and infrared goggles to kill elephants in the dead of night. What if unmanned arial vehicle (UAV) developers could imagine their inventions through the eyes of conservation field staff?
Increased battery life and flight duration greater payloads cheaper infrared sensors and affordable real-time transmission of imagery would all make a major difference.
what effect destruction events like this have on the dynamics of illegal ivory trade. Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+.
We think we have uncovered the mechanism for the appearance of seasonal greening of Amazon forests shadowing within the canopy that changes the amount of near-infrared light observed by MODIS lead study author Doug Morton of NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Near-infrared light is just beyond the visible spectrum and plants with more chlorophyll reflect more near-infrared light.
Here's how Morton and his colleagues diagnosed the problem. In the tropics in June the sun is low casting long shadows when the MODIS or Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer sensors that fly aboard NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites snap images
but see a large amount of near-infrared light which plants primarily reflect. Scientists use the ratio of red and near-infrared light as a measure of plant greenness.
By September around the time of the equinox the sun is directly overhead and the forest canopy is shadow-free and highly reflective in the infrared.
That makes it appear very green according to satellite vegetation algorithms though in reality the forest canopy hasn't actually greened the study found.
For this to become a viable possibility NASA engineers would have to solve some daunting technological materials-science and physics issues.
#Most Interesting Science News articles of the Week<p>This week we have zebra stripes on the Earth the most accurate timekeeper and even weird techni-quarks.</
</p><p>Strange stripelike features in Earth's magnetic field are caused by the planet's spin
<a href=http://www. livescience. com/44583-earth-magnetic-field-zebra-stripes-source. html target=blank>'Zebra Stripes'in Earth's Magnetic field Have Surprising Source
><p>The idea that our universe may be just one among many out there has intrigued modern cosmologists for some time.
and recent research suggests these pip-squeaks dubbed techni-quarks are likely lurking in the universe.</
or the next generation of colliders to spot these Higgs components saidthomas Ryttov a particle physicist at the University of Southern Denmark.</
<a href=http://www. livescience. com/44559-techni-quarks-may-lurk-inside-higgs-boson. html target=blank>Weird'Techni-Quarks'May Lurk Inside Higgs Boson
#Inside Science News Service is supported by the American Institute of Physics. Ker Than is a freelance writer living in the Bay Area.
Inside Science News Service is supported by the American Institute of Physics. Alexander Hellemans is a freelance science writer who has written for Science Nature Scientific American and many others e
These calcium carbonate deposits which can take the form of cave popcorn (shown here) contain radioactive uranium.
That radioactive element provided a way for scientists to date the cave art. By dating the layer of popcorn on top of the art the scientists came up with a minimum age
The deposits contain tiny amounts of radioactive uranium which decays to thorium over time. By measuring the ratio of uranium to thorium in the layers of cave popcorn scientists can determine the minimum age of underlying artwork Aubert
along with information they want to appear on the home screen including an astronomy screen that will zoom in on that day's moon and even show the entire solar system.
Inside Science News Service is supported by the American Institute of Physics. Marcus Woo is a freelance science writer based in the San francisco bay Area who has written for National geographic News New Scientist and other outlets e
However it is more effective at trapping infrared radiation (the greenhouse effect. Methane gas comes from natural sources such as decomposing plants in wetlands
and will reportedly use infrared and visible-light LEDS to detect the wearer's heart rate. Sapphire is very transparent over a very wide wavelength range so it's going to be excellent at transmitting any signals that come from your body like infrared heat Tuller said.
Transmitting these types of signals through sapphire rather than traditional glass will most likely be clearer though Tuller admits the difference is probably minuscule.
First Fire-Scorched Petrified Wood Found SACRAMENTO Calif. After serving nearly 30 years as a doorstop for a nuclear physicist a hunk of petrified wood from Arizona has finally been recognized as a one-of-a-kind find.
His father Cleo Byers was a nuclear physicist for Los alamos National Laboratory in New mexico and took his children on hikes throughout the Southwest Bruce Byers said.
