Before starting its 35th and final orbit around Jupiter next week, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft will visit three intriguing features of the giant planet’s neighborhood for the first time: a small moon named Amalthea, a dusty ring and the inner region of Jupiter’s high-energy magnetic environment.
Submarines should have improved ability to detect undersea explosive mines thanks to advancement of a type of sonar that uses a relatively small antenna to mimic a much larger one. The technology bounces sound waves off of the sea floor, one small patch at a time. Onboard processors then combine these individual glimpses to create a larger image of the area surveyed.
Until now, astronomers haven’t been able to offer a full explanation for why the Milky Way and other galaxies produce new stars at a relative snail’s pace. While they have known for decades that high turbulence keeps huge clouds of hydrogen gas from condensing into stars, they haven’t identified all the causes of the galactic perturbations. In a coming report researchers in San Diego say they have discovered that a well-known, but overlooked source of heating?regular outbursts of ultraviolet radiation from clusters of very large, bright stars?may play a significant role in keeping the Milky Way’s gas continually stirred up.
Two of the three largest impact craters on Earth have nearly the same size and structure, researchers say, but one was caused by a comet while the other was caused by an asteroid. These results could have implications for where scientists might look for evidence of primitive life on Mars.
Viagra may help to save many species of animals and plants that are now endangered due to the demand for animal sexual potency products, according to new research from the University of New South Wales and the University of Alaska. The research suggests that the availability of viagra is having an impact on trade in some of the products, which are used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat impotence, including body parts from seals, deer, green turtles, sea cucumbers, pipefishes, sea horses and geckos.
A disorder in which the body fails to make a particular enzyme — leading to severe pain in the hands and feet, and eventual damage to internal organs — has been successfully treated for the first time in Los Angeles.
In the spring of 2001, two robotic Carbon Explorer floats recorded the rapid growth of phytoplankton in the upper layers of the North Pacific Ocean after a passing storm had deposited iron-rich dust from the Gobi Desert. The carbon measurements, reported in the October 25 issue of Science, are the first direct observation of wind-blown terrestrial dust fertilizing the growth of aquatic plant life.
Contrary to an opinion held by some researchers, a new analysis of more than 20 years of historical data has found no evidence that the increasing number of large icebergs off Antarctica’s coasts is a result of global warming trends. “The dramatic increase in the number of large icebergs as recorded by the National Ice Center database does not represent a climatic change,” said Brigham Young University’s David Long. “Our reanalysis suggests that the number of icebergs remained roughly constant from 1978 to the late 1990s.” Using BYU’s supercomputers, Long enhanced images of the waters around Antarctica transmitted by satellite. Comparing this data to records from the federal government’s National Ice Center, which tracks icebergs larger than ten miles on one side, he determined that previous tracking measures were inadequate, resulting in a gross undercounting.
A new study by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) shows that the Castle Mountain fault in south-central Alaska may be ready to produce a strong magnitude 6 to 7 earthquake. Peter Haeussler, the principal investigator in the study, said his research demonstrated that major earthquakes occurred on this fault on average every 700 years or so in the last 2,700 years, and that the last significant earthquake along the fault occurred about 650 years ago. The Castle Mountain fault is the only active fault that comes to the earth’s surface in the Anchorage region, and the eastern part of the fault produced light to moderate magnitude 5.7 and 4.6 earthquakes in 1983 and 1996.
Detection techniques and technology have improved so much in recent years that seismologists now say they are able to detect and identify virtually all events that might be nuclear explosions of possible military significance under the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Verification was a major issue in the U.S. Senate debate in 1999, in which American ratification of the treaty was defeated.
Intel-rival Advanced Micro Devices got a nice science win Monday when Sandia National Laboratory and Cray Inc. said they would build a supercomputer capable 40 trillion calculations per second using AMD’s forthcoming Opteron processor. Ten thousand of them, to be precise. Total cost: $90 million. Sandia says it will use the computing heavyweight for “modeling and simulation of complex problems that were only recently thought impractical, if not impossible.”
Antennas for the next generation of cellphones and other wireless communications devices may bear a striking resemblance to the Santa Monica Mountains or possibly the California coastline.
That’s because UCLA researchers are using fractals ? mathematical models of mountains, trees and coastlines ? to develop antennas for next-generation cellphones, cars and mobile communications devices. These antennas need to be miniature and be able to operate at multiple frequencies simultaneously.
An extrasolar planet has been discovered using a new technique that will allow astronomers to detect planets no other current method can. Planets around other stars have been previously detected only by the effect they have on their parent star, limiting the observations to large, Jupiter-like planets and those in very tight orbits. The new method uses the patterns created in the dust surrounding a star to discern the presence of a planet that could be as small as Earth or in an orbit so wide that it would take hundreds of years to observe its effect on its star.
More auto news. A Stanford researcher has found that although diesel cars obtain 25 to 35 percent better mileage and emit less carbon dioxide than similar gasoline cars, they can emit 25 to 400 times more soot per kilometer. The warming due to soot may more than offset the cooling due to reduced carbon dioxide emissions over several decades. Laws that favor diesel cars over standard gasoline, therefore, may be doing more harm than good.