The Daily Galaxy: News from Planet Earth & Beyond

Impact of Post-Peak Oil on Our Quality of Life

Say good-bye to Planet Earth and don't thank the Vogon construction fleet for the privilege. Thank the oil companies. As long as the price of crude oil stays above $90 a barrel then extraction from post-peak sources becomes profitable. And that means more plastic crap from China, more SUVs on the road, and more greenhouse gases in the air. But it's not just increased consumption that gives cause to worry. The extraction methods required to get at post-peak oil require far more energy and cause much more ecological devastation than current methods. Another issue the resulting product produces a higher concentration of greenhouse gases than conventional crude.

Firing Up the Blue Brain

Excellent news for fans of computer technology, neuroscience, and people who think that us telling the machines what to do is totally backwards.  We reported on the attempts of the Swiss Mind Brain Institute to simulate the neocortical column of the rat last May, and they've recently announced success of the first phase of their project.

Marscraft -NASA's Manned Mission

"All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct."

Carl Sagan

It only took 8 years for JFK’s dream to land a man on the moon to be fulfilled, but plans to to land a man on Mars is going to take just that little bit longer. Twenty-Four years to be precise, but at least we know how we’re going to go about getting our people there.

Strange Neutron Star is Racing Through Milky Way at 3 Million MPH

One of the the fastest-moving stars ever discovered in the Milky Way is challenging theories about why it's moving so fast.

The object is a piece of the Puppis A supernova remnant created when a massive star ended its life in a supernova explosion about 3,700 years ago, forming an incredibly dense object called a neutron star.

Jurassic Park Roundup –The Top 10 Discoveries of '07

This year was a great one, at least in terms of dinosaur discoveries. Here’s a sampling of some of the most odd, interesting, fantastic and unusual findings of the year.

1. A Huge Shark-Eating Predator

The remains of an enormous, previously unknown carnivorous dinosaur was found. The monster once thrived around a giant lake 200 million years ago. The fearsome predator specialized in eating and catching giant sharks and huge bony fish that, when consumed, would have been "like biting through chain mail," Utah State paleontologist James Kirkland said. These dinos also make it to the top of the “10 Dinosaurs You’d Never Want to Pet” list. Link

Ecomigration: Will there be a Coming Environmental Exodus?

By the year 2100, global warming likely will cause the extinction of numerous species by eliminating the climate zones in which they are able to live, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy Of Sciences earlier this year. But not only will animals be forced to move or die, people will be faced with this same dilemma as well.

Antarctica -Mapping The White Continent

Antarctica has always been one of those destinations that people have longed to visit. For those of us without the bank balances to reach the frosty snows of South Pole, another option is here.

Working together and using images primarily from the American Landsat spacecraft, US and UK researchers have pasted together more than a thousand images of Antarctica. The result is a magnificent high-definition image of Antarctica.

Supposedly 10 times more detailed than ever before, the The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica can be viewed through a free website, and will also be included virtual globe projects like Google Earth.

   

Italy's Temples of Humankind

There's a modest, nondescript house about 30 miles outside of Turin, Italy that serves as the gateway to what the Italian government calls the Eighth Wonder of the World.

TGIF!

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Is Earth the New Venus?

Back in 2005, the European Space Agency launched Venus Express, a 2800-pound orbiter that found evidence of lightning on our nearest neighbor. Venus expert David Grinspoon says that data suggests about 50 lightning flashes per second, which is about half of the rate here on Earth.

Is the Human Species Hardwired for Beauty?

Are we hardwired for beauty? A recent Italian study suggests so. Researchers at the University of Parma showed fourteen test subjects with no experience in art theory original and distorted images of Classical and Renaissance sculptures and monitored their brain activity. The originals conformed to the Golden Ratio of 1.618 (the constant phi) which occurs when the ratio between the sum of two quantities and the larger of these constituent quantities is the same as the ratio between the larger and the smaller quantities.

The Golden ratio is found in nature in the proportions of spiral galaxies and seashells, tree branches and the bones that comprise human limbs . It was known to the Ancient Greeks (and was used in the design of the Parthenon, among other things), employed by renaissance painters (Leonard Da Vinci was obsessed with it), and is still taught to graphic artists as one of the foundations of good design.

"X" Cells! Five Super-powered Single Celled Organisms

We believe multi-cellular organization is where it's at, with our mesoderms and our mercedes, but there are some super-powered single cells which are far more than meets the unaided eye.  We might think their mightiest power is confining us to the bathroom after an ill-advised late night snack, but having only one cell to deal with means bacteria can adapt incredibly well - and a single mutation can give rise to powers that make Professor Xavier's wheelchair-accessible mansion look like a home for people who are good at minigolf.  Here we look at five organisms that would be called the X-Cells, if that name wasn't probably already taken by Tom Clancy.

