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Palaeontology enthusiast Sathya boasts of priceless possessions

March 27, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

Coimbatore (Tamil Nadu), Mar 27 (ANI): Coimbatore palaeontology enthusiast Arun Sathya owns a rare collection of fossils.

Forty-five year old Sathya”s mega collection includes rocks, mineral, gems and fossils. His prized and priceless possessions range from 65 to 350 million years.

He has a large collection of 190 million-years-old Amethyst geode and Ammonite, 144 million years old wood fossils as well as Gryphaea and 190 million years old chambered nautilus.

Among the stones, Sathya possesses geodes, ammonites, translucent pebbles and glittering crystals.

This fossil collector says that though he started gathering the fossils for his personal interest, he would like to establish a museum to showcase his precious collection.

“I started for my personal collection just to satisfy my personal interest. I would like to establish a museum that is my dream, I”ll do it” noted Arun Sathya.

He also has an iron nickel meteorite believed to be nearly 4.2 billion years old and reportedly it was found at Texas in 1922. (ANI)

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Scientists find meteorite that came from innermost asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter

September 19, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 18 (ANI): In a very rare finding, scientists have discovered an unusual kind of meteorite in the Western Australian desert and have uncovered that it came from the innermost main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Meteorites are the only surviving physical record of the formation of our Solar System.

However, information about where individual meteorites originated, and how they were moving around the Solar System prior to falling to Earth, is available for only a dozen of around 1100 documented meteorite falls over the past two hundred years.

According to Dr Phil Bland from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London, the lead author of the study, “We are incredibly excited about our new finding. Meteorites are the most analysed rocks on Earth, but it’s really rare for us to be able to tell where they came from.”

The new meteorite, which is about the size of cricket ball, is the first to be retrieved since researchers from Imperial College London, Ondrejov Observatory in the Czech Republic, and the Western Australian Museum, set up a trial network of cameras in the Nullarbor Desert in Western Australia in 2006.

The researchers aim to use these cameras to find new meteorites, and work out where in the Solar System they came from, by tracking the fireballs that they form in the sky.

The new meteorite was found on the first day of searching using the new network, by the first search expedition, within 100m of the predicted site of the fall.

The meteorite appears to have been following an unusual orbit, or path around the Sun, prior to falling to Earth in July 2007, according to the researchers’ calculations.

The team believes that it started out as part of an asteroid in the innermost main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

It then gradually evolved into an orbit around the Sun that was very similar to Earth’s.

The new meteorite is also unusual because it is composed of a rare type of basaltic igneous rock.

According to the researchers, its composition, together with the data about where the meteorite comes from, fits with a recent theory about how the building blocks for the terrestrial planets were formed.

This theory suggests that the igneous parent asteroids for meteorites like today’s formed deep in the inner Solar System, before being scattered out into the main asteroid belt.

Asteroids are widely believed to be the building blocks for planets like the Earth, so the new finding provides another clue about the origins of the Solar System. (ANI)

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Cracks on Mars a result of evaporating lakes in ancient times

September 17, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 16 (ANI): Networks of giant polygonal troughs etched across crater basins on Mars have been identified as desiccation cracks caused by evaporating lakes, providing further evidence of a warmer, wetter Martian past.

The findings were presented at the European Planetary Science Congress by PhD student M. Ramy El Maarry of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research.

The polygons are formed when long cracks in the surface of the Martian soil intersect.

El Maarry investigated networks of cracks inside 266 impact basins across the surface of Mars and observed polygons reaching up to 250 meters in diameter.

Polygonal troughs have been imaged by several recent missions but, until now, they have been attributed to thermal contractions in the Martian permafrost.

El Maarry created an analytical model to determine the depth and spacing of cracks caused by stresses building up through cooling in the Martian soil.

He found that polygons caused by thermal contraction could have a maximum diameter of only about 65 meters, much smaller than the troughs he was seeing in the craters.

“I got excited when I saw that the crater floor polygons seemed to be too large to be caused by thermal processes. I also saw that they resembled the desiccation cracks that we see on Earth in dried up lakes,” said El Maarry.

“The stresses that build up when liquids evaporate can cause deep cracks and polygons on the scale I was seeing in the craters,” he added.

