Planet With Four Suns Discovered

The new planet - a gas giant - is about six times the size of Earth

An international team of amateur and professional astronomers announced the discovery of a planet with four suns -- the first reported case of such a phenomenon.

The planet, located about 5,000 light years from Earth, has been dubbed PH1 in honor of Planet Hunters, a program led by Yale University in the United States which enlists volunteers to look for signs of new planets.

PH1 is orbiting two suns, and in turn is orbited by a second distant pair of stars. Only six planets are known to orbit two stars, researchers say, and none of those are orbited by other distant stars.

"Circumbinary planets are the extremes of planet formation," said Yale's Meg Schwamb, lead author of a paper presented Monday at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in Nevada.

"The discovery of these systems is forcing us to go back to the drawing board to understand how such planets can assemble and evolve in these dynamically challenging environments."

US citizen scientists and Planet Hunters participants Kian Jek and Robert Gagliano were the first to identify PH1. Their observations were then confirmed by a team of US and British researchers working in Hawaii.

PH1 is a gas giant with a radius about 6.2 times that of Earth, making it a bit bigger than Neptune. It orbits a pair of eclipsing stars that are 1.5 and 0.41 times the mass of the Sun roughly every 138 days.

The two other stars are orbiting the planetary system at a distance that is roughly 1,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.

The Planethunters.org website was created in 2010 to encourage amateur astronomers to identify planets outside our solar system, using data from the US space agency NASA's Kepler space telescope.

Kepler, launched in March 2009, is NASA's first mission in search of Earth-like planets orbiting stars similar to our Sun.

The discovery of PH1 was made available online Monday at the site arxiv.org and has been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal for publication.

"It still continues to astonish me how we can detect, let alone glean so much information, about another planet thousands of light-years away just by studying the light from its parent star," Jek said. AFP

24-Mile Skydive a Boon for YouTube, Social Media

skydiver 10 15 12

Felix Baumgartner’s 24-mile (38.6-kilometer) skydive from the stratosphere was a boon for social networks as millions of users shared in the wonder of the moment from their computers, tablets and phones.

Here’s a look at how the world, through the Internet, watched the jump.

YouTube:

As Baumgartner ascended in the balloon, so did the number of viewers watching YouTube’s live stream of the event. Its popularity grew as the moment of the jump drew closer, as people kept sharing links with each other on Twitter and Facebook and websites embedded the stream.

Nearly 7.3 million viewers were watching as Baumgartner sat on the edge of the capsule, moments before the jump.

In the United States, the opportunity to watch the jump on TV was limited to the Discovery Channel, though more than 40 television networks in 50 total countries carried the live feed, organizers said. It was streamed by more than 130 digital outlets.

Facebook:

After Baumgartner landed, sponsor Red Bull posted a picture of the daredevil on his knees to Facebook. In less than 40 minutes, the picture was shared more than 29,000 times and generated nearly 216,000 likes and more than 10,000 comments. Immediately after the jump, Red Bull solicited questions for Baumgartner through Facebook and Twitter, promising to answer three at a post-jump news conference.

Twitter:

During the jump and the moments after Baumgartner safely landed, half the worldwide trending topics on Twitter had something to do with the jump — pushing past tweets about Justin Bieber and seven National Football League games being played at the same time. Celebrities of all kinds weighed in, including athletes, actors and high-profile corporate executives.

“It’s pretty amazing that I can watch, live on my computer, a man riding a balloon to the edge of space so he can jump out of it. #TheFuture,” tweeted Wil Wheaton, who acted in the iconic science-fiction series “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

“Felix Baumgartner is a boss,” tweeted Jozy Altidore, a soccer player for the US men’s national team.

Reddit:

Two threads related to the jump made the front page of Reddit. Users quickly upvoted a request for Baumgartner to participate in an “Ask Me Anything” on the site, where users pepper someone on the site with questions about anything they want. President Barack Obama held court as the subject of a similar thread in August.

Nearly 29,000 users weighed in on a separate thread about the jump itself, voting it up and down and robustly commenting.

Agence France-Presse

Astronomers Find Diamond Planet

An artist's rendition shows interior of 55 Cancri e. (AFP/YALE UNIVERSITY/Haven Giguere)

Twinkling stars are not the only diamonds in the sky. Scientists Thursday reported the existence of a "diamond planet" twice the size of Earth, and eight times its mass, zooming around a nearby star.

In fact, this is not the first diamond planet ever discovered, but it is the first found orbiting a sun-like star and whose chemical makeup has been specified.

The discovery means that distant rocky planets can no longer be assumed to have chemical constituents, interiors, atmospheres, or biologies similar to those of Earth, said lead researcher Nikku Madhusudhan, a Yale postdoctoral researcher in physics and astronomy.

The planet was first observed last year -- but researchers initially assumed it was similar in its chemical make-up to Earth.

It was only after a more detailed analysis that the French-American research team determined the planet is vastly different from our own.

It "appears to be composed primarily of carbon (as graphite and diamond), iron, silicon carbide, and, possibly, some silicates," the authors wrote in a statement ahead of their findings' publication in the US journal "Astrophysical Journal Letters."

"The surface of this planet is likely covered in graphite and diamond rather than water and granite," he explained.

