Cloud Seeding Could Cool Off Seas Where Hurricanes Form, Making Them Weaker

Tropical Storm Issac Growing This image from NASA's GOES-13 satellite shows two active cyclones in the Atlantic -- tropical storm Issac, which will likely be a hurricane by late Thursday, and a new tropical depression. NASA

Hurricanes form in warm tropical waters, drawing strength from the heat of the ocean surface — that’s why they are expected to worsen as sea surface temperatures increase. But if we could cool them off, they may chill out and decrease in strength. Cloud seeding the areas in front of their path might be a way to do this, a new study says.

The idea is to target marine stratocumulus clouds, which cover about a fourth of the world’s oceans. Reflecting more light away from the sea surface would theoretically prevent it from getting as warm. “Then there will be less energy to feed the hurricanes,” said Alan Gadian of the University of Leeds.

In this concept, a fleet of drones at or near the surface could spray sprinkles of seawater droplets, some of which would rise into the atmosphere. The increased droplet concentration would make the clouds thicker, causing them to last longer and reflect more sunlight, the Leeds scientists say. By the way, this is the same basic technique Beijing officials used to create rain during the 2008 Olympics.

The scientists ran calculations and found this cloud-brightening technique could decrease the sea surface’s temperature by a few degrees, and thereby drop hurricanes’ strength down an entire category.

One major downside: Cloud seeding interferes with the atmosphere’s natural cycles, so laying a path for new clouds over the ocean would draw moisture away from nearby areas. Like, for instance, the Amazon rainforest. Any future cloud seeding efforts would have to be very careful.

அன்டார்டிக்கா தென்னை மரங்கள்.

   

அன்றைய

அன்டார்டிக்கா

..!

சுமார் 53 மில்லியன் ஆண்டுகளுக்கு முன்னர் இன்று பனி படர்ந்து கிடக்கும்

அன்டார்டிக்கா(பூமியின் தென் துருவம்) தென்னை போன்ற palm மரங்கள் வளர்ந்திருந்ததற்கான சான்றை ஆய்வாளர்கள் கண்டறிந்துள்ளனர். அந்தளவுக்கு அந்தப் பிரதேசம் சூடாகவும் இருந்துள்ளது.

ஆர்ட்டிக் பகுதியில் பனிப்படலத்தின் மீது துளைகள் இட்டு நடத்தப்பட்ட ஆய்வில் இருந்தும் இவ்வாறான ஒரு விடயம் முன்னர் கண்டறியப்பட்டிருந்த போதும்.. அந்தாட்டிக்காவைப் பொறுத்தவரை அது கடினமாக இருந்தது. அண்மையில் அந்தாட்டிக்காவை அண்டிய கடல்படுக்கைகளில் நடத்தப்பட்ட ஆய்வுகளில் இருந்து இந்தத் தகவல் வெளிவந்துள்ளது.

இது பூமியின் ஆதி வளிமண்டலம் சூடாகவும் காபனீரொக்சைட் (CO2) நிறைந்தும் இருந்துள்ளதை மெய்ப்பிக்கும் வகையில் அமைந்துள்ளது.

இடைப்பட்ட காலத்தில் ஏற்பட்ட CO2 அளவு வீழ்ச்சி, கண்ட நகர்வுகள் மற்றும் ice age கால பனிப்படிவின் வாயிலாக.. அந்தப் பகுதி பனி படர்ந்து நனி குளிர் பிரதேசமாக மாறி விட்டது போலும்..!

First Color Image of Mars Beamed Back to Earth by Curiosity Rover

First Color Image From Curiosity NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems

That didn't take long: early yesterday we received the earliest images from Mars rover Curiosity's descent and landing zone, and now we've received the first color image from the Mars mission. It shows the Gale Crater in the background--Curiosity's home for now--and the next images will only be getting better from here.

The dust cover on the Mars Hand Lens Imager, the instrument that the image was taken with, ended up, well, covered in dust from Curiosity's rough-and-tumble fall down to the planet's surface. Images without the cover will be sent back to Earth in the coming weeks.

MAHLI, as the lens is nicknamed, is usually used for close-up view of rocks or soil to be studied, but it can focus from right in front of its nose (about 0.8 inches) all the way to the edge of the crater seen in this photo.

New Images Show Mars Rover Curiosity's New Home in Gale Crater, and Its Mountain Destination

Behold Mt. Sharp Curiosity landed facing its ultimate target, Mt. Sharp, which is taller than any mountain in the lower 48 United States. Here it is, in front of the rover's own shadow, in this new image from Curiosity's front-facing hazard cameras. NASA/JPL

PASADENA, Calif. -- This is the latest view from NASA's Mars rover Curioisty, which landed pointing toward its target, Mt. Sharp, a huge peak at the heart of Gale Crater. What a view!

