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Gold Coast Titans forward Bodene Thompson is facing a three-week suspension for a careless high tackle, in Saturday night’s NRL match against the Canberra Raiders.
Thompson was charged with a grade five offence for a tackle that broke Travis Waddell’s jaw.
He risks a four-week ban if he contests the charge at the NRL judiciary.
London, September 18 (ANI): Scientists at a new interdisciplinary research group in Austria are working to uncover how life might evolve with “exotic” biochemistry and solvents, such as sulfuric acid instead of water.
The research group for Alternative Solvents as a Basis for Life Supporting Zones in (Exo-) Planetary Systems was established by the University of Vienna.
Traditionally, planets that might sustain life are looked for in the ‘habitable zone’, the region around a star in which Earth-like planets with carbon dioxide, water vapor and nitrogen atmospheres could maintain liquid water on their surfaces.
Consequently, scientists have been looking for biomarkers produced by extraterrestrial life with metabolisms resembling the terrestrial ones, where water is used as a solvent and the building blocks of life, amino acids, are based on carbon and oxygen.
However, these may not be the only conditions under which life could evolve.
“It is time to make a radical change in our present geocentric mindset for life as we know it on Earth,” said scientist Johannes Leitner.
“Even though this is the only kind of life we know, it cannot be ruled out that life forms have evolved somewhere that neither rely on water nor on a carbon and oxygen based metabolism,” he added.
One requirement for a life-supporting solvent is that it remains liquid over a large temperature range.
Water is liquid between 0 degree Celsius and 100 degrees C, but other solvents exist which are liquid over more than 200 degrees C.
Such a solvent would allow an ocean on a planet closer to the central star.
The reverse scenario is also possible. A liquid ocean of ammonia could exist much further from a star.
Furthermore, sulfuric acid can be found within the cloud layers of Venus and it is now known that lakes of methane/ethane cover parts of the surface of the Saturnian satellite Titan.
Consequently, the discussion on potential life and the best strategies for its detection is ongoing and not only limited to exoplanets and habitable zones.
The newly established research group at the University of Vienna, together with international collaborators, will investigate the properties of a range of solvents other than water, including their abundance in space, thermal and biochemical characteristics as well as their ability to support the origin and evolution of life supporting metabolisms. (ANI)
Washington, September 16 (ANI): In a new research, a team of scientists has unraveled the chemical evolution of the orange-brownish colored atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan, the only solar system body besides Venus and Earth with a solid surface and thick atmosphere.
Scientists at University of Hawai’i at Manoa carried out the research.
The UH Manoa team, including Xibin Gu and Seol Kim, conducted simulation experiments mimicking the chemical reactions in Titan’s atmosphere utilizing crossed molecular beams in which the consequence of a single collision between molecules can be followed.
The team’s experiments indicate that triacetylene can be formed by a single collision of a “radical” ethynyl molecule and a diacetylene molecule.
An ethynyl radical is produced in Titan’s atmosphere by the photodissociation of acetylene by ultraviolet light.
Photodissociation is a process in which a chemical compound is broken down by photons.
“Surprisingly, the photochemical models show inconsistent mechanisms for the production of polyynes,” said Kaiser, who is the principal investigator of this study.
The mechanism involved in the formation of triacetylene, was also confirmed by accompanying theoretical calculations by Alexander Mebel, a theoretical chemist at Florida International University.
These theoretical computations also provide the 3D distribution of electrons in atoms and thus the overall energy level of a molecule.
To apply these findings to the real atmosphere of Titan, Danie Liang and Yuk Yung, planetary scientists at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica and California Institute of Technology (Caltech), respectively, performed photochemical modeling studies of Titan’s atmosphere.
All data together suggest that triacetylene may serve as a building block to form more complex and longer polyynes and produce potential precursors for the aerosol-based layers of haze surrounding Titan.
The study demonstrated for the first time that a sensible combination of laboratory simulation experiments with theory and modeling studies can shed light on decade old unsolved problems crucial to understand the origin and chemical evolution of the solar system.
The researchers hope to unravel next the mystery of the missing ethane lakes on Titan – postulated to exist for half a century, but not detected conclusively within the framework of the Cassini-Huygens mission.