Just trust me on this this drink really will require flavoring Keith-Thomas Ayoob nutritionist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine told ABC News
magnetic field scientists say. By comparing ground-based studies and in-space observations of solar system's mysterious energy ribbon which was discovered first by NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) in 2009 scientists are learning more details about the conditions
and what IBEX is seeing study leader Nathan Schwadron a physicist at the University of New hampshire told Space. com. Previously maps from ground-based observatories showed researchers that clusters of cosmic rays extremely high-energy
The ribbon is roughly perpendicular to the interstellar magnetic field while cosmic rays stream on average along the interstellar magnetic field.
The particles themselves are created from interactions between the solar wind and interstellar matter. In the longer term Schwadron said work like this will help scientists better understand more about the boundary between our solar system and interstellar space.
Voyager 1's measurements of the magnetic field from the edge of interstellar space show a starkly different direction of the magnetic field inferred in the IBEX ribbon Schwadron said.
It seems like we now have good independent confirmation that the IBEX ribbon is ordered by the interstellar magnetic field
The few studies examining this issue showing little consensus. An October paper co-authored by Schwadron in Astrophysical Journal Letters argued that Voyager 1 could be measuring interstellar plasma coming in through magnetic field lines
What is really missing here is our understanding of the physics Schwadron said adding that reconnection between magnetic field lines could be an example of something that changes the conditions of the boundary region.
Infrared cameras that can locate leaks are required under a recently approved Colorado regulation. Car-mounted devices sample the air
Cows Toot Out Most Methane Magnetic field is weakening: Data from Swarm an ESA satellite array indicates Earth's magnetic field is weakening.
Researchers believe these are the beginning signs of the flipping of the magnetic poles yet it is weakening faster than expected.
Earth's Magnetic field Is Weakening 10 Times Faster Now Why seahorses growl: Warning growls are for more than the likes of dogs and bears.
#Humanity's Journey, from the Big bang to the Present (Op-Ed) Roger Briggs is the author of Journey to Civilization:
With new discoveries in astrophysics evolutionary biology molecular genetics geology and paleoanthropology a continuous story has emerged starting from the Big bang. Soon after that penultimate origin event
After about 400 million years of expansion following the Big bang the universe was cool enough for gravity to begin coalescing clouds of hydrogen into stars igniting nuclear fusion for the first time The birth of the first stars marked a turning point in the life of the universe from that point forward the universe
Astronomers have yet to see a solar system that is neatly ordered like our own with a nice rocky planet located in the sweet spot for liquid water and life.
For a more complete exploration of this journey see the slideshow Big bang to Civilization: 10 Amazing Origin Events. for more see Journey to Civilization:
Ligands in a cationic grip Using a number of techniques including the X ray crystallography beam at the Synchrotron in Melbourne they were able to describe the structure of the active component which only worked
The other eight of us sat around the dive hole staring into the vertigo-inducing dark-blue waters snacked some more (Fig Newtons this time#ou have to eat constantly in Antarctica to keep your body temperature up)
and the 365 days known by Greek astronomy. Ten days were added to the year to form a regular Julian year of 365 days.
#Capturing a Comet-Galaxy Conjunction Victor Rogus is an amateur astronomer and this is the eighth in his series of exclusive Space. com posts about amateur astronomy.
He contributed this article to Space. com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. I was prepared well in advance for a most exciting event to occur on the night of April 4 and the morning of April 5 2013:
My wife has been keen to point out that in the field of astronomy once-in-a-lifetime events seem to occur regularly.
and some amateur astronomers suggested that the celestial pair in conjunction could not be seen from there as they would be too low on either horizon.
but fluoresce under ultraviolet light. My Ohio expedition took me through some of the state s most picturesque areas including the sandstone gorges of the Hocking Hills where
but given the complicated nature of glacial dynamics all of these attempts have been limited and prone to error.
but was involved not in this study thinks the study provides the best models yet of this particular glacier's dynamics.
Physicist Stephen Hawking even addressed the crowd via telecast. While the hors d'oeuvres were in keeping with the intrepid spirit of the evening Gene Rurka the man behind the menu had another motive in serving creepy crawlies to A-list explorers.
so that the body's center of gravity balances on top of its legs. Their thin legs give them great speed and maneuverability too.
Traditional LED lights lack the ultraviolet rays plants need to thrive he said but new bulbs do a better job of mimicking the sun. The lights use less electricity
and how astrophysics and the philosophical thinking get a little bit intertwined. The project that I'm currently doing
and Caltech talking to astrophysicists and engineers and just trying to get some ideas about our human perspective
When I was discussing the idea with an astrophysicist at JPL he upped the ante
I'm just starting to learn about too that an astrophysicist or an engineer might know about
For this discovery Kiyoshi Mabuchi Kensei Tanaka Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai took home the Ig Nobel in Physics.
