Astronomers observed the intense heating of a distant planet

Washington, Jan 30: Astronomers have observed the intense heating of a distant planet as it swung close to its parent star, providing important clues to the atmospheric properties of the planet.

The observations, by astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), enabled them to generate realistic images of the planet by feeding the data into computer simulations of the planet's atmosphere.

According to Gregory Laughlin, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC, "We can't get a direct image of the planet, but we can deduce what it would look like if you were there."

"The ability to go beyond an artist's interpretation and do realistic simulations of what you would actually see is very exciting," he said.

The researchers used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to obtain infrared measurements of the heat emanating from the planet as it whipped behind and close to its star.

In just six hours, the planet's temperature rose from 800 to 1,500 Kelvin (980 to 2,240 degrees Fahrenheit).

Known as HD 80606b, the planet circles a star 200 light years from Earth, is four times the mass of Jupiter, and has the most eccentric orbit of any known planet. It spends most of its 111.4-day orbit at distances that would place it between Venus and Earth in our own solar system, while the closest part of its orbit brings it within 0.03 astronomical units of its star.

The planet zips through this dramatic close encounter with its star in less than a day. At the closest point, the sunlight beating down on the planet is 825 times stronger than the irradiation it receives at its farthest point from the star.

"If you could float above the clouds of this planet, you'd see its sun growing larger and larger at faster and faster rates, increasing in brightness by almost a factor of 1,000," Laughlin said.

Spitzer observed the planet for 30 hours before, during, and just after its closest approach to the star.

The planet passed behind the star (an event called a secondary eclipse) just before the moment of its closest approach.

This was a lucky break for Laughlin and his colleagues, who had not known that would happen when they planned the observation.

The secondary eclipse allowed them to get accurate measurements from just the star and thereby determine exact temperatures for the planet. According to Laughlin, the extreme temperature swing observed by Spitzer indicates that the intense irradiation from the star is absorbed in a layer of the planet's upper atmosphere that absorbs and loses heat rapidly.

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Scientists disapprove American comet impact theory

London, Jan 28: New data has led scientists to disapprove a theory that a large comet exploded over North America 12,900 years ago, causing a shock wave that traveled at hundreds of kilometers per hour and triggering continent-wide wildfires.

Dr Sandy Harrison from the University of Bristol and colleagues tested the theory by examining charcoal and pollen records to assess how fire regimes in North America changed between 15 and 10,000 years ago, a time of large and rapid climate changes.

Their results provide no evidence for continental-scale fires, but support the fact that the increase in large-scale wildfires in all regions of the world during the past decade is related to an increase in global warming.

According to Dr Harrison, fire is the most ubiquitous form of landscape disturbance and has important effects on climate through the global carbon cycle and changing atmospheric chemistry.

This has triggered an interest in knowing how fire has changed in the past, and particularly how fire regimes respond to periods of major warming.

“The end of the Younger Dryas, about 11,700 years ago, was an interval when the temperature of Greenland warmed by over 5 degrees Celsius in less than a few decades,” said Dr Harrison.

“We used 35 records of charcoal accumulation in lake sediments from sites across North America to see whether fire regimes across the continent showed any response to such rapid warming,” he added.

The team found clear changes in biomass burning and fire frequency whenever climate changed abruptly, and most particularly when temperatures increased at the end of the Younger Dryas cold phase.

Understanding whether rapid changes in climate have caused wild fires in the past will help understand whether current changes in global temperatures will cause more frequent fires at the present time.

Such fires have a major impact on the economy and health of the population, as well as feeding into the increase in global warming.

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A woman gave birth to eight babies

A woman gave birth Monday to eight babies, only the second time in history octuplets have survived more than a few hours, doctors said.

The mother gave birth to six boys and two girls weighing between 1 pound, 8 ounces, and 3 pounds, 4 ounces, doctors at Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center said. The hospital had scheduled a Caesarean section for seven babies, but doctors were surprised when an eighth came out at 10:48 a.m.

"My eyes were wide," Dr. Karen Maples said, explaining her reaction to the last birth. Doctors said the babies were born nine weeks premature but are in stable condition. Two newborns were placed on ventilators and a third needs oxygen. Hospital officials would not release any information about the mother, including her name, condition or whether she used fertility drugs. They did, however, say she planned to breast feed all of them.

"She's a very strong woman, so she probably will be able to handle all eight babies," said Dr. Mandhir Gupta, a neo-natologist who cared for the infants.

The mother checked into the hospital in her 23rd week of pregnancy and gave birth seven weeks later. All eight babies will probably remain in the hospital for at least two months and the mother should be released in a week, Maples said.

