Physical Science – Page 135

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Cosmology in Crisis Over Dark Energy

May 21, 2008

Ten years ago, cosmologists invented dark energy to explain certain features of the expansion of the universe that could not be reconciled with observations of supernova magnitudes. Now, reported National Geographic News, dark energy remains the most profound problem in physics. It’s like theory and observations are refusing to cooperate with an arranged marriage. […]

Astronomy

Hubble Snaps Colliding Galaxies

April 24, 2008

A new catalog of colliding galaxy images has been released by the Hubble Space Science Institute. The 59 images show “close encounters that sometimes end in grand mergers and overflowing sites of new star birth as the colliding galaxies morph into wondrous new shapes.” The release coincided with the 18th anniversary of the Hubble Space […]

Health

Mars Lacks Safety Shield for Humans

April 3, 2008

Forget all those optimistic, futuristic sci-fi tales of humans landing on Mars. It isn’t safe, said Space.com. NASA’s space radiation program doubts that a human body could survive prolonged exposure to space. This is a problem for long stays on the moon, too. “The magnetic field of Earth protects humanity from radiation in […]

Amazing Facts

Seeing Vision in a New Light

March 31, 2008

The eye is like a camera, right? That picture is way too simplistic. The eye-brain visual system does image processing and gleans information from photons in diverse and remarkable ways. Here are some recent findings by scientists: Upward mobility: A team of Harvard scientists found some retinal ganglion cells that sense upward motion. Writing in […]

Origin of Life

Enceladus: Hotter Chemical Plume Found

March 26, 2008

Initial results of Cassini’s March 12 flyby of Enceladus have been published. You can watch a replay of today’s press briefing, read the blog, and read illustrated bulletins about the organic material, chemical signatures, hot spot locations, the stellar occultation (see also the Quicktime animation). Another article shows the plume locations. An astrobiologist (Chris McKay) […]

Physics

Crater Dater Deflator: Impactors Can Be Recycled

March 25, 2008

They came from outer space – that was the old paradigm about impactors that made craters on planetary bodies. Then, we learned how secondary craters can confuse a surface’s history (06/08/2006, 09/25/2007). Now, two papers in Icarus show that moons can do a lateral pass. Alvarellos et al,1 showed that Jupiter’s moon Io […]

Astronomy

How to Avoid Dark Energy

March 15, 2008

Who needs dark energy? Copernicus? George Ellis (U. of Cape Town) said we could get rid of dark energy by throwing the Copernican Principle overboard. Writing in Nature,1 he said that dark energy may simply be an artifact of the geometry of space-time. Copernicus did not invent the Copernican Principle. He was just […]

Physics

Falling Rocks Leave Holes in Science

March 13, 2008

Hard data in astronomy is hard to come by, except when it comes by special delivery – as with meteorites. If there is any class of phenomena that should be well understood, it should be space debris and the craters they form, because the processes involved can be watched in real time. Meteorites adorn many […]

Astronomy

Is Cosmology Getting Wimp-y?

February 28, 2008

Physics and astronomy are usually thought of as the “hard” sciences, where empiricism is king. Read the following excerpts from a story on the BBC News science page with that in mind (suggestion: replace “dark matter” with “mysterious unknown stuff”). The first stars to appear in the Universe may have been powered by dark matter, […]

Human Body

Fast Protein Fine-Tunes the Ear

February 13, 2008

A protein helps the human ear respond to volume differences over 12 orders of magnitude.

Amazing Facts

Did Birds Evolve Aeronautical Engineering?

February 8, 2008

Two news stories on birds may not seem to flock together. One is about their supreme aeronautical engineering. The other ponders when they evolved. A story on EurekAlert and Science Daily describes how engineers are eyeing birds, bats and insects for design ideas. The appeal is clear from the following comparisons: A Blackbird […]

Physics

Are Long-Term Climate Models Trustworthy?

February 5, 2008

Everything from global warming policy to evolutionary history depends on long-term climate models. Textbooks make it seem like earth keeps reliable recordings that allow scientists to simply read off the record of years, decades, centuries, millennia and millions of years objectively. It’s not that simple, wrote Maureen E. Raymo and Peter Huybers in Nature last […]

Intelligent Design

SETI Signals Could Be Loaded with Information

February 4, 2008

Unusual properties of electromagnetic waves allow for a higher carrying capacity of information than thought. SETI researcher Seth Shostak reported on Space.com that Swedish researchers have found a possible “subspace channel” in the orbital angular momentum of narrowband radio waves that might allow the encoding of information. This information would be impervious to the jumbling […]

Physics

Million-Degree Plasma Found in Orion

January 19, 2008

The Orion nebula, an object of beauty to stargazers (picture, Hubble view) is pervaded by plasma heated to two million degrees Kelvin, reported astronomers in Science.1 Two funnel-shaped regions of x-ray emitting plasma in the extended nebula were observed by astronomers using the X-Ray Multi-Mirror (XMM)-Newton satellite. “The energy requirement to heat the […]

Physics

Comet Woes Lamented

December 27, 2007

Space.com posted an article on “The enduring mysteries of comets.” The mysteries include: Where did earth’s oceans come from? For a long time, scientists expected comets delivered the water, until measurements showed a discrepancy in the hydrogen/deuterium ratios. It’s also highly improbable there was enough wet stuff in those assumed delivery vehicles. No secular scientist […]

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