Saturday, August 30, 2008

Integral locates origin of high-energy emission from Crab Nebula

Thanks to data from ESA’s Integral gamma-ray observatory, scientists have been able to locate where particles in the vicinity of the rotating neutron-star in the Crab Nebula are accelerated to immense energies.

The discovery, resulting from more than 600 individual observations of the nebula, put in place another piece of the puzzle in understanding how neutron stars work.

Rotating neutron-stars, or pulsars, are known to accelerate particles to enormous energies, typically one hundred times more than the most powerful accelerators on Earth, but scientists are still uncertain exactly how these systems work and where the particles are accelerated.

A step forward in this understanding is now accomplished thanks to a team of researchers from the UK and Italy, led by Professor Tony Dean of the University of Southampton, who studied high-energy polarised light emitted by the Crab Nebula – one of the most dramatic sights in deep space.

The Crab Nebula is the result of a supernova explosion which was seen from Earth on 4 July 1054. The explosion left behind a pulsar with a nebula of radiating particles around it. The pulsar contains the mass of the Sun squeezed into a volume of about 10 km radius, rotating very fast – about 30 times a second – thereby generating very powerful magnetic fields and accelerating particles. A highly collimated jet, aligned with the spin axis of the pulsar and a bright radiating ‘donut’ structure (or torus) around the pulsar itself, are also seen.

So, the Crab is known to accelerate electrons - and possibly other particles - to extremely high speed, and so produces high energy radiation. But where exactly are these particles accelerated?

Looking into the heart of the pulsar with Integral’s spectrometer (SPI), the researchers made a detailed study to assess the polarization – or the alignment - of the waves of high-energy radiation originating from the Crab.

They saw that this polarised radiation is highly aligned with the rotation axis of the pulsar. So they concluded that a significant portion of the electrons generating the high-energy radiation must originate from a highly-organised structure located very close to the pulsar, very likely directly from the jets themselves. The discovery allows the researchers to discard other theories that locate the origin of this radiation further away from the pulsar.

Professor Tony Dean of the University’s School of Physics and Astronomy commented that the discovery of such alignment – also matching with the polarisation observed in the visible band - is truly remarkable. “The findings have clear implications on many aspects of high energy accelerators such as the Crab,” he added.

"The detection of polarised radiation in space is very complicated and rare, as it requires dedicated instrumentation and an in-depth analysis of very complex data”, said Chris Winkler, Integral Project Scientist at ESA. “Integral’s ability to detect polarised gamma-radiation and, as a consequence, to obtain important results like this one, confirms it once more as a world-class observatory.”

Notes for editors:

The results are published in the 29 August issue of the scientific journal Science, in a paper titled ‘Polarized gamma-ray emission from the Crab’, by: A. J. Dean, D.J. Clark, V.A.McBride, A.J.Bird, A.B.Hill and S.E.Shaw (University of Southampton’s School of Physics and Astronomy); J.B. Stephen and L. Bassani (INAF-IASF, Bologna); and A. Bazzano and P. Ubertini (INAF-IASF, Roma).

NASA Mars Rover Opportunity Ascends to Level Ground









EXCLUSIVE: NASA to study extending shuttle era to 2015









NASA' current budget is about $17 billion.






Read the email: Download nasa_email.doc

NASA's 'electronic nose' could sniff out cancer

From rocket science to brain surgery: a device designed to sniff out leaks on the space shuttle may soon guide surgeons as they operate on cancer patients.

The ENose was originally developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, to detect low-level leaks of ammonia in shuttles. It is based on polymer films whose electrical conductivity varies as they encounter different substances. Now its creators believe the ENose could act as a highly sensitive detector of the characteristic compounds produced by cancer cells.

