'Angry Birds: Space' gameplay ... from space

News of science:Need more proof thatAngry Birds developer Rovio is a big deal? They convinced NASA to help promote their next game -- from space.

The game publisher posted a video introducing the first footage of Angry Birds: Space. The announcement was made by astronaut Don Pettit aboard the International Space Station.

Most of the video involves Pettit participating in physics demonstrations "that involve some of the things you might see in the Angry Birds game."

The footage of Angry Birds: Space in action kicks off at right around the 3-minute mark. Gravity definitely plays a role, as viewers will see birds floating in space poised to knock out hiding pigs.

The game launches March 22 for Apple's iOS, Google Android, PC and Mac.

News source:usatoday

Mars Swings Into Opposition March 3

News of science:Every two years and two months the Earth and Mars line up with the Sun, giving us a relatively close view of the red planet. Cynthia Graber reports.
Now's a great time to break out that backyard telescope. Because Saturday, March 3, is the Mars Opposition. It's one of the times that the Earth and Mars pass the closest to one another. The name - the Mars opposition - means that Mars and the Sun are on, well, opposite sides of us. And it happens only once every two years and two months.
But if you don't have such equipment handy, you might want to head over to the online Slooh Space Camera.
It's usually a members-only site that allows users to look at web images broadcast from telescopes around the world and to click to snap photos. The pictures get integrated into Google Earth/Sky. The site also offers free weekly space shows.
But Saturday there'll be a free live streaming of the Mars Opposition, hosted by astronomy experts. It'll include views of the planet from a variety of observatories including those in Arizona and the Canary Islands. You'll be able to pick out surface features such as canyons, volcanoes and polar caps.
The online broadcast will begin on Saturday at 11 pm Eastern time. Head over to the online Slooh Space Camera.
News source:scientificamerican

Planet of the Apes? No, Humans Have the Cooperative Edge

News of science:Unlike other animals, humans have a “cumulative culture” that enables us to build bigger, better and more powerful tools by sharing knowledge and learning from one another.

So researchers are reporting after a study that compared preschool-age children with chimps and capuchin monkeys when solving a puzzle. The children cooperated; the animals did not.

For the study, which appears in the current issue of Science, the researchers presented children, chimps and monkeys with a puzzle box that had to be solved in stages. Each stage provided a better reward (stickers for the children, fruit for the primates).

“Human children would teach other and motivate each other,” said an author of the study, Kevin Laland, a biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “We saw literally hundreds of cases where children would give other children stickers they’d received.”

Among the chimps and capuchins, by contrast, “we didn’t see one instance of sharing,” he said.

The scientists also wondered whether adult chimps and monkeys would help their young learn.

“But in fact, we found exactly the opposite, that parents were stealing their offspring’s food,” Dr. Laland said.

The study highlights one of the most important aspects of modern human society: the power of teaching. “Perhaps the most effective means through which you can cooperate is through teaching,” Dr. Laland said. In this way, a basic skill or piece of knowledge spreads through society, “and then one individual will refine it, and then that will be spread through the society, and then that process will be repeated.”

That may help explain why “we have particle accelerators and sophisticated medicine,” he continued. “When you think about all the component parts that go into it, the technology that we have now is way beyond anything any one individual could invent.” 

News source:nytimes

Giant Jurassic Fleas Packed a Mean Mouth

News of science:Scientists have discovered the world’s oldest fleas to date — bloodsuckers that lived among (and possibly on) dinosaurs.

Fossils found in northeastern China belong to two ancient species of fleas, the researchers report in the current issue of the journal Nature: one dating to the Middle Jurassic, about 165 million years ago, and the other to the Early Cretaceous, about 125 million years ago.

Females ranged from one-eighth to half an inch long, males from one-sixth to a third of an inch.

That makes them giants. Today’s fleas are only about one-tenth the size.

Also, although modern fleas feed primarily on the blood of mammals, the ancient fleas may have relied on that of dinosaurs.

