Is Jupiter a Soggy Planet?
Launched in August of last year, NASA's Juno probe is on a Kamikaze mission to go prospecting for water on Jupiter.
Juno is nearly 300 million miles from Earth -- that's so far that a radio signal takes over 25 minutes to reach the probe. The spacecraft will loop back toward Earth and in October 2013 to get an added boost in speed by robbing some orbital momentum from our planet. It slingshots into Jupiter orbit in 2016. Juno will set a new record as the farthest solar-power probe ever launched. (There was a shortage of nuclear fuel, as used on all previous NASA outer solar system spacecraft.) |
Highest Man-Made Temperature: 4 TRILLION Degrees
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory doesn't have anywhere near the name recognition of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. But for the time being, it can lay claim to its own impressive achievement: it's just been recognized by Guinness World Records for achieving the "Highest Manmade Temperature." Go, RHIC!
The honor comes courtesy of the STAR (Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC) collaboration, designed to study the formation and characteristics of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a state of matter believed to have existed for ten-millionths of a second after the universe's birth. |
Archaeologists in Greece uncover Roman road
Archaeologists in Greece's second-largest city have uncovered a 70-metre section of an ancient road built by the Romans that was city's main travel artery nearly 2,000 years ago.
The marble-paved road was unearthed during excavations for Thessaloniki's new underground system, which is due to be completed in four years.
The road in the northern port city will be raised to be put on permanent display when the metro opens in 2016.
The marble-paved road was unearthed during excavations for Thessaloniki's new underground system, which is due to be completed in four years.
The road in the northern port city will be raised to be put on permanent display when the metro opens in 2016.
Jersey pair in 30-year search for Iron Age coins
Two metal detector enthusiasts from Jersey uncovered what could be Europe's largest hoard of Iron Age coins - after a painstaking search spanning 30 years.
Reg Mead and Richard Miles began their hunt after a woman told them her father had found coins in a field some years before. But the woman could only give the pair a rough location for the discovery. And to complicate things further, the field's owner would only allow them to look for a short time each year after the crop was harvested. |  |
French classify ancient vines as national treasure
A wine plague spread by lice destroyed vines in France in the 19th century but a small area in the Pyrenees, which contains plants up to 200 years old, was spared and is being classified as a national heritage monument.
Like other national treasures such as the Palace of Versailles and Notre Dame cathedral, the vines in the Ardour valley will be protected.
They contain the ancient DNA of local grape varieties. Some grapes are still being used with grapes from younger generation vines to make Saint-Mont wine.
Like other national treasures such as the Palace of Versailles and Notre Dame cathedral, the vines in the Ardour valley will be protected.
They contain the ancient DNA of local grape varieties. Some grapes are still being used with grapes from younger generation vines to make Saint-Mont wine.
Wonky-Eyed Fish Link: DNews Nuggets
The face of a flounder, sole, halibut or other flatfish looks like a hodgepodge of mismatched puzzle pieces forced together, with eyes that don't seem to match one another nor the orientation of the animal's mouth.
This is because, as these fish mature, one eye migrates over the top of the fish's head, coming to rest above the other eye, so both are on the same side of the head. A new fossil discovery has shed light on how this strange trait came about. Matt Friedman, a paleobiologist at University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, found a sort of flatfish missing link in a drawer of unidentified fish fossils in the Natural History Museum of Vienna, Austria. |
Talisman of ancient Egypt's googly-eyed god uncovered
A newly identified googly-eyed artifact may have been used by the ancient Egyptians to magically protect children and pregnant mothers from evil forces.
Made of faience, a delicate material that contains silica, the pale-green talisman of sorts dates to sometime in the first millennium B.C. It shows the dwarf god Bes with his tongue sticking out, eyes googly, wearing a crown of feathers. A hole at the top of the face was likely used to suspend it like a bell, while a second hole, used to hold the bell clapper, was apparently drilled into it in antiquity. |  |
Tracking Asteroids From A Backyard In Kansas
Meteors enter Earth's atmosphere every day, with most burning up before they reach the ground. But asteroids, which are larger than meteors, have the potential to cause some damage, and there's a man in Kansas who's tracking these chunks of space rock — in his own backyard, using a telescope he made himself.
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The Super-Seers Who Live Among Us
The ancestors of modern humans developed color vision 30 million years ago. But it was not until the late 1700s that there are records of anyone seeing colors in an unusual way. English chemist John Dalton, who found that people thought he was joking when he asked whether a geranium flower was blue or pink, wrote a description in 1794 of what he saw for the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society journal: His world was suffused by shades of blue and yellow, but contained none of the mysterious sensation known as red. “That part of the image which others call red,” he wrote, “appears to me little more than a shade or defect of light.” It was one of the first mentions of colorblindness in human history.
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Space mirrors will dry out US and Eurasia
INSTALLING huge mirrors in space would help reverse global warming, but they would come at a price: less rain for the Americas and northern Eurasia.
