Aurora Borealis - Dance of the Spirits

Could our planet be under attack from the unearthly forces that cast a mysterious glow across the poles, disrupting life as we know it?

The strange, beautiful coloured lights that circle the Earth's polar regions are a source of fascination for many. 

But as the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, dance in the frozen skies over Alaska, scientists' trigger fingers are poised to launch rockets. 

This magnificent phenomenon, Aurora Borealis is named after the Roman goddess of dawn, Aurora, and the Greek name for the north wind, Boreas. It is also known as "Dance of the Spirits" by the Cree  and was believed a sign from the heaven's during the Middle Ages in Europe.

 

 The lights at their most frequent in late autumn and winter/early spring could be spotted between the autumn equinox and spring equinox (21 September - 21 March), as it is dark between 6 pm and 1 am. However, the weather is also of importance, and September, October and November tend to be wet and snowless in the north

  Auroras seen near the magnetic pole may be high overhead, but from farther away, they illuminate the northern horizon as a greenish glow or sometimes a faint red, as if the Sun were rising from an unusual direction. 

Discrete aurora often display magnetic field lines or curtain-like structures, and can change within seconds or glow unchanging for hours, most often in fluorescent green. The phenomenon most often occurs near the equinoxes.  

 

Researchers at the world's largest land-based rocket range hope to learn more about these storms and their impact on lives in the northern hemisphere. 

The luminous sheets of light might look spectacular, but they are also visual indicators of geomagnetic storms in space that can interfere with satellites, power grids, navigation and communication systems. They can even corrode oil pipelines.

It is this disruption that the researchers are trying to help mitigate. 

LISP Inventor mourned by AI Community

American Scientist and Artificial Intelligence Researcher, John McCarthy, Inventor of the computer language LISP has died at the age of 84.

LISP went on to become the programming language of choice for the AI community, and is still used today.

Professor McCarthy is also credited with coining the term 

"Artificial Intelligence" 

in 1955 when he detailed plans for the first Dartmouth conference. 

The brainstorming sessions helped focus early AI research.

Prof McCarthy's proposal for the event put forward the idea that "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it".

The conference, which took place in the summer of 1956, brought together experts in language, sensory input, learning machines and other fields to discuss the potential of information technology.

Other AI experts describe it as a critical moment.

"John McCarthy was foundational in the creation of the discipline Artificial Intelligence," said Noel Sharkey, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sheffield.

"His contribution in naming the subject and organising the Dartmouth conference still resonates today." 

In 1971 Prof McCarthy was awarded the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in recognition of his importance to the field. He went on to win the National Medal of Science in 1991.

After retiring in 2000, Prof McCarthy remained Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University, maintaining a website where he gathered his ideas about the future of robots, the sustainability of human progress and some of his science fiction writing.

"John McCarthy's main contribution to AI was his founding of the field of knowledge representation and reasoning, which was the main focus of his research over the last 50 years," said Prof Sharkey

He added that Prof McCarthy wished he had called the discipline Computational Intelligence, rather than AI. However, he said he recognised his choice had probably attracted more people to the subject

LISP

 

Prof McCarthy devised LISP at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which he detailed in an influential paper in 1960. 

The computer language used symbolic expressions, rather than numbers, and was widely adopted by other researchers because it gave them the ability to be more creative.

"The invention of LISP was a landmark in AI, enabling AI programs to be easily read for the first time," said Prof David Bree, from the Turin-based Institute for Scientific Interchange.

"It remained the AI language, especially in North America, for many years and had no major competitor until Edinburgh developed Prolog."

Mystery of The First Recorded Supernova...

A mystery surrounding the first recorded supernova - seen by Chinese astronomers in AD185 - has been solved.

The supernova RCW 86 lit up the sky for eight months, documented at the time as a "guest star". 

In more recent times, astronomers have wondered how it grew so large, so fast.

