SPACE & SCIENCE NEWS: August 2002
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Something stirs in the Andromeda Chamber
(Aug. 28, 2002)
Researchers at the University of Arkansas, led by Timothy Kral, have used a device called the Andromeda Chamber to show that methanogens (methane-producing microbes) could grow at the low pressures found on Mars. Their findings strengthen claims that life could have existed on the Red Planet in the past, present, or at some point in the future. The chamber, which was originally constructed for comet simulations, consists of an insulated compartment with heating and cooling elements. A sample container can be lowered into the chamber, which contains various detection and monitoring instruments. The researchers grew methanogenic cultures in bottles and froze them. They then placed them below the surface of the soil simulant in the sample container. With the recent successful missions to Mars, and especially the discovery that there is probably a vast ocean of frozen water below the surface, there is a greater possibility that life may exist below the surface today. Since methane is a greenhouse gas methanogens could be used to raise Mars' surface temperature, eventually terraforming the planet so that it could support life. |
Meteorite hits girl
(Aug. 27, 2002)
The odds against being hit by a meteorite are billions to one – but a teenager in North Yorkshire may have had one land on her foot. Siobhan Cowton, 14, was getting into the family car outside her Northallerton home at 1030 BST on Thursday when a stone fell on her from the sky. Noticing it was "quite hot", she showed it to her father Niel. The family now plan to have the stone analysed by scientists at Durham University. Read more. Source: BBC. |
New approaches in SETI
(Aug. 18, 2002)
Scientific interest is growing in extending current SETI searches to embrace the possibility that there may be evidence of exterrestrial intelligence in the Solar System. While conventional SETI approaches, involving the attempt to detect electromagnetic signals (microwave and visible) across interstellar distances is continuing, a growing body of scientists and engineers recognizes that we have paid too little attention, at a professional level, to looking for signs of ETI on our doorstep. One of the problems for professional scientists is that the fields of SETV (Search for Extraterrestrial Visitation) and SETA (Search for Extraterrestrial Artifacts) have been strongly tainted by wild, popular speculation about UFOs, Martian cities, and the like, based on poor quality data. Because there is a strong desire to believe in alien involvement, it is very easy for people to imagine they see evidence for it in every anomalous light in the sky or fuzzy shape on Mars. Serious SETV and SETA starts from the assumption (as in the case of mainstream SETI) that, while we have no good evidence for ETI in the Solar System at present, searches based on well-designed protocols are worthwhile. This website supports these aims.
For more information on scientific SETV and SETA, visit these sites: setv.org, and Allen Tough's paper on interstellar probes. See also these entries, from Astrobiology Central's A-Z: Bracewell probes and sentinel hypothesis. More to come on this exciting topic in the weeks ahead. |
Alien intelligence – crow-style!
(Aug. 12, 2002)
The ability to make tools was once thought to lie solely within the purview of humans. Then in the 1960s Jane Goodall discovered that chimpanzees, too, fashion implements to perform certain tasks. Since then, researchers have observed tool use in a variety of animals. Nonhuman primates are widely thought to be the most sophisticated tool-users after us. Now observations of an innovative New Caledonian crow named Betty could alter that view.
Read more. Source: Scientific American. |
Could antigravity be real?
(Aug. 7, 2002)
H. G. Wells, in The First Men in the Moon, whisks his astronauts to the lunar surface courtesy of a spaceship covered in the antigravity substance, cavorite. But the idea of anything that can oppose or shield against gravity has always seemed to most scientists about as credible as a perpetual motion machine. Now, it seems, practical antigravity is being taken seriously-seriously enough for Boeing, British defence contractor BAe Systems, and NASA, among others, to pump R&D funds into it. The focus of interest is the Podkletnov effect, named after Russian physicist Evgeny Podkletnov who discovered it while doing a routine test on a superconductor in his lab at the Tampere University of Technology, Finland, in 1992. Take a large yttrium-barium-copper-oxide superconducting disk suspended in nitrogen vapor and cooled to around -233°C, levitate the disk in a magnetic field and spin it up to 5,000 rpm and – bingo – objects placed above the disk lose around 1% of their weight. Or so Podkletov claims. The trouble is no one's yet been able to replicate his results. However, there are theories waiting in the wings to explain the effect if it proves real. At the University of Alabama, Ning Li claims to have predicted the antigravity effect in 1989. Her theory suggests that if a time-varying magnetic field is applied to a superconductor, charged and deformed lattice ions within the superconductor can absorb enormous amounts of energy, which would cause the lattice ions to spin rapidly about their equilibrium positions and create a minuscule gravitational field. If these charged, rotating, lattice ions were lined up with each other by a strong magnetic field, Li says, the resulting change in local gravity would be measurable. Early in 2002, Raymond Chiao at the University of California, Berkeley, put forward his own theory relating gravity and superconductors. He predicted that bombarding a superconductor with electromagnetic waves would produce gravitational radiation and is now attempting to prove his theory by experimentation.
For more, go to the Quantum Cavorite website. More on Boeing and antigravity: Jane's Defence Weekly article and American Antigravity website |
Martian meteorite positive life signs?
(Aug. 4, 2002)
The earliest seafloor hydrothermal vents – supposedly more than three billion years old – may be nothing more than deposits from underground springs active in the last few thousand years. That is the claim of two US geologists who carried out a new analysis of rocks from South Africa which were previously dated to the Archaean period – when life first began to diversify. The findings could have important implications for our understanding of the early Earth and the microbial life forms that lived there. But one authority on the geology of the Barberton greenstone belt – where the rocks are found – launched a vigorous defence of evidence that they contain ancient hydrothermal vents.
Read more. Source: Spaceflight Now/NASA. |
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