Using DNA evidence from a shawl that is believed to have been at one of the Jack the Ripper’s murders, forensic scientists think they have finally identified the serial killer.
The story is fascinating, but what makes it even more convincing to me is that the person they name is hardly the wild romantic suspect that many books and movies have proposed in past decades. Instead, he was one of Scotland Yard’s prime suspects.
The uncertainty of science: Geysers that have been detected on Europa in 2012 have now disappeared.
A new mosaic of four Rosetta navigation camera images shows a faint jet of material coming from the comet nucleus.
The jet appears to come from the neck between the two lobes, but that is uncertain.
The first results from Rosetta’s ultraviolet spectrograph find the surface of Comet 67P/C-G to be surprisingly lacking in exposed ice patches.
The lack is unexpected, considering that this same instrument has also detected evidence of water in the comet’s coma.
Paleontologists have discovered an almost complete skeleton of a dinosaur that they estimate was 85 feet long and weighed 65 tons when it died.
And it appears that the dinosaur was still growing when it died.
More information here.
The Rosetta science team announced today that they will unveil the chosen landing site for their Philae lander on September 15.
In approving extensions of seven NASA planetary missions, a review panel concluded that the Curiosity rover wasn’t doing the best it could, and that the project scientist didn’t work hard enough to change their minds.
The Mars Science Laboratory’s Curiosity rover landed on the red planet in August 2012. Equipped with a drill to gather surface samples and spectroscopy equipment to analyze the samples, the rover has collected and analyzed five surface specimens so far and, according to the extended mission proposal just approved by NASA, would analyze another eight over the next two years. That is “a poor science return for such a large investment in a flagship mission,” a 15-person senior review panel chaired by Clive Neal, a geologist at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, wrote in a report published Sept. 3.
The report also chided John Grotzinger, the lead Curiosity project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for neglecting to show up in person during a Mars-focused senior review panel meeting in May. “This left the panel with the impression that the [Curiosity] team felt they were too big to fail,” the senior review panel wrote.
This sounds like a pissing war between scientists. Grotzinger didn’t give them the required deference so they slammed him. No matter happened, however, we know they weren’t going to cancel Curiosity’s funds.
Worlds without end: New research now suggests that almost half of all exoplanets exist in binary star systems.
The astronomers estimate that between 40% to 50% of all exoplanets have binary stars as their host stars.
A new study has provided further proof that the main driving force behind the abandonment of obscure languages is the desire of people to gain economic wealth.
Of all the variables tested, economic growth was most strongly linked to language loss, Amano says. Two types of language loss hotspots emerged from the study, published online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. One was in economically well developed regions such as northwestern North America and northern Australia; a second was in economically developing regions such as the tropics and the Himalayas. Certain aspects of geography seemed to act as a buffer or threat, Amano says. For example, recent declines appear to occur faster in temperate climates than in the tropics or mountainous regions—perhaps because it is easier to travel in and out of temperate regions, Amano says.
As is usual for most of today’s modern intellectuals, already prosperous and speaking English, the author of the article as well as the researchers themselves lament the loss of obscure languages.
Although the study is silent on the subject of interventions to help preserve endangered languages, there is a range of revitalization efforts that can serve as examples, such as the incorporation of the Hawaiian language into school curricula and daily government operations, she says.
In other words, ordinary people want to improve their lives by learning the dominant languages that provide a gateway to wealth, and these self-righteous prigs want to do whatever they can to interfere with that desire. How nice of them!
New data confirms that the solar system is presently traveling through what astronomers call the Local Bubble, a region of relatively empty space blown out by past supernovae.
In a press photo op the Japanese have unveiled the completed Hayabusa 2, ready for its journey to an asteroid.
Hayabusa 2 will deploy one of five target markers that it will use to guide itself into landing and collecting a sample. It will deploy a European-built lander named MASCOT and three (count them, three) “rovers” called MINERVA-II. I put “rovers” in quotes because I think these are not wheeled rovers but rather bouncy hoppers like Hayabusa 1’s MINERVA (which was deployed but sadly missed Itokawa). Then it will do an experiment like Deep Impact’s, releasing an impactor to make a crater on the asteroid’s surface. But because Hayabusa 2’s impactor won’t have much kinetic energy, they made it explosive. The mothership will have to hide in the shadow of the asteorid as the explosion happens, so they have also added the deployable DCAM3 to try to get a view of the crater’s formation.
Rendezvous is set for around 2018 with the spacecraft’s sample return to Earth sometime in 2020.
As New Horizons begins its final shake-down in advance of its July 2015 flyby of Pluto, scientists have so far failed to find any Kuiper Belt objects in the right place for it to fly past after Pluto.
They haven’t given up hope, however. The search continues. As for the Pluto flyby,
The hibernating spacecraft will send weekly status beacons back to Earth, with wakeup scheduled for Dec. 7 to begin the final phase of its approach to Pluto. New Horizons will stay awake for two years to prepare for the encounter, fly by Pluto, and downlink science data. The craft’s appointment with Pluto is set for July 14, 2015, when it will zoom about 6,200 miles from the icy world’s unmapped surface for a one-shot chance to explore Pluto’s geology and atmosphere.