NASA downloaded lots more data from the rover overnight and is preparing for it to awaken on Mars. As of 4:30 p.m. Pacific time Monday, it was about 9 in the morning at the rover's new home on Mars.

The Mars Descent Imager on Curiosity's undercarriage also took a video of the rover's nailbiting descent and landing. Stay tuned for further images.

Mars Rover Curiosity Sends First High-Resolution Photo

The First High-Res Look at Curiosity on Mars NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA has just released the best-looking photo (above) we have of the Gale Crater, the piece of the Red Planet where Mars rover Curiosity landed last night. The photo shows the rim of the crater on the horizon and a gravel field in the foreground, as seen through a fisheye lens, a part of the many cameras Curiosity has on board.

Even though this image is twice the size of the first sent out by the rover, we'll be seeing plenty of amazing images (with more pixels) soon. What you see here was taken with one of Curiosity's lower resolution hazard avoidance cameras; the higher resolution, full-color images will be beamed back in the coming days.

Video: Make Your Houseplant a Touchscreen? Or Theremin? What Is Going On Here

Botanicus Interactus Disney Research

For people who like the Microsoft Kinect but also the simple joys of nature, the dream makers at Disney Research have just smashed together that particular peanut butter and chocolate into a magical (and very, deeply strange) new technology: plants that can register movements like a touchscreen, then display those movements, or use them to interact with an electronic device.
The project, nicknamed Botanicus Interactus, works when a wire is placed in the soil of a plant (either real or artificial). The technology monitors the plant, and can detect when something touches it. An electronic display can relay that information back, or it could work with another device like an iPod, turning on when a certain motion is detected. It's built with the same sort of technology as the ubiquitous touchscreen, but works on multiple frequencies, instead of the usual single frequency. With that, it can pick up where it's being touched and how hard.
So, yes, this is pretty weird, and it's not entirely clear what the practical applications are yet, if any. We've seen similar projects come out of the Disney Research wing, including the interesting Touché project. But researchers are looking into the idea that other everyday objects could also be interacted with, maybe leading to a future where the barrier between electronics and everything else gets a little blurrier.
[PhysOrg]

Are Recent Extreme Weather Events Caused By Global Warming? NASA Scientist Says Yes

Drought at Lake Constance, Switzerland Kecko/Flickr

It's not in doubt that global warming is changing the planet for the worse, but it's difficult to identify which, if any, specific weather events we can definitively link to it. But a new (and divisive) paper from senior NASA climate scientist James E. Hansen suggests that global warming is almost definitely the cause of heat waves and other events observed in the last decade.

The paper, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says events like last year's heat wave in Texas and the 2003 heat wave in Europe were almost certainly caused by systematic climate change. We can say with certainty, says Hansen, that these events wouldn't have happened without the effects of greenhouse gases.

The study examined extreme weather events from 1951 to 1980, then compared them with events between 1980 and 2011. They found that only two tenths of a percent of the world was hit by extreme weather in the former years, but that the number jumped to between 4 and 13 percent in the latter span. That, the scientists say, is enough to conclude that recent extreme weather events could only plausibly be caused by global warming.

Some climate scientists, however, are critical of that analysis, saying the correlation between global warming and specific extreme weather events isn't great enough to warrant linking them.

Use Your Body's Electrical Field To Uniquely Identify Yourself

EEG Machine Wikimedia Commons

You are unique. This is one of the more obscure ways you're unique: An alternating current of different frequencies running through you causes a reaction that's noticeably different from anyone else's. Researchers from Dartmouth University are trying to put this difference to use by creating wearable electronics that respond to--and only to--their intended user.

The design they're discussing is called "Amulet," a device "not unlike a watch" that could take a measurement like this, confirming the identity of a person. The device would use small electrodes to measure how the body's tissue react to the alternating current, which changes from person to person. It's a lock that's keyed into your biology; when it's set up with the device, it only unlocks it for you.

After that, it gets even better: once that connection has been established, researchers say, that device can coordinate with others. Those devices would join the party through physical contact--maybe as easily as being slipped into a pocket, and staying securely rooted in your unique biology.

A system like that could be used to better monitor a person's health; a single device attached directly to the body could monitor that person from anywhere, without causing wireless security concerns. But researchers are conceding that a better way of reliably interpreting the data coming from the sensor will still take time, and reliability is more than a little important for something like this.

Pluto has even colder “twin” of similar size, studies find

A “d­warf plan­et” or­bit­ing our sun three times fur­ther away than the dis­tant dwarf plan­et Plu­to is around the same size as that better-known, frig­id world, as­tro­no­mers have found.