In fact, the planet, dubbed Cancri 55 e, appears to have no water at all. And as much as a third of the planet's substantial mass could be made of diamond, a super-dense compound of carbon.

In comparison, the Earth's interior is rich in oxygen and very poor in carbon, explained Kanani Lee, also of Yale and another of the study's co-authors.

The researchers estimated the planet's radius with data collected while it was transiting in front of its star.

That information, combined with an estimate of its mass, was used to model the planet's chemical composition, based on a calculation of just what elements and compounds could result in that specific size and mass.

The planet's orbit around its star is lightning fast -- a year lasts just 18 hours, compared to the 365 days of an Earth year. And because it is so close to its star, the surface temperatures average 3,900 degrees Fahrenheit (2,148 degrees Celsius), rendering it completely inhospitable to life.

But the planet -- 40 light years away from Earth in the Cancer constellation -- opens new avenues for studying geochemical and geophysical processes of Earth-sized planets outside our solar system. Afp

Japan team offers fertility hope with stem cell eggs

Handout. A team at Kyoto University harvested stem cells from mice and altered a number of genes to create cells very similar to the primordial germ cells that generate sperm in men and oocytes -- or eggs -- in women.

Hopes of a cure for infertility in humans were raised Friday after Japanese stem cell researchers announced they had created viable eggs using normal cells from adult mice.

The breakthrough raises the possibility that women who are unable to produce eggs naturally could have them created in a test tube from their own cells and then planted back into their body.

A team at Kyoto University harvested stem cells from mice and altered a number of genes to create cells very similar to the primordial germ cells that generate sperm in men and oocytes -- or eggs -- in women.

They then nurtured these with cells that would become ovaries and transplanted the mixture into living mice, where the cells matured into fully-grown oocytes.

They extracted the matured oocytes, fertilised them in vitro -- in a test tube -- and implanted them into surrogate mother mice.

The resulting mice pups were born healthy and were even able to reproduce once they matured.

Writing in the US journal Science, which published the findings, research leader professor Michinori Saito said the work provided a promising basis for hope in reproductive medicine.

"Our system serves as a robust foundation to investigate and further reconstitute female germline development in vitro, not only in mice, but also in other mammals, including humans," he said.

Saito cautioned that this was not a ready-made cure for people with fertility problems, adding that a lot of work remained.

"This achievement is expected to help us understand further the egg-producing mechanism and contribute to clarifying the causes of infertility," he told reporters.

"We intend to continue this research with monkeys and humans," he said.

Stem cells -- infant cells that develop into the specialised tissues of the body -- have sparked great excitement because they offer the chance of rebuilding organs damaged by disease or accident.

Until fairly recently, the only way to obtain stem cells was to harvest them from embryos, a process that is controversial because it necessitates the destruction of the embryo.

Religious conservatives, amongst others, have objected to research on human embryonic stem cells because they hold that the destruction of a foetus is wrong.

But pioneering work done in 2006 by Shinya Yamanaka, also at Kyoto University, succeeded in generating "induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells", from skin tissue.

Like embryonic stemcells, iPS cells are also capable of developing into any cell in the body, but crucially their base material is readily available.

The findings on egg development published this week come just a year after scientists in Kyoto successfully coaxed sperm cells from mouse stem cells.

In that work, researchers took mice that were unable to produce normal sperm and injected them with the stem cell-derived primordial germ cells, or PGCs.

These PGCs "produced normal-looking sperm, which were then used to successfully fertilize eggs", the study said last year. AFP

April Indonesia Quake Broke the Records

Illustration

An 8.7 earthquake that struck west of Indonesia on April 11 was the biggest of its kind ever recorded and confirms suspicions that a giant tectonic plate is breaking up, scientists said on Wednesday.

The quake, caused by an unprecedented quadruple-fault rupture, gave Earth’s crustal mosaic such a shock that it unleashed quakes around the world nearly a week later, they said.

“We’ve never seen an earthquake like this,” said Keith Koper, a geophysicist at the University of Utah in the western United States.

“Nobody was anticipating an earthquake of this size and type, and the complexity of the faulting surprised everybody I’ve spoken to about this,” said Thorne Lay, a planetary sciences professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The quake occurred around 500 kilometers (300 miles) west of Sumatra in the middle of the Indo-Australian plate, a piece of Earth’s crust that spans Australia, the eastern Indian Ocean and the Indian sub-continent.

It was initially reported as measuring 8.6 on the “Moment magnitude” scale.

But a new calculation places it at 8.7, which under this logarithmic scale means the energy release is 40 percent greater than thought, according to investigations published in Nature.

It was the biggest “strike-slip” earthquake ever recorded, meaning a fault which opens laterally rather than up or down, and the 10th biggest quake of any kind in the last century.

It was followed two hours later by an 8.2 event on another fault a little farther to the south, and both were felt from India to Australia.

Earthquakes of such intensity are typically “subduction” quakes, where one tectonic plate slides beneath another at a plate boundary, causing vertical movement that can displace the sea and unleash a tsunami.

The December 26 2004 9.1 quake off Sumatra, whose waves killed a quarter of a million people around the Indian Ocean, is one such example.

But the April 11 event caused no tsunamis because the movement was sideways. Fatalities, too, were few — 10, according to the Indonesian authorities — because it occurred under the Indian Ocean.

