Auroras In Northern And Southern Hemispheres Are Not Identical

Norwegian researchers have shown that the auroras in the Northern and the Southern hemispheres can be totally asymmetric. These findings contradict the commonly made assumption of aurora being mirror images of each other.

The study was performed by PhD student Karl Magnus Laundal and professor Nikolai Østgaard at the Institute of Physics and Technology at the University of Bergen.

“The aurora is produced due to collisions between the Earth’s atmosphere and electrically charged particles streaming along the Earth’s geomagnetic field lines. – Since these processes occur above the two hemispheres, both the Northern and the Southern light are created. So far researchers have assumed that these auroras are mirror images of each other, but our findings show that this is not always the case,” professor Nikolai Østgaard says.

The researchers at the University of Bergen have used data from the two NASA-satellites IMAGE and Polar to examine the Northern and the Southern light. In the Nature letter they present several possible explanations to the unexpected result.

“The most plausible explanation involves electrical currents along the magnetic field lines. Differences in the solar exposure may lead to currents between the two hemispheres, explaining why the Northern and the Southern light are not identical,” PhD student Karl Magnus Laundal says.

In addition to yielding new knowledge about the aurora, the results are important for other researchers studying the near-Earth space.

“Our study shows that data from only one hemisphere is not sufficient to state the conditions on the other hemisphere. This is important because most of our knowledge about the aurora, as well as processes in the upper atmosphere in the polar regions, is based solely on data from the Northern hemisphere,” Østgaard points out.

via Auroras In Northern And Southern Hemispheres Are Not Identical.

Money Relieves Pain

Money dulls physical pain and eases the sting of social rejection, new research shows.

Through six experiments, psychologists and a marketing professor probed the power of money as a proxy for social acceptance. Among their results, they found that merely touching bills or thinking about expenses paid affected the participants both physically and emotionally.

Because it affects pain, money may be a clue to how the brain evolved to process social interactions, the researchers wrote in a paper published in the June edition of the journal Psychological Science.

via Money Relieves Pain | LiveScience.

Ancient mammal tracks found at national monument

Hundreds of tiny footprints left by mammals some 190 million years ago have been found on a canyon wall in a remote part of Dinosaur National Monument, park officials said Thursday.

The tracks are a rare find, mostly because they were left at a time when the area was a hostile, vast Sahara-like desert where towering sand dunes seldom preserved signs of animal life.

“It’s just astonishing,” Dan Chure, a paleontologist at the monument, said Thursday. “We were giggling like kids.”

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He and paleontologist George Engelmann of the University of Nebraska at Omaha spotted the tracks July 8 while scouring the area for fossils and other evidence from the early Jurassic period. Dinosaur National Monument, founded because of its rich and plentiful supply of dinosaur bones, straddles the Utah-Colorado border.

Most of the tracks are the size of a dime or smaller. A few include impressions of up to four toes. The mammals — perhaps the size of a rat — were among the few species that were able to survive between large sand dune fields where there was water, dinosaurs and a few plants, Chure said.

via Ancient mammal tracks found at national monument – Science- msnbc.com.

New lizard species found in India

Scientists have discovered a new species of lizard in the lush Western Ghats mountain range in the Indian state of Maharashtra.

The small reptile is a form of gecko and was found by taxonomist Varad Giri in the Kolhapur district. It has been named Cnemasspis kolhapurensis.

Mr Giri and his co-workers published their findings in this month’s edition of the Zootaxa journal.

It is the third new species of lizard recently discovered in the area.

Mr Giri, a curator at the Bombay Natural History Society, told the BBC that the Western Ghats has never been surveyed for amphibians and reptiles.

“A gecko of this particular character has not been recognised elsewhere in the world,” he said.

Mr Giri said he first noticed the lizard in 2005 during a survey of one of the forests in the area.

“When I first stumbled across it, the lizard looked like a normal specimen,” he said.

“It was basically a form of gecko but then I saw that it was interesting because its scales were shiny.”

He said that when the gecko was held up in a certain light, the tail dorsum exhibited an “iridescent sheen”.

Iridescence is commonly reported in a variety of reptiles – but not geckos.

via BBC NEWS | South Asia | New lizard species found in India.

