Thursday, November 7, 2013

Reuters: Science News: Astronomers 'dumbfounded' by six-tailed asteroid

Reuters: Science News
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Astronomers 'dumbfounded' by six-tailed asteroid
Nov 7th 2013, 19:31

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Thu Nov 7, 2013 2:31pm EST

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - - Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have spotted a freakish asteroid with six comet-like tails of dust streaming from its body like spokes on a wheel, scientists said on Thursday.

"We were literally dumbfounded when we saw it," astronomer David Jewitt with the University of California at Los Angeles, said in a statement. "It's hard to believe we're looking at an asteroid."

Asteroids normally have no tails.

The asteroid, known as P/2013 P5, first appeared as a fuzzy point of light in a sky survey by the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii in August.

In September astronomers used the sharp-eyed orbiting Hubble telescope to zero in on the object, located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Not only is the asteroid sporting six tails, follow-up observations 13 days later showed it had changed shape.

Scientists suspect pressure from photons, small particles of light or electromagnetic radiation, in sunlight is causing the asteroid to spin faster, disrupting its surface.

Computer models show the dust plumes likely started rising off the asteroid's surface in April 2012, according to Jessica Agarwal, with the Max Planck Institute in Lindau, Germany.

"P/2013 P5 might be losing dust as it rotates at high speed," Agarwal said in a statement. "The sun then drags this dust into the distinct tails we're seeing."

Astronomers intend to keep a lookout for signs the asteroid is breaking up, a process they suspect is common, but never before observed.

"This is just an amazing object to us, and almost certainly the first of many more to come," Jewitt said.

The research appears in this week's issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

(Reporting by Irene Klotz; Editing by Jane Sutton and Xavier Briand)

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Reuters: Science News: Scientists say new dinosaur found in Utah is relative of T. rex

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Scientists say new dinosaur found in Utah is relative of T. rex
Nov 7th 2013, 15:02

The skeleton of a Lythronax argestes is seen in this handout image from the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah. REUTERS/Mark Loewen/Natural History Museum of Utah/Handout

1 of 3. The skeleton of a Lythronax argestes is seen in this handout image from the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Credit: Reuters/Mark Loewen/Natural History Museum of Utah/Handout

By Laila Kearney

Thu Nov 7, 2013 10:26am EST

(Reuters) - Scientists in Utah say they have discovered Tyrannosaurus rex's "great-uncle," a massive predator with a thick skull and large teeth dubbed the "king of gore."

Bones of the 24-foot (7.3-meter) -long dinosaur, slightly smaller than T. rex and older by about 10 million years, were unveiled at the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, and an announcement of the species discovery was published in the scientific journal Plos One.

Scientists hope the find will help them better understand the ecosystem where the predator roamed.

Discovered by workers for the Federal Bureau of Land Management in eastern Utah in 2009, scientists named the animal Lythronax argestes, or "king of gore," for its large teeth and apparent dominance as a predator.

"Discovering the Lythronax pushes back the evolution of the group that gives rise to T. rex, which is something we didn't understand before," said Mark Loewen, a geologist at the University of Utah, who led the dig for the new dinosaur. "Lythronax is like the great-uncle of T. rex."

Paleontologists have thought that members of the group with characteristics like T. rex - large bodies, tiny arms, thick skulls and forward facing eyes - dated as far back as 70 million years, but the Lythronax shows signs of being at least 80 million years old.

Like its relative, the Lythronax is believed to have been the top predator of its time, roaming a stretch of land from Mexico to Alaska, including parts of Utah, during the Campanian stage of the Late Cretaceous period.

"The really cool thing is that this shows that the origins of the last known tyrannosaurs were in the southern part of North America as opposed to Asia or far North America," as previously thought, said Andrew Farke, curator at the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in Claremont, California.

Photos of the fossil remains of the newly discovered species were sent to Loewen and his team soon after they were discovered at the southern end of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, on the Utah-Colorado border.

The group spent the following two years retrieving, preserving and assembling the bones. Then, they traveled to locations where other bones from the tyrannosaur group were being studied, including China; Birmingham, Alabama; Washington, D.C.; and New York.

The Lythronax bones were set between layers of volcanic ash, which allowed scientists to determine the age of the dinosaur by studying the decomposition of the ash crystals that surrounded them.

"This sort of discovery is very interesting and exciting because it's not just another animal from that era but a large predator from that era," said paleontologist Peter Roopnarine, who studies the ecology of dinosaur periods for the California Academy of Sciences.

Roopnarine said being able to learn about the Lythronax will reveal more about the ecosystem at the time of its reign.

"This is going to change our understanding of this older ecosystem," Roopnarine said.