Taking a scalpel to what happened that day, the seismologists believe there was a near-simultaneous rupturing of at least four faults, stacked up and lying at right angles to one another.

They ripped open one by one, all within 160 seconds, in a process known by the French term “en echelon.”

Even more remarkable, though, was where the event took place.

It occurred nowhere near a boundary between the plates which like a jigsaw puzzle comprise Earth’s crust.

Instead, it occurred in the heart of the Indo-Australian plate, tearing a gash up to 40 meters (yards) wide and confirming long-held suspicions that the plate is fragmenting.

According to this theory, the process began roughly millions of years ago, and is caused by a pulling-apart of the plate: the western part is colliding with Asia, which stops its movement, while the eastern part is gliding beneath Sumatra.

“It will take millions of years to form a new plate boundary and, most likely, it will take thousands of similar large quakes for that to happen,” Koper said.

Another study in Nature found that quakes occurred around the world for at least six days afterwards.

They included a 7.0 quake in Baja California, Mexico, and in Indonesia and Japan.

Mercifully, the big shakes occurred in rural areas, not in urban areas where the outcome “could potentially have been disastrous,” said Roland Burgmann of the University of California at Berkeley.

“Until now, we seismologists have always said, ‘Don’t worry about distant earthquakes triggering local quakes.’ This study now says that, while it is very rare — it may only happen ever few decades — it is a real possibility if the right kind of earthquake happens.”

Agence France-Presse

NASA Counts Down to Dramatic Mars Landing

Members of the Mars Science Laboratory test out an engineering model of its next generation Mars rover, dubbed "Curiosity", in the desert near Baker, California. Reuters/Gene Blevins

The Mars rover Curiosity, on a quest for signs the Red Planet once hosted ingredients for life, streaked into the home stretch of its eight-month voyage on Sunday nearing a make-or-break landing attempt that Nasa calls one of the toughest feats of robotic spaceflight.

Curiosity, the first full-fledged mobile science laboratory sent to a distant world, was scheduled to touch down inside a vast, ancient impact crater on Sunday at 10:31pm Pacific time (1:31am EDT on Monday/0531 GMT on Monday).

Mission control engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles acknowledge that delivering the one-ton, six-wheeled, nuclear-powered vehicle in one piece is a highly risky proposition, with zero margin for error.

In this 2011 file artist's rendering, a "sky crane" lowers the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover onto the surface of Mars. AP/Nasa/JPL-Caltech

But just 12 hours away from Curiosity's rendezvous with Mars, JPL's team said the spacecraft and its systems were functioning flawlessly, and forecasts called for favorable Martian weather over the landing zone.

After a journey from Earth of more than 350 million miles (567 million km), engineers said they were hopeful the rover, the size of a small sports car, will land precisely as planned near the foot of a tall mountain rising from the floor of Gale Crater in Mars' southern hemisphere.

"We're rationally confident, emotionally terrified," Adam Seltzner, leader of Curiosity's descent and landing team, told reporters at a JPL briefing early on Sunday, as the spacecraft hurtled to within 100,000 miles (161,000 km) of its destination - less than half the distance between Earth and the moon.

A file photo shows Mars photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope on the planet's closest approach to Earth in 60,000 years. AP/Nasa

The vessel was sailing through space at about 8,000 miles (13,000 km) per hour and steadily gaining speed from the tug of Martian gravity.

Flight controllers anticipate clear and calm conditions for touchdown, slated to occur in the Martian late afternoon.

There may be some haze in the planet's pink skies from ice clouds, typical for this time of year, with temperatures at about 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 12 Celsius).

Facing deep cuts in its science budget and struggling to regain its footing after cancellation of the space shuttle program - Nasa's centerpiece for 30 years - the agency has much at stake in the outcome of the $2.5 billion mission.

President Barack Obama's top science adviser, John Holdren, was among the dignitaries visiting JPL on Sunday for the landing, along with Nasa Administrator Charles Bolden.

"It's critically important for the nation because it allows us to stay on pace for what the president asked us to, getting humans to Mars in the mid-2030s," Bolden told Reuters.

He added that success also was key to Nasa's international partners in 12 countries in maintaining public and government support abroad for their continued funding.

Mars is the chief component of Nasa's long-term deep space exploration plans. Curiosity, the space agency's first astrobiology mission since the 1970s-era Viking probes, is designed primarily to search for evidence that the planet most similar to Earth may once have harbored the necessary building blocks for microbial life to evolve. 

Packed with gadgets

The rover, formally called the Mars Science Lab, is equipped with an array of sophisticated chemistry and geology instruments capable of analyzing samples of soil, rocks and atmosphere on the spot and beaming results back to scientists on Earth.

One is a laser gun that can zap a rock from 23 feet (7 meters) away to create a spark whose spectral image is analyzed by a special telescope to discern the mineral's chemical composition

For details on Curiosity rover mission, click here.

Speeding toward a landing on Mars

Nearing the end of its journey encased in a capsule-like shell, Curiosity was essentially flying on automatic pilot, guided by a computer packed with pre-programmed instructions.

Mission control activated the craft's backup computer on Saturday night, ensuring it will assume onboard command of the vessel should the primary computer fail during entry into the Martian atmosphere and its tricky descent to the surface.

