Physics Today: A space shuttle mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope was given the go ahead on Friday, in a desperate attempt to keep NASA's flagship space-based instrument up and running. An official announcement by NASA administrator Michael Griffin is expected later today.
The space shuttle will visit HST in 2008, replacing the six gyroscopes that position the telescope, adding new instruments, and extending its working life to beyond 2013. The Columbia space shuttle accident caused the last service mission to be canceled as the risks of reaching the HST, which is in a higher orbit and inclination to the International Space Station--the emergency 'lifeboat' for space shuttle flights in case the shuttle has to be abandoned -- outweighed the benefits said Sean O' Keefe, the previous NASA administrator at the time. New safety equipment has limited the risk involved say NASA officials, and the servicing mission has popular support among the astronaut corp, the public, and the scientific community.
The HST is the most successful NASA instrument ever placed in orbit. The HST replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope, is falling behind schedule, and now not expected to fly until 2014. Extending the lifetime of the HST would allow observations at ultraviolet and near infrared wavelengths to continue, instead of ending in 2008, when the HST's last gyroscope is expected to fail.
NASA had investigated using a unmanned robot to service the HST and fit a de-orbit module to the telescope, to help with a controlled re-entry when the telescope's orbit decayed around 2013. New orbit calculations suggest that the telescope could survive the scheduled increase in solar activity over the next fifteen years, if the shuttle boosted its orbit slightly. The extra orbit time will allow NASA to consider new ways to dispose of the HST, or retrieve it.
Azom.com: Plasma physicists at the Universities of Texas and Michigan have photographed speedy plasma waves, known as Langmuir waves, for the first time, using a specially designed holographic-strobe camera. The waves are the fastest matter waves ever photographed, clocking in at about 99.997% of the speed of light. The waves are generated in the wake of an ultra-intense laser pulse, and give rise to enormous electric fields, reaching voltages higher than 100 billion electron volts/meter (GeV/m). The waves' electric fields can be used to accelerate electrons so strongly that they may lead to ultra-compact, tabletop versions of a high-energy particle accelerators that could be a thousand times smaller that devices which currently exists only in large-scale facilities, which are typically miles long.
Financial Times: Large companies are pouring money into research and development at an unprecedented rate, in response to growing global competition. The international R&D Scoreboard, published on Monday, shows a 7 per cent increase in spending by the world’s top 1,250 companies.
The Independent: Climate change has been made the world's biggest priority, with the publication of a stark report showing that the planet faces catastrophe unless urgent measures are taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The New York Times: Though experts agree the world faces a daunting challenge in finding nonpolluting energy sources, research into new technology has declined.
China.org: A training center for nuclear fusion research has been established at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, capital city of east China's Zhejiang Province, to boost expertise in the nuclear fusion field.
ScienceNow: Researchers looking for better ways to make and store hydrogen have accidentally discovered an entirely new kind of ice. Made of molecular oxygen and hydrogen, the highly energetic and as-yet-unnamed compound currently exists only under rarefied laboratory conditions. It is different from the 17 known forms of ice, but researchers think its discovery could advance understanding of the nature of water under extreme conditions, such as in the interior of planets and even inside nuclear reactors. It also might help to spawn new rocket fuels.
The Independent: The world's target for stopping global warming should be based on the point at which the melting of the great Greenland ice sheet becomes irreversible, says the Government's chief scientific adviser, Sir David King.
The Register:
Intel is to close its UK research centre in Cambridge, The Register understands, just three and a half years after it was first opened. The move is part of the streamlining of the company outlined by CEO Paul Otellini earlier this year.
Science: Cassini team members at the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences meeting, held here from 8 to 13 October, reported the first detection of a change on the surface of Titan since Cassini's arrival, and it appears to be powered from within.
Reuters: Iran has injected gas into a new network of centrifuges, Iran's student news agency ISNA reported on Friday, referring to part of an atomic programme the West fears is aimed at making bombs.
San Francisco Chronicle: A giant underwater landslide that gouged the bottom of Lake Tahoe thousands of years ago sent a tsunami coursing across the lake and left huge ripples of rock that remain today, geologists have discovered.
BBC: US space agency Nasa has launched two spacecraft that are expected to make the first 3D movies of the Sun.