The world's first live octuplets were born in March 1967 in Mexico City, but all the babies died within 14 hours, according to Encyclopedia Britanica.

The United States' first live octuplets were born in Houston in December 1998. They were three months premature and their weights at birth ranged from 11 ounces to 1 pound, 11 ounces. The tiniest infant died of heart and lung failure a week after being born. The surviving siblings - girls Ebuka, Gorom, Chidi, Chima and Echerem, and their brothers Ikem and Jioke - turned 10 in December.

Their mother and father, Nkem Chukwu and Iyke Louis Udobi, said they are astonished and grateful their children have grown up to be healthy and active. Chukwu is even happier to hear another mother successfully accomplished the same feat.

"It's a blessing, truly a blessing," Chukwu told The Associated Press. "We'll keep praying for them."

Forty-six hospital staff and four delivery rooms were used for the latest octuplets' births. After one baby was born, staff rushed the newborn into another room and waited for the next, the hospital said. But despite weeks of preparation, doctors did not expect the eighth child.

"It is quite easy to miss a baby when you're anticipating seven babies," said Dr. Harold Henry, chief of maternal and fetal medicine at the hospital. "Ultrasound doesn't show you everything."

Doctors said they repeatedly conducted practice sessions on the deliveries and were well prepared. Gupta said the woman was given spinal anesthesia and could hear the babies as they came out.

"When the first baby came out, he was crying and kicking," Gupta said. "That eased the tension in the operating room because the first one came out healthy." Dr. Richard Paulson, director of the fertility program at the University of Southern California, said octuplets born premature could face serious health risks, including breathing problems and neurological damage. The mother also has an increased risk of hemorrhage, Paulson said.

"It's a risky decision to try to have all eight babies," said Paulson, who had no role in the delivery. "I would not recommend it under any circumstances, but I respect a parent's decision."

For people who use fertility drugs, the vast majority of births — 80 percent — are single babies. Among multiple births, the most common are twins, Paulson said. Paulson said the latest births likely resulted from the use of fertility drugs and not in vitro fertilization.

"When you hear about someone having octuplets, it's almost always the case that they took fertility medications and not IVF," he said.

It's easier to control the number of births through in vitro fertilization, which involves combining egg and sperm in a lab dish and transferring the embryo into the uterus. Fertility drugs induce or enhance ovulation and couples often opt for selective reduction, in which women carrying multiple fetuses reduce the number of viable fetuses to two. The Bellflower medical center is about 17 miles southeast of Los Angeles.

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Invisibility cloaks by 2039?

London, Jan 26: Science experts have predicted that X-Ray vision and Harry Potter-style invisibility cloaks may be among some of the inventions that will become part of everyday life by 2039.

The list of predicted inventions also includes an affordable and readily-available jet pack, like that used by James Bond in the film Thunderball.

It would allow users to travel short distances quickly and to avoid roads.

The experts believe that X-Ray vision’s realisation could be possible because of an extention of existing research on ultrasound. They say that it would allow people to see through walls.

They further state that shops will also be selling invisibility cloaks, like those worn by fictional characters including Harry Potter, in future.

According to them, ongoing studies aimed at developing fabrics that deceive the human eye by distorting light waves may make it possible.

In the meanwhile, material replicating a gecko''s foot could be developed for gloves and boots, allowing people to stick to walls and climb like Spiderman.

The predicted inventions have been enlisted to mark the 30th anniversary of the first mobile telephone network, which was launched in Tokyo in 1979 by a Japanese company.

The survey conducted by the magazine also showed that most scientists believed that within 30 years a handheld language-translating device, like the "Babel Fish" in The Hitchhiker''s Guide to the Galaxy, could be developed, allowing the instant conversion of foreign words being heard by the user.

The scientists were of the opinion that it could build on technology already used by US soldiers in Iraq, which recognises common speech patterns to translate Arabic into English.

Also on the list was a "handheld healing machine", similar to that wielded by Dr McCoy in Star Trek. The scientists surveyed thought that it could be pointed at a user''s body to discover internal injuries and encourage healing.

Meanwhile, a device to harness human energy to charge devices like mobile phones and iPods could also be developed, said the scientists.

"Crystal-ball gazing is a fraught endeavour... but in 30 years'' time these gadgets may change our lives as much, or maybe more, than cellphones, iPods and the internet," the Telegraph quoted the magazine as saying.

