Science News
Scientists Explain Why Greenwich Prime Meridian Moved
by Sci-News.com
The ‘Prime Meridian’ that’s been running through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, UK, since 1884 is now located 335 feet (102 meters) east of its historic spot. Dr Ken Seidelmann from the University of Virginia and his colleagues investigated the cause of this apparent discrepancy.
In 1884, the International Meridian Conference recommended that Earth’s prime meridian “to be employed as a common zero of longitude and standard of time-reckoning throughout the globe” pass through the “center of the transit instrument at the Observatory of Greenwich.”
This instrument – named the Airy Transit Circle for its designer, British Astronomer Royal Sir George Biddell Airy – is a nineteenth-century telescopic device for measuring star positions, and could be used for determining local time.
Today, tourists visiting its meridian line must walk east approximately 335 feet before their satellite-navigation receivers indicate zero longitude.
Why? Because newer technologies – primarily the superb accuracy of GPS, which uses satellites to precisely measure grid coordinates at any point on the Earth’s surface – replaced the traditional telescopic observations used to measure the Earth’s rotation.
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9,350-Year-Old Stonehenge-Style Monolith Found in Mediterranean Sea
by Sci-News.com
A submerged, 39-foot-long (12 m) monolith has been discovered in the waters off the coast of Sicily at a depth of about 130 feet (40 m).
The man-made monolith is at least 9,350 years old. It weighs about 15 tons and is broken into two parts.
It has three regular holes of similar diameter: one that crosses it completely on its top, and another two at two sides of the monolith.
There are no reasonable known natural processes that may produce these elements, according to Dr Emanuele Lodolo from the National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics in Italy and Dr Zvi Ben-Avraham from the University of Haifa and Tel Aviv University in Israel, who found the monolith.
“The monolith is made from stone other than those which constitute all the neighboring outcrops, and is quite isolated with respect to them,” the scientists said.
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Technology News
Apple's Boot Camp now supports Windows 10
With Boot Camp version 6, Apple users can dual-boot Mac OS X with the 64-or 32-bit version of Windows 10.
by Lance Whitney
Mac users can now officially run Windows 10 through an updated version of Apple's Boot Camp dual-boot utility.
An Apple support document posted late Wednesday lists the Mac and iMac models that support dual booting with Windows 10 via the release of Boot Camp version 6 and explains how to install Microsoft's new OS for your dual-boot environment.
Boot Camp is designed for Mac users who want or need to run Windows but don't have or wish to purchase a dedicated Windows PC. Through Boot Camp, you can run the Mac OS X and Windows in two separate partitions on the same Mac and then simply choose which operating system you wish to load each time your computer boots up. On the down side, your Mac's performance through Boot Camp can be slow. On the plus side, you can share files between OS X and Windows, so Boot Camp is a good solution for people who want to work with the same documents in both operating systems.
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Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can’t Protect Us Anymore
Wired.com
You have a secret that can ruin your life.
It’s not a well-kept secret, either. Just a simple string of characters—maybe six of them if you’re careless, 16 if you’re cautious—that can reveal everything about you.
Your email. Your bank account. Your address and credit card number. Photos of your kids or, worse, of yourself, naked. The precise location where you’re sitting right now as you read these words. Since the dawn of the information age, we’ve bought into the idea that a password, so long as it’s elaborate enough, is an adequate means of protecting all this precious data. But in 2012 that’s a fallacy, a fantasy, an outdated sales pitch. And anyone who still mouths it is a sucker—or someone who takes you for one.
No matter how complex, no matter how unique, your passwords can no longer protect you.
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Environmental News
Sucking CO2 from the Air Would Not Halt Effects of Global Warming
Sans reduced emissions, using extreme geoengineering to remove atmospheric carbon dioxide would not protect the oceans, models show
By Maria Temming
As nations repeatedly fail to make major cuts in their greenhouse gas production, scientists and others have begun to wonder if climate change might be halted not by emissions cuts but by technology that removes those gases from the atmosphere. The approach is called geoengineering. Unfortunately, a recent simulation of its effects on the oceans found that even extreme methods would not be able to completely rehabilitate the ocean environment. The work was published in Nature Climate Change on August 3. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)
The experiments focused on carbon dioxide removal (CDR), the process of extracting excess CO2 directly from the atmosphere. In theory this could help oceans because they become dangerously acidic when they absorb too much atmospheric CO2. One CDR idea is to plant trees that consume large amounts of CO2 and then burn the trees in facilities where the emissions can be captured and stored underground. But no one has ever tested this or similar carbon removal schemes on a large scale.
The next-best thing to large-scale testing is a large-scale simulation. In the new study researchers led by Sabine Mathesius, an environmental scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, used a computer model to investigate CDR’s effectiveness in rehabilitating seawater damaged by CO2 emissions.
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Colorado Mine Spill Aftermath: How to Clean a River
The EPA is now scrambling to mitigate the mess it created when agency workers inadvertently unleashed a pool of wastewater from an abandoned gold mine
By Stephanie Pappas and LiveScience
On Aug. 5, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) workers inadvertently breached a wall of loose debris that was holding back a pool of mustard-hued wastewater from the abandoned Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colorado.