In the future, the UH Manoa team will combine the research results with terrestrial-based observations of Titan’s atmosphere. (ANI)
Washington, Sept 10 (ANI): Talk show queen Oprah Winfrey has come out in defense of her decision to not to support Chris Brown, after the star slammed the TV titan for siding with ex-girlfriend Rihanna following the bust-up.
After Brown’s beating of Rihanna in February (09), Winfrey dedicated an episode of her hit daytime talkshow to the topic of domestic abuse and also advised the ‘Umbrella’ singer against the Brown.
However, Brown hit out at Winfrey insisting he had helped the media mogul out in the past.
He said, “I commend Oprah on being like, ‘This (abuse) is a problem’, but it was a slap in my face. I did a lot of stuff for her, like going to Africa and performing for her school. She could have been more helpful, like, ‘OK, I’m going to help both of these people out.’”
In an interview to Access Hollywood, Winfrey backed up her decision not to defend Brown, insisting that although she was grateful for his help during the opening of her African girls school, she does not condone domestic violence in any way.
“So this is what happened; Chris Brown did my show several years ago, I think it was 2007. Fun, fun time and afterward he said, ‘If there’s anything ever I can do for you then let me know.’ I almost never take anybody up on that… But my girls at the Academy in Africa love Chris Brown, love, love, love, love, love Chris Brown,” Contactmusic quoted her as saying. (ANI)
Washington, August 26 (ANI): A new research paper has proposed a possible new mechanism for the development of very large linear dunes formed on the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.
The paper, authored by LSU (Louisiana State University) Department of Geography and Anthropology Chair Patrick Hesp and United States Geological Survey scientist David Rubin, is titled – “Multiple origins of linear dunes on Earth and Titan.”
The authors examined the linear – or longitudinal – dunes that stretch across the surface of China’s Qaidam Basin, finding them composed of sand and some salt and silt.
The latter two elements make the dunes cohesive or sticky.
According to the study, this leads to a complete change in dune form from transverse dunes to linear dunes, even though the wind speed and direction does not change.
Typically, transverse dunes are formed by winds from a narrow directional range while longitudinal or linear dunes are formed by winds from two obliquely opposing directions.
These findings offer an alternative interpretation of similar dunes found on Titan.
Hesp and Rubin suggest that if the giant linear dunes found on the surface of Titan are also formed from cohesive sediment, then they too could be formed by single-direction winds.
This is in sharp contrast to earlier studies, which assumed that the sediments were loose and interpreted the dune shape as evidence of winds coming from alternating directions.
The alternative hypothesis that Titan’s linear dunes are formed in cohesive sediment has significant implications for studies on Titan.
If the Hesp and Rubin alternative is correct, new hypotheses regarding the composition, origin, evolution, grain size, stickiness, quantity, global transport patterns and suitability for wind transport of Titan’s sediment; the velocities, directions and seasonal patterns of Titan’s winds; and overall surface wetness will all have to be completely reassessed. (ANI)
London, August 22 (ANI): A new study has shown that the largest lake on Saturn’s moon Titan is as smooth as a mirror, varying in height by less than 3 millimeters, and good enough for skipping rocks on it.
According to a report in New Scientist, the find, based on new radar observations, adds to a deluge of evidence that the moon’s lakes are indeed filled with liquid, rather than dried mud.
“Unless you actually poured concrete and spread it really, really smoothly, you’d never see something like that on Earth,” said team member Howard Zebker of Stanford University.
Astronomers have waffled on whether Saturn’s largest moon is dry or wet, but the bulk of the evidence points to liquid lakes.
The radar on the Cassini spacecraft, which arrived at Saturn in 2004, turned up dark splotches at Titan’s poles.
The darkness in radar indicates those regions are very smooth, like the signal expected from the surface of a liquid lake.
Spectral data also showed that the apparent lakes seem to be filled with methane and ethane, which would be liquid on Titan’s frigid surface, and “geomorphologically, they just look like lakes,” Zebker said.
But, previous radar observations viewed the apparent lakes at an angle, and therefore did not see bright radar glints reflected back from their surface, leaving open the possibility that the features were dry lake beds or patches of soot.