The list included:

- X-Ray vision

- Invisibility cloak

- Hand-held healing machine

- Spiderman-like materials for gloves and boots

- Human energy phone charger

- Jet pack

- Personal spaceship

- Artificial diving gills

- Translating machine

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A new way to produce hydrogen 'discovered'

Washington, Jan 24: Scientists have discovered what they claim is a new way to produce hydrogen "by exposing selected clusters of aluminium atoms to water".

"Our previous research suggested that electronic properties govern everything about these aluminium clusters, but this new study shows that it is the arrangement of atoms within the clusters that allows them to split water.

"Generally, this knowledge might allow us to design new nanoscale catalysts by changing the arrangements of atoms in a cluster. The results could open up a new area of research not only related to splitting water, but also to breaking the bonds of other molecules, as well," lead scientist Evan Pugh of Penn State University said.

In their study, the scientists probed the reactions of water with individual aluminium clusters by combining them under controlled conditions in a custom-designed flow-reactor.

They found that a water molecule will bind between two aluminium sites in a cluster as long as one of the sites behaves like a Lewis acid, a positively charged centre that wants to accept an electron, and the other behaves like a Lewis base, a negatively charged centre that wants to give away an electron.

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Mars and Mercury were formed from the scraps of Earth and Venus

Washington, Jan 23: Scientists have come up with a radical new theory of planet formation, by suggesting that Mars and Mercury were formed from the scraps of Earth and Venus.

According to a report in National Geographic News, the model, made by Brad Hansen, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles, could explain some characteristics of Mars and Mercury that have long puzzled scientists.

“In this picture, Mars and Mercury are essentially byproducts” of Earth and Venus, said Hansen.

Scientists generally agree that Earth and the other rocky planets in the solar system formed from a wispy disk of gas and dust that ringed the infant sun some 4.5 billion years ago.

Over time, the microscopic dust particles coalesced into pebble-size clumps. The pebbles became boulders that became mountain-size “planetesimals,” which merged into full-fledged planets.

In computer simulations of this process, scientists typically assume that the initial dust particles were distributed evenly in a disk around the sun.

“While this is a logical first guess, there are some problems,” said Andrew Youdin, a planetary modeler at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) who was not involved in the research.

If the rocky planets formed from a homogenous debris disk, they should all be roughly the same size and orbit the sun in similar circular orbits, Youdin explained.

In reality, however, Venus and Earth are much more massive than Mercury and Mars, and the orbits of the latter two planets are more elliptical, or eccentric, than expected.

Hansen proposes that the dust disk fragmented into bands of debris at various distances from the sun—much like the rings of Saturn.

According to this scenario, Earth and Venus formed within one particularly thick band, or annulus, in the inner solar system.

As the young Earth and Venus circled the sun, they waded through a sea of pebble- and mountain-size debris.

The two planets captured and assimilated some of this debris, but hurled other chunks out of the annulus. Most of these ejected particles eventually circled back, returning to the annulus. But other bits collided with one another during their exile.

“If this happens, the particles are put on a new orbit,” Hansen said. “They become decoupled from the main annulus and don’t come back,” he added.

Computer simulations by Hansen suggest Mercury and Mars could have formed from such separated debris. According to Hansen’s estimates, about 90 percent of the debris in the annulus went into the formations of Earth and Venus, while the leftovers formed Mercury and Mars.

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Different fishes but still same!

Washington, Jan 23: Researchers believe that they have solved the puzzle of three seemingly different fish, one all males, one all females and one all juveniles. They're the same fish, and undergo remarkable changes as they mature. "You can imagine it was a pretty exciting discovery," said G David Johnson, an ichthyologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. "The pieces kept falling into place."

"And it tells you how little we know about the deep sea, Johnson said in a telephone interview.

The fish live in the sparsely populated deep water thousands of feet below the surface, though as youngsters they rise to shallower levels where there is more to eat.

Cetomimidae, a type of whale fish, had been known since the 19th century, but only females had been found.

Seemingly related species called Mirapinnidae, or tapetails, and Megalomycteridae, or bignose fish, were identified in the 1950s and 1960s. Tapetails were only found as juveniles and bignoses only as males.

Although their skeletons indicated the three were related, there were so many differences no one could believe they were the same fish at different sexes or stages in life, Johnson said.

But it turns out that is the case, Johnson and colleagues report this week in Biology Letters, a journal of Britain's Royal Society.

All three will now be classified as Cetomimidae, he said.

Johnson said the researchers were able to link the fish through comparative anatomical study and, once they obtained fresh samples, by their DNA.

The larvae are called tapetails because they grow long streamers, he said. The purpose of the streamer remains unknown, but several fish larvae develop similar appendages, so it must have some value, he said. They reside within 600 feet of the surface, a region well stocked with food.