When pooping dogs prefer to align their bodies along the north-south axis of Earth's magnetic field.
versus a beautiful one while being shot in the hand with a laser beam. For their 2008 aesthetic study the team took home this year's Art Prize.
The angle of inclination allowed them to figure out the coefficient of friction between the snakes and the surface which is related to how much force the snakes must produce to support their body weight Byrnes said.
Biofuels are a type of combustible matter holding potential energy in the form of carbon that was bonded chemically in the recent past (when considered on a geologic time scale.
During these wars Seleucid ruler Antiochus III the Great fought against Ptolemy IV Philopator the fourth ruler of the Ptolemaic Dynasty in Egypt
but Ptolemy didn't. Instead he set up outposts in what is now modern-day Eritrea to get African elephants.
Ptolemy however was able to recover due to missteps by Antiochus and eventually won the battle.
African elephants In reality Asian elephants are smaller than African elephants so some historians speculated that perhaps the Ptolemies were using African forest elephants
Sloths in the wild though sleep about as much as humans according to research by the Planck Institute for Ornithology in Starnberg Germany.
The Edmi gazelle also known as the Cuvier's gazelleis the only gazelle that lives in the mountains.
For example the Cuvier's gazelle's population is estimated at only 1750 to 2950 according to International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List.
and increased exposure to ultraviolet or UV light brought on by climate change may be behind chemical changes in the bark of cork oaks.
Bark acts as the protective outer layer on trees that protects the plant from drought and shields against radiation.
which suggests the bad-quality cork trees are adapting to protect themselves from elevated radiation levels.
More pooping leads to more weight loss Seems like this one is aligned with the laws of physics:
#Most Interesting Science News articles of the Week<p>From echos of the Big bang to the breathing of the Amazon forest we found some super cool stories in Science this week!</
</p><p>Astronomers have found the first direct evidence of cosmic inflation the theorized dramatic expansion of the universe that put the bang in the Big bang 13.8 billion years ago new research suggests.</
which also confirms the existence of hypothesized ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves would give researchers a much better understanding of the Big bang and its immediate aftermath.</
'Smoking Gun'for Universe's Incredible Big bang Expansion Found</a p><p>There's never been a shortage of doomsday scenarios.
Humans Can Smell More than 1 Trillion Scents</a p><p>The first direct evidence of cosmic inflation a period of rapid expansion that occurred a fraction of a second after the Big bang also supports the idea that our universe is just
If the results are confirmed they would provide smoking-gun evidence that space-time expanded at many times the speed of light just after the Big bang 13.8 billion years ago.</
leading particle colliders scientists have determined the mass of the heaviest elementary particle the top quark.</</p><p>The measurement was made using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva Switzerland and the Tevatron at Fermilab in Batavia Ill.
Four separate experiments found a joint value for the top quark of 173.34(+/0. 76) gigaelectronvolts divided by the speed of light squared scientists announced Wednesday (March 19) at a physics conference in Italy.</
<a href=http://www. livescience. com/44230-mass-of-top-quark-found-joint-effort. html target=blank>Top quark:
#Chernobyl Trees Barely Decomposed, Study Finds Almost 30 years ago the world's attention was fixed on Chernobyl the nuclear power plant in Ukraine that exploded in one of the world's worst nuclear disasters.
and Anders Møller of the Universitã Paris-Sud have made ongoing investigations into the biology of radioactive areas like Chernobyl and Fukushima Japan.
To find out what was happening or more accurately what wasn't happening the research team collected hundreds of samples of leaf litter from forest floors that were contaminated not by radiation
The degree of decay was proportional to the degree of radioactive contamination at each site according to the study published in the journal Oecologia.
Radiation is known to have harmful effects on microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi. Recent research has found that radiation therapy can cause severe complications in cancer patients by reducing the populations of helpful bacteria in the intestines.
How Radiation Affects the Human body Mousseau and other researchers are concerned that the buildup of leaf litter on the forest floor presents a real danger.
which could then spread radiation throughout the region. That would end up moving radiocesium and other contaminants via smoke into populated areas Mousseau said.
so it is far from secure that the coprolites they worked on are said from humans Michael Richards a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany who was involved not in the study.