The ship also began warming up rocket engines that will be used in final descent and landing maneuvers. 
Mission control contemplated sending Curiosity one last "parameter update" on Sunday, hours before atmospheric entry, giving the vessel an exact fix on its position in space.

But Nasa engineers said they would likely forego that transmission because the vessel has varied so little from its ideal course.
Otherwise, controllers will have little to do but anxiously track Curiosity's progress as it flies into Mars' upper atmosphere at 13,000 miles (20,921 km) per hour, 17 times the speed of sound, and begins a descent and landing sequence Nasa refers to as "the seven minutes of terror."

"We're all along for the ride," Seltzner said.
Curiosity's fate will then hinge on a complex series of maneuvers that include a giant, supersonic parachute deployment and a never-before-used jet-powered "sky crane" that must descend to the right spot over the planet, lower the rover to the ground on nylon tethers, cut the cords and fly away.

The sequence also involves 79 pyrotechnic detonations to release exterior ballast weights, open the parachute, separate the heat shield, detach the craft's back shell, jettison the parachute and other functions.

The failure of any of those would foil a successful landing, Seltzner said.
If everything works according to plan, controllers at JPL will know within a minute or two that the Curiosity is safely on the ground, alerted by a terse radio transmission relayed to Earth from the Mars orbiter Odyssey flying overhead.

A satellite relay is necessary because Earth will set beneath the Martian horizon about two minutes before the scheduled landing.

If no landing signal comes, it could take hours or days for scientists to learn if radio communications with the rover were merely disrupted or that it crashed or burned up during descent.

From 154 million miles (248 million kilometers) away, 1,400 scientists, engineers and guests were expected to tensely wait at JPL to learn Curiosity's fate, among them film star Morgan Freeman, television's Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek, comic actor Seth Green and actress June Lockhart of Lost in Space fame.
Another 5,000 people will be watching from the nearby California Institute of Technology, the academic home of JPL.

In a good-luck tradition dating back to the 1970s, engineers in the control room at JPL plan to break out cans of roasted peanuts about an hour before landing.

For details on Mars missions, click here.

Liu Yang First Woman Into Space From China

Bye: China's first female astronaut Liu Yang waves during a sending off ceremony as she departs for the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft rocket launch pad at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Jiuquan, China, Saturday. China will send its first woman and two other astronauts into space Saturday to work on a temporary space station for about a week, in a key step toward becoming only the third nation to set up a permanent base in orbit. (AP/Ng Han Guan)

China has launched its first female space traveller aboard a rocket that blasted off from the Gobi Desert on one of the country's most ambitious space missions yet.

Liu Yang, a 34-year-old air force pilot, and two male taikonauts, Jing Haipeng and Liu Wang, were aboard the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft as it left the Earth on Saturday on a voyage that will see it dock with an orbiting space module.

Two of the crew will live and work inside the bus-sized Tiangong 1 space module for a week to test its life-support systems while the third will remain in the capsule to deal with unexpected emergencies as China bids to become only the third nation with a permanent base orbiting Earth.

State media have said the mission will last about 10 days before the taikonauts travel back to Earth in the capsule that will land in the grasslands of western China with the help of parachutes.

Success in docking, and in living and working aboard the Tiangong 1, would smooth the way for more ambitious projects, such as sending a taikonaut to the moon, and add to China's international prestige in line with its growing economic prowess.

If completed, the mission will put China alongside the United States and Russia as the only countries to have independently maintained space stations, a huge boost to Beijing's ambitions of becoming a space power.

The mission demonstrated China's "commitment to its long-term human spaceflight plan", said Joan Johnson-Freese, an expert on the Chinese space programme at the US Naval War College in Rhode Island.

She said its success would "demonstrate the technological capabilities requisite for a future permanent space station".

Excluded from space station

Still, that is some years away. The Tiangong 1 is only a prototype, and the plan is to eventually replace it with a permanent, and bigger, space station due for completion around 2020.

Analysts say China's exclusion from the International Space Station, largely on objections from the United States, was one of the key spurs for it to pursue an independent programme 20 years ago, which reaches a high point with Saturday's launch.

China first launched a man into space in 2003 followed by a two-man mission in 2005 and a three-man trip in 2008 that featured China's first space walk.

While operating with limited resources, China's space programme is a source of huge national pride and enjoys top-level political and military backing.

The first female taikonaut is giving the programme an additional publicity boost. State media have gushed this week about Liu, pointing out that she once successfully landed her plane after a bird strike disabled one of its engines.

As with China's other female taikonaut candidates, Liu is married and has a child, a requirement because the space programme worries that exposure to space radiation may affect fertility. Aljazeera

Shouryya Ray cracked puzzles set by Sir Isaac Newton that have baffled mathematicians for more than 350 years

Shouryya Ray has been hailed a genius after working out the problems set by Sir Isaac Newton

Dailymail report: A 16-year-old has managed to crack puzzles which have baffled the world of maths for more than 350 years.

Shouryya Ray has been hailed a genius after working out the problems set by Sir Isaac Newton.

The schoolboy, from Dresden, Germany, solved two fundamental particle dynamics theories which physicists have previously been able to calculate only by using powerful computers.

