Fish hits airplane

Newly opened database shows airplane bird strikes not rare

Nationwide, there were 98,328 reports of aircraft striking birds or other wildlife since January of 1990, although the actual numbers probably are far higher. The Federal Aviation Administration said only 20 percent of incidents are reported under the voluntary system of data collection.

The database shows strikes resulted in “substantial damage” to aircraft on about 3,000 occasions. Eleven people died in incidents relating to bird strikes.

The FAA initially fought to keep its database closed, saying publication of the details might discourage the industry from reporting information. …

While bird strikes account for the majority of the mishaps, the database contains numerous aircraft encounters with deer, moose, caribou and even fish.

According to the records, a fish hit a US Airways aircraft landing in Warwick, Rhode Island, in May of 2000. The fish had been dropped by an osprey.

The FAA opted to make the database public after being pelted with criticism from passengers, media organizations and the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates crashes.

Interest in aviation bird strikes has been heightened by several recent incidents in addition to Sullenberger’s flight — the January 15 ditching of US Airways Flight 1549 in New York’s Hudson River. All on board survived.

via Newly opened database shows airplane bird strikes not rare – CNN.com.

Paul McCartney, Elton John and Mick Jagger hit by economic crisis

Paul McCartney, Elton John and Mick Jagger have lost large chunks of their personal fortunes during the economic crisis over the last year, according to a rich list published on Friday.

Along with many of the world’s richest people, their wealth has been eroded by sharp falls in the value of property, shares and other investments, the annual survey for the Sunday Times newspaper said.

Elton John’s personal wealth fell by more than a quarter to 175 million pounds from 235 million pounds last year.

The flamboyant 62-year-old, whose hits include “Your Song,” and “Rocket Man,” saw his wealth tumble due to a combination of the effects of the downturn, the end of a lucrative run of Las Vegas concerts and donations to charity worth 42 million pounds.

Former Beatle McCartney saw 60 million pounds wiped off his fortune, a 12 percent decline on last year.

Jagger, lead singer of the Rolling Stones, fared even worse. His wealth slipped by 16 percent to 190 million pounds.

Top of the list of British music millionaires was a less well-known name: Clive Calder, who founded the Zomba record label, home to artists like Britney Spears. He sold it seven years ago for about $3 billion (2 billion pounds).

The rich list said his current wealth is unchanged from last year at 1.3 billion pounds.

via Elton John hit by economic crisis | Entertainment | Reuters.

Proof of a massive sea monster discovered

Just 800 miles (1287 km) from the North Pole, paleontologists believe they have found the fossilized remains of a massive sea monster that lived 150 million years ago. Predator X — a new species of a Pliosaur — is said to have been the most dangerous creature to have lived under water. The creature was about 50 feet (15 meters) long, had a head ten feet (3 meters) long and jaws armed with teeth the size of cucumbers. Dr. Jorn Hurum, and his team of paleontologists discovered Predator X in northern Norway last October and says the new species of a Pliosaur was more fearsome in power than the land-based Tyrannosaurus Rex.

No Dark Matter? New Theory Of Gravitation?

The high speed of stars and apparent presence of ‘dark matter’ in the satellite galaxies that orbit our Milky Way Galaxy presents a direct challenge to Newton’s theory of gravitation, according to physicists from Germany, Austria and Australia. …

The team of scientists looked at the distribution of these satellite dwarf galaxies and discovered they were not where they should be. “There is something odd about their distribution”, explains Professor Kroupa. “They should be uniformly arranged around the Milky Way, but this is not what we found.” The astronomers discovered that the eleven brightest of the dwarf galaxies lie more or less in the same plane – in a kind of disk shape – and that they revolve in the same direction around the Milky Way (in the same way as planets in the Solar System revolve around the Sun).

Professor Kroupa and the other physicists believe that this can only be explained if today’s satellite galaxies were created by ancient collisions between young galaxies. Team member and former colleague Dr Manuel Metz, now at the Deutsches Zentrum fuer Luft- and Raumfahrt, also worked on the study. “Fragments from early collisions can form the revolving dwarf galaxies we see today” comments Dr Metz. But he adds that this introduces a paradox. “Calculations suggest that the dwarf satellites cannot contain any dark matter if they were created in this way. But this directly contradicts other evidence. Unless the dark matter is present, the stars in the galaxies are moving around much faster than predicted by Newton’s standard theory of gravitation.”

Dr Metz continues, “The only solution is to reject Newton’s theory. If we live in a Universe where a modified law of gravitation applies, then our observations would be explainable without dark matter.”

via Time For A New Theory Of Gravitation? Satellite Galaxies Challenge Newtonian Model.

Water found 19.8 billion light years away: Black hole spews water vapour

Astronomers have found the most distant evidence of water in the Universe, a major conference has been told.

The vapour is thought to be present in a jet ejected from a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy that is billions of light-years away.

The discovery, by a US-European team, was announced at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science meeting.

The water was emitted from the black hole when the Universe was only about 2.5 billion years old.

This is about one fifth of the Universe’s current age, astronomers say. The water’s signature, seen at radio wavelengths, is only now being detected because of the huge distance in space between the black hole and Earth.

