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Gems from Science

http://news.discovery.com/space/milky-way-july-120705.html

It's possible that most people on Earth have never seen the Milky Way, the galaxy in which we live. The Milky Way used to be a part of every human's life experience, but now that the majority of mankind lives in cities, with their light pollution, the Milky Way is rarely seen.

Our Milky Way galaxy is at its best for the next couple of weeks, but most of you will need to make a special effort to see it. It will probably require a drive of an hour or more to reach a dark enough location, where the Milky Way will be visible. Then it will require another 20 minutes for your eyes to become adjusted to the dark.

What will you see? Not the brilliant array of stars you see in photographs made with long exposures. The real Milky Way looks like a faint band of moonlit cloud arcing across the sky. Your eyes cannot resolve it into individual stars.

No one knew it was made up of stars until Galileo first turned his telescope on it in 1609; this was one of his major discoveries. It wasn't until a couple of centuries later that astronomers began to realize that this band of stars was in fact the local version of the "spiral nebulae" that astronomers were discovering all over the sky.
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INFOGRAPHS of the Milky Way http://www.space.com/16204-milky-way-galaxy-guide-infographic.html

I'm gonna try to remember to go out and see it. Maybe if I can get away from the bright light in the front yard I'll be able to see it. I hope they mosquitoes don't kill me.
 
I've tried, but never been able to see it. I don't even know where around here I could go to expect to see a dark sky. It really sucks that there's an orange glow everywhere.
 
http://www.alternet.org/environment/156179/10_mind-blowing_discoveries_this_week/?page=2

Boston Children’s Hospital has developed a fatty oxygen particle that doctors can inject into a patient who has gone into respiratory failure that will put enough oxygen in their blood to keep the patient alive for up to 30 minutes. Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo describes it as a “seemingly magical elixir,” which can be easily carried and used by paramedics and other emergency crews. Injected right into the blood stream the particle, which carries up to four times the amount of oxygen as red blood cells, quickly oxygenates the body and allows doctors to work “without risking heart attack or permanent brain injuries to the patient.”

Diaz writes that, “Similar solutions have failed in the past because they caused gas embolism, rather than oxygenating the cells.” This particle works because it’s oxygen contained inside a layer of deformable lipids that can “squeeze through capillaries where free gas would get stuck,” said John Kheir at the department of Cardiology at Boston Children’s Hospital. He developed the particle after treating a little girl with a fatal lung hemorrhage who died before she could be put on a heart-lung machine.

“We drew each other’s blood, mixed it in a test tube with the microparticles and watched blue blood turn immediately red, right before our eyes.”

You don’t read the word “magic” in science or medical stories much, but Diaz uses it and it does seem apt in the case of this particle, which could save countless lives.
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SCIENCE!
 
Spearheads and DNA Point to a Second Founding Society in North America

Stone spearheads and human DNA found in Oregon caves, anthropologists say, have produced firmer evidence that these are the oldest directly dated remains of people in North America. They also show that at least two cultures with distinct technologies — not a single one, as had been supposed — shared the continent more than 13,000 years ago.

In other words, the Clovis people, long known for their graceful, fluted projectile points, were not alone in the New World. The occupants of Paisley Caves, on the east side of the Cascade Range, near the town of Paisley, left narrow-stemmed spear points shaped by different flaking techniques. These hunting implements are classified as the Western Stemmed Tradition, previously thought to be younger than the Clovis technology.

The new research, based on the recent discovery of the artifacts and more refined radiocarbon dating tests, established that the cave dwellers who made the Western Stemmed points overlapped or possibly preceded the Clovis artisans elsewhere, the scientists reported in a paper published online Thursday by the journal Science.

“These two distinct technologies were parallel developments, not the product of a unilinear technological evolution,” the research team, led by Dennis L. Jenkins of the University of Oregon, concluded in the report. “The colonization of the Americas involved multiple technologically divergent, and possibly genetically divergent, founding groups.”

Indeed, new genetic evidence described in the current issue of the journal Nature shows that the Americas appeared to be first populated by three waves of migrants from Siberia: one large migration about 15,000 years ago, followed by two lesser migrations. Such a pattern had been hypothesized 25 years ago on the basis of Native American language groups spoken today, but had not been widely accepted by linguistics scholars.

Dr. Jenkins and colleagues did not discuss in the paper or at a news conference how the divergent technologies might be related to initial migration patterns. They noted only that the human DNA from the cave, extracted from coprolites, or dried feces, pointed to Siberian-East Asian origins of the people.

The findings lend support to an emerging hypothesis that the Clovis technology, named for the town in New Mexico where the first specimens were discovered, actually arose in what is now the Southeastern United States and moved west to the Plains and the Southwest. The Western Stemmed technology began, perhaps earlier, in the West. Most artifacts of that kind have been found on the West Coast and in Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.

