Is it true that Dinosaurs DNA Can Be Saved?

The study, conducted by researchers from Murdoch University in Australia concluded that the DNA of living things would not survive, if age has reached more than 6.8 million years ago. This finding is clearly contrary to the possibility of replicating the dinosaurs lived, because most dinosaurs became extinct about 65 million years ago.

The scientists previously claimed to have been able to extract DNA from dinosaur fossils, where they try to unravel the related "myths Jurassic Park". "We permanently, Jurassic Park is plagued by myths that have emerged since the early nineties," said Mike Bunce, research leader of the Sydney Morning Herald, as reported by the Telegraph, Friday (12/10/2012).

Scientists have long check whether dinosaur DNA could have survived. "The myth is still there. Fact, other scientists ask whether this possibility can be proved," he said.

The project was described by Michael Crichtin bestsellers and Stephen Spielberg movie. Meanwhile, several papers claim insect DNA was 135 million years ago, could be extracted from amber (fossilized tree resin).

However, the likelihood is undeniable, as the remnants of insect DNA was contaminated with human genetic material. The new study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is based on carbon dating of the bones moa. Moa is a New Zealand native birds that have become extinct.

Researchers found that DNA from moa bones split after 521 years. Researchers say, at a temperature of minus five degrees and the age of the DNA reaches 6.8 million years, the last fragment of the DNA in the bone will disappear.

"However, this is possible in approximately 1 million years in frozen condition. You can extract a bit of DNA and do something with it," said Bunce.

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Scientists Reveal Weather "Strange" in the UK

Scientists said the last few months in the UK, there is erratic weather. Based on the research note, spring is the driest for more than a century, turned into the wettest recorded in April to June. It is said to be the weather "weird", because the dramatic changes that have not been documented before.

Reported by the BBC, Friday (19/10/2012), the scientists said, there is no evidence that climate change "rare" is due to the result of man-made climate change. However, experts have now warned the British to plan anticipatory measures to tackle drought and flood conditions.

This warning comes from the Environment Agency, Met Office and the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) in London, England. Terry Marsh from CEH said, there is no modern precedent for a transitional approach remarkable watershed. The closest comparison occurred in 1903, but this year is fabulous judged.

The amazing thing other weather related "weird" is, local people do not have to worry or suffer flooded. The main message from the experts also said discussion, the community has continued to increase resilience to flooding.

Paul Mustow, Head of Flood Management at the Environment Agency said, 4,500 properties flooded this year. "However, when you look at 2007, when more than 55 thousand properties under water, we are relatively fortunate to impact can be seen in this summer," said Paul.

"The pattern of rainfall impact in different areas. Addition, there is also a lag between rain periods, to minimize the impact," he added.

Experts also say, no flood defenses, approximately 53 thousand properties would be inundated with water this year. Meanwhile, approximately 190 thousand properties receiving flood protection in recent years.

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Mystery Water on the Moon Answered

Scientists are busy trying to solve the mystery about the discovery of water on the moon. Now they have found the answer that the water source is a stream of particles from the Sun.

Reporting from The Hindu, Wednesday (17/10/2012), the findings revealed by the researchers from the University of Michigan showed that the ice in the crater that is permanently shadowed moon, containing hydrogen atoms carried solar wind.

They analyzed samples of Apollo which reveal the existence of a hydroxyl. The compound was in the glass formed by meteorite impact at the micro-regolith.

"We found that the components of the water or hydroxyl which is located in the regolith. Mostly a result of the solar wind containing protons. Compounds when combined with aksigen will form hydroxyl," said the expert Geological Science, Youxue Zhang.

"It also means that the results of our work indicate that there is a hydroxyl component in various objects. Though not in the form of ice or liquid, will still be useful for sending human missions to moon," he added.

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Planet Likes Earth Found in Alpha Centauri

An Earth-like planet discovered outside our solar system. The planet was discovered by astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

Reporting from the International Business Times, Wednesday (17/10/2012), the planet has in common with the Earth in terms of size and distance from the Sun. It is in the Alpha Centauri which is 4.3 light years away as far from Earth.

The astronomers used the High Accuracy Radial-velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) with a long 3.6 meter telescope to discover the planet. But according to them, the planet can be seen with the naked eye from certain places.

Despite having the same size as the Earth, the planet is too hot to be habitable living creatures. The temperature there can reach 2,200 degrees and an estimated surface composed of molten lava.

Seeing this, astronomers remain optimistic about the possibility of another planet similar in size and more suitable for habitable living creatures.

"Maybe this planet is only one of several planets in the solar system. HARPS our other results and new discoveries from Kepler, they show clearly that the majority of low-mass planet discovered in the solar system," said co-author's research Stephane Udry.

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New Theory, Month Comes from Earth

A paper published in the journal Science reveals that the theory explains why the Earth and the Moon have similar chemical composition and.

Quoted from the Telegraph, Thursday (19/10/2012), the theory is said by Sarah Stewart and Matija Cuk. According to them, the Earth spins faster when the Moon began to form. Speed ​​was made one day only consists of one or three hours.

Because turnover is very fast, a big collision could catapult Earth material into space. The material is then formed the Moon.

According to this new theory, the speed of rotation of the Earth and then reached in the present because there is interaction between the gravitational orbit around the Sun and the orbit of the Moon around the Earth.

The scientists also noted that the proportion of their theory different from those currently believed. The theory is widely believed today is the giant moon created from material that hit Earth.

Stewart is a professor of Earth and planets at Harvard. While Cuk is an astronomer and researcher at the SETI Institute, which supports research in the search for life beyond Earth.

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Supernova exploding star 2012

A supernova, Saturday (27 / 8), appear to be close to the earth. The distance is closer than other supernovae. Astronomers say that supernovas exploded just moments ago.

Supernova is the explosion of stars that produce radiation that sometimes radiates to all parts of the galaxy for several weeks or months.

In the aftermath of the explosion, a supernova spreads a lot of energy in the form of luminescence light material and other stars at 30,000 km / sec.
Reported Geek, supernova was discovered by astronomer Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory University of Berkeley.

Joshua Bloom, assistant professor of astronomy, say, a supernova called PTF 11kly this is an important finding that will be a significant observational material to study.

 
These include Type Supernova He had also discovered in 1972, 1937, and 1572. Weidong Li, senior scientist at Berkeley say they still do not know the cause of the supernova.

But these findings will help them find know why and what the implications for bumi.Hasil findings were obtained from the survey PTF (Palomar Transient Factory), which uses a robotic telescope. Automated telescope is mounted on the Samuel Oschin 48-inch telescope at the Palomar Observatory in southern California.

Earth almost doom

On December 27, 2004, suddenly a burst of energy invisible hit Earth. He is expected to come from a considerable distance, ie distance from the constellation Sagittarius that reach about 50 thousand light years, or more than 473 thousand trillion miles.

Explosion and lacing was first detected gamma rays by NASA's Swift satellite. As for astronomers, the observation of these events provide the most detailed examples of the burst of energy ever recorded in history.

Although the burst of energy that only attack for about 0.2 seconds, but the energy is just as much to the energy of sunlight shining on the Earth up to 500 thousand years old.

As a result of devastating blows gammar beam energy, a lot of electronic satellites orbiting the Earth were damaged. Earth's upper atmosphere is also experiencing tremendous ionization.

After further investigation, astronomers discovered that the source of the attack was a rare magnetar SGR 1806-20 is located on the other side of the Milky Way.

Soft gamma ray repeaters (SGRs) This occurs when the magnetic field being tangled in trying to straighten her back and broke the crust of the magnetar. As a result, there was a burst of energy by turning off zone that can reach several light years.

Magnetar's magnetic field alone has 1,000-fold compared to pulsars (neutron stars that emit high bermedan magnet electromagnetic radiation) used. He is very strong and could lead to the destruction of anything within a distance of 1,000 kilometers in the vicinity.

The Young Woman Suddenly Became Old

Viewing images in addition to this, you must have guessed that the photo is 20-year-old girl and her grandmother. However, in actuality, the photo is the same person, who photographed the difference is only a few days.

Nguyen Thi Phuong, the woman's name, is now the object of medical research is scarce. she allegedly suffered an extreme allergic to seafood that changes its skin, but some experts doubt it.

Phuong, 26, said he started the swelling of the face and his skin started sagging in the year 2008. But then he did not try to seek treatment because of poverty.

The more days, his appearance is aging. Now, he appears like a woman in her 70s years. Thanh Tuyen, her husband, admit it. however, this carpenter confessed his love for his wife never fade. Everyday, Phuon always wear masks in public to hide his appearance. Only now, she becomes the object of research and medical treatment after a hospital eliminate the entire cost of treatment.
He believes the condition is caused by a severe allergy to seafood. He said he suffered a very bad reaction in 2008.

