This 'Da Vinci Code' will stay hidden
The controversial effort to find out whether a long-lost Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece lies beneath a fresco in Florence has been suspended without resolving a mystery that some have compared to a "Da Vinci Code" riddle.
The mystery surrounds a painting known as "The Battle of Anghiari," or "Fight for the Standard," which was commissioned by city officials for a meeting hall in the Palazzo Vecchio to commemorate a Florentine military victory in 1440. Contemporary accounts indicate that Leonardo began the wall painting in 1505 — but left it unfinished, due to problems he encountered with the experimental technique he was using to apply the paint. |  |
Mars fragments and moon rocks on meteorite auction block
If you've ever yearned to own something from out of this world, here's your chance.
On Oct. 14 in Manhattan, fragments of Mars, the moon and asteroids that have fallen to Earth go up for sale, in what auction house Heritage Auctions is billing as the largest public meteorite auction ever held. More than 125 items are for sale, a number of which have no minimum bid attached. The growing market for meteorites has driven the emergence of a meteorite prospecting industry in northwestern Africa and Oman, but even as people scour the deserts for meteorites, rocks from space remain among the most rare things on Earth. |  |
The biggest challenge to interstellar spaceflight? Us
The biggest challenge in mounting a space mission to another star may not be technology, but people, experts say.
Scientists, engineers, philosophers, psychologists and leaders in many other fields gathered in Houston last week for the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting to discuss launching an interstellar voyage within 100 years. |  |
Beyond-the-moon base stirs up buzz
A concept that calls for building a deep-space outpost beyond the moon's orbit has stirred up some positive buzz from space pioneers — including Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin.
Over the weekend, the Orlando Sentinel reported that top NASA officials have chosen the construction of a space exploration platform at a gravitational balance point known as EML-2, or Earth-moon Lagrange point 2, as the agency's next major mission. The outpost would be held in an orbit 277,000 miles away from Earth, and 38,000 miles beyond the moon. |  |
Where is Mars's moon Deimos?
Despite more than a century of observations, the orbit of the Martian moon Deimos is still not known to a high degree of accuracy, but a new study using images taken by ESA's Mars Express orbiter has provided the best orbital model to date.
135 years have passed since Asaph Hall discovered Phobos and Deimos, two small companions of the planet Mars. Since that time, the satellites have been imaged innumerable times from the Earth and from spacecraft, including recent measurements by the panoramic cameras on the Mars Exploration Rovers and instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. |  |
Ocean on Jupiter's Moon Europa Likely Deep Underground
Missions hoping to explore the huge subsurface ocean thought to exist on Jupiter's moon Europa may have to dig deep — really deep.
Water stays in a liquid state near Europa's surface for just a few tens of thousands of years or so, new research suggests. That's a blink of an eye in geological terms, since our solar system is more than 4.5 billion years old. "A global water ocean may be present, but relatively deep below the surface — around 25 to 50 kilometers," Klára Kalousová, of France's University of Nantes and Charles University in Prague, said in a statement today (Sept 24). |  |
Sounds of 'Alien Birds' in Space Recorded by NASA Spacecraft
A NASA spacecraft has made the clearest record yet of choruses of noise in the Earth's magnetosphere.
The chirps and whoops were captured by one of NASA's two recently launched Radiation Belt Storm Probes spacecraft, whose mission is to understand more about space weather. "My wife calls it 'alien birds,'" joked experiment principal investigator Craig Kletzing, an astronomer at the University of Iowa. |  |
Yale Researchers Call for Specialty Metals Recycling
An international policy is needed for recycling scarce specialty metals that are critical in the production of consumer goods, according to Yale researchers in Science.
“A recycling rate of zero for specialty metals is alarming when we consider that their use is growing quickly,” said co-author Barbara Reck, a research scientist at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. |  |
Slow-moving rocks better odds that life crashed to Earth from space
Microorganisms that crashed to Earth embedded in the fragments of distant planets might have been the sprouts of life on this one, according to new research from Princeton University, the University of Arizona and the Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) in Spain.
The researchers report in the journal Astrobiology that under certain conditions there is a high probability that life came to Earth—or spread from Earth to other planets—during the solar system's infancy when Earth and its planetary neighbors orbiting other stars would have been close enough to each other to exchange lots of solid material. The work will be presented at the 2012 European Planetary Science Congress on Sept. 25. |  |
Desalination no panacea for Calif. water woes
MARINA, Calif. (AP) — In the Central California coastal town of Marina, a $7 million desalination plant that can turn salty ocean waves into fresh drinking water sits idle behind rusty, locked doors, shuttered by water officials because rising energy costs made the plant too expensive.
