Aestus Ajith

Since the 1960s, we’ve known the winds of Venus “super-rotate,” or blow faster than the planet rotates. Now a spacecraft has found Venus’ winds are speeding up. Venus is well known for its curious super-rotating atmosphere , which whips around the planet once every four Earth days. This is in stark contrast to the rotation of the planet itself – the length of the day – which takes a comparatively laborious 243 Earth days. Now ESA’s Venus Express has revealed that the winds on the planet Venus have steadily been getting faster over the last six years. The spacecraft chronicled what ESA says is the “most detailed record of cloud motion” yet in the atmosphere of Venus in order to reach this conclusion. Average wind speeds at low latitudes on Venus Photo by: between the equator and 50 degrees north or south Examples of cloud features identified in Venus Express images and used to monitor wind speeds. These long-term studies were based on tracking the motions ...

UOW scientists have developed a novel way to turn sea water into hydrogen, for a sustainable and clean fuel source. Using this method, as little as five litres of sea water per day would produce enough hydrogen to power an average-sized home and an electric car for one day. The research team at UOW’s Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES) have developed a light-assisted catalyst that requires less energy input to activate water oxidation, which is the first step in splitting water to produce hydrogen fuel. A major limitation with current technologies is that the oxidation process needs a higher energy input, which rules out using abundant sea water because it produces poisonous chlorine gas. The research team, led by Dr Jun Chen and Professor Gerry Swiegers, have produced an artificial chlorophyll on a conductive plastic film that acts as a catalyst to begin splitting water. The results were recently published in the jo...

The question of what role nuclear power will play in this country’s energy future is filled with uncertainty. On one hand, it is the only low-carbon source of gigawatt scale power that even environmentalists like James Lovelock and Stewart Brand have endorsed. On the other hand, post-Fukushima safety concerns, rising cost projections, and the steadily decreasing cost and rapid growth of renewables have led authorities like Amory Lovins to declare it an unnecessary risk in the decades to come. What is certain is the fact that we already have a large stockpile of highly radioactive nuclear waste that we don’t know what to do with. In this country alone, there is roughly 65,000 tons of the stuff, some of which will remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years. The reversal of support for a long-term storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada exemplifies the challenges and the potential long term costs of dealing with this waste pile, which continues to grow. Dr. ...

(ISNS) -- The discovery of two new jumbo-sized viruses is blurring the lines between viral and cellular life and could point to the existence of a new type of life, scientists suggest. The two large viruses, detailed in this week's issue of the journal Science , have been dubbed "Pandoraviruses" because of the surprises they may hold for biologists, in reference to the mythical Greek figure who opened a box and released evil into the world. The discovery of Pandoraviruses is an indication that our knowledge of Earth's microbial biodiversity is still incomplete, explained study coauthor Jean-Michel Claverie , a virologist at the French National Research Agency at Aix-Marseille University. "Huge discoveries remain to be made at the most fundamental level that may change our present conception about the origin of life and its evolution," Claverie said. Eugene Koonin , a computational evolutionary biologist at the National Center for Biot...

A distant star thought to be almost identical to our own sun is providing scientists with the chance to see how our solar system will look in four billion years time. A graphic showing our own sun, which is around 4.6 billion years old, while HIP 102152 is 8.2 billion years old Photo by: Photo: European Southern Observatory The star, known as HIP 102152, is considered to be one of the closest “twins” of our Sun that astronomers have found to date, but is considerably older. Located 250 light years from Earth, scientists now hope to study it to learn how our own sun will age. It has similar temperature, size and chemical composition to our Sun. The observations, achieved using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, also suggest that the star may be orbited by rocky planets. If this turns out to be the case, it could even provide some clues as to our own fate as the solar system gets older. Jorge...

A heavyweight contender for the periodic table Swedish scientists have confirmed the existence of a new super-heavy element, temporarily dubbed ununpentium for its position at the 115th spot on the periodic table. First proposed by Russian scientists back in 2004, the new element was created by a Swedish team from Lund University. They fired a beam of calcium, which has 20 protons, into a piece of americium, which has 95 protons. For an entire second, ununpentium burst into existence, composed of 115 protons. As to why this is important, the Christian Science Monitor writes that "scientists hope that by creating heavier and heavier elements, they will find a theoretical 'island of stability,' an undiscovered region in the periodic table where stable super-heavy elements with as yet unimagined practical uses might exist." Before the element is officially added to the periodic table, it needs to be confirmed by the Inte...

