Planets Caught In "Catastrophic Collision"

Planetary collision: An artist's rendering depicts planets colliding in a Sun-like binary star system about 300 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Aries.

From Cosmos Magazine:

LOS ANGELES: Two planets about 300 light-years from Earth slammed into each other recently, marking the first time evidence of such a catastrophic collision has been seen by scientists.

Astronomers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the California Institute of Technology (CALTECH) said the crash involved two planets orbiting a star in the Aries constellation.

Massive and catastrophic

The collision was uncovered while astronomers were attempting to measure the star's age, and found an unusually large amount of dust orbiting the star.

"It's as if Earth and Venus collided with each other," said Benjamin Zuckerman, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy. "Astronomers have never seen anything like this before. Apparently, major catastrophic collisions can take place in a fully mature planetary system."

The astronomers' research will be published in December in the Astrophysical Journal. The collision was an "ultimate extinction event" that would have wiped out any life on either planet in minutes, the report says.

The prospect of Earth suffering an apocalyptic collision with another planet or asteroid has been fodder for science-fiction writers and film-makers ever since Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer's 1933 novel When Worlds Collide.

Read more ....

Weaker Solar Wind Won't Slow Global Warming, May Threaten Astronauts

From Popular Mechanics:

If a spacecraft keeps chugging along for long enough, eventually it may find something startling.

Ulysses, a satellite operated by NASA and the European Space Agency, has been observing solar wind—charged particles ejected by the sun's upper atmosphere—since its launch in 1990. It's been around long enough to see two solar minimums, when the sun's radiation reaches the lowest point in an 11-year cycle, and a solar maximum, when the sun spouts sunspots and spews its highest level of radiation. But what Ulysses found during the most recent solar minimum has surprised astrophysicists: The solar wind was 20 to 25 percent weaker than during the last minimum, NASA and ESA announced at a press conference on Tuesday, and the weakest since they began measuring it at the dawn of the space age a half-century ago.

It's an exciting find for scientists studying the stars—a new weather condition adds a new variable in terms of research. But what does a weak solar wind really mean?

Read more ....

Pictured: The Dark Matter Galaxy That Could Be Orbiting Our Milky Way

The recently discovered galaxy 'Segue 1' orbits the Milky Way, and is believed to
be composed of mainly dark matter

The Daily Mail:

A satellite galaxy made almost entirely of dark matter could be orbiting the Milky Way, a new image has revealed.

It is one of 24 neighbouring galaxies spotted by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which has recorded the night sky in greater detail than ever before.

The results have doubled the number of known dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way.

The latest finding is particularly significant as it appears to have a very low light-to-mass ratio - a billion times less bright than the Milky Way itself.

Yale Professor of Astronomy Marla Geha, who led the team that made the discovery, believes that the galaxy, named 'Segue 1' is mainly composed of dark matter.

The scientists studying the galaxy believe this is due to the fact that despite having a mass of a million suns, it is not nearly as bright as it should be.

Read more ....

Read more ....

Caffeine Experts At Johns Hopkins Call For Warning Labels For Energy Drinks

From E!Science News:

Johns Hopkins scientists who have spent decades researching the effects of caffeine report that a slew of caffeinated energy drinks now on the market should carry prominent labels that note caffeine doses and warn of potential health risks for consumers. "The caffeine content of energy drinks varies over a 10-fold range, with some containing the equivalent of 14 cans of Coca-Cola, yet the caffeine amounts are often unlabeled and few include warnings about the potential health risks of caffeine intoxication," says Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., one of the authors of the article that appears in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence this month.

The market for these drinks stands at an estimated $5.4 billion in the United States and is expanding at a rate of 55 percent annually. Advertising campaigns, which principally target teens and young adults, promote the performance-enhancing and stimulant effects of energy drinks and appear to glorify drug use.

Without adequate, prominent labeling; consumers most likely won't realize whether they are getting a little or a lot of caffeine. "It's like drinking a serving of an alcoholic beverage and not knowing if its beer or scotch," says Griffiths.

Read more ....

Green Ways To Care For Your Pet

Dirty Dogs and Carbon Cats -- The Slate

The greenest ways to care for your pet.

This one is a little gross, but I have lots of pets at home, and most of my weekly waste is composed of dog and cat poop. What's the best way to dispose of all that so that I don't end up hurting the environment?