Sci­en­tists took the mea­sure­ments when the fur­ther-off world, Er­is, made a rare oc­culta­t­ion—in which it passes in front of a dis­tant star, dim­ming its light slight­ly. Such an event pro­vides a means of de­ter­min­ing Er­is’ size and im­prov­ing our un­der­stand­ing of the ob­ject, ac­cord­ing to the re­searchers.

The in­ves­ti­ga­t­ion may al­so, they said, help ex­plain the un­usu­al bright­ness of Er­is, which was dis­cov­ered in 2005 and or­bits the Sun about 10 bil­lion km (six bil­lion miles) away on av­er­age.

Eris, named after a god­dess of Greek myth­o­logy, has a moon named after her daugh­ter, Dys­nom­ia. Ow­ing to the great dis­tances, meas­ur­ing the size or de­tect­ing a pu­ta­tive at­mos­phere for Eris is dif­fi­cult.

Af­ter the oc­culta­t­ion was seen in No­vem­ber 2010, Bru­no Si­cardy of the Pierre and Ma­rie Cu­rie Uni­vers­ity and Ob­serv­a­to­ry of Par­is and col­leagues meas­ured Er­is as about 2,326 km (2,011 miles) wide.

Plu­to, which was of­fi­cially re­clas­si­fied as a dwarf plan­et in 2006 af­ter be­ing con­sid­ered a plan­et for dec­ades, is an es­ti­mat­ed 2,300 to 2,400 km wide. Those es­ti­mat­ed dis­tances would make Earth five to six times wid­er than ei­ther dwarf plan­et.

As ex­pected, Er­is is round or nearly so, the usu­al shape for larg­er ce­les­tial ob­jects, said Sicardy and col­leagues. They al­so sug­gest its bright sur­face may be caused by a col­lapsed at­mos­phere, fro­zen by its cold en­vi­ron­ment. Er­is might de­vel­op an at­mos­phere si­m­i­lar to that of Plu­to when it or­bits clos­er to the Sun, they spec­u­lat­ed.

The find­ings are to ap­pear in the Oct. 27 is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Na­ture.

A human bias against creativity is hindering science, research claims

ost us us pro­fess to love cre­ativ­ity. But we re­coil when it stares us in the face, ac­cord­ing to a new study that seems to seems lodge a qui­et in­dict­ment against the whole hu­man race.

Jen­ni­fer S. Mueller of the Uni­vers­ity of Penn­syl­va­nia and col­leagues, who con­ducted the work, say their study both demon­strates and helps ex­plain the phe­nom­e­non. The prob­lem that per­haps most in­ter­feres with our rec­og­ni­tion and ap­preci­ation for real-life cre­ativ­ity, they claim, is that cre­ativ­ity usu­al­ly comes with a side dish of un­cer­tain­ty: Will this new idea ac­tu­al­ly work? What will peo­ple think of me if I ac­cept it?

One of many scien­tists ri­di­culed in his time for work now con­sid­ered sem­i­nal—the Ameri­can phys­i­cist Rob­ert God­dard (1882-1945)

Our love of cre­ativ­ity is what we pro­fess in pub­lic—but our dread of it is what we tend to hide from the world, and of­ten even from our­selves, they add.

The study is im­por­tant, they con­tin­ue, be­cause so­ci­e­ty lov­ing­ly ex­pends re­sources to fos­ter cre­ativ­ity in each new gener­ation—then of­ten turns around and squash­es the new ide­as that re­sult. It’s time to fig­ure out ways to put a stop to this, they say.

“Robert God­dard, the fa­ther of mod­ern rock­et pro­pul­sion, en­dured rid­i­cule and de­ri­sion from his con­tem­po­rary sci­en­tif­ic peers who stat­ed his ide­as were lu­di­crous and im­pos­si­ble,” they not­ed as an ex­am­ple, in a re­port on their find­ings. The pa­per ap­pears in the Nov. 29 ad­vance on­line is­sue of the jour­nal Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence.

Sci­en­tists in eve­ry gen­er­a­tion from Gal­i­le­o to Dan­iel Shecht­man—2011 No­bel lau­re­ate in chem­istry—were in­i­tial­ly rid­i­culed for now-famous work. The same can be said of a le­gion of artists.

“The field of cre­ativ­ity may need to shift its cur­rent fo­cus from iden­ti­fy­ing how to gen­er­ate more cre­ative ide­as to iden­ti­fy­ing how to help in­no­va­tive in­sti­tu­tions rec­og­nize and ac­cept cre­ativ­ity,” Mueller and col­leagues wrote. “If peo­ple hold an im­plic­it bi­as against cre­ativ­ity, then we can­not as­sume that or­gan­iza­tions, in­sti­tu­tions or even sci­en­tif­ic en­deav­ors will de­sire and rec­og­nize cre­ative ide­as even when they ex­plic­it­ly state they want them.”

