Science News
Enigmatic Viking fortress discovered in Denmark
Aarhus University
In collaboration with the diocese of Vallø, archaeologists from the Danish Castle Centre and Aarhus University have discovered a previously unknown Viking fortress in a field west of Køge, Denmark. The discovery could be an important piece in Denmark's historical jigsaw puzzle.
Archaeologists have discovered traces of a circular Viking fortress and embankments in a field in the diocese of Vallø, west of Køge. The circular fortress is similar to the famous "Trelleborg" fortresses built by King Harald Bluetooth around the year 980 AD.
"This is the first time for more than 60 years that a new Viking ringed fortress has been discovered in Denmark," explains Nanna Holm, an archaeologist and curator at the Danish Castle Centre. Her colleague on the excavation Søren Sindbæk, who is a professor of medieval archaeology at Aarhus University, adds: "The discovery of the new Viking fortress is a unique opportunity to learn more about the battles and conflicts of the Vikings, and gives us a new chance to study the most famous of our Viking monuments."
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Groundwater tied to human evolution
University of New South Wales
Our ancient ancestors' ability to move around and find new sources of groundwater during extremely dry periods in Africa millions of years ago may have been key to their survival and the evolution of the human species, a new study shows.
The research -- published in the journal PLOS ONE -- combines geological evidence from the Olduvai sedimentary basin in Northern Tanzania, which formed about 2.2 million years ago, and results from a hydrological model.
It shows that while water in rivers and lakes would have disappeared as the climate changed due to variations in Earth's orbit, freshwater springs fed by groundwater could have stayed active for up to 1000 years without rainfall.
"A major unknown connected with human evolution in this climatically turbulent environment is the availability of resources, particularly freshwater," says lead author Dr Mark Cuthbert, holder of a European Community-funded Marie Curie Research Fellowship at UNSW's Connected Waters Initiative and University of Birmingham (UK).
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Technology News
Electronics that need very little energy? Nanotechnology used to help cool electrons with no external sources
University of Texas at Arlington
A team of researchers has discovered a way to cool electrons to -228 °C without external means and at room temperature, an advancement that could enable electronic devices to function with very little energy.
A chip, which contains nanoscale structures that enable electron cooling at room temperature, is pictured.
The process involves passing electrons through a quantum well to cool them and keep them from heating.
The team details its research in "Energy-filtered cold electron transport at room temperature," which is published in Nature Communications on Wednesday, Sept. 10.
"We are the first to effectively cool electrons at room temperature. Researchers have done electron cooling before, but only when the entire device is immersed into an extremely cold cooling bath," said Seong Jin Koh, an associate professor at UT Arlington in the Materials Science & Engineering Department, who has led the research. "Obtaining cold electrons at room temperature has enormous technical benefits. For example, the requirement of using liquid helium or liquid nitrogen for cooling electrons in various electron systems can be lifted."
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The iPhone 6′s New Camera Could Forever Change Filmmaking
By Angela Watercutter
Amidst all the hoopla over the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus and their motion processors, faster CPUs, and larger screens, it was also announced that Apple’s latest smartphones would have a much better camera. And while that’s great news for those looking to take less-wack selfies at the bar, the new video features that come along with it mean something else: a high-quality camera filmmakers—and those who aspire to be—can keep in their pockets.
Not that they didn’t have that before. iPhones have been used to make shorts and other types of films before—there are even multiple iPhone film festivals—but what the iPhone 6 offers is what Apple’s Phil Schiller called “technology used by high-end DSLRs” during yesterday’s product announcement. Coupled with the ability to grab 1080p high-definition clips at 60 frames per second, take 240-fps slow-motion shots, provide cinematic video stabilization, and offer up to 128 gigabytes of storage, there’s more than enough oomph in the iPhone 6 for a few takes. It’s the kind of power that could, like other developments in filmmaking technology, give rise to a whole new style of moviemaking.
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Environmental News
Earth's ozone layer on track to recovery, scientists report
United Nations Environment Programme
Earth's protective ozone layer is well on track to recovery in the next few decades thanks to concerted international action against ozone depleting substances, according to a new assessment by 300 scientists.
The Assessment for Decision-Makers, a summary document of the Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion 2014, is being published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and is the first comprehensive update in four years.
The stratospheric ozone layer, a fragile shield of gas, protects Earth from harmful ultraviolet rays of the sun. Without the Montreal Protocol and associated agreements, atmospheric levels of ozone depleting substances could have increased tenfold by 2050. According to global models, the Protocol will have prevented 2 million cases of skin cancer annually by 2030, averted damage to human eyes and immune systems, and protected wildlife and agriculture, according to UNEP.
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Ordinary People Play Hidden Role in Studying Climate Change
Citizen science is the key to gathering data that shows how global warming is affecting animals like birds
By Niina Heikkinen and ClimateWire
Whether they call it crowdsourcing, community-based monitoring or simply volunteer research, many scientists rely on members of the public for collecting data, but that fact is not always obvious in the studies that they later publish.
Caren Cooper, a scientist at the Bird Population Studies and Citizen Science programs at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, would like to see that change. She says more researchers should explicitly state when their research relies on "citizen science," the term she uses to describe "research practices that relies on public contributions of data."
