La actividad mental convertida en música (o «así suena el cerebro humano»)

Microsiervos

Investigadores han convertido la actividad mental en música, y suena increíblemente parecida a una improvisación de jazz con piano. El traductor cerebro-a-sonido convierte las variaciones eléctricas del cebrero en el tono de la notas y la circulación sanguínea en su intensidad.

El audio se puede oir en Listen: The Music of a Human Brain >>

Higgs Boson Likely a Boring Boson [and documentary]

Ian O'Neill  

The thing with physicists is that they love discovering something unexpected, strange or exotic. This mindset is what makes physics, and indeed all science disciplines, awesome. But in light of the grand announcement of the probable discovery of the elusive Higgs boson in July, it looks like the particle that was discovered is likely a "standard" Higgs boson. As in, it's a little bit boring.

Of course, "boring" is a relative term. The story of the hunt for the Higgs -- the 'exchange particle' that endows matter with mass -- reads like a Dan Brown novel, culminating in the construction of the biggest, boldest and most complex machine mankind has ever conceived: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). There's more twists, turns and subplots than you can shake a lepton at.

But the famous Higgs boson, that until recently has been purely a theoretical particle only appearing in equations, looks like it comes from the Standard Model of physics and not something more exotic.

The Standard Model is a set of equations and particles that underpin our known Universe. It's a recipe book of sorts and works like this: If you collide particle A with particle B you get particle C plus some energy -- we know what will come out of a particle interaction even before the interaction takes place. There's nothing unexpected in this recipe book; so it doesn't work like this: If you collide particle A with particle B you get particle Q and -- what the #$%@?! -- a small elephant playing with a black hole!

The latter scenario would violate our known laws of physics, suggesting something more exotic is going on. In that case, there would be some kind of new physics, something beyond the Standard Model at play -- perhaps an exotic result from the LHC would provide evidence of "supersymmetry." One interpretation of supersymmetry suggests there may be an entire family of Higgs bosons that cannot be explained by the Standard Model. However, supersymmetry has recently been dealt a "hospitalizing" blow. 

Read  More >>

TheNovadex On the 4th July 2012 the Higgs Boson was found with a mass of 125-126 GeV.
Why was it soo important to create a multi billion dollar device to detect it.  

Powerful camera seeks snapshots of dark energy

ReutersVideo

Nov. 09 - The most powerful sky-mapping instrument ever built is about to embark on a far-reaching survey of deepest space to find evidence of the theoretical force called Dark Energy. From a high plateau in Chile, the Dark Energy Camera is being pointed billions of light years into the cosmos in an effort by astronomers to answer questions about Dark Energy's influence over the expansion of our universe. Elly Park reports.

Carl Sagan, política y religión

Microsiervos

Hoy es el cumpleaños de Carl Sagan, uno de los más conocidos divulgadores científicos de los últimos años, que podría haber cumplido hoy 78 años de no haber muerto tan joven.

Pero nos ha dejado muchas frases que recordar, algunas de ellas muy apropiadas con la que está cayendo:

En ciencia suele ocurrir que un científico diga: «Es un buen argumento, yo estaba equivocado», cambie de opinión y desde ese momento no se vuelva a mencionar la antigua posición. Realmente pasa. Aunque no todo lo frecuentemente que debería ya que los científicos son humanos y el cambio es a veces doloroso. Pero ocurre cada día. No recuerdo la última vez que algo así pasó en política o religión.

Artificial Inteligent Could Make a Healthier, Wealthier World

ForaTv

Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals?

Discovery news

Charles Choi, LiveScience Contributor

spiegel.de

The only modern humans whose ancestors did not interbreed with Neanderthals are apparently sub-Saharan Africans, researchers say.

New findings suggest modern North Africans carry genetic traces from Neanderthals, modern humanity's closest known extinct relatives.