Mueller and col­leagues paid a group of par­tici­pants to take a se­ries of tests de­signed to re­veal both con­scious and un­con­scious at­ti­tudes to­ward cre­ativ­ity.

In one test that took the form of a word-associ­ation game, they found that par­tici­pants seemed to dis­play an un­con­scious neg­a­tive at­ti­tude to­ward cre­ativ­ity if the ex­peri­menters had made an at­tempt to plant thoughts of un­cer­tain­ty in their heads. They tried to seed this un­cer­tain­ty by prom­is­ing that some par­tici­pants would later re­ceive an ad­di­tion­al pay­ment based on a lot­tery. In the word game—si­m­i­lar to a type of test pre­vi­ous­ly used to re­veal un­con­scious ra­cial at­ti­tudes—re­search­ers sought to meas­ure wheth­er par­tici­pants took a lit­tle long­er to as­so­ci­ate words re­lat­ed to cre­ativ­ity with pos­i­tive things than with neg­a­tives ones, or vice-versa.

In a sec­ond ex­peri­ment, the re­search­ers found that neg­a­tive feel­ings about cre­ativ­ity al­so dis­rupted the abil­ity to rec­og­nize that qua­lity. In this part, they pre­sented par­tici­pants with an idea for an in­ven­tion that had been judged cre­ative by a group of col­lege stu­dents. It in­volved a sneak­er with a nan­otech­nol­ogy that sup­posed­ly ad­justed fab­ric thick­ness to cool the foot and re­duce blis­ters.

Mueller and col­leagues point­ed to one pos­si­ble route through which sci­en­tif­ic in­sti­tu­tions are sti­fling their own abil­ity to rec­og­nize cre­ativ­ity.

“When jour­nals ex­tol cre­ative re­search, uni­vers­ities train sci­en­tists to pro­mote cre­ative so­lu­tions, R&D com­pa­nies com­mend the de­vel­op­ment of new prod­ucts, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies praise cre­ative med­i­cal break­throughs, they may do so in ways that pro­mote un­cer­tain­ty by re­quir­ing gate-keepers to iden­ti­fy the sin­gle ‘best’ and most ‘ac­cu­rate’ idea there­by cre­at­ing an un­ac­knowl­edged aver­sion to cre­ativ­ity,” they wrote.

“Fu­ture re­search should iden­ti­fy fac­tors which mit­i­gate or re­verse the bi­as against cre­ativ­ity.”

First cosmic objects burned brightly, astronomers say

A faint, lumpy glow from the first ob­jects in the uni­verse may have been de­tected with the best pre­ci­sion yet, us­ing NASA’s Spitzer Space Tel­e­scope, as­tro­no­mers say.

The ob­jects might be enor­mous stars or vo­ra­cious black holes, the sci­en­tists add; they’re too dis­tant to make out in­di­vid­u­ally, but Spitzer has cap­tured ev­i­dence of what seems to be an over­all pat­tern cre­at­ed by their light. The ob­serva­t­ions help con­firm the first ob­jects were nu­mer­ous and burned fu­ri­ous­ly, as­tro­no­mers claim.

“These ob­jects would have been tre­men­dously bright,” said Al­ex­an­der “Sasha” Kash­lin­sky of NASA’s God­dard Space Flight Cen­ter in Green­belt, Md., lead au­thor of a pa­per on the find­ings pub­lished in The As­t­ro­phys­i­cal Jour­nal. “We can’t yet di­rectly rule out mys­te­ri­ous sources for this light that could be com­ing from our near­by uni­verse, but it is now becom­ing in­creas­ingly likely that we are catch­ing a glimpse of an an­cient ep­och. Spitzer is lay­ing down a roadmap for NASA’s upcom­ing James Webb Tel­e­scope, which will tell us ex­actly what and where these first ob­jects were.”

Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC

The above panels show the same slice of sky in the constellation Boötes, dubbed the "Extended Groth Strip." The area covered is about 1 by 0.12 degrees of sky. The top panel show's Spitzer's initial infrared view of this patch, including foreground stars and a confusion of fainter galaxies. In the lower panel, all of the resolved stars and galaxies have been masked out of the image (grey patches), and the remaining background glow has been smoothed and enhanced. This processing reveals structure too faint to be seen in the original image. The structure of the lower panel matches just what we would expect for the patterns of clusters from the first galaxies formed in the universe, scientists say. Although any particular early galaxy would be too faint to see individually, this technique is thought to let astronomers better understand what things were like shortly after the Big Bang. 


The Spitzer telescope first caught hints of the re­mote pat­tern of light, known as the cos­mic in­fra­red back­ground, in 2005, and again with more pre­ci­sion in 2007. Now, Spitzer is in an ex­tend­ed phase of its mis­sion, dur­ing which it per­forms more in-depth stud­ies on spe­cif­ic patches of the sky. Kash­lin­sky and his col­leagues used Spitzer to look at two patches of sky for more than 400 hours each.