(Editing by Sharon Bernstein and Eric Walsh)

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Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Reuters: Science News: Russian rocket takes Sochi Olympic torch to space

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Russian rocket takes Sochi Olympic torch to space
Nov 7th 2013, 04:19

1 of 2. International Space Station (ISS) crew members, Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata (top) and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, board the Soyuz TMA-11M spacecraft with the torch of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games at the Baikonur cosmodrome November 7, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Shamil Zhumatov

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Reuters: Science News: Britons invited to post their genomes online for science

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Britons invited to post their genomes online for science
Nov 7th 2013, 00:03

By Ben Hirschler

LONDON | Wed Nov 6, 2013 7:03pm EST

LONDON (Reuters) - The hunt is on for 100,000 British volunteers to post their genetic information online in the name of science as a North American open-access DNA project arrives in Europe.

The launch of the Personal Genome Project UK on Thursday offers the public a chance to learn more about their own genetic profiles and contribute to advances in medical science - but it also poses ethical challenges.

Unlike other genome-sequencing initiatives, where data is placed behind a firewall, information contributed to the new project will be available to all.

George Church of Harvard Medical School, who first launched a U.S. version of the scheme in 2005, believes sharing such data is critical to scientific progress but has been hampered by traditional research practices.

"Precision medicine is about big datasets about individuals and that is what the Personal Genome Project offers," he told reporters in London, comparing the approach to a genetic version of Wikipedia.

A genome is a read-out of a person's entire genetic information. As a result, sharing this data could create dilemmas for those involved.

It could, for example, reveal the presence of undetected diseases or an increased risk of developing a condition such as Alzheimer's. There is also the possibility that new technology might allow the malicious use of DNA data.

Those volunteering will be warned about the implications for their own privacy and that of their families, according to Stephan Beck, professor of medical genomics at the UCL Cancer Institute and director of the British project.

To enroll, participants will have to be aged at least 18 and pass an online exam to check they understand the risks and benefits. After getting an analysis of their genome, they will also have a four-week "cooling off" period before deciding whether they want their data to go online.

Beck told reporters he expected within the first year to sequence 50 people's genomes - the 3 billion chemical pairings that make up human DNA.

Understanding the role of this genetic code and the genes it forms is increasingly important in unraveling complex diseases like cancer. It may also reveal why some people have particular traits, such as musical perfect pitch, Beck said.

Since the first human-genome map was unveiled in 2000, some 25,000 people around the world have had their genomes sequenced - but just a fraction of this genetic information is publicly available for all scientists to scrutinize.

In the United States, Church has signed up some 3,000 volunteers for his open-access project, with a few hundred more in Canada, although only around 200 full genomes have yet been sequenced.

He predicted genome sequencing will speed up as the cost continues to fall dramatically - it has come down from $1 billion 20 years ago to a few thousand dollars today.

(Editing by Barry Moody)

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Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Reuters: Science News: India blasts off in race to Mars with low-cost mission

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India blasts off in race to Mars with low-cost mission
Nov 5th 2013, 13:38

By Sruthi Gottipati

NEW DELHI | Tue Nov 5, 2013 4:17am EST

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India launched its first rocket to Mars on Tuesday, aiming to put a satellite in orbit around the red planet at a lower cost than previous missions and potentially positioning the emerging Asian nation as a budget player in the global space race.

The Mars Orbiter Mission blasted off from the southeastern coast with the satellite scheduled to start orbiting Mars by September, searching for methane and signs of minerals.

"This is our modest beginning for our interplanetary mission," said Deviprasad Karnik, spokesman for the state-run Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

Only the United States, Europe, and Russia have sent probes that have orbited or landed on Mars. Probes to Mars have a high failure rate and a success will be a boost for national pride, especially after a similar mission by China failed to leave Earth's orbit in 2011.

India's ties with its neighbor are marked as much by competition as cooperation. Government scientists deny any space race, but analysts say India has stepped up its program because of concerns about China's civilian and military space technology.

The probe's 4.5 billion rupee ($73 million) price tag is a fraction of the cost of NASA's MAVEN mission, also due to launch in November. Analysts say India could capture more of the $304 billion global space market with its low-cost technology.

The Mars mission is considerably cheaper than some of India's more lavish spending schemes, including a $340 million plan to build the world's largest statue in the state of Gujarat, including surrounding infrastructure.

Even so, it has drawn criticism in a country suffering from high levels of poverty, malnutrition and power shortages and experiencing its worst slowdown in growth in ten years.

India has long argued that technology developed in its space program has practical applications to everyday life.

"For a country like India, it's not a luxury, it's a necessity," said Susmita Mohanty, co-founder and chief executive of Earth2Orbit, India's first private space start-up. She argued that satellites have broad applications from television broadcasting to disaster management.

India's space program began 50 years ago and developed rapidly after Western powers imposed sanctions in response to a nuclear weapons test in 1974, spurring scientists to build advanced rocket technology. Five years ago, its Chandrayaan probe landed on the moon and found evidence of water.

The relative prowess in space contrasts with poor results developing fighter jets by India's state-run companies.

