Monday midday has come again, right on schedule. It's time for Science Tidbits. As always we take a look at the new discoveries and technologies that have occurred In the 168 hours since. Over the fold are human artifacts on the verge of leaving home and traveling the stars, and another launched to search for black holes. We've discovered a new very close relation amongst our fellow apes. and that bears can count. These and other wonders we present for your approbation this day.
So, it's a beautiful summer day, pull up your chaise lounge and enjoy the science-shine.
Our esteemed host possum is away from the Hollow this week so we hope you'll pardon a provisional pressman palantir. A poor proxy for possum perhaps, so with your kind permission...
Featured Stories
Nearly thirty-five years ago NASA launched a pair of remarkable spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Their storied sojourn has carried them 17.97 and 14.6 billion kilometers, respectively, since their launch in 1977 and they are now on the verge of taking their leave of the solar system. A report from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of June 15th expresses scientists expectation that the venerable starcraft could cross into interstellar space at almost any moment.
Scientists analyzing recent data from NASA's Voyager and Cassini spacecraft have calculated that Voyager 1 could cross over into the frontier of interstellar space at any time and much earlier than previously thought. The findings are detailed in this week's issue of the journal Nature.
Data from Voyager's low-energy charged particle instrument, first reported in December 2010, have indicated that the outward speed of the charged particles streaming from the sun has slowed to zero. The stagnation of this solar wind has continued through at least February 2011, marking a thick, previously unpredicted "transition zone" at the edge of our solar system.
Pertussis, or whooping cough, has returned to haunt America again. The disease can be fatal to infants, the elderly, and immune deficient and is back due to the deluded opinion that vaccinations are some kind of pharmaceutical conspiracy. A
Los Angeles Times article describes the heartbreaking tale of a young victim of this highly controllable disease. You may also be interested in the Alternet article which goes into some detail about
Pertussis in this article.
It seems pertussis or whooping cough has made a big comeback in the US. It was practically nonexistent in the 70's and 80's but cutbacks to public health funding and fear of vaccinations seems to have led to a return of these diseases. In 2010 we had over 27,000 cases and this year so far we have over 12,000 cases of this disease that we once thought had been effectively eliminated from the US.
So here we are a nation that doesn't trust the government, corporations, or science. Ok, government and corporations haven't earned our trust recently, but science hasn't steered us wrong very often and when it has it generally gets it right eventually. Folks, vaccinate your kids and get your boosters regularly.
You may, if you've had occassion to read any of my diaries, know that I tend to gravitate toward the heavy stuff. You know the universe and it's operating system, so I took notice when NASA sent a black-hole hunting satellite into orbit. The
NuStar (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) satellite was launched on June 13th. It is the first telescope tuned to image high-energy x-ray radiation, just the instrument to find and study black-holes and the x-ray emitting accretion disks that form around them.
The NuSTAR mission will deploy the first focusing telescopes to image the sky in the high energy X-ray (6 - 79 keV) region of the
electromagnetic spectrum. Our view of the universe in this spectral window has been limited because previous orbiting telescopes have not employed true focusing optics, but rather have used coded apertures that have intrinsically high backgrounds and limited sensitivity.
During a two-year primary mission phase, NuSTAR will map selected regions of the sky in order to:
- take a census of collapsed stars and black holes of different sizes by surveying regions surrounding the center of own Milky Way Galaxy and performing deep observations of the extragalactic sky;
- map recently-synthesized material in young supernova remnants to understand how stars explode and how elements are created; and
- understand what powers relativistic jets of particles from the most extreme active galaxies hosting supermassive black holes.
Hot stuff. No, really it's hot stuff :)
We, as a species, are beginning to understand that we aren't the only intelligent species on the planet after all. Studies of the great apes, cetacea, elephants, corvids (crows, ravens, and jays) have shown their innate intelligence. Now a study with black bears reported by
IO9 entitled
Study proves bears can “count” as well as primates.
Most people readily accept that bears are smart animals. In fact, most wildlife biologists regard bears as
some of the most intelligent land mammals on Earth; and yet, there's very little formal research to support what everyone pretty much accepts as true. Now, in the first study of its kind, researchers Jennifer Vonk and Michael J. Beran have demonstrated that American black bears can differentiate between groups of dots on a touchscreen computer, based on the number of dots each group contains.
The experiment was relatively straightforward. Bears were presented with two arrays of dots. The researchers trained two bears to choose the smaller of two arrays, and a third bear to select the larger array.
It should come as no surprise to our fair readers that humans share 98.7% of our DNA with chimpanzees (pan troglodyte). The recently completed DNA sequence of bonobos (pan paniscus) shows that they as well share nearly 99% of their DNA with humans and 99.6% of their DNA with chimpanzees. You might find articles from
Science and the
Christian Science Monitor interesting reading. From the Science article...
Chimpanzees now have to share the distinction of being our closest living relative in the animal kingdom. An international team of researchers has sequenced the genome of the bonobo for the first time, confirming that it shares the same percentage of its DNA with us as chimps do. The team also found some small but tantalizing differences in the genomes of the three speciesu2014differences that may explain how bonobos and chimpanzees don't look or act like us even though we share about 99% of our DNA.
"We're so closely related genetically, yet our behavior is so different," says team member and computational biologist Janet Kelso of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "This will allow us to look for the genetic basis of what makes modern humans different from both bonobos and chimpanzees."
And from the CS Monitor...
Behold the bonobo, our ape cousin that's kinder and gentler than the chimp or, well, us. Now scientists have mapped the primate's DNA, and some researchers say that may eventually reveal secrets about how the darker side of our nature evolved.
Scientists have found that we are as close genetically to the peace-loving but little-known bonobo as we are to the more violent and better understood chimpanzee. It's as if they are siblings and we are cousins, related to them both equally, sharing some traits with just bonobos and other characteristics with just chimps.
Knucklehead's Photo of the Week
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Other Worthy Stories of the Week
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NASA picture of the day. For more see the NASA image gallery or the Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive