FLAIR - UTILITIES

Science Monitor
NEW INVENTIONS AND DISCOVERIES
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Scientists have found a mysterious object that may be a sun-like star in its death throes, or a pair of ageing stars masquerading as a single youngster. In any case, officials at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena say it defies all known classifications. The object, called He2-90, looks like a young, dust-enshrouded star with narrow jets of material resembling strings of beads emanating from it. Each jet contains at least six bright clumps of gas speeding along at rates of at least 375,000 miles per hour. These clumps are ejected into space about every 100 years. Young stars behave in a similar way. Hubble astronomers believe the object is actually two aging stars masquerading as a single youngster. One may be a bloated red giant star shedding matter from its outer layers. This matter is then captured by gravity in a rotating accretion disk around a compact partner, most likely a young white dwarf, the collapsed remnant of a sun-like star..

The northern right whale is one of the most endangered mammals on Earth, but five whales spotted ahead of the boat on a recent shimmering August day were doing their bit to perpetuate the species. ‘‘What we are seeing is a mating ritual. The four males are rubbing and caressing the female in the hope of attracting her attention,’’ marine biologist Tom Goodwin said as the huge whales churned up the still waters of Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy. For the small group on Goodwin’s Zodiac boat, seeing five of the mammals — which number only about 300 in the world — was a breathtaking privilege, especially at such close quarters. Many scientists fear they will soon be extinct — making their sighting at close quarters from a small boat an even more poignant experience. ‘‘When you only have a population of 300, and they are forced to inbreed, you know they won’t be around forever,’’ Goodwin said.

Trees dotting an arid corner of Israel mark a front line in the global fight against desertification. It’s all in the genes, say agricultural researchers from Israel’s Hebrew University who have isolated one called BspA that protects Euphratica poplar trees against the stress of an arid environment. The Euphratica trees live in the Avdat canyon in Israel’s southern Negev desert and thrive on the area’s scarce, highly saline water. When the gene is inserted into other kinds of poplar trees, they also adapt, the scientists said. Researchers believe that the gene transfer technology has enormous potential in that it might eventually be applied to protect other kinds of plants under environmental threat.

Results from new Martian meteorites seem to be opening up a Pandora’s box of questions about Mars. Evidence from the rocks doesn’t seem compatible with the trusted scientific conclusions about Mars: that the majority of its surface is billions of years old. The Los Angeles meteorite discovered last fall was only 175 million years old — contemporary in geologic terms. It is a volcanic rock that cooled from magma near the Martian surface and is one of seven meteorites with ages of about 175 million years old. This applies to nearly half of the 15 Martian meteorites with known ages. The finding stands in startling contrast to older, more accepted theories about Mars, which hold that geological activity on the Red Planet ended billions of years ago.

Two new studies bolster the popular theory that the moon formed from debris after a rogue planet smacked into Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. One fresh line of evidence for the so-called ‘‘big whack’’ comes from the oldest record of Earth’s ocean tides ever found — 3.2-billion-year-old rocks from South Africa. Pinstriped sand-and-silt layers in the rocks were deposited by daily, fortnightly and monthly tidal cycles. The layers reveal the primeval moon’s orbit was nearly circular, as it is today, consistent with the ‘‘giant impact theory,’’ said Virginia Tech geologist Ken Eriksson in the journal Geology. Eriksson said the South African rocks also indicate that 3.2 billion years ago, the moon orbited Earth in perhaps a 20-day month and was 25-percent closer to Earth than it is today. But Earth would have spun faster, so there would have been about 550 days in a year.

In the not too distant future, flesh-and-bone astronaut explorers may meet their match as automatons become increasingly imbued with the robotic ‘‘right stuff.’’ In years to come, NASA robot experts see an increasing need for humans and robots fulfilling assignments in space together. While not prioritised as yet, ‘‘a cloud of possible missions are out there,’’ said David Lavery, NASA programme executive for solar system exploration. Working on robotics for some 15 years, Lavery said a main research thrust of NASA is giving an operator the ability to not only see what a robot sees, but to also allow that person to be fully ‘‘immersed’’ in the environment surrounding the robot.