Now, researchers report seeing just that signal.
In December last year, Cassini pointed its radar straight down over Titan’s largest lake, Ontario Lacus, which spans 235 kilometres at the moon’s south pole.
The reflected signal was so strong, it maxed out the probe’s receiver.
The radar echoes revealed a surface covering thousands of square metres whose height varies by less than 3 millimetres – 10 times as flat as previous measurements were able to reveal.
“It’s very hard to imagine a solid surface that is smooth on the order of millimeters,” lead author Lauren Wye of Stanford told New Scientist.
This provides strong evidence that the lake is currently liquid, not dried mud.
“If you’ve ever walked outside and seen an area on the ground where there’s mud and the water dries up, even that is pretty flat – but you get cracks in the mud and pieces that curl up,” Zebker said. “You never see anything as smooth as what we’re inferring for Titan’s surface,” he added.
Confirming the presence of liquid on Titan adds to the long list of similarities between Titan and Earth. (ANI)
London, June 26 (ANI): A new laboratory study has suggested that blasting the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan with X-rays can produce DNA building blocks, a finding that adds to evidence that Titan may be ripe for life.
According to a report in New Scientist, researchers led by Sergio Pilling of the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil have produced adenine, one of five base components of DNA and RNA, in Titan-like conditions.
Instead of using UV light, however, they used low-energy, or “soft”, X-rays.
“Soft X-rays can penetrate deeper in Titan’s atmosphere and reach denser regions (than UV),” Pilling told New Scientist, adding that X-rays set off different chemical reactions in Titan’s atmosphere.
They modelled Titan’s current atmosphere using a mixture of nitrogen and methane gas, and added water to it to simulate the conditions when the moon is bombarded with water-bearing comets or asteroids – a situation that occurred much more frequently in the early solar system.
A frozen sheet of salty water ice lay below this ‘atmosphere’ and caused the gas to condense into liquid droplets, like dew settling onto Titan’s icy surface.
Then, the researchers bombarded the setup with X-rays for up to three days, representing the radiation that Titan would get from the sun over a period of about 7 million years.
Afterwards, the still-frozen surface contained some organic compounds, but nothing that could be called the building blocks of life.
But when they heated the samples to room temperature, adenine appeared.
That means Titan’s saucepan of proto-life would need a source of extra heat to activate.
If there was a warm period in Titan’s history, perhaps prompted by volcanic activity or meteoroid impacts, “a primitive life could have had a chance to flourish there,” according to the researchers.
Titan is due to be heated up in the next few billion years, when the sun bloats into a red giant star, expanding to the present orbit of Earth, they added.
According to Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA, if impacts sometimes allow water to exist on the moon’s surface, then things might happen.
“It is interesting to see how far the chemistry can go,” he said. (ANI)
London, Apr 27 (ANI): Visitors to the Kew Gardens in Britain are set to see the world’s smelliest flowers coming into bloom this week.
However, they have been warned to keep away as the flowers emit a smell of rotting flesh.
The Titan Arum, which is native to Indonesia, flowers just once every six or seven years, and during this time it lets out an odour so stomach-churning that it is colloquially known as “the corpse flower”, reports the Telegraph.
The garden’s Princess of Wales Conservatory houses 12 of the plants, which produce cream and pink flowers while in bloom, while the base of the stems releases the sickening odour for around three days when the Arums are ready to pollinate.
Conservatory co-ordinator Phil Griffiths has said that visitors should expect a ‘strong and pungent’ scent, which comes in waves and smells like something is dead and rotting.
The plants make the unpleasant smell to attract flesh-eating beetles who crawl into the flowers and become trapped, covering themselves in pollen in an effort to escape.
The flowers then wither allowing the insects out.
The largest Arums at the gardens weigh about 200lb (90kg) and can grow at a rate of quarter of an inch an hour. It takes four members of staff to repot the plants.
Sir David Attenborough invented the name Titan Arum after capturing its flowering on film for his BBC TV series The Private Life of Plants. (ANI)
Despite the rather heavy booking amount, ranging between Rs. 95,000 and Rs. 1,40,000, the dealers of Tata Motors alone have had more than 51,000 forms sold to the excited customers for the small wonder Nano, during the five days since the forms were made available from April 1.