Such a device could be invaluable for surgeons operating on areas where spotting tumour tissue is particularly tricky. Surgeons currently rely on visual inspection to locate cancerous tissue, referring back to scans taken before surgery. But brain tissue, for example, is hard to distinguish from cancer, and it also changes shape when the skull is opened, so the scans don't match what the surgeon sees. That makes it difficult to cut out all the cancerous tissue while avoiding damage to healthy areas.

Babak Kateb of City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, California, says the ENose has correctly diagnosed lung cancer and diabetes in patients who have breathed into it. He and his colleagues believe the device could be linked to other brain imaging and mapping devices to create a real-time high-resolution image of the brain that pinpoints cancer hotspots.

The work was presented at the International Brain Mapping & Intraoperative Surgical Planning Society Conference at the University of California, Los Angeles this week.

Now Hear This: Don't Remove Earwax





Good-for-you goo





Older adults are more prone to earwax buildup then younger individuals.



Leave your ears alone











Scientists find ancient lost settlements in Amazon

A vast region of the Amazon forest in Brazil was home to a complex of ancient towns in which about 50,000 people lived, according to scientists assisted by satellite images of the region.

The scientists, whose findings were published on Thursday in the journal Science, described clusters of towns and smaller villages connected by complex road networks and housing a society doomed by the arrival of Europeans five centuries ago.

European colonists and the diseases they brought with them probably killed most of the inhabitants, the researchers said. The settlements, consisting of networks of walled towns and smaller villages organized around a central plaza, are now almost entirely overgrown by the forest.

"These are not cities, but this is urbanism, built around towns," University of Florida anthropologist Mike Heckenberger said in a statement.

"If we look at your average medieval town or your average Greek polis, most are about the scale of those we find in this part of the Amazon. Only the ones we find are much more complicated in terms of their planning," Heckenberger added.

Helped by satellite imagery, the researchers spent more than a decade uncovering and mapping the lost communities.

Prior to the arrival of Europeans starting in 1492, the Americas were home to many prosperous and impressive societies and large cities. These findings add to the understanding of the various pre-Columbian civilizations.

The existence of the ancient settlements in the Upper Xingu region of the Amazon in north-central Brazil means what many experts had considered virgin tropical forests were in fact heavily affected by past human activity, the scientists said.

The U.S. and Brazilian scientists worked with a member of the Kuikuro, an indigenous Amazonian people descended from settlements' original inhabitants.

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Friday, August 29, 2008

New Milky Way map reveals a complicated outer galaxy

CHICAGO -- The halo of stars that envelops the Milky Way galaxy is like a river delta criss-crossed by stellar streams large and small, according to new data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-II). While the largest rivers of this delta have been mapped out over the last decade, analysis of the new SDSS-II map shows that smaller streams can be found throughout the stellar halo, said Kevin Schlaufman, a graduate student at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

A theoretical model of a galaxy like the Milky Way, showing trails of stars torn from disrupted satellite galaxies that have merged with the central galaxy. The structures seen in the SDSS-II star maps support this prediction of a complicated outer Galaxy. The region shown is about one million light years on a side; the sun is just 25,000 light years from the center of the Galaxy and would appear close to the center of this picture. Credit: K. Johnston, J. Bullock

Schlaufman reported his results at an international symposium in Chicago, titled "The Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Asteroids to Cosmology." Over the last three years, Schlaufmann explained, the SEGUE survey of SDSS-II has measured the motions of nearly a quarter million stars in selected areas of the sky. A careful search for groups of stars at the same velocity turned up 14 distinct structures, 11 of them previously unknown.

"Even with SEGUE, we are still only mapping a small fraction of the Galaxy," said Schlaufman, "so 14 streams in our data implies a huge number when we extrapolate to the rest of the Milky Way." If each velocity structure were a separate stream, Schlaufman explained, there would be close to 1,000 in the inner 75,000 light years of the Galaxy. However, these structures could arise from a smaller number of streams that are seen many times in different places.