As adults, however, these fish descend thousands of feet down into the dark ocean.

There is scarce food there and the females cope by developing a large mouth — a common trait among fish living in the deepest waters — and they even develop teeth in their gill area that can serve as an additional mouth.

Even stranger, males who reach adulthood don't eat at all. Having gorged as larvae, their jaw fuses and they develop a vestigial gut that only stores shells from previous meals. That's an advantage, Johnson said, because in the deep ocean "there's not a lot of food, you're better off taking your lunch with you." The males gorge as larvae and grow a giant liver, storing energy there to live on.

"This thing was basically a set of testes looking for the female," Johnson said.

The males also develop a large nose to sense smells in the dark water.

Meanwhile, researchers had noted that females have some unusual tissue, separate from the skin, on their body. It's not luminous, so Johnson speculated that this tissue may produce a pheromone that the big-nosed male can home in on.

Co-authors of the paper were John R. Paxton of the Australian Museum, Sydney; Tracey T. Sutton of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Takashi P. Satoh and Mutsumi Nishida of the University of Tokyo and Tetsuya Sado and Masaki Miya of the Natural History Museum, Chiba, Japan.

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Astronomers discovered “Super-Neptune"

Washington, Jan 22: Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have discovered a planet somewhat larger and more massive than Neptune orbiting a star 120 light-years from Earth, which they have termed as “Super-Neptune”.

While Neptune has a diameter 3.8 times that of Earth and a mass 17 times Earth’s, the new world (named HAT-P-11b) is 4.7 times the size of Earth and has 25 Earth masses.

HAT-P-11b was discovered because it passes directly in front of (transits) its parent star, thereby blocking about 0.4 percent of the star’s light.

This periodic dimming was detected by a network of small, automated telescopes known as “HATNet,” which is operated by the Center in Arizona and Hawaii.

HAT-P-11b is the 11th extrasolar planet found by HATNet, and the smallest yet discovered by any of the several transit search projects underway around the world.

Transit detections are particularly useful because the amount of dimming tells the astronomers how big the planet must be.

By combining transit data with measurements of the star’s “wobble” (radial velocity) made by large telescopes like Keck, astronomers can determine the mass of the planet.

A number of Neptune-like planets have been found recently by radial velocity searches, but HAT-P-11b is only the second Neptune-like planet found to transit its star, thus permitting the precise determination of its mass and radius.

The newfound world orbits very close to its star, revolving once every 4.88 days. As a result, it is baked to a temperature of around 1100 degrees F.

The star itself is about three-fourths the size of our Sun and somewhat cooler.

There are signs of a second planet in the HAT-P-11 system, but more radial velocity data are needed to confirm that and determine its properties. Another team has located one other transiting super-Neptune, known as GJ436b, around a different star. It was discovered by a radial velocity search and later found to have transits.

According to Harvard astronomer Gaspar Bakos, who led the discovery team, “Having two such objects to compare helps astronomers to test theories of planetary structure and formation.”

HAT-P-11 is in the constellation Cygnus, which puts in it the field of view of NASA’s upcoming Kepler spacecraft.

Kepler will search for extrasolar planets using the same transit technique pioneered by ground-based telescopes.

This mission potentially could detect the first Earth-like world orbiting a distant star.

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Lightest known exoplanet

The lightest known exoplanet, called MOA-2007-BLG-192-L b, may be even smaller than earlier thought, according to a study.

Scientists initially believed that the exoplanet weighed 3.3 Earths.

But Jean-Philippe Beaulieu of the Paris Astrophysical Institute, a member of the team behind the latest study, said that the planet weighs just 1.4 Earths.

A presentation on the new analysis of the rocky body was made at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in London last week.

The presenters said that, in size terms, the planet was a near twin of our own planet, closer in mass than any known planet except Venus.

Scott Gaudi of Ohio State University in Columbus, who was not part of the research team, said that the new measurements "give a much more robust estimate" of the mass of the planet and its host star.

"The result is important because this is the lowest-mass planet yet detected, and is extremely close to the mass of the Earth. Obviously, finding a true Earth-mass planet is one of the biggest goals of searches for exoplanets. We are very close to that goal now," New Scientist quoted him as saying.

The researchers plan to get more data on the parent star in April or May using the Very Large Telescope in northern Chile.

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We all are Martians!

London, Jan 19: An astronomer has suggested that all human beings may be Martians, as meteorites from the Red Planet may have seeded life on Earth billions of years ago. According to a report in The Sun, the astronomer in question is Heather Couper.