“We seem to have two different traditions coexisting in the United States that did not blend for a period of hundreds of years,” Dr. Jenkins said.

Although other pre-Clovis sites have been claimed, only the 14,600-year-old Monte Verde campsite in Chile and now Paisley Caves have so far cleared most hurdles of critical review. When the first dating of human DNA from the caves was reported in 2008, some archaeologists worried that the coprolites could have been seriously contaminated, possibly by the leaching of later DNA from humans by water and rodent urine downward through the caves’ many layers of sediment.

So Dr. Jenkins returned to the caves in 2009 and each year since. Digging five to six feet into silt, the archaeologists uncovered the Western Stemmed projectile points and not a single Clovis point. They extracted DNA from more coprolites. Since DNA cannot be directly dated with radiocarbon technology, researchers instead dated fibers from the coprolites, residue of the food the cave dwellers had eaten. Any contaminating carbon was washed out of the coprolites with distilled water.

One of the samples, found with one of the Western Stemmed points, was dated to 13,000 to 13,200 years ago. The researchers said they conducted DNA analysis on 65 coprolites and obtained 190 radiocarbon dates from material at several of the caves.

Michael R. Waters, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A & M University, who was not involved in the new research, said the Paisley Caves findings “really provide solid evidence that the two technologies are contemporaneous.” Dr. Waters specializes in investigating Clovis sites.

Eske Willerslev of the Center for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen said that independent tests at two other laboratories confirmed his findings that the DNA was human and that some of the specimens were possibly of a pre-Clovis age.

In a teleconference with reporters, Dr. Willerslev said it was no easy matter getting DNA out of ancient coprolites. So far, the researchers have extracted only mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited from the mother, but this “definitely suggests,” he said, that these people were from Asia and could be related to today’s Native Americans.

“We are trying to retrieve nuclear DNA from the site,” he added, which should provide more precise information about who are the “closest contemporary people” associated with the cave dwellers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/s...north-america-spearheads-and-dna-suggest.html
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Spearheads and DNA Point to a Second Founding Society in North America

Stone spearheads and human DNA found in Oregon caves, anthropologists say, have produced firmer evidence that these are the oldest directly dated remains of people in North America. They also show that at least two cultures with distinct technologies — not a single one, as had been supposed — shared the continent more than 13,000 years ago.

In other words, the Clovis people, long known for their graceful, fluted projectile points, were not alone in the New World. The occupants of Paisley Caves, on the east side of the Cascade Range, near the town of Paisley, left narrow-stemmed spear points shaped by different flaking techniques. These hunting implements are classified as the Western Stemmed Tradition, previously thought to be younger than the Clovis technology.

The new research, based on the recent discovery of the artifacts and more refined radiocarbon dating tests, established that the cave dwellers who made the Western Stemmed points overlapped or possibly preceded the Clovis artisans elsewhere, the scientists reported in a paper published online Thursday by the journal Science.

“These two distinct technologies were parallel developments, not the product of a unilinear technological evolution,” the research team, led by Dennis L. Jenkins of the University of Oregon, concluded in the report. “The colonization of the Americas involved multiple technologically divergent, and possibly genetically divergent, founding groups.”

Indeed, new genetic evidence described in the current issue of the journal Nature shows that the Americas appeared to be first populated by three waves of migrants from Siberia: one large migration about 15,000 years ago, followed by two lesser migrations. Such a pattern had been hypothesized 25 years ago on the basis of Native American language groups spoken today, but had not been widely accepted by linguistics scholars.

Dr. Jenkins and colleagues did not discuss in the paper or at a news conference how the divergent technologies might be related to initial migration patterns. They noted only that the human DNA from the cave, extracted from coprolites, or dried feces, pointed to Siberian-East Asian origins of the people.

The findings lend support to an emerging hypothesis that the Clovis technology, named for the town in New Mexico where the first specimens were discovered, actually arose in what is now the Southeastern United States and moved west to the Plains and the Southwest. The Western Stemmed technology began, perhaps earlier, in the West. Most artifacts of that kind have been found on the West Coast and in Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.

“We seem to have two different traditions coexisting in the United States that did not blend for a period of hundreds of years,” Dr. Jenkins said.

Although other pre-Clovis sites have been claimed, only the 14,600-year-old Monte Verde campsite in Chile and now Paisley Caves have so far cleared most hurdles of critical review. When the first dating of human DNA from the caves was reported in 2008, some archaeologists worried that the coprolites could have been seriously contaminated, possibly by the leaching of later DNA from humans by water and rodent urine downward through the caves’ many layers of sediment.