The Lantern has never been trusted to care for any pet larger than a hamster—rest in peace, Fonzie!—so he'll admit that this question falls a little outside his comfort zone. But your question raises an important point: To own a dog or cat can significantly increase the ecological footprint of your household. The Lantern hopes to cover other aspects of domestic animal husbandry in the future, but today let's focus one of the most important ways you can manage your pet's "pawprint": responsible waste disposal.

Whether you have a dog or a cat, you'll have two problems to deal with: How do you collect your animal's poop, and what do you do with it once you have it in hand? Most dog owners have been conditioned to clean up after their pets when they walk on public streets and sidewalks. But it's just as important to dispose properly of dog waste in your own backyard. Pet waste contains bacteria that can contaminate local waterways if it washes from your lawn into storm drains. In large enough quantities, this pollution can remove oxygen from streams and rivers and contribute to algal blooms, threatening marine life.

Read more ....

Sun's Wind And Output On Extended Dimmer Switch: Scientists

From CNews Science:

WASHINGTON - The sun has dialled back its furnace to the lowest levels seen in the space age, new measurements from a space probe show.

But don't worry - it's too small a difference to change life on Earth, scientists say.

In fact, it means satellites can stay in orbit a little longer.

The solar wind - a stream of charged particles ejected from the sun's upper atmosphere at 1.6 million kilometres per hour - is significantly weaker, cooler and less dense than it has been in 50 years, according to new data from the NASA-European solar probe Ulysses.

And for the first time in about a century, the sun went for two months this summer without sunspots, said NASA solar physicist David Hathaway.

Read more ....

New Optics Technology To Study Alien Worlds

Artist's concept of the New Worlds Observatory. The dark, flower-shaped object in the center is the star shade. (Credit: NASA and Northrop Grumman)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 24, 2008) — NASA Goddard scientist Rick Lyon has been working on potential missions and technologies to find planets around other stars (called exoplanets or extrasolar planets) since the late 1980s. Only recently has he begun to believe that NASA may actually fly a planet-finding mission in his lifetime.

"This is the closest it’s come to being real," he said.

Lyon and other scientists and engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., have joined teams studying optics technologies for three possible exoplanet missions: the Extrasolar Planetary Imaging Coronagraph (EPIC), the New Worlds Observer (NWO), and the eXtrasolar Planet Characterization (XPC) mission.

The possibility of a mission devoted to planet finding is tantalizing, especially to those interested in ratcheting up a science that began 13 years ago when astronomers found and confirmed the existence of the first planet outside the solar system. Since then, scientists have confirmed nearly 300, most of which are gas giants like Jupiter. However, most of these detections have been indirect, because the planets are too faint to be seen directly. Instead, their presence is revealed by measuring how much the unseen world's gravity pulls on its parent star.

Read more ....

Chocolate Helps Heart Stay Healthy

From Live Science:

A small square of dark chocolate daily protects the heart from inflammation and subsequent heart disease, a new study of Italians suggests. Milk chocolate might not do the job.

However, this guilty pleasure has a limit.

Specifically, only 6.7 grams of chocolate per day (or 0.23 ounces) represents the ideal amount, according to results from the Moli-sani Project, one of the largest health studies ever conducted in Europe. For comparison, a standard-sized Hershey's Kiss is about 4.5 grams (though the classic Kiss is not made of dark chocolate) and one Hershey's dark chocolate bar is about 41 grams (so a recommendation might be one of those weekly).

Chronic inflammation of tissues in the circulatory system is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, such as myocardial infarction or stroke. So doctors strive to keep patients' inflammation under control. One marker for inflammation in the blood is called C-reactive protein.

The researchers found a relationship between dark chocolate intake and levels of this protein in the blood of 4,849 subjects in good health and free of risk factors (such as high cholesterol or blood pressure, and other parameters). The findings are detailed in the latest issue of the Journal of Nutrition.

Read more ....

5 Myths About Wind Energy

Analysts estimate it would take at least 260,000 turbines, each 300 feet tall, to meet the United States' electricity needs. These turbines are in King City, Mo.
Credit: MU Cooperative Media Group, Steve Morse photo

From Live Science:

Editor's Note: Each Wednesday LiveScience examines the viability of emerging energy technologies — the power of the future.

Wind energy might be the simplest renewable energy to understand. Yet there are misconceptions about what makes the wind industry turn.