Cooper is a big supporter of citizen science. Much of her research draws on information from eBird, a program that allows users to report any bird seen anywhere and is the biggest volunteer-based data collection in the world. She also gives talks on the subject, where she says she often hears the same concern from other scientists.
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Medical News
Neuroscientists decode brain maps to discover how we take aim
York University
Serena Williams won her third consecutive US Open title a few days ago, thanks to reasons including obvious ones like physical strength and endurance. But how much did her brain and its egocentric and allocentric functions help the American tennis star retain the cup?
Quite significantly, according to York University neuroscience researchers whose recent study shows that different regions of the brain help to visually locate objects relative to one's own body (self-centred or egocentric) and those relative to external visual landmarks (world-centred or allocentric).
"The current study shows how the brain encodes allocentric and egocentric space in different ways during activities that involve manual aiming," explains Distinguished Research Professor Doug Crawford, in the Department of Psychology. "Take tennis for example. Allocentric brain areas could help aim the ball toward the opponent's weak side of play, whereas the egocentric areas would make sure your muscles return the serve in the right direction."
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Nerve impulses can collide, continue unaffected
University of Copenhagen - Niels Bohr Institute
According to the traditional theory of nerves, two nerve impulses sent from opposite ends of a nerve annihilate when they collide. New research from the Niels Bohr Institute now shows that two colliding nerve impulses simply pass through each other and continue unaffected. This supports the theory that nerves function as sound pulses.
The results are published in the scientific journal Physical Review X.
Nerve signals control the communication between the billions of cells in an organism and enable them to work together in neural networks. But how do nerve signals work?
Old model
In 1952, Hodgkin and Huxley introduced a model in which nerve signals were described as an electric current along the nerve produced by the flow of ions. The mechanism is produced by layers of electrically charged particles (ions of sodium and potassium) on either side of the nerve membrane that change places when stimulated. This change in charge creates an electric current.
This model has enjoyed general acceptance. For more than 60 years, all medical and biology textbooks have said that nerves function is due to an electric current along the nerve pathway. However, this model cannot explain a number of phenomena that are known about nerve function.
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Space News
NASA to Send Sample-Return Mission to Earth-Bound Asteroid
A spacecraft set to launch in 2016 will head for a carbonaceous asteroid that has a high probability of colliding with Earth in the 22nd century
By Robin Lloyd
NASA has long wanted to send a mission to Mars to grab some of its surface and sling it back to Earth. But it looks like the agency will snag a sample from a measly asteroid before returning pieces of the Red Planet home. A U.S. mission to return an asteroid sample is approved, funded and set to launch on an Atlas 5 rocket from Florida in September 2016—similar missions to Mars are stuck in pdf loops.
The asteroid-return mission qualifies as sophisticated exploration, building on the U.S. space agency’s wildly successful two-decade run of robotic missions to Jupiter, Saturn and the terrestrial planets. But Japan’s space agency JAXA already won the race to take home an asteroid sample. Hayabusa looked like a jinxed mission at several junctures with fuel, communications and engine troubles. But once it successfully dropped its collection canister in the Australian desert, a last-ditch dental-style scraping in 2010 yielded miniscule amounts of dust taken from the miniature asteroid Itokawa. JAXA might even beat the U.S. to a second sample return as its Hayabusa 2 mission is in the works.
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Cosmologists Review the Evidence for an Accelerating Universe
Dark energy does more than hurry along the expansion of the universe. It also has a stranglehold on the shape and spacing of galaxies
By Christopher J. Conselice
What took us so long? Only in 1998 did astronomers discover we had been missing nearly three quarters of the contents of the universe, the so-called dark energy—an unknown form of energy that surrounds each of us, tugging at us ever so slightly, holding the fate of the cosmos in its grip, but to which we are almost totally blind. Some researchers, to be sure, had anticipated that such energy existed, but even they will tell you that its detection ranks among the most revolutionary discoveries in 20th-century cosmology. Not only does dark energy appear to make up the bulk of the universe, but its existence, if it stands the test of time, will probably require the development of new theories of physics.
Scientists are just starting the long process of figuring out what dark energy is and what its implications are. One realization has already sunk in: although dark energy betrayed its existence through its effect on the universe as a whole, it may also shape the evolution of the universe's inhabitants—stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters. Astronomers may have been staring at its handiwork for decades without realizing it.
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Odd News
Ancient swamp creature had lips like Mick Jagger
Duke University
Sir Mick Jagger has a new animal named after him. Scientists have named an extinct swamp-dwelling creature that lived 19 million years ago in Africa after the Rolling Stones frontman, in honor of a trait they both share -- their supersized lips.
"We gave it the scientific name Jaggermeryx naida, which translates to 'Jagger's water nymph,'" said study co-author Ellen Miller of Wake Forest University. The animal's fossilized jaw bones suggest it was roughly the size of a small deer and akin to a cross between a slender hippo and a long-legged pig.
Researchers uncovered the fossils -- consisting of multiple jawbone fragments -- amid the sand dunes and eroded rock of a remote site in the Egyptian desert.
The creature belonged to a family of extinct hoofed animals called anthracotheres. Jaggermeryx is one of six species of anthracotheres found at the site. What distinguished it from other members of this family was a series of tiny holes on either side of its jaw that held the nerves providing sensation to the chin and lower lip.
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