Space telescope observations now suggest that before exploding, a wind of material from the star blew a cavity around it, into which the supernova could expand much more quickly.

The supernova, about 8,000 light-years away, is huge - if the infrared light it emits could be seen by our eyes, it would appear to be as large in the sky as the full Moon.

The findings, published in the Astrophysical Journal, combine existing data from the Chandra X-ray telescope and the XMM-Newton Observatory with recent images from the US space agency Nasa's Spitzer and Wide-field Infrared Survey (Wise) telescopes.


Both of these telescopes are sensitive to infrared light, giving a picture of the conditions of material that is at fairly low temperatures in the supernova remnant. 

Taken together, the data show that the supernova initially expanded into a comparatively empty "cavity", meaning its material could quickly expand unimpeded.

However, the case is not closed for RCW 86; these cavities are associated only with what are called core-collapse supernovas, but the Chandra and XMM-Newton observations show evidence of a great deal of iron in the remnant - associated instead with Type 1A supernovas.


"Modern astronomers unveiled one secret of a two-millennia-old cosmic mystery only to reveal another," said Bill Danchi, a programme scientist for the Spitzer and Wise missions.

"Now, with multiple observatories extending our senses in space, we can fully appreciate the remarkable physics behind this star's death throes, yet still be as in awe of the cosmos as the ancient astronomers."

www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment

The Earth's surface really is getting warmer....

The Earth's surface really is getting warmer, a new analysis by a US scientific group set up in the wake of the "Climategate" affair has concluded.

The Berkeley Earth Project has used new methods and some new data, but finds the same warming trend seen by groups such as the UK Met Office and Nasa.

The project received funds from sources that back organisations lobbying against action on climate change.

"Climategate", in 2009, involved claims global warming had been exaggerated.
Emails of University of East Anglia (UEA) climate scientists were hacked, posted online and used by critics to allege manipulation of climate change data.

Fresh start

The Berkeley group says it has also found evidence that changing sea temperatures in the north Atlantic may be a major reason why the Earth's average temperature varies globally from year to year.

The project was established by University of California physics professor Richard Muller, who was concerned by claims that established teams of climate researchers had not been entirely open with their data.

He gathered a team of 10 scientists, mostly physicists, including such luminaries as Saul Perlmutter, winner of this year's Nobel Physics Prize for research showing the Universe's expansion is accelerating.

Funding came from a number of sources, including charitable foundations maintained by the Koch brothers, the billionaire US industrialists, who have also donated large sums to organisations lobbying against acceptance of man-made global warming

"I was deeply concerned that the group [at UEA] had concealed discordant data," Prof Muller told BBC News. "Science is best done when the problems with the analysis are candidly shared."

The group's work also examined claims from "sceptical" bloggers that temperature data from weather stations did not show a true global warming trend. The claim was that many stations have registered warming because they are located in or near cities, and those cities have been growing - the urban heat island effect.
The Berkeley group found about 40,000 weather stations around the world whose output has been recorded and stored in digital form.

It developed a new way of analysing the data to plot the global temperature trend over land since 1800.
What came out was a graph remarkably similar to those produced by the world's three most important and established groups, whose work had been decried as unreliable and shoddy in climate sceptic circles.

Two of those three records are maintained in the US, by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa).
http://berkeleyearth.org/index.phpThe third is a collaboration between the UK Met Office and UEA's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), from which the e-mails that formed the basis of the "Climategate" furore were hacked two years ago.

"Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK," said Prof Muller.

"This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change sceptics did not seriously affect their conclusions."

Since the 1950s, the average temperature over land has increased by 1C, the group found.
They also report that although the urban heat island effect is real - which is well-established - it is not behind the warming registered by the majority of weather stations around the world. They also showed that in the US, weather stations rated as "high quality" by Noaa showed the same warming trend as those rated as "low quality".

