Dying Stars Eat Comets For Their Last Supper

Snacking on comets (Image: HST/NASA)

From New Scientist:

WHEN the sun dies, it's not just Earth that will be doomed - the destruction will reach as far as the comets in the outer solar system. That's according to a new explanation of the behaviour of planetary nebulae - bubbles of gas sloughed off by dying stars (pictured).

There are two methods for calculating the abundance of elements in planetary nebulae: looking at light emitted when electrons and ionised atoms recombine, or looking at the energy emitted by atoms excited by collisions. Yet they yield very different results, a discrepancy that has baffled astronomers for decades.

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Britain Facing Food Crisis As World's Soil 'vanishes In 60 Years'V

From The Telegraph:

British farming soil could run out within 60 years, leading to a catastrophic food crisis and drastically higher prices for consumers, scientists warn.

Fertile soil is being lost faster than it can be replenished and will eventually lead to the “topsoil bank” becoming empty, an Australian conference heard.

Chronic soil mismanagement and over farming causing erosion, climate change and increasing populations were to blame for the dramatic global decline in suitable farming soil, scientists said.

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The Whale Whisperer: Astonishing Bond Between Diver And Scar The Giant Sperm Whale

Friends: Andrew Armour and Scar the sperm whale consider one another solemnly as they swim in the waters off Dominica last weekend

From The Daily Mail:

Peering solemnly nose-to-nose at each other, this is the Whale Whisperer and his friend - Scar the 10-year-old giant of the sea.

These spectacular images show Andrew Armour bonding with the colossal sperm whale in the warm Caribbean waters off the island of Dominica.

Taken on the weekend, the photographs offer stunning insight into the lives of other pod members travelling with Scar.

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Fringe's Killer Biological Weapon Is Rooted in Fact

From Popular Mechanics:

Last week, a lethal virus unleashed in an office building caused us to rethink what would happen in the midst of a real outbreak. In Jan. 29's episode, "The Bishop Revival," the cast of Fringe encounters its most plausible case yet. We talk to toxin expert professor Dale Johnson of UC Berkley's Nutritional Science and Toxicology program to determine if a chemical weapon can be designed to target those with specific genetic traits.

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Google Contributes Massive Amounts of Computing Power To Engineer Antibodies

Finding Antibodies Medical hide and seek could get a boost from Google Tolerx, Inc

From Popular Science:

Google has quietly put millions of dollars' worth of resources into a biotech startup that creates targeted antibody drugs that single out diseased targets among healthy cells. The Internet search giant ultimately hopes that computer models alone could identify the best antibody for particular targets for testing in human clinical trials. That would speed up or even replace the usual "wet lab" work and years spent on drug safety testing in animals and humans that costs hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Xconomy.

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Saturn Mission 'Extended Again'

Cassini completed its initial four year mission to explore Saturn in June 2008.

From The BBC:

The US space agency (Nasa) has extended the international Cassini-Huygens mission once again.

The unmanned Cassini-Huygens probe arrived at Saturn in 2004 on a mission that was meant to come to end in 2008.

The mission had already been extended by two years; potentially, the Cassini spacecraft could now explore the Saturn system until 2017.

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Genetic Test For 'Speed Gene' In Thoroughbred Horses

New research identifies the 'speed gene' contributing to a specific athletic trait in thoroughbred horses. (Credit: iStockphoto/Derek Dammann)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 3, 2010) — Groundbreaking research led by Dr Emmeline Hill, a leading horse genomics researcher at University College Dublin's (UCD) School of Agriculture, Food Science and Veterinary Medicine has resulted in the identification of the 'speed gene' in thoroughbred horses.

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Brute Force: Humans Can Sure Take A Punch

A boxer punching. Credit: stockxpert

From Live Science:

The human body can take a remarkable amount of punishment, given bones made of one of the strongest materials found in nature. At the same time, even an unarmed person can inflict an astonishing amount of damage with the proper training.

So how much does it take to crack a bone? And how much mayhem can a person deal out? In an era when "extreme fighting" has become a popular phenomenon, scientists are testing the extremes that athletes at the peak of their game can reach in order to help the rest of us.

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Whales Get Support On Sonar Ban

Watch CBS News Videos Online

From CBS News:

NOAA May Limit Sonar Tests, though Another Case Heads to Court.

Whales and the U.S. Navy have tangled repeatedly over the past years over charges that the Navy’s sonar exercises disorient or injure whales and other marine mammals. Now, whales in the Pacific appear to have a new champion: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is considering limiting the Navy’s sonar tests in certain marine mammal “hot spots.”

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Monitoring Cell Death Could Help Cancer Treatment

Image: Death of a tumor: This PET scan, taken just days after radiation therapy, shows a hot spot of cell-death activity in a brain tumor--a good indication that the therapy is working. Credit: Aaron Allen, Davidoff Comprehensive Cancer Center, Rabin Medical Center

From Technology Review:

An earlier measure of treatment could improve patients' prognosis.

When it comes to aggressive cancers, in the brain or lung for example, oncologists know that the sooner they can determine whether a treatment is unsuccessful, the sooner they can reevaluate and, if necessary, prescribe a new course of action. But typically, it takes two months or more to do the before-and-after comparisons that help determine whether a tumor is shrinking. Now an Israeli company called Aposense says it may have found a way to drastically speed up the process: an imaging marker that, when used with PET scans, indicates the presence of dying cells.