Bee my wife

Li Wenhua and Yan Hongxia are both enthusiastic beekeepers and work for the Nanhu forestry commission at Ning’an city in northern China.

And despite the fact that most of their pals kept their distance, the couple were still delighted with their new clothes.

Husband Li said: “I have been working with bees for two decades and it was the obvious choice for us for our big day.

“I also wanted to set a world record for the biggest coat of bees – I put a queen bee on each of us but the only thing is it was impossible to count how many bees we had – I don’t know if a guess is enough?”

His wife added: “It was an amazing feeling to have a carpet of living bees moving over my body.

“I could feel them as they moved around – it was amazing. I have always loved bees but this was a totally new experience.”

via Ananova – Bee my wife.

Wireless power system shown off

A system that can deliver power to devices without the need for wires has been shown off at a hi-tech conference.

The technique exploits simple physics and can be used to charge a range of electronic devices over many metres.

Eric Giler, chief executive of US firm Witricity, showed mobile phones and televisions charging wirelessly at the TED Global conference in Oxford.

He said the system could replace the miles of expensive power cables and billions of disposable batteries.

“There is something like 40 billion disposable batteries built every year for power that, generally speaking, is used within a few inches or feet of where there is very inexpensive power,” he said.

Trillions of dollars, he said, had also been invested building an infrastructure of wires “to get power from where it is created to where it is used.”

“We love this stuff [electricity] so much,” he said.

Mr Giler showed off a Google G1 phone and an Apple iPhone that could be charged using the system.

Witricity, he said, had managed to pack all the necessary components into the body of the G1 phone, but Apple had made that process slightly harder.

“They don’t make it easy at Apple to get inside their phones so we put a little sleeve on the back,” he said.

He also showed off a commercially available television using the system.

“Imagine you get one of these things and you want to hang it on the wall,” he said. “Think about it, you don’t want those ugly cords hanging down.”

The system is based on work by physicist Marin Soljacic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

It exploits “resonance”, whereby energy transfer is markedly more efficient when a certain frequency is applied.

When two objects have the same resonant frequency, they exchange energy strongly without having an effect on other, surrounding objects.

For example, it is resonance that can cause a wine glass to explode when a singer hits exactly the right tone.

But instead of using acoustic resonance, Witricity’s approach exploits the resonance of low frequency electromagnetic waves.

via BBC NEWS | Technology | Wireless power system shown off.

Tesla developed wireless power 118 years ago.  He thought of beaming power all over the world like radio waves. The problem was, the power companies could not regulate it.

• 1891: Nikola Tesla improves transmitter supply in his patent No. 454,622, “System of Electric Lighting.”
• 1893: Nikola Tesla demonstrates the wireless illumination of phosphorescent bulbs of his design at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

When Tesla had demonstrated the feasibility of his wireless power system, he rushed back to New York to begin construction on a transmitter located at Wardenclyffe, Long Island, New York.

Morgan stonewalled him and created a panic on Wall St. in 1907.

Millionaire John Jacob Astor, Tesla’s close friend and financier, died on the Titanic in 1912. – reformation

According to the writer of the Tesla page here, a few powerful men are responsible for our use of polluting gasoline as opposed to clean electricity over the last 100 years.

With the discovery of electricity, everybody expected that all cars would be electric and run on rechargeable batteries. Tesla had gone one better and actually produced a working automobile that ran on electricity taken from the surrounding ether like an antenna picks up radio waves. This would revolutionize travel just like his AC induction motor had revolutionized the industrial world.

The 3 stooges Morgan, Rockefeller, and Ford had to sabotage his idea at all costs….No air polluting gasoline engine meant no oil monopoly for Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Company. No oil monopoly meant no excuse for Rockefeller to own the U.S. government, and no excuse to be involved in foreign countries . . . especially those surrounding Russia.

Archaeologists find graveyard of sunken Roman ships

A team of archaeologists using sonar technology to scan the seabed have discovered a “graveyard” of five pristine ancient Roman shipwrecks off the small Italian island of Ventotene.

The trading vessels, dating from the first century BC to the fifth century AD, lie more than 100 meters underwater and are amongst the deepest wrecks discovered in the Mediterranean in recent years, the researchers said on Thursday.

