real-aliens.com » research

Buried Prehistoric Antarctica Lakes May Yield Life-Forms Isolated for Millions of Years

Tom McFay — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 08:30:00 +0000

“These lakes were rediscovered within the past 10 years or so, but no one yet has penetrated them and we want to make sure that the research is done properly and adheres to the highest environmental stewardship principles,” says Kennicutt….

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Buried Prehistoric Antarctica Lakes May Yield Life-Forms Isolated for Millions of Years

MIT Team Offers ‘Snapshot’ of Life in Other Universes

Tom McFay — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 09:00:00 +0000

Modern cosmology theory holds that our universe may be just one in a vast collection of universes known as the multiverse. MIT physicist Alan Guth has suggested that new universes (known as “pocket universes”) are constantly being created, but they cannot be seen from our universe. In this view, “nature gets a lot of tries — the universe is an experiment that’s repeated over and over again, each time with slightly different physical laws, or even vastly different physical laws,” says Jaffe. Some of these universes would collapse instants after forming; in others, the forces between particles would be so weak they could not give rise to atoms or molecules. However, if conditions were suitable, matter would coalesce into galaxies and planets, and if the right elements were present in those worlds, intelligent life could evolve. Some physicists have theorized that only universes in which the laws of physics are “just so” could support life, and that if things were even a little bit different from our world, intelligent life would be impossible. In that case, our physical laws might be explained “anthropically,” meaning that they are as they are because if they were otherwise, no one would be around to notice them. MIT physics professor Robert Jaffe and his collaborators felt that this proposed anthropic explanation should be subjected to more careful scrutiny, and decided to explore whether universes with different physical laws could support life. The MIT physicists have showed that universes quite different from ours still have elements similar to carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and could therefore evolve life forms quite similar to us, even when the masses of elementary particles called quarks are dramatically altered. Jaffe and his collaborators felt that this proposed anthropic explanation should be subjected to more careful scrutiny, so they decided to explore whether universes with different physical laws could support life. Unlike most other studies, in which varying only one constant usually produces an inhospitable universe, they examined more than one constant. Whether life exists elsewhere in our universe is a longstanding mystery. But for some scientists, there’s another interesting question: could there be life in a universe significantly different from our own? In work recently featured in a cover story in Scientific American, Jaffe, former MIT postdoc, Alejandro Jenkins, and recent MIT graduate Itamar Kimchi showed that universes quite different from ours still have elements similar to carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and could therefore evolve life forms quite similar to us. Even when the masses of the elementary particles are dramatically altered, life may find a way. “You could change them by significant amounts without eliminating the possibility of organic chemistry in the universe,” says Jenkins. Although bizarre life forms might exist in universes different from ours, Jaffe and his collaborators decided to focus on life based on carbon chemistry. They defined as “congenial to life” those universes in which stable forms of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen would exist. “If you don’t have a stable entity with the chemistry of hydrogen, you’re not going to have hydrocarbons, or complex carbohydrates, and you’re not going to have life,” says Jaffe. “The same goes for carbon and oxygen. Beyond those three we felt the rest is detail.” They set out to see what might happen to those elements if they altered the masses of elementary particles called quarks. There are six types of quarks, which are the building blocks of protons, neutrons and electrons. The MIT team focused on “up”, “down” and “strange” quarks, the most common and lightest quarks, which join together to form protons and neutrons and closely related particles called “hyperons.” In our universe, the down quark is about twice as heavy as the up quark, resulting in neutrons that are 0.1 percent heavier than protons. Jaffe and his colleagues modeled one family of universes in which the down quark was lighter than the up quark, and protons were up to a percent heavier than neutrons. In this scenario, hydrogen would no longer be stable, but its slightly heavier isotopes deuterium or tritium could be. An isotope of carbon known as carbon-14 would also be stable, as would a form of oxygen, so the organic reactions necessary for life would be possible. The team found a few other congenial universes, including a family where the up and strange quarks have roughly the same mass (in our universe, strange quarks are much heavier and can only be produced in high-energy collisions), while the down quark would be much lighter. In such a universe, atomic nuclei would be made of neutrons and a hyperon called the “sigma minus,” which would replace protons. They published their findings in the journal Physical Review D last year. Jaffe and his collaborators focused on quarks because they know enough about quark interactions to predict what will happen when their masses change. However, “any attempt to address the problem in a broader context is going to be very difficult,” says Jaffe, because physicists are limited in their ability to predict the consequences of changing most other physical laws and constants. A group of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has done related studies examining whether congenial universes could arise even while lacking one of the four fundamental forces of our universe — the weak nuclear force, which enables the reactions that turn neutrons into protons, and vice versa. The researchers showed that tweaking the other three fundamental forces could compensate for the missing weak nuclear force and still allow stable elements to be formed. That study and the MIT work are different from most other studies in this area in that they examined more than one constant. “Usually people vary one constant and look at the results, which is different than if you vary multiple constants,” says Mark Wise, professor of physics at Caltech, who was not involved in the research. Varying only one constant usually produces an inhospitable universe, which can lead to the erroneous conclusion that any other congenial universes are impossible. One physical parameter that does appear to be extremely finely tuned is the cosmological constant — a measure of the pressure exerted by empty space, which causes the universe to expand or contract. When the constant is positive, space expands, when negative, the universe collapses on itself. In our universe, the cosmological constant is positive but very small — any larger value would cause the universe to expand too rapidly for galaxies to form. However, Wise and his colleagues have shown that it is theoretically possible that changes in primordial cosmological density perturbations could compensate at least for small changes to the value of the cosmological constant. In the end, there is no way to know for sure what other universes are out there, or what life they may hold. But that will likely not stop physicists from exploring the possibilities, and in the process learning more about our own universe. Casey Kazan via MIT News Office