His solutions mean that scientists can now calculate the flight path of a thrown ball and then predict how it will hit and bounce off a wall.

Shouryya only came across the problems during a school trip to Dresden University where professors claimed they were uncrackable.

'I just asked myself, 'Why not?',' explained Shouryya.

'I think it was just schoolboy naivety. I didn't believe there couldn't be a solution,' he added.

Modest Shouryya began solving complicated equations as a six year old but says he's no genius.

'There are other things at school I wish I was better at - football for one,' he said.
For years Shouryya has enjoyed what he calls 'intrinsic beauty' of maths.

When he was young, his father, an engineer, began testing his brain by setting him arithmetic problems.

After arriving from Calcutta four years ago without knowing any German, Shouryya is now fluent in the language.

His intelligence was quickly noted in class and he was pushed up two years in school - he is currently sitting his exams early.

Modestly Shouryya has pointed out he has weak points as a mathematician, and says he is not as competent in sport.

Wow, Giant Digital Camera With 3.2 Bilion Pixel

The 22.3-megapixel CMOS sensor on Canon’s new EOS 5D Mark III is no joke, it's the best cameras ever in public now — except when compared to the hardware in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) camera. The 3.2 billion-pixel digital camera is meant to “capture the widest, fastest and deepest view of the night sky ever observed,” according to the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

The whole shebang will weigh around three tons and have 189 different sensors. Right now it’s passed something called Critical Decision 1, which means the lab can start a detailed design, schedule and budget phase. The hope is to start construction on the LSST camera by 2014; its huge 8.4-meter primary mirror is already being built in northern Chile.

When completed, the camera is supposed to record 6 million gigabytes of data each year, the equivalent of taking around 800,000 photos with an eight-megapixel camera every single night.

Its purpose? To look at totally awesome space stuff. It's deep and frequent cosmic vistas will help answer critical questions about the nature of dark energy and dark matter and aid studies of near-Earth asteroids, Kuiper belt objects, the structure of our galaxy and many other areas of astronomy and fundamental physics.

It's deep and frequent cosmic vistas will help answer critical questions about the nature of dark energy and dark matter and aid studies of near-Earth asteroids, Kuiper belt objects, the structure of our galaxy and many other areas of astronomy and fundamental physics.

Wow, Apparently Africa Have A Abundant Water Resources

Finding water in Africa

Scientists say the notoriously dry continent of Africa is sitting on a vast reservoir of grouwater.

They argue that the total volume of water in aquifers underground is 100 times the amount found on the surface. The team have produced the most detailed map yet of the scale and potential of this hidden resource. Writing in the journal Environmental Research Letters , they stress that large scale drilling might not be the best way of increasing water supplies.

Across Africa more than 300 million people are said not to have access to safe drinking water. Demand for water is set to grow markedly in coming decades due to population growth and the need for irrigation to grow crops.

Africa Map

Freshwater rivers and lakes are subject to seasonal floods and droughts that can limit their availability for people and for agriculture. At present only 5% of arable land is irrigated.

Now scientists have for the first time been able to carry out a continent-wide analysis of the water that is hidden under the surface in aquifers. Researchers from the British Geological Survey and University College London (UCL) have mapped in detail the amount and potential yield of this groundwater resource across the continent.

Helen Bonsor from the BGS is one of the authors of the paper. She says that up until now groundwater was out of sight and out of mind. She hopes the new maps will open people's eyes to the potential.

"Where there's greatest ground water storage is in northern Africa, in the large sedimentary basins, in Libya, Algeria and Chad," she said. "The amount of storage in those basins is equivalent to 75m thickness of water across that area - it's a huge amount."

Ancient events

Due to changes in climate that have turned the Sahara into a desert over centuries many of the aquifers underneath were last filled with water over 5,000 years ago.

The scientists collated their information from existing hydro-geological maps from national governments as well as 283 aquifer studies.

The researchers say their new maps indicate that many countries currently designated as "water scarce" have substantial groundwater reserves.

African water supplies may be more resilient to climate change than was thought

However, the scientists are cautious about the best way of accessing these hidden resources. They suggest that widespread drilling of large boreholes might not work. Dr Alan MacDonald of the BGS, lead author of the study, told the BBC: "High-yielding boreholes should not be developed without a thorough understanding of the local groundwater conditions. "Appropriately sited and developed boreholes for low yielding rural water supply and hand pumps are likely to be successful".

With many aquifers not being filled due to a lack of rain, the scientists are worried that large-scale borehole developments could rapidly deplete the resource. According to Helen Bonsor, sometimes the slower means of extraction can be more efficient. "Much lower storage aquifers are present across much of sub-Saharan Africa," she explained.

"However, our work shows that with careful exploring and construction, there is sufficient groundwater under Africa to support low yielding water supplies for drinking and community irrigation". The scientists say that there are sufficient reserves to be able to cope with the vagaries of climate change.

"Even in the lowest storage aquifers in semi arid areas with currently very little rainfall, ground water is indicated to have a residence time in the ground of 20 to 70 years." Dr Bonsor said.

"So at present extraction rates for drinking and small scale irrigation for agriculture groundwater will provide and will continue to provide a buffer to climate variability".

