Read moreWhen the Viking landers touched down on Mars in 1976 and scooped up soil samples, scientists were surprised that the two craft failed to unearth evidence that the Red Planet contained any organic compounds. The apparent lack of organic molecules – a basic requirement for carbon-based organisms – helped to cement the notion of Mars as an entity that would not easily support life.
But a new study, which relies on soil samples from Earth, now suggests that the Viking craft may have found organic compounds from Mars but failed to recognize them. The finding represents a sea change in the way many scientists think about Mars and suggests a specific strategy for searching for vestiges of life on the planet, says study co-author Rafael Navarro-González of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City.
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The study was inspired by an analysis of soil samples conducted by the Mars Phoenix Lander, which arrived in the north polar region of Mars in May 2008 and operated for five months. Phoenix found that most of the chlorine at the landing site was in the form of perchlorate, rather than a chloride salt as had been assumed.
Perchlorate is an oxidizing agent that when heated, breaks down into highly reactive fragments that destroy organic compounds. These reactions take place at the same temperatures – 200° to 500° Celsius – to which Martian soil samples were heated by the Viking craft. The only organic compounds found by Viking, chloromethane and dichloromethane, were interpreted as contaminants from Earth, since they are common in cleaning fluid, solid rocket fuel, fireworks and other explosives.
But when Navarro-González and his colleagues added 1 percent by weight magnesium perchlorate to soil from the Atacama Desert in Chile, which is thought to closely resemble Martian soil and is known to contain organic compounds, they found an intriguing result. Heating the perchlorate-adulterated desert soil to temperatures comparable to those in the Viking experiments produced the same chlorinated organic compounds that were found by the landers in 1976 but dismissed as contaminants. Nearly all the organic compounds originally in the Chilean soil were destroyed during the heating.
Similarly, the team says, the soil at the two Viking sites likely contained plenty of organics that were destroyed upon heating and were turned into chlorinated methane compounds due to the presence of perchlorate.
“The bottom line of this work is that the Viking landers did detect organics on Mars, we just did not realize it,” McKay asserts. He and his colleagues estimate that the Martian soil contains a few parts per million of organics, comparable with the driest parts of the Atacama Desert.
Quotes
Read moreFrank Palkoska, is a former Army officer and West Point fitness instructor who adorns his office here with black-and-white photographs of 19th-century exercise classes and an assortment of retrograde equipment like medicine balls and wooden dumbbells.
“It’s back to the future,” Mr. Palkoska says
Read moreFor the average narcissist, Facebook “offers a gateway for hundreds of shallow relationships and emotionally detached communication.” More importantly for this study, social networking in general allows the user a great deal of control over how he or she is presented to and perceived by peers and other users.
The study postulated that narcissists would show more overall Facebook activity than average users and that their activity would be more self-promotional, either descriptively or superficially. The survey’s results showed “significant positive correlations between narcissism and self-promotional content in the following areas: Main Photo, View Photos , Status Updates and Notes.”
People who scored higher on the study’s narcissism test also spent more time on Facebook and checked it more times each day than their less narcissistic counterparts.
I call this the smart biped paradox: once you are an upright ape, all natural selection pressures should be in favour of retaining a small cranium. That’s because walking upright means having a narrower pelvis, capping babies’ head size, and a shorter digestive tract, making it harder to support big, energy-hungry brains. Clearly our big brains did evolve, but I think Darwin had the wrong mechanism. I believe it was technology. We were never fully biological entities. We are and always have been artificial apes.
Artificial Ape Man: How Technology Created Humans
– m1k3y sez mandatory reading
I think if Space Opera was invented now, it would be spacepunk. Maybe astropunk. Asimov would have invented robopunk. But I guess we couldn’t have punk before punk, in the late 1970s. I’ve seen some “fairy punk” costumes.
If hard science fiction was relabeled “Science Punk” do you think it would become more popular? Or would it just be a dark, gritty type of hard science fiction???
You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya [cyber/hyper/steam/etc]punk?
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Read moreBinary systems comprise two stars that orbit closely around one another.
The erratic behaviour of these twin suns can fling orbiting planets into devastating head-on collisions.
In the new study, the pulverised remains of former worlds have been spotted around four different binary stars using Nasa’s Spitzer Space Telescope.
The double stars that are the subject of present attention orbit only 3.2 million km apart (two million miles). This is a mere 2% of the distance between the Earth and our own Sun.
As they twirl around one another every few days, their powerful magnetic fields cause them to move closer together. This results in gravitational changes that disrupt the trajectory of orbiting planets.
These changes can send planets smashing into one another.
Read moreSince the 2001 discovery of a stone point in the Iceman’s left shoulder, many scientists have assumed that someone shot and killed Ötzi with an arrow as he attempted to flee through a mountain pass after a disastrous fight. From this perspective, the Iceman preserves a brutal prehistoric moment in time.