"A jumble of pasta" is the way Columbia University researcher Kathryn Johnston described her theoretical models of the Milky Way's stellar halo. In a review talk at the symposium, Johnston explained how dwarf galaxies that pass close to the Milky Way can be stretched by gravitational tides into spaghetti-like strands, which wind around the Galaxy as stars trace out the same orbital paths at different rates.

"In the center of the Galaxy, these stellar strands crowd together and you just see a smooth mix of stars," said Johnston. "But as you look further away you can start to pick out individual strands, as well as features more akin to pasta shells that come from dwarfs that were on more elongated orbits. By looking at faint features, Kevin may be finding some of the 'angel hair' that came from smaller dwarfs, or ones that were destroyed longer ago."

Heidi Newberg of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and her thesis student Nathan Cole have been trying to follow some of the larger strands as they weave across the sky. "It's a big challenge to piece things together," said Cole, "because the stream from one dwarf galaxy can wrap around the Galaxy and pass through streams of stars ripped from other dwarf galaxies."

Toward the constellation Virgo, where SDSS images revealed an excess of stars covering a huge area of sky, Newberg finds that there are at least two superposed structures, and possibly three or more. The SEGUE velocity measurements can separate systems that overlap in sky maps, Newberg explained in her symposium talk. "Part of what we see toward Virgo is a tidal arm of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, whose main body lies on the opposite side of the Milky Way, but we don't know the origin of the other structures. There really aren't enough pasta varieties to describe all the structures we find."

In addition to stellar streams, astronomers searching the SDSS data have found 14 surviving dwarf companions of the Milky Way, including two new discoveries announced today at the symposium by Gerard Gilmore of Cambridge University. These satellite galaxies are orbiting within the halo of invisible dark matter whose gravity holds the Milky Way itself together. Most of them are much fainter than the ten satellites known prior to the SDSS.

Because even the SDSS can only detect these ultra-faint dwarfs if they are relatively nearby, there could be several hundred more of them further out in the Milky Way's dark halo, according to independent analyses by graduate students Sergey Koposov, of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, and Eric Tollerud, of the University of California at Irvine. "Even so," said Koposov, "we expect that the number of dark matter clumps is much larger than that, so something must prevent the smaller clumps from gathering gas and forming stars."

The SDSS dwarfs have far fewer stars than the previously known satellites, noted Gilmore, but they have similar spatial extents, and the stars within them move at similar speeds. "I think the internal dynamics of these tiny galaxies may be hard to explain with our conventional ideas about dark matter," said Gilmore.

"The SDSS has taught us a huge amount about the Milky Way and its neighbors," said Johnston, who is pleased to see some of the predictions of her models confirmed by the new data. "But we're still just beginning to map the Galaxy in a comprehensive way, and there's a trove of discoveries out there for the next generation of surveys, including the two new Milky Way surveys that will be carried out in SDSS-III."

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is the most ambitious survey of the sky ever undertaken, involving more than 300 astronomers and engineers at 25 institutions around the world. SDSS-II, which began in 2005 and finished observations in July, 2008, is comprised of three complementary projects. The Legacy Survey completed the original SDSS map of half the northern sky, determining the positions, brightness, and colors of hundreds of millions of celestial objects and measuring distances to more than a million galaxies and quasars. SEGUE (Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration) mapped the structure and stellar makeup of the Milky Way Galaxy. The Supernova Survey repeatedly scanned a stripe along the celestial equator to discover and measure supernovae and other variable objects, probing the accelerating expansion of the cosmos. All three surveys were carried out with special purpose instruments on the 2.5-meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory, in New Mexico.



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Scientists discover why flies are so hard to swat










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Giant Clams Fed Early Humans

A new species of giant clam, Tridacna costata, found in the Red Sea. Credit: Carin Jantzen

By Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience




"These are all strong indications that T. costata may be the earliest example of marine overexploitation," said researcher Claudio Richter, a marine ecologist at the Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany.

Fossil evidence that the researchers uncovered suggests the stocks of these giant clams began crashing some 125,000 years ago, during the last interval between glacial periods. During that time, scientists think modern humans first emerged out of Africa, Richter said.

These mollusks could have played a key role in feeding people during that crucial era, serving as a prime target due to their large size, the scientists added. Indeed, competition for these clams and other valuable sea resources "may have been an important driver for human expansion," Richter told LiveScience.

Since this new species bore some features in common with two other living species of Red Sea clams, at first the researchers thought the new mollusk might have been a hybrid, but genetic analysis showed otherwise. These results were further corroborated by marked differences in behavior — while the other two clams spawn over a long period in summer, the new species reproduces during a brief spurt in spring.

No one had expected to discover a new giant clam species, "particularly in the Red Sea, one of the best investigated coral reef provinces," Richter said. The fact that it was overlooked for so long "is a testimony as to how little we really know about marine biodiversity."

Underwater surveys carried out in the Gulf of Aqaba (north of the Red Sea, between the Sinai Peninsula and Arabian mainland) and northern Red Sea revealed this long-overlooked clam must be considered critically endangered. Only six out of 1,000 live specimens the scientists observed belonged to the new species. This mollusk could be the earliest victim of human degradation of coral reefs in this region, the researchers added.

The scientists detailed their findings online on Aug. 28 in the journal Current Biology.

Original here

Bell Labs Kills Fundamental Physics Research






"Fundamental physics is absolutely crucial to computing," says Mike Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society. "Say in the case of integrated circuits, there were many, many small steps that occurred along the way resulting from decades worth of work in matters of physics."

Bell Labs was one of the last bastions of basic research within the corporate world, which over the past several decades has largely focused its R&D efforts on applied research -- areas of study with more immediate prospects of paying off.

Without internally funded basic research, fundamental research has instead come to rely on academic and government-funded laboratories to do kind of long-term projects without immediate and obvious payback that Bell Labs used to historically do, says Lubell.

Most of the scientists working in the company's fundamental physics department have been reassigned, says Benedict. Nature, which first reported the news, says just four scientists are left working the fundamental physics department in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Benedict wouldn't confirm or deny that.

Computing and wireless technologies owe much to advancements in physics, though the connection may not always be immediately apparent. An example is the Global Positioning Systems or GPS.

For instance, an integral element of GPS are atomic clocks, which stemmed from the creation of the hydrogen maser.

The hydrogen maser, or hydrogen frequency standard, uses the properties of a hydrogen atom to serve as a precision frequency reference.

"GPS is based on very accurate timing mechanisms," says Lubell. "So the measure of time and the frequency standards that are used to do it date back to research in optical pumping which led to the development of hydrogen maser."

In the past Bell Labs was the place where such fundamental research that impacts the fields of both computing and physics could meet.

Bell Labs was founded in 1925 by Walter Gifford, then president of AT&T. AT&T, a monopoly, established Bell Telephone Laboratories, popularly known as Bell Labs, as a joint venture with Western Electric, AT&T's manufacturing subsidiary.

The Labs became the Mecca for researchers in science, computers and mathematics. Deregulation, however, forced AT&T in 1995 to spin off Bell and other parts of the company into Lucent Technologies. The move marked a shift in fortunes for the research arm as research budgets came to be trimmed and Alcatel-Lucent faced increasing pressure from stockholders.

"Bell Labs could do the kind of fundamental research it did in the past because it was functioning as part of a monopoly," says Lubell. "With that gone the landscape changed dramatically."

In recent years, Bell Labs' physics unit had its share of controversy when researcher J. Hendrik Schön was found to have published data in the area of molecular-scale transistors between 1998 and 2001 that had been manipulated and falsified.

That's a long way from where the Labs once stood with its position as a Nobel Prize magnet.

In 1937, Bell Labs researcher Clinton Davisson shared the Nobel Prize in physics for demonstrating the wave nature of matter.

Nearly twenty years later, in 1956 came the Nobel prize for inventing the transistor and it was shared by William Shockley, John Bardeen and Bell scientist Walter Brattain.