Although modern humans are the only surviving members of the human lineage, others once roamed the Earth, including the Neanderthals. Genetic analysis of these extinct lineages' fossils has revealed they once interbred with our ancestors, with recent estimates suggesting that Neanderthal DNA made up 1 percent to 4 percent of modern Eurasian genomes. Although this sex apparently only rarely produced offspring, this mixing was enough to endow some people with the robust immune systems they enjoy today.  More >>

Nuclear Fusion Project Struggles to Put the Pieces Together

Scientific American/ Geoff Brumfiel and Nature magazine

peakoil.com

The world's largest scientific project is threatened with further delays, as agencies struggle to complete the design and sign contracts worth hundred of millions of euros with industrial partners, Nature has learned.

ITER is a massive project designed to show the feasibility of nuclear fusion as a power source. The device consists of a doughnut-shaped reactor called a tokamak, wrapped in superconducting magnets that squeeze and heat a plasma of hydrogen isotopes to the point of fusion. The result should be something that no experiment to date has been able to achieve: the controlled release of ten times more energy than is consumed.

That's the dream. But so far, ITER has been consuming mostly money and time. Since seven international partners signed up to the project in 2006, the price has roughly tripled to around €15 billion (US$19.4 billion), and the original date of completion has slipped by four years to late 2020. Many of the delays and cost increases have come from an extensive design review, which was completed in 2009 (see 'Fusion dreams delayed').

Now, sources familiar with the project warn that the complex system for buying ITER's many pieces could put the project even further behind schedule. Rather than providing cash, ITER's partners have pledged 'in kind' contributions of pieces of the machine. Magnets, instruments and reactor sections will arrive from around the world to be cobbled together at the central site in St-Paul-lès-Durance in southern France. Because no one body holds the purse strings, designs for the machine's components face a tortuous back-and-forth between the central ITER Organization and national 'domestic agencies', which ensure that local companies secure contracts for ITER's components.

Nowhere is the problem more pronounced than the tokamak, the central structure that will eventually house ITER. The construction of the building is meant to be contracted out by Fusion for Energy (F4E), Europe's domestic agency. But the ITER Organization could not tell the agency what needed to be built, says Rem Haange, ITER's technical director, until it received data from the other domestic agencies on the numerous systems and subsystems that the building must house. That process was seriously behind schedule when Haange arrived in 2011, he says. "Not a single piece of data had been given by the domestic agencies."

Haange says, however, that the project remains firmly on schedule, and he is racing to make up for lost time. A task force of engineers is working through the tokamak building design floor-by-floor to finalize it. "We have a deadline for every floor level, and we are just about making it," he says. The final design will be finished in March next year, but to keep the project on schedule, F4E must tender the construction contract by the end of this year.

Contract compromises
F4E is also encountering trouble on another key contract, for the giant poloidal field coils that will wrap around the girth of the machine. The coils are among the largest in ITER, and the bottommost ones must be completed before the machine can be assembled. The ITER Organization authorized procurement of the coils in 2009, but F4E's tender received just a single, joint bid from the French firm Alstom and the German company Babcock Noell.

F4E rejected the bid because it came in far above the agency's cost expectations, according to multiple sources, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the bidding process. Isabelle Tourancheau, a spokeswoman for Alstom, said that the bid had failed after "long and difficult technical and commercial negotiations". Aris Apollonatos, a spokesperson for F4E, says that the contract will now be broken into seven parts to make it more attractive to competitors and put it back out to tender. A meeting earlier this month garnered interest from 27 companies, he says. More >>