Prof Phil Jones, the CRU scientist who came in for the most personal criticism during "Climategate", was cautious about interpreting the Berkeley results because they have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

"I look forward to reading the finalised paper once it has been reviewed and published," he said.

  The findings so far provide validation for Phil Jones, targeted during the "Climategate" affair 

 

"These initial findings are very encouraging, and echo our own results and our conclusion that the impact of urban heat islands on the overall global temperature is minimal."

The Berkeley team has chosen to release the findings initially on its own website.
They are asking for comments and feedback before preparing the manuscripts for formal scientific publication.

In part, this counters the accusation made during "Climategate" that climate scientists formed a tight clique who peer-reviewed each other's papers and made sure their own global warming narrative was the only one making it into print.

But for Richard Muller, this free circulation also marks a return to how science should be done.
"That is the way I practised science for decades; it was the way everyone practised it until some magazines - particularly Science and Nature - forbade it," he said. "That was not a good change, and still many fields such as string theory practice the traditional method wholeheartedly."

This open "wiki" method of review is regularly employed in physics, the home field for seven of the 10 Berkeley team. Bob Ward, policy and communications director for the Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change and the Environment in London, said the warming of the Earth's surface was unequivocal.
"So-called 'sceptics' should now drop their thoroughly discredited claims that the increase in global average temperature could be attributed to the impact of growing cities," he said.

"More broadly, this study also proves once again how false it was for 'sceptics' to allege that the e-mails hacked from UEA proved that the CRU land temperature record had been doctored.

"It is now time for an apology from all those, including US presidential hopeful Rick Perry, who have made false claims that the evidence for global warming has been faked by climate scientists."

Ocean currents
The Berkeley group does depart from the "orthodox" picture of climate science in its depiction of short-term variability in the global temperature.

The El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is generally thought to be the main reason for inter-annual warming or cooling.

But by the Berkeley team's analysis, the global temperature correlates more closely with the state of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) index - a measure of sea surface temperature in the north Atlantic.

There are theories suggesting that the AMO index is in turn driven by fluctuations in the north Atlantic current commonly called the Gulf Stream.

The team suggests it is worth investigating whether the long-term AMO cycles, which are thought to last 65-70 years, may play a part in the temperature rise, fall and rise again seen during the 20th Century.
But they emphasise that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) driven by greenhouse gas emissions is very much in their picture. "Had we found no global warming, then that would have ruled out AGW," said Prof Muller. "Had we found half as much, it would have suggested that prior estimates [of AGW] were too large; if we had found more warming, it would have raised the question of whether prior estimates were too low.
"But we didn't; we found that the prior rise was confirmed. That means that we do not directly affect prior estimates."

The team next plans to look at ocean temperatures, in order to construct a truly global dataset.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment

http://berkeleyearth.org

Galileo goes into Orbit

Europe's first satellite-navigation spacecraft "Galileo" has been sent into orbit.

The two Galileo satellites were launched by a Russian Soyuz rocket from its new base in French Guiana at 07:30 local time (10:30 GMT; 11:30 BST).

The European Commission (EC) is investing billions of euros in its own version of the American GPS system.

It expects Galileo to bring significant returns to EU nations in the form of new businesses that can exploit precise space-borne timing and location data.

The Soyuz mission was a long one - it took three hours and 49 minutes to get the satellite pair into their correct orbit 23,222km above the Earth. "Galileo is at the heart of our new industrial policy," EC Vice-President Antonio Tajani said once the separation confirmation had come through. "We must commit very strongly to Galileo. We need this; this not entertainment. This is necessary for the competitiveness of our European Union in the world."

Mr Tajani then announced the industrial competition to procure 6-8 more satellites over and above the 18 already contracted.

Working Together

The two spacecraft launched on Friday are pathfinders for the Galileo system as a whole.

Together with another pair of satellites to be lofted next year, they will prove that Galileo works as designed, from the spacecraft in the sky to all the control and management operations on the ground.
 

