The Daily Thing

Scientists got a little surprise this week when they began analyzing photos and data sent back by the Messenger spacecraft who made a pass of Mercury earlier this month. Turns out Mercury isn’t quite what they expected.

Messenger’s Pictures From Mercury Surprise Scientists - washingtonpost.com: “The Messenger spacecraft that sped past Mercury on Jan. 14 sent back pictures of a geological formation never seen before in the solar system: a central depression with more than 100 narrow troughs radiating out from it.

Called ‘The Spider’ by scientists analyzing the trove of images and data coming back from Messenger, the puzzling feature is the kind of surprise that researchers live for.

‘Messenger has sent back data near perfectly, and some of it confirms earlier understandings, and some of it tells us something brand-new,’ said principal investigator Sean C. Solomon. ‘The Spider is definitely in the category of something we never imagined we’d find.’

Scientists were also surprised by evidence of ancient volcanoes on many parts of the planet’s surface and how different it looks compared with the moon, which is about the same size. Unlike the moon, Mercury has huge cliffs, as well as formations snaking hundreds of miles that indicate patterns of fault activity from Mercury’s earliest days, more than 4 billion years ago.

‘It was not the planet we expected,’ said Solomon, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. ‘It’s a very dynamic planet with an awful lot going on.’

Messenger passed by Mercury after a journey of more than 2 billion miles. It will swing by the planet twice more before settling into orbit around it in 2011. “

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An out of control spy satellite that was reported as “crashing to earth” has experts assuring people that the chance you might actually be hit by the pieces of the satellite as “very slim”.

BBC: “In reality, a spy satellite heading uncontrollably towards Earth is not an uncommon event, says Dr Ruediger Jehn, a space debris analyst at the European Space Agency (Esa). He says that satellites come out of orbit and fall back to Earth harmlessly on average once a year.

Normally, when US spy satellites reach the end of their lives, they are disposed of through a controlled re-entry and dumped in the Pacific Ocean, so that no-one can learn their secrets.

But, Dr Jehn says older satellites are often more difficult to de-orbit properly.

‘When they re-enter they usually burn up in the atmosphere because a lot of heat has developed and there is a lot of friction,’ he says.

‘Only heat-resistant or very heavy objects will survive. There is a risk in this case that something will hit the ground, but given that the Earth is so big, the probability in this case that someone will be hit is really remote.’

US defence officials have released few details of the satellite because of its sensitive nature. Such spacecraft are used for reconnaissance and information gathering. No-one knows for certain how big it is but experts say it is probably a few tonnes.

White House officials told journalists on Saturday that a large US spying satellite, whose engine had failed, was falling from orbit.

Officials say they have no idea where it might land but that they are keeping other countries abreast of the situation. “

Sounds like pre-entry damage control to me. I wonder how much money your family gets if you get nailed by a piece of this? If one comes down near me I’m sticking my brother in front of it.

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A super fast moving star has proven to be an enigma to scientists but now a new theory has surfaced that the star may actually be alien in origin.

Science Daily: “A young star is speeding away from the Milky Way so fast that astronomers have been puzzled by where it came from; based on its young age it has traveled too far to have come from our galaxy. Now by analyzing its velocity, light intensity, and for the first time its tell-tale elemental composition, Carnegie astronomers Alceste Bonanos and Mercedes López-Morales, and collaborators Ian Hunter and Robert Ryans from Queen’s University Belfast have determined that it came from our neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The result suggests that it was ejected from that galaxy by a yet-to-be-observed massive black hole.

The star, dubbed HE 0437-5439, is an early-type star and one of ten so-called hypervelocity stars so far found speeding away from the Milky Way. “But this one is different from the other nine,” commented López-Morales. “Their type, speed, and age make them consistent with having been ejected from the center of our galaxy, where we know there is a super-massive black hole. This star, discovered in 2005*, initially appeared to have an elemental makeup like our Sun’s, suggesting that it, too, came from the center of our galaxy. But that didn’t make sense because it would have taken 100 million years to get to its location, and HE 0437-5439 is only 35 million years old.”

To explain the enigma, or “paradox of youth,” the discoverers proposed that HE 0437-5439 was either a so-called blue straggler–a relatively young, massive star resulting from the merger of two low-mass stars from the Milky Way, or it originated from the Large Magellanic Cloud.”

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Here’s something cool and new: iTunes is now offering iTunesU, a collection of lectures from Yale, Harvard, Stanford and other universities across the nation. I just downloaded Yvon Choinard, famous Yosemite big-wall climber and president of Patagonia clothing talking at Stanford University. Nice part is it’s FREE.

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Two years ago a virtual plague unintentionally spread across the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft now researchers want to study the dynamics of the virtual plague to see if it can help scientists model and predict the spread of real world diseases.

Ars Technica: “There were a number of features in the virtual outbreak that actually mimicked the spread of and response to real-world epidemics. A key feature was that the disease could be carried by the game’s ‘pets,’ the virtual equivalent of domesticated animals; this behavior is shared by SARS and avian flu, among other diseases. The game’s teleportation acted like air travel in allowing the disease to rapidly go ‘global.’ The humans controlling the players also mimicked the behavior of real populations during historical epidemics. As the populations of cities were wiped out by the disease, surviving players began avoiding them, and any large groups of players became scarce in the surrounding countryside.