The team then sub­tracted all the known stars and ga­lax­ies in the im­ages. Rath­er than be­ing left with a black, emp­ty patch of sky, they found faint pat­terns of light with sev­er­al tell­tale char­ac­ter­is­tics of the cos­mic in­fra­red back­ground. The lumps in the pat­tern are con­sist­ent with the way the very dis­tant ob­jects are thought to be clus­tered to­geth­er, the re­search­ers said.

Kash­lin­sky likens the ob­serva­t­ions to look­ing for fire­works in New York ­city from Los An­ge­les. First, you’d have to re­move all the fore­ground lights be­tween the two ­ci­ties, as well as the blaz­ing lights of New York it­self. You ul­ti­mately would be left with a fuzzy map of how the fire­works are dis­trib­ut­ed, but they would still be too dis­tant to make out in­di­vid­u­ally.

“We can gath­er clues from the light of the uni­verse’s first fire­works,” said Kash­lin­sky. “This is teach­ing us that the sources, or the “s­parks,” are in­tensely burn­ing their nu­clear fu­el.”

The uni­verse is thought to have formed some 13.7 bil­lion years ago in a fiery, ex­plo­sive event called the Big Bang. With time, it cooled and, by around 500 mil­lion years lat­er, the first stars, ga­lax­ies and black holes be­gan to take shape. As­tro­no­mers say some of that “first light” might have trav­eled bil­lions of years to reach the Spitzer Space Tel­e­scope. The light now ap­pears as in­fra­red—a low-energy form of light in­vis­i­ble to the un­aided eye­—be­cause the uni­verse has been ex­pand­ing, a pro­cess that stretches out light waves, turn­ing them in­to in­fra­red.

The new study was de­signed to im­prove on pre­vi­ous ob­serva­t­ions by meas­ur­ing this cos­mic in­fra­red back­ground out to scales equiv­a­lent to two full moon­s—a good deal larg­er than what was de­tected be­fore. Im­ag­ine try­ing to find a pat­tern in the noise in an old-fash­ioned tel­e­vi­sion set by look­ing at just a small piece of the screen. It would be hard to know for cer­tain if a sus­pected pat­tern was real. By see­ing a larg­er sec­tion of the screen, you could re­solve small- and large-scale pat­terns, fur­ther con­firming your in­i­tial sus­pi­cion.

Like­wise, as­tro­no­mers us­ing Spitzer have in­creased the amount of sky ex­am­ined to ob­tain more de­fin­i­tive ev­i­dence of the cos­mic in­fra­red back­ground. The re­search­ers plan to ex­plore more patches of sky in the fu­ture to gath­er more clues hid­den in the light of that an­cient time.

Scientists: birds are just baby dinosaurs, in a way

There’s a good rea­son birds are so much cut­er and less threat­en­ing than their scary an­ces­tors—the di­no­saurs—if new re­search is cor­rect.

It’s be­cause birds are, in a sense, di­no­saurs stuck in ba­by mode.

“When we look at birds, we are ac­tu­ally look­ing at ju­ve­nile di­no­saurs” to a great de­gree, said Arkhat Abzhanov of Har­vard Uni­vers­ity, co-au­thor of a re­port on the find­ings.

Skulls of three types of ar­chosaur—al­li­ga­tor, prim­i­tive di­no­saur, and ear­ly bird. The left col­umn rep­re­sents ju­ve­niles and the right col­umn rep­re­sents adults. (Im­age cour­te­sy U. of Tex­as at Aus­tin)

Abzhanov and col­leagues an­a­lyzed doz­ens of bird and di­no­saur skulls. They found that rath­er than take years to reach sex­u­al matur­ity, as many di­no­saurs did, birds sped up the clock­—some spe­cies take as lit­tle as 12 weeks to ma­ture—al­low­ing them to re­tain the phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics of ba­by di­no­saurs.

The report ap­peared May 27 in an on­line edi­tion of the jour­nal Na­ture.

In ev­o­lu­tion, spe­cies change be­cause some char­ac­ter­is­tics are more use­ful than oth­ers in a given envi­ron­ment. Thus in­di­vid­u­als with more of those traits thrive, and through their off­spring, spread those fea­tures through a popula­t­ion. In­di­vid­u­als lack­ing those traits grad­u­ally drop out. As this goes on, spe­cies can even­tu­ally be­come nearly un­rec­og­niz­a­ble com­pared to their old selves.

Most ev­o­lu­tion­ary re­search has fo­cused on the phys­i­cal struc­ture of or­gan­isms, but “what is in­ter­est­ing about this re­search,” Abzhanov said, is that it il­lus­trates how great changes can oc­cur “simply by chang­ing the rel­a­tive tim­ing of events in a crea­ture’s de­vel­op­ment.” Thus, he added, “na­ture has pro­duced the mod­ern bird—an en­tirely new crea­ture and one that, with ap­prox­i­mately 10,000 spe­cies, is to­day the most suc­cess­ful group of land ver­te­brates on the plan­et.”