El Maarry identified the crater floor polygons using images taken by the MOC camera on Mars Global Surveyor and the HiRISE and Context cameras on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The polygons in El Maarry’s survey had an average diameter of between 70 and 140 kilometers, with the width of the actual cracks ranging between 1 and 10 meters.

Evidence suggests that between 4.6 and 3.8 billion years ago, Mars was covered in significant amounts of water.

Rain and river water would have collected inside impact crater basins, creating lakes that may have existed for several thousand years before drying out.

However, according to El Maarry, in the northern hemisphere, some of the crater floor polygons could have been formed much more recently.

“When a meteorite impacts with the Martian surface, the heat can melt ice trapped beneath the Martian crust and create what we call a hydrothermal system. Liquid water can fill the crater to form a lake, covered in a thick layer of ice. Even under current climatic conditions, this may take many thousands of years to disappear, finally resulting in the desiccation patterns,” said El Maarry. (ANI)

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Barrage of small meteorite impacts cause the moon to “hum”

September 10, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, September 9 (ANI): A new research has suggested that a steady barrage of small meteorite impacts cause the moon to “hum”.

But, no seismometers sent to the moon to date have been sensitive enough to hear the “hum”.

According to a report in New Scientist, Philippe Lognonne at the Institute of Earth Physics of Paris and colleagues decided to work out how loud the ring is.

The team estimated the meteorite population in the solar neighbourhood, and calculated the likely seismic signals that would be created by a range of meteorite sizes and velocities as they strike the moon.

To determine how the vibrations from these impacts would be seen by seismometers, the team used data taken by Apollo seismometers four decades ago.

These measured the vibrations created by the landings of lunar modules and spent rocket stages.

Since the precise locations and timing of these landings were known, they could be used to gauge how long it would take vibrations caused by meteorite impacts to travel through the moon, and how much the signals might dim.

Their calculations revealed space rocks with masses ranging from a gram to a kilogram do indeed create a hum, but it is subtle.

Earth’s hum, created by pounding waves, is more than 1000 times louder.

“This shows that all planets may hum, those with and those without atmosphere,” said Lognonne.

“The moon-hum’s quietness means future lunar seismometers should be able to peek deep within the moon without the hum creating problematic background noise, he added.

Instead, seismometers can focus on measuring waves created by moonquakes, tremors created by a variety of sources, including the tidal tug of the Earth.

Because seismic waves are sensitive to the type, arrangement and density of rocks they pass through, studying the quakes can reveal more about the moon’s interior.

The network of seismometers left by the Apollo missions has been shut down since 1977, so Lognonne hopes more sensitive instruments will be sent to the moon soon.

These could reach deeper than the Apollo network to measure the size of the moon’s core.

“I think the study is a great idea,” said Clive Neal of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, who was not associated with the research.

“Estimating the actual background noise is critical for designing the next generation of seismometers to go to the moon,” he added. (ANI)

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Minerals on ancient Martian rock formed in a habitable environment

August 29, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, August 29 (ANI): A new analysis has suggested that a rock found on Mars in 1996, which was claimed by scientists to host life, has minerals which could have only been formed in a habitable environment.

Researchers led by David McKay of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, caused a sensation 13 years ago when they proposed that a chunk of Mars rock found in Antarctica, called ALH 84001, contained possible signs of past life on the Red Planet, including complex carbon-based molecules and some microscopic objects shaped like bacteria.

But, the claim was never widely accepted.

Other scientists countered that the shapes were ambiguous and that the complex carbon-based molecules could have been produced without life, since they are also found in chunks of asteroids that fall to Earth as meteorites, for example.

Some argued that the carbon in the meteorite could have been deposited in very harsh conditions, involving water at more than 150 degrees Celsius.

Even the hardiest known terrestrial microbes die above about 120 degrees C.

But, according to a report in New Scientist, a new analysis suggests that the water involved was cool enough to allow for life, which at least keeps open the possibility of fossilized life in the meteorite.

The study was led by Paul Niles of NASA Johnson. Neither he nor any of the other team members were part of the 1996 life claim.

To explain deposits of minerals containing calcium, magnesium, and iron, in the rock, Niles and his colleagues suggest the rock was sitting at or near the surface of Mars, with water rich in carbon dioxide bubbling up to the surface in the area from deep underground, perhaps as part of a hot spring.

The relative amounts of the three metals deposited from solution depend on the temperature of the water they were dissolved in.

The team used previous measurements of these amounts to calculate a water temperature of less than 100 degrees C.

This was not a certainty beforehand, since water can remain liquid above that temperature at the higher pressures underground.

“These minerals were formed in what is very likely to have been a habitable environment,” Niles said.

The study shows there is still more to learn from what is “probably the single most examined rock in all of human history,” said Marc Fries of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. (ANI)

Filed Under: Science News Tagged With: asteroids, Calcium Magnesium, david mckay, environment researchers, fossilized life, habitable environment, harsh conditions, hot spring, johnson space center, mars rock, Martian Rock, meteorite, meteorites, microbes, NASA, nasa johnson, New Scientist, niles, red planet, Relative Amounts, Water Temperature

Brit boy finds space rock while collecting eggs from garden hens

August 21, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, August 21 (ANI): A 6-year-old Brit boy reportedly found a piece of rock from space when he went to collect eggs from his garden hens.

Josh Chapple was stunned to find the egg-shaped shiny black lump of rock.

He found the 2ins rock the morning after Britain was blitzed by the annual Perseid meteor shower last week.

According to reports, up to 100 meteors an hour streaked across the sky above his home in Bratton Fleming in Devon, like shooting stars.

The little boy initially took the rock to be a lump of coal, but his parents later discovered that it was a meteorite.

“I saw it on the ground near our back door – there were burn marks all over it. I’ve never seen anything like it before. It was dark and shiny,” the Daily Express quoted him as saying.

Josh’s mother Sarah, 36, said that she knew at first glance the 2ins rock was not coal.

As to how she found out what it was, she said: “We found pictures of meteorites that had been found elsewhere in the world (on the Internet) – they looked just like the rock we had found.”

Josh’s father Andrew, 34, said that all three of his sons-Josh, Aiden, 13, and Kai, 11-got very excited when they realized what the find was.

He said:”We looked on eBay and there were people selling bits of meteor.One bloke in Mexico was selling it in slices for 15,000 pounds a go. The boys were saying ‘Dad can we buy a racing car’, but then there was someone in China selling them off for 15 pounds, so I said they’d probably have to wait.” (ANI)

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NASA scientists make first discovery of life’s building block in comet

August 18, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, August 18 (ANI): NASA scientists have discovered glycine, a fundamental building block of life, in samples of comet Wild 2 returned by NASA’s Stardust spacecraft.

“Glycine is an amino acid used by living organisms to make proteins, and this is the first time an amino acid has been found in a comet,” said Dr. Jamie Elsila of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“Our discovery supports the theory that some of life’s ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite and comet impacts,” he added.

“The discovery of glycine in a comet supports the idea that the fundamental building blocks of life are prevalent in space, and strengthens the argument that life in the universe may be common rather than rare,” said Dr. Carl Pilcher, Director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, which co-funded the research.

Stardust passed through dense gas and dust surrounding the icy nucleus of Wild 2 on January 2, 2004.

As the spacecraft flew through this material, a special collection grid filled with aerogel – a novel sponge-like material that’s more than 99 percent empty space – gently captured samples of the comet’s gas and dust.

The grid was stowed in a capsule, which detached from the spacecraft and parachuted to Earth on January 15, 2006.

Since then, scientists around the world have been busy analyzing the samples to learn the secrets of comet formation and our solar system’s history.

“We actually analyzed aluminum foil from the sides of tiny chambers that hold the aerogel in the collection grid,” said Elsila.

“As gas molecules passed through the aerogel, some stuck to the foil. We spent two years testing and developing our equipment to make it accurate and sensitive enough to analyze such incredibly tiny samples,” he added.

Earlier, preliminary analysis in the Goddard labs detected glycine in both the foil and a sample of the aerogel.

However, since glycine is used by terrestrial life, at first the team was unable to rule out contamination from sources on Earth.