It took only six months for the first academic analysis of the outbreak to appear in the journal Epidemiology. The article highlighted the advantages of the WoW incident, comparing it favorably to existing computer models that ‘are limited in their potential to account for changes in human behaviors during epidemics.’ At the same time, it recognized that virtual characters might not accurately track all normal human behaviors.

On balance, the analysis in Epidemiology felt that virtual worlds might provide a useful supplement to traditional models of disease spread, and suggested working with game programmers to test a variety of disease conditions. ‘Multiplayer online role-playing games may even be useful as a testing ground for hypotheses about infectious disease dissemination,’ the author said, ‘Game programmers could allow characters to be inflicted by various infectious diseases, some of which may not be visible to the player, and track the dissemination patterns of the disease in specific subpopulations.’ It looks like something of the sort is in the works. A report from the Agence France-Presse indicates that Nina Fefferman, a researcher from Tufts University, is currently negotiating with Blizzard about running epidemiological tests in WoW.”

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Canonical, the company behind the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu, is looking to capture the business market by releasing a tool to administrate servers and desktop machines across a broad network. This is the first time a Linux distributor has sought to directly infiltrate the office environment largely held by Microsoft.

ArsTechnica: “Landscape makes it possible to remotely deploy patches, updates, and packages. It also provides extensive support for reporting and resource-usage analysis across groups of systems. In order to provide more flexible group management, Landscape allows administrators to organize groups of systems by using tags. Launchpad also includes an auditing framework that can show a history of actions performed on the local system as well as changes made by an administrator through Landscape.Landscape has support for ’semi-connected management’ functionality, which will queue operations for systems that aren’t currently online and then perform the tasks when the system is once again network accessible. Semi-connected management makes it possible to manage systems that don’t consistently have connectivity, like laptops that are deployed in the field.”

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A rash of recent big foot sightings in rural India is prompting authorities to investigate. What makes these sightings different is almost all have been within the last month.

Discovery Channel: “The bizarre sightings have been made in the Garo hills area of Meghalaya state, close to the borders with Bangladesh and Bhutan, with villagers calling the mysterious creatures ‘Mande Burung’ or Jungle Man.

‘A team of wildlife officials and other experts will conduct a study to find out if there is any truth in the locals’ claims about these hairy giants,’ said Samphat Kumar, a district magistrate in the West Garo Hills district.

The creatures have apparently been talked about and occasionally spotted for years, but sightings have increased in the past month, prompting authorities to look into the matter.

One local farmer, 40-year-old Wallen Sangma, said he had seen an entire family of the creatures.

‘The sight was frightening: two adults and two smaller ones, huge and bulky, furry,’ he told a reporter who visited the remote area on Thursday and Friday.

‘Their heads looked as if they were wearing caps, and their colour was blackish-brown,’ he said, adding the four ‘monsters’ were about 100 to 130 feet away from him as he looked for firewood in a forested area.

‘The four of them quietly vanished into the undergrowth,’ he said of the recent sighting.”

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Researchers in Switzerland have solved one mystery only but now are faced wih a “who dunnit?” that’ll be a little more difficult to solve.

Discovery Channel News: “A prehistoric hunter known as Oetzi whose well-preserved body was found on a snow-covered mountain in the Alps died more than 5,000 years ago after being struck in the back by an arrow, scientists said in an article published Wednesday.

Researchers from Switzerland and Italy used newly developed medical scanners to examine the hunter’s frozen corpse to determine that the arrow had torn a hole in an artery beneath his left collarbone, leading to a massive loss of blood.

That, in turn, caused Oetzi to go into shock and suffer a heart attack, according to the article published online in the Journal of Archaeological Science.”

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Here’s something interesting from the web. Cuban President Fidel Castro has published some articles in Granma, the Cuban daily newspaper, pointing out what should be apparent to every American, trading our dependency on foreign oil for a dependency on biofuels will only hurt us in the end.

Caribbean Net News: “Castro and his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chavez have opposed US President George W. Bush’s efforts to boost ethanol production, arguing that two-thirds of the world population would starve if corn, sugar and edible seeds are used to produce fuel instead of food. Venezuela is the word’s sixth largest exporter of crude oil.

Rather than swap fossil-fuels for biofuels, Castro suggested that governments replace incandescent light bulbs with florescent bulbs in businesses and private homes, as has been done in wide-scale electricity savings programs in Cuba and Venezuela. The shift could save hundred of billions of dollars a year worldwide, Castro wrote. “

If you think about it, biofuels are going to be developed by petroleum companies who have the most to gain and the most to lose. When we’re all dependent on biofuels are we going to be paying $12-15 at the pump because it “costs more to grow the corn”? Just something to think about.

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Here’s a look at a multi-touch driven computer screen that (if real) is immensely impressive and at the top of my “OMG I WANT THAT” list. You may remember multi-touch is the new technology behind the Apple iPhone interface. This you have to see to believe though. It’ll totally change the way we use computers in more ways than one.

Thanks, Chris!

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technology, science, computers, ui, user interface

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