ScienceNow: A veritable who's who of climate scientists has weighed in on an important question before the Supreme Court: whether the U.S. government should regulate carbon emissions from new cars. Last month, a group of climate scientists told the Supreme Court that a 2003 decision by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) not to regulate greenhouse gases from cars was based on a misreading of the scientific literature. Yesterday, eight climatologists took EPA's side in the case, writing that there is "insufficient evidence that carbon dioxide emissions will endanger public health or welfare."
The New York Times: In an unusual foray into electoral politics, 75 science professors at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland have signed a letter endorsing a candidate for the Ohio Board of Education.
Nature: Geoff Brumfiel asks in this week's Nature whether US plans to limit North Korea's exporting opportunities of its nuclear technology will work. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been meeting leaders from neighboring countries to discuss ways to detect and intercept illicit nuclear stocks but some proliferation experts doubt that the screening regime is practical or even possible. A particular concern is that North Korea might smuggle nuclear material to other states or terrorist groups, says Michael Burns, principal deputy for threat reduction at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. If terrorists do get hold of a nuclear bomb says Michael May and Jay Davis in a commentary write in the same issue, it will be crucial to know where the terrorists got their material. In that regard, they propose that the international community should consider expanding the IAEA existing database of nuclear explosives to develop the field of nuclear forensics. "Establishing the data bank proposed here would greatly reduce the time between this most terrible of events and the ability to respond to it," says Davis and May.
Philadelphia Enquirer: Princeton geoscientist calls Mexican meteor idea flat-out wrong.
The New York Times: Two satellites are scheduled to lift off on Wednesday night on a $550 million mission to observe the Sun in three dimensions.
Wired: They run out of juice – or burst into flames – at exactly the wrong time. Can't anyone make a battery that doesn't suck?
ScienceNow: Finding Egyptian tombs is a tricky business that often requires a fair amount of luck. Now geologists have found a way to take some of the chance out of the equation.
ABC News: New analysis suggests experiments on Viking landers were flawed
Space.com: The Sun had sisters when it was born, according to new research, hundreds to thousands of them.
And at least one was a supernova, providing further support for the idea that there could be lots of planets around other stars since our solar system emerged in such an explosive environment.
The Register: Researchers working at the FermiLab particle accelerator in the US have discovered two new kinds of particle, exotic relatives of the common-or-garden proton and neutron.
Herald Sun: Thousands of scientists are queuing to use Melbourne's synchrotron when it opens for business next year.
The New York Times: Eager for precision in a field notorious for ambiguity and frustration, curators at top museums in Europe and the United States have long reached for the instruments of nuclear science to hit treasures of art with invisible rays. The resulting clues have helped answer vexing questions of provenance, age and authenticity.
Salon.com: Burned by 2004, I've been doing my best this time around to avoid the echo chamber of lefty blogs telling me what I want to hear about the possibility of Democrats taking control of Congress. But when the Wall Street Journal starts predicting a blowout, the siren song gets hard to resist.
Environmental News Network: The world -- especially the Western United States, the Mediterranean region and Brazil -- will likely suffer more extended droughts, heavy rainfalls and longer heat waves over the next century because of global warming, a new study forecasts.
BBC: A Rhodes scholarship-type scheme will be set up to attract the world's best scientists to the UK, the government is set to announce.
MSNBC: Lunar lander takes a tumble; Space Elevator Games go into overtime
Arms Control Today: On Oct. 9, North Korea announced that it had carried out an underground nuclear test. In subsequent days, the apparent low yield of the device and initial lack of reports of detection of radioactivity from the test raised questions about whether North Korea had actually tested a nuclear device or if a test had failed.
Science: European researchers have compiled a wish list of 35 large-scale projects that they would love to see built over the next 2 decades.
Los Angeles Times: Shares of defense services contractor Science Applications International Corp. added more than 21 percent Friday in the company's trading debut.
San Francisco Chronicle: Changes seasonal, scientists expect long-term shrinking.
Opinion: Nature:
In less than two-and-a-half years, the next president of the United States will take the oath of office and deliver his or her inaugural address. In early 2009, the president and a small group of sleep-deprived aides will submit a multi-trillion-dollar budget, nominate or appoint senior advisers and members of the cabinet, and establish the administration's initial policy priorities. As a result of my eight years as a science and technology policy adviser to President Clinton, I am convinced that the scientific and technical community should begin to plan now for this transition.
BBC: The complete works of one of history's greatest scientists, Charles Darwin, are being published online.