Di­no­saurs have long snouts and mouths bristling with teeth, while birds have pro­por­tion­ally larg­er eyes and brains. But what in­spired the study was the real­iz­a­tion that skulls of mod­ern birds and ju­ve­nile di­no­saurs show sur­pris­ing si­m­i­lar­ity, re­search­ers said.

“No one had told the big sto­ry of the ev­o­lu­tion of the bird head be­fore,” said Bhart-Anjan Bhullar, a Har­vard doc­tor­al stu­dent and first au­thor of the stu­dy. “There had been a num­ber of smaller stud­ies that fo­cused on par­tic­u­lar points of the anat­o­my, but no one had looked at the en­tire pic­ture. ... When you do that, you see the ori­gins of the fea­tures that make the bird head spe­cial lie deep in the histo­ry of the ev­o­lu­tion of Ar­chosaurs, a group of an­i­mals that were the dom­i­nant, meat-eating an­i­mals for mil­lions of years.”

With col­leagues at The Uni­vers­ity of Tex­as at Aus­tin, the re­search­ers con­ducted CT scans on doz­ens of skulls, rang­ing from mod­ern birds to theropod­s—the di­no­saurs most closely re­lat­ed to birds—to early di­no­saur spe­cies. By mark­ing var­i­ous “land­marks” in the skull the scien­tists tracked how the over­all shape changed over mil­lions of years.

“We ex­am­ined skulls from the en­tire line­age that gave rise to mod­ern birds,” Abzhanov said. “We looked back ap­prox­i­mately 250 mil­lion years, to the Ar­chosaurs, the group which gave rise to crocodiles and al­li­ga­tors as well as mod­ern birds.”

It turned out, he said, that while early di­no­saurs, even those closely re­lat­ed to mod­ern birds, un­dergo vast struc­tur­al changes as they ma­ture, the skulls of ju­ve­nile and adult birds re­main re­markably sim­i­lar. In the case of mod­ern birds, Abzhanov said, the change is the re­sult of a pro­cess known as pro­ge­n­e­sis, which causes an an­i­mal to reach sex­u­al matur­ity ear­li­er.

“To really study some­thing you have to look at its whole ex­ist­ence, and un­der­stand that one por­tion of its life can be parceled out and made in­to the en­tire life­span of a new, and in this case, radic­ally suc­cess­ful or­gan­is­m,” Bhullar said.

Satyendra Nath Bose towers over Higgs in world of physics

 City-based scientists are glad that Bengal remembered 20th century physicist Satyendra Nath Bose when the world celebrated the confirmation of the Higgs boson particle on Wednesday. But they were also anguished that Bose never quite received the honour or adulation that Swami Vivekananda or Rabindranath Tagore did.
The 'boson' in the Higgs boson particle, whose search and ultimate detection was one of the longest and most expensive in the history of science, owes its name to Bose. In 1924, the city-based physicist had sent a paper to Albert Einstein, describing a statistical model that led to the discovery of the Bose-Einstein condensate phenomenon. The paper laid the basis for describing the two classes of subatomic particles - bosons, named after Bose, and fermions, after Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.

NASA Celebrates Mars Rover Curiosity's Perfect Landing

Celebration After a Perfect Landing Members of the Mars Science Laboratory team in the MSL Mission Support Area react after learning the the Curiosity rover has landed safely on Mars. NASA/JPL

PASADENA, Calif. -- Long minutes of thunderous applause greeted the managers and engineers who paraded into an auditorium here Sunday night, triumphant after a perfect landing on another world. The Mars rover Curiosity sent a picture from the Martian surface just moments after its self-piloted descent and airdrop, and everyone assembled at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory could not help but cheer. It's a huge moment for NASA, which delivered the rover over budget and two years late -- but delivered it, and beautifully.

Nothing is harder than landing on Mars, and no one does it better than the United States, said Charles Bolden, NASA's administrator. In a few moments of proud flag-waving, Bolden, White House science adviser John Holdren and others trumpeted the space agency's momentous achievement.

"Tonight, there are at least 4 countries, and I won't name them, who are on Mars. And they're on Mars because they went with the United States," Bolden said. "Our leadership is going to make this world better."

The landing comes at a transition time for NASA and space exploration generally -- the agency retired its storied space shuttles a year ago, and its Mars program has been in question amid ongoing federal budget debates. A successful landing carries much more than the promise of groundbreaking science -- it's a moment fraught with enormous pressure, weighing on the agency's prestige, and this was evident in all the speeches and words of congratulations Sunday night.