With a sudden gush, some 3 million gallons (about 11 million liters) of acidic, heavy-metal-laden water flooded into Cement Creek, a tributary of the nearby Animas River. From there, the plume headed downstream into the San Juan River (a major tributary of the Colorado River), headed for New Mexico and, eventually, Lake Powell on the Utah-Arizona border.
On the way, the plume traveled through Durango and Navajo Nation land in New Mexico, forcing warnings against touching the water, drinking it or using it for irrigation. The EPA is now scrambling to clean up the mess. [See Images of the Gold King Mine Spill]
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Medical News
Eye movements 'change scenes' during dreams
By Jonathan Webb
For the first time, scientists have recorded from individual brain cells during the dreaming phase of sleep.
After each rapid eye movement (REM) they recorded bursts of activity that match what happens when we are awake and we see - or imagine - a new image.
They suggest that these well-known flickering movements accompany a "change of scene" in our dreams.
The recordings were made from patients with electrodes implanted in their brains to monitor seizures.
"It's a unique opportunity to look at what's happening inside the human brain," Dr Yuval Nir, from Tel Aviv University in Israel, told the BBC. "We're very thankful to the epilepsy patients who volunteered to take part."
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Scientists Say Fetal Tissue Essential for Medical Research
The furor on Capitol Hill over Planned Parenthood has stoked a debate about the use of tissue from aborted fetuses.
By COLLIN BINKLEY and CARLA K. JOHNSON, Associated Press
BOSTON (AP) — The furor on Capitol Hill over Planned Parenthood has stoked a debate about the use of tissue from aborted fetuses in medical research, but U.S. scientists have been using such cells for decades to develop vaccines and seek treatments for a host of ailments, from vision loss to cancer and AIDS.
Anti-abortion activists triggered the uproar by releasing undercover videos of Planned Parenthood officials that raised questions of whether the organization was profiting from the sale of fetal tissue. Planned Parenthood has denied making any profit and said it charges fees solely to cover its costs.
University laboratories that buy such cells strongly defend their research, saying tissue that would otherwise be thrown out has played a vital role in lifesaving medical advances and holds great potential for further breakthroughs.
Fetal cells are considered ideal because they divide rapidly, adapt to new environments easily and are less susceptible to rejection than adult cells when transplanted.
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Space News
Rosetta: Comet 67P makes closest approach to Sun
By Jonathan Webb
Comet 67P has passed the closest point to the Sun in its 6.5-year orbit, with the European spacecraft Rosetta still in orbit around it.
This landmark, called "perihelion", occurred at 03:03 BST on Thursday, when 67P was 186 million km from the Sun - a distance that puts it between the orbits of Earth and Mars.
The Rosetta team has been studying the small, icy world as it warms up.
It has released dust and gas, including a very bright jet seen on 29 July.
Scientists have also seen a "boulder" - a chunk of the comet nucleus - travelling through space above 67P's surface.
Dramatic images of the dust and gas outburst - the brightest jet seen so far by Rosetta's cameras - were released on Tuesday by the European Space Agency, Esa.
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RGG 118: Astronomers Find Smallest Known Supermassive Black Hole
by Sci-News.com
A team of astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the 6.5-m Clay Telescope in Chile has found the smallest supermassive black hole ever observed in the center of a galaxy.
The supermassive black hole in question resides about 340 million light-years away at the center of a dwarf disk galaxy called RGG 118.
The estimated mass of this object is about 50,000 solar masses. This is less than half the mass of the previous smallest black hole at the center of a galaxy.
The black hole is nearly 100 times less massive than the supermassive black hole found in the center of the Milky Way. It’s also about 200,000 times less massive than the heaviest black holes found in the centers of other galaxies.
“It might sound contradictory, but finding such a small, large black hole is very important. We can use observations of the lightest supermassive black holes to better understand how black holes of different sizes grow,” said Dr Vivienne Baldassare from the University of Michigan, lead author of a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters (arXiv.org preprint).
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Odd News
Super-Sniffing Ants Smell Things Humans Can't
by Lindsay Dodgson, Live Science
Ants may be experts at sniffing out body odor, according to a new study that reveals these insects have a "high-definition ability" to detect tiny chemical changes in the pheromones other ants give off.
Scientists from the University of California, Riverside, studied how ants tell each other apart in their colonies based on tiny, nearly undetectable changes in how other ants smell. The research, published on Thursday in the journal Cell Reports, revealed how much ants' sniffing abilities may have been underestimated.
Social insects, like ants, detect each other's smells using sensors in their antennae. It was initially thought that ants used these smells to distinguish between friends and foes, but the new study suggests the insects' abilities go further than this.
The researchers tested how the ants react to different odors by sticking tiny glass electrodes into single sensory hairs on the insects' antennae, which were then exposed to puffs of different hydrocarbons. The electrodes acted like sensors to show whether each antenna was responding and if the ant had recognized a smell. The researchers discovered that ants are highly sensitive to chemical changes, with sensory neurons able to respond to a variety of subtly different hydrocarbon odors.
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