Tyrannosaurs Flying F-14s!

The cover of this issue of Galaxy features an unusual space launch concept, but an article inside had more realistic and interesting insights.

From The Space Review:

The comic strip Calvin & Hobbes once ran a classic on a Sunday in 1995. Calvin and his tiger buddy are playing with toy dinosaurs and F-14 Tomcat fighter planes when Calvin concludes that the only thing cooler than tyrannosaurs and F-14s… is tyrannosaurs flying F-14s.

This is a scene that has been repeated throughout the history of human spaceflight, when somebody has come up with some concept for a rocket, spacecraft, whatever, that they decide can be made infinitely cooler by combining it with another concept for a rocket, spacecraft, whatever. Want to explore the icy moons of Jupiter? Let’s combine the most powerful ion engines ever built and the largest space nuclear reactor ever built and the largest rocket ever built. That would be cool. (It will also cost twenty-three billion dollars and never be built.)

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Oddball Stars Explained: New Observations Solve Longstanding Mystery Of Tipped Stars

This artist's conception of the double-star system DI Herculis illustrates the key findings from the new research. Spectroscopic observations showed that the two stars are both tipped over almost horizontally, relative to the plane of their orbits around each other. Because they are rotating rapidly which creates equatorial bulges, the tidal interactions between the two slows down a regular variation in the plane of the orbits, called precession -- a slowing that had been a mystery for three decades. (Credit: Courtesy of Simon Albrecht)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 18, 2009) — A pair of unusual stars known as DI Herculis has confounded astronomers for three decades, but new observations by MIT researchers and their colleagues have provided data that they say solve the mystery once and for all.

It has long been clear that there was something odd going on in this double-star system, but it wasn't clear just what that was. The precession of the orbits of the two stars around each other — that is, the way the plane of those orbits change their tilt over time, like the wobbling of a top as it winds down — seems to take place four times more slowly than established theory says it should. The anomaly is so unexpected that at one point it was seen as possible evidence against Einstein's long-accepted theory of relativity.

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7 Solid Health Tips That No Longer Apply

From Live Science:

Are you taking a daily aspirin or multivitamin to stay healthy? Avoiding eggs and choosing no-cholesterol margarine over butter? Convinced that jogging will ultimately kill your knees? Advice that was once considered gospel truth among the medical community is now being questioned.

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Plugged-In Age Feeds a Hunger for Electricity

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From The New York Times:

With two laptop-loving children and a Jack Russell terrier hemmed in by an electric fence, Peter Troast figured his household used a lot of power. Just how much power did not really hit him until the night the family turned off the overhead lights at their home in Maine and began hunting gadgets that glowed in the dark.

“It was amazing to see all these lights blinking,” Mr. Troast said.

As goes the Troast household, so goes the planet.

Electricity use from power-hungry gadgets is rising fast all over the world. The fancy new flat-panel televisions everyone has been buying in recent years have turned out to be bigger power hogs than some refrigerators.

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How Broadband Is Changing Africa

From The BBC:

Fast broadband will transform Africa, and the rest of the world will change too, says Bill Thompson.

Norman Borlaug, whose work in Mexico and India led to the 'green revolution' in agricultural production, died last week and was widely commemorated for his important work.

While the introduction of new crops and the use of irrigation, fertilisers and pesticides certainly enabled us to feed millions of people, the crops were delivered at a price, and we should not forget that Borlaug's green revolution, like every revolution, had a negative as well as a positive side.

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Warming Arctic 'Halts Migration'

From The BBC:

Milder winters in the Arctic region have led to fewer Pacific brants, a species of sea goose, migrating southwards, say researchers.

A study by the US Geological Survey (USGS) found that as many as 30% of the birds were overwintering in Alaska rather than migrating to Mexico.

Until recently, more than 90% of the species were estimated to head south.

Writing in the journal Arctic, the team said the shift coincides with warming in the North Pacific and Bering Sea.