Inside Science News Service is supported by the American Institute of Physics. Cynthia Mckelvey is a science writer based in Santa cruz California.
#My Time With Comet Lovejoy (Op-Ed) Victor Rogus is an amateur astronomer and this is the sixth in his series of exclusive Space. com posts about amateur astronomy.
He contributed this article to Space. com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. On September 7 2013 Australian Terry Lovejoy using an 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope discovered
and noticed a recurring theme in comments made by amateur astronomers. Observers stated that they had seen a strange sparking in and around the comet's tail.
but is about 34 times more potent at trapping infrared radiation (the greenhouse effect) than carbon dioxide which is more abundant
The researchers used remote spectrometers on the ground to measure and compare emissions from the San juan Generating Station with those of the Four Corners Generating Station two large coal-fired power plants in northwest New mexico near the city of Farmington.
but two Italian sausages it s clear that caloric extremism still rules the roost at many of America s chain restaurants said Paige Einstein a dietitian at CSPI.
These pigments act like sunscreen for leaves blocking out damaging radiation and providing protection from excess light.
says David Fahey, a physicist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado.
If grown in unnaturally high temperatures or strong ultraviolet light plants do produce small amounts of methane.
Frank Keppler of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, a co-author on the original report on plant methane emissions,
observes that recent studies point to a strong link between methane production and ultraviolet radiation, and that methane can come from parts of plants that do not give off water4,
Rainforest loss in Xishuangbanna also has implications for carbon dynamics and climate change in the region.
NASA can also perform some CO2 monitoring with the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder, AIRS, launched aboard the Aqua satellite in 2002.
or particle physics, says Harry Collins, a sociologist of science at Cardiff University. In general, when scientific discoveries are made first they're messy and untidy,
Frank Postberg at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear physics in Heidelberg, Germany, likes the ocean idea.
Reich and Kueppers use infrared heating lamps which have the advantage of not enclosing the sides of test plots,
and habitat impacts of various energy mixes from nuclear power to biofuels resulting from an array of policy options.
A nuclear reactor in Petten, The netherlands, that supplies radioactive isotopes for use in medical imaging reopened last week after a month's scheduled maintenance partly alleviating a global shortage of the isotopes (see Nature 460,312-313;
By studying experimental rice plots and real farmland, Chris Butenhoff and Aslam Khalil, physicists from Portland State university in Portland, Oregon, together with Xiong Zhenqin, an ecologist at Nanjing Agricultural
The researchers report in the Journal of Zoology1 that the bats had an average maximum bite force of 10.9 newtons,
Astronomers have struggled to fully account for the carbon shortfall in Earth's mantle and in meteorites.
) Merkel is expected also to review the country's plans to phase out its nuclear power stations over the next decade.
The week ahead 5-7 october The 2009 Nobel prizes for physiology or medicine, physics and chemistry are announced. http://nobelprize. org 5-7 october Singapore hosts the Stem Cells
Canada, is to predict the dynamics between the organisms under various climatic conditions. We should be able to look at particular genes
Germany's new coalition government will extend the lifespan of the nation's nuclear power plants which last year produced around 23%of the country's electricity needs beyond 2022.
A former Los alamos nuclear-weapons physicist says that he is under investigation for espionage. The researcher, P. Leonardo Mascheroni, spoke to the Associated press on 22 october,
& the Press News maker Large Hadron Collider Physicists last week injected particles into the accelerator for the first time
The physics prize went to Charles Kao, for his work on how light can be transmitted through optical glass fibres;
and industrial representatives converge on Brussels to discuss the region's space programme. www. spaceconference. eu 15-25 october Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical physics (see Nature 461,
including incentives for natural gas and nuclear power, but leaves many of the biggest issues including how to structure the initial allocation of emissions permits,
Under the changes, bodies such as the National Research Council, the National Institute of Nuclear physics and the space agency, will be able to write their own statutes and regulations.
Satellites smash debris threatens Hubble An active communications satellite owned by Iridium Satellite of Bethesda, Maryland, slammed into a defunct Russian military communications satellite 800 kilometres above Siberia on 10 february 2009.