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MIT Team Offers ‘Snapshot’ of Life in Other Universes

New Tech Mapping Whale Songs

Tom McFay — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:50:00 +0000

Land areas are not the only places getting busier: so too are the oceans, says a Cornell researcher Chris Clark who uses underwater recorders to create animated maps of the oceans’ noise. Clark discussed his state-of-the-art acoustic animations and the difficulties facing whales Feb. 21 at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in San Diego. Increasingly, the oceans are being polluted by shipping traffic noise, especially up and down the U.S. eastern and western seaboards. The cacophony interferes with the ability of whales and other sea animals to hear each other; they rely on quiet waters to communicate many miles apart. “People have no idea the world in the ocean off the coast is so urbanized,” said Christopher Clark, the I.P. Johnson Director of the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. His research not only documents ocean noise and its repercussions but also tracks such endangered species as the North Atlantic right whale. Clark presented color animations that show time-elapsed maps of the sounds of passing whales and ships. Clark and colleagues placed arrays of recording devices spaced over the ocean floor for three months at a time. The devices were then retrieved, their terabytes of data analyzed at Cornell and transferred into a visual format (above). This animation frame shows the noise from a single commercial ship entering Boston harbor. The bright yellow-orange signifies a noisy ocean. The loudness (voices) of the calling whales are lost beneath the shipping noise. “Now I can quantify how much [sound is generated] every time a ship comes through,” Clark said. “It creates acoustic ‘bleaching,’ and you can measure how much acoustic space is lost by ships coming through. For example, every day right whales lose 80 to 85 percent of their opportunities to communicate as a result of ship traffic.” Sound travels very efficiently in water and gets trapped in a layer of water known as a deep sound channel about half a mile deep, depending on latitude, Clark said. He likened diving into this channel to a curtain rising so that suddenly you can hear clearer and louder. He hypothesizes that whales’ voices and hearing have evolved to communicate with each other over very large distances. Ads by Google Retire VT Yankee on Time – It’s Old, Dangerous, Irresponsible. Tell your Senator: Vote to CLOSE IT – NotSafeNotTrustworthy.org “I can hear a blue whale that’s singing off the Grand Banks of Canada while listening off Puerto Rico,” Clark said. Although blue whales use very low frequencies that can travel such great distances, higher-pitched humpback whale singers can be heard only over a few hundred miles, and North Atlantic right whales over only tens of miles. But manmade sounds are now bleaching whales’ underwater communication channels. “Now we are listening to observe what the whales do as noise levels go up,” Clark said. Some 60 years ago when there was little traffic noise, whales could hear each other pretty much all the time, except when storms came through. Then they would stop chattering, only to resume when the storm passed. But now, what do whales do amid the steady din? Using his acoustic techniques, Clark has found that as traffic noise increases or oil exploration vessels pound the sea floor, communication among whales breaks down, and sometimes the animals evacuate the area within hours to days. Clark also discussed the use of listening buoys off the coast of Massachusetts that automatically detect right whales and inform ship captains to slow down when a whale is in or near the shipping lanes. Provided by Cornell University Image credit: Dimitri Ponirakis