"This phase is called in-orbit validation - IOV," said Javier Benedicto, the Galileo project manager at the European Space Agency (Esa), the EC's technical agent on the project. 

"The intention is to test and verify the various system functionalities and the ultimate system performance," he told BBC News.

Deployment of the full Galileo system is likely to take most of the decade. Sat-nav users themselves will not immediately see any benefits from Galileo, however. That will have to wait until a navigation signal is switched on, and it is likely to be 2015 before there are enough spacecraft in orbit for Galileo to start to show its true capability.

Compared with the Americans' current version of GPS, Galileo carries more precise atomic clocks - the heart of any sat-nav system.

In theory, the data transmitted by Galileo should therefore be significantly better than its US counterpart. Whereas a position fixed by the publicly available GPS signal might have an error of about 10m, Galileo's designers promise metre-scale accuracy when full deployment is achieved.

But the plan is to make the different systems interoperable, meaning the biggest, most obvious benefit to users will simply be the fact that they can see more satellites in the sky at any one time.

So, as the decade progresses and the number of spacecraft in orbit increases, the performance of all sat-nav devices should improve. Fixes ought to be faster and more reliable, even in testing environments such as big cities where tall buildings will often obscure a receiver's view of a transmitting spacecraft.

Galileo was famously called the "Common Agricultural Policy in the sky" by one British politician infuriated by the price of the project.

It is presently running about a decade behind schedule, and it will cost in excess of five billion euros to put the full constellation (27 satellites and three spares) in orbit before 2020. Ongoing running costs, including the renewal of worn out spacecraft, are estimated to be about 800 million euros a year.

But the EC maintains this expenditure will be dwarfed by the economic returns of having improved sat-nav.
Few people perhaps recognise the full extent of GPS usage today. Sat-nav is not just about drivers trying to find their way on unfamiliar roads - banks employ GPS time to stamp global financial transactions; and telecommunications and computer networks are synchronised on the "ticks" of the satellites' atomic clocks
.
Indeed, Britain's Royal Academy of Engineering issued a report earlier in the year that said the UK economy had become dangerously over-reliant on satellite-navigation signals, and that too many applications had little or no back-up were these signals to go down.

In that sense, having a second system that is separate but compatible with the US GPS network should make applications more robust. "Nevertheless, like GPS, the Galileo signal is transmitted from over 10,000 miles above the Earth's surface, and Galileo therefore shares many of the vulnerabilities that the academy described in its recent report," said lead author, Dr Martyn Thomas.

"The report recommended investment in a high-power, terrestrial, low-frequency alternative to GPS and Galileo. The best candidate remains the enhanced Loran system, eLoran, that has been researched and developed in the UK by the General Lighthouse Authorities."

Pad beauty

Galileo should have three services available by mid-decade: one that is open and free to anyone with compatible receiver equipment; another that is encrypted and for use by law enforcement and other government agencies; and a third application dedicated to search and rescue (SAR).

This last service would enable sailors in distress, for example, to transmit their position and receive an acknowledgement that help is on its way.

The technology for SAR on Galileo was supposed to be being provided by China until late technical and political disagreements prompted the EC to look for alternative sourcing. As a consequence, the first two spacecraft will fly with dummy SAR payloads.

Friday's launch was doubly significant because it marked the first time a Russian Soyuz rocket had launched from Western territory. A new spaceport costing half a billion euros has been fashioned for the rocket in French Guiana's jungle landscape.

"Some people say it is a beautiful launch pad. I don't know about that, but it is certainly very impressive," Jean-Marc Astorg, who led the Soyuz in French Guiana project for the French space agency (Cnes), told BBC News.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment

Tintin enters the third dimension

More than 80 years since Tintin first appeared in print in Belgium, the roving boy reporter has been transformed for the big screen by Steven Spielberg.
 

Creator and illustrator Herge's pen lines have been brought to life by 3D and performance capture techniques, in an animated movie that takes the comic book hero firmly off the page.

