Scientific Evidence

Space tourist

2006-09-18T23:51:00.000-07:00

MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) -- It was a first in the annals of space history. A Russian-built rocket carrying the world's first female space tourist blasted off Monday in Kazakhstan on a flight to the international space station.

Anousheh Ansari, a telecommunications entrepreneur, was accompanied by a U.S.-Russian crew on the Soyuz TMA-9 capsule.

The Iranian-born American will go down in the record books in a couple of ways. She's the first woman to pay her way into space and the first person of Iranian descent to get there. Ansari is the fourth space tourist.

Her colleagues on the flight, American Michael Lopez-Alegria and Russian Mikhail Tyurin, are starting a six-month stint in space. But Ansari will return to Earth in 10 days with the outgoing U.S.-Russian crew.

"The flight is normal, the crew feel fine," a flight controller at Mission Control near Moscow said according to Reuters news service.

In an exclusive interview with CNN, Ansari said she knows people will be watching -- a belief confirmed by the comments posted on her blog, anoushehansari.com.

"Me being the first female has inspired a lot of women and girls in Iran, especially being Iranian, and I've received numerous e-mails, messages of different sorts saying how proud of me they are."

Ansari's left Iran at the age of 16 just a few years after the Islamic Revolution, in part because her family wanted her to pursue her passion for the sciences to the fullest extent possible.

When she arrived, she knew next to no English except for a few verses from the song "My Favorite Things," from the film "The Sound of Music."

But within the next several years, Ansari had taught herself English, earned a university degree and landed a job at MCI earning a little more than $26,000. There she met her husband.

She and her husband soon quit their jobs at MCI, cashed in their retirement savings, and ran up their credit cards to finance a telecommunications company they opened.

In 2000, they sold that company for more than half-a-billion dollars to Sonus Networks Inc. A year later, Fortune magazine estimated her personal wealth at about $180 million dollars. The stock price of Sonus has since plummeted, and Ansari is being sued for insider trading.

The Ansaris would not comment on the lawsuit, other than to note that she is no longer a Sonus officer, according to The Associated Press.

Sing of the volcano

2006-08-13T13:41:00.000-07:00

The low-frequency, seismic rumblings of volcanoes are being transformed into delicate musical scores in an effort to predict when they will erupt.

Researchers in Italy have already created a concerto from the underground movements of Mount Etna on Sicily.

They are now creating melodies from Ecuador's recently erupted Tungurahua.

By correlating the music with precise stages of volcanic activity on both volcanoes the team hope to learn the signature tune of an imminent eruption.

"If you can identify the musical patterns that warn of an eruption then you can implement civil protection measures, days or even hours before the event," said Professor Roberto Barbera of the University of Catania.

Cosmic blob biggest thing in universe

2006-08-08T06:49:00.000-07:00

(SPACE.com) -- An enormous amoeba-like structure 200 million light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas is the largest known object in the universe, scientists say.

The galaxies and gas bubbles, called Lyman alpha blobs, are aligned along three curvy filaments that formed about 2 billion years after the universe exploded into existence after the theoretical Big Bang.

The filaments were recently seen using the Subaru and Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea.

The galaxies within the newly found structure are packed together four times closer than the universe's average.

Some of the gas bubbles are up to 400,000 light years across, nearly twice the diameter of our neighboring Andromeda Galaxy.

Scientists think they formed when massive stars born early in the history of the universe exploded as supernovas and blew out their surrounding gases. Another theory is that the bubbles are giant gas cocoons that will one day give birth to new galaxies.

The finding will give researchers new insight into what the structure of cosmos looks like at the largest scale.

"Something this large and this dense would have been rare in the early universe," said study team member Ryosuke Yamauchi from Tohoku University.

"The structure we discovered and others like are probably the precursors of the largest structures we see today which contain multiple clusters of galaxies," Yamauchi said.

X-rays reveal Archimedes secrets

2006-08-06T12:11:00.000-07:00

A series of hidden texts written by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes are being revealed by US scientists.

Until now, the pages have remained obscured by paintings and texts laid down on top of the original writings.
Using a non-destructive technique known as X-ray fluorescence, the researchers are able to peer through these later additions to read the underlying text.
The goatskin parchment records key details of Archimedes' work, considered the foundation of modern mathematics.
The writings include the only Greek version of On Floating Bodies known to exist, and the only surviving ancient copies of The Method of Mechanical Theorems and the Stomachion.
In the treatises, the 3rd Century BC mathematician develops numerical descriptions of the real world.
"Archimedes was like no-one before him," says Will Noel, curator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland and director of the imaging project.
"It just doesn't get any better than re-reading the mind of one of the greatest figures of Western civilisation."

'Eighth wonder'

Revealing Archimedes' writings presents a huge challenge to the imaging team.
The original texts were transcribed in the 10th Century by an anonymous scribe on to parchment.
Each page takes 12 hours to reconstruct
Three centuries later a monk in Jerusalem called Johannes Myronas recycled the manuscript to create a palimpsest.
Palimpsesting involves scraping away the original text so the parchments can be used again. To create a book, the monk cut the pages in half and turned them sideways.
To create a book Myronas also used recycled pages from works by the 4th Century Orator Hyperides and other philosophical texts.
Mr Noel describes the palimpsest as "the eighth wonder of the world".
"You never get three unique palimpsested texts from the ancient world together in one book," he told the BBC News website. "That's just completely unheard of."
The monks filled the recycled pages with Greek Orthodox prayers.
Later, forgers in the 20th Century added gold paintings of religious imagery to try to boost the value of the tome.
The result was the near total obliteration of the original texts apart from faint traces of the ink used by the 10th Century Scribe.

Bright light

Previously the privately-owned palimpsest has been investigated using various optical and digital imaging techniques.
However, much of the text remained hidden behind paint and stains.
The researchers have now turned to a technique known as X-ray fluorescence to tease out the final details of the writings.
The method is used in may branches of science including geology and biology. It has previously been used by other researchers to decode ancient texts.
In August 2005 a team from Cornell University successfully deciphered a series of 2,000-year-old worn down stone inscriptions.
The X-rays are formed in a synchrotron - a particle accelerator that uses electrons travelling at close to the speed of light to generate powerful "synchrotron" light.
The light covers a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum, including powerful X-rays, a million times more intense than a transmission X-ray used in medical imaging.
"In fluorescence it's like looking at the stars at night whereas in transmission it's like looking during the day," explains Dr Uwe Bergmann of the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lab in the US, where the work is being done.
The light enables scientists to look inside matter at the molecular and atomic scale.

Glowing words

The technique is particularly useful for probing the palimpsest because the ink used by the scribe to record Archimedes' work contains iron.
"When the X-rays hit an iron atom it emits a characteristic radiation, it glows," says Dr Bergmann. "When you record the glow you can reconstruct an image of all of the iron in the book."
The glowing words are displayed on a computer screen, giving the researchers the first glimpse of the text in nearly 800 years.
"It's like receiving a fax from the 3rd Century BC," said Mr Noel. "It's the most sensational feeling."
Each page takes 12 hours to reconstruct as the highly focused beam of X-rays, the width of a human hair, sweeps across the page.
The team have until the 7 August this year to scrutinise the palimpsest, before the synchrotron is switched off for maintenance.
During that time they hope to scan between 12 and 14 pages, paying particular attention to the areas covered with the forged paintings.
The public can watch the researchers as they reveal the glowing ancient text during a live webcast at 2300 GMT on 4 August.

Probe finds evidence of lakes on Titan

2006-08-04T00:43:00.000-07:00

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Scientists say they have found the first widespread evidence of giant hydrocarbon lakes on the surface of Saturn's planet-size moon Titan.

The cluster of lakes was spotted near Titan's frigid north pole during a weekend flyby by the international Cassini spacecraft, which flew within 590 miles of the moon.

Researchers counted about a dozen lakes six to 62 miles wide. Some, which appeared as dark patches in radar images, were connected by channels, while others had tributaries flowing into them. Several were dried up, but the ones that contained liquid were most likely a mix of methane and ethane.

"It was a real potpourri," said Cassini scientist Jonathan Lunine of the University of Arizona.

Titan is one of two moons in the solar system known to possess a significant atmosphere similar to that of primordial Earth. But scientists have long puzzled over the source of its hazy atmosphere rich in nitrogen and methane.

Scientists believe methane gas breaks up in Titan's atmosphere and forms smog clouds that rain methane down to the surface. But the source of methane inside the moon, which releases the gas into the atmosphere, is still unknown, Lunine said.

Last year, Cassini found what appeared to be a liquid hydrocarbon lake about the size of Lake Ontario on Titan's south pole. But the recent flyby marked the first time the spacecraft spied a multitude of lakes.

Cassini's next Titan encounter will be September 7, when it will be 620 miles away.

Cassini, funded by NASA and the European and Italian space agencies, was launched in 1997 and took seven years to reach Saturn to explore the ringed planet and its many moons. The mission is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Cassini's accompanying probe, Huygens, developed and controlled by the ESA, touched down on Titan in 2005.

Stem cells: Hope and hype

2006-07-31T05:31:00.000-07:00

Opponents of embryonic stem cell research -- starting with President Bush -- argue that you can't destroy life in order to save it; supporters argue that an eight-cell embryo doesn't count as a human life in the first place -- not when compared with the life it could help save.

Opponents say the promise of embryo research has been oversold; supporters retort that adult stem cells are still of limited use, and to fully realize their potential we would need to know more about how they operate -- which we can learn only from studying leftover fertility-clinic embryos that would otherwise be thrown away.

Back and forth it goes, the politics driving the science, the science pushing back.

Adult-stem-cell research is morally fine but clinically limiting, since only embryonic cells possess the power to replicate indefinitely and grow into any of more than 200 types of tissue.

Extracting knowledge from embryos that would otherwise be wasted is one thing, but scientists admit that moving forward will require a much larger supply of fresh, healthy embryos than fertility clinics could ever provide. And once you start asking people about creating embryos for the purpose of experimenting on them, the support starts to slow down.

Five years after Bush announced that federal money could go to researchers only working on embryonic stem cell lines that scientists had already developed, Democrats hope to leverage the issue as evidence that they represent the reality-based community, running against the theocrats.