Columbia shuttle debris found in drought-stricken lake

Debris from the space shuttle Columbia, which burned up on re-entry in 2003, has turned up in a drought-stricken lake in eastern Texas.

The 1m-wide spherical tank was found in Lake Nacogdoches, near the Texas town of the same name where much of the debris initially fell.

The tank was part of the ill-fated orbiter’s electrical power system and contained liquid hydrogen or oxygen.

A drought in the region has driven the lake’s water levels down by nearly 3m.

A local policeman patrolling the area alerted authorities to the find.

“It had been out of the water for some time,” Nacogdoches police sergeant Greg Sowell told the Associated Press. “It had been seen by local sportsmen… People didn’t know what they were looking at.”

Local authorities will arrange to ship the tank back to the Kennedy Space Center, where other Columbia wreckage has been collected for analysis. Nasa said about 40% of the orbiter had been recovered.

The Columbia shuttle broke up in the skies over eastern Texas in February 2003, killing all seven of its crew. The heat shield that protects the shuttle from the searing heat of re-entry was damaged on liftoff by a piece of insulating foam that broke away from an external fuel tank.

via BBC News – Columbia shuttle debris found in drought-stricken lake.

“Spectacular” Three-Cat Monolith Unearthed in Mexico

With a little help from archaeologists, three giant cats have slunk into view after spending thousands of years underground in central Mexico.

Carved in a vaguely Olmec style into a stone monolith, the seated jaguars—or possibly mountain lions—may have been part of a decorative hillside wall that was crawling with big-cat carvings, experts suggest.

The circa 700 B.C. carving, dubbed the “Triad of Felines” by archaeologists, was found about 60 miles (a hundred kilometers) south of Mexico City at Chalcatzingo, an archaeological site known to have had ties to the Olmec civilization.

Measuring about 5 feet (1.5 meters) tall and 3.6 feet (1.1 meters) wide, the carving was originally set within a hillside and was designed to be clearly visible from a village below, experts say.

The discovery is only the latest of about 40 large stone carvings found at Chalcatzingo since 1935—many of them depicting cats, said David Grove, an anthropologist at the University of Florida who conducted research at Chalcatzingo for 30 years beginning in the 1970s.

As an example of Olmec-style art, Grove added, “Triad of Felines” is “spectacular.”

via “Spectacular” Three-Cat Monolith Unearthed in Mexico.

Ancient dog skull unearthed in Siberia tells origins of man’s best friend

A very well-preserved 33,000 year old canine skull from a cave in the Siberian Altai mountains shows some of the earliest evidence of dog domestication ever found.

But the specimen raises doubts about early man’s loyalty to his new best friend as times got tough.

The findings come from a Russian-led international team of archaeologists.

The skull, from shortly before the peak of the last ice age, is unlike those of modern dogs or wolves.

The study is published in the open access journal Plos One.

Although the snout is similar in size to early, fully domesticated Greenland dogs from 1,000 years ago, its large teeth resemble those of 31,000 year-old wild European wolves.

This indicates a dog in the very early stages of domestication, says evolutionary biologist Dr Susan Crockford, one of the authors on the study.

“The wolves were not deliberately domesticated, the process of making a wolf into a dog was a natural process,” explained Dr Crockford of Pacific Identifications, Canada.

But for this to happen required settled early human populations: “At this time, people were hunting animals in large numbers and leaving large piles of bones behind, and that was attracting the wolves,” she said.

The most curious, least fearful wolves tended to have more juvenile characteristics with shorter, wider snouts and smaller, more crowded teeth, features that, over generations, came to define the domesticated dog. …

via BBC News – Ancient dog skull unearthed in Siberia.

Giant Rat Kills Predators with Poisonous Hair

By utilizing the same plants that African tribesmen use to poison their arrows, the furry fury known as the African crested rat can incapacitate and even kill predators many times its size, researchers have found.

“This is the first mammal that is borrowing a deadly poison from a plant and slathering it on itself without dying,” said study researcher Jonathan Kingdon, of Oxford University in England. “This is an extraordinary thing to have evolved.”

Growing up in Africa, Kingdon was frequently exposed to these rats, even keeping one (very cautiously) as a pet. He had heard this animal was poisonous, but it look 30 years for him to figure out how and why this special animal kills and sickens its predators.

Whenever a predator, like a dog, comes upon the rat and tries to eat it, the animal gets a mouthful of potentially deadly poison.

“It isn’t really designed to kill. If it killed every time nothing would ever learn that this is distasteful,” Kingdon said. “The way it really works is that you go away and you recover from a terrible experience and you never, ever invite that experience again.”

