away. The galaxy is the home of numerous Wolf-Rayet stars are evolved, massive stars (over 20 solar masses), which are losing mass rapidly by means of a very strong stellar wind, with speeds up to 2000 km/s. Wolf-Rayet stars are very hot, with surface temperatures in the range of 25,000 K to 50,000 K. It is believed that the star in the galaxy NGC 2770 that exploded into a supernova on January 9, 2008 — SN 2008D, the first supernova ever observed in the act of exploding — was a Wolf-Rayet star,

Strange Neutron Star Solves Mystery of Milky Way's Youngest Supernova

2009-11-06T01:00:00-08:00

Scientists have finally identified the mysterious source of X-ray emissions at the center of our galaxy’s youngest supernova: Inside the remains of Cassiopeia A sits a baby neutron star surrounded by a thin layer of carbon. Discovered in Chandra's "First Light" image obtained in 1999, the point-like X-ray source at the center of Cas A was presumed to be a neutron star, or pulsar, the typical remnant of an exploded star, but it surprisingly did not show any evidence for X-ray or radio pulsations.
Pulsars rank at or near the top of freaky phenomena found in our Universe. In the early 1930s, California Institute of Technology astrophysicist, Fred Zwicky, an immigrant from Bulgaria, focused his attention on a question that had long troubled astronomers: the appearance of random, unexplained points of light, new stars.

It occurred to Zwicky that if a star collapsed to the sort of density found in the core of atoms, the result would be an unimaginably compacted core: atoms would be crushed together with their electrons squeezed into the nucleus, forming neutrons and a neutron star, with a core so dense that a single spoonful would weigh 200 billion pounds. But there's more, Zwicky concluded: with the collapse of the star there would be huge amounts of leftover energy that would result in a massive explosion, the biggest in the known universe that we called today supernovas.

Most neutron stars house incredibly large magnetic fields. If they are spinning rapidly they make fabulous clocks, cosmic radio beacons we call pulsars. Pulsars can keep time to an accuracy better that one microsecond per year. Some pulsars generate more than 1000 pulses per second, which means that an object with the mass of the Sun packed into an object 10 to 20 kilometers across is rotating over 1000 times per second, or more that half the speed of light!

Twenty times heavier than our sun and 11,000 light years away, Cassiopeia A was a dense star whose explosion was observed from Earth roughly 330 years ago. The supernova left behind a dense central core 12.5 miles wide that was first spotted in 1999 by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

But until now, astronomers hadn’t come up with a model to explain the object’s confusing X-ray emission spectrum. Previous attempts had come up with a radius too small to be a neutron star, or a non-uniform surface temperature, which didn’t make sense.

Combining data from two prior studies, researchers have discovered that Cassiopeia’s X-ray emission pattern can be explained by the presence of a very young neutron star with a low magnetic field and an unusually thin carbon atmosphere.

Cassiopeia A (Cas A, for short) the remains of a massive star that exploded in our galaxy. Evidence for a thin carbon atmosphere on a neutron star at the center of Cas A has been found. Besides resolving a ten-year-old mystery about the nature of this object, this result provides a vivid demonstration of the extreme nature of neutron stars.

By applying a model of a neutron star with a carbon atmosphere to this object, it was found that the region emitting X-rays would uniformly cover a typical neutron star. This would explain the lack of X-ray pulsations because this neutron star would be unlikely to display any changes in its intensity as it rotates. The result also provides evidence against the possibility that the collapsed star contains strange quark matter.

The properties of this carbon atmosphere are remarkable. It is only about four inches thick, has a density similar to diamond and a pressure more than ten times that found at the center of the Earth. As with the Earth's atmosphere, the extent of an atmosphere on a neutron star is proportional to the atmospheric temperature and inversely proportional to the surface gravity. The temperature is estimated to be almost two million degrees, much hotter than the Earth's atmosphere. However, the surface gravity on Cas A is 100 billion times stronger than on Earth, resulting in an incredibly thin atmosphere.

Casey Kazan. Adapted from materials provided by the Chandra Space Observatory.

Extragalactic Solar Systems: Signals Observed Shining Across Millions of Light Years

2009-11-06T00:58:00-08:00

With exoplanets apparently all around us (galactically speaking), a global team of researchers have kicked it up a notch. Signals shining across millions of light years, from other galaxies, indicate the birth of solar systems - and we can see them.

The work is based on spectroscopy, the science of examining what wavelengths of light come in and extracting all kinds of information from it (far more than our eyes, which just say "that's blue" and call it a day). Every material has a unique emission spectrum (very specific wavelengths they emit) and any intervening material absorbs it (according to the same spectroscopic signature). This technique allows us to 'see' even when the light source is too faint or far away to make out detail any other way.

The Spitzer Space Telescope and Infrared Space Observatory collected data from over eighty galaxies, and from these mind-meltingly far-flung light sources we can see spectroscopic signs of spawning solar systems. The received light (once adjusted for intergalactic red shift) shows three peaks: a huge spike for stellar material, a second peak from heated interstellar dust, and a faint third bump thought to result from circumstellar discs of material - like the one that eventually formed us.

This is awesome science: as well as literally finding new worlds where no-one has gone before, we can use this new discovery as a (limited) window into the history of our own system. Discovering new things, and then using those to learn more new things. SCIENCE!

Luke McKinney

Signs of alien worlds

A New African Ocean Emerging with Spectacular Speed

2009-11-06T00:18:00-08:00

In 2005 an Ethiopian volcano erupted, tearing a thirty-five mile rift in the country in a matter of days. That might be slightly slower than the average Michael Bay event but it's still incredibly fast in geological terms - especially since this may well be the first sign of an incoming Ethiopian Ocean. Nature seems to like keeping us on our toes.

It's known that new oceans form as magma forces its way into rifts between tectonic plates, but since every other such system worked - and is now under miles of ocean - we can't actually get down there for a detailed look. Instead, an international collaboration of scientists both local and abroad studied the sudden "mega-dike intrusion" (a much less scary way of saying "holy hell our country just ripped open") and found that it matches all the signs for a prototype ocean bed.

The spectacular speed is what stunned scientists: it was assumed that such events occurred slowly in smaller steps, not sudden tectonic upheavals of the kind that cut the Earth itself open in less than a week. We were wrong about that. This raises important questions, both in terms of geophysical processes which shape the Earth we live on, and for anyone living within an earthquake of such a region.

Even with earthquake acceleration it'll be a long time before an Ethiopian port becomes an issue. But this sudden starting point will be an international hub of oceanographic interest until then - and with oceanographers carefully studying the African desert, it's proof that Nature has a sense of irony.

Luke McKinney

An Incipient African Ocean

Image of the Day: Einstein's Cross

2009-11-06T00:14:00-08:00

The Einstein Cross is a gravitationally lensed quasar that is quadruply imaged, hence its name, Einstein Cross, forming a nearly perfect cross, with the lensing galaxy at its center. The quasar is located about 8 billion light years from Earth, while the lensing galaxy is located at a distance of 400 million light years. Many scientists believe quasars are powered by giant black holes feeding on nearby gas. Gas trapped in the black hole's powerful gravity is compressed and heated to millions of degrees, giving off intense light and/or radio energy. Most quasars lurk in the outer reaches of the cosmos, over a billion light years away, and are therefore distant enough to appear stationary to us.