Far to the north in well-heeled Marin County, plans were scrapped for a desalination facility despite two decades of planning and millions of dollars spent on a pilot plant. |  |
Airborne Analysis of Burning Amazon Forests Could Close Climate Model Gaps
A group of scientists from Brazil and the United Kingdom are taking an unusual tropical field trip: 21 days flying in and out of heavy smoke plumes from wildfires in the Amazon and measuring everything they can, from the size of cloud droplets to the thickness of the aerosol column up to the stratosphere.
The goal is to understand how burning biomass in South America is affecting the local weather and air quality, and to close crucial gaps in climate models about how the process changes Earth’s radiation balance. |  |
In Bolivian Amazon, a Yardstick for Modern Health
SANTA MARÍA, Bolivia — There seems to be little that distinguishes the indigenous Tsimane of northern Bolivia from dozens of other native Amazonian peoples. They still live in small communities, fishing daily, hunting and relying on subsistence farming. They remain relatively isolated from the outside world. They still have large families and fall victim to parasites, worms and infectious diseases. And until a decade ago, few had contact with doctors.
Research on the Tsimane led to the finding in 2009 that cardiovascular disease is probably an ill of modern societies. Studies of the group also provided the most conclusive data supporting the idea that high levels of physical activity drastically reduce the risk of diabetes, obesity and hypertension. Ongoing Tsimane research explores links between testosterone and infection, diet and the nutritional value of breast milk, and DNA and life span. |  |
Eunuchs reveal clues to why women live longer than men
Castration had a huge effect on the lifespans of Korean men, according to an analysis of hundreds of years of eunuch "family" records.
They lived up to 19 years longer than uncastrated men from the same social class and even outlived members of the royal family. The researchers believe the findings show male hormones shorten life expectancy. The study is published in the journal Current Biology. |  |
In Prehistoric Britain Cannibalism Was Practical and Ritualistic
BORDEAUX—Mealtime in Gough’s cave in Somerset, England, 14,700 years ago, was not for the faint of heart. Humans were on the menu, for consumption by their own kind. Anthropologists have long studied evidence for cannibalism in the human fossil record, but establishing that it occurred and ascertaining why people ate each other have proved difficult tasks. A new analysis provides fresh insights into the human defleshing that occurred at this site and what motivated it—and hints that cannibalism may have been more common in prehistory than previously thought.
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Ancient crocodiles ate like killer whales
Crocodiles are often thought of as living fossils, remaining unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs. But scientists have shown this is not always the case and that 150 million years ago, their feeding mechanisms were more similar to some mammals living today, the killer whales.
An international team led by Dr Mark Young of the University of Edinburgh, and including Dr Lorna Steel at the Natural History Museum, studied two species of extinct marine dolphin-like crocodylians, Dakosaurus maximus and Plesiosuchus manselii. Their research is published today in the journal PLoS One. |  |
Report warns of global food insecurity as climate change destroys fisheries
The Persian Gulf, Libya, and Pakistan are at high risk of food insecurity in coming decades because climate change and ocean acidification are destroying fisheries, according to a report released on Monday.
The report from the campaign group Oceana warns of growing food insecurity, especially for poorer people, from the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic to the Cook Islands in the South Pacific, Eritrea, Guyana, Indonesia, Kuwait and Singapore. Some of the countries at highest risk were in oil-rich – and politically volatile – regions. |  |
Ancient potatoes hold key to Irish Famine mystery
Potato samples stored for more than 170 years have helped solve the mystery of why blight caused so many deaths in Ireland during the 19th Century.
UK researchers have discovered that the potato blight that caused the Great Famine of 1845-48 was the same strain which caused a second outbreak some 30 years later. If the same information was available today, farmers and smallholders would be advised to harvest the crop, eat or sell it but not store any seed potatoes for planting the following year. |  |
Animals are conscious and should be treated as such
ARE animals conscious? This question has a long and venerable history. Charles Darwin asked it when pondering the evolution of consciousness. His ideas about evolutionary continuity - that differences between species are differences in degree rather than kind - lead to a firm conclusion that if we have something, "they" (other animals) have it too.
In July of this year, the question was discussed in detail by a group of scientists gathered at the University of Cambridge for the first annual Francis Crick Memorial Conference. Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, spent the latter part of his career studying consciousness and in 1994 published a book about it, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The scientific search for the soul. |  |
The relaxation of cannabis laws shows the failure of the war on drugs
When the Uruguayan president José Mujica was asked about his proposal to make a historic break with global prohibition and put in place a legal, state-controlled market for cannabis, he replied: "Someone has to be first."
Most surprising have been reforms in the US, the spiritual home of the "war on drugs" ethos and still its primary cheerleader internationally, despite more than 50% of Americans now supporting cannabis legalisation. Fourteen US states have decriminalised cannabis possession, and 17 now allow medical cannabis – in some cases with the distinction between medical and non-medical use becoming increasingly blurred. Most significant are the three state ballot initiatives, in Washington, Oregon and Colorado being voted on in November, which will legalise and regulate cannabis markets for non-medical use. |  |
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