“They had very elongated and sharp mouth parts,” said the study’s first author, Diying Huang, a paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nanjing.

This sharp mouth part, known as a siphon, may have allowed the fleas to penetrate the leathery skin of reptiles like dinosaurs, Dr. Huang said.

But he added that much more remained to be uncovered to determine what animals the fleas used as hosts. Mammals did exist at the time, though they were far less common, and fleas may have fed off them.

“So we need to know more about the function and morphology of the fleas,” Dr. Huang said. 

News source:nytimes

Dark matter blob confounds experts

News of science:
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope are mystified by a merging galaxy cluster known as Abell 520 in which concentrations of visible matter and dark matter have apparently come unglued.
A report on the Hubble observations, published in the Astrophysical Journal, raises more questions than answers about a cosmic pile-up that's occurring 2.4 billion light-years away.
"We were not expecting this," the study team's senior theorist, Arif Babul of the University of Victoria, said in a news release. "According to our current theory, galaxies and dark matter are expected to stay together, even through a collision. But that's not what's happening in Abell 520. Here, the dark matter appears to have pooled to form the dark core, but most of the associated galaxies seem to have moved on."

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The dark core was first detected in 2007 during a survey aimed at measuring the masses of 50 galaxy clusters using data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope at Mauna Kea in Hawaii.The discovery presented the perfect opportunity to map the distribution of visible vs. dark matter in the cosmic mess. Studies have shown that we can see only about 15 percent of the matter in the universe. Most of the matter that exists around us can't be seen directly, but can be detected only by its gravitational effect. Scientists don't know what dark matter is, but they suspect it's an exotic class of subatomic particles that can interact only weakly with the kinds of matter we can see.Dark matter is thought to provide the invisible "scaffolding" for structure in the universe, gravitationally binding galaxy clusters into a cosmic web. Those clusters get so massive that they bend the light of distant galaxies like a lens. By analyzing those subtle deflections of light, it's possible to come up with a map showing where the dark matter lies. That's what astronomers did with Abell 520 — first with the telescope in Hawaii, and then with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.The results contradict what scientists thought they knew about dark matter. In a previous study of the Bullet Cluster, 3 billion light-years from Earth, astronomers found that concentrations of dark matter blasted through the scene of a collision, with their associated galaxies tagging along. Meanwhile, waves of hot, X-ray-emitting gas clumped up in the middle.

In the case of Abell 520, the situation is completely different: The galaxies sailed through the collision, but the dark matter piled up in the middle, along with the hot gas.
Researchers were hoping that Hubble would resolve the mystery first posed by the detection of the dark core in 2007. No such luck.
"We know of maybe six examples of high-speed galaxy cluster collisions where the dark matter has been mapped. But the Bullet Cluster and Abell 520 are the two that show the clearest evidence of recent mergers, and they are inconsistent with each other," James Jee, an astronomer at the University of California at Davis who is the lead author of the Astrophysical Journal paper, said in a news release from the Space Telescope Science Institute. "No single theory explains the different behavior of dark matter in those two collisions. We need more examples."
Jee, Babul and their colleagues propose several possible explanations for the discrepancy. One explanation might be that the dynamics of the Abell 520 collision are more complex than the Bullet Cluster's crash. Maybe multiple collisions, involving three or four galaxy clusters, have led to the dark matter pile-up.
Another possibility is that there's actually lots of ordinary galactic material in the core, but it's just too dim to be seen, even by Hubble. That would suggest that the super-dim galaxies in the core have somehow formed far fewer stars than normal galaxies.