The project run by Cambridge University has digitised some 50,000 pages of text and 40,000 images of original publications - all of it searchable.
People's Daily Online: Analyzing the highest resolution radar-signal images ever made on the moon, planetary astronomers on Wednesday excluded the possibility of ice existing in craters at the lunar south pole.
The New York Times: In 1979, Shing-Tung Yau, then a mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, was visiting China and asked the authorities for permission to visit his birthplace, Shantou, a mountain town in Guangdong Province.
ScienceNow: Technicians at the W. M. Keck Observatory on the island of Hawaii are in the process of restoring operations to the station's twin giant telescopes, which were disrupted by the magnitude-6.7 earthquake and aftershocks that hit the west coast of the island Sunday morning. The earthquake was the largest in Hawaii in 20 years and caused power and communication failures across the state but caused no deaths or serious injuries.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: In the rarefied world of supercomputing, a petaflop is the four-minute mile of number crunching - the kind of raw computational power needed to predict detailed global climate changes, simulate nuclear chain reactions or model the birth of the cosmo.
Reuters: A seemingly violent collision of two galaxies is in fact a fertile marriage that has birthed billions of new stars, and an image released on Tuesday gives astronomers their best view yet.
BBC: There is an "urgent need" to help developing countries adapt to impacts of climate change, UK Climate Change Minister Ian Pearson has said.
San Jose Mercury News: By firing atoms of metal at another metal, Russian and American scientists have discovered a new element -- No. 118 on the Periodic Table -- that is the heaviest substance known and probably hasn't existed since the universe was in its infancy
ABC News: Despite the controversy that still surrounds the use of nuclear power, a Russian energy company has planned to build a floating nuclear power plant to fill the energy needs of the country's northern territories.
The Christian Science Monitor: The orbiter's cameras offer the most detailed images yet of the red planet's surface.
Seattle Post Intelligencer: Scientists were excited when they pulled a 154-pound meteorite from deep below a Kansas wheat field, but what got them most electrified was the way they unearthed it.
The New York Times: The declaration last Monday by North Korea that it had conducted a successful atomic test brought to nine the number of nations believed to have nuclear arms. But atomic officials estimate that as many as 40 more countries have the technical skill, and in some cases the required material, to build a bomb.
San Francisco Chronicle: A 6.6 magnitude earthquake and more than 40 aftershocks rocked the Hawaiian islands Sunday, collapsing roofs and causing landslides and widespread power outages.
Reuters: Scientists said on Monday that they had found the first direct evidence linking the collapse of an ice shelf in Antarctica to global warming widely blamed on human activities.
Science: Long-term visitors to the moon will have to cope with daily temperatures that rise and fall up to 250 degrees Celsius. But that's nothing compared to the day-night cycle on Upsilon Andromedae b, a giant extrasolar planet some 40 lightyears away. Going from the nightside to the dayside of this planet would be like jumping from an iceberg into a volcano, according to the first temperature variation measurements of a planet outside our solar system.
Two papers in Arxiv highlight new data about dark matter galaxies near the Milky Way. In the first paper, astro-ph/0608528, the group reports on the Milky Way satellite dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies, which are the smallest dark matter dominated systems in the universe. Dark matter makes up most of the matter in the universe, but are usually only observed indirectly. The paper claims that the density of dSph objects follow a predictive pattern not expected by astronomers. The paper is in press to be published in Nuclear Physics B.
Some researchers from that research group have also announced with additional colleagues, the discovery of five new satellites of the Milky Way in paper astro-ph/0608448. The new objects were found in Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). They include four probable new dwarf galaxies -- one each in the constellations of Coma Berenices, Canes Venatici, Leo and Hercules -- together with one unusually extended globular cluster, Segue 1. Their location led to the ironic title of their paper "Cats and Dogs, Hair and A Hero: A Quintet of New Milky Way Companions" In the last two years 10 new Milky Way satellites have been discovered in the SDSS which are less luminous, more irregular and appear to be more metal-poor than the previously-known nine Milky Way dwarf spheroidals. This paper has been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal.
Related Links
Observed Properties of Dark Matter: dynamical studies of dSph galaxies
Cats and Dogs, Hair and A Hero: A Quintet of New Milky Way Companions
Astrophysical Journal
Nuclear Physics B
Science: With its big political hurdle behind it, the make-or-break project must run a gantlet of technical challenges to see whether fusion can fulfill its promise of almost limitless energy.
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