In the seventies, Bell Labs won two Nobel prizes in physics back-to-back in the years 1977 and 1978. Philip Anderson shared the Nobel for developing an improved understanding of the electronic structure of glass and magnetic materials. The next year Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were feted for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation.

Former Bell Labs researcher Steven Chu shared the Nobel in 1997 for developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light. A year later Horst Stormer, Robert Laughlin, and Daniel Tsui were awarded a Nobel for the discovery and explanation of the fractional quantum Hall effect.

In the last few years, Lucent has sold its semiconductor business and that means research in areas connected to that had to be scaled back, especially in areas such as integrated circuits and Microelectromechanicals Systems (MEMS).

Meanwhile, Alcatel-Lucent continues to hack away at its jewels. Though Murray Hill in New Jersey, the company's U.S. headquarters, and the site of many great scientific discoveries remains safe, Alcatel-Lucent has sold its Holmdel campus. Holmdel's technological contributions include contributions to Telstar, the first communications satellite and Chu's Nobel Prize-winning work.



For Bell Labs, yet another chapter in its storied history of comes to a close taking the once iconic institution closer to being just another research arm of a major corporation.


Original here

How bacteria could help power the future

By Michael Schirber



Of particular interest are microbes that thrive in hot temperatures, near the boiling point of water. VanFossen and her colleagues carried out a detailed DNA study of one of these thermophilic (heat-loving) bacteria called Caldicellulosiruptor saccharolyticus, which was first found in a hot spring in New Zealand.








Bionic microbe






© 2008 All rights reserved.

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Swift Enterprises Joins Race for Alternative Jet Fuel

Green Gym Uses Human-Powered Energy

Why US must invest against climate change

Eight scientific organisations have urged the next US president to help protect the country from climate change by pushing for increased funding for research and forecasting. The organisations say about $2 trillion of US economic output could be hurt by storms, floods and droughts.

"We don't think we have the right kind of tools to help decision makers plan for the future," said Jack Fellows, the vice president for corporate affairs of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a consortium of 71 universities.

The groups, including the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, urged Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and Republican rival John McCain to support $9 billion in investments between 2010 and 2014 to help protect the country from extreme weather, which would nearly double the current US budget for the area.

The UN's science panel says extreme weather events could hit more often as temperatures rise due to climate change.

Each year the United States suffers billions of dollars in weather-related damages ranging from widespread events like Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the more recent droughts in the Southeast, to smaller, more frequent glitches like airline delays from storms, they said. More than a quarter of the country's economic output, about $2 trillion, is vulnerable to extreme weather, they added.


Invest to protect

John Snow, the co-chairman of the Weather Coalition, a business and university group that advocates for better weather prediction, said improved computers would help scientists forecast extreme weather events more locally, which could help cities better prepare for weather disasters.

It could also help businesses that produce virtually no greenhouse emissions, such as wind farms, know where to best locate their operations, he said.

The scientists said cooler temperatures in the first half of this year are making their task more difficult. "One of the challenges we face ... is to make the case that while we are in a period of warming, we should not expect every year to be the warmest year on record," Snow said.

The global mean temperature to the end of July was 0.28 C above the 1961-1990 average, the UK-based MetOffice for climate change research said on Wednesday. That would make the first half of 2008 the coolest since 2000.

Neither campaign responded immediately to questions about the plea for funding. Obama and McCain, who face off in a November election, both support regulation of greenhouse gases through market mechanisms such as cap-and-trade programs on emissions.

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Ford Tests Improve Gas Mileage 24% with EcoDriving

Ford is really throwing down the guantlet by showing how dedicated it is to the new EcoDriving initiative we talked about the other day. I really liked it because it validates a lot of what we’re trying to do on the forums in terms of improving fuel economy on an individual level, but also showed that automakers were willing to commit (at least in name) to supporting fuel efficient driving. However, it seems Ford has really stepped up to the plate by offering ecodriving lessons over the course of several days to see how effective it really is.