The new research used isotopic analysis of the foil to rule out that possibility.

“We discovered that the Stardust-returned glycine has an extraterrestrial carbon isotope signature, indicating that it originated on the comet,” said Elsila.

According to Dr. Daniel Glavin of NASA Goddard, “Based on the foil and aerogel results it is highly probable that the entire comet-exposed side of the Stardust sample collection grid is coated with glycine that formed in space.” (ANI)

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Giant Martian egg cups could be used to trace the Red Planet’s climate

July 14, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, July 14 (ANI): A new study has suggested that craters embedded on pedestals that tower above the Martian landscape like giant egg cups could be used to trace the planet’s climate.

‘Pedestal’ craters were gouged out by impacts, like other craters, but stand out because they sit atop plateaus that loom an average of 50 metres above the Martian surface.

It’s not clear exactly how the pedestals formed.

According to a report in New Scientist, a comprehensive catalogue of the objects is lending weight to the idea that the pedestals may conceal ice-rich soil from previous eras, when the planet’s spin axis tilted at a different angle than it does today.

Seth Kadish of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and colleagues identified 2696 pedestal craters in the planet’s mid- and low-latitudes from images taken primarily by the thermal imager aboard NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft.

The craters seem to be concentrated at the mid-latitudes, with very few found at the planet’s equator.

About 3 per cent of them have depressions around their bases that resemble areas in Antarctica where permafrost ice vaporizes, creating pits in the soil left behind.

The team said that strengthens the hypothesis that the pedestals were created from soil that was enriched in ice during a period when the Martian poles pointed more towards the sun and its mid-latitudes were colder.

Because Mars does not have a massive satellite that stabilises it, like Earth’s moon, the tilt of its axis is thought to change regularly on scales of tens of thousands of years.

When the planet is tilted most drastically on its side, the planet’s poles receive a lot of sunshine. Any water locked in ice there is thought to vaporize and move towards the equator, where it falls as snow.

Tens of metres of snow are thought to be deposited on the planet’s mid-latitudes during these episodes.

Pedestal craters may preserve regions with this ancient snow.

The researchers suspect the impact of the meteorite that created each pedestal crater could somehow ‘armour’ the ground in the area, producing a top layer that protected ice from sublimating into gas during warmer periods.

The unprotected ice surrounding the armoured area, however, would eventually disappear when the planet’s tilt changed and the area warmed.

That would leave behind the modern-day, ice-laden pedestals that can be more than 100 metres thick.

“These pedestals represent almost like a cookie-cutter section of past icy, dust-rich layers,” Kadish said. (ANI)

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Space rock yields important “ingredient in kitchen” on Earth before life began

May 27, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, May 27 (ANI): Scientists have found formic acid, a molecule implicated in the origins of life, has been found at record levels on a meteorite that fell into the Tagish Lake in Canada in the year 2000.

According to a report by BBC News, cold temperatures on the lake prevented the volatile chemical from dissipating quickly.

The researchers told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union that the formic acid was extraterrestrial.

Formic acid is one of a group of compounds dubbed “organics”, because they are rich in carbon.

“We are lucky that the meteorite was untouched by humans hands, avoiding contamination by organic compounds that we have on our fingers,” said Dr Christopher Herd, the curator of the University of Alberta’s meteorite collection.

Samples of the meteorite, totalling 850 grams, were collected from Tagish Lake in Canada.

The scientists found levels of formic acid four times higher than had previously been recorded on a meteorite.

“This has for a while been overlooked as we concentrated predominantly on the Murchison meteorite, but now we’ve got another fresh sample and we can start to analyze a different portion of the asteroid belt and therefore a different portion of the Solar System,” said Mark Sephton, a meteorite and geochemistry professor at Imperial College London.

The particular types, or isotopes, of hydrogen that are found in the formic acid show that it most likely formed in the cold regions of space before our Solar System existed.

On Earth, formic acid is commonly found in the stings of insects such as ants, but Professor Sephton said that it is likely to have been an important “ingredient in the kitchen” on Earth before life began.

The acid is known to act as a “reducing agent” – acting as a magnet for oxygen atoms during chemical reactions – and facilitate the conversion of some amino acids into others.