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New Tech Mapping Whale Songs

Is Jupiter Protecting Earth from Massive Comet & Asteroid Impacts? "Maybe Not" Experts Say

Tom McFay — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 08:58:00 +0000

On 1994 July 16-22, over twenty fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with the planet Jupiter. The comet, discovered the previous year by astronomers Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker and David Levy, was observed by astronomers at hundreds of observatories around the world as it crashed into Jupiter’s southern hemisphere. This past July, a comet or asteroid ripped another Pacific-Ocean sized hole in Jupiter (image below). Is Jupiter a giant protective magnet for Earth, or are these events wake-up calls? As Stephen Hawking says, the general consensus is that any comet or asteroid greater than 20 kilometers in diameter that strikes the Earth will result in the complete annihilation of complex life – animals and higher plants. (The asteroid Vesta, for example, one of the destinations of the Dawn Mission, is the size of Arizona). Since 1941 many astronomers have thought of Jupiter as a protective big brother for planet Earth -a celestial shield, deflecting asteroids and comets away from the inner Solar System. This long-standing belief that Jupiter acts as a celestial shield, deflecting asteroids and comets away from the inner Solar System, has been challenged by the first in a series of studies evaluating the impact risk to the Earth posed by different groups of object. Dr Jonathan Horner of Great Britain’s Open University has studied the impact hazard posed to Earth by the Centaurs, the parent population of the Jupiter Family of comets. His research showed that the presence of a Jupiter-like planet in the Solar System does not necessarily lead to a lower impact rate at the Earth. Horner said that Jupiter’s role as guardian may have been overstated: “It seems that the idea isn’t so clear-cut.” The idea of Jupiter as protector was first proposed by planetary scientist George Wetherill in 19941. Wetherill showed that the planet’s enormous mass — more than 300 times that of the Earth — is enough to catapult comets that might hit Earth, like a slingshot ,out of the Solar System. Other astronomers have postulated that Jupiter’s gravitational pull would thin the crowd of dangerous asteroids and other objects, making Earth less impact prone. Other research has suggested that, in the past, changes in Jupiter’s orbit might have actually increased the number of objects on a collision course with earth. Until now, Horner says, little work was done to test either idea. The short period Jupiter Family of Comets (JFCs) are believed to originate from the Kuiper Belt and have orbital periods of up to 20 years and low inclination controlled by Jupiter. The Kuiper Belt is a large reservoir of small icy bodies just beyond Neptune. From collisions or gravitational perturbations some Kuiper Belt objects escape and fall towards the Sun. When they approach the Sun their volatile elements will start to sublimate off the surface and we will see the object as a comet. Because the orbit crosses that of Jupiter, the comet will have gravitational interactions with this massive gas giant. The objects orbit will gradually change from these interactions and eventually the object will either be thrown out of the Solar System or collide with a planet or the Sun. The second class of comets, the long periods, are believed to originate from the Oort cloud. This is a vast spherical reservoir believed to exist at the edge of the Solar System. The long period comets have periods of less than 200 years and no preference in orbital inclination. “The idea that a Jupiter-like planet plays an important role in lessening the impact risk on potentially habitable planets is a common belief but there has only really been one study done on this in the past, which looked at the hazard due to the Long Period Comets,” Horner continued.” We are carrying out an ongoing series of studies of the impact risks in planetary systems, starting off by looking at our own Solar System, since we know the most about it.” Horner and colleague Barrie Jones built several versions of the Solar System on the Open University’s computers: one with a Jupiter, one without, and several with a gas giant that was either a quarter, half, or three-quarters of Jupiter’s mass. The system also contained 100,000 centaurs — large, icy bodies from the Solar System’s Kuiper belt, within which Pluto lies. After running their models for 10 million virtual years, Horner and Jones found some striking results:The Earth was about 30% more likely to be hit by a centaur in a Solar System with a life-size Jupiter than it was in a Jupiter-less system. “We’ve found that if a planet about the mass of Saturn or a bit larger occupied Jupiter’s place,” Horner concluded, “then the number of impacts on Earth would increase. However if nothing was there at all, there wouldn’t be any difference from our current impact rate. Rather than it being a clear cut case that Jupiter acts as a shield, it seems that Jupiter almost gives with one hand and takes away with the other!” The weakness of Horner’s tentative conclusion is that it fails to take into account Jupiter’s ability to deflect Earth-colliding objects from the Oort cloud, a massive cloud of comets that surrounds the Solar System The Open University team is assessing the impact risk posed to the Earth by the asteroids and will go on to study the long period comets, before examining the role of the position of Jupiter within our system. But back to Stephen Hawking: How many times in our galaxy alone has life finally evolved to the equivalent of our planets and animals on some far distant planet, he asks, only to be utterly destroyed by an impact? Galactic history suggests it might be a common occurrence. Our cold comfort comes from the adjective “galactic” -that’s a hugely different time perspective that our biblical three score and ten. Posted by Casey Kazan Links: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070824133636.htm http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070820/full/070820-11.html http://allaboutscienceblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/jupiter-friend-or-foe.html http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~sheppard/satellites/jf.htm

