Flowing Water On Mars

The discovery of bright deposits on Mars could indicate that liquid water has recently flowed on a few locations on the planet.


Art © Frazetta

It has been an established fact for several years now that water exists on Mars. However, the big question is how much of it – if any – is in liquid form. The newly discovered deposits were identified by comparing different images of the same area taken by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor (MOC camera), over a period of few years. The images suggest that water may have flowed there sometime within the past seven years.


Photo: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems

ESA’s Mars Express has found large reservoirs of water underground using its radar experiment MARSIS. All are frozen, with the largest in Mars's polar regions. Such frozen underground lakes might be driven to temporarily thaw and flow across the surface by changes in temperature, caused by changes in illumination from the Sun or, possibly, by local variations in the underground pressure.


Art © Frank Cho

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100 Million Year Old Bee Found In Amber

The discovery of a 100-million-year old bee embedded in amber, perhaps the oldest bee ever found, pushes the bee fossil record back about 35 million years.



Scientists have long believed that bees first appeared about 120 million years ago -- but previous bee fossil records dated back only about 65 million years. Danforth and Poinar's fossil provides strong evidence for a more remote ancestry. The fact that the bee fossil also has some wasp traits suggests an evolutionary link between wasps and bees.

In a related study, published in the Oct. 10 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Danforth and colleagues examined early bees' structures in combination with bee DNA, producing the largest molecular and morphological study to date on bee family-level phylogeny -- the evolutionary development and diversification of a species. Their goal was to examine the early evolutionary pattern of bees and how their evolution relates to the evolution of flowering plants.



Until now, many researchers believed the most primitive bees stemmed from the family Colletidae, which implies that bees originated in the Southern Hemisphere (either South America or Australia). However, the work of Danforth and his group suggests that the earliest branches of the bee's evolutionary tree originate from the family Melittidae. That would mean that bees have an African origin and are almost as old as flowering plants, which would help explain a lot about the evolutionary diversification of these plants. link


Invisible Kid and Chameleon Boy © DC Comics

A Fossil Bee from Early Cretaceous Burmese Amber. 2006. G. O. Poinar. Science 314: 614.

When Dinosaurs Bikinis Ruled The Earth

Posters

Watch the Trailer for “When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth”.

Vaughn Bodé’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea: Part 3

Back in the 60’s Vaughn Bodé illustrated a number of classics that had been rewritten for “reading challenged” kids. The books were published by Frank E. Richards and sold exclusively to schools.

Because these books are almost impossible to find at reasonable prices I’ll be posting all the illos from the best book of the bunch, “Jules Verne’s ’20,000 Leagues Under The Sea” in eight installments.

Read: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Science Levitates Bugs

“What will happen if a living animal is put into the acoustic field? Will it also be stably levitated?", asked researcher Wenjun Xie, a materials physicist at Northwestern Polytechnical University.

Image courtesy Wenjun Xie

From Live Science:

Xie and his colleagues employed an ultrasound emitter and reflector that generated a sound pressure field between them. The emitter produced roughly 20-millimeter-wavelength sounds, meaning it could in theory levitate objects half that wavelength or less.

After the investigators got the ultrasound field going, they used tweezers to carefully place animals between the emitter and reflector. The scientists found they could float ants, beetles, spiders, ladybugs, bees, tadpoles and fish up to a little more than a third of an inch long in midair. When they levitated the fish and tadpole, the researchers added water to the ultrasound field every minute via syringe.

The levitated ant tried crawling in the air and struggled to escape by rapidly flexing its legs, although it generally failed because its feet find little purchase in the air. The ladybug tried flying away but also failed when the field was too strong to break away from.

The editors at Live Science note that acoustic levitation has been used for many years. Watch a video of a micro-gravity experiment for a NASA-related project done in 1987 by David Deak:

The Temperature At The Earth's Core

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For the first time, scientists have directly measured the amount of heat flowing from the molten metal of Earth's core into a region at the base of the mantle, a process that helps drive both the movement of tectonic plates at the surface and the geodynamo in the core that generates Earth's magnetic field.

The boundary between the core and the mantle lies half-way to the center of the Earth, at a depth of 1,740 miles (2,900 kilometers). Seismologists are able to probe the structure of this region by studying its effects on seismic waves generated by earthquakes. The new temperature measurements were obtained by relating seismic observations to a recently discovered mineral transformation that occurs at the ultrahigh pressures and temperatures prevailing near the core-mantle boundary.

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The temperature at the upper boundary of the lens, where the phase transition from perovskite to postperovskite occurs, is around 2,500 kelvins (4,000° F). At the lower boundary, where the reverse transition occurs, the temperature is around 3,500 kelvins (5,800° F). These two points gave the researchers a temperature gradient from which they calculated the heat flow, or thermal flux: about 80 million watts per square meter. Extrapolating to the entire surface of the core gave a total heat flow of about 13 trillion watts. link

A Post-Perovskite Lens and D'' Heat Flux Beneath the Central Pacific. 2006. T. Lay et al. Science 314: 1272-1276.

Space Voyagers: The Delta Brain by Alex Nino

Legardary comic book artist Alex Nino recently returned to the medium after too-long an absence with a book called God the Dyslexic Dog. I’m not sure what’s it’s about (other than god as a ‘dyslexic dog’—a point made in just about EVERY panel) but anything with his art in it is worth picking up (despite a mess of a colouring and printing job that pretty much obscures Nino’s fine pen line).

Nino’s name may not have a high recognition factor but he got his start in NA in the 70’s as one of many Philipino artist’s picked up by DC when they exponentially expanded their line and needed new talent fast. Nino never had a ‘name’ book, never did a superhero that I know of, doing mostly SF and horror short stories, back-ups, and stories for Eerie, Creepy and the other anthology mags that flourished for a while. His art is best described as early Walt Simonson on hallucinogens filtered through that fluid style of the best of the Philipinos, e.g. Nestor Redondo – who’s short lived book ‘Rima, The Jungle Girl’ is worth picking up from the 5 cent bins for the gorgeous art and Nino’s bizarre SF back-up story (see below). Hurrah for anyone with enough sense to have him drawing stories again.

Space Voyagers © DC Comics
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