The young adventurer's famous quiff is lustrous and red and his face full of expression, as up-to-the-minute technology brings him alive and makes him eerily human. But will traditional fans accept this new guise?

Actor Jamie Bell, who provides the voice and human movement for the Belgian icon, is adamant that Tintin "deserves" such treatment and calls Spielberg "the only guy who could have made this movie".

"In the comic books he's not a living, breathing person. In the film, every strand of his quiff moves," explains the British star, who has given Tintin a standard English accent and says an American twang would have been "criminal".

"I've never seen such a realistic Tintin in my life. In the comics the characters don't look like people - they're surrealist drawings," he adds.
 
The 25-year-old says that the film - which is produced by Peter Jackson - can be "paused at any moment and put back into a comic".

The Billy Elliot star reveals that while performing the actors, including Andy Serkis and Daniel Craig, had frames from the original cartoons pasted around their studio "so we could look directly at the source".

Bell believes that Tintin's transformation will draw in a fresh wave of fans - on their own terms.
"To try and bring Tintin to a new generation of children, you have to present it to them in a way they understand. Steven Spielberg they understand; they understand 3D.

"I hope they see this film and decide to go back to the source material," says the actor, adding that "this movie will hopefully branch out from Tintin's exclusive fanbase".

Bell also maintains that he will return for further Tintin movies, should they be made, so long as the character is "represented in the right way".

Michael Farr is a leading light on Tintin who knew Herge and has written extensively on the subject.
"Herge was terribly interested in new technology and a film buff. I think he would have been very excited by the new film.

"When I was writing his biography I found among his papers a note he had written three months before he died [in 1983] which said if there's one person who can bring Tintin successfully to the screen, it's this young American director - and he meant Steven Spielberg," Mr Farr explains.

As for fans with an expert knowledge, who are also known as Tintinologists, he thinks there will be a "mixed" reaction to the new movie, given the visual familiarity with Herge's enduring image of Tintin.

But he adds: "Nobody has said to me it is a disastrous development. Not one fan I have met has said they would rather it hadn't been done. It's an endorsement of their enthusiasm."

'Tintin for morons'

Mr Farr also believes that the film will draw new converts to the original Tintin comic books, which he calls a "running success story".

His note of caution concerns the US, which has maintained its own cartoon-strip superhero tradition.
 
"American audiences may find the film a bit difficult. Some have known him and loved him, like Spielberg, but not the audience at large."

While US audiences must wait until Christmas to see Tintin, UK critics have delivered early verdicts, including The Guardian's Nicolas Lezard, a lifelong devotee of the comic books.

"As it is, the film has turned a subtle, intricate and beautiful work of art into the typical bombast of the modern blockbuster, Tintin for morons," he writes.


The Telegraph's Robbie Collin also draws comparisons with the original comic books.

"As a family-friendly adventure romp," he says, "it ticks every box, but the unique appeal of the Tintin books does not lie in seeing boxes being ticked."

Empire magazine's Ian Nathan, meanwhile, says: "No room is found for Herge's political satire, or his more becalmed, intuitive moments, to gaze, incredulous, at the world."

But the writer adds that it is "an iconography so ingrained in the artist's style that it might be untranslatable".
Spielberg's latest venture would appear to be coming under close scrutiny, as a Belgian institution turns into Hollywood hot property.

Tintin and the Secret of the Unicorn opens in UK cinemas tomorrow (Wednesday 26 October) and is due for release in the US on 21 December.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts

Argentina's Cristina Fernandez to keep changing history

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has won a landslide election victory. 

With votes counted from 75% of polling stations, Ms Fernandez has won 53% of vote, enough to secure re-election in the first round.
Her closest challenger - the socialist Hermes Binner - had just 17%.


In a victory speech, Ms Fernandez said she wanted to keep changing history, as thousands chanted and waved flags in Buenos Aires' Plaza de Mayo.

