Jupiter is sporting a new, Earth-sized scar near its south pole, and NASA has confirmed that the gas giant was thumped by a massive impact over the past few days. The discovery was made Sunday night by a Australian computer programmer who uses his spare time to stargaze with his backyard telescope, and today NASA declared that the dark spot is definitely not a weather system, and is indeed evidence of a collision. It’s not yet known exactly what smacked into Jupiter; astronomers say it could have been an unknown comet, or a stray piece of ice.
This is only the second time such an impact has been observed. The first was almost exactly 15 years ago, when more than 20 fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with the gas giant. “This has all the hallmarks of an impact event, very similar to Shoemaker-Levy 9,” said Leigh Fletcher, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab…. “We’re all extremely excited” [New Scientist].
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In the past century, jockeys have helped their horses race about six percent faster, thanks to a position on the horse known as the “monkey crouch.” This elevated, squatting stance minimizes the work the horse must do to propel his rider forward, according to a study published in Science.
To analyze the movement of the horse and jockey while racing, scientists attached sensors to the saddle and the jockey’s belt. They found that when a horse runs, it also moves up and down, bringing the jockey along with it. The rider can therefore weigh the horse down or, in the case of the monkey crouch, he can isolate himself from the horse’s motions, and therefore minimize his effect on the horse’s movement. When seated upright, riders act much like sandbags, weighing down the horse and incurring increased mechanical and metabolic costs. But in the crouched … position, a jockey can move relative to the horse and minimize this forward-backward and up-and-down movement [Scientific American].
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Why does a wiener dog look like a wiener, with its body poised on such short, stubby legs? Researchers say they’ve discovered the answer in a single genetic mutation that’s found in dachshunds, corgis, basset hounds, and other short-legged dog breeds. Study coauthor Heidi Parker says this gene may turn on growth mechanisms at the wrong time during foetal development, stunting the growth of long bones in the leg and making them curvy. The trait affects only the legs, unlike the small-all-over effect seen in miniature or toy breeds, such as poodles [Reuters].
The mutation popped up sometime after modern dogs diverged from wolves, researchers say, and it’s a dominant gene–meaning that a dog with only one copy of the gene will show obvious signs of it. Having joined the genetic repertoire of dogs, the gene was available for selection by dog breeders whenever they wanted to develop a downsized breed. The basset hound, for example, was bred for its short legs so people on horseback could keep up with it during hunting, Dr. Parker said [The New York Times].
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Circumcising men who are infected with HIV does not protect their female partners from the deadly virus, researchers have found. The Uganda-based study was stopped early due to “futility,” the researchers wrote in a study published in The Lancet, when it became clear that the women were not benefiting. The outcome was disappointing because circumcision has been shown to drastically reduce infection rates in men. But the researchers said that wide-scale circumcision is so effective in protecting men that [it] will still likely benefit women indirectly by reducing circulation of the virus in general [Reuters].
In 2007, the World Health Organization concluded that circumcising males reduced female-to-male transmission of the HIV virus by about 60 percent. The foreskin of the penis, which is removed during circumcision, is rich in cells that are particularly easy for the virus to infect. The theory is that removing this source of vulnerable cells makes infection more difficult [Reuters].
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Bats may have a clever way of catching prey, but it turns out the tiger moth has some tricks of its own to avoid becoming a bat’s next meal. According to a study published in Science, the tiger moth disrupts the sound waves the bat uses home in on prey by emitting its own ultrasound blasts.
Researchers knew that the tiger moth emitted ultrasound waves, but they weren’t sure why. Previous studies indicated the moth’s sounds might serve to startle the bats, or warn them that the insects were unpalatable. The new research, however, tested both of these theories. The scientists had so-called big brown bats hunt tiger moths in a chamber fitted with ultrasonic recording equipment and high-speed infrared video. If the moth sound is used to startle bats, then in the chamber the bats should be disrupted on first attack, then learn to ignore the ultrasonic click, the team figured. That didn’t happen. If the moths’ clicks are warnings that the insects taste bad, then the bats should hear the click, bite the moth—and never do so again whenever they hear the sound. That didn’t happen either [National Geographic News].
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Forty years ago today, two men walked on the moon. To celebrate that moment of transcendent ambition and triumph, the world is looking back to July 20, 1969: NASA has released restored video footage of the Apollo 11 landing, and a new NASA moon orbiter has taken snapshots of the Apollo landing site, where left-behind gear still sits on the lunar surface. But for some space buffs, the anniversary has a touch of melancholy to it.