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Is Jupiter Protecting Earth from Massive Comet & Asteroid Impacts? "Maybe Not" Experts Say

WOW! or HISS: Have Scientists Detected Dark Matter or Background Noise?

Tom McFay — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 09:30:00 +0000

Scientists may have glimpsed a particle that is a leading candidate for mysterious dark matter but say conclusive evidence remains elusive. A nine-year search from a unique observatory in an old iron mine 2,000 feet underground has yielded two possible detections of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. But physicists, who include two University of Florida researchers, say there is about a one in four chance that the detections were merely background noise — meaning that a worldwide hunt involving at least two dozen different observatories and hundreds of scientists will continue. “With one or two events, it’s tough. The numbers are too small,” said Tarek Saab, a UF assistant professor and one of dozens of physicists participating in the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search II, or CDMS II, experiment based in the Soudan mine in Northern Minnesota. A scientific system buried deep below the Earth, constructed of ultrapure materials held hovering over absolute zero, has finally stirred. This isn’t an attack by misbegotten monsters but an encouraging clue to the main mystery of the universe: dark matter. The kind of matter with which we are familiar — atoms and molecules, and indeed every particle we have ever created in a laboratory known as baryonic– only makes up about 5% of the universe. Another 25% is dark matter, a kind of particle that is massive and weakly interacting. The remaining 70% is dark energy, which is not even a particle — it’s a smoothly-distributed energy field that remains persistent in density even as the universe expands. The ongoing effort to understand dark matter and dark energy is the most important task of twenty-first century cosmology. The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search II (CDMS II) does exactly what it says – it’s cryogenically cooled, it’s searching for dark matter, and this is the second time they’ve done it. High purity low temperature crystals of germanium and silicon vibrate are disturbed by anything impacting on them, and they’re buried under seven hundred meters of iron mine to make sure most of “anything” can’t make it. One thing that could conceivably come down and stir things up is a WIMP, a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle – one of the options for dark matter. The system is so shielded that over an entire year users only expect 0.8 events, and in 2008 they saw two. This is a tantalising taste of data: analysis indicates that the event energy matches the model for dark matter WIMPs, but even after screening out as much noise as possible it simply isn’t enough signal to be sure. Scientists, you see, double-check and confirm things before shouting about them (unlike others who – for example – might hack unprocessed e-mails, strip random sentences out of context, then start screaming about all kinds of nonsense. This excitement is motivating instead of mob-making: the research team are upgrading the equipment with Super-CDMS stacks of crystal which will triple its efficiency. Space satellites, subterranean sensors, and that little LHC thing: we want this dark matter stuff. The bulk of the dark matter that makes up 75% of the universe is believed to be nonbaryonic, which means that it contains no atoms and that it does not interact with ordinary matter via electromagnetic forces and includes neutrinos, and possibly hypothetical entities such as axions, or supersymmetric particles. Unlike baryonic dark matter, nonbaryonic dark matter did not contribute to the formation of the elements in the early universe, so its presence is detected only by its gravitational attraction. Scientists recognized decades ago that the rotational speed of galaxies and the behavior of galaxy clusters could not be explained by the traditional forces of gravity due to the mass of visible stars alone. Something else — something invisible, undetectable yet extremely powerful — had to exert the force required to cause the galaxies’ more-rapid-than-expected rotational speed and similar anomalous observations. What came to be known as “dark matter” – dark because it neither reflects nor absorbs light in any form, visible or other – is now estimated to comprise as much as 23 percent of the universe. But despite abundant evidence for its influence, no one has ever observed dark matter directly. There are several possibilities for the composition of this mysterious, omnipresent matter. Particle physics theory points toward WIMPs as one of the most likely candidates. WIMPs are “weakly interacting” because, although their masses are thought to be comparable to the masses of standard atomic nuclei, they have little or no effect on ordinary matter, and among other things, that makes them extremely difficult to detect. However, scientists believe WIMPs should occasionally “kick” or bounce off standard atomic nuclei, leaving behind a small amount of energy that should be possible to detect. The CDMS II observatory is located a half-mile underground beneath rock that blocks most particles, such as those accompanying cosmic rays. At the observatory’s heart are 30 hockey-puck-sized germanium and silicon detectors cryogenically frozen to negative 459.58 Fahrenheit, just shy of absolute zero. In theory, WIMPs would be among the few particles that make it all the way through the earth and rock. They would then occasionally kick the atoms on these detectors, generating a tiny amount of heat, a signal that would be observed and recorded on the experiment’s computers. Observers recorded the two possible WIMP events in 2007, one on Aug. 8 and the second on Oct. 27. Scientists had estimated that five detections would be sufficient to confirm WIMPs — meaning that the two fell short, according to the CDMS. But while the two detections may not be conclusive, they do help to set more stringent values on the WIMPs’ interaction with subatomic particles. At the very least, the finding helps to eliminate some theories about dark matter — raising the profile of the WIMP and potentially accelerating the race to detect it. Most experts agree that in the next five years or so, someone will see a clear signal. Casey Kazan with Luke McKinney via University of Florida Image at top: Dark Matter ring in Galaxy Cluster CI 0024+17 Hubble Space Telescope