Has graphene's time in the sun already come and gone? The super-material that's stronger than diamonds, lighter than downy fluff, conducts electricity better than copper, and can be produced in layers no thicker than an atom, is about to be dethroned as the reigning  toughest-stuff-on-earth material. A flurry of articles about a new carbon substance, carbyne, were published recently after Rice University said the material was actually twice as stiff as graphene, significantly stronger, yet even more flexible. While companies like IBM , Intel , and Nokia  are already employing graphene's amazing properties in products today, the revelations seemed to suggest investors looking to capitalize on its potential may have already missed the boat. Not so fast. While graphene isn't exactly new, having been discovered within the past decade, carbyne actually has an older pedigree going back to the 1960s, but scientists always figured it was an unstable materia...

The idea of continents that supported ancient, perhaps even cultured and prosperous people, before they sunk under the sea has captivated historians since the days of Plato and even earlier. Made popular by the famous ancient Greek philosopher Plato, Atlantis is perhaps the most widely known, but certainly not the only sunken great landmass. In addition to the legend of Atlantis, there are also legends of other sunken continents, or large landmasses, one called Lemuria and another called Mu. Furthermore, there are others which have already been verified by science: Zealandia, Doggerland, and the Kerguelen Plateau, for example. Perhaps the most famous sunken continent legend, Atlantis has sparked centuries of theories without much verification other than Plato’s stories, titled Tinnaeus and Critias, according to BBC. Plato tells a story of an island; he actually doesn’t use the term continent. Its influence extended into the Mediterranean, past the Pillars of Hercule...

The University of Washington envisions a future where our bodies will be tuned to heal us just as easily as software is built to entertain us — and it's come up with a method that could eventually turn this idea into a reality. University researchers have developed a programming language that engineers could use to build artificial DNA molecules that can be embedded into human cells. While the language is still in its infancy and not far enough along for use in the medical industry, the university says it hopes its creation will eventually be used to craft custom molecules that can be inserted into a patient's body to deliver drugs or detect diseases and other abnormalities. The language essentially builds on the sort of chemical equations anyone who has taken a chemistry class will be familiar with. In a report published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology , researchers said the language lets them write equations for DNA in c...

Boom, zap, pow! Who needs superheroes to move mountains, when lighting does the job just fine? Powerful explosions sparked by lightning create piles of angular, jumbled rocks atop mountain summits, a new study shows. The frequent blasts break down high peaks more quickly than frost-shattering — when freezing water wedges apart fractured rock. In Lesotho's Drakensberg mountains , a single lightning bolt can blow out 100 to 350 cubic feet (3 to 10 cubic meters) of bedrock, said Jasper Knight, lead study author and a geomorphologist at Wits University in South Africa. The sheer volume of summer lightning strikes atop high peaks, combined with their massive erosive power, means electric blasts are a long-overlooked force in bringing down mountains, Knight and his co-author conclude. "Lightning is very significant in causing landscape erosion and the formation of lots of fractured bedrock," Knight told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet. "What I think t...

Today, the National Ignition Facility passed a new milestone , heating a hydrogen fuel until it emitted more energy than it absorbed, fueled by the atomic energy released in fusion. The results bring the lab one step closer to turning nuclear fusion into a viable power source — although, as scientists were quick to note, there's still a long way to go. The process works by shining 192 beams from a powerful laser into a small pellet of hydrogen fuel, hoping to heat a small area to the extreme temperatures required for fusion. While the lab has succeeded in getting the fuel to export energy, the process overall is still a net energy loser, thanks to inefficiencies in the laser system. Still, scientists believe the results will provide an important boost for the project, and potentially spur further research into nuclear fusion as an energy source. Source BBC Image Cred...

By James Chi , www.theepochtimes.com View Original November 13th, 2013 Tasmanian tiger Photo by: Thylacine 1. Thylacine Reported extinct around 1936. Thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian Tiger, means “the dog-headed pouched one” in Greek. Thylacines were found throughout the Island of Tasmania in Australia and was the largest flesh eating marsupials of modern times. Based on fossil records, its immediate family members are known to have existed as early as 23 million to 5 million years ago. In late 2013, a team of british naturalists from the Centre for Fortean Zoology traveled into the wild terrains of Tasmania where the human population is near non-existent. Even though they haven’t been able to capture any live footage of the animal with their camera traps, the researches are optimistic that some specimens still exists. The group claims that they’ve interviewed some fairly credible witnesses and gathered sources of what could be the animal’s feces for...