The Nano forms are being sold for Rs. 300 out of which Rs. 250 is retained by Tata Motors, while Rs. 50 goes to the dealer. Sources familiar with the proceedings say that Tata Motors will expectedly earn nearly Rs. 30 crore from the sale of about 10 lakh forms through 218 dealers.
With the company planning to manufacture only 50,000 cars in the first year, the number of forms sold is staggering, more so since it does not include the additional 30,000 forms sold at other locations like SBI, its subsidiaries and associates; other preferred financiers; and outlets of Tata Finance, Croma, Titan, Westside, and Tata Indicom.
While one of the dealers said that the response to the Nano has been so huge that it ran short of forms at one of its dealerships; an official at a Tata Motors Mumbai-based dealership said: The response has been quite good, even though customers have not been given a chance to test-drive the car!
Washington, March 25 (ANI): Scientists have made new virtual topographic maps of Saturn’s moon Titan, which provide a bird’s-eye view its Earth-like landscapes.
Cassini radar team member Randy Kirk with the Astrogeology Science Center at the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona, created the maps.
He used some of the 20 or so areas where two or more overlapping radar measurements were obtained during 19 Titan flybys.
These stereo overlaps cover close to two percent of Titan’s surface.
The process of making topographic maps from them is just beginning, but the results already reveal some of the diversity of Titan’s geologic features.
The new flyover maps show, for the first time, the 3-D topography and height of the 1,200-meter (4,000-foot) mountain tops, the north polar lake country, the vast dunes more than 100 meters (300 feet) high that crisscross the moon, and the thick flows that may have oozed from possible ice volcanoes.
“These flyovers let you take in the bird’s-eye sweeping views of Titan, the next best thing to being there,” said Kirk.
“We’ve mapped many kinds of features, and some of them remind me of Earth. Big seas, small lakes, rivers, dry river channels, mountains and sand dunes with hills poking out of them, lava flows,” he added.
The maps show some features that may be volcanic flows. These flows meander across a shallow basin in the mountains.
One area suspected to be an ice volcano, Ganesa Macula, does not appear to be a volcanic dome. It may still have originated as a volcano, but it’s too soon to know for sure.
“It could be a volcanic feature, a crater, or something else that has just been heavily eroded,” said Kirk.
The stereo coverage includes a large portion of Titan’s north polar lakes of liquid ethane and methane. Based on these topographical models, scientists are better able to determine the depth of lakes.
The highest areas surrounding the lakes are some 1,200 meters (about 4,000 feet) above the shoreline.
By comparing terrain around Earth to the Titan lakes, scientists estimate their depth is likely about 100 meters (300 feet) or less.
More 3-D mapping of these lakes will help refine these depth estimates and determine the volume of liquid hydrocarbons that exist on Titan.
This information is important because these liquids evaporate and create Titan’s atmosphere. Understanding this methane cycle can provide clues to Titan’s weather and climate. (ANI)
Washington, March 18 (ANI): The Hubble Space Telescope has taken a photo of four moons of Saturn passing in front of their parent planet, in a rare moon transit.
In this view, the giant orange moon Titan casts a large shadow onto Saturn’s north polar hood.
Below Titan, near the ring plane and to the left is the moon Mimas, casting a much smaller shadow onto Saturn’s equatorial cloud tops.
Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, crossed Saturn on four separate occasions: January 24, February 9, February 24, and March 12, although not all events were visible from all locations on Earth.
Farther to the left, and off Saturn’s disk, are the bright moon Dione and the fainter moon Enceladus.
These rare moon transits only happen when the tilt of Saturn’s ring plane is nearly “edge on” as seen from the Earth.
The latest pictures were taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on February 24, 2009, when Saturn was at a distance of roughly 775 million miles (1.25 billion kilometers) from Earth.
Hubble can see details as small as 190 miles (300 km) across on Saturn.
The dark band running across the face of the planet slightly above the rings is the shadow of the rings cast on the planet.