It may also be implicated in the transformation of the more primitive RNA into DNA.

Only one of the four “nucleobases” that make up RNA and DNA is different between the two: uracil is present in RNA while thymine takes its place in DNA.

Professor Sephton’s team found uracil in the Murchison meteorite, but no measurable amount of thymine.

However, formic acid is known to help along the reaction that converts the uracil into thymine.

“The reaction is one of the ways in which you can take some simple molecules and increase the chemical diversity of the pool of pre-biotic molecules,” said Professor Sephton. (ANI)

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Mars was windy, wet and wild in ancient times

May 22, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 22 (ANI): The instruments aboard the Rover Opportunity, which are studying the Victoria Crater on Mars, has revealed more evidence of the red planet’s windy, wet and wild past.

According to Steve Squyres, Cornell professor of astronomy and the principal investigator for NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover mission, Opportunity’s two-year exploration of Victoria Crater – a half-mile wide and 250 feet deep – yielded a treasury of information about the planet’s geologic history and supported previous findings indicating that water once flowed on the planet’s surface.

The data shows that water repeatedly came and left billions of years ago.

Wind persisted much longer, heaping sand into dunes between ancient water episodes. These activities still shape the landscape today.

At Victoria, steep cliffs and gentler alcoves alternate around the edge of a bowl about 0.8 kilometers in diameter.

The scalloped edge and other features indicate the crater once was smaller than it is today, but wind erosion has widened it gradually.

“The impact that excavated the crater millions of years ago provided a golden opportunity, and the durability of the rover enabled us to take advantage of it,” said Squyres.

Imaging the crater’s rim and interior, Opportunity inspected layers in the cliffs around the crater, including layered stacks more than 10 meters (30 feet) thick.

Distinctive patterns indicate the rocks formed from shifting dunes that later hardened into sandstone, according to Squyres and 33 co-authors of the findings.

Instruments on the rover’s arm studied the composition and detailed texture of rocks just outside the crater and exposed layers in one alcove called “Duck Bay.”

Rocks found beside the crater include pieces of a meteorite, which may have been part of the impacting space rock that made the crater.

Other rocks on the rim of the crater apparently were excavated from deep within it when the object hit.

These rocks bear a type of iron-rich small spheres, or spherules, that the rover team nicknamed “blueberries” when Opportunity first saw them in 2004.

The spherules formed from interaction with water penetrating the rocks.

The spherules in rocks deeper in the crater are larger than those in overlying layers, suggesting the action of groundwater was more intense at greater depth.

Opportunity’s first observations showed interaction of volcanic rock with acidic water to produce sulfate salts.

Dry sand rich in these salts blew into dunes. Under the influence of water, the dunes hardened to sandstone.

Further alteration by water produced the iron-rich spherules, mineral changes and angular pores left when crystals dissolved away. (ANI)

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New evidence suggests meteorite did not wipe out dinos

May 5, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 5 (ANI): A geoscientist and her research team from Princeton University have compiled new evidence disproving a popular theory that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago.

Gerta Keller, the scientist in question, whose studies of rock formations at many sites in the United States, Mexico and India have led her to conclude that volcanoes, not a vast meteorite, were the more likely culprits in the demise of the Earth’s giant reptiles, is producing new data supporting her claim.

Examinations at several new sites have produced “biotic evidence” – the fossilized traces of plants and animals tied to the period in question – indicating that a massive die-off did not occur directly after the strike but much later.

In addition, Keller and other researchers have found “aftermath” sediments that remained undisturbed and showed signs of active life, with burrows formed by creatures colonizing the ocean floor.

This would quash a theory advanced by some that a massive tsunami followed the impact, according to Keller.

“Careful documentation of results that are reproducible and verifiable will uncover what really happened,” Keller said. “This study takes an important step in that direction,” she added.

Much of the new data comes from a trench dug out of low-lying hills in northeastern Mexico at a site called El Penon.

A group of Princeton undergraduates, including Richard Lease and Steven Andrews, accompanying Princeton Professor Gerta Keller on a field trip to Mexico in 2004 excavated the area and uncovered the new evidence.

Keller and her team have been analyzing that evidence for the last several years.