The collision sent hundreds of pieces of debris flying at high speed across low-Earth orbit, threatening other satellites and increasing the risk to a NASA shuttle mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope
(see'Kaputnik chaos could kill Hubble'and'Collision debris increases risk to Earth-observing satellites'.
'In the end, the Hubble mission went off without a hitch, and other satellites have yet to be influenced by the shrapnel from the collision.
More than 70%of the university's staff and 90%of the staff at the nearby but undamaged underground national particle physics laboratory at Gran Sasso were left homeless.
'The Gran Sasso National Laboratory offered shelter to physics students and teachers from the university and conditions slowly improved over the summer.
The Gran Sasso National Laboratory is also organizing a joint graduate school in particle physics with the science faculty.
says Inez Fung, an atmospheric physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. She presented the results of her team's study on 14 december at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San francisco
Sweden. go. nature. com/PUFASN 11 december NASA's orbiting infrared telescope, the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, is scheduled to launch. http://wise. ssl. berkeley. edu 14-18 december The American Geophysical Union meets in San francisco,
California. www. agu. org/meetings/fm09 Number crunch 221 The number of days unmanned underwater glider Scarlet Knight took to cross the Atlantic ocean, gathering water data.
a proposed planet near a star some 6 Â parsecs from Earth may not exist after all.
The finding is also a strike against a planet-seeking strategy called astrometry, which measures the side-to-side motion of a star on the sky to see
Ground-based astrometry has been used for more than a century, but none of the extrasolar planets it has detected has been verified in subsequent studies.
Radial-velocity measurements typically exploit the visible bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. But VB10 is a very dim star
and gives off most of its light as infrared radiation. At the Very Large Telescope in Chile, Bean placed a gas cell filled with ammonia in the path of the starlight,
enabling him to calibrate the instrument for the infrared. We would definitely have seen a significant amount of variation in our data
Unfortunately, astrometry is a very difficult business, counters Bean, explaining that Earth's atmosphere can introduce distortions that affect the measurements.
says Alessandro Sozzetti, an astrometry expert at the Turin Observatory in Italy. Even if we think we have selected a good set of reference stars,
when Dutch astronomer Piet van de Kamp used astrometry to claim that two planets were orbiting Barnard's Star a finding disproved a decade later.
is another example of how hard it is to detect extrasolar planets using astrometry from the ground.
Astronomers expect astrometry to work much better above the distorting effects of the atmosphere. Two space missions in the works the European space agency's GAIA, due to launch in 2012,
More significantly, astrometry can yield the mass of a planet, whereas radial velocity only puts a lower limit on it.
Bean admits that astronomers might one day find a planet around VB10 if they scrutinize the star long and hard enough The main lesson from VB10,
Astronomers witness biggest star explosion: Nature Newsastronomers have watched the violent death of what was probably the most massive star ever detected.
One supernova in particular was very unusual, recalls Avishay Gal-Yam, an astronomer at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel
The explosion generated several Suns'worth of radioactive nickel-56 and vast quantities of other lighter elements, such as carbon and silicon.
Gal-Yam says that it is the radioactive decay of the nickel that kept the explosion glowing for months.
Some astronomers have suggested that stars might not be able to grow larger than about 150 solar masses,
but none has been seen until now, says Norbert Langer, an astrophysicist at the University of Bonn in Germany.
Astronomers think that the Universe was composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium shortly after the Big bang. Those elements are thought to have formed giant stars that burned briefly and brightly before exploding,
creating heavier elements that eventually went on to form planets and people. There's a long interest in how these first stars evolved
The US Department of energy on 16 february issued an US$8. 3-billion loan guarantee for a pair of nuclear power plants in Georgia,
Events Wise delivers infrared wisdom NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has offered up the first pictures
Whereas the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope honed in on specific objects, WISE, with its huge field of view, will take an infrared census.
It should complete 1. 5 sweeps of the sky before its cryogens run out around October.
Physicists Anton Zeilinger, John Clauser and Alain Aspect share the prestigious 2010 Wolf Prize in Physics for their work on quantum entanglement.
and oceans to futuristic'solar-radiation management'techniques for example, creating haze in the stratosphere to act as a cheap layer of sunscreen.
Testing solar-radiation management techniques on a global scale is given particularly daunting that detecting changes in the climate system caused by geoengineering would be nearly as difficult as measuring global warming itself.
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