The Mars Orbiter Mission plans to search for methane in the Martian atmosphere, the chemical strongly tied to life on Earth. Recent measurements made by NASA's rover, Curiosity, show only trace amounts of it on Mars.

India's mission will also study Martian surface features and mineral composition. ($1 = 61.8 rupees)

(Editing by Frank Jack Daniel and Nick Macfie)

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Monday, November 4, 2013

Reuters: Science News: One in five Milky Way stars hosts potentially life-friendly Earths: study

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One in five Milky Way stars hosts potentially life-friendly Earths: study
Nov 4th 2013, 22:44

By Irene Klotz

Mon Nov 4, 2013 5:29pm EST

(Reuters) - One out of every five sun-like stars in the Milky Way galaxy has a planet about the size of Earth that is properly positioned for water, a key ingredient for life, a study released on Monday showed.

The analysis, based on three years of data collected by NASA's now-idled Kepler space telescope, indicates the galaxy is home to 10 billion potentially habitable worlds.

The number grows exponentially if the count also includes planets circling cooler red dwarf stars, the most common type of star in the galaxy.

"Planets seem to be the rule rather than exception," study leader Erik Petigura, an astronomy graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, said during a conference call with reporters on Monday.

Petigura wrote his own software program to analyze the space telescope's results and found 10 planets one- to two-times the diameter of Earth circling parent stars at the right distances for liquid surface water.

The telescope worked by finding slight dips in the amount of light coming from target stars in the constellation Cygnus.

Some light dips were due to orbiting planets passing in front of their parent stars, relative to Kepler's line of sight.

Extrapolating from 34 months of Kepler observations, Petigura and colleagues found that 22 percent of 50 billion sun-like stars in the galaxy should have planets roughly the size of Earth suitably positioned for water.

A positioning system problem sidelined Kepler in May. Scientists are developing alternative missions for the telescope. More than a year of data already collected by Kepler, which was launched in 2009, still has to be analyzed.

In another Kepler study, the telescope found 3,538 candidate planets, 647 of which are about the size of Earth, said astronomer Jason Rowe, with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

Of the 3,538 candidates, 104 are at the right distance from their parent stars for water, he said.

"When exoplanet hunting started, everyone expected solar systems to look just like ours," Rowe said. "But we're finding quite the opposite, that there's a wide variety of systems out there. If you can imagine it, the universe probably makes it."

The research was published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and presented on Monday at a Kepler science conference at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

(Editing by Kevin Gray and Philip Barbara)

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Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Reuters: Science News: Planet hunters find Earth-like twin beyond the solar system

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Planet hunters find Earth-like twin beyond the solar system
Oct 30th 2013, 22:34

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Wed Oct 30, 2013 6:34pm EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - For the first time, scientists have found a planet beyond the solar system that not only is the same size as Earth, but has the same proportions of iron and rock, a key step in an ongoing quest to find potentially habitable sister worlds.

The planet, known as Kepler-78b, circles a star that is slightly smaller than the sun located in the constellation Cygnus, about 400 light years away.

One light year, is the distance light, moving at 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second) travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).

Kepler-78b was discovered last year with NASA's now-idled Kepler space telescope, which detected potential planets as they circled in front of their parent stars, blocking a bit of light.

That measurement not only revealed that Kepler-78b was relatively small, with a diameter just 20 percent larger than Earth's, but that it was practically orbiting on the surface of its host star.

While the planet's presumably molten surface and searing temperatures make it ill-suited for life, two independent teams of astronomers jumped at the opportunity to follow up the discovery with ground-based measurements to try to determine the density of Kepler-78b.

Using different telescopes, the teams zeroed in on how strongly the little planet's gravity tugs at its parent star, information that could be used to figure out Kepler-78b's weight and composition.

In two papers in this week's journal Nature, the teams report that not only were they successful, but that they came to the same conclusion: Kepler-78b has roughly the same density as Earth, suggesting that it also is made primarily of rock and iron.

Earth's density is 343 pounds per cubic foot (5.5 grams per cubic centimeter). Kepler-78b is 331 pounds per cubic foot (5.3 grams per cubic centimeter).

Scientists would like to be able to make the same measurements of Earth-sized planets in more life-friendly orbits, but that is beyond today's technology.

"The only reason they've been able to do this is because it's an Earth-mass planet in really close to the star," said University of Maryland astronomer Drake Deming.

"To me this means that planets like the Earth are probably not all that uncommon," he added.

Kepler-78b is among a dozen or so recently discovered small planets that orbit very close to their parent stars. Kepler-78b, for example, completes an orbit in just 8.5 hours.

Scientists do not know how the planets ended up so close to their host stars. One theory is that the bodies are the rocky remains of larger gas planets that migrated inward and had their atmospheres stripped away.

(Editing by Kevin Gray and Eric Walsh)

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