Part of an archipelago situated halfway between Rome and Naples on Italy’s west coast, Ventotene historically served as a place of shelter during rough weather in the Tyrrhenian Sea.

“The ships appear to have been heading for safe anchorage, but they never made it,” said Timmy Gambin, head of archaeology for the Aurora Trust (www.auroratrust.com). “So in a relatively small area we have five wrecks…a graveyard of ships.”

The vessels were transporting wine from Italy, prized fish sauce from Spain and north Africa, and a mysterious cargo of metal ingots from Italy, possibly to be used in the construction of statues or weaponry.

Gambin said the wrecks revealed a pattern of trade in the empire: at first Rome exported its produce to its expanding provinces, but gradually it began to import from them more and more of the things it once produced.

In Roman times Ventotene, known as Pandataria, was used to exile disgraced Roman noblewomen. The Emperor Augustus sent his daughter Julia there because of her adultery. During the 20th century, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini used the remote island as a prison for political opponents.

Images of the wrecks show their crustacean-clad cargoes spilling onto the seafloor, after marine worms ate away the wooden hull of the vessels.

Due to their depth, the ships have lain untouched for hundreds of years but Gambin said the increasing popularity of deep water diving posed a threat to the Mediterranean’s archaeological treasures.

“There is a race against time,” he said. “In the next 10 years, there will be an explosion in mixed-gas diving and these sites will be accessible to ordinary treasure hunters.”

via NewsDaily: Archaeologists find graveyard of sunken Roman ships.

Light Bulbs from DNA

By adding fluorescent dyes to DNA and then spinning the DNA strands into nanofibers, researchers at the University of Connecticut have made a new material that emits bright white light. The material absorbs energy from ultraviolet light and gives off different colors of light–from blue to orange to white–depending on the proportions of dye it contains.

The researchers, led by chemistry professor Gregory Sotzing, create white-light-emitting devices by coating ultraviolet (UV) light-emitting diodes (LEDs) with the material. They are even able to fine-tune the white color tone to make it warm or cold, as they report in a paper published online in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

The new material could be used to make a novel type of organic light bulb. The light emitters should also be longer-lasting because DNA is a very strong polymer, Sotzing says. “It’s well beyond other polymers [in strength],” he notes, adding that it lasts 50 times longer than acrylic.

The color-tunable DNA material relies on an energy-transfer mechanism between two different fluorescent dyes. The key is to keep the dye molecules separated at a distance of 2 to 10 nanometers from each other. When UV light is shined on the material, one dye absorbs the energy and produces blue light. If the other dye molecule is at the right distance, it will absorb part of that blue-light energy and emit orange light.

via Technology Review: Making Light Bulbs from DNA.

Amazing solar eclipse photo

In this photo released by China’s Xinhua News Agency, the minaret of a mosque is silhouetted against the solar eclipse in Yinchuan, capital of northwest China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, at 8:43 a.m. on Wednesday, July 22, 2009.

via Total solar eclipse blacks out millions in India, Asia | Herald Sun.

Amazing shot. The more you think about all the planning that must have been behind it, the more amazing it seems… unless it was pure luck…

Special glasses alter time perception

There’s an intriguing study about to be published in Psychological Science finding that people wearing prism glasses that shift everything to the right overestimate the passage of time, while people wearing left-shift glasses underestimate it.

The researchers, led by psychologist Francesca Frassinetti, asked participants to watch a square appear on-screen for varying time periods, and then reproduce the duration or half the duration with a key press.

Glasses that skewed vision to the left seemed to shrink time, while glasses that skew everything to the right expanded it.

Apart from the interesting perceptual effect, it gives further evidence for the idea that our internals model of space and time are heavily linked, to the point where modifying one has a knock-on effect on the other.

In fact, there is increasing evidence that other abstract concepts are implicitly understood as having a spatial layout. Experiments on the SNARC effect have found that numbers seem to have a ‘location’, with larger numbers being on the right and smaller numbers on the left.

At least, that seems to be the case for native English-speakers, but for Arabic speakers, where text is written right-to-left, the reverse seems to be true.

via Mind Hacks: Vision shift glasses alter time perception.