July 24, 2008
1911: Exploring in Peru, Yale archaeologist Hiram Bingham locates Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas. The event will set off a century of controversy.
Bingham’s expedition photographed Machu Picchu soon after his 1911 arrival.
Bingham was born in Honolulu, the son and grandson of Protestant missionaries in the Pacific. He graduated from Yale University and did graduate work in history and politics at the University of California and Harvard.
Bingham had already made two expeditions to South America — and published a book on each — when he returned to Peru in 1911. He located the last Inca capital, Vitcos, and made the first ascent of the 21,763-foot Mt. Coropuma. Then came the find that would make him famous: Machu Picchu.
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July 24, 2008
THE plumes of hot magma that fuel the volcanism of "hotspots" like Hawaii and Iceland have long been thought to be efficient conduits of Earth’s fiery contents. Yet it seems they can be rather lacklustre on their way to the surface.
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We traditionally picture the plumes of hot magma that rise through the mantle as mushroom-shaped with a thin stalk feeding a bulbous head, or hotspot, beneath the crust. However, seismic imaging in Iceland reveals a patchy structure without a stalk, leading some researchers to suggest there are no plumes at all.
Ichiro Kumagai and colleagues at the Paris Institute of Earth Physics in France reckon they can explain these patchy structures. They created plumes by heating the base of a tank containing sugar syrups of varying densities, to simulate the composition of the mantle. The densest material was heated just enough to…
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July 24, 2008
Researchers and sky watchers are en route to remote regions of the Earth to catch a glimpse of a total solar eclipse.
On 1 August, a total solar eclipse will be visible from Canada to China. The path is shown in blue
(Map: Fred Espenak/NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center)
On 1 August, the Moon will pass in front of the Sun, casting a shadow across the Earth. Much of the northern hemisphere will see a partial eclipse, but the total eclipse will only be visible in a narrow band as the shadow tracks from Canada to China.
Totality is expected to be relatively short, lasting at most about two and a half minutes. In contrast, a total eclipse in 2009 will last more than six and a half minutes in some places.
Despite the short duration of this year’s event, expeditions are underway to Russia and China to see it. Several aircraft will aim to observe the eclipse from above the clouds, and an icebreaker will bring watchers to the Svalbard Islands in the Arctic.
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July 24, 2008
Your grandmother might have little in common with an astronaut, but both could benefit from a new device an MIT graduate student is designing to test balancing ability.
The iShoe insole could help doctors detect balance problems before a catastrophic fall occurs, says Erez Lieberman, a graduate student in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology who developed the technology as an intern at NASA.
Falls among the elderly are common and can be deadly: In 2005, nearly 300,000 Americans suffered hip fractures after a fall, and an average of 24 percent of hip-fracture patients aged 50 and over die in the year following their fracture, according to the National Osteoporosis Foundation.
The iShoe insole would measure and analyze the pressure distribution of the patient’s foot and report back to their doctor. (Credit: Photo / Donna Coveney)
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July 24, 2008
A University of Washington study of top-selling laundry products and air fresheners found the products emitted dozens of different chemicals. All six products tested gave off at least one chemical regulated as toxic or hazardous under federal laws, but none of those chemicals was listed on the product labels.
"I first got interested in this topic because people were telling me that the air fresheners in public restrooms and the scent from laundry products vented outdoors were making them sick," said Anne Steinemann, a UW professor of civil and environmental engineering and of public affairs. "And I wanted to know, ‘What’s in these products that is causing these effects?’"
She analyzed the products to discover the chemicals’ identity.
"I was surprised by both the number and the potential toxicity of the chemicals that were found," Steinemann said. Chemicals included acetone, the active ingredient in paint thinner and nail-polish remover; limonene, a molecule with a citrus scent; and acetaldehyde, chloromethane and 1,4-dioxane.
Researchers found that all top-selling laundry products and air fresheners tested gave off at least one chemical regulated as toxic or hazardous under federal laws, but none of those chemicals was listed on the product labels. (Credit: iStockphoto/Nicholas Homrich)
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July 24, 2008
For the first time, a team of international researchers has found a way to view the accretion disks surrounding black holes and verify that their true electromagnetic spectra match what astronomers have long predicted they would be.
A polarizing filter attached to a telescope suppresses the light emitted by dust particles and ionized gas clouds around the quasar
so its true electromagnetic spectrum can be revealed.