Link to video: Stephen Hawking at the Science Museum Physics would have been "far more interesting" if scientists had been unable to find the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider in Cern , according to Stephen Hawking . The cosmologist was speaking at an event to mark the launch of a new exhibit about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the Science Museum in London and discussing the unanswered questions at the edges of modern physics as part of a history of his own work in the field. Though the Higgs boson was predicted by theory in the early 1960s, not everyone believed it would be found. If it had not been, physicists would have had to go back to the drawing board and rethink many of their fundamental ideas about the nature of particles and forces – an exciting prospect for some scientists. "Physics would be far more interesting if it had not been found," said Hawking. "A few weeks ago, Peter Higgs and François Englert shared the N...

Bimini Road, stones submerged off the coast of the Bahamas said by some to be a man-made wall some 10,000 to 20,000 years old. It is part of body of evidence some say show prehistoric civilizations were far more advanced than conventional science is willing to admit. Photo by: Shutterstock* Two camps of scientists have faced off on the issue of the underwater structure known as Bimini Road off the coast of the Bahamas since it was first discovered in 1968. One camp says it is a 12,000–19,000-year-old man-made structure—flouting the conventional understanding that advanced civilizations only emerged some 5,000 years ago. The other camp says it is a natural formation. Dr. Eugene Shinn dismisses as “New Age” the claims that a culture advanced enough to build such a structure existed in that region so long ago. He has behind him the heavy weight of current scientific understandings. Dr. Greg Little realizes his claims to the contrary are viewed with “outright ridicule...

Is the moon hollow? Was it man-made, with a thick layer of dust simply covering it’s metal frame over billions of years? Such theories remain of interest to many as scientists continue to study the moon and learn about its composition and workings. Here’s a look at some moon oddities. 1. Reverberations: Hollow Moon? NASA created an impact on the moon in 1969 so Apollo 12 astronauts could measure the resulting seismic waves. The shock waves shocked scientists. Very different from any seismic phenomena recorded on Earth, the vibrations continued for about an hour and started out as small waves that gained in strength. Dr. Ross Taylor’s explanation is quoted in the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal on the NASA website. Taylor is a lunar scientist who helped examine samples gathered by Apollo 11. He said: “This was one of those extraordinary things. When you had the impact of these things on the moon, unlike a terrestrial earthquake, which dies away quickly, the shock w...

As Adam Frank   has said over on the 13.7 blog , "Earth and Mars have been swapping spit   (astrobiologically speaking) for eons ... [and] it is entirely possible we were Earth's first alien invasion." Thursday   at a conference in Italy , chemist Steven Benner from the Westheimer Institute of Science and Technology in Gainesville, Fla., offered what he believes is evidence that in fact, "we are actually all Martians; that life started on Mars and came to Earth on a rock." There's an abstract describing his research   posted here . The BBC   sums up the key points this way : "Scientists have long wondered how atoms first came together to make up the three crucial molecular components of living organisms: RNA, DNA and proteins. ... "Simply adding energy such as heat or light to the more basic organic molecules in the 'soup' does not generate RNA. Instead, it generates tar. RNA needs to be coaxed into shape by 'templatin...

We are now a year on from what was possibly the most speculated upon, widely discussed, prophesied about, and generally hyped-up date in the modern era ( at the very least since Y2k). Otherwise known as the end of the Thirteen Baktun cycle in the Mayan long count, December 21, 2012, came and went like any other day. Or did it? I have to declare an interest here, as the author of a ‘2012’ book ‘The Everything Guide to 2012’, I have had a long standing interest in Mayan calendrics, especially from an astronomical point of view, as well as from a cultural point of view. I have been a speaker at events worldwide on the subject for a number of years. The essential point of view I was hoping to share in my talks- and in my book- is that the Classic-era Maya had a far more sophisticated and, in many ways, accurate calendar than the one we currently use. I envisaged this leading to the possibility of modern culture coming to a critical point of self-realization as it contemplat...