Category Archives: Science

Science

Bird Flu Found in Africa for First Time

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According to the BBC H5N1 has arrived in Nigeria, the first time bird flu has been identified in Africa.

This has been seen as something of a worry by scientists due to the size of the continent and the prevalence of AIDS which means many people with weakened immune systems who could both succumb and provide carriers for future mutation of the virus. As this New Scientist editorial said:

It is pretty clear now that wild water birds are carrying the virus. We do not know how many are infected, but they could spread the infection to the rest of Asia next and to Africa, where the prevalence of backyard chickens, poverty and HIV will be an explosive mix. The more humans are infected, the more likely it is that H5N1 will learn to spread between us.

On a complete tangent, Rich Boakes “autometa” tag generator for Technorati came up with the following, rather appropriate, list: h5n1 arrived nigeria time bird identified africa worry

Stardust@Home

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Here’s an interesting project I picked up from the Planetary Society’s Planetary Radio podcast – the Stardust team needs volunteers to scan images from microsope photographs of the Aerogel that has been recovered to spot the tracks made by interstellar dust grains.

I know, you’re thinking “why don’t they do it automatically?” – the reason is that the grains will only travel a very short distance into the aerogel, and make marks quite similar to natural cracks that will have appeared during the mission. It is, in fact possible – BUT:

In order for it to work, however, they would have to “train” the computer with real images of aerogel containing grains of interstellar dust. But here’s the rub: no such particles had ever been collected!

So it’s a classic chicken/egg situation – they could find them automatically but they need to find the grains to teach the program before it will work reliably.

So, now it’s time for the public! They will produce a lot (order of a million) images for people to go through one by one (after some online training) to try and spot these particles by eye. The article on the challenge at the Stardust@Home site likens it to:

…searching for 45 ants in an entire football field, one 5cm by 5cm (2 inch by 2 inch) square at a time!

At least in this case the ants won’t be moving.. 🙂

So, if you want to find out more read the Planetary Society page on the project, the Berkeley press release about the project and the Stardust@Home project page itself & think about registering to help them out. Who knows, you could be the first one to find a piece of cosmic space dust!

Rats Smell In Stereo ?

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Here’s an interesting article from the BBC saying that scientists believe that rats smell in stereo – a pretty neat feat!

I’ve been trying to work out what it would feel like by closing my eyes and listening carefully and sniffing but all I’ve managed to do is give myself a headache.. 🙂

Pioneer Anomaly Update

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The Planetary Society has posted an interesting update on the Pioneer Anomaly especially about the fact that they’ve managed to recover almost all of the original telemetry data as well as the doppler shift information they were after.

The original tapes were to have been destroyed after 7 years, but as they say:

Fortunately, this is not what happened in the case of the Pioneer missions. Not only were the original magnetic tapes not destroyed but, in the early 1990s, before deterioration would have made the tapes unusable, they were copied to much more durable magneto-optical media. Since then, the files, about 40 gigabytes in total, have been copied to modern computers and we have now developed tools to extract information from them.

Lava Hosepipe in Hawaii

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Leon’s got a couple of nice photos from Hawaii from the collapse of an entire active lava bench belonging to Kilauea volcano.

The USGS also has another photo (shown below) from the press release of the resulting lava hosepipe that was created when a 6 foot wide lava pipe was left spewing molten rock into the see from a height of 50 foot. Quite an amazing sight!

Does Pluto Have Rings ?

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Listening to the Planetary Radio podcast about the New Horizons mission from NASA to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt and heard the principle investigator, Alan Stern say that they were hoping to find that Pluto had a ring system!

This is likely because its three moons (Charon and the two unnamed ones discovered earlier this year) have such low gravity that there’s a good chance that meteorite impacts would throw up dust that would escape the moons could end up in orbit around Pluto.

Hayabusa Thruster Update

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It looks like JAXA has got the thruster problem under control for the moment, although that’s partly because of the fact that they’ve put the spacecraft into safe mode.

RogueEngineer gives a translation of part of the press conference saying:


When we switched to the main system from the backup system and started the thruster operation, the same problem occured. Due to the attitude change, the probe automatically switched to the safe mode. After that, we controlled the valve to stop the leakage.
[…]


Because of the leakage incident, we are not able to see the detail of sampling yet. However, the sequence of the onboarded computer is confirmed to have executed normally. We expect the touchdown attitude was good, but we’ll have to wait for the completion of data downloading for definite answer.

Mr 5thstar translates another part of the press conference about the impact of this problem on getting Hayabusa back safely.


Fuji Sankei Business Eye: What are the impacts to the returning home?


Kawaguchi: We realize it is very critical. It depends on how we examine the situation.

Good luck everyone!