Category: science

Interesting news from space:

The Hubble Space Telescope has detected what scientists believe may be the oldest galaxy ever observed.

It is thought the galaxy is more than 13 billion years old and existed 480 million years after the Big Bang.

An international team says this was a period when galaxy formation in the early Universe was in “overdrive”.

The image, which has been published in Nature journal, was detected using Hubble’s recently installed wide field camera.

You can read more here. Personally, I find it difficult to even attempt to comprehend the numbers being used here – but Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar is a helpful visualization of astronomical time-spans like 13 billion years.

A brain-damaged Iowan woman who apparently does not feel fear has helped scientists to identify some of the brain structures responsible for that emotion. From The Telegraph:

The mother-of-three, who experiences all other emotions, is thought to be
unique in the world in her ability to be completely unfazed by danger.

Her condition means she constantly puts herself at risk and in her 44 years
has been threatened with a knife, held at gunpoint and assaulted on
different occasions.

Yet she has come away completely untouched emotionally by her experiences.

She often just strolls away from the scene and has to be told to report them
to the police.

Known simply as SM, the woman from Iowa in America, suffers from a condition
called Urbach-Wiethe disease which has destroyed a part of her brain known
as the amygdala.

Fascinating stuff. Read more here.

Image via Wikipedia

I’m not too good at explaining or summarizing theoretical or experimental physics that I myself barely comprehend (to put it generously), so I’ll instead quote the fine science writers at MSNBC:

In a new finding that could have game-changing effects if borne
out, two astrophysicists think they’ve finally tracked down the elusive
signature of dark matter.

This invisible substance is thought to make up much of the universe but scientists have little idea what it is. They can only infer the
existence of dark matter by measuring its gravitational tug on the normal matter that they can see.

Now, after sifting through observations of the center of our Milky Way galaxy, two researchers think they’ve found evidence of
the annihilation of dark matter particles in powerful explosions.

You can read the whole article about this exciting discovery here. The diagram above details the hypothetical composition of the known universe. As you can see, most of it is dark energy and dark matter.

Future-deniers, think again – if there was ever a headline that people in the 1950s would have expected to read in 2010, this is it. It seems that the U.S. military has developed and deployed robots – known as Mobile Detection Assessment Response Systems, or MDARS – to patrol a nuclear dumping ground in Nevada. From Wired:

The camera-equipped MDARS
can scoot around pre-determined paths on its own, alerting
flesh-and-blood guards when it encounters an intruder or a broken lock.
In development by the Navy and General Dynamics since the early 1990s,
the diesel-fueled sentry bot
can operate for up to 16 hours, and reach a top speed of 20 mph. The
U.S. military has experimented with using the MDARS machines to patrol some of its Hawthorne Army Depot in Nevada. The bots have even been tested with automatic weapons — though I doubt that’s the plan at the nuke site.

Check out this official video footage. Not quite as spine-chilling as Terminators, but getting there:

In the meantime, on the other side of the country, researchers at Carnegie Mellon are attempting to duplicate human learning processes in machines:

Since the start of the year, a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University — supported by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Google, and tapping into a research supercomputing cluster provided by Yahoo
— has been fine-tuning a computer system that is trying to master
semantics by learning more like a human. Its beating hardware heart is a
sleek, silver-gray computer — calculating 24 hours a day, seven days a
week — that resides in a basement computer center at the university, in
Pittsburgh. The computer was primed by the researchers with some basic
knowledge in various categories and set loose on the Web with a mission
to teach itself.

(Read more here.) Bring these two together, and what do you get? Well… we’ll find out. (Along these lines – check out this NPR segment, “Can Unmanned Robots Follow the Laws of War?“)

This is fascinating stuff – evolution at work. Sounds like some of the theories about how eukaryotes first emerged. Check it out:

It looks like any other sea slug, aside from its bright green hue.
But the Elysia chlorotica is far from ordinary: it is both a plant and
an animal, according to biologists who have been studying the species for two decades.

Not only does E. chlorotica turn sunlight into energy —
something only plants can do — it also appears to have swiped this
ability from the algae it consumes.

 

Native to the salt marshes of New England and Canada, these sea
slugs use contraband chlorophyll-producing genes and cell parts called
chloroplasts from algae to carry out photosynthesis, says Sidney Pierce,
a biologist at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

 

That genetic material has since been passed down to the next generation, eliminating the need to consume algae for energy.

Full article.