SPACE
& SCIENCE NEWS: April 2004
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Runaway stars may solve black hole riddle
(Apr 15, 2004)
Runaway stars that bulk up by crashing into and merging with one star
after another could become the middleweight black holes that have
so tantalised astronomers, according to new computer simulations.
This snowballing effect would occur in the centres of young, dense
star clusters, producing a black hole when the accumulated stars explode
and die. Medium-sized black holes have yet to be unambiguously identified
by astronomers. But they are thought to be the crucial missing link
between black holes about 10 times the mass of the Sun and those millions
or billions of times more massive, both of which have been documented.
Image: the galaxy M82, inside which a candidate medium-sized black
holes has been identified.
Read
more. Source: New Scientist |
Memory bottleneck limits intelligence
(Apr 15, 2004)
The number of things you can hold in your mind at once has been traced
to one penny-sized part of the brain. The finding surprises researchers
who assumed this aspect of our intelligence would be distributed over
many parts of the brain. Instead, the area appears to form a bottleneck
that might limit our cognitive abilities, researchers say. "This is
a striking discovery," says John Duncan, an intelligence researcher
at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK.
Read
more. Source: Nature |
Invisible giants exposed in new Spitzer
image
(Apr 14, 2004)
Hidden behind a curtain of dusty darkness lurks one of the most violent
pockets of star birth in our galaxy. Called DR21, this stellar nursery
is so draped in cosmic dust that it appears invisible to the human
eye. By seeing in the infrared, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has
pulled this veil aside, revealing a fireworks-like display of massive
stars. The biggest of these stars is estimated to be 100,000 times
as bright as our own Sun. "We've never seen anything like this before,"
said Dr. William Reach, an investigator for the latest observations
and an astronomer at the Spitzer Science Center, located at the California
Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. "The massive stars are ripping
the cloud of gas and dust around them to shreds."
Read
more. Source: Caltech/JPL |
Sedna has no moon say puzzled astronomers
(Apr 14, 2004)
Sedna, the Solar System's farthest known object, does not have a moon,
puzzled astronomers have revealed. Its slow spin was thought to be
due to the gravity of a small, companion body. Researchers have now
discounted this but say the unexpected finding may offer clues to
the origin and evolution of objects on the Solar System's edge. Sedna's
discovery announced on 15 March led to huge excitement and an argument
among scientists over whether the small world could be classified
as a planet. Co-discoverer Mike Brown, of the California Institute
of Technology (CalTech), US, was so convinced at first that Sedna
had a satellite that the artist's concept of the object commissioned
to accompany the announcement included a hypothetical moon.
Read more. Source: BBC |
Trilobite was ancient snack food
(Apr 14, 2004)
Direct evidence has now been found to show that trilobites - among
the most diverse of fossil animal groups – were eaten by other
ancient sea creatures. Scientists discovered cracked trilobite body
parts in the gut of a 510-million-year-old fossil marine animal. It
was long suspected that the ubiquitous trilobites, which survived
for about 300 million years, were a major food source for larger creatures.
New research in Biology Letters offers the first firm evidence for
this.
Read
more. Source: BBC |
With tiny brain implants, just thinking
may make it so
(Apr 13, 2004)
A machine read a person's mind? A medical device company is about
to find out. The company, Cyberkinetics Inc., plans to implant a tiny
chip in the brains of five paralyzed people in an effort to enable
them to operate a computer by thought alone. The Food and Drug Administration
has given approval for a clinical trial of the implants, according
to the company. The implants, part of what Cyberkinetics calls its
BrainGate system, could eventually help people with spinal cord injuries,
strokes, Lou Gehrig's disease or other ailments to communicate better
or even to operate lights and other devices through a kind of neural
remote control. "You can substitute brain control for hand control,
basically," said Dr. John P. Donoghue, chairman of the neuroscience
department at Brown University and a founder of Cyberkinetics, which
hopes to begin the trial as early as next month.
Read
more. Source: New York Times (requires registration) |
Turin Shroud 'shows second face'
(Apr 13, 2004)
New research into the Turin Shroud has added to the mystery surrounding
the controversial artefact. A second ghostly image of a man's face
has been discovered on the back of the linen, according to a report
published by London's Institute of Physics. The delicate 14ft-long
linen sheet is believed by some to be the cloth in which Jesus was
wrapped after being taken down from the cross. It has been dismissed
by others as an elaborate hoax. The back of the shroud has rarely
been seen as it was hidden beneath a piece of cloth sewn on by nuns
in 1534, after it was damaged by fire. But the back surface was exposed
during a restoration project in 2002.
Read more. Source: BBC |
Barren Siberia may be original home of
animal life
(Apr 13, 2004)
Trilobites, the primitive shelled creatures considered by many to
be among the first animals to appear in the fossil record, may have
originated in a place known today largely for its barren lifelessness:
Siberia.The finding is one of the conclusions of a two year study
by geologists at the University of Florida and University of Kansas.
By comparing separate, seemingly unrelated findings on trilobite evolution
and geological history, UF's Joe Meert and KU's Bruce Lieberman concluded
that precursors to modern continents began splitting off from a giant
supercontinent at the South Pole about 580 million years ago, migrating
north toward the equator for about 80 million years. The scientists'
analysis suggests that a prominent theory holding that the continents
moved far more rapidly is wrong.
Read
more. Source: Science Daily / University of Florida |
Mars life-detection experiment being developed
(Apr 13, 2004)
The same cutting-edge technology that speeded sequencing of the human
genome could, by the end of the decade, tell us once and for all whether
life ever existed on Mars, according to a University of California,
Berkeley, chemist. Richard Mathies, UC Berkeley professor of chemistry
and developer of the first capillary electrophoresis arrays and new
energy transfer fluorescent dye labels – both used in today's
DNA sequencers – is at work on an instrument that would use
these technologies to probe Mars dust for evidence of life-based amino
acids, the building blocks of proteins.
Read
more. Source: U. California at Berkeley |
Stunning new views from Mars Express
(Apr 12, 2004)
The latest images from the European Space Agency Mars Express orbiter
show a system of sapping channels, called Louros Valles (named in
1982 after river in Greece), south of the Ius Chasma canyon which
runs east to west. These images were taken by the High Resolution
Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board Mars Express during orbit 97 from an
altitude of 269 kilometres. The images have a resolution of about
13 metres per pixel and are centred at 278.8° East and 8.3° South.
The colour image has been created from the nadir and three colour
channels. North is at the right. The Ius Chasma belongs to the giant
Valles Marineris canyon system on Mars. The Geryon Montes, visible
at the right of this image, is a mountain range which divides the
Ius Chasma into two parallel trenches. The dark deposits at the bottom
of the Ius Chasma are possibly related to water and wind erosion.
Read
more. Source: ESA |
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