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WOW! or HISS: Have Scientists Detected Dark Matter or Background Noise?

"Restaurant at the End of the Universe" – NASAs Roadmap to Life in the Milky Way

Tom McFay — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 08:34:00 +0000

“I know this great Restaurant at the End of the Universe.” Ford Prefect, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. If we live in a physical universe versus a biological universe, where the ultimate product of cosmic evolution is planets, stars, and galaxies, Steven Dick, NASA’s chief historian, suggests it may be human destiny to populate the universe rather than to interact with extraterrestrials: humanity would eventually become the extraterrestrials. NASA has created an “Astrobiology Roadmap” in 2008 that outlines pathways for research and exploration to answer three huge questions that have gone unanswered through centuries of human history: How does life begin and evolve? Does life exist elsewhere in the universe? What is the future of life on Earth and beyond? Dick’s vision of a biological universe where planetary systems are common with life originating where conditions are favorable and culminating with intelligence is at odds with NASA’s current focus on earth-like microbial habitats and water-based habitats, which might be exceedingly rare in the cosmos: “A planet or planetary satellite is habitable if it can sustain life that originates there or if it sustains life that is carried to the object. Habitable environments must provide extended regions of liquid water, conditions favorable for the assembly of complex organic molecules, and energy sources to sustain metabolism.” Up until last year, when the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council strongly urged that NASA start searching for non-carbon based life forms in it’s report “The Limits of Organic Life.” NASA’s astrobiology program has concentrated on microbial life. “Nothing,” the report concludes, “would be more tragic in the American exploration of space than to encounter alien life and fail to recognize it.” Earth did not accumulate oxygen during the first roughly 3 billion years, or form an ozone layer until about 1.5 billion years ago. There is considerable emphasis on looking for contemporary Earth atmospheres that have oxygen and an ozone layer, but, the report hits home, we should also be using models with different anaerobic microbial non-carbon ecosystems, atmospheres that might parallel the different stages in the evolution of Earth’s atmospheres over 4 billion years, and conditions that could indicate the presence of a tectonically active planet. The report pointed out that the exploration of the planet is concentrated on looking for places where liquid water exists—which goes along with the idea of where life is found on the Earth. However, they emphasize that liquids such as ammonia, methane, and formamide could also be the building blocks for life. The challenge of remotely detecting life on a planet that has not developed a biogenic source of oxygen, the NASA “Astrobiology Roadmap” warns, is fraught with unknowns. What chemical species and spectral signatures should be sought? What metabolic processes might be operating? How does one guard against a false positive detection? Research that is guided both by our knowledge of Earth’s early (i.e., before the rise of an oxygenated atmosphere) and by studies of alternative biological systems can help address these questions and provide guidance to astronomers seeking evidence of life elsewhere. While the discovery of microbes will have less effect than the discovery of intelligence the discovery of fossils or microbes derives much of its impact from the fact that it is the first step on the road to intelligence. It would have great scientific interest, but might not necessitate the realignment of theologies and world philosophies. Some future version of a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will contain the answer to humankind’s great question: whether or not we are alone in the universe, at least