(Credit: Makoto Kishimoto, with cloud image by Schartmann)
A black hole and its bright accretion disk have been thought to form a quasar, the powerful light source at the center of some distant galaxies. Using a polarizing filter, the research team, which included Robert Antonucci and Omer Blaes, professors of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, isolated the light emitted by the accretion disk from that produced by other matter in the vicinity of the black hole.
"This work has greatly strengthened the evidence for the accepted explanation of quasars," said Antonucci.
Quasars are the brilliant cores of remote galaxies, at the hearts of which lie supermassive black holes that can generate enough power to outshine the Sun a trillion times. These mighty power sources are fuelled by interstellar gas, thought to be sucked into the hole from a surrounding ‘accretion disc’. New research verifies a long-standing prediction about the intensely luminous radiation emitted by these accretion discs.
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July 24, 2008
Electrotechnology student Felix Adamczyk has devised an ECG machine that runs on solar energy. This especially lends itself to use in developing countries or troubled areas. Adamczyk christened it “Kadiri”, which means “make possible” in the Tanzanian language Kiswahili.
Felix Adamczyk spawned the idea of building a solar EKG two years ago. At the time, he was concentrating intensively on Africa and had already built various technical devices. This prompted him to construct an EKG machine that can also be deployed successfully in developing countries. The requirements for such an EKG unit are conceivably simple, as Felix Adamczyk was soon to discover when he consulted a company in Tanzania that specializes in medical technology: “It should be robust, affordable and energy-efficient”, he explains. It does not make any sense to buy medical equipment from industrial nations and send them to developing countries. “You have to adapt the apparatus to suit the local conditions”, Adamczyk stresses.
Experience gathered in Africa
Felix Adamczyk demonstrating his solar ECG on a live model. (Credit: Image courtesy of ETH Zurich/Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)
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July 24, 2008
The adage that your enemies know your weaknesses best is especially true in the case of plants and predators that have co-evolved: As the predators evolve new strategies for attack, plants counter with their own unique defenses.
Milkweed is the latest example of this response, according to Cornell research suggesting that plant may be shifting away from elaborate defenses against specialized caterpillars toward a more energy-efficient approach. Genetic analysis reveals an evolutionary trend for milkweed plants away from resisting predators to putting more effort into repairing themselves faster than caterpillars — particularly the monarch butterfly caterpillar — can eat them.
"An important question with co-evolution is where does it end?" said Anurag Agrawal, Cornell associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and lead author of a paper in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "One answer is when it becomes too costly. Some plants seem to have shifted away from resisting herbivory [plant eating] and have taken that same energy and used it to repair themselves."
A monarch butterfly caterpillar gets ready to devour a milkweed leaf. Before feeding, the caterpillar disarms the plant’s natural defense system by cutting the milkweed’s veins that deliver a toxic and sticky latex. (Credit: Anurag Agrawal)
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July 24, 2008
A small but significant find made during a geological survey provides evidence of the oldest human presence yet discovered along the northernmost margin of Egypt’s Nile delta.
A rock fragment carried by humans to the site was discovered in a sediment core section north of Burullus lagoon near the Mediterranean coast.
Radiocarbon analysis of plant-rich matter in the mud surrounding the object provides a date of 3350 to 3020 B.C., the late Predynastic period.
This long, thin object, formed of dolomite, had not been deposited by the Nile or the sea, but was collected and transported from an outcrop exposure positioned at least 160 kilometers south of the core site. The fragile object lay buried at a depth of 7.5 meters in dark mud deposited in a brackish lagoon setting close to a marsh.
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July 24, 2008
It has long been debated whether dinosaurs were part of the ‘Terrestrial Revolution’ that occurred some 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous when birds, mammals, flowering plants, insects and reptiles all underwent a rapid expansion.
An international study, led by the University of Bristol, shows that during their last 50 million years of existence, dinosaurs were not expanding as actively as had been previously thought and that the apparent explosion of dinosaur diversity may be largely explained by sampling bias.
The team produced a ‘supertree’ of dinosaurs, showing the most likely pattern of evolution for 440 of the 600 known species of dinosaur. "Supertrees are very large family trees made using sophisticated computer techniques that carefully stitch together several smaller trees which were previously produced by experts on the various subgroups”, explained lead author Graeme Lloyd.
“Our supertree summarises the efforts of two decades of research by hundreds of dinosaur workers from across the globe and allows to look for unusual patterns across the whole of dinosaurs for the first time." It is the most comprehensive picture ever produced of how dinosaurs evolved.
Super-tree of dinosaurs with 440 species listed. (Credit: Image courtesy of Graeme Lloyd, Bristol University)
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