For all the promised “giant leap for mankind” the mission foretold, the prophesied future of moon bases and journeys to Mars, Jupiter and beyond is still science fiction. The last of six moon landings, bringing two men each time to the lunar surface, was in 1972. Since then, no one has left low Earth orbit. For many advocates, there is a consensus that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is suffering from what President Obama this March called “a sense of drift” [Washington Post].
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As much as we humans like to think we can do two things at once, our brains can only process one thing at a time—like the iPhone—but we can get better at switching between the two tasks, according to a study published in Neuron.
Previous studies showed that multitasking activates the brain’s prefrontal cortex, or PFC. This area has been found to be the “bottleneck” that can limit the speed at which we multitask, and it becomes less active as we practice doing two things at once. The prevailing theory for that decreased activity had been that when we practise a task, the brain starts to automatically reroute information from the PFC to regions that are more directly involved [Nature News].
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Earlier this week, the oil giant ExxonMobil announced a significant shift in direction: Rather than drilling ever downward in an attempt to find more oil, the company will invest heavily in green, growing things that can manufacture biofuel. Exxon plans to put $600 million into the production of algae-based biofuels, and will partner with the genetics company Synthetic Genomics run by genomics pioneer Craig Venter. The announcement came just a week after another industrial giant, Dow Chemical, declared its own investment in algae technology.
The biofuel industry is currently facing a shift from first-generation biofuels to so-called advanced biofuels as evidence mounts that corn-based ethanol and soybean biodiesel are not as ecologically, socially or economically sustainable as many first thought…. Algae have been touted as a better organic material for producing biofuel by many researchers and entrepreneurs. It does not take up any arable land and can be grown in controlled conditions; at a basic level algae only needs water, sunlight, carbon dioxide and some nutrients to grow [CNN].
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The sandfish lizard appears to “swim” like a fish through sand, but how exactly the animal does it has long puzzled biophysicists. Now, a study published in Science reveals that the four-legged creature really does swim through sand like it would in water by retracting its legs and undulating its body.
To examine the lizard’s movement, researchers had to peek underground. They did this using X-ray imaging, and found that once the lizard, or skink, has dived beneath the sand, it doesn’t paddle. “When started above the surface, the animals dive into the sand within half a second. Once below the surface, they no longer use their limbs for propulsion — instead, they move forward by propagating a traveling wave down their bodies like a snake,” said study leader Daniel Goldman [LiveScience]. This movement was surprising because previous magnetic resonance imaging studies seemed to suggest that the lizards pushed themselves along using their legs.
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The solar system’s main asteroid belt may have taken its shape when three gas giant planets were flung into more distant orbits, scattering the remote, icy objects that were lurking at the solar system’s edge. A new study, published in Nature, suggests that the event sent “space invaders” to the belt between Mars and Jupiter that seem more like primitive frozen comets than the baked rocks that make up the overwhelming majority of asteroids [AP].
The findings support a recent theory for the solar system’s formation called the Nice model (named after the city in France), which suggests that all four gas giants originally formed near to the sun, but migrated in what “we believe was a very violent event that happened roughly 700 million years after the solar system formed,” when the solar system was in “its teenage years,” [SPACE.com], explains study coauthor Harold Levison. He says the original orbits of the gas giants weren’t stable, and “the orbits really just went kablooy”. Jupiter moved inwards, while Saturn, Uranus and Neptune all moved away from the Solar System’s centre. As they did so, they catapulted icy bodies from the early protoplanetary disc into the inner Solar System [Nature News].
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Five patent applications for technology that aims to control the weather bear the signature of a man who knows how to think big: Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The applications made public by the U.S. Patent Office last week describe floating devices that could reduce the strength of hurricanes by drawing warm water from the ocean’s surface and channeling it down to the depths through a long tube. A second tube would reverse the process and bring deep, cold water up to the surface.
The applications were filed by an entity called Searete, which is part of the company Intellectual Ventures that was founded by former Microsoft executives as an “invention business;” Bill Gates is an investor in the company. Gates is listed as one of the inventors on each hurricane-quelling patent application, along with scientists like the geoengineering expert Ken Caldeira. One of the patent applications describes how part or all of the cost of building and maintaining the hurricane-killer ships could be raised by selling insurance to coastal residents whose risk would be reduced by using the new system [New Orleans Times-Picayune].
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A French hacker broke into the email accounts of Twitter executives and employees, and now the cyber snoop is leaking business and personal info about company leaders to TechCrunch, an American blog, and Korben, a French blog. The hacker reportedly guessed passwords and gained access to several Gmail accounts, as well as accounts with Google Docs, PayPal, and other services.
TechCrunch received a compressed zip file of 310 confidential documents, including a complete Twitter employee list and salary information; food preferences of Twitter employees; confidential contracts with companies such as Nokia, Samsung, Dell, AOL, Microsoft, and others; a contact list of notable Web and entertainment personalities; meeting reports; [and] applicant resumes [PC World]. Now it’s up to the site to decide what information to publish. Thus far, TechCrunch has decided not to release anything that is personally embarrassing. Still, under the philosophy “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising,” the site will release documents it considers relevant to the company. These include notes from executive meetings, the original pitch for a Twitter TV show, and certain company financial information.
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One of Britain’s best-known orchestra conductors and his wife have ended their lives at an assisted suicide facility, reigniting the debate over assisted suicide. Helping someone die is a criminal offense in Britain, so Sir Edward Downes, 85, traveled to a “right-to-die” facility near Zurich with his 74-year-old wife, Joan, who had terminal cancer.
Under Britain’s Assisted Suicide Act, helping someone kill him- or herself can bring a penalty of up to 14 years in prison. In Switzerland, however, assisted suicide is legal; the Downeses were not the first Britons who traveled there to legally commit assisted suicide. Since the Zurich clinic run by [the non-profit group] Dignitas was established in 1998 under Swiss laws that allow clinics to provide lethal drugs, British authorities have effectively turned a blind eye to Britons who go there to die…. None of the family members and friends who have accompanied the 117 people living in Britain who have traveled to the Zurich clinic for help in ending their lives have been charged with an offense [The New York Times]. Experts say it’s unlikely that this will change in the case of the Downses’ children, who potentially assisted in their parents’ suicide by traveling with them to the Zurich facility. Still, the fact remains that the couple’s children could potentially be charged with a crime for their involvement in the suicide.
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The Chinese government has banned the controversial use of electroconvulsive therapy, or shock therapy, to treat the controversial diagnosis of “Internet addiction.” With an estimated 300 million Internet users, China has been grappling with how to keep avid Web surfers from spending their whole lives online, and various clinics have sprung up, offering parents the chance to “cure” their children of the uncontrollable urge to blog or play online games [Telegraph]. But a recent scandal involving a psychiatric hospital in Shandong province that was using a “brain-waking” treatment of electric shocks has rallied public opinion against such clinics.
China’s Ministry of Health has now posted a notice on its Web site stating that there is no evidence that electric shock therapy is an effective treatment for Internet addiction. A hospital spokeswoman last week said “sensationalized” media reports had already led it to cease the shock treatment. The shocks were meant to cause subjects to associate a negative result with Internet use, according to the hospital [ComputerWorld]. People who were subjected to the treatment report that they were forced to apologize for and repudiate their Internet-using ways while receiving the shocks, which were also used as punishment for uncooperative behavior. In what might be an indication of the clinic’s effectiveness, its practices came to light when former patients went online to complain [The Wall Street Journal].
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Yesterday, Russian engineers cracked the wax seal on a metal hatch, and six men emerged from the simulated space capsule where they had spent the last 105 days in experiment designed to simulate the isolation of a manned trip to Mars. The experiment is part of a larger project dubbed “Mars 500.” The three months the men spent in isolation are a precursor to another simulation to take place in 2010, when another crew will submit themselves to 520 days in isolation, the projected time it would take for a return trip to Mars [ABC News].
The four Russians, one German, and one Frenchman were chosen from among 6,000 applicants, and were paid about $21,000 each for participating. Inside the mock capsule, they conducted experiments to test their physical and psychological reactions to the isolation, and performed many of the tasks that would keep Mars-bound astronauts busy. They had no television or Internet and their only link to the outside world was communications with the experiment’s controllers — who also monitored them via TV cameras — and an internal e-mail system. Communications with the outside world had 20-minute delays to imitate a real space flight [AP].
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