Deadly Virus Makes Mosquito Thirsty For Blood

    This picture shows the presence of the dengue virus in the mosquitoes' chemosensory (antennae and palp) and feeding organs (proboscis).

Mosquitoes are already blood-sucking machines, but new research indicates that the dengue virus, which the mosquitoes transmit to humans, makes them even thirstier for blood.

Live Science Report on 29 March 2012, The virus specifically turns on mosquito genes that make them hungrier for a blood meal; the activated genes also enhance mosquitoes' sense of smell, something that likely improves their feeding skills. The result is a mosquito better able to serve the virus by carrying it more efficiently to human hosts.

"The virus may, therefore, facilitate the mosquito's host-seeking ability, and could — at least theoretically — increase transmission efficiency, although we don't fully understand the relationships between feeding efficiency and virus transmission," study researcher George Dimopoulus, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said in a statement. "In other words, a hungrier mosquito with a better ability to sense food is more likely to spread dengue virus."

Dengue dangers

The virus doesn't hurt the mosquitoes that carry it, a specific species called Aedes aegypti, but it lives in them. When the mosquito bites a human, it spreads the deadly disease through its saliva. More than 2.5 billion people live in areas where dengue fever-infected mosquitoes live. The World Health Organization estimates that between 50 million and 100 million dengue infections occur each year.

The researchers analyzed the mosquito genes before and after being infected with the virus, finding changes in 147 genes. These post-infection genes make proteins that are involved in processes that include virus transmission, immunity, blood feeding and host seeking, they found.

This is just one of many recent examples of a parasite taking control of an animal for its own benefit.

The study was published today (March 29) in the journal PLoS Pathogens.

Sea of Stars on Maldives

 

Pinpricks of light on the shore seem to mirror stars above in an undated picture taken on Vaadhoo Island in the Maldives. The biological light, or bioluminescence, in the waves is the product of tiny marine life-forms called phytoplankton-and now scientists think they know how some of these sea beasts create brilliant blue glow.

Various species of phytoplankton are known to bioluminesce, and their lights can be seen in oceans all around the world, said marine biologist and bioluminescence expert Woodland Hastings of Harvard University. 

"I've been across the Atlantic and Pacific, and I've never seen a spot that wasn't bioluminescent or a night that [bioluminescence] couldn't be seen," Hastings said. 
 
 The most common type of marine bioluminescence is generated by phytoplankton known as dinoflagellates. A recent study co-authored by Hastings has for the first time identified a special channel in the dinoflagellate cell membrane that responds to electrical signals—offering a potential mechanism for how the animals create their unique illumination.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/03/pictures/120319-glowing-waves-ocean-blue-bioluminescent-plankton-science/?source=hp_dl1_news_waves20120320

Soon, The Woolly Mammoth’s Return

Good news for anyone who wishes we could revert to prehistoric times, or really, anyone who thinks woolly mammoths are awesome. Scientists in Asia have announced plans to recreate the giant creature that stomped around the Earth some 4,500 years ago.

It turns out that cloning scientist Hwang Woo-suk really meant it when he said last October that his next project would be to bring a mammoth back to life. On Tuesday, scientist Hwang Woo-suk of South Korea’s Sooam Biotech Research Foundation signed an agreement with Vasily Vasiliev of Russia’s North-Eastern Federal University to clone a mammoth.

On Monday, nine Korean and Russian scientists got together in Seoul to discuss their joint research in details including how to retrieve DNA samples from a mammoth. According to the Sooam Institute, bioengineering scientists since 2002 have discovered what they believe to be the remains of a mammoth in the permafrost of Russia. Last August, it was reported that a thigh bone of a mammoth was discovered in Siberia.

Their plan is to replace the nuclei of an elephant cell with one from a mammoth to produce an embryo with mammoth DNA. Then they are going to plant the embryo into the womb of a surrogate elephant. The institute said it would take 22 months before delivery. Though the project sounds possible only in a “Jurassic Park”-like story, bioscientists around the world, Japanese and Russian in particular, have been working hard since early 2000 to make this dream into reality.

Hwang, once lauded as a pioneer in the field of cloning, lost a bit of credibility in 2006 when some of his breakthrough human stem cell research turned out to be fabricated. However, experts have verified his work in creating the world’s first cloned dog, Snuppy, in 2005. Hwang’s next goal could also come to fruition now that portions of Siberia’s permafrost have thawed and left behind mammoth remains. Sooam officials said the foundation will launch research this year.

So how exactly does one go about cloning a woolly mammoth? The scientists plan to replace the nuclei of elephant egg cells with those of a mammoth, producing embryos with mammoth DNA. Then, those embryos will be planted into the wombs of elephants for delivery. The mammoth cells would come from internal organs, skin, bones and blood. Finding well-preserved tissue with an undamaged gene will be the most difficult task, the researchers told.

Though the initiative is quite ambitious, the researchers said they’re confident, given their previous success in cloning animals — and the success of their colleagues. South Korean scientists have already cloned animals including a cat, dogs, a pig, a cow and a wolf.

Sooam’s Director Hyun Sang-hwan told the Journal that Dr. Hwang’s team has toyed with the idea since late 1990s and that their know-how and expertise in the cloning field would, hopefully, put the Korean team at an advantage.

http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/03/14/the-woolly-mammoths-return-scientists-plan-to-clone-extinct-creature/?iid=nf-article-mostpop1
http://blogs.wsj.com/korearealtime/2012/03/13/will-be-resurrecting-a-mammoth-possible/
 http://news.sky.com/home/world-news/article/16188009

The Existence of A Rare Sumatran Tiger is Increasingly Threatened

The year is off to a bad start for Sumatran tigers, as conservation officials in Bengkulu province are reporting almost as much conflict in just a few months as from all of last year. “So far in 2012, we have handled two tiger deaths and six tiger-human conflicts,” Amon Zamora, the head of the province’s Natural Resources Conservation Center, said on Tuesday.

Last year in all of Sumatra, two endangered Sumatran tigers were found trapped and four were known to have died from injuries inflicted by human actions. Bengkulu’s first tiger death this year was of a male, named Rajo by conservation staff, who had been rescued from a snare trap in the Bukit Daun protected forest in Lebong district.

When conservation staff found Rajo on Jan. 8, it seemed he had been left for dead by an unknown attacker who had beaten him with a blunt instrument. “It looked like they had deliberately tried to kill him,” Amon said. “We found him alive but covered in injuries". Despite medical care, Rajo eventually succumbed to his wounds.

The second tiger to die was discovered in Seluma district in February, dismembered and buried in an apparent attempt to hide the crime. “We do not know the cause of death, but when our team dug the tiger out, we found it in pieces, with bones missing,” Amon said, adding that the forest police were still investigating the killing.

Dara, another female tiger so named after she was discovered snared in a North Bengkulu logging concession in February, will never return to the wild after her rescuers were forced to amputate her ensnared front leg, which was badly gangrenous.

In the most recent conflict, residents of Alas Bangun village in North Bengkulu district have reported unrest because of a tiger that has appeared in the vicinity of their village several times over the past few days.

Amon said his staff members were on their way to help. “We’ll try to chase it into the forest, but if that proves impossible then we’ll be forced to conduct an ‘evacuation,’ ”he said, referring to an evacuation of the tiger, not the villagers, highlighting the cause of the problem.

Amon said the increasing frequency of such encounters points to a bleak future for the endangered species, of which only about 400 remain in the wild. Their decline stems primarily from the constant encroachment of human development into their habitat, the conservation officer said.

Of the 400-odd tigers clinging on to their natural habitat, less than a third are thought to be living in areas set aside for conservation purposes.

The rest live in forests earmarked for timber concessions, plantations or other extractive purposes. NGO group Forum HarimauKita, the Indonesian Tiger Conservation Forum, blames such conflicts on a lack of understanding and guidelines for tiger conservation among low-level government officials and plantation workers. 

Antara, JG

New Leopard Frog Species Found in New York City Area

Scientists have identified a new species of leopard frog in and around New York City. The frog was found hiding in plain sight on Staten Island.

The New York Times (http://nyti.ms/zI0tBt ) reports the find is surprising because the frog was discovered in one of the world's most populated urban areas.

Researchers say the new frog species was confused for a long time with a frog it closely resembles, the southern leopard frog. The leopard frogs in the region were noted as having a croak that was quite distinct from those of the two species that inhabit the northern and southern parts of the East Coast. (A researcher involved in the finding described the other species as having a “long snore” or a “rapid chuckle.”) Speculation had focused on the possibility that the New York frogs were a hybrid of the two species, but molecular evidence shows that they are distant from both.

Although New York City has probably not been especially kind to the frogs — any appropriate habitat for them in Manhattan is probably long gone — they still survive in a number of areas nearby, including New Jersey, Staten Island, and the Bronx. The researchers suggest that their range is probably centered on Yankee Stadium. Given the molecular evidence, the team that found the species (which has members in New Jersey, Alabama, and California) are now going back to study it more closely so that they can give it a formal description.

Jeremy Feinberg also found specimens in parts of New Jersey and to counties north of New York City, all within commuting distance of Manhattan.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/new-frog-species-nyc/
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/03/15/new-frog-species-found-nyc-area.html

Nuke Could Stop Asteroid Armageddon

A huge asteroid hurls toward Earth. In desperation, scientists send a group of astronauts to blast the deadly rock with a nuclear bomb and save humanity. It is a scenario that has been depicted in Hollywood films, but new a U.S. study suggests that a timely nuclear explosion could save us from a devastating asteroid impact. Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory conducted a supercomputer simulation to test the effects of a nuclear weapon on an asteriod, according to Space.com. 

They “hit” a 500-meter diameter asteroid with a 1-megaton weapon, which is about 50 times more powerful than the bomb used on Nagasaki, Japan, during World War II. Researchers found that the blast from the bomb would “disrupt all of the rocks in the rockpile of this asteroid” and mitigate the damage that would be caused by impact. Movies such as “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact,” suggest that a nuclear blast would have to take place inside the asteroid to have a significant impact. 

But the simulation showed that blasting the surface could be effective, sparing astronauts the dangerous job of navigating their way inside the asteroid. But even a successful blast could have negative side effects such as sending debris toward Earth. Such a mission would therefore likely be a last resort if we had just months to stop the impact, Los Alamos scientist Bob Weaver said. 