So Dr. Jenkins returned to the caves in 2009 and each year since. Digging five to six feet into silt, the archaeologists uncovered the Western Stemmed projectile points and not a single Clovis point. They extracted DNA from more coprolites. Since DNA cannot be directly dated with radiocarbon technology, researchers instead dated fibers from the coprolites, residue of the food the cave dwellers had eaten. Any contaminating carbon was washed out of the coprolites with distilled water.

One of the samples, found with one of the Western Stemmed points, was dated to 13,000 to 13,200 years ago. The researchers said they conducted DNA analysis on 65 coprolites and obtained 190 radiocarbon dates from material at several of the caves.

Michael R. Waters, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A & M University, who was not involved in the new research, said the Paisley Caves findings “really provide solid evidence that the two technologies are contemporaneous.” Dr. Waters specializes in investigating Clovis sites.

Eske Willerslev of the Center for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen said that independent tests at two other laboratories confirmed his findings that the DNA was human and that some of the specimens were possibly of a pre-Clovis age.

In a teleconference with reporters, Dr. Willerslev said it was no easy matter getting DNA out of ancient coprolites. So far, the researchers have extracted only mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited from the mother, but this “definitely suggests,” he said, that these people were from Asia and could be related to today’s Native Americans.

“We are trying to retrieve nuclear DNA from the site,” he added, which should provide more precise information about who are the “closest contemporary people” associated with the cave dwellers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/s...north-america-spearheads-and-dna-suggest.html
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Another Moon on Pluto Has Astronomers Aglow

Pluto is still not a planet, but it does boast an impressive entourage.

Astronomers said Wednesday that they had spotted a fifth moon orbiting Pluto, which they already knew had four. The discovery, made with the Hubble Space Telescope, gives Pluto more moons than Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars combined.

The announcement, initially conveyed on Twitter, caught the attention of some science-minded comedians on the same medium. “It’s like, since being kicked out of the planet gang, it’s decided to form a rival solar system,” said Dean Burnett, a neuroscientist and stand-up comic in Britain. “Good one Pluto, I say.”

The discovery of the moon, known simply as P5 for now, by itself does not change the terms of the “Is Pluto a planet?” debate. Moons are not a prerequisite for planethood — unless one wanted to first expel Mercury and Venus, which are moonless — and many smaller bodies are also known to have moons orbiting them.

But that did not stop top planetary scientists from friendly taunting on Twitter. One comment came from Michael Brown, the astronomer at the California Institute of Technology who discovered an object in the outer solar system that appeared larger than Pluto and set off the chain of events that culminated in the demotion of Pluto from planet to dwarf planet in 2006. “The REAL implication of 5+ moons for Pluto?” he wrote. “Even things which aren’t planets can be complicated and interesting. But you knew that. Right?”

(Just in case you are not certain of Dr. Brown’s views, his Twitter name is “plutokiller.”)

S. Alan Stern, the principal investigator of NASA’s New Horizon’s spacecraft, which is currently speeding toward a close encounter with Pluto in July 2015, wrote a tart reply: “Does CalTech cultivate old school ideas? Get used to planets unlike Earth ruling. Accept Nature. Breathe Mike. Breathe.”

However, the new moon could spell trouble for Dr. Stern and New Horizons.

The chances that New Horizons would crash into P5 — a tiny nugget most likely no wider than Manhattan is long — or one of the other moons are vanishingly small. But Pluto could be enshrouded by smaller debris shed by the moons. With New Horizons flying through at 30,000 miles per hour, “even small particles that weigh less than a milligram can be lethal to the spacecraft,” Dr. Stern said.

The Hubble pictures of Pluto, led by Mark Showalter, an astronomer at the Seti Institute in Mountain View, Calif., were conducted to help identify safe regions for the NASA spacecraft. For now, not much is known about P5 other than that it is a speck of light, about one hundred-thousandth as bright as Pluto, that orbits at a distance of 26,000 miles.

The New Horizons team is coming up with a backup plan that would let it change the flyby — currently planned to pass less than 7,000 miles above the surface of Pluto — to a safer distance if it turns out that neighborhood is too cluttered.

Dr. Stern said the mission would still meet all of its main objectives. “That doesn’t leave us in the poorhouse,” he said. “We don’t get some of the icing of going up close.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/science/space/astronomers-spot-fifth-moon-orbiting-pluto.html
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That Pluto!
 
Just give the flybot grippers and more manuevering ability and you don't need so many steps or bots to retrieve a book.
 
Termites' crystal backpacks help them go out with bang

A species of termite has been found to inflict more damage on its enemies as it ages.

When defending their colony, some termites "explode", releasing chemicals that injure intruders.

A previously unknown crystal structure has been discovered that raises the toxicity of their chemical weapons.

As worker termites grow older, they become less able to perform their duties.

Yet this newly discovered structure allows ageing workers to better defend their colony. The research was published today in Science.