She discovered that the evidence for the asteroid theory was not so clear.

In field investigations, she and her team of students and collaborators found populations of Cretaceous age foraminifera, one-celled ocean organisms that evolved rapidly during select geological periods, living on top of the impact fallout from Chicxulub.

The fallout from the asteroid that struck Chicxulub is visible as a layer of glassy beads of molten rock that rained down after the impact.

If this impact caused the mass extinction, then the foraminifera above the impact glass beads should have been the newly evolved species of the Tertiary age.

Using these fossil remains to construct a timeline, she and her team were able to date the surrounding geologic features and begin to piece together proof that the impact occurred 300,000 years before the great extinction. (ANI)

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Swat Sharia regulation ambiguous and vague: Pakistani paper

April 22, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Islamabad, April 20 (IANS) The bill passed by Pakistan’s National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, to impose Sharia laws in Swat and other parts of the country’s restive northwest ‘lacks all the essential qualities of good legislation’, an article in a leading English daily said Monday.

A reading of the regulation’s text ‘indicates that members of our parliament hurriedly passed the resolution without exerting their right of reading and carefully studying several provisions of the regulation’, the article in Dawn said.

‘The regulation lacks all the essential qualities of good legislation: clarity, accuracy and constitutionality. Ambiguity and vagueness ruin the very purpose of the legislation and are the two qualities that one may find floating on the surface of this law,’ it maintained.

Noting that no one could deny the ‘enormously serious political impact’ that the Sharia regulation will have, the article lamented: ‘Our major political parties bury their heads in the sand when a meteorite hits our political landscape and jolts our whole constitutional infrastructure.’

Alongside its adverse effects on the overall governance of the North West Frontier Province, the Nizam-i-Adl Sharia regulation ‘will have widespread legal repercussions’, it maintained.

Some of these repercussions are already evident.

On Sunday, Taliban-linked radical cleric Maulana Sufi Mohammed said Pakistan’s existing judicial system was unIslamic and vowed to impose Sharia across the country.

Sufi Mohammed, who heads the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat Muhammadi (TNSM), termed judges, lawyers and pro-democracy clerics of Pakistan as ‘rebels’.

He also set a Thursday deadline for establishing appeals courts in the Malakand division of the NWFP where verdicts handed down by the Sharia courts could be contested.

The cleric had brokered the controversial Feb 16 peace deal with the NWFP government to impose Sharia laws in Malakand in return for the Taliban laying down their arms. The National Assembly ratified the accord April 13 with President Asif Ali Zardari signing it into law the same night.

The regulation ‘makes not only various constitutional provisions redundant but also marginalises the role of constitutional bodies, for instance, the Islamic Ideology Council, and even parliament’, the article noted.

It also pointed out that when late military dictator Ziaul Haq amended the constitution and established the Federal Sharia Court (FSC) and granted it the power to examine laws on the touchstone of the Quran, the FSC ‘was bound to refer the matter to the president to make amendments in case the court found any law or its provision repugnant to the injunctions of Islam’.

‘The FSC is not empowered to make law and proclaim that this law will now be applicable. In the absence of such a provision, when qazis will declare any law unIslamic, they will also assert what the Islamic law is. Then, their version of Islamic law will begin to apply.

‘To pass on this burden of legislation to qazis is delegating their responsibility to individuals who will enforce their personal interpretation of Sharia on others,’ the article contended.

Thus, it was ‘beyond comprehension’ as to how and on what basis the parliament ‘can pass on its role of legislation to another body of the state, more so when the authority is passed to individuals, who have neither technical education nor the experience of dispensation of justice, keeping in view the fundamental human rights enshrined in our constitution’, the article maintained.

‘It was the function of parliament to legislate laws which do not violate the injunctions of Islam and treaties Pakistan is a signatory to. To delegate such an authority to qazis who enjoy ample discretionary powers will espouse sectarian interpretations of Islamic law and dispense injustice.