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Police Want Backdoor To Web Users' Private Data

From CNET News:

Anyone with an e-mail account likely knows that police can peek inside it if they have a paper search warrant.

But cybercrime investigators are frustrated by the speed of traditional methods of faxing, mailing, or e-mailing companies these documents. They're pushing for the creation of a national Web interface linking police computers with those of Internet and e-mail providers so requests can be sent and received electronically.

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No (Primordial) Soup For You: Origins Of Life Were Not What You Think

From Discovery News:

The predominant theory of the origin of life would make a terrific setting for a space horror movie, or a particularly tense episode of Star Trek: picture early Earth, a noxious place devoid of oxygen, its young oceans choked with some kind of indiscernible ooze.

Depending on how you like your origin stories, a thunderstorm passes overhead, and lightning crackles into the broth, pouring forth ever bigger organic molecules until -- presto! -- virus-sized strands of RNA and the first replicating life is formed.

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Slate Showdown: iPad vs. HP Slate vs. JooJoo vs. Android Tablets & More

From Gizmodo:

Everybody's talking about tablets, especially those single-pane capacitive touchscreen ones more specifically known as "slates." The iPad is the biggest newsmaker, but there are lots headed our way (most with built-in webcams). Here's how they measure up, spec-wise:

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DARPA's Robotic Ghost Ships Will Stalk Submarines

Robot Frigates Now imagine this ship without the people U.S. Navy/Scott Taylor

From Popular Science:

Ships that appear in perfect working order except for a missing human crew would normally raise suspicions that something has gone terribly wrong, possibly in the vicinity of the Bermuda Triangle. Yet an unmanned frigate is exactly what DARPA's mad scientists at the Pentagon have ordered, according to The Register. The automated ships' mission would have it spending months cruising the seas unmanned, on the hunt for ghostly enemy submarines.

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Amazon Acquires Touch Screen Startup; Souped Up Kindle Being Planned?

From ZDNet:

Amazon is reportedly buying Touchco, a start-up focused on touch screen technology, in a move that may signal a multi-touch Kindle in the future.

According to the New York Times, Amazon is acquiring Touchco, a New York-based company with a handful of employees and technology that was never commercialized.

Touchco was a project at New York University’s Media Research Lab. Terms of the deal weren’t available, but it doesn’t appear to be material enough to warrant much disclosure.

What does this deal mean?

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Exoplanet Gas Spotted From Earth

Photo: The team used Nasa's Nasa's Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii

From The BBC:

Astronomers have used a new ground-based technique to study the atmospheres of planets outside our Solar System.

The work could assist the search for Earth-like planets with traces of organic, or carbon-rich, molecules.

Astronomers spotted evidence of methane gas in the atmosphere of an exoplanet.

Gases have previously been discerned on exoplanets before, but only by using space-based telescopes.

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NASA's New Mission: Space To Thrive

From The Economist:

A plan to overhaul America’s space agency is long overdue.

IN 2004 George Bush announced a plan for America’s space agency, NASA, to return to the moon by 2020, land there, explore the surface and set up a base. The moon would then serve as a staging post for a journey to Mars. It was, unfortunately, unclear how this modest proposal would be paid for and, as work began and costs spiralled, the “vision” seemed more science fiction than science.

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Twitter Forces Password Reset to Protect Some Accounts

From PC World:

Twitter required some users to reset their passwords on Tuesday after discovering that their log-in information may have been harvested via security-compromised torrent Web sites, the company said.

For years, a malicious hacker has been setting up file-sharing torrent sites that appear legitimate and then selling them to well-meaning buyers who want to own their own download site, explained Del Harvey, Twitter's director of trust and safety, in a blog post.

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Suspected Asteroid Collision Leaves Odd X-Pattern Of Trailing Debris

This is a NASA Hubble Space Telescope picture a comet-like object called P/2010 A2, which was first discovered by the LINEAR (Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research program) sky survey on January 6. The object appears so unusual in ground-based telescopic images that discretionary time on Hubble was used to take a close-up look. This picture, from the January 29 observation, shows a bizarre X-pattern of filamentary structures near the point-like nucleus of the object and trailing streamers of dust. The inset picture shows a complex structure that suggests the object is not a comet but instead the product of a head-on collision between two asteroids traveling five times faster than a rifle bullet (5 kilometers per second). Astronomers have long thought that the asteroid belt is being ground down through collisions, but such a smashup has never before been seen. (Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA))

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 2, 2010) — NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has observed a mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and trailing streamers of dust that suggest a head-on collision between two asteroids. Astronomers have long thought the asteroid belt is being ground down through collisions, but such a smashup has never been seen before.

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The 'New' NASA Will Look Back At Earth

An artist's concept of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory. Credit: NASA

From Live Science:

NASA's new proposed budget will in part shift the space agency's focus from landing people on the moon back to Earth, with more money slated to go to projects that will help us understand our planet's climate and even plans to re-launch the carbon observatory that failed to launch last year.

The 2011 proposed budget for NASA, announced on Monday, cancels the Constellation program to build new rockets and spacecraft optimized for the moon, but increases NASA's overall budget by $6 billion over the next five years. Of that $6 billion, about $2 billion will be funneled into new and existing science missions, particularly those aimed at investigating the Earth sciences, particularly climate.

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