The Enlightening Science Thread

Sifting through atmospheres of far-off worlds

New craters abound: Mars camera reveals hundreds of impacts each year

Comet ISON is hurtling toward uncertain destiny with Sun

BBC News - Asteroid 1998 QE2 flies past Earth

Woolly Mammoth Found With Liquid Blood Still In It — Fueling Talks Of Cloning The Animal

A woolly mammoth carcass, still with liquid blood in it, was recently discovered in the Arctic. The 10,000-year-old mammoth was found in the remote New Siberian Islands in the Arctic Ocean. A place where temperatures get as low as -10 Celsius. The mammoth is estimated to have been about 60 years old when it died.

Source

A Guy

How's your pareidolia? Rats on Mars?

BBC News - Pareidolia: Why we see faces in hills, the Moon and toasties

Magnetic Monopoles Erase Data: Efficient and Long-Lived Storage of Information in Magnetic Vortices

A physical particle postulated 80 years ago, could provide a decisive step toward the realization of novel, highly efficient data storage devices. Scientists at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), the Technische Universitaet Dresden and the University of Cologne found that with magnetic monopoles in magnetic vortices, called skyrmions, information can be written and erased.

Iron filings strewn on a sheet of paper trace the field lines of a bar magnet below the paper, thereby showing the magnet's north and south poles. No matter how often it is split, the bar magnet always forms a north and a south pole. However, in the early 1930s physicist Paul A. M. Dirac postulated a particle that should, as the magnetic counterpart of the electron, possess only one of the two poles, and should carry just one magnetic elementary charge.

Looking for a simple way to study the magnetic vortices, researchers associated with TUM physicist Prof. Christian Pfleiderer collaborated with Prof. Lukas Eng's group at the Technische Universitaet Dresden, which has a magnetic force microscope. When they scanned the surface of the materials with this microscope, they not only observed the vortices for the first time, but also found that neighboring skyrmions merge with one another.

Full article: Magnetic monopoles erase data: Efficient and long-lived storage of information in magnetic vortices

BBC - Future - Technology - The magic of truth and lies (and iPods)

Eight bronze age boats surface at Fens creek in record find

A fleet of eight prehistoric boats, including one almost nine metres long, has been discovered in a Cambridgeshire quarry on the outskirts of Peterborough.

The vessels, all deliberately sunk more than 3,000 years ago, are the largest group of bronze age boats ever found in the same UK site and most are startlingly well preserved. One is covered inside and out with decorative carving described by conservator Ian Panter as looking "as if they'd been playing noughts and crosses all over it". Another has handles carved from the oak tree trunk for lifting it out of the water. One still floated after 3,000 years and one has traces of fires lit on the wide flat deck on which the catch was evidently cooked.

Source

A Guy

Wow 3,000-year-old fleet discovered, would like to see that (I make a point of watching Time Team on TV) :)