Archive for the ‘Science and Space’ Category
A new species of squid has been discovered by scientists during a research cruise in the southern Indian ocean.
The 70cm-long specimen is a large member of the chiroteuthid family.
Squid from this group are long and slender with light-producing organs, which act as lures to attract prey.
It was found during analysis of 7,000 samples gathered during last year’s Seamounts cruise led by the conservation group IUCN.
The project started a year ago when marine experts embarked on a six-week research expedition in the Indian Ocean.
The aim of the cruise was to unveil the mysteries of seamounts – underwater mountains – in the southern Indian Ocean and to help improve conservation and management of marine resources in the area.
“For 10 days now 21 scientists armed with microscopes have been working through intimidating rows of jars containing fishes, squids, zooplankton and other interesting creatures,” says Alex Rogers, of the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford,
“Many specimens look similar to each other and we have to use elaborate morphological features such as muscle orientation and gut length to differentiate between them.”
So far, more than 70 species of squid have been identified from the Seamounts cruise, representing more than 20% of the global squid biodiversity.
The first atomic bomb exploded at a test site in July 1945
Forensic analysis of the debris left after a nuclear explosion could yield crucial evidence about the composition and the origin of the bomb, say scientists.
A US team examined Trinitite, the glassy ground debris from the first-ever nuclear test that the US Army conducted in 1945 in New Mexico.
They used advanced analytical techniques to reveal details about the materials used to construct the bomb.
The study appears in the journal PNAS.
The first atomic bomb exploded in the early hours of 16 July, 1945, in the desert near Alamogordo Air Base. Code-named “Trinity”, the detonation was just a test conducted far away from any settlements.
Just weeks later, in the final stages of World War II, two atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Between 90,000-166,000 people died in Hiroshima and some 60,000-80,000 in Nagasaki. About half of the deaths happened on the day of the bombing.
Tracing the responsible
Now, many consider the threat of a nuclear attack by terrorists to be very real. Such an attack could potentially wipe out whole cities.
But if someone does ever undertake such an attack, could the culprits behind the bomb ever be found?
The current study’s lead author Albert Fahey, of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (Nist) in Gaithersburg, US, seems to think so.
“Prior to this, pretty much everyone assumed that everything would be vaporised, it would all be homogeneous and we would have no idea whatsoever where this thing came from,” he told BBC News.
“Turns out that’s not true.”
The researcher explained that his team used nuclear forensic analysis to study a little piece of trinitite that he obtained from a material collector over the internet.
The scientists were surprised to find that their “microanalysis” techniques identified the secondary materials used to build the device that went off at Trinity site.
This information, in turn, can be used to trace the bomb’s origin, he said.
“Prior to this study, people didn’t realise that other components of the bomb could be discerned from looking at ground debris and seeing what’s associated [with it],” said Dr Fahey.
“But there are some distinctive signatures that were in the bomb other than fission products and plutonium, and that gives you hope that you can get some additional information out of it – like where it was made.”
Other materials
The researchers write in the paper that contrary to the nuclear material that would be likely to come from wherever a person could get it, “whether it was submitted by a state that’s sympathetic or they got it on the black market”, other materials would likely be of local origin.
“The materials that go to make the rest of the bomb, to produce the critical mass, [would be] obtained from local sources,” said Dr Fahey.
“Perhaps if it’s a gun-type device, an artillery barrel, maybe it was put in a shipping container so maybe there were bricks around it.
“And they’ll have records associated with them. For example, if someone were to use a lead tamper, then the isotopic composition of the lead would pinpoint or at least narrow down the number of lead mines it could come from.”
The site for the first atomic bomb test was code-named TrinityRichard Lindstrom, also of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and a co-author of the study, told BBC News that the study was a crucial first step to help identify those behind any future nuclear terrorist attack.
“The interest that the team are trying to stir up is that here is this ancient material from 1945 that contains a tremendous amount of information that maybe we should go back and try to understand a little bit better – just in case we ever should try to infer the composition and source of a nuclear explosion from the debris of a terrorist event.
“Just from this random sample of trinitite we can draw a surprising number of conclusions about the device.” <!–94e02828954b42f084dc3171ef02ee15–>
The Large Hadron Collider has successfully created a “mini-Big Bang” by smashing together lead ions instead of protons.
The scientists working at the enormous machine on Franco-Swiss border achieved the unique conditions on 7 November.
The experiment created temperatures a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun.
The LHC is housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border near Geneva.
Up until now, the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator – which is run by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) – has been colliding protons, in a bid to uncover mysteries of the Universe’s formation.
THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER
- The LHC is smashing together particles in a bid to unlock the secrets of formation of our Universe
- It is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) in Geneva
- The collider is housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border
- The giant tunnel is located an average of 100m underground
- The LHC is the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator
- The circumference of the LHC is 26 659 m, with a total of 9300 magnets inside
- The magnets are cooled to an operating temperature of -271.3°C (1.9 K) – colder than deep space
Proton collisions could help spot the elusive Higgs boson particle and signs of new physical laws, such as a framework called supersymmetry.
But for the next four weeks, scientists at the LHC will concentrate on analysing the data obtained from the lead ion collisions.
This way, they hope to learn more about the plasma the Universe was made of a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.
One of the accelerator’s experiments, ALICE, has been specifically designed to smash together lead ions, but the ATLAS and Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiments have also switched to the new mode.
‘Strong force‘
David Evans from the University of Birmingham, UK, is one of the researchers working at ALICE.
He said that the collisions obtained were able to generate the highest temperatures and densities ever produced in an experiment.
“We are thrilled with the achievement,” said Dr Evans.
One of the lead-ion collisions at the LHC“This process took place in a safe, controlled environment, generating incredibly hot and dense sub-atomic fireballs with temperatures of over ten trillion degrees, a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun.
“At these temperatures even protons and neutrons, which make up the nuclei of atoms, melt resulting in a hot dense soup of quarks and gluons known as a quark-gluon plasma.”
Quarks and gluons are sub-atomic particles – some of the building blocks of matter. In the state known as quark-gluon plasma, they are freed of their attraction to one another. This plasma is believed to have existed just after the Big Bang.
He explained that by studying the plasma, physicists hoped to learn more about the so-called strong force – the force that binds the nuclei of atoms together and that is responsible for 98% of their mass.
After the LHC finishes colliding lead ions, it will go back to smashing together protons once again.
The ALICE experiment has been designed specifically for lead ion collisions
Relief officials have begun recovering bodies but many more are still strewn on beachesBad weather is again obstructing efforts to get aid to the survivors of Monday’s tsunami in Indonesia.
Heavy rain and high tides are making it hard for boats to deliver supplies to the isolated Mentawai islands off the west coast of Sumatra.
More than 400 people are confirmed dead, but many bodies have yet to be recovered from coastal areas and more than 300 people are still missing.
The tsunami was triggered by a 7.7-magnitude undersea earthquake.
Disaster-relief officials plan to start dropping aid by air, but reports say there are not enough helicopters to reach many of the devastated areas.
Struggling with devastation
The government has pledged millions of dollars for the relief effort, but aid agencies said people on the islands still urgently need food and shelter.
Meanwhile, an Indonesian government official has told the BBC the earthquake was so close to land that the early warning system in the area did not have a chance to send out an alert before the giant waves broke.
The epicentre was 80km from the Mentawai islands.
The government is now planning to install new earthquake detection equipment, said Kusuma Habir from the foreign ministry.
Disaster official Ade Edward says the 3m (10ft) surge is likely to have carried many of the missing out to sea, or buried them in the sand.
Analysis
There are still many of the aid relief supplies stored here in Sikakap, the capital district of Mentawai, while many other supplies are still stored in Padang, the capital city of the province of West Sumatra.
Transportation is still the biggest obstacle in this process: boats are very limited and aircraft are almost not available
This poses a very significant problem because the aid cannot be transported quick enough from Padang or any other city.
At the same time, the aid that has arrived here in Sikakap cannot be dispersed to worst-affected areas.
As the scale of the tsunami disaster became clear on Thursday, Mr Edward painted a bleak picture of the chances of finding more survivors.
“Of those missing people, we think two-thirds of them are probably dead, either swept out to sea or buried in the sand,” he told the AFP news agency.
“When we flew over the area yesterday, we saw many bodies. Heads and legs were sticking out of the sand; some of them were in the trees.”
He estimated that a further 200 people may have been killed.
Indonesia’s state-run news agency Antara reported that 468 houses had been completely destroyed by the wave.
Village chief Tasmin Saogo told the BBC’s Indonesian service that the islanders had begun to bury their dead.
“In the village of Sadegugung, there aren’t any body bags. In the end, we just lifted them and we buried 95 people today,” he said.
“There are still many bodies lying about, underneath coconut trees and in other places.”
A three-month-old baby was found alive in a ditch
Indonesia is also struggling with the devastation caused by this week’s eruption of Mount Merapi in central Java, which killed more than 30 people.
The volcano erupted again on Friday, sending hot ash down its slopes, but no further casualties have been reported.
Meanwhile, the party of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has been trying to defuse a growing political row over comments made by one of its senior members.
Indonesia’s 32 hours of disaster
- 25 Oct, 0600 local time: Highest alert issued for Mt Merapi eruption; villagers advised to leave.