‘It is a dangerous trend that will influence the members of the judiciary all over Pakistan and they will begin to legislate what they think is based on the ‘true’ interpretation of Islamic injunctions,’ the article said.
Indo Asian News Service

Filed Under: International News Tagged With: ambiguity and vagueness, clerics, constitutionality, frontier province, House Of Parliament, Islamabad, Jolts, judicial system, legal repercussions, malakand division, meteorite, national assembly, Nizam, north west frontier, NWFP, peace deal, political impact, Political Landscape, radical cleric, restive northwest, sharia laws

Watery asteroids may explain why life is ‘left-handed’

March 17, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, March 17 (ANI): A new study has suggested that watery asteroids hurtling through the solar system gave a boost to left-handed proteins on Earth, which explains why life on our planet is ‘left-handed’.

Curiously, almost every living organism on Earth uses left-handed amino acids instead of their right-handed counterparts.

According to a report in New Scientist, the new research suggests that water on asteroids amplified left-handed amino acid molecules, making them dominate over their right-handed mirror images.

In the 1990s, scientists found that meteorites contain up to 15 percent more of the left version too.

That suggests space rocks bombarding the early Earth biased its chemistry so that life used left-handed amino acids instead of right.

“Meteorites would have seeded the Earth with some of the prebiotic compounds like amino acids that are needed to get life started, and also biased the origin of life to the left-handed amino acid form,” said Daniel Glavin at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Some have suggested that polarized starlight preferentially destroyed right-handed amino acids on asteroids.

But, this alone couldn’t explain why the meteorite bias is so strong.

Now, Glavin and colleague Jason Dworkin have shown that water amplified the asymmetry.

They studied an amino acid called isovaline in six meteorites that showed evidence of ancient exposure to liquid water for about 1000 to 10,000 years.

The longer water persisted in the rock, the stronger its left-handed isovaline bias, the team found. (ANI)

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Space rock detected ahead of collision with Earth

February 20, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, Feb 20 (ANI): Scientists have, for the first time, detected a space rock ahead of a collision with Earth, watched it streak through the atmosphere, and then recovered pieces of it.

An analysis of the meteorites could shed light on conditions in the early solar system more than 4 billion years ago.

When the asteroid, called 2008 TC3, was discovered on 6 October last year, it was just 20 hours away from hitting Earth.

Though the warning period was short, it was the first time a space rock had been found before it impacted the planet.

Orbital calculations predicted the object would plunge into the atmosphere above Sudan at 0246 GMT on 7 October, and it arrived right on time.

Observations suggested it was no more than 5 meters across, too small to survive intact all the way to the ground and cause damage.

The brilliant fireball it made as it descended through the atmosphere was seen far in the distance by the crew of a KLM airliner, and was observed by various satellites, including a weather satellite called Meteosat-8.

Now, according to a report in New Scientist, a team of meteorite hunters has found fragments of the object.

The meteorites are a unique group in that they come from an object seen hurtling through space before its plunge into Earth’s atmosphere.

Students from the University of Khartoum found the first fragments, led by Dr Muawia Shaddad, using data provided by NASA to hone in on where fragments were likely to be found.

Lindley Johnson, head of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program office at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC, reported the find in Vienna, at a United Nations meeting discussing near-Earth object (NEO) impacts.

Donald Yeomans, who manages NASA’s efforts to find and track NEOs at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, confirmed that “quite a few” fragments have been found.

Before the fragments were found, meteorite expert Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario in Canada said that the asteroid was likely made of relatively weak material, given that 2008 TC3 broke up unusually quickly once it hit the atmosphere, exploding about 37 kilometers above ground.

According to researchers, the 2008 TC3 meteorites could be especially illuminating because the parent object was observed in space before the breakup, allowing scientists to calculate its former orbit around the Sun.

This provides precious information connecting the meteorites to their place of origin in the solar system. (ANI)

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Oldest zircon from lunar rock suggests molten moon solidified 90 million years after creation

January 27, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, Jan 27 (ANI): Scientists have found the oldest known zircon on Earth from a lunar rock sample, dating back to 4.42 billion years, which has helped pinpoint the age at which the molten moon solidified as 90 million years after the impact that created it.

According to a report in New Scientist, a team of scientists recovered a speck of the mineral zircon, that’s older than any yet found on Earth, from a rock sample brought back by Apollo 17 astronauts.

