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First animals on Earth resembled blobs of gelatinous goo, reveal 850 mln yr old fossils

May 12, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, May 12 (ANI): Scientists have discovered 850 million year old fossil traces in Canadian rocks, which resembled blobs of gelatinous goo, that has potentially solved a major problem for the origin of animal life.

The previous oldest animal fossils date from “only” 650 million years ago, although “molecular clocks” based on rates of genetic divergence indicate that animals should have originated about 850 million years ago.

According to a report in New Scientist, the new findings may therefore help solve the problem of the 250 million-year-gap.

Palaeontologists have looked long and hard for traces left by the first multi-celled organisms, fully aware that the soft-bodies might have left very few fossils.

The breakthrough came when Elizabeth Turner, of Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, spotted odd patterns in the rocks of 850-million-year-old limestone reefs in the Mackenzie Mountains of Canada’s Northwestern territory.

She has spent the last 15 years, with Fritz Neuweiler of University Laval in Quebec, trying to deduce their origin.

Now, Turner and Neuweiler, along with David Burdige of Old Dominion University in Virginia, have shown that the patterns match the distinctive textures found in reefs built by sponges.

Studies of modern sponges show that when their collagen structure decays it calcifies and leaves a signature pattern.

Since collagen is a fibrous protein found only in animals, some ancestral animal must have lived in the ancient reef, argue researchers.

The animal consisted of “cells living embedded in a scaffold of collagen, which they extruded to make their home,” said Turner.

“There probably were more than one type of cell, but we can’t tell. Nothing like it lives today, but if we saw one, it would look like a little blob of gelatinous goo,” she added.

The presence of animals this early in Earth’s history would resolve the long-standing disparity between molecular clocks and the fossil record, and show that the evolution of animals began before the Earth slipped twice into a global deep freeze.

“I applaud the approach of looking for distinctive textures seen along with sponge skeletons in younger rocks,” said Andrew Knoll of Harvard University. “It’s a good first step, but it’s not yet proof, he added. (ANI)

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‘Astro-comb’ to hunt for Earth-like planets

May 8, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 8 (ANI): Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have created an “astro-comb” to help astronomers detect lighter planets, more like Earth, around distant stars.

In most cases, extrasolar planets can’t be seen directly-the glare of the nearby star is too great-but their influence can be discerned through spectroscopy, which analyzes the energy spectrum of the light coming from the star.

Not only does spectroscopy reveal the identity of the atoms in the star (each element emits light at a certain characteristic frequency), it can also tell researchers how fast the star is moving away or toward Earth, courtesy of the Doppler effect, which occurs whenever a source of waves is itself in motion.

By recording the change in the frequency of the waves coming from or bouncing off of an object, scientists can deduce the velocity of the object.

Though the planet might weigh millions of times less than the star, the star will be jerked around a tiny amount owing to the gravity interaction between star and planet.

This jerking motion causes the star to move toward or away from Earth slightly in a way that depends on the planet’s mass and its nearness to the star.

The better the spectroscopy used in this whole process, the better will be the identification of the planet in the first place and the better will be the determination of planetary properties.

In tests, the Harvard researchers are now able to calculate star velocity shifts of less than 1 m/sec, allowing them to more accurately pinpoint the planet’s location.

Smithsonian researcher David Phillips says that he and his colleagues expect to reach a velocity resolution of 60 cm/sec, and maybe even 1 cm/sec, which when applied to the activities of large telescopes presently under construction, would open new possibilities in astronomy and astrophysics, including simpler detection of more Earth-like planets.

With this new approach, Harvard astronomers achieve their great improvement using a frequency comb as the basis for the astro-comb.

A special laser system is used to emit light not at a single energy but a series of energies (or frequencies), evenly spaced across a wide range of values.

A plot of these narrowly-confined energy components would look like the teeth of a comb, hence the name frequency comb.

The energy of these comb-like laser pulses is known so well that they can be used to calibrate the energy of light coming in from the distant star.

The resultant astro-comb should enable a further expansion of extrasolar planetary detection. (ANI)

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Scientists clear away “cosmic dust” to get better look at youngest supernova remnant

April 24, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, April 23 (ANI): Researchers at North Carolina (NC) State University have used a mathematical model that allows them to get a clearer picture of the galaxy’s youngest supernova remnant by clearing away the distortions caused by “cosmic dust”.

Their new data provides evidence that this remnant is from a type Ia supernova – the explosion of a white dwarf star – and raises questions about the ways in which magnetic fields affect the generation of the remnant’s cosmic ray particles.

NC State physicists Dr. Stephen Reynolds and Dr. Kazimierz Borkowski, with colleagues from Cambridge University and NASA, re-examined their original X-ray images of supernova remnant G1.9+0.3 in an attempt to glean more information about the remnant’s origins, rate of expansion, and any cosmic particles that may have resulted from the explosion.

Scientists know that supernovae create cosmic rays – fast-moving subatomic particles that play a role in the formation of stars – but they aren’t sure how this occurs or what other functions the particles may serve.

“We knew the dust was a problem. It’s why we never saw the original supernova light in Victorian times,” said Reynolds.

“Our high-powered orbiting telescopes use X-rays to take pictures of these objects, and the dust scatters these X-rays, so in order to get data that might be helpful to us, we first had to correct for the dust distortion,” he added.

A mathematical model allowed the scientists to deduce how many X-rays from each part of the remnant were scattered from another part.

After this correction, they found that the “bright” and “dim” sides of the remnant had more and fewer of the highest-energy X-rays, respectively.

According to Reynolds, this pattern is best explained by a type Ia supernova, and that the difference in brightness corresponds to the level of synchrotronic X-rays present.

Synchrotronic X-rays (like those produced by terrestrial synchrotron particle accelerators) are produced by high-energy cosmic particles, making this remnant one of the best examples of a cosmic ray accelerator that scientists have.

In addition, the location of the bright and dim sides point to the presence of a magnetic field that is affecting the remnant’s acceleration process, and the distribution of cosmic rays. (ANI)

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Obama’s flawed Afghan-Pakistan policy has united terrorists: Lodhi

April 12, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

The Afghan-Pak policy of the Obama Administration is flawed, which has only united the various terrorist groups in the region who have now created an alliance, former Pakistani envoy to the US Maleeha Lodhi has said.

“If the flawed concept of Afghan-Pakistan has achieved anything at all so far, it has done so by uniting the militants on both sides of the border in a new alliance to resist the impending military troop deployments in southern Afghanistan,” said Lodhi while delivering a key-note address at the National Defence University.

“For now, the militants have read Afghan-Pakistan very quickly and have created an alliance which did not exist before,” added Lodhi.

Observing that the various elements of Pakistan Taliban were never united, and certainly now always united with the objectives of Afghan Taliban, Lodhi said: “Today they are. They are because they wish to focus their efforts in resisting the US troop surge in Afghanistan.”

Lodhi said the Pakistani establishment too is not happy with the Afghan-Pakistan policy either.

“Islamabad also finds unsettling the notion or the concept of treating Pakistan’s and Afghanistan’s border region as a single theater of combat,” said Lodhi.

“It is one thing to use this Afghan-Pakistan acronym or concept to urge greater coordination and great cooperation. It’s quite another to deduce from this or conclude from this that one size will fit both because both countries security trajectories are different, the capacities are different, the nature of the threat is really quite different also,” argued Lodhi.

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BMW CEO says used car values steadying -paper

April 12, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

FRANKFURT, April 10 (Reuters) – German carmaker BMW’s (BMWG.DE) chief executive said residual values of used cars have been steadying since the beginning of this year, according to a newspaper interview.

“Prices for used cars in the United States and in Great Britain have stabilised. But I would not want to deduce a turnaround from that yet,” Norbert Reithofer told Sueddeutsche Zeitung in an interview to be published on Saturday.

Carmakers including Chrysler and General Motors (GM.N) have halted or cut back their leasing business because falling residual values of cars coming off leases can mean big losses.

BMW absorbed a 1.6 billion euros ($2.13 billion) hit last year after hiking provisions for risky leasing deals, substantially more than peer Daimler’s (DAIGn.DE) 465 million euros impairment charge.

In the global auto industry as a whole, Reithofer said he saw a recovery from 2010 that would strengthen in 2011.

“We are currently seeing a slight improvement, but we do not expect a significant market recovery this year.”

He said he expected that unit sales declines seen across the industry could remain in a double-digit percentage range throughout 2009.

He said BMW could weather the storm of the global economic crisis for a while longer thanks to more than 20 billion euros in equity capital.

“Hypothetically, we could manage one or two years with relatively high losses,” he said.

He also reiterated that he could imagine expanding BMW’s cooperation with Daimler to further parts of the business.

BMW has been pooling component purchases with Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz, but this encompassed less than 100 parts that are not relevant to the brand image.