The United States now has nearly 17,000 megawatts of wind power installed, which can supply about 1.2 percent of the nation's demand for electricity, according to a recent report from the Department of Energy (DOE).

With these numbers projected to grow in the coming years, it might be good to be aware of a few myths that are blowing in the wind.

Read more ....

Saturn's Rings May Be Billions of Years Old

From Universe Today:

Saturn's enigmatic rings may be much older and also much more massive than previously thought, according to a new study. Because Saturn's rings look so clean and bright, it was thought the rings were younger than the planet itself, which is estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old. But using data from the Cassini spacecraft's UVIS (Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph) instrument, Principal Investigator Dr. Larry Esposito and his team used computer simulations to study colliding particles in Saturn's rings and their erosion by meteorites. Their results support the possibility that Saturn's rings formed billions of years ago, perhaps at the time when giant impacts excavated the great basins on the Moon. The findings also suggest that giant exoplanets may also commonly have rings.

Read more ....

More Fears On Global Warming

Researchers believe the Arctic Ocean seabed is thawing in patches and releasing greenhouse gases

New Global Warming Threat As Scientists Discover Massive Methane 'Time Bomb' Under The Arctic Seabed -- Daily Mail

Global warming could rapidly accelerate as millions of tons of methane escape from beneath the Arctic seabed, scientists warned today.

Huge deposits of the greenhouse gas - 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide - are rising to the surface as the Arctic region heats up, according to preliminary findings.

Researchers found massive stores of sub-sea methane in several areas across thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf and observed the gas bubbling up from the sea floor through 'chimneys', according to newspaper reports.

The researchers believe escaping sub-sea methane is connected to rises in temperatures in the Arctic region.

One of the expedition leaders, Orjan Gustafsson, of Stockholm University in Sweden, said researchers had found 'an extensive area of intense methane release'.

Read more ....

UK Experts Say Stonehenge Was Place Of Healing -- Summary Of News Reports

A view of Stonehenge at sunrise. Two bluestone fragments found at Britain's prehistoric Stonehenge monument could prove that the mysterious stone circle was once a centre of healing, archaeologists said Monday. (AFP/File/Carl de Souza)

UK Experts Say Stonehenge Was Place of Healing
-- ABC News

The first excavation of Stonehenge in more than 40 years has uncovered evidence that the stone circle drew ailing pilgrims from around Europe for what they believed to be its healing properties, archaeologists said Monday.

Archaeologists Geoffrey Wainwright and Timothy Darvill said the content of graves scattered around the monument and the ancient chipping of its rocks to produce amulets indicated that Stonehenge was the primeval equivalent of Lourdes, the French shrine venerated for its supposed ability to cure the sick.

An unusual number of skeletons recovered from the area showed signs of serious disease or injury. Analysis of their teeth showed that about half were from outside the Stonehenge area.

Read more ....

More News On Stonehenge

Stonehenge was built in 2300 BC as a 'prehistoric Lourdes', first dig in 44 years reveals -- Daily Mail
Stonehenge was ancient healing site: experts -- AFP
Stonehenge may have been pilgrimage site for sick -- Yahoo News/Reuters
Dig hints at Stonehenge’s healing role -- MSNBC
Stonehenge may have been an ancient Lourdes -- LA Times
Archeologists 'solve' mystery of Stonehenge -- CNews Science
Stonehenge was place of healing: experts -- The West

CERN'S Large Hadron Collider Shut Down Till Spring 2009 -- News Updates

A technician walks under the core magnet of the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment at the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN (Centre Europeen de Recherche Nucleaire) in the French village of Cessy, near Geneva, in this March 22, 2007 file photo. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

More Delays For LHC: Particle Collider's Tune-Up
To Last Until 2009 -- Scientific American

The world's largest physics experiment is on hold until spring while scientists and engineers try to figure out what caused a helium leak into the tunnel deep beneath the Large Hadron Collider, its operator says.

Making the tunnel warm enough for humans, then giving them the time to inspect the magnets blamed for the Sept. 19 leak, will take three to four weeks, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) says in a statement. CERN believes a faulty electrical connection between two magnets that will guide protons in planned collision studies is behind the leak.

After the magnets are inspected and fixed, the collider must then undergo a scheduled winter maintenance, CERN says.

