Archive for the ‘Tech/Science’ Category

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The East Coast earthquake left more than just residents unaccustomed to feeling the ground shake and sway in a daze. It also surprised some scientists who spend their careers trying to untangle the mysteries of sudden ground shifts.

Despite decades of research, earthquake prediction remains elusive. As much as society would like scientists to tell us when a jolt is coming, mainstream seismologists are generally pessimistic about ever having that ability.

They lived through the checkered history of earthquake prediction, filled with passioned debates, failed oracles and the enduring search for warning signs that may portend a powerful quake. The Earth so far has refused to give up its secrets.

In recent years, however, a more hopeful camp has emerged, pushed by researchers using satellites who say it may be possible to someday predict earthquakes from space and others who think they can tease out signals in rocks. The two schools of thought swapped notes during a two-day meeting in Los Angeles weeks before a relatively mild magnitude-5.8 rattled the Eastern Seaboard.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The Mars rover Opportunity is snapping pictures like a tourist since arriving at its latest crater destination, much to the delight of scientists many millions of miles away.

The solar-powered workhorse beamed back images of the horizon, soil and nearby rocks that are unlike any it has seen during its seven years roaming the Martian plains.

Opportunity is doing more than just sightseeing. It recently spent a chunk of time using its robotic arm to investigate a flat-topped boulder that likely formed in a hydrothermal environment.

Scientists were giddy with excitement Thursday - a tone reminiscent of the mission's early days.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Space junk has made such a mess of Earth's orbit that experts say we may need to finally think about cleaning it up.

That may mean vacuuming up debris with weird space technology - cosmic versions of nets, magnets and giant umbrellas, according to the chairman of an expert panel that issued a new report on the problem Thursday.

There are 22,000 objects in orbit that are big enough for officials on the ground to track and countless more smaller ones that could do damage to human-carrying spaceships and valuable satellites. The International Space Station has to move out of the way of debris from time to time.

"We've lost control of the environment," said retired NASA senior scientist Donald Kessler, who headed the National Academy of Sciences report.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The Mars rover Opportunity is snapping pictures like a tourist since arriving at its latest crater destination much to the delight of scientists many millions of miles away.

The solar-powered workhorse beamed back images of the horizon, soil and nearby rocks that are unlike any it has seen during its seven years roaming the Martian plains.

Opportunity is doing more than just sightseeing. It recently spent a chunk of time using its robotic arm to investigate a flat-topped boulder to find out what it's made of.

After a three-year drive, the six-wheel rover finally rolled up to the western rim of Endeavour Crater earlier this month to begin a new chapter of exploration.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Ancient humans fashioned hand axes, cleavers and picks much earlier than believed, but didn't take the stone tools along when they left Africa, new research suggests.

A team from the United States and France made the findings after traveling to an archaeological site along the northwest shoreline of Kenya's Lake Turkana. Two-faced blades and other large cutting tools had been previously excavated there along with primitive stone flakes.

Using a sophisticated technique to date the dirt, researchers calculated the age of the more advanced tools to be 1.76 million years old. That's older than similar stone-age artifacts in Ethiopia and Tanzania estimated to be between 1.4 and 1.6 million years old.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Forget the wind and fury. Hurricane Irene's most worrisome weapon is water.

There's just way too much of it: storm surge pushing seawater ashore and heavy rainfall causing flooding. That's not unusual with hurricanes, but with Irene there are a couple of added factors that are making meteorologists nervous.

This massive, slow-moving hurricane is forecast to soak an already drenched Northeast and may come ashore at a time when tides are unusually high, making storm surge even worse - 4 to 11 feet with waves on top, forecasters say.

"Water is the No. 1 killer," retired National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield said Friday afternoon. "That's going to cause the greatest loss of life."

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russian emergency workers are using helicopters Thursday in their search for the wreckage of the unmanned supply ship that crashed and exploded in a forested area in Siberia.

The spaceship was launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan some 1,500 kilometers (900 miles) southwest of the crash site. It fell after the third stage of its booster rocket failed a few minutes into the launch, in the Choisky district in Russia's Altai province.

It was the 44th launch of a Progress supply ship to the space station - and the first failure in the nearly 13-year life of the complex.

The Progress ship carrying almost 3 tons of supplies to the International Space Station was destroyed. The rocket failed barely a month after NASA's final space shuttle flight.

Without the shuttles, NASA now is counting on Russia, Europe and Japan, as well as private U.S. businesses, to keep the station stocked.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Our world is a much wilder place than it looks. A new study estimates that Earth has almost 8.8 million species, but we've only discovered about a quarter of them. And some of the yet-to-be-seen ones could be in our own backyards, scientists say.

So far, only 1.9 million species have been found. Recent discoveries have been small and weird: a psychedelic frogfish, a lizard the size of a dime and even a blind hairy mini-lobster at the bottom of the ocean.

"We are really fairly ignorant of the complexity and colorfulness of this amazing planet," said the study's co-author, Boris Worm, a biology professor at Canada's Dalhousie University. "We need to expose more people to those wonders. It really makes you feel differently about this place we inhabit."

While some scientists and others may question why we need to know the number of species, others say it's important.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- NASA's humanoid robot has finally awakened in space.

Ground controllers turned Robonaut on Monday for the first time since it was delivered to the International Space Station in February. The test involved sending power to all of Robonaut's systems. The robot was not commanded to move; that will happen next week.

"Those electrons feel GOOD! One small step for man, one giant leap for tinman kind," Robonaut posted in a Twitter update. (All right, so a Robonaut team member actually posted Monday's tweets under AstroRobonaut.)

The four visible light cameras that serve as Robonaut's eyes turned on in the gold-colored head, as did the infrared camera, located in the robot's mouth and needed for depth perception. One of Robonaut's tweets showed the view inside the American lab, Destiny.

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- A bio-art project to create bulletproof skin has given a Utah State researcher even more hope his genetically engineered spider silk can be used to help surgeons heal large wounds and create artificial tendons and ligaments.

Researcher Randy Lewis and his collaborators gained worldwide attention recently when they found a commercially viable way to manufacture silk fibers using goats and silkworms that had spider genes inserted into their makeup.

Spider silk is one of the strongest fibers known and five times stronger than steel. Lewis' fibers are not that strong but much stronger than silk spun by ordinary worms.

With Lewis' help, Dutch artist Jalila Essaidi conducted an experiment weaving a lattice of human skin cells and silk that was capable of stopping bullets fired at reduced speeds.

DISKO ISLAND, Greenland (AP) -- The old hunter was troubled by the foreigners encroaching on his Inuit people's frozen lands.

"The Inuit say that they are going to heat the `siku' (the sea ice) to make it melt. There will be almost no more winter," the elder says of the southerners in Jean Malaurie's "Last Kings of Thule," the French explorer's classic account of a year in the Arctic.

The year was 1951. A lifetime later, another Inuit hunter looks out at Disko Bay from this island's rocky fringe and remembers driving his dogsled team over the solid glitter of the siku all the way to Ilulissat, a town 90 kilometers (50 miles) across the water.

"The ice then was 1 to 2 meters thick," Jakob Jensen, 65, recalled of those winters past.

"Now, it's a few centimeters. It's very thin and you can't go on dogsled."

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Animals across the world are fleeing global warming by heading north much faster than they were less than a decade ago, a new study says.

About 2,000 species examined are moving away from the equator at an average rate of more than 15 feet per day, about a mile per year, according to new research published Thursday in the journal Science which analyzed previous studies. Species are also moving up mountains to escape the heat, but more slowly, averaging about 4 feet a year.

The species - mostly from the Northern Hemisphere and including plants - moved in fits and starts, but over several decades it averages to about 8 inches an hour away from the equator.

"The speed is an important issue," said study main author Chris Thomas of the University of York. "It is faster than we thought."

WASHINGTON (AP) -- That old moon might not be as antique as we thought, some scientist think. They say it's possible that it isn't a day over 4.4 billion years old. But other astronomers disagree with a new study's conclusions. They think the moon is up to its typical age-defying tricks and is really pushing 4.6 billion as they have suspected all these years.

Either way, the new analysis of an important moon rock brought back by the Apollo 16 mission is showing that the moon isn't ready to give up its true age and origins quite yet, even though scientists thought they had it all figured out a decade or two ago.

ILULISSAT, Greenland (AP) -- Greenland's Inuit people have countless terms in their language to describe ice in all its varieties. This gallery of photographs by AP's Brennan Linsley likewise is something of a visual vocabulary for the striking and beautiful forms ice takes on and around the giant Arctic island.

ON JAKOBSHAVN GLACIER, Greenland (AP) -- The pilot eased his five-ton helicopter toward the glacier's rumpled surface, aiming for the lightest of setdowns atop one of the fastest-flowing ice streams on Earth.

David Holland's voice suddenly broke in on the intercom.

"Carl doesn't like this!" the scientist shouted. "Carl says it's snow bridges!" - drifts that can hide a deep crevasse.

The chopper pulled up sharply and veered off over the chaotic icescape of white knobs and pinnacles and bluish glints of meltwater, on to another, safer landing spot where Carl Gladish, Holland's lanky, ponytailed assistant, stepped cautiously off the skid and onto the ice, under the thudding rotor blades, to swiftly carry out his assigned task.

DENVER (AP) -- A spaceship that could carry the next wave of astronauts to an asteroid or beyond is being prepared for a new round of tests at a Lockheed Martin facility near Denver.

Engineers have attached a launch-abort system to the nose of the capsule and will subject the combined spacecraft to a series of experiments to see if it can withstand the rigors of blastoff, Lockheed Martin said Friday.

The launch-abort system, essentially a rocket attached to the nose of the capsule, could lift the capsule off its booster rocket and carry it to safety if a problem developed before or during launch.

Lockheed Martin, of Bethesda, Md., is building the capsule, called the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, under a $7.5 billion NASA contract issued in 2006.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- An unmanned hypersonic glider developed for U.S. defense research into super-fast global strike capability was launched atop a rocket early Thursday but contact was lost after the experimental craft began flying on its own, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said.

The problem occurred during the critical point of transition to aerodynamic flight, DARPA said in a statement that described the mission as an attempt to fly the fastest aircraft ever built.

"More than nine minutes of data was collected before an anomaly caused loss of signal," it said. "Initial indications are that the aircraft impacted the Pacific Ocean along the planned flight path."

The 7:45 a.m. launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, 130 miles northwest of Los Angeles, was the second of two planned flights of a Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle-2. Contact was also lost during the first mission.

Shaped like the tip of a spear, the small craft is part of a U.S. military initiative to develop technology to respond to threats at 20 times the speed of sound or greater, reaching any part of the globe in an hour.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The remains of a giant sea creature are providing the first proof that these prehistoric reptiles gave birth to their young rather than laying eggs.

Plesiosaurs, which lived at the time of dinosaurs, were large carnivorous sea animals with broad bodies and two pairs of flippers. Researchers have long questioned whether they would have been able to crawl onto land and lay eggs like other reptiles or gave birth in the water like whales.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Months after the death of the Mars rover Spirit, its surviving twin is poised to reach the rim of a vast crater to begin a fresh round of exploration.

Driving commands sent up to Opportunity directed the six-wheel rover to make the final push toward Endeavour crater, a 14-mile-wide depression near the Martian equator that likely could be its final destination.

At its current pace and barring any hiccups, Opportunity should roll up to the crater's edge on Tuesday. The finish line was a spot along a ridge that the rover team nicknamed "Spirit Point" in honor of Opportunity's lost twin.

"I'm totally pumped. We've been driving for so long," said Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis who is part of the team.

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- A sun-powered robotic explorer named Juno is rocketing toward Jupiter on a fresh quest to discover the secret recipe for making planets.

Hundreds of scientists and their families and friends - among thousands of invited guests - cheered and yelled "Go Juno!" as the unmanned Atlas rocket blasted into a clear midday sky Friday. It will take five years to reach Jupiter, the solar system's most massive and ancient planet.

"Next stop is Jupiter," exulted Scott Bolton, Juno's principal investigator and an astrophysicist at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

"It's fantastic!" said Fran Bagenal, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who is also part of the NASA project. "Huge relief all around."

Within an hour of liftoff, Juno hurtled out of Earth's orbit at 24,000 mph on a roundabout course for Jupiter. It was expected to whip past the orbit of the moon in half a day, or early Saturday morning.