Reithofer previously said he wanted to expand this cooperation wherever possible without diluting the strong differentiation in brands. ($1=.7530 euros) (Reporting by Maria Sheahan; editing by Mike Nesbit)

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Idea of infinity stretched back to third century B.C.

February 18, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Feb 18 (ANI): A new analysis of a medieval manuscript has pushed back the first mathematical use of the concept of actual infinity by some 2,000 years, all the way back to the third century B.C.

The manuscript in question is a tattered page of parchment on which a medieval monk in Constantinople copied the third century B.C. work of the Greek mathematician Archimedes.

Infinity is one of the most fundamental questions in mathematics and still remains an unsolved riddle.

Mathematicians today refer to actual infinity as an uncountable set of numbers such as the number of points existing on a line at the same time, while a potential infinity is an endless sequence that unfolds consecutively over time.

The parchment page, which pushes back the first use of the concept of infinity, comes from the 348-page Archimedes Palimpsest, the oldest copy of some of the Greek genius’ writings.

They were hidden for centuries because a monk partly scraped them off the animal-skin parchment in the 13th century A.D. to clear the pages to print a prayer book.

Also, a forger painted pictures over the prayer book hundreds of years after that.

A scholar named Johan Ludvig Heiberg in 1906 studied the written remnants behind the religious words to discover the Palimpsest, finding evidence of Archimedes’ systematic use of the concept of infinity in a portion of the document called the Method of Mechanical Theorems.

In the past few years, the Palimpsest was re-examined at a far higher level of detail using a hair-thin X-ray scanning technique at Stanford University’s Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource in California.

Stanford classicist Reviel Netz asked Uwe Bergmann of the Stanford scanning facility to focus on the edge of a torn page, where Heiberg had figured just one line of text was missing.

The X-rays produced images of phosphorus and calcium from the ink used on the document.

Netz examined the scan and was able to deduce the presence of previously unseen Greek letters, kappa and alpha, which were likely followed by an iota to spell the Greek word for “and.”

This led Netz to conclude that two lines were missing, rather than one and to arrive at a new reading of the passage, according to Bergmann.

“Scholars are now talking about some new words which are emerging in the reconstruction of the evidence in introduction to the Method, that Archimedes’ concept of infinity was rather different from what was previously thought,” Bergmann said.

In fact, the new reading reveals that Archimedes was engaged in math that made conceptual use of actual infinity. (ANI)

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Antarctica is warming more than previously thought

January 22, 2009 By Rajesh Leave a Comment

Washington, Jan 22 (ANI): New research has shown that much of Antarctica is warming more than previously thought, and for the past 50 years, it has been getting warmer at a rate comparable to the rest of the world.

“In fact, the warming in West Antarctica is greater than the cooling in East Antarctica, meaning that on average the continent has gotten warmer,” said Eric Steig, a University of Washington (UW) professor of Earth and space sciences and director of the Quaternary Research Center at the UW.

“West Antarctica is a very different place than East Antarctica, and there is a physical barrier, the Transantarctic Mountains, that separates the two,” he added.

For years, it was believed that a relatively small area known as the Antarctic Peninsula was getting warmer, but that the rest of the continent – including West Antarctica, the ice sheet most susceptible to potential future collapse – was cooling.

Steig noted that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, with an average elevation of about 6,000 feet above sea level, is substantially lower than East Antarctica, which has an average elevation of more than 10,000 feet.

While the entire continent is essentially a desert, West Antarctica is subject to relatively warm, moist storms and receives much greater snowfall than East Antarctica.

The study found that warming in West Antarctica exceeded one-tenth of a degree Celsius per decade for the last 50 years and more than offset the cooling in East Antarctica.

The researchers devised a statistical technique that uses data from satellites and from Antarctic weather stations to make a new estimate of temperature trends.

“While other interpolations had been done previously, no one had really taken advantage of the satellite data, which provide crucial information about spatial patterns of temperature change,” said Steig.

Satellites calculate the surface temperature by measuring the intensity of infrared light radiated by the snowpack, and they have the advantage of covering the entire continent.

The scientists found temperature measurements from weather stations corresponded closely with satellite data for overlapping time periods.

That allowed them to use the satellite data as a guide to deduce temperatures in areas of the continent without weather stations.

According to Steig, “Simple explanations don’t capture the complexity of climate. The thing you hear all the time is that Antarctica is cooling and that’s not the case.

“If anything, it’s the reverse, but it’s more complex than that. Antarctica isn’t warming at the same rate everywhere, and while some areas have been cooling for a long time the evidence shows the continent as a whole is getting warmer,” he added. (ANI)

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