CERN Director General Robert Aymar admits that the delay "is undoubtedly a psychological blow."

“Nevertheless … I have no doubt that we will overcome this setback with the same degree of rigor and application,” Aymar says.

When we spoke to Judy Jackson of Fermilab yesterday, she told us that "there inevitably are going to be setbacks along the way — it's part of the process" of starting up a particle accelerator. You can read more about what she and theoretical physicist Sean Carroll had to say about the unexpected delays here.

More News On CERN's Atom Smasher

Large Hadron Collider shuts down early for the winter -- Science News
"Big Bang" collider to restart in spring 2009 -- Reuters
Collider halted until next year -- BBC News
Repairs and onset of winter mean Europe's atom smasher on ice until spring -- CNews Science
Atom smasher will have to wait until spring -- CNN Science
Supercollider shut down until spring -- MSNBC
CERN says collider will have to wait until spring -- International Herald Tribune
Damage to atom smasher forces 2-month halt -- LA Times
'Big Bang Machine' to Be Shut Down Until Spring -- FOX News
Collider halted till next year over magnets problem -- Independent
Faulty Transformer Sidelines Atom Smasher -- CBS News
Atom-smasher shut down for two months after malfunction -- China View
Atom-smasher findings out soon -- News 24
Melted wire may shut down collider until '09 -- San Francisco Chronicle
LHC meltdown before first collision -- Nature News
The Large Hadron Collider News -- Nature News

Rescue Shuttle At Launch Pad For Hubble Trip

Hubble Telescope

From CNews:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — In an unprecedented step, a space shuttle was moved to the launch pad Friday for a trip NASA hopes it will never make — a rescue mission.

The shuttle Endeavour is on standby in case the seven astronauts who go up on Atlantis next month need a safer ride home.

Atlantis and its crew are headed into space for one last repair job on the 18-year-old Hubble Space Telescope. It’s a venture that was canceled when first proposed a few years ago because it was considered too dangerous.

The risk is this: If Atlantis suffers serious damage during launch or in flight, the astronauts will not be at the international space station, where they could take refuge for weeks while awaiting a ride home. They would be stranded on their spacecraft at the Hubble, where NASA estimates they could stay alive for 25 days. Air would be the first to go.

Endeavour and four more astronauts would need to blast off on a rescue flight as soon as NASA determined Atlantis was too damaged to fly home.

Read more ....

Duelling Banjos Ain't Got Nuthin On Duelling Birdsong

Birds' Harmonious Duets Can Be 'Aggressive Audio Warfare,'
Study Finds -- eScienceNews

Researchers reporting in the September 4th Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, have new insight into the motivating factors that drive breeding pairs of some tropical bird species to sing duets. Those duets can be so closely matched that human listeners often mistake them for solos. They now report evidence that male and female rufous-and-white wren partners sing as a way of keeping track of one another when they are apart. But the duets, as pleasant as they may sound, also have a more sinister purpose. During confrontations with rivals, the wrens essentially duel one another with their duets.

The discovery was made possible by sophisticated sound recording technology developed by the University of Windsor and Cornell University team. That system, including eight microphones recording to a single laptop computer, allowed them to triangulate the duetting birds' positions in the dense tropical forests of Costa Rica where they live.

"Your first impression after you hear the duet of a pair of tropical birds is one of great harmony and cooperation," said Daniel Mennill of the University of Windsor. "Their duets require coordination and synchronization, and my multi-microphone recordings confirm that birds do coordinate their activities by performing duets. But there is a darker side to duetting; tropical birds also perform duets in very aggressive contexts, and respond with special aggression to rival individuals of the same sex. Their voices are beautiful harmonies, but they're also aggressive audio warfare."

Read more ....

The US Has No Option But To Use Russia's Soyuz Craft

The Soyuz TMA-9 crew capsule closes in on the space station with Earth as a backdrop, as seen in this September 2006 photo taken from the station. TMA-9 is due to become the longest-serving Soyuz craft in space history, with its landing coming 214 days after launch.

From Space Travel:

After 2010, the United States will likely be unable to deliver its astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) on its own. For several years Russia's Soyuz craft will remain the only vehicle available to do that, and the U.S. may find it hard to do without Russian cooperation.

During Senate hearings on Wednesday, September 17, William Burns, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, said the U.S. is depending on Russia for its ISS flights and that the Bush administration was in support of a Congressional amendment to exempt Russia's Soyuz vehicles from existing sanctions.

