Rachel Kaufman, freelance reporter » Featured Stories

Comet Seen Vaporizing in Sun’s Atmosphere—A First

Rachel — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:27:46 +0000

For the first time, a death-diving comet has been observed as it vaporized in the sun’s atmosphere, thanks to new data from a NASA satellite.

More than a thousand known comets are so-called Kreutz sungrazers, a family of icy bodies that pass very near to the sun’s surface on their orbits through the solar system.

Using NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), astronomers are able to spot many of these sungrazers as they get close to our star.

That’s because SOHO carries a key instrument that has an occulting disk, a circle that blocks out the glare of the sun’s main body so scientists can study the star’s faint upper atmosphere, or corona.

So far, most of SOHO’s documented sungrazer deaths involved comets breaking up at a distance or simply vanishing behind the occulting disk.

“Some of them made it behind the disk, and none of them came out on the other side,” said solar physicist Karel Schrijver, a fellow at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, California.

But this comet was different. Here’s why.

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Sharks Eating Songbirds in Gulf of Mexico

Rachel — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:33:10 +0000

What’s a songbird doing in the belly of a tiger shark?

The predators are eating land birds affected by offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico (map), according to new research.

Marcus Drymon, of Dauphin Island Sea Lab, has been studying fish off the Alabama coast since 2006. During a routine sampling in 2009, he pulled a tiger shark onto the deck of his boat to tag and release it.

“He coughed up some feathers,” Drymon said.

That in itself wasn’t unusual, he said. Tiger sharks in other parts of the world are known to eat marine birds. But once Drymon analyzed the feathers in the lab, he was fairly sure they had come from a terrestrial bird.

So Drymon and his team launched a project to study the sharks’ diets. Over two years the team caught 50 tiger sharks—mostly within 5 to 10 miles (8 to 16 kilometers) offshore—and dissected their stomachs.

In about half of the sharks, Drymon found “feathers, or beaks, or bird feet, or some kind of bird part.”

All the parts were later found to originate from land birds such as woodpeckers, tanagers, and meadowlarks.

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Small Spiders Have Big Brains That Spill Into Their Legs

Rachel — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 18:14:37 +0000

They’re not fat, they’re just big-brained: Tiny spiders have such huge brains for their body sizes that the organs can spill into the animals’ body cavities, a new study shows.

Such big brains may explain why very small spiders—some less than a millimeter across—are just as good at spinning webs as bigger arachnids.

For the study, a team led by Bill Eberhard, a staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and a professor at the University of Costa Rica, examined nine spider species from six web-weaving families.

The researchers found that the smaller the spider, the bigger its brain relative to its body size.

In some spiders, the central nervous system took up nearly 80 percent of the space in their bodies, sometimes even spilling into their legs.

(Read more here.)

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It Doesn’t Add Up

Rachel — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:50:04 +0000

Much attention has been given to the gap in performance between boys and girls in mathematics skills. In a new study published in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Jonathan Kane, a professor of mathematical and computer science at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, and Janet Mertz, a professor of oncology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, examine this gender gap and test several popular explanations. Their cross-cultural analysis seems to rule out several causal candidates, including coeducational schools, low standards of living, and innate variability among boys — a proposal made famous in a 2005 speech by Lawrence H. Summers, who was Harvard University’s president at the time. “We have pretty clear data debunking the greater male variability hypothesis,” Mertz says.
What, then, is the cause of the gender gap? Like the gap itself, the cause varies, the authors conclude. Mertz and Kane, who are married, don’t rule out the existence of very small biological difference, but, by comparing test scores across cultures, they indict local social factors as the likely primary culprit. Gender gaps vary from place to place, showing that cultural factors swamp biological ones.
Read more….

Photo on this page is from Jimmiehomeschoolmom on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.

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Can Russia’s Stuck Mars Spacecraft Be Saved?

Rachel — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 18:22:25 +0000

Russia’s latest shot at Mars suffered a setback shortly after launch yesterday when its upper-stage thrusters failed to fire, leaving the Phobos-Grunt probe stuck in orbit around Earth instead of on its way into deep space.

Details are still hazy about what went wrong, but the problem appears to lie with an instrument called a star sensor.