When faced with a threat, many termite species employ a type of altruistic suicide known as "autothysis" in order to deter attackers.

In a few species, workers join "soldier" termites in the defence of their colony and perform these acts of suicidal defence.

However, a twist to this system has been discovered in a species from French Guiana.

"My PhD student, Thomas Bourguignon, was studying termite community ecology and collecting species when, casually, he found something really special," Prof Yves Roisin from the Free University of Brussels told BBC News.

By rupturing their bodies, Neocapritermes taracua release a toxic chemical that sticks to intruders, holding them fast and corroding their bodies.

"[Autothysis] is usually a one component system. The defensive secretions are stored in salivary glands, but in these species there is a 'backpack' with two crystals carried outside the body. When the termite bursts, the two mix together, producing the more toxic compounds," Prof Roisin explained.

The "backpacks" are formed from pouches on the outside of the body.

Defensive bombs

Although termite societies contain castes of "soldier" individuals with vastly enlarged mandibles that have evolved for the purpose of attacking intruders, workers can join fights and perform defensive suicides should the need arise.

The research shows that as workers in this species grow older and more incapable of performing other tasks, they store up crystals that produce a chemical reaction when mixed with glandular secretions. This increases the toxicity of their explosive defence mechanism.

Biologists believe it allows the ageing workers to become more "useful" to the colony as sacrificial, defensive bombs.

How the crystals are synthesised is, as yet, unknown. Also unknown is whether other species in the genus have evolved a similar backpack system.

"There are some five or six species in the genus, but it's the only species [that carries a backpack] we've seen so far," Professor Yves Roisin said.

"It's quite strange."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19001083
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Termite suicide bombers!
 
Warp Drive Like That On 'Star Trek' May Be Feasible After All, Physicists Say

7043.imgcache.jpg

A ring-shaped warp drive device could transport a football-shape starship (center) to effective speeds faster than light. The concept was first proposed by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre.

By: Clara Moskowitz
Published: 09/17/2012 12:13 PM EDT on SPACE.com
Posted: 09/17/2012 1:04 pm Updated: 09/17/2012 1:04 pm

HOUSTON — A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel — a concept popularized in television's Star Trek — may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say.

A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light. A concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, however subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy.

Now physicists say that adjustments can be made to the proposed warp drive that would enable it to run on significantly less energy, potentially brining the idea back from the realm of science fiction into science.

"There is hope," Harold "Sonny" White of NASA's Johnson Space Center said here Friday (Sept. 14) at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting to discuss the challenges of interstellar spaceflight.

Warping space-time

An Alcubierre warp drive would involve a football-shape spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it. This ring, potentially made of exotic matter, would cause space-time to warp around the starship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind. [Star Trek's Warp Drive: Are We There Yet? | Video]

Meanwhile, the starship itself would stay inside a bubble of flat space-time that wasn't being warped at all.

"Everything within space is restricted by the speed of light," explained Richard Obousy, president of Icarus Interstellar, a non-profit group of scientists and engineers devoted to pursuing interstellar spaceflight. "But the really cool thing is space-time, the fabric of space, is not limited by the speed of light."

With this concept, the spacecraft would be able to achieve an effective speed of about 10 times the speed of light, all without breaking the cosmic speed limit.

The only problem is, previous studies estimated the warp drive would require a minimum amount of energy about equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter.

But recently White calculated what would happen if the shape of the ring encircling the spacecraft was adjusted into more of a rounded donut, as opposed to a flat ring. He found in that case, the warp drive could be powered by a mass about the size of a spacecraft like the Voyager 1 probe NASA launched in 1977.

Furthermore, if the intensity of the space warps can be oscillated over time, the energy required is reduced even more, White found.

"The findings I presented today change it from impractical to plausible and worth further investigation," White told SPACE.com. "The additional energy reduction realized by oscillating the bubble intensity is an interesting conjecture that we will enjoy looking at in the lab."

Laboratory tests

White and his colleagues have begun experimenting with a mini version of the warp drive in their laboratory.

They set up what they call the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer at the Johnson Space Center, essentially creating a laser interferometer that instigates micro versions of space-time warps.

"We're trying to see if we can generate a very tiny instance of this in a tabletop experiment, to try to perturb space-time by one part in 10 million," White said.

He called the project a "humble experiment" compared to what would be needed for a real warp drive, but said it represents a promising first step.

And other scientists stressed that even outlandish-sounding ideas, such as the warp drive, need to be considered if humanity is serious about traveling to other stars.

"If we're ever going to become a true spacefaring civilization, we're going to have to think outside the box a little bit, were going to have to be a little bit audacious," Obousy said.
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Caution: Exceeding certain speeds may still turn you into a lizard.
 
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