The First Image Returned by Mars Rover Curiosity: Includes a bit of wheel

"It will stand as an American point of pride far into the future," Holdren said of Curiosity.

Obama himself said via Twitter that the U.S. had made history once again. "I congratulate and thank all the men and women of NASA who made this remarkable accomplishment a reality," the tweet said.

So many people followed the landing on Twitter and through NASA channels that the space agency's websites briefly crashed in the moments after the landing. Members of the public (and media) who were hoping to access Curiosity's first images via a special NASA site were instead greeted with error messages. It was a frustrating glitch, but it was also strong evidence of the public's fascination with the robot geologist and all it represents.

Charles Elachi, JPL's director, said he hoped the landing would inspire new generations of engineers and spark their curiosity. It's what NASA is about.

"This movie cost you less than seven bucks per American citizen, and look at the excitement we have," he said, to further applause.

Panasonic's Artificial Photosynthesis Turns Water, Sunlight, and CO2 into Useful Chemicals

Artificial Photosynthesis Yielding Formic Acid Panasonic

Artificial photosynthesis--the idea that we might be able to create energy and other useful thing from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide, as plants do--is something of a holy grail for energy and green chemistry researchers. And while some efforts have shown modest potential--MIT’s Nocera Lab, for instance, claims to have created an artificial leaf from stable materials--efficiency is still a problem. That hasn’t stopped consumer electronics giant Panasonic; the company yesterday revealed that it is investing in artificial photosynthesis technology that turns carbon dioxide and sunlight into industrial chemicals. Just add water.

Panasonic’s two-step approach involves a nitride semiconductor that converts sunlight into a flow of electrons that splits water into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen. A second reaction then coverts carbon dioxide and the harvested hydrogen into formic acid via a metallic catalyst. Formic acid is a widely-used chemical in textile production and food preservation, particularly for livestock feed (fun fact: it occurs naturally in bee and ant venom).

The problem here--as always--is efficiency. The conversion of water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide to formic acid reaches just two-tenths of one percent efficiency, far below the threshold that could make it commercially viable. But every technology starts somewhere. The company will present the research at this week’s International Conference on Photochemical Conversion and Storage of Solar Energy.

Nine Unsuspecting Scientists Win $27 Million in Suddenly Announced Largest-Ever Annual Physics Prize

Exploding Universe Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at Stanford University who studies cosmic expansion and created this visualization, is one of nine $3 million winners of a new Fundamental Physics Prize. Andrei Linde

A Russian physics student turned social media billionaire just made theoretical physics the most lucrative thing in science, heaping $3 million apiece on nine researchers. The new Fundamental Physics Prize is worth more than double the Nobel, at least monetarily speaking.
Yuri Milner, whose investments are reportedly worth $12 billion, studied theoretical physics as a student in Russia in the 1980s and 1990s and founded the prize for his love of the field. He told the New York Times that the quest to understand the universe “really defines us as human beings.” And he told Nature News yesterday that physics should get its day in the sun: “The intention was to say that science is as important as shares trading on Wall Street,” he said.

There are no strings attached, according to him — the goal is to raise the stature of theoretical physics and the people who study it. Milner chose the winners, all of whom are male and all but one of whom are from Western countries, himself. The physicists seemed as baffled by the news as anyone. MIT professor Alan Guth, who proposed the idea of cosmic inflation in the moments after the Big Bang, told the New York Times it knocked him off his feet. The money is already in his bank account, which previously carried a $200 balance. Nature News asked Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at Stanford University, how he would spend his money: “This is a problem that is much more complicated than the physics problems I'm trying to solve,” he replied.
Milner wants past winners to choose the next crop of laureates — as part of accepting the honors, the winners agree to form a selection committee. He also wants to honor junior scientists in the field, chosen by laureates, who will win a $100,000 New Horizons in Physics Prize. Along with a Nobel, physical scientists can also win the Kavli Prize and the Shaw Prize, both valued at $1 million.
Here is the list of winners, along with Guth and Linde: Nima Arkani-Hamed, Juan Maldacena, Nathan Seiberg and Edward Witten, all of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.; Alexei Kitaev, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology; Maxim Kontsevich, a mathematician at the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies outside Paris; and Ashoke Sen, a string theorist at Harish-Chandra Research Institute in India.

The Navy's Autonomous X-47B Warplane Makes its First East Coast Test Flight

X-47B in Flight at NAS Patuxent River Northrop Grumman

PopSci’s favorite autonomous warplane is having a big week at Naval Air Station Patuxent River. The first of the two aircraft has been reassembled, run through a battery of tests, and is officially back in the air, this time on the East Coast.