Ford takes on ecodriving

Recently, Ford and a group called Pro Formance decided to take on ecodriving in the form of a 4-day long seminar with 48 different drivers taking part. Using the ecodriving tips taught by Pro Formance, the participants increased their fuel economy between 6-50%, with and average increase of 24%.

With the gas crunch hitting people hard, it’s good to see a company like Ford stepping up and showing consumers that there’s more than just air up your tires and cleaning out the trunk. Here’s their take on ecodriving:

“By working with Pro Formance to conduct validation testing, Ford is proving that eco-driving techniques are teachable and work across a broad spectrum of vehicles and drivers,” said Drew DeGrassi, president and CEO of Pro Formance Group. “It’s a great initiative for Ford to lead in this country. It’s not the end-all solution for America to obtain energy independence, but it is an important part of it.”

I would love to see what the training program is like, but for the rest of us Ford give us 10 ecodriving tips. Sure, they pale in comparison to EcoModder’s ecodriving tips list, but most drivers aren’t interested in getting really involved, and Ford’s hands-on approach is a good way to get results without asking too much of people.

Evidently they have been doing this since the 1990s in Germany, where gas mileage has been an issue for longer than it has in the US. Hopefully, this will encourage other manufacturers to bring their most efficient vehicles and programs to a ready-and-willing US market.


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Scientists: Save the planet—have fewer kids

As rising populations strain a warming planet, a British journal suggests having smaller families

|Chicago Tribune correspondent

LONDON — There are plenty of ways to cut your carbon footprint, whether it's driving less or buying an energy-efficient refrigerator. But the British Medical Journal, in an editorial last month, urged a more controversial one: having fewer children.

With 60 million people already living in one of the most densely populated countries in the world, the journal said, British couples should aim to have no more than two children as part of their contribution to worldwide efforts to reduce carbon emissions, stem climate change and ease demands on the world's resources.

Limiting family size is "the simplest and biggest contribution anyone can make to leaving a habitable planet for our grandchildren," the editorial's authors said.


Europe's rates diving

Increasingly, "a casual attitude toward global warming ought to be viewed as a sin," argues James Nash, director of the Churches' Center for Theology and Public Policy, a Washington-based research group that studies the relationship between Christian faith and public policy.

The appeal to have fewer children sounds a bit odd in Europe, where one of the biggest worries these days is plunging birthrates. German women today bear an average of 1.3 children, fewer than women in China, where the one-child policy is fast weakening. Even British women are giving birth to just 1.9 children on average, a level below that needed to produce a stable population.

But each child born in a rich country like Britain or the United States is likely to be responsible for 160 times as much carbon emitted as a child born in Ethiopia, said John Guillebaud, a British family-planning doctor, professor and one of the authors of the British Medical Journal editorial. With efforts to cut emissions likely to go only so far, cutting births may be the best option, he said.

"We're not Big Brother. We're not for pushing people," he insisted in an interview. "We just think deciding how big a family to have should take into consideration our descendants."

At the current projected rates of growth, the world's population, now at 6.7 billion, is expected to reach about 9 billion by 2050. Environmentalists argue that a population that large will dramatically overtax the world's resources and lead to growing conflict as well as potentially crippling climate change, particularly as poorer parts of the world develop and begin using more resources.

Most of the expected growth in population is projected to come in less-developed parts of the world, particularly Asia, where 60 percent of the world's people live, and Africa, where birthrates are the highest in the world.

Worldwide, population growth is declining, and even in much of Asia and Africa "the drop in fertility rate has been quite amazing," said Werner Haug, director of the United Nations Population Fund's technical division. Despite falling international investment in family planning, Thailand today has a European-like birthrate; Kenyan women, who once averaged eight children, are now having five.