"I'm really itching all over body. I scratched even when sleeping," he said.
He bought the drug in the shop to stop the itch. "After one month of taking the drug, less itchy. Then I turned to traditional medicine and all the itching disappeared. However, my skin started to sag and fold," he said.
Phuon then take another kind of traditional medicine to treat problems of rapid aging. But this measure did not help.

The doctor says it may be what happened as a result of long-term use of traditional medicines are often spiked with corticoids. This accelerating effect of steroid medication, but could trigger a rare skin disease called mastocytosis, in which the body produces too many mast cells.
The couple does not remember what drugs they are buying time.

Figure crop circles made ​​by Japanese farmers

We've all heard about crop circles (crop circles) and see them on television, film, or maybe in real life, but in Japan you can see the art of rice in the fields. Every year Japanese farmers grow rice in different patterns and use different types of rice for color. The result is a spectacular picture. But unfortunately it can only be seen until the rice is harvested in September.

 

 

Earthlike Planet Found Orbiting at Right Distance for Life

Kepler-22b is first planet confirmed "smack in the middle of the habitable zone."

A possible Earth twin has been confirmed orbiting a sunlike star 600 light-years away—and the new planet may be in just the right spot for supporting life, NASA announced Monday.
Discovered by the Kepler space mission, the new planet—dubbed Kepler-22b—is the first world smaller than Neptune to be found in middle of its star's habitable zone.


Also called the Goldilocks zone, the habitable zone is the region around a star where a planet's surface is not too hot and not too cold for liquid water—and thus life as we know it—to exist.
(Also see "New Planet May Be Among Most Earthlike—Weather Permitting.")
Other planets have been spotted in the habitable zones of their stars, but most of those worlds are Jupiter- or Neptune-size bodies that are unlikely to harbor life.

"The number of confirmed sub-Neptunian worlds in their habitable zones are few and far between, because they are the hardest ones to find," said Natalie Batalha, Kepler's deputy science team leader at San Jose State University in California.

(Related: "Six New Planets—Mini-Neptunes Found Around Sunlike Star.")
In fact, only two known planets fit this description so far—Gliese 581d and HD 85512—and both worlds orbit at the very edges of their stars' habitable zones, making them more akin to Venus and Mars than to Earth.

"What makes this particular discovery so exciting is that this planet is right smack in the middle of the habitable zone," Batalha said.
"It's also orbiting a star that's almost a twin of our sun, whereas the other two detections are orbiting significantly cooler stars."
(Find out more about the possibly habitable worlds in the Gliese system.)

Getting Closer to Truly Earthlike
The Kepler mission finds new worlds by simultaneously monitoring 150,000 stars for dips in brightness, which are indicative of planets passing in front of—or transiting—their stars.

Kepler-22b was among the 54 roughly Earth-size planet candidates announced by the Kepler team in February. But the spacecraft needs to watch at least three transits to confirm that a signal is a planet.
"Fortune smiled upon us with the detection of this planet," William Borucki, Kepler's principal investigator at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, said in a statement.
"The first transit was captured just three days after we declared the spacecraft operationally ready. We witnessed the defining third transit over the 2010 holiday season."

The new planet is about 2.4 times the radius of Earth, but scientists don't yet know its composition, because they are still missing a crucial piece of information: Kepler-22b's mass.
(See "NASA Finds Smallest Earthlike Planet Outside Solar System.")
The Kepler team is hopeful, however, that the mass of Kepler-22b could be calculated with the help of a new ground-based instrument in the Spanish Canary Islands that will begin observations next spring.
Called HARPS North, the new telescope is capable of measuring with high precision a planet's doppler velocity—changes in the frequency of light from an object in space as it moves toward or away from Earth.
With this information, scientists can calculate the mass, and therefore the density, of Kepler-22b and determine whether it's a rocky planet or a water world.