On Sunday the X-47B made a 36-minute flight, looping over the Chesapeake Bay at altitudes up to 7,500 feet--appropriately with the Navy’s carrier-capable workhorse, an F/A-18 jet, giving chase. The X-47B is the Navy’s (and the world’s) first attempt at creating an unmanned jet aircraft that can take off and land on a carrier deck--if successful, it will also be the first tailless aircraft to do so. Pax River held a media event yesterday to celebrate the first flight, which brings us one big step closer to the advent of the first unmanned, autonomous, aircraft carrier-capable strike aircraft.

Unlike the initial flight tests at Edwards Air Force Base in California, this first flight at NAS Pax River demonstrates that the X-47B has been successfully folded into the Navy's command and control framework, which has been designed to mimic that of an aircraft carrier. Pax River is home to one of the world’s only terrestrial carrier simulators--a runway fitted with arresting cables for carrier-style landings and a steam catapult for high-speed launches. From a facility at Pax that simulates the air traffic control center and primary flight control tower on real carriers, the Unmanned Combat Air System team will spend the rest of this year getting the X-47B ready for real carrier tests, slated for sometime in the first half of 2013, pending the availability of a carrier on the East Coast.

While the X-47B itself is not intended for active duty, the UCAS program that created it will provide operational guidance and demonstrate technologies for a follow-on program (currently termed UCLASS) that aims to put operational unmanned strike jets on carrier decks by the end of the decade.

We Can See Through Walls Using Wireless Router

In the 1930s, U.S. Navy researchers stumbled upon the concept of radar when they noticed that a plane flying past a radio tower reflected radio waves. Scientists have now applied that same principle to make the first device that tracks existing Wi-Fi signals to spy on people through walls.

Wi-Fi radio signals are found in 61 percent of homes in the U.S. and 25 percent worldwide, so Karl Woodbridge and Kevin Chetty, researchers at University College London, designed their detector to use these ubiquitous signals. When a radio wave reflects off a moving object, its frequency changes—a phenomenon called the Doppler effect. Their radar prototype identifies frequency changes to detect moving objects. It’s about the size of a suitcase and contains a radio receiver composed of two antennas ­and a signal-processing unit. In tests, they have used it to determine a person’s location, speed and direction—even through a one-foot-thick brick wall. Because the device itself doesn’t emit any radio waves, it can’t be detected.

Wi-Fi radar could have domestic applications ranging from spotting intruders to unobtrusively monitoring children or the elderly. It could also have military uses: The U.K. Ministry of Defence has funded a study to determine whether it could be used to scan buildings during urban warfare. With improvements, Woodbridge says, the device could become sensitive enough to pick up on subtle motions the ribcage makes during breathing, which would allow the radar to detect people who are standing or sitting still.

See image above for how it'll work.

1. MOVING SUBJECT
When Wi-Fi radio waves bounce off a moving object, their frequency changes. If, for example, a person is moving toward the Wi-Fi source, the reflected waves’ frequency increases. If a person is moving away from the source, the frequency decreases.

2. REGULAR OL' ROUTER
A Wi-Fi Internet router already in the room fills the area with radio waves of a specific frequency, usually 2.4 or 5 gigahertz.

3. BASELINE SIGNAL
One antenna of the radar system tracks the baseline radio signal in the room.

4. SHIFTED SIGNAL
A second antenna detects radio waves that have reflected off of moving objects, which changes their frequency.

5. PERP, SPOTTED
By comparing the two antennas’ signals, the computer calculates the object’s location to within a few feet as well as its speed and direction.

BREATHE EASY

Breathe Easy:

It’s possible to detect a person’s breathing rate by surrounding him with radio waves. Neal Patwari’s wireless engineering group at the University of Utah designed a network of 20 inexpensive radio transmitters that are placed around a patient’s bed. Then they created an algorithm that detects a stationary person’s breaths better than current detectors do. Patwari plans to upgrade the algorithm by the end of the year to filter out body movements too. The system could someday be used in hospitals in place of tubes and masks.

The Shirt That Cools Your Body Temperature

Ice Tee Courtesy Columbia Sportswear

The human body already has a highly efficient cooling system: As perspiration evaporates, it draws heat away from the body. Wicking fabrics facilitate this process by distributing sweat evenly over the fabric, so that it dries more quickly. Despite devising cheats, such as menthol-like chemical coatings added to fabrics, companies have never actually improved upon the body’s natural cooling process. Designers at Columbia Sportswear have now made a fabric that does.

The wicking polyester base of the Omni-Freeze ZERO T-shirt is embedded with thousands of 0.15-inch hydrophilic polymer rings (a men’s medium has more than 41,000 of them). As the base spreads sweat, the rings absorb moisture and expand into three-dimensional doughnuts. In order to swell, the rings require energy, which they gather as body heat. In tests, the shirt was up to 10 degrees cooler against the wearer’s skin than shirts made from any other material.