The spacecraft should have “known” when to fire its engines after using the sensor to orient itself to the stars, thereby setting its course for Mars. Either a software problem stopped the star sensor from working, or the sensor itself failed.

The craft is scheduled to pass over Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan shortly, and technicians there will attempt to communicate with Phobos-Grunt to determine whether the failure is fixable.

The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, originally said they had three days to get the stranded craft working, but mission managers have since changed that estimate to two weeks, giving them more time to fix the problem.

Read more, but know that in early January 2012, the craft plunged into the Pacific ocean. Bummer.

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Closer Inspection: Swell Time

Rachel — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 17:38:02 +0000

(Click this to hit up Washingtonpost.com for the full version.)

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Upgrading the Electric Grid With Flywheels and Air

Rachel — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 17:42:27 +0000

The modern electric grid is getting some help from some admittedly old-fashioned technology.

Flywheels and compressed air don’t sound as sexy as wind turbines and solar cells, but the latter probably won’t go mainstream without the former.

“The growth of renewables has posed a problem,” said Imre Gyuk, program manager for energy storage research at the United States Department of Energy (DOE). “It used to be that the load [demand on the electric grid] was unpredictable, and generation would try to follow it.” As wind and solar installations proliferate, supply also has become unpredictable.

For electric grid operators, “Now it is a balancing act,” Gyuk said during the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.

Because wind power is generated only when the wind blows, and solar energy isn’t collected on a cloudy day, technologies that can store extra power when it’s not being used and mete it out when needed are becoming increasingly important.

“For this balancing act, storage is ideal,” Gyuk said.

Read the rest at NationalGeographic.com

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Astronauts Walk on “Mars,” Start Experiments

Rachel — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 17:35:03 +0000

Today, after months of anticipation, three brave astronauts set foot on Mars�or rather, a darkened, sand-filled room designed to simulate Mars.

The explorers make up half the crew of the Mars500 mission, a project designed to study the psychological effects of a year-and-a-half long, deep-space voyage to the red planet.

Since June 2010 six men�three Russians, two Europeans, and one Chinese�have been living in isolation in a 19,423-cubic-foot (550-cubic-meter) “spaceship” outside Moscow, doing maintenance work, conducting experiments, and trying to stave off boredom by playing Rock Band and reading the complete works of Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez.

The crew is made up of volunteers, some with no real-life space experience but all with applicable skills, such as engineering and medicine.

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Bumblebees Taking a Nosedive in North America

Rachel — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 17:37:20 +0000

Four bumblebee species once common across North America have suffered precipitous�and so far mysterious�declines, a new study shows.

Within the past 20 years abundances of the bee species Bombus occidentalis, B. affinis, B. pensylvanicus, and B. terricola have plummeted by up to 96 percent.

The finding is based on a new analysis of more than 73,000 museum collections of bumblebees, which showed where bees had been found over the last century, as well as collections of wild bees across the United States. The study looked at 8 of the 50 known bumblebee species in North America.

“We found that yes, indeed, [these four species] are seriously declining, but there are some other species doing very well,” said study co-author Sydney Cameron of the University of Illinois’ department of entomology.

The discovery makes it harder to pinpoint pesticides or climate change as a cause for the bug die-off, because those factors wouldn’t explain why other bumblebee species in the same areas have survived.

Read the rest at NationalGeographic.com

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Fuzzy Critters’ Crystallized Pee Changes Climate Record?

Rachel — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 19:14:23 +0000

A guinea-pig-like mammal’s prehistoric urine may be one of the best tools for understanding climate change in arid regions, scientists announced Tuesday. Already, analysis of crystallized rock hyrax pee appears to contradict some results of current climate models.

Looking like a rodent but more closely related to elephants and manatees, the roughly rabbit-size rock hyrax has, for tens of thousands of years, lived in colonies of up to about 50 individuals in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.

The animals use communal “toilets” called middens, where rock hyrax waste slowly crystallizes into a layered, amber-esque, smelly substance.

Like amber, the middens can contain valuable evidence—in this case, traces of how much grass the animals were eating and isotopes indicating how dry that grass was.

Read the rest at nationalgeographic.com

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