"Count on me to continue pursuing the project," she said, watched by supporters on a huge TV screen. "All I want is to keep collaborating ... to keep Argentina growing."

If confirmed, the victory margin would be the biggest since Argentina returned to democracy in 1983.
Votes in Ms Fernandez's stronghold of Buenos Aires province are still to be counted.

Ms Fernandez, 58, has presided over strong economic growth and introduced popular social policies.
The sudden death of her husband, former president Nestor Kirchner, a year ago brought her a wave of public sympathy.

Her critics say she has also benefited from a weak and fragmented opposition in this election.
"This is a strange night for me," Ms Fernandez told her jubilant supporters. "This man who transformed Argentina led us all and gave everything he had and more ... Without him, without his valour and courage, it would have been impossible to get to this point."

Ms Fernandez may also regain control of Congress, which she lost in mid-term elections in 2009.
Nearly 30 million voters were choosing who will fill 130 seats in the lower house of congress, 24 senate seats and nine governor's offices as well as hundreds of local seats.

Following her election in 2007, her public support quickly plummeted to around 20% after rows with farmers and media groups over of the introduction of exports quotas.

It was often suggested, during her early years in office, that it was her husband who was really running the country. Nestor Kirchner was president from 2003 to 2007 and stood aside to let his wife run for office to succeed him.He was widely expected to run again for the presidency in 2011 until his sudden death from a heart attack last October.

Political analysts say Ms Fernandez's current popularity is mostly due to the health of the economy, which has boomed thanks to high prices for exports such as soya.

She has also carried out social programmes - such as benefits for three million of the country's poorest children - which have proved extremely popular. But her critics accuse her of pursuing populist policies, and question whether such programmes can be sustained.

She has also been accused of downplaying the scale of inflation, which is now the second highest in Latin America, behind Venezuela.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america

A Planet is Born !!

HONOLULU (AP) — Astronomers have captured the first direct image of a planet being born.

Adam Kraus, of the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy, said the planet is being formed out of dust and gas circling a 2-milion-year-old star about 450 light years from Earth.

The planet itself, based on scientific models of how planets form, is estimated to have started taking shape about 50,000 to 100,000 years ago.

Called LkCa 15 b, it's the youngest planet ever observed. The previous record holder was about five times older.

Kraus and his colleague, Michael Ireland from Macquarie University and the Australian Astronomical Observatory, used Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea to find the planet.

"We're catching this object at the perfect time. We see this young star, it has a disc around it that planets are probably forming out of and we see something right in the middle of a gap in the disc," Kraus said in a telephone interview.

Kraus presented the discovery Wednesday at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Kraus and Ireland's research paper on the discovery is due to appear in The Astrophysical Journal.

Observing planets while they're forming can help scientists answer questions like whether planets form early in the life of a star or later, and whether they form relatively close to stars or farther away.

Planets can change orbits after forming, so it's difficult to answer such questions by studying older planets.
"These very basic questions of when and where are best answered when you can actually see the planet forming, as the process is happening right now," Kraus said.

Other planets may also be forming around the same star. Kraus said he'll continue to observe the star and hopefully will see other planets if there are in fact more.

Scientists hadn't been able to see such young planets before because the bright light of the stars they're orbiting outshines them.

Kraus and Ireland used two techniques to overcome this obstacle.
One method, which is also used by other astronomers, was to change the shape of their mirror to remove light distortions created by the Earth's atmosphere.

The other, unique method they used was to put masks over most of the telescope mirror. The combination of these two techniques allowed the astronomers to obtain high-resolution images that let them see the faint planet next to the bright star.

The astronomers found the planet while surveying 150 young dusty stars. This led to a more concentrated study of a dozen stars.

The star LkCa 15 — the planet is named after its star — was the team's second target. They immediately knew they were seeing something new, so they gathered more data on the star a year later.

news.yahoo.com