Previous studies have shown that geoengineering cannot restore both temperature and rain to previous levels, but they could not specify what a geoengineered climate would look like. Hauke Schmidt of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, and his colleagues played out the same simple scenario in four different climate models. In each one, he quadrupled carbon dioxide levels from pre-industrial levels. Then, to mimic the effect of space-borne mirrors, he reduced the amount of incoming sunlight to precisely compensate for the extra trapped heat. |  |
NASA, FAA work out spaceship rules
NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration have worked out their division of labor for clearing a new generation of private-sector spaceships for liftoff — putting the aviation agency in charge of any crew-carrying spacecraft that launches and lands, but requiring the space agency's additional signoff on any missions it's paying for.
The arrangement was set out under the terms of a memo signed this month. It's in line with Congress' mandate that the FAA regulate spacecraft to protect public safety, while letting spaceship companies fly private passengers at their own risk. |  |
Tablet PCs preserve indigenous knowledge
THE Herero people know just what to do when a horse is too wild or unpredictable: they lash a donkey to it, which forces the horse to slow down and helps to tame it. Unruly animals have been dealt with this way for generations by the inhabitants of the small village of Erindiroukambe, which lies in the heart of the Kalahari desert in eastern Namibia.
But times are changing and, as young men leave to work or study in cities like Windhoek, 400 kilometres away, it becomes much harder to hang on to this kind of local knowledge. Kasper Rodil, at Aalborg University in Denmark, and his colleagues want to see if tablet computers can help bridge the gap. "The human race would lose some colour if we lost this kind of knowledge," says Rodil. |  |
Findings of Deep-Sea 'Alien' Hunt Revealed
Swedish explorers have put to rest speculation of a spaceship at the bottom of the Baltic -- but they're adding fuel to the ‘what is it’ mystery of this deep-sea object anyway.
Digital pictures FoxNews.com has obtained from the team show that the object, located beneath the waves of the Baltic between Sweden and Finland, is some sort of “natural, geological formation,” Peter Lindberg, the leader of the Ocean Explorer team, told FoxNews.com. “It’s not obviously an alien spacecraft. It’s not made of metal,” the scientist said. Lindberg concedes that it could be an alien space ship -- if the aliens decided to make their vessels out of meteor-like rocks. “Who says they had to use metal?” he joked. “This trip has raised a lot of questions. |  |
Real-time gene sequencing used to combat superbug
LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have used genome sequencing technology to control an outbreak of the superbug MRSA in a study that could point to faster and more efficient treatment of a range of diseases.
The work adds to a burgeoning body of research into better techniques for diagnosing disease more quickly and at an earlier stage to allow more effective treatment and reduce healthcare costs. |  |
NNSA's Sequoia supercomputer ranked as world's fastest
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today announced that a supercomputer called Sequoia at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) was ranked the world's most powerful computing system.
Clocking in at 16.32 sustained petaflops (quadrillion floating point operations per second), Sequoia earned the No. 1 ranking on the industry standard Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers released Monday, June 18, at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC12) in Hamburg, Germany. Sequoia was built for NNSA by IBM. |  |
Chinese spacecraft docks with orbiting module
BEIJING (AP) — A Chinese spacecraft carrying three astronauts docked manually with an orbiting module on Sunday, a first for the country as it strives to match American and Russian exploits in space.
The Shenzhou 9 capsule's maneuver with the Tiangong 1 module was shown live on national television. It follows a docking last week that was carried out by remote control from a ground base in China. |  |
Trouble in Paradise: Book Explores How Hawaii’s Monarchy Fell to the Sugar Barons
Julia Flynn Siler’s Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012) (CA, UK, US) is a meticulously researched narrative of the events that took place over three generations that led to Hawaii’s annexation by the United States.
The basic story is well known: Sugar became Hawaii’s economic base in the early 1830s, and foreign-born sugar barons cultivated influence in the island nation’s political and social structure to protect their economic interests there. Then, riding the imperialist wave of the 1890s, they gained enough influence to win U.S. annexation of Hawaii as a territory.
The basic story is well known: Sugar became Hawaii’s economic base in the early 1830s, and foreign-born sugar barons cultivated influence in the island nation’s political and social structure to protect their economic interests there. Then, riding the imperialist wave of the 1890s, they gained enough influence to win U.S. annexation of Hawaii as a territory.
Lonesome George, last-of-its-kind Galapagos tortoise, dies
Lonesome George, the giant tortoise who became the face of the Galapagos Islands conservation effort, was found dead in his corral Sunday morning, according to a statement by the Galapagos National Park Service. He was believed to be more than 100 years old and weighed 200 pounds.
He is the last known Pinta Island giant tortoise, and his death likely marks the complete extinction of his subspecies. |  |
Giant Ibexes Once Roamed Pyrenees
C. p. pyrenaica, the Pyrenean Ibex, became extinct in 2000 before its biological and phytogenetic characteristics could be explored in depth.
In 1984 and 1994 during routine explorations a speleological group found the bone remains of two male and one female Ibex in the karstic caves and wells that acted like traps in Larra and Millaris, Spain. Both locations lie at 2,390 and 2,500 m height, respectively. Dr Ricardo García-González, a researcher at the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology has been put in charge of analyzing the skulls and comparing their craniometric characteristics with both fossil and modern day neighboring mountain goat populations. |  |