U.S. Energy Department Unleashes Its Titan Supercomputer

Scientific American/  Larry Greenemeier

afterdawn.com

In 2005 engineers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DoE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled Jaguar, a system that would later be upgraded into a world-beating supercomputer. By 2011 it had grown to a room-size system that used seven megawatts of energy, ran nearly 225,000 processor cores and had a peak performance of 2.3 petaflops, or 2.3 quadrillion calculations per second. Topping Jaguar, albeit necessary to deliver ever more complex modeling of sophisticated energy challenges, would not be easy.
Simply adding more CPUs, or central processing units, to scale Jaguar to 20 petaflops would require enough energy to power 60,000 homes. To best their own record, the Oak Ridge engineers instead turned to video games—or more precisely, to the graphics processors used in Microsoft Xboxes, Nintendo Wiis and other video game systems.
As of Monday Jaguar becomes Titan, a supercomputer that leverages both CPU and GPU (graphics processing unit) accelerators to deliver 10 times the performance of Jaguar with more than five times the power efficiency.
The key to Titan's speed and efficiency is a design that uses more than 18,500 NVIDIA GPUs, along with nearly 300,000 CPU cores, which typically form the foundation of high-performance computers. The GPUs account for about 90 percent of the system's computational performance and enable Titan to remain roughly the same size as Jaguar.

When fully brought up to speed, Titan (a Cray XK7 system) promises to be the world's most powerful open-science supercomputer, even more powerful than the DoE's Sequoia, a 16.3-petaflop IBM Blue Gene/Q system crowned the world's fastest supercomputer in June. Sequoia differs from Jaguar/Titan, which placed sixth on the list, in that Sequoia is used exclusively by the DoE's National Nuclear Security Administration to monitor U.S. nukes. Titan will be used by a variety of researchers for a variety of projects.
Titan will initially support a handful of key projects at Oak Ridge, including Denovo, simulation software that models the behavior of neutrons in a nuclear power reactor. Oak Ridge's engineers designed Denovo for Jaguar as a way to help extend the lives of the U.S.'s aging nuclear power plants, which provide about a fifth of the country's electricity. Running Denovo, Titan will take 13 hours to model the complete state of a reactor core at a specified point in time, a job that took Jaguar 60 hours to perform.
"The ability to burn nuclear fuel uniformly is very much dependent on knowing and being able to predict the distribution of neutrons in the core," says Tom Evans, a computational scientist at Oak Ridge's Consortium for the Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL), which created Denovo. Titan will enable much more precise simulations.
Titan calculations will also be used to provide nanoscale analysis of materials used to build electric motors and generators as well as model the burning of a variety of fuels in internal combustion engines. Still another application will simulate long-term global climate. A sizable amount of Titan's capacity in the coming year will be devoted to the DoE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment program (INCITE), which invites academia, government researchers and industry to apply for access to the supercomputer for their various projects.  More >>

Cuba on my mind/ National Geographic

Juan Valdes*

New and Complete Map of Cuba, supplement to National Geographic magazine, October 1906; NG Maps.

Since our first post, this blog has addressed the history of cartography at National Geographic, geographic names (toponyms), and even the cartographic exploits of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, the American artist best known for the painting “Whistler’s Mother.” I hope that these topics have proven of interest to some if not all of you. But what we have not addressed is the personal more intimate side of cartography here at the Society.

Unquestionably, National Geographic is the place to be if you love the science as well as the art of mapmaking. Our production schedules are full of stimulating and challenging projects that often test our knowledge of the cartographic profession. Once in a while, we will be assigned a project so close and near to our hearts that it becomes an overriding passion. Several months ago, I was given such an assignment—a large format (36″ x 24″) political map of Cuba.

The last time the Society published such a map was in October 1906! Those of you in the exiled Cuban community, both in the U.S. and abroad, know the significance of this map. Anyone who has visited Miami’s Little Havana, Tampa’s Ybor City, or even Union City, New Jersey, can’t avoid seeing maps of Cuba painted on walls, plastered on windows, or even printed on the sides of grocery bags.

To Cuban exiles of a certain generation, such maps bear more significance than any mere icon—they serve as portals to a place and time forever frozen in our hearts and minds. The mere site of them awakens our senses. They evoke the smell of sugar being processed in the mills, the taste and feel of a mango, and even the sounds of dominoes being shuffled on a tabletop.