within our galaxy. Olaf Stapledon’s vision of “Interplanetary Humanity” fifty years ago will be extended to “Interstellar Humanity,” in which our philosophy, religion, and science are much more attuned to the cosmos. By then we will know if we live in a physical or a biological universe, and we may even have traveled our nearest star some 40 light years away in Alpha Centauri. Posted by Casey Kazan NASA Astrobiology Roadmap 2008 The NASA Astrobiology Roadmap provides guidance for research and technology development across the NASA enterprises that encompass the space, Earth, and biological sciences. The ongoing development of astrobiology roadmaps embodies the contributions of diverse scientists and technologists from government, universities, and private institutions. The Roadmap addresses three basic questions: how does life begin and evolve, does life exist elsewhere in the universe, and what is the future of life on Earth and beyond? Seven Science Goals outline the following key domains of investigation: understanding the nature and distribution of habitable environments in the universe, exploring for habitable environments and life in our own Solar System, understanding the emergence of life, determining how early life on Earth interacted and evolved with its changing environment, understanding the evolutionary mechanisms and environmental limits of life, determining the principles that will shape life in the future, and recognizing signatures of life on other worlds and on early Earth. For each of these goals, Science Objectives outline more specific high priority efforts for the next three to five years. These eighteen objectives are being integrated with NASA strategic planning. Goals In order to answer the fundamental questions of astrobiology, the NASA Astrobiology program pursues the following science goals: Goal 1: Understand how life arose on the Earth. Goal 2: Determine the general principles governing the organization of matter into living systems. Goal 3: Explore how life evolves on the molecular, organism, and ecosystem levels. Goal 4: Determine how the terrestrial biosphere has co-evolved with the Earth. Goal 5: Establish limits for life in environments that provide analogues for conditions on other worlds. Goal 6: Determine what makes a planet habitable and how common these worlds are in the universe. Goal 7: Determine how to recognize the signature of life on other worlds. Goal 8: Determine whether there is (or once was) life elsewhere in our solar system, particularly on Mars and Europa. Question: What is Life’s Future on Earth and Beyond? Goal 9: Determine how ecosystems respond to environmental change on time-scales relevant to human life on Earth. Goal 10: Understand the response of terrestrial life to conditions in space or on other planets.

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"Restaurant at the End of the Universe" – NASAs Roadmap to Life in the Milky Way

Image of the Day: The World’s Smallest (Nano) Valentine

Tom McFay — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 08:02:00 +0000

According to physicists observing the atoms through the Nanoscale Physics Research Laboratory JEOL 2100F microscope, they watched with loving fascination as they viewed the smallest Valentine image on the planet: only 8 nanometers in size, it will be impossible to see on your sweetheart’s finger. Although the palladium Valentine was a nice bit of serendipity, the “size-selected atomic clusters, of the kind which fused together to assemble the atomic heart, are of practical relevance providing “precise control of the atomic architecture of the clusters may lead to enhanced yield and especially selectivity in complex catalytic reactions, as well as reducing the number of metal atoms needed to catalyze the reaction,” according to Professor Richard Palmer, head of the Laboratory. The Nanoscale Physics Research Laboratory was established in 1994 as the first centre for nanoscience in the UK. Casey Kazan via PhysOrg.com

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Image of the Day: The World’s Smallest (Nano) Valentine