"Mars is closer to the solar system's asteroid belt than us and must have been hit by many more impacts. Some collisions blasted bits of Mars into space which circled the sun and fell to Earth as meteorites," she said.

"So, it is possible life began on Mars and spread to Earth thanks to cosmic collisions. It means we could all be Martians," she added. The claim follows the recent finding that methane gas has been detected on Mars.

It is backed up by tests by scientists to see if microbes could survive the shock of being blasted into space and hitting another planet. They showed micro-organisms that live in cracks within rocks survived all but the most cataclysmic impacts.

The discovery that microbes may still inhabit Mars is sparking fresh interest in a four billion-year-old Martian meteorite found in Antarctica in 1984. NASA has said that it might contain fossils of microbes, which some scientists believe are Martian life forms.

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New dinosaur species named Minotaurasaurus Ramachandrani

New Delhi, Jan 17: A previously unknown species of dinosaurs found in the Gobi desert has been named after an Indian-origin scientist who made available a virtually complete skull in his possession for scientific scrutiny.

American paleontologists Clifford Miles and Clark Miles, who studied the skull with a bull-like appearance with flared nostrils, described it as belonging to a new genus and species of Ankylosaurid.

Ankylosaurids are armoured dinosaurs that evolved about 125 million years ago and were found in North America, East Asia and Europe.

Indian-origin scientist V S Ramachandran bought the skull from a Japanese fossil collector and displayed it at the Victor Valley Museum, California.

The US scientists at the Western Paleontological Laboratories in Utah named the new species as Minotaurasaurus Ramachandrani, after Ramachandran made the skull available to them.

Miles reported their findings in the latest issue of Indian research journal Current Science.

The generic name 'Minotaurasaurus' means 'man-bull reptile' in Latin. The species has been named so because of the bull-like appearance of the skull which was found in the Gobi desert.

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Scientists solve astronomy mystery

Washington, Jan 16: In a new research, scientists have solved the longstanding astronomy mystery of how massive stars form without blowing away the clouds of gas and dust that feed their growth.

The research, by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, University of California, Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley, has shown how a massive star can grow despite outward-flowing radiation pressure that exceeds the gravitational force pulling material inward.

Using 3-D radiation hydrodynamics simulations, the group, which includes Livermore’s Richard Klein, who also is an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley, and his LLNL postdoc Andrew Cunningham, unexpectedly discovered that these massive stars also tend to occur in binary or multiple star systems.

“Originally, we were just exploring the physics of massive star formation,” Klein said. “As we were looking at the physics, we found that gravitational instabilities cause companion stars to form around massive stars,” he added.

Massive stars produce so much light that the radiation pressure they exert on the gas and dust around them is stronger than their gravitational attraction, a circumstance that has long been expected to prevent them from growing by accretion.

“We didn’t set out to solve that question, so it was a nice side benefit of the study,” said Mark Krumholz, lead author and an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the UC Santa Cruz said.

“The main finding is that radiation pressure does not limit the growth of massive stars,” he added.

The team spent years developing complex computer codes for simulating the processes of star formation.

Combined with advances in computer technology, their latest code (called ORION) enabled them to run a detailed 3-D simulation of the collapse of an enormous interstellar gas cloud to form a massive star.

“Logically, we thought the massive amounts of radiation pressure would stop the star in its tracks from growing any larger,” Klein said.

“But instead, gravitational instabilities channeled gas onto the star system through disks and filaments, sort of like fingers, that self-shield against the radiation, while allowing the radiation to escape through optically thin bubbles,” he added.

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Levitation

Many of those who have been known to levitate have had fervent and passionate states of mind. The early Christian Church believed levitation was a sign of demonic possession, and certainly it has been known to afflict the possessed. However, throughout the centuries, many holy people have also been able to lift themselves off the ground. The most famous was probably St Joseph of Copertino, born in 1603 in Apulia, Italy, who reached a state of religious ecstasy that allowed him to defy gravity.

He is said to have levitated over a hundred times in his life, and it was the demonstration of his rapture-induced ability in front of Pope Urbain VIII that led to his canonisation. Eastern philosophies and religions teach that levitation can be achieved through a devoted study to fully harness the body’s life force. This natural energy is called ‘Ch’i’ or ‘Ki’, and is said to be controlled by extensive yogic training. The phenomenon of ‘yogic hops’, where a person can make short levitational movements using transcendental meditation is also advanced by Eastern teachings. The focus is placed less on extreme emotion, but more on visualisationand breath control to summon up all latent energy within the body.