Overall, Asia's birthrate, excluding China, is 2.8 children per woman, and Africa's is 5.4—well down from the past, said Carl Haub of the Washington-based Population Reference Bureau, an independent organization that analyzes demographic data.

Asia set for boom

But because a birthrate above 2.1 children per couple — the approximate replacement level, allowing for some untimely deaths—will produce ever-expanding growth, even Asia is still set to "grow like wildfire," Haub said.

The problem is worst in places such as northern India, where literacy, education and access to birth control are poor and poverty levels and population numbers are already high. If those conditions continue, runaway growth could push India toward a population of 2 billion people, Haub said. Sub-Saharan Africa, at expected growth rates, is likely to nearly triple its population by 2050, also to about 2 billion people, he said.

Even in the United States, birthrates, which had fallen to around 1.85 children per non-Hispanic white woman, are now about 2.1 children per U.S. couple, thanks to Hispanic migration.

In a nation where Texas' 23 million people account for more greenhouse gas emissions than all 720 million Sub-Saharan Africans, even small rates of U.S. population growth may have a disproportionate impact on global warming, said the UN's Haug.

Experts say the best way to cut the world's birthrate is simply to push ahead with what has worked best in the past: education, access to information about birth-control options, and better health care to give parents confidence that children born will survive to adulthood.

Original here

Thursday, August 28, 2008

MythBusters Tackle Moon Conspiracies: Behind the Scenes


NASA Images Show Gamma Ray Bursts Across Milky Way

NASA researchers yesterday released images collected by a new telescope studying high-energy gamma rays. A combined image from 95 hours of the telescope's initial observations showed bursts of gamma rays glowing across the plane of the Milky Way.

The Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope, renamed Fermi, was launched in June and is off to a promising start, NASA scientists said.

"I like to call it our extreme machine," said Jon Morse, the director of astrophysics for NASA. "It will help us crack the mysteries of these enormously powerful emissions."

Gamma rays are powerful light rays invisible to the naked eye. Because Earth's atmosphere absorbs gamma rays, they can be studied only from the edges of the visible universe.

Fermi is gathering data on gamma rays that originate near black holes and high-energy stars called pulsars.

Though much remains unknown, bursts of gamma rays are thought to be emitted from particles coming out of black holes and pulsars, said Peter Michelson, a Stanford physicist and a principal investigator for the mission.

"We don't yet understand the mechanism for how the particles that emit the gamma rays are accelerated," Michelson said. "We're not even sure what the nature of the particles are."

The study is a follow-up on work done by the Energetic Gamma-Ray Experiment Telescope, a mission that studied gamma rays from 1991 to 2000.

Fermi's technology allowed scientists to compile in days what took the first mission one year to do, said Steve Ritz, one of the project's scientists.

The telescope was renamed Fermi yesterday, after Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, because he is "today regarded as one of the top scientists of the 20th century," Ritz said.

The scientists hope that in the five to 10 years that it is in orbit, Fermi will be as remarkable as its namesake.

"This powerful space observatory will explore the most extreme of environments for us," Morse said.

Original here

TV's 'Mythbusters' Tackle Moon Landing Hoax Claims

In 2005, Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, special effects experts better known by the title of their popular Discovery Channel series, "MythBusters", were asked during an interview about the myth they would most like to test provided an unlimited budget.

"Jamie and I have done the research, and figured that the only way to end the debate about the 'myth' of the Apollo moon landing is to go there," Savage replied to Slashdot, a technology news website, about the belief held by some that the United States faked the lunar landings.

Three years later, the Mythbusters are ready to share the results of their 'trip' as they devote their next show, airing on Wednesday, to the moon landing hoax claims.

"We built a hybrid rocket that was fueled by poo and nitrous oxide — thought we had enough Teflon tape on the seals but the stink got through anyway. Too bad that the footage got lost in transit to the editors," Hyneman told, explaining that their limited budget would not cover the cost of regular rocket fuel.

Of course, he was joking.

