Mysterious marks in virgin forest explained
During a recent mapping of rare virgin forest in and around the Øvre Dividalen National Park in Troms, Norway, scientists noticed significant scarring on the trees.
Many pine trees had some of their bark cut away on one side, leaving marks that were hard to explain. They came up with three possibilities: The first suggestion was the cuts had been made by settlers who started farms in the Dividalen valley in 1850, but the scars seemed to be older than that date. |  |
July 3 2012
Hidden Doggerland underworld uncovered in North Sea
A huge area of land which was swallowed up into the North Sea thousands of years ago has been recreated and put on display by scientists.
Doggerland was an area between Northern Scotland, Denmark and the Channel Islands. It was believed to have been home to tens of thousands of people before it disappeared underwater. Now its history has been pieced together by artefacts recovered from the seabed and displayed in London. |  |
Mysterious Structures Found in Syrian Desert
An ancient landscape of stone circles, alignments and possible tombs lies out in the Syrian Desert, according to a Royal Ontario Museum archaeologist who has dubbed the mysterious structures "Syria's Stonehenge."
"These enigmatic arrangements are not especially imposing, they are not megaliths or anything like that, but they are very intriguing and clearly deliberately aligned," Robert Mason of Canada's Royal Ontario Museum told Discovery News. |
Innovative technique enables scientists to learn more about elusive exoplanet Tau Bootis b
For the first time a new technique has allowed astronomers to study the atmosphere of an exoplanet in detail -- even though it does not pass in front of its parent star. An international team has used ESO's Very Large Telescope to directly catch the faint glow from the planet Tau Boötis b, solving a 15-year-old problem. The team also finds that the planet's atmosphere seems to be cooler higher up, differently from the expected.
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Quest to find the Wild Man
For centuries, the villagers around the Shennongjia forest of China's central Hubei province, a forbidding 1,000 square mile reserve of high mountains and deep forests, have believed that the "Wild Man", or Yeren, lives among them.
Standing just under seven feet tall (2.15 metres) and covered in dark grey hair, this Chinese incarnation of Bigfoot or the yeti has been spotted hundreds of times. Size 12 primate-like footprints have been documented in the area, and long thick strands of hair have been tested by scientists, who concluded that they did not belong to any of the known creatures inside the reserve. |  |
Apes With Apps
Have you ever watched a toddler play with an iPhone?
Most likely, the child was completely captivated and surprisingly adept at manipulating the tiny icons. Two-year-old Teco is no different. Sitting with his Motorola Xoom tablet, he’s rapt, his dark eyes fixed on the images, fingers pecking away at the touch screen. He can’t speak, but with the aid of the tablet app I created for him, he’s building a vocabulary that will likely total several thousand words. What’s more, he’ll be able to string those words together into simple sentences and ask questions, tell jokes, and carry on conversations. |  |
July 3 2012
UFOs Exist, Say 36 Percent in National Geographic Survey
If you believe in UFOs, you may be in better company than you think.
Thirty-six percent of Americans, about 80 million people, believe UFOs exist, and a tenth believe they have spotted one, a new National Geographic poll shows. Seventeen percent said they did not believe in UFOs, or Unidentified Flying Objects, and nearly half of those surveyed said they were unsure. Perhaps reflective of today's political climate, there appears to be near-universal skepticism of government — nearly four-fifths of respondents said they believe the government has concealed information about UFOs from the public. |  |
Gold and DNA Could Create New Dark Matter Detector
A combined team of physicists and biologists aim to build a directional dark matter detector using strands of DNA and gold.
Dark matter is a hypothesized type of matter which accounts for much of the mass of the universe. It cannot be seen, but its existence is inferred from its gravitational influence on visible matter and the structure of the universe. Some of the most popular models of dark matter suggest that it exerts itself on galaxy clusters and surrounds the Earth like a sea as it travels around the Sun, which in turn is slowly traveling towards the constellation Cygnus as it rotates around the galactic center. If this is the case, Earth should experience a “headwind” of dark matter in front of it (coming form the direction of Cygnus) for half of the year and a tailwind for the other half of the year, depending on where it is on its orbit around the Sun. |  |
The Higgs Boson: Whose Discovery Is It?
On July 4, scientists at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider will present their latest results on the search for the Higgs boson, with many physics bloggers eagerly speculating that they will officially announce the discovery of this long-sought particle. Not to be outdone, U.S. researchers at Fermilab will be presenting their final analysis from Tevatron data regarding evidence for the Higgs. And precious more bits of information could come out during the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia, which runs July 4 to 11.
“Until pretty recently, there didn’t seem to be any real prospect of discovering the Higgs,” said Nobel-prize-winning theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg from the University of Texas at Austin. “Now the time is finally ripe for finding it. |  |
Far side of the moon offers quiet place for telescopes
FORTY years after NASA ditched the idea of landing Apollo 17 on the far side of the moon, the forbidden fruit is being sought once again. Not by astronauts this time, but by astronomers seeking a quiet spot from which to observe the universe's "dark ages".
This was an epoch in the development of the cosmos, which lasted for a few hundred million years after the big bang, before stars and galaxies began to form. The only way to observe the dark ages is to look for faint radio signals from neutral hydrogen - single protons orbited by single electrons - which filled the early universe. |  |
Black Hole-Hunting Telescope Takes First X-ray Photo
NASA’s black hole-hunting NuSTAR telescope has taken its first images, the sharpest ever photos of high energy X-rays in deep space.
The NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) observatory was launched 13 June, with the main objective of documenting high-energy events in deep space, such as black holes. It is able to produce images with 100 times more sensitivity and 10 times more resolution than any other X-ray telescope, including its predecessors Chandra and XMM-Newton. The first images (below) show the Cygnus X-1 black hole that is gradually draining gas from a nearby giant star 6,000 light years from Earth. |  |
The Fantastic Voyager
It is a journey that will never end and it began on August 20 1977, at the Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida when a Titan-Centaur rocket blasted into a clear blue sky.
Back then the excited scientists had what now seem like relatively limited hopes for the payload spiralling above them in a plume of white smoke.
Voyager One, which was launched two weeks after its sister probe Voyager Two, was meant to exploit a rare geometric arrangement of the outer planets occurring just once every 175 years.
Back then the excited scientists had what now seem like relatively limited hopes for the payload spiralling above them in a plume of white smoke.
Voyager One, which was launched two weeks after its sister probe Voyager Two, was meant to exploit a rare geometric arrangement of the outer planets occurring just once every 175 years.