Some psychics also believe the power needed to levitate ourselves is a naturally inherent psychokinetic power. The nineteenth century medium Daniel Douglas Home was known as a practised proponent of the levitating craft. In 1868 he was seen levitating out of a window on the third storey of a building. It was reported that he reentered the building through another window on the same floor. Unlike the religious examples, Douglas Home did not enter a trance, and believed it just required a good deal of concentration. However, many people in the modern age believe the theories of levitation are best left to the engineers, designers and magicians in glamorous cabaret shows.

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Venus may have had continents and oceans in its ancient past

London, Jan 14: In a new research, scientists have claimed to detect evidence for granite highlands on Venus in data almost two decades old, which suggests that the planet may have once been far more like Earth, with oceans and continents.

According to a report in Nature News, the data includes nighttime infrared emissions coming from the surface of Venus, which was detected by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in 1990.

Analyzing these data, an international team led by planetary scientist George Hashimoto, now at Okayama University, Japan, found that Venus’s highland regions emitted less infrared radiation than its lowlands.

One interpretation of this lower infrared emission from the highlands, according to the authors, is that they are composed largely of ‘felsic’ rocks, particularly granite.

Granite, which on Earth is found in continental crust, requires water for its formation.

“This is the first direct evidence that early in the history of the Solar System, Venus was a habitable planet with plenty of water,” said Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Washington State University in Pullman.

“The question is how long Venus remained habitable. But this gives new impetus for the search for microbial life in Venus’s lower atmosphere,” he added.

Before Galileo, researchers had believed that only radar could see through the dense clouds of sulphuric acid in Venus’s atmosphere to the surface, according to co-author Kevin Baines, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “Detecting the surface in the infrared is a breakthrough,” he said.

The possible presence of granite also suggests that tectonic plate movement and continent formation may have occurred on Venus, as well as recycling of water and carbon between the planet’s mantle and atmosphere.

According to geophysicist Norm Sleep of Stanford University in California, the implication of continent formation is “quite significant”.

Venus might have once been almost entirely underwater, although without further geochemical data, we don’t know whether this early ocean’s temperature was 30 degree Celsius or 150 degree Celsius, he added.

“Whether tepid or boiling, any ocean on Venus would have lasted only a few hundred million years. As the Sun became hotter and brighter, the planet experienced a runaway greenhouse effect,” Sleep explained.

Nowadays, the planet is a paragon of the uninhabitable, with an atmosphere of 96 percent carbon dioxide and a surface temperature of around 460 degrees C.

“Any life on Venus that hadn''t figured out how to colonize the cloud tops a billion years after the planet’s formation would have been in big trouble,” said Sleep.

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Bricks for future Moon colonies

Students from the college of engineering at Virginia Tech in the US have made highly durable bricks composed of a lunar rock-like material, which one day might be used to build dwellings in colonies on the moon.

The invention won the In-Situ Lunar Resource Utilization materials and construction category award from the Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems (PISCES).

The team of students, under the advisement of Kathryn Logan, a professor in the materials science and engineering department, designed the brick as a potential building tool for future colonies on the moon.

Initially designed to construct a dome, the building material is composed of a lunar rock-like material mixed with powdered aluminum that can be molded into any shape.

Design work on the early-development lunar bricks was based on previous work by the college of engineering student team's adviser Kathryn Logan, a professor of materials science and engineering and the Virginia Tech Langley Professor at the National Institute of aerospace in Hampton, Virginia.

Logan's prior research entailed mixing powdered aluminum and ceramic materials to form armor plating for tanks funded through a department of defense contract.

"I theorized that if I could do this kind of reaction to make armor, then I could use a similar type of reaction to make construction materials for the moon," Logan said.

Since actual lunar rock, known as regolith, is scarce, the students used volcanic ash from a deposit on Earth along with various minerals and basaltic glass, similar to rock on the lunar surface, according to Eric Faierson, a doctoral student who led the Virginia Tech team.

During initial experiments, the simulated regolith and aluminum powder were mixed and placed inside a shallow aluminum foil crucible.

A wire was inserted into the mixture, which was then heated to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit triggering a reaction called self-propagating high-temperature synthesis (SHS), according to Logan.

The reaction caused the material to form a solid brick. A ceramic crucible was used in later experiments to form complex curved surfaces.

Once the student team had created a brick, they found that it was almost as strong as concrete under various pressure tests.

According to Faierson, one-square inch of the brick could withstand the gradual application of 2,450 pounds.

This strength would enable it to withstand an environment where gravity is a fraction of the pull on Earth.

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10 extinct beasts to walk again

A report in New Scientist has predicted ten extinct creatures that might be brought back to life.

On the assumption that necessary technology to re-create extinct life would soon be available, the selected ten animals are:

Sabre-toothed tiger: There are some spectacularly preserved sabre-toothed specimens from the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles. There are also some permafrost-preserved specimens that might be a better source of DNA.

Neanderthal: A draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome should be published sometime this year. There is speculation that it could be used to resurrect the Neanderthal. Because of our very close-shared ancestry, humans would make ideal egg donors and surrogate mothers.

Short-faced bear: Recovering the DNA of the short-faced bear should be possible as there are specimens encased in permafrost.

Tasmanian tiger: The existence of various preserved tissues less than a century old means geneticists should be able to get good-quality DNA and produce a complete sequence of the Tasmanian tiger genome before too long.

Glyptodon: The Volkswagen Beetle-sized “colossal” armadillo, with its spiky, club-like tail, once rumbled across the South American countryside. Because there are no frozen glyptodons, obtaining usable DNA will depend on finding well-preserved remains in a cool, dry cave.

Woolly rhinoceros: Resurrecting the woolly rhino has lots going for it. As with the mammoth, there are plenty of specimens preserved in permafrost, and the availability of hair, horns and hooves is a big plus.

Dodo: In 2002, geneticists at the University of Oxford got permission to cut into the world’s best-preserved dodo specimen, a foot bone, complete with skin and feathers. This yielded minute fragments of dodo mitochondrial DNA but nothing more. Since then, no other specimen has yielded even a whiff of dodo DNA, but there is still hope that some will one day be found.

Giant ground sloth: The sloth’s relatively recent extinction means that several specimens have been found with hair, an excellent source of DNA.

Moa: There is plenty of moa DNA to be found in well-preserved bones and even eggs in caves across New Zealand, so obtaining a moa genome should be doable.

Irish elk: This Pleistocene giant was once found across Europe. A typical male of the species stood more than 2 metres tall at the shoulder and sported antlers 4 metres wide. It is actually a deer rather than an elk, and its closest living relative is the much smaller fallow deer.

Gorilla: Conservationists are freezing tissue samples from some threatened species of Gorilla, so clones could be created with the help of a closely related surrogate species if a suitable habitat becomes available.

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Astrophysicists has developed the first complete map of the Milky Way galaxy

Washington, Jan 06: A team of astrophysicists has developed the first complete map of the Milky Way galaxy’s four spiral arms. The new map was developed by Iowa State University’s Martin Pohl, Peter Englmaier of the University of Zurich in Switzerland and Nicolai Bissantz of Ruhr-University in Bochum, Germany.

As the sun and other stars revolve around the center of the Milky Way, researchers cannot see the spiral arms directly, but have to rely on indirect evidence to find them. In the visible light, the Milky Way appears as an irregular, densely populated strip of stars. Dark clouds of dust obscure the galaxy’s central region; so it cannot be observed in visible light.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Cosmic Background Explorer satellite was able to map the Milky Way in infrared light using an instrument called the Diffuse IR Background Experiment. The infrared light makes the dust clouds almost fully transparent. Englmaier and Bissantz used the infrared data from the satellite to develop a kinematic model of gas flow in the inner galaxy.

Pohl used the model to reconstruct the distribution of molecular gas in the galaxy, and that led to the researchers’ map of the galaxy’s spiral arms. The map shows that the inner part of the Milky Way has two prominent, symmetric spiral arms, which extend into the outer galaxy where they branch into four spiral arms.

“For the first time, these arms are mapped over the entire Milky Way,” said Pohl, an Iowa State associate professor of physics and astronomy. “The branching of two of the arms may explain why previous studies, using mainly the inner or mainly the outer galaxy, have found conflicting numbers of spiral arms,” he added.

In addition to the two main spiral arms in the inner galaxy, two weaker arms exist. These arms end about 10,000 light-years from the galaxy’s center. One of these arms has been known for a long time, but has always been a mystery because of its large deviation from circular motion.

The new model explains the deviation as a result of alternations to its orbit caused by the bar’s gravitational pull. The other, symmetric arm on the far side of the galaxy was recently found in gas data. The discovery of this second arm was a great relief for Englmaier. “Finally, it is clear that our model assumption of symmetry was correct and the inner galaxy is indeed quite symmetric in structure,” he said.

ANI

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Now broomstick can take you to space

London, Jan 06: If scientists have their way, future astronauts would be literally going into space by a broomstick, in the form of a 100,000km long tether anchored to the Earth as a “space elevator”.

According to a report, Raymond Riise of the European Space Agency demonstrated the device at a space elevator conference in December last year.