“Lunar zircons were not studied at the time of the Apollo missions because the technology to date them did not exist,” said geologist Clive Neal of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. “It’s serendipitous to find this, and really emphasizes the (value) of sample returns,” he added.

Until now, the zircon found in lunar rocks was between 3.90 and 4.35 billion years old, the same as the oldest zircon found on Earth.

But, many of these lunar grains came from low-lying areas on the moon, where the crust had been resurfaced after being melted by meteorite impacts.

The new sample, found by Alexander Nemchin at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia, and colleagues, is 4.42 billion years old, and came from the lunar highlands.

That means it crystallized after the crust first solidified, within 100 million years of the moon’s formation.

The grain sets limits on the moon’s age, according to Dianne Taylor of the University of California, Los Angeles, who has studied similar samples.

The moon is thought to have formed from debris ejected by a giant impact between Earth and a smaller body between 10 and 100 million years after the formation of the solar system, 4.57 billion years ago.

According to Taylor, the lunar crust formed within 90 million years of the impact, which tallies well with the age of the zircon. (ANI)

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We are all Martians, claims scientist

January 18, 2009 By Rajesh Leave a Comment

London, Jan 18 (ANI): An astronomer has suggested that all human beings may be Martians, as meteorites from the Red Planet may have seeded life on Earth billions of years ago.

According to a report in The Sun, the astronomer in question is Heather Couper.

“Mars is closer to the solar system’s asteroid belt than us and must have been hit by many more impacts. Some collisions blasted bits of Mars into space which circled the sun and fell to Earth as meteorites,” she said.

“So, it is possible life began on Mars and spread to Earth thanks to cosmic collisions. It means we could all be Martians,” she added.

The claim follows the recent finding that methane gas has been detected on Mars.

It is backed up by tests by scientists to see if microbes could survive the shock of being blasted into space and hitting another planet.

They showed micro-organisms that live in cracks within rocks survived all but the most cataclysmic impacts.

The discovery that microbes may still inhabit Mars is sparking fresh interest in a four billion-year-old Martian meteorite found in Antarctica in 1984.

NASA has said that it might contain fossils of microbes, which some scientists believe are Martian life forms. (ANI)

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Link established between meteorite impact and massive volcanism 30 mln yrs ago

January 8, 2009 By Rajiv Gupta Leave a Comment

Washington, Jan 8 (ANI): In a new research, scientists have discovered the second example of a meteorite impact that occurred at the same time as massive volcanic activity 30 million years ago in Belarus.

The first time such a coincidence was observed, at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, was the catastrophic event thought to be responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago.

This new event, uncovered after the 17 km diameter Logoisk impact structure in Belarus was precisely dated, is thought to have taken place around 30 million years ago.

The crater was dated using argon isotopes, and found to have occurred at a similar time to a period of massive volcanism known as the Afro-Arabian flood volcanism, which started in NW Yemen at around 30.9 Mya (million years ago), and SW Yemen at around 29.0 Mya.

The impact also coincides broadly with a period of sudden global cooling and sea level fluctuation.

The researchers, led by Sarah Sherlock at the Open University, argue that massive volcanic eruptions and meteorite impacts are likely to have coincided much more frequently than has previously been thought, but because the preservation of impact craters on Earth is poor much of the evidence for these coincidences is lost.

Prior to the study, only one example of an impact coinciding with volcanism had been found: the Chicxulub and Boltysh impacts and the Deccan Traps flood volcanism, all of which occurred at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary.

Unlike the Cretaceous-Tertiary event, the combination of the Logoisk impact and the Afro-Arabain flood volcanism does not seem to have caused an extinction event.

The researchers suggest that the reason for this may be that the magnitude of the event was not sufficiently large in comparison.

While the Cretaceous-Tertiary event saw the release of around 8000 billion tons of SO2 by the volcanism and meteorite impact, the Logoisk impact and the Afro-Arabian volcanism are thought to have contributed only 30 billion tons of SO2.

Meteorite impact craters are extremely difficult to date, but an understanding of their age and frequency is crucial to attempts to control the number of future impacts, as well as understanding the links between impacts and other catastrophic events such as large volcanic eruptions and mass extinctions. (ANI)

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