Saturn’s rings will be perfectly edge on to our line of sight on August 10, 2009, and September 4, 2009. Unfortunately, Saturn will be too close to the Sun to be seen by viewers on Earth at that time.
This “ring plane crossing” occurs every 14-15 years.
In 1995-96, Hubble witnessed the ring plane crossing event, as well as many moon transits, and even helped discover several new moons of Saturn.
The banded structure in Saturn’s atmosphere is similar to Jupiter’s.
Early 2009 was a favorable time for viewers with small telescopes to watch moon and shadow transits crossing the face of Saturn. (ANI)
London, March 9 (ANI): A computer simulation has indicated that the gas giant Jupiter was once a cannibal, in the sense that it ate many of its moons early in its history.
The four giant “Galilean” moons orbiting Jupiter are the last survivors of at least five generations of moons that once circled the planet.
“All the other moons – and there could have been 20 or more – were devoured by the planet in the early days of the solar system,” Robin Canup of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, told New Scientist.
The four Galilean moons have played a key role in the history of science. Their discovery by Galileo 400 years ago provided irrefutable evidence that not all bodies orbited the Earth.
But until recently, nobody had suspected that Jupiter had once had many more moons.
“Astronomers have long been aware of a mystery thrown up by simulations of the way Jupiter and its moons formed,” said Canup.
These models indicate that the mass of the debris disc around Jupiter, from which the moons formed, was several tens of a per cent of the mass of giant planet; And yet only 2 per cent is enough to make the moons we see today.
Now, Canup and her colleague William Ward believe they know why. The extra mass can be explained if other moons formed while the debris disc was still present.
“A key process is therefore the interaction between the growing moons and the disc material still flowing in from the solar system,” said Canup.
This interaction would have caused the early moons to spiral in towards Jupiter and eventually be “eaten”.
According to Canup, this would explain the discrepancy in the earlier simulations, as one set of moons was swallowed, a new set immediately began to form.
“There could have been five generations of moons,” she said. “The current Galilean moons formed just as the inflow of material into the disc from the solar system choked off, so they escaped the fate of their unfortunate predecessors,” she added.
According to Canup and Ward, in each generation, the total mass of the moons was the same, but the number of moons could have varied.
“We think something similar happened around Saturn, where the last generation contained one giant moon – Titan,” said Canup.
This could have implications for the solar system as a whole. Rocky planets may take as long as 10 million years to aggregate, chunk by chunk. (ANI)
Noida, Feb 28 (ANI): Amity International Business School (Noida) organised Asia’s largest three-day (February 25- February 27) International Business Summit and Research Conference “INBUSH (2009)”, where it presented 13 most coveted Corporate Excellence awards.
The awards bestowed during the summit included:
Amity Corporate Excellence Award for Model PSU in Corporate Governance -BSNL
Amity Corporate Excellence Award for Dominant Leadership and Global Presence-ONGC
Amity Academic Excellence Award -A. N Rai- Vice Chancellor, Mizoram University
Amity Corporate Excellence Award for Fostering International Relations- Roberto
Toscano ,Ambassador of Italy
Amity Corporate Excellence Award for Fostering International Relations- Juan
Alfredo Pinto Saavedra, Ambassador of Columbia
Amity Corporate Excellence Award for Corporate Social Responsibility-Aditya Birla Group
Amity Corporate Excellence Award for Leveraging Technology in Global Business-Tech Mahindra Ltd.
Amity Corporate Excellence Award for Outstanding Bank- Axis Bank Ltd.
Amity Corporate Excellence Award for Best Retail Chain -Bata India Ltd.
Amity Corporate Excellence Award for Best Customer Service Firm-MBS Gymkhana Ltd.
Amity Corporate Excellence Award for Outstanding Marketing-IDEA Cellular SRS Group Ltd.
Amity Corporate Excellence Award for Best Hospitality Services-Hotel Corporation of India Ltd and Mosaic Hotels
Amity Corporate Excellence Award for Best Retail Chain-Titan.
Over 150 CEO’s, 19 Vice Chancellors from distinguished National and International Universities, 34 foreign diplomats, judges of the Supreme Court and High Court, Members of Parliament and scores of media personalities participated in the conference.(ANI)
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