First mooted by Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1895, the space elevator idea has captured imaginations as what would be the greatest space mission ever conceived. The idea rests on making use of the outward centrifugal force supplied by the Earth’s rotation.

If the centrifugal force provided by the Earth is balanced with its gravitational force, by making use of a space elevator cable or tether whose centre of mass is at geostationary orbit, the tether would be held taut permanently, providing a means to propel people and cargo into space.

A long-standing critical issue is how to power the “climber” that would ascend the cable into space. Prevailing ideas include delivering microwave or laser power to the climber beamed from the Earth’s surface, or even from orbiting solar power collectors. But, European Space Agency ground station engineer Riise provided a markedly more simple idea. He proposed sending power mechanically, effectively by providing a carefully timed jerk of the cable at its base.

To demonstrate, he employed a broomstick to represent the cable held in tension, and an electric sander to provide a rhythmic vibration to the bottom of the stick.

Around the broomstick’s circumference, he tied three brushes representing the climber with their bristles pointing downwards, meaning it took slightly more force to lower the brush assembly than to raise it.

The vibration from the sander allowed the assembly to slide upward along the broomstick as it moved slightly downward, but grip it as it moved slightly upward. The net effect was that the assembly rose against gravity straight to the top of the stick.

The prototype’s approach would make for a bumpy ride in practice, but according to Riise, the rhythmic tugging on the cable could be smoothed out.

“It would be possible to make a suspension system that completely decouples the cabin where the passengers are,” he told. “For them, it would be a linear movement with very little disturbance,” he added.

ANI

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Mouse model of brain cancer developed

Washington, Jan 5: Researchers led by an Indian American have developed a versatile mouse model of glioblastoma - the commonest of deadly brain cancers in humans.

"Mouse models of human cancer have taught us a great deal about the basic principles of cancer biology," said Inder Verma, professor in the Laboratory of Genetics at the Salk Institute.

"By definition, however, they are just that: approximations that simulate a disease but never fully capture the molecular complexity underlying disease in humans."

Verma received his Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science and was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT. He is an American Cancer Society professor of molecular biology and recipient of an NIH (National Institutes of Health) Outstanding Investigator award. Verma is the director of the Laboratory of Genetics at the Salk Institute.

Trying to mimic randomly occurring mutations that lie at the heart of all tumours, Salk Institute researchers used modified viruses to shuttle cancer-causing oncogenes into a handful of cells in adult mice.

This could not only prove very useful in faithfully reproducing different types of tumours but also to clarify the nature of elusive cancer stem cells.

The most frequently used mouse cancer model relies on xenografts: Human tumour tissue or cancer cell
lines are transplanted in mice programmed to develop tumours quickly.

"These tumours are very reproducible, but this approach ignores the fact that the immune system can make or break cancer," said co-author Tomotoshi Marumoto, former postdoctoral researcher in the Verma lab and now an assistant professor at the Kobe Medical Centre Hospital in Kobe, Japan.

Other animal models either express oncogenes in a tissue-specific manner or shut down the expression of tumour suppressor genes in the whole tissue.

"But we know that tumours generally develop from a single cell or a small number of cells of a specific cell type, which is one of the major determinants of the characteristics of tumour cells," explained co-author Dinorah Friedmann-Morvinski.

To sidestep the shortcomings of currently used cancer models, the Salk team harnessed the power of lentiviral vectors to infect nondividing as well as dividing cells and ferry activated oncogenes into a small number of cells in adult, fully immunocompetent mice, said a Salk Institute release.

"These findings show that our cancer model will not only allow us to start understanding the biology of glioblastoma but will also allow us to answer many questions surrounding cancer stem cells," said Verma.

Although the work described to date pertains to glioblastoma, Verma and his team are currently using this methodology to investigate lung, pancreatic, and pituitary cancers.

IANS

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Boxgrove Priory Ruins

Boxgrove Priory, in the village of Boxgrove in Sussex, was founded in about 1066 by Robert de Haye, who in 1105 bestowed the church of St. Mary of Boxgrove upon the Benedictine Abbey of Lessay. In about 1126 upon the marriage of Robert's daughter Cecily, to Roger St. John the number of monks living at Boxgrove was increased from the original three to six, and by 1187 there were a total of fifteen. The nineteenth monk was added to the priory in about 1230 by William de Kainesham, Canon of Chichester. By 1535 the priory's possessions were worth £185 19s. 8d. gross, and £145 10s. 2½d. clear.

The Priory was dissolved in 1536. At the time of the dissolution there were eight priests and one novice, as well as twenty-eight servants and eight children living in the priory.

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