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VW Redefines ‘Car’ With A 170-MPG Diesel Hybrid

From Autopia:

Volkswagen is redefining the automobile with the L1, a bullet-shaped diesel hybrid that weighs less than 900 pounds, gets an amazing 170 mpg and might see production within four years.

The L1 concept car unveiled at the Frankfurt auto show pushes the boundaries of vehicle design and draws more inspiration from gliders than conventional automobiles. The only question the company’s engineers asked when designing the L1 was, “How would a car have to look and be built to consume as little energy as possible.” Their answer was small, light and extremely aerodynamic. Those guidelines led to a car that requires just 1.38 liters of diesel fuel to go 100 kilometers.

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Chinese Climate Wisdom

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From Watts Up With That?:

The Chinese civilization has existed survived intact far longer than any other in human history, and they have records of that civilization that span 2-3 thousand years BC. They’ve seen more climate change than any other civilization.

The Guardian recently interviewed Xiao Ziniu, the director general of the Beijing Climate Center.

Excerpts:

A 2C rise in global temperatures will not necessarily result in the calamity predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), China’s most senior climatologist has told the Guardian.

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Superstitions Stay With Us From Childhood

Despite what we may have learned as we grew up, some misconceptions often remain with us as adults, says a new study. Credit: iStockphoto

From Cosmos:

GUILDFORD, U.K.: Superstitious beliefs we hold as adults may be a by-product of the processes we use to make sense of the world around us as children, according to a novel hypothesis.

The research offers an explanation for curious traditions such as crossing fingers or tapping wood, as responses to events that we can't explain in any other way.

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Pentagon Wants ‘Space Junk’ Cleaned Up

From The Danger Room:

The orbit around Earth is a very messy place and the Pentagon’s far-out research arm wants to do something about it. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency put out a notice yesterday requesting information on possible solutions to the infamous space debris problem.

“Since the advent of the space-age over five decades ago, more than thirty-five thousand man-made objects have been cataloged by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network,” the agency notes. “Nearly twenty-thousand of those objects remain in orbit today, ninety-four percent of which are non-functioning orbital debris.”

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Fake Video Footage 'Persuades Half Of People To Wrongly Accuse Others Of Crime'

Fake video footage can persuade almost half of viewers to
accuse innocent people of crimes Photo: GETTY

From The Telegraph:

Fake video footage can persuade almost half of viewers to accuse people of crimes they have not committed, new research suggests.

The study found that exposure to fabricated footage can "dramatically alter" individuals' version of events, even convincing them to testify as an eyewitness to an event that never happened.

The study, by Warwick University, found that almost 50 per cent of people shown false footage of an event they witnessed first hand were prepared to believe the video version rather than what they actually saw.

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Solar Cycle Driven By More Than Sunspots; Sun Also Bombards Earth With High-speed Streams Of Wind

When the solar cycle was at a minimum level in 1996, the Sun sprayed Earth with relatively few, weak high-speed streams containing turbulent magnetic fields (left). In contrast, the Sun bombarded Earth with stronger and longer-lasting streams last year (right) even though the solar cycle was again at a minimum level. The streams affected Earth's outer radiation belt, posing a threat to earth-orbiting satellites, and triggered space weather disturbances, lighting up auroras in the sky at higher latitudes.

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 18, 2009) — Challenging conventional wisdom, new research finds that the number of sunspots provides an incomplete measure of changes in the Sun's impact on Earth over the course of the 11-year solar cycle. The study, led by scientists at the High Altitude Observatory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Michigan, finds that Earth was bombarded last year with high levels of solar energy at a time when the Sun was in an unusually quiet phase and sunspots had virtually disappeared.

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Sea Stars Grow Faster As Water Warms

Purple ocher sea stars prey on mussels. Credit: Dave Cowles

From Live Science:

Climate change will deal clams, mussels, and other marine bivalves a double whammy. Biologists already expect them to have trouble making their shells because elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) levels will acidify seawater. Now it seems they’ll also have to contend with brawnier predatory starfish.

Bivalves are the preferred prey of the purple ocher sea star (Pisaster ochraceus), a familiar denizen of the intertidal zone along the Canadian and American west coast.

