Find out the latest news and topics of interest from Dr. James G. Hood, D.D.S., M.A.!
Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
Scientists re-create Big Bang in lab
Monday, November 15, 2010
by Liz Goodwin
Source: Yahoo
Scientists say they have created a mini Big Bang using the world’s largest atom smasher, resulting in a temperature “a millions times hotter” than the sun’s center, the BBC reports.
In an underground tunnel near Geneva, the European Organization for Nuclear Research smashed together particles inside the $10 billion accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider, in an effort to learn more about the plasma that formed the universe a split- second after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. Scientists say a tiny ball of matter exploded and then quickly formed a melted “soup” of matter, which then re-ordered itself into what is now the universe.
The experiment, using lead ions instead of protons, produced the highest densities and temperatures ever created by scientists, and a kind of matter formerly unseen on Earth, The Telegraph reports.
“At these temperatures even protons and neutrons, which make up the nuclei of atoms, melt, resulting in a hot dense soup of quarks and gluons known as a quark-gluon plasma,” researcher David Evans from the University of Birmingham told the BBC.
The Guardian explains that the moment the scientists are re-creating happened about 0.00000000001 seconds after the Big Bang, an interval when “protons and neutrons can’t even stay whole.”
Scientists are also trying to figure out more about the “strong force,” which binds the nuclei of atoms and gives them most of their mass.
0
Clouds can communicate, Scientists Say, Source: Fox News
Friday, August 13, 2010
Clouds Can Communicate, Scientists Say
By Jeremy A. Kaplan
Published August 13, 2010
| FoxNews.com
Little, fluffy and talkative? Clouds can communicate, a new paper suggests — but what are they talking about?
A new study has found that clouds “communicate” with each other, much like chirping crickets or flashing fireflies on a summer night. The surprising findings, published online in the journal Nature, may have significant implications for our understanding of the Earth’s climate.
So the next time you find yourself laying on your back picking out shapes among the clouds, mull on this one: Are they talking among themselves about you?
“Cloud fields organize in such a way that their components ‘communicate’ with one another and produce regular, periodic rainfall events,” explained Graham Feingold, a research scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) and the paper’s lead author.
In other words, Feingold found clear evidence of self-organization in the regular patterns of rainfall and repeating growth of those floating puffs of cotton.
How does such synchronization come about? Falling rain cools the air as it descends. This creates downward air currents. These downdrafts hit the surface of the planet, flow outward, and collide with each other, forming updrafts. The air flowing up creates new clouds in previously open sky as older clouds dissipate. Then the new clouds rain, and the oscillating pattern repeats itself.
“In a sense what’s going on is that the clouds are communicating with each other by driving down to the ground. If you have a number of clouds doing exactly that, air is forced to go sideways from one cloud and meets the air from another,” Feingold told FoxNews.com.
Voila! cloud speech!
Earlier theories about cloud structure explained that temperature change was at the heart of cloud generation, that warming and cooling shifts were the key forces. Precipitation as a driving factor is something of a radical shift.
But talking clouds? That’s even more radical.
Feingold is nevertheless quite serious, citing a lengthy history of research into cloud communication.
“If you go back far enough, the basic physics behind this phenomenon was recorded in the early 1900s by a French scientist,” he explained.
He was looking at the sun though a telescope and noticed convection patterns. Lord Rayleigh later put it into a theoretical framework, explaining the hexagonal patterns observed in the lab, Feingold told FoxNews.com.
“1933 is the earliest report of patterns in the clouds,” by a scientist known as Graham, he said. But Feingold thinks the idea of cloud communication might date back far further.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if the ancients were looking up at the clouds and seeing patterns early on,” he told FoxNews.com.
Scientist lives as Inuit for a year to save disappearing language, Source: CNN
Friday, August 13, 2010
Scientist lives as Inuit for a year to save disappearing language
By Thair Shaikh, CNN
August 13, 2010 1:21 p.m. EDT
London, England (CNN) — A British anthropologist is setting out on a year-long stay with a small community in Greenland in an ambitious attempt to document its dying language and traditions.
Stephen Pax Leonard will live with the Inughuit in north-west Greenland, the world’s most northernmost people, and record their conversations and story-telling traditions to try and preserve their language.
The Inughuit, who speak Inuktun, a “pure” Inuit dialect, are under increasing political and climactic pressure to move south, says Leonard.
“They have around 10 to 15 years left in their present location, then climate change and politics will force them to move south and they will be assimilated into a different culture, into a broader community, and their way of life will be lost,” Leonard told CNN.