But a new analysis of the distribution of Ötzi’s belongings around his body, published in the September issue of Antiquity, raises the possibility that he perished near kin living at low altitudes, who took him to the mountains for a final send-off as soon as the weather permitted.
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Archaeobotanist Klaus Oeggl of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, reported in 2000 that high concentrations of a binding material used in Ötzi’s equipment appeared not just near his body but on a nearby ridge that includes the burial platform proposed by Vanzetti’s team.
Oeggl agrees that warming and freezing cycles caused the Iceman’s body to move from an initial resting place on the ridge to the gully. But no compelling evidence demonstrates that stones on the ridge were placed there to form a burial platform, he says.
…The Iceman’s joints and spine display no dislocations that would have resulted from a downhill slide. Intact blood clots in his arrow wound would show damage if the body had been carted up the mountain, Zink adds.
If Zink is correct, warming and freezing cycles should have randomly spread out his belongings, Bondioli counters. Instead, a mathematical analysis of the position of artifacts recovered around Ötzi reveals two main clumps of items, one at the proposed stone platform and another in the gully where his body lay.
A backpack frame rested on the platform, trapped by a protruding rock. Clumps of human and animal hair, plant fragments, splinters of arrow shafts and an ax lay nearby.
Remains of a grass mat, regarded as an overcoat by many investigators, were found near Ötzi’s body. Vanzetti’s group suspects the mat was part of a funeral shroud.
Ötzi’s belongings include an unfinished wooden bow and arrow shafts lacking points, which make sense as burial offerings because a hunter could not have used them, the researchers add.
Read moreInspired by Dr Mick Grierson at Goldsmiths, University of London, who specialises in real-time interactive audiovisual research with a focus on cognition and perception, the Music Of The Mind project uses Brain Computer Interface technology and new software which claims to allow musicians to “think music into being.”
Peters and his musicians will dress in lab coats and will control instruments utilising the technology to perform new compositions which have titles such as ‘Agitation’, ‘Brain Solo’, ‘Meditation’ and ‘Oxygen’. The track ‘Sleep Music’ from the album, for instance, has a washy, slow feel, building gently to a drum part with a strong emphasis on the fourth beat opening up for the horns to inhabit closely arranged harmonic territory before transforming, and almost disappearing, into the smoke of the sound.
Read moreOn 16 August 1951, postman Leon Armunier was doing his rounds in the southern French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit when he was suddenly overwhelmed by nausea and wild hallucinations.
“It was terrible. I had the sensation of shrinking and shrinking, and the fire and the serpents coiling around my arms,” he remembers.
Leon, now 87, fell off his bike and was taken to the hospital in Avignon.
He was put in a straitjacket but he shared a room with three teenagers who had been chained to their beds to keep them under control.
“Some of my friends tried to get out of the window. They were thrashing wildly… screaming, and the sound of the metal beds and the jumping up and down… the noise was terrible.
"I’d prefer to die rather than go through that again.”
Over the coming days, dozens of other people in the town fell prey to similar symptoms.
Doctors at the time concluded that bread at one of the town’s bakeries had become contaminated by ergot, a poisonous fungus that occurs naturally on rye.
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Albarelli believes the Pont-Saint-Esprit and F. Olson Files, mentioned in the document, would show – if they had not been “buried” – that the CIA was experimenting on the townspeople, by dosing them with LSD.
The conclusion drawn at the time was that one of the town’s bakeries, the Roch Briand, was the source of the poisoning. It’s possible, Albarelli says, that LSD was put in the bread.
It is well known that biological warfare scientists around the world, including some in Britain, were experimenting with LSD in the early 1950s – a time of conflict in Korea and an escalation of Cold War tensions.
Albarelli says he has found a top secret report issued in 1949 by the research director of the Edgewood Arsenal, where many US government LSD experiments were carried out, which states that the army should do everything possible to launch “field experiments” using the drug.
Using Freedom of Information legislation, he also got hold of another CIA report from 1954.
In it an agent reported his conversation with a representative of the Sandoz Chemical company in Switzerland.
Sandoz’s base, which is just a few hundred kilometres from Pont-Saint-Esprit, was the only place where LSD was being produced at that time.
The agent reports that after several drinks, the Sandoz representative abruptly stated: “The Pont-Saint-Esprit ‘secret’ is that it was not the bread at all… It was not grain ergot.”
Read moreIf you’re not moved by the scale of the disaster and its aftermath, consider that our future security is inextricably bound up with the future for Pakistan. Of 175 million Pakistanis, some 100 million are under age 25. In the years ahead they’ll either opt for gainful employment or, in its absence, may choose Islamic extremism.
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Right now, Islamic insurgents are using the chaos as an opportunity, attacking police posts in Pakistan’s northwest while police have been occupied in rescue and relief work. Meanwhile, lacking help and losing hope, many Pakistanis are becoming increasingly hostile toward President Asif Ali Zardari.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 