Kingdon noted one example he’s seen firsthand: When in the presence of a crested rat, a dog that previously had a run-in with one of the animals quivered in fear and wouldn’t approach the innocuous- looking foot-long rat.

To figure out the rat’s secret, Kingdon and his colleagues observed the rats in the wild and ran lab tests on a line of hairs that run along its back and seemed to have a unique structure. They also tested the chemicals in the hairs’ poisons alongside that of the bark of the Acokanthera schimperi, which the rats are known to chew.

They found that to make its poison fur, the rat — which averages about 14 inches (36 cm) long — chews the bark of the A. schimperi and licks itself to store the resulting poisonous spit in specially adapted hairs. …

via Giant Rat Kills Predators with Poisonous Hair – Yahoo! News.

Scientist converts human skin cells into functional brain cells

Shinya Yamanaka, MD, PhD, a UCSF professor of anatomy and senior investigator at the UCSF-affiliated Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease and Kyoto University, Japan, will be honored with the 2010 March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology for his pioneering stem cell work.

Yamanaka has reprogrammed human skin cells into embryonic-like stem cells, which are pluripotent, meaning that they have the ability to develop into any kind of cell. The Yamanaka method eliminates the need to obtain stem cells from human embryos and has fundamentally altered the field of developmental biology and will aid research into the prevention of birth defects. … – ucsf

 

A scientist at the Gladstone Institutes has discovered a novel way to convert human skin cells into brain cells, advancing medicine and human health by offering new hope for regenerative medicine and personalized drug discovery and development.

In a paper being published online July 28 in the scientific journal Cell Stem Cell, Sheng Ding, PhD, reveals efficient and robust methods for transforming adult skin cells into neurons that are capable of transmitting brain signals, marking one of the first documented experiments for transforming an adult human’s skin cells into functioning brain cells.

“This work could have important ramifications for patients and families who suffer at the hands of neurodegenerative diseases such Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease,” said Lennart Mucke, MD, who directs neurological research at Gladstone. “Dr. Ding’s latest research offers new hope for the process of developing medications for these diseases, as well as for the possibility of cell-replacement therapy to reduce the trauma of millions of people affected by these devastating and irreversible conditions.” …

via Scientist converts human skin cells into functional brain cells.

Search is on for missing ‘floating island’

‘Is Land’ was a £9,000 helium-filled sculpture of a desert island which floated above the heads of revellers at the Secret Garden Party festival recently.However, the art project drifted off somewhere without anyone seeing it and may now be floating in the troposphere, the lowest portion of Earth’s atmosphere.Sarah Cockings and Laurence Symonds, Royal College of Art graduates, who created the seven-metre wide airborne islet have asked that any sightings be reported via the website is-land.co.uk.’Is Land’ is made of durable polyurethane with foliage décor and was built over six months.It was last seen at approximately 3am on Sunday 24 July hanging over a lake at the Cambridgeshire festival by security guards who witnessed two unidentified youths in a dinghy cutting all five of its tether ropes, releasing the island into the sky.A statement on the ‘Is Land’ website reads: “Due to ignorant vandals, the original Is Land is currently floating at an unknown height somewhere within the atmosphere.”However what goes up must come down, so the hunt is on. If what looks like a floating chunk of earth turns up in your Nan’s back garden, or if you think you see a new planet intercept your easyJet flight to the Algarve, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

via Search is on for missing ‘floating island’ – Telegraph.

Computer screen ‘tan’ tricks thousands

A website offering the chance to get a tan from computer screens has been revealed as a hoax.

The webpage said users could download software which would enable screens to convert the light system in monitors to produce UV rays.

The professional-looking site promised a “Tan-tastic” year-round appearance.

It was organised by the skin cancer charity Skcin to help raise awareness of the dangers of sun beds and skin cancer rates in general in the UK.

It’s attracted almost 200,000 people keen to check out the offer of a free tan courtesy of their computer screens.

‘Serious issue’

But people who signed up expecting to top up their tans were instead confronted with a number of alarming facts and figures about the dangers of skin cancer.

A spokesperson for the charity said: “This is an astonishing response and has undoubtedly helped raise awareness of the dangers of skin cancer in this country.”

It is the most common form of cancer in young adults, and is largely preventable. …

via BBC – Newsbeat – Health – Computer screen ‘tan’ tricks thousands.

Internet Explorer story was bogus

A story which suggested that users of Internet Explorer have a lower IQ than people who chose other browsers appears to have been an elaborate hoax.

A number of media organisations, including the BBC, reported on the research, put out by Canadian firm ApTiquant.

It later emerged that the company’s website was only recently set up and staff images were copied from a legitimate business in Paris.

It is unclear who was behind the stunt.

The story was reported by many high profile organisations including CNN, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph and Forbes.

Questions about the authenticity of the story were raised by readers of the BBC website who established that the company which put out the research – ApTiquant – appeared to have only set up its website in the past month.

Thumbnail images of the firm’s staff on the website also matched those on the site of French research company Central Test, although many of the names had been changed. …

via BBC News – Internet Explorer story was bogus.

Might still be true, but no one has really done the research as claimed.

Germans question Facebook tagging privacy

Facebook is being accused of violating German privacy laws with its facial recognition system.

Hamburg’s privacy commissioner said that the technology was collecting users’ biometric information and ordered the data be deleted.

The commissioner has the power to levy a fine of up to 300,000 euros (£261,000).

Facebook said it would be considering the claim, but rejected the accusation that it had broken the law.

In a statement, a company spokesperson added: “People like the convenience of our photo tag suggest feature which makes it easier and safer for them to manage their online identities.”

Facebook introduced facial recognition to its photos application in June. The system suggests the identity of users’ friends while they are tagging images.

The site came under fire at the time based on the erroneous belief that the technology could be used to identify strangers.

In reality, it is restricted to a user’s friends.

However, the concerns of Hamburg’s information commissioner, Dr Johannes Caspar, centre around the fact that the social network is building a private database of faces.

“The risks of such a collection of biometric data is immense,” said Dr Caspar. …

via BBC News – Germans question Facebook tagging privacy.

Listen to the Germans. They know the privacy of your identity can be a matter of life and death.  Facebook makes it look like so much innocent fun to tag your friends … and set the world stage for genocide. It does not matter if Facebook has evil intentions, someone who gets their data eventually will. And then, the Dr. Evil of the future could send a deadly insect drone to quietly sting every person in the world of a certain ethnicity, or political belief, or religion, or level of intelligence, or income level, or ____.

Earth may once have had two moons

A new theory suggests the Earth once had a small second moon that perished in a slow motion collision with its “big sister”.

Researchers suggest the collision may explain the mysterious mountains on the far side of our Moon.

The scientists say the relatively slow speed of the crash was crucial in adding material to the rarely-seen lunar hemisphere.

Details have been published in the journal Nature.

The researchers involved hope that data from two US space agency (Nasa) lunar missions will substantiate or challenge their theory within the next year.

For decades, scientists have been trying to understand why the near side of the Moon – the one visible from Earth – is flat and cratered while the rarely-seen far side is heavily cratered and has mountain ranges higher than 3,000m.

Various theories have been proposed to explain what’s termed the lunar dichotomy. One suggests that tidal heating, caused by the pull of the Earth on the ocean of liquid rock that once flowed under the lunar crust, may have been the cause.

But this latest paper proposes a different solution: a long-term series of cosmic collisions.

The researchers argue that the Earth was struck about four billion years ago by another planet about the size of Mars. This is known as the global-impact hypothesis. The resulting debris eventually coalesced to form our Moon.

But the scientists say that another, smaller lunar body may have formed from the same material and become stuck in a gravitational tug of war between the Earth and the Moon. …

Dr Martin Jutzi from the University of Bern, Switzerland, is one of the authors of the paper. He explained: “When we look at the current theory there is no real reason why there was only one moon.

“And one outcome of our research is that the new theory goes very well with the global impact idea.”

After spending millions of years “stuck”, the smaller moon embarked on a collision course with its big sister, slowly crashing into it at a velocity of less than three kilometres per second – slower than the speed of sound in rocks.

Dr Jutzi says it was a low velocity crash: “It was a rather gentle collision at around 2.4km per second; lower than the speed of sound – that’s important because it means no huge shocks or melting was produced.

At the time of the smash, the bigger moon would have had a “magma ocean” with a thin crust on top.

The scientists argue that the impact would have led to the build-up of material on the lunar crust and would also have redistributed the underlying magma to the near side of the moon, an idea backed up by observations from Nasa’s Lunar Prospector spacecraft….

via BBC News – Earth may once have had two moons.

Woah. Dan Bern, a brilliant and disturbing songwriter, wrote a song many years ago called, Kabbaba, which repeats the line, “Back when the Earth had two moons… “. I always wondered if he got the idea from some science story he read, but the story above seems to be very new… How did he know?