Leonard, who flies out to Copenhagen on Sunday before heading to Greenland, says there are about 1,000 speakers of Inuktun, an undocumented language.
Although most Inughuit are trilingual, also speaking Danish and Greenlandic, their primary language is still Inuktun.
“There is no doubt that this is a major linguistic challenge… they speak a very pure form of Inuit, partly because of their geographic isolation. Their entire culture is based on a story-telling culture.”
Greenland
There is no doubt that this is a major linguistic challenge
–Stephen Pax Leonard
–Stephen Pax Leonard
Leonard, an anthropological linguist at Cambridge University, England, is under no doubt about the physical and cultural hurdles that face him. The average temperature is minus 25 degrees Celsius, although it can fall to minus 40 degrees Celsius in the winter.
Inughuit, which is the name of the northern Inuits, are hunter-gatherers; they do not have a cash economy and the men can spend weeks away from home hunting for walruses, seals and other mammals. They still use dog sleds in the winter and kayaks in the summer.
Hivshu, an Inughuit who now lives in Sweden, helped Leonard establish contacts with his former community in Greenland.
He has written about the Inughuit way of life on his website: “Even before I went to school I began assisting my father when he was out hunting, summer or winter, no difference. That was the way I heard the stories about my ancestors and their songs told and sung by the old people as it was a tradition to tell the stories and sing the traditional drum songs of Inuit to all of us during the hunting.”
Leonard says he is determined to become a part of their community and plans to hunt with the men if he is allowed.
He is taking solid-state audio recorders that should work in the freezing conditions and plans to produce an “ethnography of speaking.”
That he hopes will be a permanent record that shows how their language and culture are interconnected.
Article Courtesy of CNN at: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/08/13/greenland.inuit.language/index.html?hpt=Sbin
Asteroid Up Close and Personal, Source: Fox News
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
An 800-Mile-Long, 4.5-Billion-Year-Old Asteroid … Up Close
By Denise Chow
Published July 12, 2010
| Space.com
The asteroid Lutetia at closest approach.
The first close-up photos of the battered asteroid Lutetia taken by a European spacecraft have amazed scientists with views of a possible otherworldly landslide and a deep depression gouged across the landscape that hints at the space rock’s ancient, violent past.
The new photos of Lutetia, beamed back from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta space probe during a Saturday flyby, show what scientists said is a primitive asteroid survivor from the tumultuous birth of the solar system.
“I think this is a very old object,” said Holger Sierks, principal investigator for Rosetta’s main scientific imaging system, OSIRIS, in a statement on the night of the flyby. “Tonight we have seen a remnant of the solar system’s creation.”
Close views of Lutetia show that the space rock is covered in craters from many impacts during its 4.5 billion years of existence.
As Rosetta drew close, a giant bowl-shaped depression stretching across much of the body of Lutetia rotated into view. What appeared to be an asteroid landslide was also spotted in the spacecraft’s photos.
In another striking photo, the ringed planet Saturn can be seen in the distance beyond Lutetia as the asteroid hovers in the foreground. [Photo of asteroid Lutetia and Saturn.]
Rosetta’s flyby confirmed that Lutetia is an elongated body, with its longest side spanning approximately 81 miles (130 km), ESA officials said.
The Rosetta spacecraft is actually headed to visit the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. The Lutetia flyby – as well as an earlier visit to the asteroid Steins in 2008 – was a pit stop on the way to the probe’s ultimate comet destination.
“It has been a great day for exploration, a great day for European science,” said David Southwood, ESA Director of Science and Robotic Exploration, in a statement. “The clockwork precision is a great tribute to the scientists and engineers in our Member States in our industry and, not least, in ESA itself. Roll on 2014 and our comet rendezvous.”
Lutetia unmasked
The asteroid Lutetia remained a mystery for many years until Rosetta’s Saturday flyby, largely because previous observations from ground-based telescopes found some confusing asteroid characteristics.
Some measurements placed the asteroid in the ‘C-type’ category left over from the formation of the solar system, which means it contains primitive compounds of carbon. Yet other studies suggested Lutetia was an ‘M-type’, which would mean that there are metals on its surface. These have been associated with iron meteorites, are usually reddish and thought to be fragments of the cores of much larger objects.
The new pictures of Lutetia came from Rosetta’s OSIRIS instrument, which combines a wide angle and a narrow angle camera. At closest approach, details down to a scale of almost 200 feet (60 m) can be seen over the entire surface of the asteroid.
The new images, combined with compositional data, will help astronomers determine how Lutetia stacks up with other solar system asteroids, researchers said.
Rosetta turned its full suite of instruments on Lutetia during the weekend encounter, including remote sensing and in-situ measurements.