One alternative could be to send a robotic probe to ride along the asteroid, which would be tugged by the probe’s gravitational field out of the Earth’s path. Another scenario is to slam a spacecraft into the asteroid to push it off course. Both scenarios have real-life precedents in part. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is currently orbiting the huge asteroid Vesta and a spacecraft was sent to crash into a comet in 2005. 

Astronomers say it is a mathematical certainty that Earth will eventually be hit by a hazardous space rock. It is just a matter of when and whether we will be ready for it.

http://www.koreaherald.com/national/Detail.jsp?newsMLId=20120314000591
http://www.sciencephoto.com/media/324665/enlarge

The Blood Type Now Not Only A, B, O and Rhesus, NowThere is a New Blood Type : So what Your Blood Type?

A, AB, O, O positive. Sounds familiar, right? How about Langereis or Junior? Stumped? That’s because scientists just discovered these two new blood groups, according to research published in Nature Genetics.

Remember that your blood type doesn’t consist of just one protein like type A or B, but 32 blood group systems like Rhesus positive or negative. (That’s what “A positive” or “O negative” mean.)

And now researchers know that everyone has a Junior (JR) or Langereis (LAN) blood type, explains study coauthor Bryan Ballif, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology at the University of Vermont. You can be positive or negative for each. For example, your blood type could comprise of A, Rh+ (aka “A positive”), LAN+, and JR+.

Most people are LAN- or JR-positive because they produce two types of proteins that chauffeur nutrients in and out of the cell and defend their red blood cells against foreign invaders. But a small percentage of the population (mostly occurring in Japan) don’t have these proteins and end up with LAN- and JR-negative blood types.

There are some major perks to these discoveries. First, it will be easier to identify people who have these rarer blood types. More importantly, when being transfused, technicians can be more accurate and insure that they will be giving people the correct blood types, explains lead study author Lionel Arnaud, Ph.D., a research scientist at the National Institute of Blood Transfusion in Paris, France. (Before these proteins were discovered, LAN-negative or JR-negative people could’ve been transfused with LAN-positive or JR-positive blood, which their bodies would’ve rejected.)

The findings don’t only apply to blood transfusions. People who are LAN-negative or JR-negative don’t have the ability to clear certain cancer drugs, and may not be able to handle certain types of chemotherapy as well.

“The discovery of these two new blood types is important for personalized medicine, which is currently in the infancy,” explains Arnaud. “We hope that everybody will be typed for Langereis and Junior in order to improve the prescription of treatments, and therefore, decrease the side effects of these treatments.”

Because the blood system classifying increasingly, a person would probably need a longer column on The Identity Card to reveal details such as blood group AB, Rh positive, negative LAN.

http://news.menshealth.com/two-new-blood-types-discovered/2012/02/29/

Similar UFO objects found in the Baltic Sea

Swedish researchers found a foreign object that resembles a flying saucer. They also found traces indicate dragging the object is moving or falling to the seabed. While experts speculate that it is only the fault of the sonar system, a new report says that researchers recently discovered two similar objects, and not far from the location of the first object.

As reported by MSNBC, Friday (03/02/2012), this story began last July when Peter Lindberg, who led the expedition announced it had found a round object foreign to the depth of 91 meters approximately, at the bottom of the sea Gulf of Bothnia, between Finland and Sweden.

Lindberg claims about foreign objects that may not be accurate. Although the visible round of the sonar image resolution is too low to be verified. And though there are scars that would indicate a shuffle of movement, there is also a possibility that does not relate. Foreign bodies remain unidentified, and many researchers have questioned whether the sonar images are accurate from the outset. Lindberg himself revealed his group was not interested and had no more resources to further investigate these anomalies. 

But some time ago, interest in the discovery of the sudden rise Lindberg. This happened after CNN reported that his group found a second foreign bodies, which are similar and are not far from the first foreign object found Lindberg. Bowman broke from CNN claimed that the mysterious object, "not by itself be there. Sea exploration team also found another disc-shaped object is nearby. Both show the marks of dragging along more than 400 meters. Size and unusual shape, triggering the emergence of a strange theory. "

The announcement of the discovery reinforces the original claims about the foreign object. Although the sidescan sonar images is known to result in the wrong, much less likely to produce one of two almost identical pictures. Indeed, the two objects look almost nothing like discs that can be defined as the first object. The second thing is more like an eggplant fruit or a muffin. But that first attracted the attention of the objects form a remarkable first round. The most appropriate answer to this mystery, it still seems to be waiting for the next exploration with better equipment. 

http://techno.okezone.com/read/2012/02/03/56/568698/benda-mirip-ufo-ditemukan-di-dasar-laut-baltik 

Thomas Alva Edison

Thomas Alva Edison

Thomas Alva Edison Born in 1847, The sentence is not forgotten from a famous scientist and inventor of the electric light bulb was. A sentence that would arouse our spirit when we are tired, weak because of our failure.

 

 "Many people who fail did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up"

 

Tremendous Edison would see change take place in his lifetime. He was also to be Responsible for making many of Those changes occur.He believed in hard work, Sometimes working twenty hours a day. One more sentence that we quoted from him as a spirit to our example in our lives:

 

"Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration" 

 

So, keep trying and do not give up, because someday we will surely succeed.