The vapour is observed as a “maser”, in which molecules in the gas amplify and emit beams of microwave radiation.

“We have been observing the water maser every month since the detection and seen a steady signal with no apparent change in the velocity of the water vapour in the data we’ve obtained so far,” said Dr John McKean of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy.

“This backs up our prediction that the water is found in the jet from the supermassive black hole, rather than the rotating disc of gas that surrounds it.”

Long lens

The faint signal was detected using a technique called gravitational lensing.

This is where the gravity of a massive galaxy in the foreground acts as a cosmic telescope, bending and magnifying light from the more distant galaxy.

“The radiation that we detected has taken 11.1 billion years to reach the Earth,” explained Dr McKean.

“However, because the Universe has expanded like an inflating balloon in that time, stretching out the distances between points, the galaxy in which the water was detected is about 19.8 billion light years away.”

via BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Black hole spews water vapour.

Obstacle-passing bending laser to fish for lightning

A special laser beam that can curve and pass obstacles may be used to direct lightning and make future particle accelerators smaller.

A team of scientists at the University of Arizona headed by Professor Pavel Polynkin combined a high energy pulse laser beam, which can be used to ionize gases in the atmosphere to create a plasma channel, with a special beaming technique. The technique called Airy beam – named after George Biddell Airy, a 19th century astronomer who discovered the mathematics behind the phenomenon – allows bending laser, reports Nature journal.

An Airy beam is actually created by complicated interference of a light pattern, created by a laser passing through a digital screen, carefully phasing the light waves. The resulting beam, or rather a pattern of one bright area surrounded by small dim patches, has several curious characteristics.

For one, it bends by several millimetres for every several dozen centimetres it travels. Combined with an intensive laser, the technology can create curved plasma channels.

via Obstacle-passing bending laser to fish for lightning | SciTech from 2009-04-10 | RT.

This is from focus, November 2007:

A new optics experiment makes a light beam appear to bend in air. The brightest patch of the beam also appears to travel with almost no spreading, unlike ordinary laser beams, as a team reports in the 23 November Physical Review Letters. The so-called Airy beam may lead to new kinds of optical engineering.

Any ordinary beam of light spreads as it travels, thanks to the wave effect known as diffraction. Even a laser pointer’s beam gets wider and dimmer on the way to a distant screen. But in 1987 a team introduced the Bessel beam, whose intensity remains constant as you move away from the source [1]. The “trick” is that light doesn’t actually travel along the beam axis; the intensity at any location in the beam results from the complicated interference of light emerging from all points in a large, ring-shaped slit at the source. Other researchers have devised variations on the Bessel beam that have other surprising properties. … focus.aps.org

This from PhysOrg, Nov 2007

Scientists have made the first observation of an unusual class of optical waves called Airy beams. Unlike most types of light waves, Airy beams have the ability to resist diffraction over long distances, and can also freely accelerate during propagation.
The researchers, Georgios Siviloglou, John Broky, Aristide Dogariu, and Demetrios Christodoulides from CREOL-University of Central Florida (UCF), hope that these unusual features may enable Airy beams to be used in applications such as particle manipulation and in nonlinear media. The group’s study, published in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters, reports the observation of Airy beams in both one- and two-dimensional configurations.

Airy beams take their name from the “airy integral,” introduced by Sir George Biddell Airy in the 1830s to explain optical caustics such as those appearing in a rainbow. Airy beams were initially predicted in 1979 by two scientists, Michael Berry and Nandor Balazs, within the context of quantum mechanics. The scientists theorized the existence of a free particle described by the Schrödinger equation that could exhibit an Airy wave packet that doesn’t spread out as it propagates—in other words, it is diffraction-free. Remarkably, an Airy wave packet has the unusual ability to freely accelerate even in the absence of an external stimulus.

“We are not sure why this absolutely fascinating prediction went unnoticed for so long given the fame of Michael Berry,” Christodoulides told PhysOrg.com. “We think that it is partly due to the fact that it was initially published in a relatively ‘obscured’ journal. The second issue has to do with experimental implementation. It is only very recently that we realized that exponentially truncated Airy beams have a Gaussian power spectrum and can thus be easily synthesized from standard Gaussian beams.” – physorg

World first for strange molecule

A molecule that until now existed only in theory has finally been made.

Known as a Rydberg molecule, it is formed through an elusive and extremely weak chemical bond between two atoms.

The new type of bonding, reported in Nature, occurs because one of the two atoms in the molecule has an electron very far from its nucleus or centre.

It reinforces fundamental quantum theories, developed by Nobel prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi, about how electrons behave and interact.

The Rydberg molecules in question were formed from two atoms of rubidium – one a Rydberg atom, and one a “normal” atom.

The movement and position of electrons within an atom can be described as orbiting around a central nucleus – with each shell of orbiting electrons further from the centre.

A Rydberg atom is special because it has one electron alone in an outermost orbit – very far, in atomic terms, from its nucleus.

Back in 1934 Enrico Fermi predicted that if another atom were to “find” that lone, wandering electron, it might interact with it.

“But Fermi never imagined that molecules could be formed,” explained Chris Greene, the theoretical physicist from the University of Colorado who first predicted that Rydberg molecules could exist.

via BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | World first for strange molecule.