Mission managers even switched on some of the instruments on Rosetta’s Philae lander, which will land on the probe’s target comet, to take more observations. Together, Rosetta and its lander scoured for evidence of any highly tenuous atmosphere or magnetic effects on Lutetia, and recorded the space rock’s surface composition and density.
Rosetta and its Philae lander also attempted to catch any dust grains that may have been floating in space near the asteroid for additional on-board analysis, ESA officials said. The data and results from these instruments are expected to come at a later time.
A speedy visit
Rosetta zoomed past the asteroid Lutetia on July 10, at a relative speed of 32,400 mph (52,142 kph). The closest approach took place at about 1610 GMT (12:10 p.m. EDT), at a distance of about 1,900 miles (3,162 km).
Still, the cameras and other instruments onboard Rosetta had been working for hours, and in some cases days, beforehand. ESA released preliminary images as the spacecraft neared Lutetia, showing the asteroid growing larger on approach.
Rosetta will now continue on its path to the spacecraft’s primary target, a rendezvous with the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. It will then accompany the comet for months, from near the orbit of Jupiter down to its closest approach to the sun.
In November 2014, Rosetta is expected to release the Philae lander to touch down on the comet’s nucleus.
Article and photograph Courtesy of Fox News at http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/07/12/battered-asteroid-survivor-solar-systems-birth/
Origin of the Milky Way (not the candy bar)
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
‘Galactic Archaeologists’ Find Origin of Milky Way’s Ancient Stars
ScienceDaily (June 30, 2010) — Many of the Milky Way’s ancient stars are remnants of other smaller galaxies torn apart by violent galactic collisions around five billion years ago, according to researchers at Durham University.
Scientists at Durham’s Institute for Computational Cosmology and their collaborators at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, in Germany, and Groningen University, in Holland, ran huge computer simulations to recreate the beginnings of our galaxy.
-The simulation shows the Milky Way-like Galaxy around 5 billion years ago when most satellite galaxy collisions were happening. (Credit Andrew Cooper/John Helly, Durham University)
The simulations revealed that the ancient stars, found in a stellar halo of debris surrounding the Milky Way, had been ripped from smaller galaxies by the gravity generated by colliding galaxies.
Cosmologists predict that the early Universe was full of small galaxies which led short and violent lives. These galaxies collided with each other leaving behind debris which eventually settled into more familiar looking galaxies like the Milky Way.
The researchers say their finding supports the theory that many of the Milky Way’s ancient stars had once belonged to other galaxies instead of being the earliest stars born inside the galaxy when it began to form about 10 billion years ago.
The research, funded in the UK by the STFC, appears in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Lead author Andrew Cooper, from Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology, said: “Effectively we became galactic archaeologists, hunting out the likely sites where ancient stars could be scattered around the galaxy.
“Our simulations show how different relics in the galaxy today, like these ancient stars, are related to events in the distant past.
“Like ancient rock strata that reveal the history of Earth, the stellar halo preserves a record of a dramatic primeval period in the life of the Milky Way which ended long before the Sun was born.”
The computer simulations started from the Big Bang, around 13 billion years ago, and used the universal laws of physics to simulate the evolution of dark matter and the stars.
These simulations are the most realistic to date, capable of zooming into the very fine detail of the stellar halo structure, including star “streams” — which are stars being pulled from the smaller galaxies by the gravity of the dark matter.
One in one hundred stars in the Milky Way belong to the stellar halo, which is much larger than the galaxy’s familiar spiral disk. These stars are almost as old as the Universe.
Professor Carlos Frenk, Director of Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology, said: “The simulations are a blueprint for galaxy formation.
“They show that vital clues to the early, violent history of the Milky Way lie on our galactic doorstep.
“Our data will help observers decode the trials and tribulations of our galaxy in a similar way to how archaeologists work out how ancient Romans lived from the artefacts they left behind.”
The research is part of the Aquarius Project, which uses the largest supercomputer simulations to study the formation of galaxies like the Milky Way.
Aquarius was carried out by the Virgo Consortium, involving scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University, UK, the University of Victoria in Canada, the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, Caltech in the USA and Trieste in Italy.
Durham’s cosmologists will present their work to the public as part of the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary ‘See Further’ exhibition, held at London’s Southbank Centre until Sunday, July 4.
The highlight of their ‘Cosmic Origins’ exhibit is an award winning 3-D movie describing how the Milky Way formed. Visitors to the exhibit can also create their own star streams by colliding galaxies with an interactive 3-D simulation.
Article and Image Courtesy of http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100629193135.htm
Latest Comments