The Planet’s Largest Prehistoric Snake Was 45-Feet Long & Ate Crocs for Dessert

Tom McFay — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 08:12:00 +0000

The largest snake the world has ever known -42 to 45 feet long -ruled tropical ecosystems only 6 million years after the disappearance Tyrannosaurus rex, according to a new discovery in Columbia of the fossil skeletons of a giant, boa constrictor-like snake (skull left), named Titanoboa cerrejonensis. Tipping the scales at an estimated 1.25 tons, the snake lived during the Paleocene Epoch, a 10-million-year period immediately following the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. “Truly enormous snakes really spark people’s imagination, but reality has exceeded the fantasies of Hollywood,” said Florida Museum vertebrate paleontologist Jonathan Bloch , who co-led the expedition with Carlos Jaramillo, a paleobotanist from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. “The snake that tried to eat Jennifer Lopez in the movie ‘Anaconda’ is not as big as the one we found.” Jason Head, a paleontologist at the University of Toronto in Mississauga and the paper’s senior author, described Titanoboa this way: “The snake’s body was so wide that if it were moving down the hall and decided to come into my office to eat me, it would literally have to squeeze through the door.” During the expedition, the scientists found many skeletons of giant turtles and extinct primitive crocodile relatives, the 7-foot-long (2.1-meter-long) Cerrejonisuchus improcerus—which wouldn’t have stood a chance against the 45-foot-long (13.7-meter-long) Titanoboa cerrejonesis. “Prior to our work, there had been no fossil vertebrates found between 65 million and 55 million years ago in tropical South America, leaving us with a very poor understanding of what life was like in the northern Neotropics,” Bloch said. “Now we have a window into the time just after the dinosaurs went extinct and can actually see what the animals replacing them were like.” The snake’s gigantic dimensions are a sign that temperatures along the equator were once much hotter, Bloch said. Snakes and other cold-blooded animals are limited in body size by the ambient temperature of where they live. “If you look at cold-blooded animals and their distribution on the planet today, the large ones are in the tropics, where it’s hottest, and they become smaller the farther away they are from the equator,” he said. “Based on the snake’s size, the team was able to calculate the mean annual temperature at equatorial South America 60 million years ago was about 91 degrees Fahrenheit, about 10 degrees warmer than today,” Bloch said. The presence of outsized snakes and freshwater turtles shows that even 60 million years ago the foundations of the modern Amazonian tropical ecosystem were in place, he said. Harry W. Greene, a professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University and one of the world’s leading snake experts, said the “colossal” ancient boa researchers found has “important implications for snake biology and our understanding of life in the ancient tropics.” Jason McManus

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The Planet’s Largest Prehistoric Snake Was 45-Feet Long & Ate Crocs for Dessert

The Daily Flash -Eco, Space, Tech (2/11)

Tom McFay — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 08:04:00 +0000

Early Galaxies Formed Stars Fast Because They Had More Gas The mystery of why galaxies formed early in the history of the universe give birth to more stars than modern ones has been solved. An abundance of dense, cold gas fueled rapid star formation in these early galaxies, according to a new study. Astronomers collected signals from 19 different 8- to 10-billion-year old galaxies scattered across the northern sky. These early-universe stellar nurseries had much more interstellar gas — dense, hydrogen-rich clouds at a chilly minus 441 to minus 414 degrees Fahrenheit — than their modern counterparts. If You Ran the World, What Would You Do? If you ran the world, what would you do (in 140 characters or less)? That’s the question asked by IfWeRanTheWorld, a site launched in beta this week at the TED conference that aims to harness human intentions into actiion. Start by answering the question, ‘If you ran the world, what would you do?’ with a tangible, achievable goal: this will be your actionplatform. So far, the responses are varied in usefulness. “Raise money”, “educate”, and “Define laws to support global values” are some of the most recent, and represent the vague nature of the majority of the answers. Of course, the site has been live for less than a day–we’ll be on the lookout for more interesting responses as time goes by. Google to build ultra high-speed broadband networks Internet giant Google has announced plans to trial ultra high-speed broadband networks that would deliver Internet speeds 100 times faster than most Americans have access to now. Google announced plans Wednesday to build experimental ultra high-speed broadband networks that would deliver Internet speeds 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today. “We’re planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States,” Google product managers Minnie Ingersoll and James Kelly said in a blog post.

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The Daily Flash -Eco, Space, Tech (2/11)

Google Street View for USA’s Great Ski Slopes

Tom McFay — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 08:03:00 +0000

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Google Street View for USA’s Great Ski Slopes