On Tuesday, September 23, the U.S. Congress will consider an amendment, supported by President George W. Bush, allowing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to buy Russian Soyuz spacecraft and launch services.

Read more ....

Wind Power's Impact On Climate

From The New York Times:

Q. Could a plan being explored to use wind to produce a third of the power for New York City affect weather systems?

A. The usual objections raised to wind farming involve aesthetic issues, expense, noise and fears of danger to wildlife, and the issue of weather impact from wind farming has not been conclusively studied.

There has been at least one preliminary study of wind farming that suggested the possibility of an adverse effect on local weather systems from a large wind farm with many rotors in one area. But the researchers also suggested that potential problems could be ameliorated by redesigning the rotors to produce less turbulence.

The study, published in October 2004 in The Journal of Geophysical Research, used a hypothetical model of a wind farm much larger than any that had been built: 10,000 turbines, with rotor blades 165 feet long, in a 60-by-60-mile grid in north-central Oklahoma.

Read more ....

7,000 Years Ago, Neolithic Optical Art Flourished

Earliest Op-Art? Little is known about the Cucuteni-Trypillians. Excavation data revealed that they lived in proto-cities in what is now Romania, Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova. Their op-art like pottery, as shown in the piece here, was dominated by repeating lines, circles and spirals.

From MSNBC/Science:

An egalitarian Neolithic Eden filled with unique, geometric art flourished some 7,000 years ago in Eastern Europe, according to hundreds of artifacts on display at the Vatican.

Running until the end of October at the Palazzo della Cancelleria in the Vatican, the exhibition, "Cucuteni-Trypillia: A Great Civilization of Old Europe," introduces a mysterious Neolithic people who are now believed to have forged Europe's first civilization.

Little is known about these people — even their name is wrapped in mystery.

Archaeologists have named them "Cucuteni-Trypillians" after the villages of Cucuteni, near Lasi, Romania and Trypillia, near Kiev, Ukraine, where the first discoveries of this ancient civilization were made more than 100 years ago.

The excavated treasures — fired clay statuettes and op art-like pottery dating from 5000 to 3000 B.C. — immediately posed a riddle to archaeologists.

Read more ....

Neanderthals Had A Taste For Seafood

The Gibraltar caves from the sea. All have evidence of Neanderthal occupation.
Photograph: Natural History Museum, London

From The Guardian - Science:

The last of the Neanderthals feasted on warmed mussels, baby seals and washed-up dolphins, according to fossil hunters working in ancient seaside caves in Gibraltar.

Excavations in the giant Gorham's and Vanguard caves on the Rock's eastern flank unearthed flint stone tools and remnants of seafood meals alongside the long-dead embers of hearths, which have been carbon-dated to around 28,000 years ago.

The findings suggest that Neanderthals who lived in the caves exploited the plentiful resources that the Mediterranean shoreline provided, and may help explain why groups living in Gibraltar clung on to life while those elsewhere became extinct around 7,000 years earlier.

An international team led by Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London and Clive Finlayson at the Gibraltar Museum uncovered bones and shells that had clearly been butchered with primitive cutting and stripping tools.

Read more ....

Continental Clash Cooled The Climate

From Science News:

The collision between India and Asia set off events that likely caused long-term cooling in Earth’s climate

When the tectonic plate carrying India slammed into Asia about 50 million years ago, the ensuing geological changes triggered a long-term cooling trend. That trend later enabled Antarctic ice sheets to grow, a new study suggests.

Before the collision, volcanoes along the rim of southern Asia spewed immense quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Much of that planet-warming greenhouse gas came from seafloor, carbonate-rich sediments that were shoved below Asia by tectonic movements, says Dennis V. Kent, an earth scientist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J. Carbon in those sediments soon reappeared in the atmosphere as the carbon dioxide spewing from volcanoes. When the India-Asia collision removed those seafloor sediments, that source of carbon dioxide disappeared, Kent and his colleagues argue in an upcoming Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Simultaneously, erosion of rocks on the Indian subcontinent — in particular, the chemical weathering of a large amount of basaltic rocks formed from volcanic eruptions just a few million years earlier — consumed large volumes of carbon dioxide. That double whammy, the researchers speculate, caused atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to plummet, cooling Earth significantly.

Read more ....