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Lunar Orbiter Begins Long-Awaited Mapping Mission

In a surprise, high-resolution data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, right, shows indications of hydrogen both inside and outside of permanently shadowed craters. (Credit: NASA)

From CNET:

After two months of checkout and calibration, NASA's $504 million Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was maneuvered into a circular 31-mile-high mapping orbit Tuesday, and scientists said Thursday the spacecraft's instruments are delivering intriguing clues about the possible presence of water ice.

"The moon is starting to reveal her secrets, but some of those secrets are tantalizingly complex," said Michael Wargo, NASA's chief lunar scientist.

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Colossal Apollo Statue Unearthed in Turkey

Apollo, God of the Sun. The bust of the recently discovered statue of the Greek god Apollo appears above. The massive statue, around four meters (13 feet) in height, is one of only about a dozen in existence. Francesco D'Andria

From the Discovery Channel:

Sept. 8, 2009 -- A colossal statue of Apollo, the Greek god of the sun, light, music and poetry, has emerged from white calcified cliffs in southwestern Turkey, Italian archaeologists announced.

Colossal statues were very popular in antiquity, as evidenced by the lost giant statues of the Colossus of Rhodes and the Colossus of Nero. Most of them vanished long ago -- their material re-used in other building projects.

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Blueprint for a Quantum Electric Motor

From Technology Review:

Place a couple of cold atoms in an alternating magnetic field and you've got a quantum version of an electric motor.

How small can you make an electric motor? Today, Alexey Ponomarev from the University of Augsburg in Germany and a couple of pals describe how to do it with just two atoms. Yep, an electric motor made of just two ultracold atoms.

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Humanoid Robot Plays Soccer

From Wired Science:

et aside your fears of world-dominating cyborgs and say hello to Hajime 33, an athletic robot who’s about as tall as Kobe Bryant. Granted, this bot plays soccer, not basketball (yet).

Created by Hajime Sakamoto, Hajime 33 is the latest addition to Sakamoto’s fleet of humanoid robots. Powered by batteries, the robot is controlled with a PS3 controller, and it can walk and kick a ball. Hajime 33 weighs in at just 44 pounds while overlooking his creator at more than 6 feet 5 inches tall.

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High-Speed Video of Locusts Could Help Make Better Flying Robots

From Wired Science:

A new study may inspire aeronautical engineers to be more flexible with their designs. That’s because the bends and twists in locusts’ flexible, flapping wings power the insects’ extraordinary long-distance flights, a Sept. 18 Science paper reveals.

Even though researchers have been studying how insects and other creatures fly for a long time, “we still don’t completely understand the aerodynamics and architectures of wings,” comments Tom Daniel of the University of Washington in Seattle, who was not involved in the new study. The new work, Daniel says, uncovers the flight signatures of flapping, flexible wings.

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Mosquito-borne African Virus A New Threat To West

A man walks behind a model of an Anopheles mosquito in the new Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum, in London September 8, 2009. REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth

From Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States and Europe face a new health threat from a mosquito-borne disease far more unpleasant than the West Nile virus that swept into North America a decade ago, a U.S. expert said on Friday.

Chikungunya virus has spread beyond Africa since 2005, causing outbreaks and scores of fatalities in India and the French island of Reunion. It also has been detected in Italy, where it has begun to spread locally, as well as France.

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'First Clown In Space' Promises To Bring Humour To Astronauts

Canadian billionaire Guy Laliberte, who owns Cirque du Soleil, is set to become the world's seventh and Canada's first space tourist Photo: REUTERS

From The Telegraph:

The man who plans to be "the first clown in space" has said he will liven up the atmosphere on the international space station by playing pranks on the astronauts.

Guy Laliberte, founder of Cirque du Soleil, told reporters he plans to tickle the professional astronauts while they're sleeping, and he's will also bring a consignment of red clown noses aboard.

"I'm a person with a pretty high spirit, who's there to crack jokes and make jokes to those guys, and while they're sleeping, you know, I'll be tickling them," Mr Laliberte said.

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