- 25 Oct, 2142: 7.7 magnitude quake near Mentawai Islands; tsunami watch issued.
- 26 Oct, 1300: First reports of people missing after tsunami
- 26 Oct, 1402: Mt Merapi erupts.
Rival politicians criticised his statement as insensitive, and the party has apologised.
Earlier, Mr Yudhoyono cut short a trip to Vietnam to oversee the rescue effort, flying in a helicopter loaded with food and other basic necessities to the remote and otherwise inaccessible islands.
Indonesian officials said local residents had been given no indication of the coming wave, as a high-tech tsunami warning system installed in the wake of 2004’s giant Indian Ocean tsunami was not working.
The vast Indonesian archipelago sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, one of the world’s most active areas for earthquakes and volcanoes.
More than 1,000 people were killed by an earthquake off Sumatra in September 2009.
In December 2004, a 9.1-magnitude quake off the coast of Aceh triggered a tsunami in the Indian Ocean that killed a quarter of a million people in 13 countries including Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand.
An image of debris ejected from Cabeus Crater and into the sunlight, about 20 seconds after the LCROSS impact. The inset shows a close-up with the direction of the Sun and the EarthThere are oases of water-rich soil that could sustain astronauts on the Moon, according to Nasa.
The impacts kicked up large amounts of rock and dust, revealing a suite of fascinating chemical compounds and far more water than anyone had imagined.
A Nasa-led team tells Science magazine that about 155kg of water vapour and water-ice were blown out of the crater.
The researchers’ analysis suggests the lunar regolith, or soil, at the impact site contains 5.6% by weight of water-ice.
“That’s a significant amount of water,” said Anthony Colaprete, from the US space agency’s Ames research centre.
“And it’s in the form of water-ice grains. That’s good news because water-ice is very much a friendly resource to work with. You don’t have to warm it very much; you just have to bring it up to room temperature to pull it out of the dirt real easy.”
And he added: “If you took just the 10km region around the impact site and say it had 5% water – that would be equivalent to about a billion gallons of water. I’m not saying that’s what’s there, but it just shows you that even at these small concentrations there’s potential for lots of water.”
The LCROSS spacecraft followed closely behind the spent rocket stageThe Nasa-led team has published six papers in the American journal describing the findings of the 9 October, 2009, impacts of the LCROSS spacecraft and its companion rocket stage.
The pair was targeted at the Moon’s southern pole – at Cabeus Crater, a depression so deep and dark that the odds of disturbing ice were thought to be very good.
The rocket stage went in first, followed a few minutes later by the LCROSS probe which gathered imagery and other data just before it too slammed into the surface.
Another spacecraft, Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), was passing close by. It also was able to study the plume of material ejected into sunlight more than 15km above the rim of Cabeus.
Moon’s ‘archive’
The suite of instruments deployed on that day has determined as much as 20% of this dust plume was made up of volatile compounds, including methane, ammonia, hydrogen gas, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.
In addition, the instruments saw relatively large amounts of some metals, such as sodium, and mercury. There was even a signature of silver, but this was tiny.
Scientists say the water and mix of volatiles could be remnants of comet or asteroid impacts through the eons, but they reckon a number of quite complex chemical and physical processes are also working to cycle and migrate these substances around the Moon.
“The LCORSS mission provided some surprises with significant implications for the creation, transport, collection and archiving of volatiles below the shadows of the south pole,” said team-member Peter Schultz from Brown University.
“We’ve opened this lunar closet and discovered things we just didn’t expect. And just as the Earth holds its clues to the past climates in the ices at its poles, the Moon also holds clues to past impacts and perhaps even the last stages of lunar volcanism.”
Daytime temperatures at the Moon’s southern pole. The shadowed parts of some craters are among the coldest places in the Solar SystemThe water-ice is not uniformly distributed across the southern pole. Rather, it is held in pockets.
Some of these oases are, like in Cabeus, to be found in shadows where LRO’s Diviner instrument has sensed temperatures down to minus 244C. Under such conditions, ices will stay fixed for billions of years.
But the research indicates there is probably water-ice even in areas which receive some sunlight through the year, provided it is buried in the soil.
“We’ve dubbed these newly discovered regions ‘lunar permafrost areas’; and they’re very extensive,” said David Paige, Diviner’s principal investigator.
“This could facilitate future human and robotic explorers in their quest for understanding of the lunar ice, as well as its potential use as resource; because rather than having to brave the cold and dark conditions inside permanent shadow, they could land much more conventionally in areas where the sunlight is shining – at least for part of the year – and then dig a small distance below the surface and access the ice.”
Yossi Fadhli World News and Entertainment 