"We are really hopeful that HARPS North might be able to be a really big help in this quest for the mass of this planet," San Jose State's Batalha said.
"We're just getting closer and closer to what is truly Earthlike, and that progress is exciting to watch."
The new planet Kepler-22b will be detailed in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

source news nationalgeographic

A New Milestone for New Horizons

 

Artist’s rendering of New Horizons. Southwest Research Institute (Dan Durda)/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (Ken Moscati)

Last Friday, December 2, 2011, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft became the closest spacecraft ever to Pluto, a record previously held by Voyager 1 which came within 983 million miles of Pluto on January 29, 1986. This marks the beginning of a new period in the New Horizons mission, when every day – every moment, in fact – is the closest a manmade vehicle has ever come to the distant dwarf planet!

“What a cool milestone!” said Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute and New Horizons Principal Investigator. “Although we’re still a long way – 1.5 billion kilometers from Pluto – we’re now in new territory as the closest any spacecraft has ever gotten to Pluto, and getting closer every day by over a million kilometers.”

Launched on January 19, 2006, New Horizons has been traveling at incredible speeds through the solar system for 2,149 days (as of the time of this writing.) The spacecraft is one of the fastest machines ever created, speeding through interplanetary space at up to 47,000 mph. That’s over twenty times the speed of a rifle bullet – almost 13 miles a second!

Watch a video of New Horizons’ launch from Cape Canaveral.

Yet, even at that rate, it will take New Horizons another 3 1/2 years to finally reach Pluto, a frozen and enigmatic world holding court with its four (known) moons at the far reaches of the solar system. At its closest Pluto is still over 4.2 billion miles from Earth. From that distance the Sun is just an extra-bright star in an eternally twilit sky, casting about as much heat as the pad of sticky-notes on your desk.

 

Still, over the course of its 248-year-long orbit that heat is enough to visibly change the coloration of its surface, at least as most recently seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in a series of images acquired from 2002-2003. Likely an effect of surface materials sublimating and re-freezing across Pluto’s surface, these shifting patterns indicate that Pluto is a dynamic place that undoubtedly has many more surprises in store for NASA’s steadily approaching spacecraft.

The most detailed view to date of the entire surface of Pluto, constructed from multiple NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken from 2002 to 2003. The center disk has a mysterious bright spot that is unusually rich in carbon monoxide frost. Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Buie (Southwest Research Institute).

The most detailed view to date of the entire surface of Pluto, constructed from multiple NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken from 2002 to 2003. The center disk has a mysterious bright spot that is unusually rich in carbon monoxide frost. Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Buie (Southwest Research Institute).

New Horizons will ultimately make a close pass by Pluto on July 14, 2015, imaging the dwarf planet with a suite of science instruments, in particular its high-resolution LORRI (Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) camera which will be able to resolve features on its surface as small as 200 feet across.

After its close encounter with our solar system’s erstwhile ninth planet New Horizons will continue outwards into the Kuiper Belt, an even further region where icy bodies and even more worlds like Pluto reside, orbiting the Sun in ever larger and longer orbits.

New Horizons may even visit one of these distant worlds, should the mission be extended.

Ultimately, in another few years (1,312 days and counting, to be exact) we will learn more about Pluto in one sudden and glorious burst of information than we ever have in the 81 years since its discovery, thanks to New Horizons. Until then we can only imagine what it might find.

See you in 2015!

Light Pollution

 

 

If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go in darkness happily, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun's light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don't think of ourselves as diurnal beings any more than we think of ourselves as primates or mammals or Earthlings. Yet it's the only way to explain what we've done to the night: We've engineered it to receive us by filling it with light.

This kind of engineering is no different than damming a river. Its benefits come with consequences—called light pollution—whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky, where it's not wanted, instead of focusing it downward, where it is. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and radically alters the light levels—and light rhythms—to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life—migration, reproduction, feeding—is affected. 


For most of human history, the phrase "light pollution" would have made no sense. Imagine walking toward London on a moonlit night around 1800, when it was Earth's most populous city. Nearly a million people lived there, making do, as they always had, with candles and rushlights and torches and lanterns. Only a few houses were lit by gas, and there would be no public gaslights in the streets or squares for another seven years. From a few miles away, you would have been as likely to smell London as to see its dim collective glow. 

Now most of humanity lives under intersecting domes of reflected, refracted light, of scattering rays from overlit cities and suburbs, from light-flooded highways and factories. Nearly all of nighttime Europe is a nebula of light, as is most of the United States and all of Japan. In the south Atlantic the glow from a single fishing fleet—squid fishermen luring their prey with metal halide lamps—can be seen from space, burning brighter, in fact, than Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro.