Archive for Science
Fresh tests on Shroud of Turin
The Oxford laboratory that origininally announced that the Shroud of Turin was a fake some 20 years ago is now re-investigating its claims that its original test results were botched. The head of the world-renowned lab is remains skeptical that an error would have cause the results to deviate more than a thousand years, but he says that he wants to keep an open mind. The original carbon dating was carried out on a sample by researchers working separately in laboratories in Zurich and Arizona as well as Oxford. Christians were dissapointed, to say the least, when the carbon dating tests conducted on the four meter linnen cloth dated it to the medieval era, but these recent turn of events are sure to re-ignight speculations about the shroud. The results will form a segments of a documentary on the Turin Shroud that is scheduled to broadcast on BBC 2 on Easter Saturday.
Read ‘Fresh tests on Shroud of Turin‘. Originally Posted by Jonathan Petre, Religion Correspondent (www.telegraph.co.uk)
Scientists get rare look at dinosaur soft tissue
This is indeed paranormal, if you take the word literally. What this group found blows me away. Sure, I have heard of a fossilized dinosaur, but a mummified one is a completely different thing.
Content from external source:
A high school student hunting fossils in the badlands of his native North Dakota discovered an extremely rare mummified dinosaur that includes not just bones but also seldom seen fossilized soft tissue such as skin and muscles, scientists will announce today.
‘Dark energy’ may mean the end of the Universe
I’m no physics expert, but when I see a story like this one, I can’t help but to laugh. How is it that humans, who will never really understand how the universe came to be, could ever possible begin to fathom how it will end? These scientists have decided the future using a kind of matter (if you accept “dark matter” as a type of matter) that we cannot analyze…
Anyway, my rant is over. Here is the article, please post your thoughts as a comment or in the shoutbox (link is on the front page under the technorati button)
Content from external source:
PARIS, Nov 21 AFP – Astronomers may have unwittingly hastened the end of the Universe by simply looking at it, according to a theory reported in next Saturday’s New Scientist.
The novel idea is being aired by two US physicists, who attack the notion that the Universe, believed to have been created in the “Big Bang” some 13.7 billion years ago, will go on, well, forever.
In fact, the poor old cosmos is in a rather delicate state, they say.
Until recently, a common idea was that the energy unleashed in the Big Bang happened when a “false vacuum” – a bubble of high energy with repulsive gravity – broke down into a safe, zero-energy “ordinary” vacuum.
But recent evidence has emerged that places a cosmic question-mark over this cosy thought.
For one thing, cosmologists have discovered that the Universe is still expanding.
And, they believe, a strange, yet-to-be-detected form of energy called dark energy pervades the Universe, which would explain why the sum of all the visible sources of energy fall way short of what should be out there.
Dark energy, goes the thinking, is a result of the Big Bang and is accelerating the Universe’s expansion.
If so, the Universe is not in a nice, stable zero-vacuum state but simply another “false vacuum” state that may abruptly decay again – and with cataclysmic consequences.
The energy shift from the decay would destroy everything in the Universe, “wiping the slate clean,” says Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
The good news is: the longer the Universe survives, the better the chance that it will mature into a stable state. We are just beyond the crucial switching point, believes Krauss.
The bad news is: the quantum effect, a truly weird aspect of physics that says whenever we observe or measure something, we reset its clock.
Krauss and colleague James Dent point to measurements of light from supernovae in 1998 that provided the first evidence of dark energy.
These measurements may have reset the decay clock of the “false vacuum” back to zero, back before the switching point and to a time when the risk of catastrophic decay was greater than now, say Dent and Krauss.
“Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may have reduced the life-expectancy of the Universe,” says Krauss.
“We may have snatched away the possibility of long-term survival for our Universe and made it more likely it will decay.”
The report appears in next Saturday’s issue of the London-published science weekly.
It says the claim is contested by other astrophysicists and adds reassuringly: “The fact that we are still here means this can’t have happened yet.”
Wormholes on Earth?
Content from external source:
According to a group of mathematicians, it may be possible to create devices with internal tunnels that are invisible to detection by electromagnetic waves—wormholes, in a sense. The group discusses the idea in a paper published in the October 29 online edition of Physical Review Letters. The scientists say that by custom designing the values of two parameters that describe electromagnetic (EM) materials, the electrical permittivity and magnetic permeability, around and inside a cylinder, a novel optical device could be produced. Essentially, most of the device would be invisible to detection by external EM radiation of a certain frequency, with only the ends of the cylinder being visible and accessible to the EM waves. “The chosen values for the permittivity and permeability would cause the coating to manipulate EM waves in a way that is not seen in nature,” explained University of Rochester mathematician Allan Greenleaf, one of the paper’s authors, to PhysOrg.com. Permittivity is a measure of a material’s readiness to become electrically polarized in response to an applied electric field (how well it “permits” the field). Permeability describes how magnetized a material becomes when a magnetic field is applied. Modern EM materials known as metamaterials allow theoretical designs, such as a wormhole, to be physically constructed, at least in principle. Greenleaf and his colleagues, Yaroslav Kurylev of University College in London, Matti Lassas of the Helsinki University of Technology, and Gunther Uhlmann of the University of Washington, use the word “wormhole” in more of a mathematical sense than physical.
That is, the devices would act as wormholes from the viewpoint of Maxwell’s equations, the four fundamental equations that describe the relationship between electric fields, magnetic fields, electric charge, and electric current. For any other frequencies than those for which the permittivity and permeability were designed, the tunnel region would look roughly like a solid cylinder.
A Brain Response to a Future Event?
Content from external source:
Whenever we suddenly encounter something that frightens or startles us, our body has a tendency to “jump” in response. Over the past decade, a considerable amount of evidence has been gathered to suggest that, on a very subtle and unconscious level, our body’s autonomic nervous system may also “jump” in response to frightening or startling stimuli. However, it does so even before our body encounters such stimuli. This evidence comes from various experiments designed to explore the possible physiological signatures of a precognition-related experience that has come to be known as presentiment or pre-stimulus response.
So You Want to Live Forever?
Content from external source:
“Sirtris Pharmaceuticals is testing a fountain-of-youth pill in humans. You won’t live forever, but it may slow aging and increase lifespan. So far, it’s working.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals is testing such a pill in humans in a Food and Drug Administration-approved clinical trial. The tests began last spring with 85 volunteers; in August, the company announced that this medication designed to slow aging and bump up lifespan is working.”
Fish lives in logs, breathing air
A tiny western Atlantic fish does something never before seen: It makes like a bird, living in mangrove wood for months at a time. A team of U.S. and English scientists accidentally discovered the unique behavior, which they call “logpacking,” during recent excursions to Belize and Florida. They were studying how the mangrove rivulus—an animal already infamous for its bizarre sexual behavior—survived the frequent dry spells that strike its swampy forest habitat. “One of us kicked at a log, which broke apart and out came the fish!” said team leader Scott Taylor of Brevard County, Florida’s Environmentally Endangered Lands Program. Log-Dwelling Fish The mangrove rivulus, also known as the mangrove killifish, is native to the Americas and is about two inches (five centimeters) long. The fish has long been studied for its many unique features. It’s the only vertebrate known to naturally self-fertilize, for example. In some populations, it can become a hermaphrodite, developing both male and female parts simultaneously, to produce clones of itself. (Related: “Sexual Orientation Is Genetic in Worms, Study Says” [October 25, 2007].) The animal can also live out of water for up to 66 days, Taylor said, and is one of very few fish species that spend their entire lives in mangrove swamps. Most fish move in and out of the areas as water sources dwindle.
Taylor and his team had previously found that when small pools of water dried up, the rivulus settled into crab burrows. But even those disappear during extreme dry spells. “Sometimes the pools have very heavy [rivulus] populations, and they have to go somewhere when they dry,” he said. “We had seen them under logs and in piles of damp leaves, inside coconuts, even in beer cans—for real.”
Scientists find oldest living animal, then kill it
British marine biologists have found what may be the oldest living animal — that is, until they killed it. The team from Bangor University in Wales was dredging the waters north of Iceland as part of routine research when the unfortunate specimen, belonging to the clam species Arctica islandica, commonly known as the ocean quahog, was hauled up from waters 250 feet deep. Only after researchers cut through its shell, which made it more of an ex-clam, and counted its growth rings did they realize how old it had been — between 405 and 410 years old. Another clam of the same species had been verified at 220 years old, and a third may have lived 374 years. But this most recent clam was the oldest yet. “Its death is an unfortunate aspect of this work, but we hope to derive lots of information from it,” postdoctoral scientist Al Wanamaker told London’s Guardian newspaper.
“For our work, it’s a bonus, but it wasn’t good for this particular animal.”