"Dude, I sooo wished we could have gone there," Savage admitted.

So, with their feet firmly planted on the Earth (at least for most of the time, but more on that later), Hyneman and Savage, along with fellow Mythbusters Tory Belleci, Kari Byron and Grant Imahara, set out to use science to 'bust' or confirm the truth behind the hoaxers' claims.

Low hanging fruit

Hoax believers have had 40 years to devise reasons why the Apollo moon landings must have been filmed in an Earth-based studio. As special effects experts, Hyneman felt they were well suited for the subject.

First however, they needed to choose which parts of the myth to test.

"We looked at the ones that for some reason or other, seemed most prevalent," Savage explained in an e-mail interview.

"We took the low hanging fruit," Hyneman added. "The key idea was that the footage that proved we were there was a special effect. Adam and I are experienced effects artists, so it was natural for us to dig into it."

"We wanted to tackle the ones that actually take some experimentation to prove," Savage said.

To narrow the field however, the Mythbusters sought the assistance of someone very familiar with debunking the moon hoax myth, or they would have if he had not come calling first.

"I was actually first involved with the Mythbusters early on, when I was contacted by one of their producers asking if I had any astronomical myths for them to bust," shared Dr. Phil Plait, a.k.a. "The Bad Astronomer", in an interview with An astronomer who worked with the Hubble Telescope, Plait created a website, Bad Astronomy, aimed at dispelling astronomy and science based myths, including the moon hoax, which expanded into books and his recent appointment as president of the James Randi Educational Foundation.

"I made some suggestions but sadly they didn't use any of them," Plait said. "I guess most of them don't make very good TV."

That early interaction, which was followed by meeting the Mythbusters at conferences, led to Plait establishing a relationship with the show. So he was surprised when a fellow astronomer contacted him about the Mythbusters investigating the moon hoax.

"I hadn't heard anything about [this show] so I fired off an e-mail to Adam Savage and said, 'What gives?' and he e-mailed me back and said, 'Oh oh oh, we're going to ask you about this,'" recalled Plait.

"Over the course of a few days, they were on the phone with me and a lot of other people who knew about, for example, the properties of the lunar surface, to try to figure out not just the best way of debunking the moon hoax but the best aspects of it... so they wanted to know which ones that they had found were the ones that I ran into and what were the best ways to tackle them. It was actually a lot of fun."

Ultimately, Hyneman, Savage and the others settled on three major areas of the hoax: how light interacted with the lunar surface, how the astronauts appeared to move in the low gravity of the Moon and how items behaved in the airless void of space.

Original here

Strange Clouds at the Edge of Space



see caption








see caption

Above: Noctilucent clouds over Mt. Sabalan, a 15,784 ft extinct volcano in northwestern Iran. Photo credit: Siamak Sabet. [more]

"This year's apparition over Iran (pictured above) was splendid," says Thomas. The Persian clouds appeared on July 19th, just a few days before the ISS display, and were photographed from latitude 38o N. "That's pretty far south," he says.








Why did NLCs first appear in the 19th century?

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Yellowstone's Ancient Supervolcano: Only Lukewarm?

Molten plume of material beneath Yellowstone cooler than expected

Photo of a geyser in Yellowstone National Park.

Yellowstone National Park and its famous geysers are the remnants of an ancient supervolcano.
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In an effort to find out, Derek Schutt of Colorado State University and Ken Dueker of the University of Wyoming took the hotspot's temperature.

The scientists published results of their research, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s division of earth sciences, in the August, 2008, issue of the journal Geology.

"Yellowstone is located atop of one of the few large volcanic hotspots on Earth," said Schutt. "But though the hot material is a volcanic plume, it's cooler than others of its kind, such as one in Hawaii."

When a supervolcano last erupted at this spot more than 600,000 years ago, its plume covered half of today's United States with volcanic ash. Details of the cause of the Yellowstone supervolcano's periodic eruptions through history are still unknown.








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