The most unsettling scenario proposes that there are different kinds of dark matter, and some of those kinds are "stickier" than others. Abell 520 might have a particularly sticky kind of dark matter that interacts with itself and clumps up like a wet snowball.The astronomers behind the Abell 520 observations are now planning to run computer simulations of cluster crashes to find out whether there's an unusual set of conditions that could produce those observations and still fit current theory. "My colleagues tell me the likelihood is nil," Ahmed Mahdavi, a member of the study team from San Francisco State University, said in a news release, "but now we have the responsibility to go and do the hard work to check the simulations."If the simulations aren't successful, the mystery might have to be left for particle physicists to mull over. Some hope that experiments such as Europe's Large Hadron Collider and the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, installed last year on the International Space Station, will eventually shed additional light on the dark matter mystery."I'm just as perplexed as I was back in 2007," Mahdavi said. "It's a pretty disturbing observation to have out there."

Update for 5:40 p.m. ET: The picture of Abell 520 served as this week's "Where in the Cosmos" picture puzzle on the Cosmic Log Facebook page this morning, and it took only a few minutes for Ryan Marquis to figure out what the image was all about. "It appears the dark matter and galaxies aren't anchored as previously believed," he wrote.
I'm sending Ryan a pair of 3-D glasses as a token of my appreciation. It turns out Ryan's a fellow space blogger who posts his items on 46BLYZ. We're glad to have him as a Cosmic Log correspondent, and hope that more of you will join our Facebook community. That's where you'll find the next "Where in the Cosmos" puzzle, a week from now.
News source:cosmiclog.msnbc.msn

Decision About One Second Is Postponed for Three Years

News of science:The leap second survives — for at least three more years.
Delegates at an international telecommunications meeting in Geneva were to decide on Thursday whether to recommend the elimination of leap seconds, which are occasionally added to the world’s atomic clocks to keep them synchronized with Earth’s rotational cycles.
Richard C. Beaird, a State Department official who led the American delegation, said in a statement that discussions at the meeting “revealed a heightened degree of interest that has not previously existed on this issue.” With no consensus among the delegates, officials at the International Telecommunication Union, part of the United Nations, sent the issue back to a panel of experts for further study. A revised proposal will be introduced no earlier than 2015.
Mr. Beaird characterized the delay as “a significant step forward” and said the burst of interest in leap seconds “should allow for a decision that will have the widest possible backing.”
Opponents of leap seconds, led by the United States, say the sporadic addition of these timekeeping hiccups is a potential nightmare for computer networks that depend on precise time to coordinate communications.
But nations like Britain that wish to keep the current system say that eliminating leap seconds might create bigger problems.
They also oppose the uncoupling of time from the notion that the length of a day is tied to the motion of Earth and Sun. Because Earth’s rotation is gradually slowing, days are lengthening. Without leap seconds, noon on the clock would slide earlier and earlier in the morning.
The postponement pleased P. Kenneth Seidelmann, a University of Virginia professor who has argued in favor of leap seconds, but he said the study panel had been working on the issue for the better part of 10 years without reaching consensus. “What are they going to accomplish in the next three?” he asked.
The last leap second occurred in 2008. The next one will be added to clocks this year at the end of June.
News source:nytimes

California's tiniest baby goes home from hospital

News of science:

Melinda Guido, the smallest baby ever born in California, will be heading home from the hospital Friday.
She was born four months premature on Aug. 30 and weighed just more than 9 ounces, making her the second smallest in the United States and one of the world's smallest surviving babies.
Melinda was so tiny she could fit into the palm of her doctor's hand.
Doctors say the baby now weighs 4.5 pounds and has progressed enough to be discharged.
The decision was made to deliver Melinda by caesarian section when a problem developed with the placenta, which gives the fetus nutrition, blood and oxygen.
When a baby is that small, doctors say it is anybody's guess what will happen. There is little research about long-term survival. Doctors across the nation often let babies weighing less than 400 grams die. Melinda was just 270 grams at birth –- the size of a soda can.
She spent the first months of her life inside an incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit. A machine helped her breathe, and she got her nutrition through a feeding tube.
The hospital staff says it will keep a close eye on Melinda for the next six years. Children born extremely premature can suffer developmental delays and other problems, including blindness or deafness, according to doctors.
News source:latimesblogs.latimes