Saturn's Titan Provides Insight into the Origin of Life in the Solar System

“Tholins are very large, complex, organic molecules thought to include chemical precursors to life. Understanding how they form could provide valuable insight into the origin of life in the solar system."

~ Dr Hunter Waite, Southwest Research Institute, Space Science and Engineering Division and leader of the ESA's Cassini’s Ion Spectrometer team

Saturn's moon Titan is the second largest in the solar system and the only one with a dense atmosphere. Cloaked in a thick orange haze, Titan’s secrets have been difficult to penetrate. But scientists now know that the atmosphere is full of nitrogen and methane, and resembles that of the early Earth.

Einstein’s “Biggest Blunder” May Turn Out to Be His Greatest Success

A new project is revealing that Einstein was probably wrong about being wrong. In other words, Einstein was right even though he didn’t know it. His self-proclaimed “biggest blunder” was a postulation of a cosmological constant (a force that opposes gravity and keeps the universe from collapsing) may actually be completely correct, according to the research of an international team of scientists. WOW. That means Einstein was so damn smart that even his biggest failure will likely turn out to be true.

The World… 2.0

Once in a while, you come across so completely bizarre and fantastic, that it just blows your mind. And though I’m sitting here listening to Tay Zonday’s deep voice, that isn’t what’s blowing my mind. What is is the fact that someone is building a miniature version of our planet off the coast of Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

‘The World’ is a series of artificial island projects that are being designed, and is being built primarily from dredged sand. An oval breakwater surrounds the islands, which are laid out to look like a flat map of the planet.

Ha! Biology 101

Scientists Create A Cancer-proof Mouse —What Does that Mean for Humans?

A mouse that is highly resistant to cancer—even the most aggressive types—has been created by researchers at the University of Kentucky. The breakthrough stems from a discovery by UK College of Medicine professor of radiation medicine Vivek Rangnekar and a team of researchers who found a rare tumor-suppressor gene called "Par-4" in the prostate.

Deconstructing Pangea -Map of Ancient Earth Not Matching Up

Everyone loves a good mystery. There’s nothing quite as good as sitting down, and trying to work out whether it actually was the butler, or if poor Jeeves was simply framed. But mysteries come in all shapes and sizes, as can be attested to by researchers from the University of Michigan and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Three Revolutionary Alternative-Energy Sources

It's official: sucking dead-dinosaur juice out of the ground and burning it is officially uncool.  Whether you object to the way you can't breathe the resulting fumes, or it's the thought of a hundred dollars a barrel that leaves you gasping for air, people from both ends of the political spectrum agree that it's time to find a new way to power our playthings.  The mathematics of a fuel-based economy are a vast and complicated field but the simple summary is:

a) The number of people using energy continues to increase
b) The number of new dead animals turning into oil remains constant at zero

Voyager 11 to Cross Solar Wind "Termination Shock" Boundary

Using a computer model simulation, Haruichi Washimi, a physicist at University of California, Riverside, has predicted when the interplanetary spacecraft Voyager 2 will cross the “termination shock” the spherical shell around the solar system that marks where the solar wind slows down to subsonic speed at 7-8.5 billion miles from the sun in late 2007-early 2008.

Solar winds create geomagnetic storms that can knock out power grids on Earth, the Northern Lights, and the plasma tails of comet always pointing away from the sun.

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Totally Cool iPod Skin

The Three Big Tech Stories of '07

The latest year on the calendar is coming to a close, and we at Daily Galaxy thought it was time to take a bit of a look back at the year. Being the resident nerd, I’ve decided to begin by tackling what we’ve had to endure this year.

Cosmic Pentimento: Beyond the Great Void May be a Great Something

Pentimento: the reappearance in a painting of an underlying image that had been painted over (usually when the later painting becomes transparent with age)

Earlier this year astronomers from the University of Minnesota discovered a massive void of space that measured nearly a billion light years across. It was an intriguing discovery, in a universe that is filled with seemingly infinite objects.

Supercomputer Simulation Saves Real Lives

Forget your high scores.  No matter how many hostages you and your fellow CounterStrikers rescue, or how often you've saved the entire Earth from alien invasion: Professor Hassan Mashriqui of the Louisiana State University can top it with the "Countless lives saved" achievement from his recent game of "Spot the Cyclone".  Don't think you can beat him either - it's only available on supercomputers.

"Mr Splashy Pants" to Ride the Great Whale Trail?

As of yesterday, more than 11,000 possible whale names have been submitted in a contest which has been whittled down to 30, ranging from Aiko, which means 'little love' in Japanese