So you may be wondering where I’m going with this blog. Well, I thought it could serve as a preface for a series of blogs on the making of our new map of Cuba. In future posts, the project’s staff will provide you with their experiences in the production of this map. And perhaps by the time it’s printed in June, you will also have Cuba on your minds.

--------------------------------

*Cuban born Juan José Valdés is The Geographer and National Geographic Maps' Director of Editorial and Research. He guides and assists the Map Policy Committee in setting border representations, disputed territories, and naming conventions for National Geographic. As NG Map's Director of Editorial and Research, he is responsible for ensuring the accuracy and consistency of its maps and map products. Also he is a Peter Pan refugee.

Rise of the Molecular Machines

Foresight Institute/—James Lewis, PhD

The RSC web site features an article on molecular machines written by Josh Howgego that gives a very good brief introduction to the topic: Rise of the molecular machines. A downloadable PDF of the article as it originally appeared in Education in Chemistry provides better images of the figures than does the HTML version. The article explains how chemists have worked to mimic the function of biological molecular machine like muscles, by using intermolecular forces to control movements of mechanically interlocked molecules. The first example given is from the work of Fraser Stoddart, winner of the 2007 Feynman Prizes in Nanotechnology for Experimental work and Co-Chair of the January 2013 Foresight Technical Conference: Illuminating Atomic Precision, which will feature a session on “Molecular Machines and Non-Equilibrium Processes,” which Prof. Stoddart will chair. The article goes on to explain that harnessing simple molecular shuttles of the type pioneered by Stoddart to do real work like muscles has proved difficult, and cites as a prototype solution a molecular machine that works in a different way: a walker that sequentially makes and breaks different types of covalent bonds, developed by David Leigh, winner of the 2007 Feynman Prizes in Nanotechnology in the Theory category. The article finishes with a description of a nanocar developed by Ben Feringa that uses electricity to move across a metal surface by rotating paddle-like wheels.

El Destino del Universo = 74,3 ± 2,1 (km/s)/Mpc

Microsiervos/

Omega, el parámetro de densidad determina cual será el destino de nuestro universo

Esta cifra, obtenida gracias a nuevas observaciones realizadas con el telescopio espacial Spitzer, es el nuevo valor de la constante de Hubble, con un margen de error del 3 por ciento.

Lo que significa es que el resto de los objetos que hay en el universo se alejan de nosotros a 74,3 kilómetros por segundo más por cada megaparsec –un megaparsec son unos tres millones y cuarto de años luz– de distancia.

Es decir, que cuanto más lejos está un objeto de nosotros en el universo, más rápido se aleja de nosotros, aunque con ciertos límites.

En cualquier caso el nuevo valor más refinado de la constante de Hubble tiene ciertamente poco o ningún efecto en nuestras vidas cotidianas más allá de que sabemos un poquito más del universo en el que vivimos; de hecho el hecho de que el universo esté en expansión tampoco influye en nuestras vidas.

Pero la constante de Hubble es uno de los parámetros de los que depende cual de los distintos destinos finales del universo que manejan los científicos es el válido.

Estos van desde un universo en permanente expansión que muere congelado a otro que en un momento dado comienza a contraerse terminando en un Big Crunch, pasando por otros en los que la expansión continua termina por hacer que toda la materia quede reducida a partículas elementales.

Y quien no haya pensado nunca en el destino del universo, aunque ni nosotros ni probablemente la especie humana vaya estar aquí para verlo, es que no es humano.

(Vía NASA).

Earth’s magnetic field long overdue for a reversal that could end our current way of life

survivepoleshift 

Scott Sutherland | Geekquinox

When a reversal does eventually happen, we have a good idea of what it will and won't do — both to us and the planet …The idea that Earth's magnetic field will flip — switching the north and south magnetic poles — isn't anything new. It's even been the topic of choice for some doomsday prophets, since it will, apparently, destroy the planet or at the very least turn it on its side, putting an end to us in either case.

It's well known that the polarity of Earth's magnetic field changes. Geologists have seen this change by examining the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. When magma wells up at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and is cooled by the ocean water, crystals in the magma will orient themselves in the direction of the Earth's magnetic field. Thus, bands of cooled magma along the ocean floor are a geologic record of what direction the magnetic field pointed in during Earth's history, and show that the magnetic field has reversed every 100,000 to 50 million years or so.

Within the last 5 million years, the reversals have been characterized by long periods of stability, of between 450,000 and 590,000 years, separated by several shorter-term reversals. The last reversal happened around 780,000 years ago, so by reckoning of some, we are long overdue.

Reversals are thought to occur when large areas of the Earth's liquid iron outer core become oppositely-aligned to their surroundings. If enough areas of the outer core do this, the entire magnetic field will flip. This does not happen suddenly, though. It takes thousands to tens of thousands of years for this to occur.

When a reversal does eventually happen, we have a good idea of what it will and won't do — both to us and the planet.

Speculation by some is that when the magnetic field flips, it will be because the solid iron inner core of the planet flips 180 degrees. This will cause the surface of the planet to shift at least 90 degrees, effectively switching our lines of latitude and longitude, and destroying us in the process. However, only the size of the inner core affects the magnetic field, with a growing core making a stronger field and a shrinking core making a weaker field, and a shift in the magnetic field will not effect the orientation of the solid core at all. Even if it did, it would take tens of millions of years for such a change to spread out from the core, through the liquid outer core, and through the mantle, before it reached the Earth's surface and did us in.

What it will do is cause a weak period in the magnetic field strength for a thousand or more years, as the various parts of the liquid outer core sort themselves out to all orient in the same direction. This would expose us to heightened amounts of solar radiation, and solar particles could even punch large, although temporary, holes in the ozone layer. Our technology would bear the greatest brunt of this kind of event, though. Even now, solar storms and coronal mass ejections can cause havoc with computers, communications systems and power grids, and this would be much worse with a weakened magnetic field. Additionally, there would be several magnetic poles during this time, making travel by compass much more difficult. What's certain is that it wouldn't be the end of us, but it would be the end of our current way of life.

There have been some signs that the magnetic field may be on the move, since within the last century, Earth's magnetic field has shifted and has lost some of its strength.

"Magnetic north has migrated more than 1,500 kilometres over the past century," said Conall Mac Niocaill, a geology and geophysics professor at Oxford University. "In the past 150 years, the strength of the magnetic field has lessened by 10 percent, which could indicate a reversal is on the cards."

Or it may not. The field changes, both in direction and strength, are well within the normal range that we've seen over the past million years or so. Also, just because something has happened in the past is no guarantee that it will happen in the future.

On the other hand, a large area underneath South America and the South Atlantic — called the South Atlantic Anomaly — was identified in the 1990s as a weak spot in the Earth's magnetic field, and could indicate a large area of the liquid core changing its polarity. It seems to be the only large area of weakness, though, so who knows if it is simply a temporary phenomenon, or a sign of things to come.

The European Space Agency is launching its 'Swarm' magnetic field mission next month. With two satellites in polar orbit to examine the magnetic field directly, and one satellite in far orbit to examine the effects of solar activity on the field, the mission could bring us much closer to understanding the Earth's magnetic field and gain more insight on how it is changing.

Could asteroid dust counter climate change on Earth?

Scientists have proposed creating a dust cloud made of asteroid material that could help to cool Earth. Here, an artist's depiction shows what a spacecraft spewing asteroid dust might look like.

NBC news/ By Charles Choi Contributor

To combat global warming, scientists in Scotland now suggest an out-of-this-world solution — a giant dust cloud in space, blasted off an asteroid, which would act like a sunshade for Earth.

The world is warming and the climate is changing. Although many want to prevent these shifts by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases that trap heat from the sun, some controversially suggest deliberating manipulating the planet's climate with large-scale engineering projects, commonly called geoengineering.

Instead of altering the climate by targeting either the oceans or the atmosphere, some researchers have suggested geoengineering projects that would affect the entire planet from space. For instance, projects that reduced the amount of solar radiation Earth receives by 1.7 percent could offset the effects of a global increase in temperature of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius).

The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has noted that climate models suggest average global temperatures will rise by 2 to 11.5 degrees F (1.1 to 6.4 degrees C) by the end of this century.

"A 1.7 percent reduction is very small and will hardly be noticeable on Earth," said researcher Russell Bewick, a space scientist at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. "People sometimes get the idea of giant screens blocking the entire sun. This is not the case ... as [the device] is constantly between the sun and the earth, it acts merely as a very light shade or filter."

Shading Earth One proposal to shade Earth from the sun would place giant mirrors in space. The main problem with this concept is the immense cost and effort needed either to build and launch such reflectors or to construct them in outer space — the current cost to launch an object into low Earth orbit runs into thousands of dollars per pound. Another would use blankets of dust to blot out the sun, just as clouds do for Earth. These offer the virtue of simplicity compared with mirrors, but run the risk of getting dispersed over time by solar radiation and the gravitational pull of the sun, moon and planets. [Top 10 Craziest Environmental Ideas]

Now, instead of having a dust cloud floating by itself in space, researchers suggest that an asteroid could essentially gravitationally anchor a dust cloud in space to block sunlight and cool the planet.   More >>

Nanotecnologia Kubiche y 700 terabytes en un ADN

seria conveniente que el vastago de castro 1 y la ministra de ciencia, tecnologia y medio ambiente [cargo donde sobran las  tres denominaciones] dejaran la boberia de la nanotecnologia kubiche y arrancaran por donde es, la frontera tecnologica del asunto.
pero que la'bana retome el ritual aspergiano [del sindrome] cientifico-tecnologico tantas veces ejecutado por el mesias del bonche en jefe, es caricaturisticamente entendible pero, que los medios desde el nuevo herald hasta el abc iberico lo repitan amplificadamente sin filtrarlo como corresponde, es una conducta esquizofrenica y/ o manipuladora.  

--------------------------------------------

Microsiervos/

Este artículo se publicó originalmente en Cooking Ideas, un blog de Vodafone donde colaboramos semanalmente.

Almacenar datos informáticos en secuencias de ADN o en soportes de memoria basados en ADN puede sonar raro y lo es. Pero es posible y al parecer es un método bastante capaz: un grupo de investigadores ha conseguido almacenar unos 700 terabytes (unos 720.000 GB) en un gramo de ADN.

Al fin y al cabo el ADN almacena información, que es algo que nos encanta hacer a los humanos; nos pasamos el día averiguando dónde más y cómo almacenar datos con la mayor capacidad y velocidad de acceso a ellos que sea posible. Y el ADN parece un buen lugar: un disco Blu-Ray puede contener hasta 25GB, o 50 GB si es de capa doble, por lo que hacen falta unos 14.000 para igualar la capacidad de un gramo de ADN. Más aún, almacenar una cantidad de información equivalente supondrían más de 230 discos duros de 3 TB, que suponen unos 150 kilos de peso, calculan en ExtremeTech.

Hace unos meses un equipo de genetistas y nanoingenieros combinaron ADN de salmón y nanopartículas de plata para construir un soporte de memoria que funciona de forma similar a un disco óptico. Es decir, se escribe la información una vez, la cual queda secuenciada en el ADN, y se puede leer tantas veces como se quiera. Según los investigadores una vez configurado el polímero compuesto por ADN y nanopartículas el patrón de datos se mantiene inalterable de forma indefinida.

Tanto si el destino es una memoria basada en ADN como una secuencia de ADN convencional el proceso es similar: primero hay que convertir la información digital, que se expresa en forma de 1 y 0 en el lenguaje del ADN, que utiliza las bases A, G, T y C.

Por ejemplo, los ceros se convierten en el par de bases A o C y los unos en las bases G o T. La secuencia codificada se guarda en cadenas de ADN convencional o modificado, caso del modelo con nanopartículas de plata. Así es como un investigador guardó miles de millones de copias de su último libro en un pequeño tubo de ensayo «y en condiciones normales durarará cientos de años». O lo que es lo mismo: un dispositivo con este tipo de memoria puede almacenar, «en lo que ocupa un dedo pulgar tanta información como la que hay en Internet».

De momento la técnica sigue estando limitada a su uso en laboratorio y al desarrollo de variantes basadas en el mismo principio, pero el coste de secuenciar ADN se ha reducido significativamente en los últimos 10 años, pasando de los 10.000 dólares por cada millón de par de bases secuenciada a los 10 céntimos por millón actuales.

Historian says piece of papyrus refers to Jesus' wife

By Laurie Goodstein

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School has identified a scrap of papyrus that she says was written in Coptic in the fourth century and contains a phrase never seen in any piece of scripture: "Jesus said to them, 'My wife …'"

The faded papyrus fragment is smaller than a business card, with eight lines on one side, in black ink legible under a magnifying glass. Just below the line about Jesus having a wife, the papyrus includes a second provocative clause that purportedly says, “she will be able to be my disciple.”

The finding is being made public in Rome on Tuesday at an international meeting of Coptic scholars by the historian Karen L. King, who has published several books about new Gospel discoveries and is the first woman to hold the nation’s oldest endowed chair, the Hollis professor of divinity.

The provenance of the papyrus fragment is a mystery, and its owner has asked to remain anonymous. Until Tuesday, King had shown the fragment to only a small circle of experts in papyrology and Coptic linguistics, who concluded that it is most likely not a forgery. But she and her collaborators say they are eager for more scholars to weigh in and perhaps upend their conclusions.

Even with many questions unsettled, the discovery could reignite the debate over whether Jesus was married, whether Mary Magdalene was his wife and whether he had a female disciple. These debates date to the early centuries of Christianity, scholars say. But they are relevant today, when global Christianity is roiling over the place of women in ministry and the boundaries of marriage.

The discussion is particularly animated in the Roman Catholic Church, where despite calls for change, the Vatican has reiterated the teaching that the priesthood cannot be opened to women and married men because of the model set by Jesus.

King gave an interview and showed the papyrus fragment, encased in glass, to reporters from The New York Times, The Boston Globe and Harvard Magazine in her garret office in the tower at Harvard Divinity School last Thursday. She left the next day for Rome to deliver her paper on the find on Tuesday at the International Congress of Coptic Studies.

She repeatedly cautioned that this fragment should not be taken as proof that Jesus, the historical person, was actually married. The text was probably written centuries after Jesus lived, and all other early, historically reliable Christian literature is silent on the question, she said. More >>

Scientists Drop the Bass and Levitate Droplets of Liquid

mashable

Scientists with the Argonne National Laboratory are testing the effects of acoustic sound waves on individual droplets of liquids containing pharmaceuticals. The result? Levitation.

Elusive dark energy is real, study says

The galaxy cluster Abell 1689 is famous for the way it bends light [gravitational lensing]

Dark energy, the mysterious substance thought to be accelerating the expansion of the universe, almost certainly exists despite some astronomers' doubts, a new study says.

After a two-year study, an international team of researchers concludes that the probability of dark energy being real stands at 99.996 percent. But the scientists still don't know what the stuff is.

"Dark energy is one of the great scientific mysteries of our time, so it isn’t surprising that so many researchers question its existence," co-author Bob Nichol, of the University of Portsmouth in Engalnd, said in a statement. "But with our new work we’re more confident than ever that this exotic component of the universe is real — even if we still have no idea what it consists of."

The roots of dark energy Scientists have known since the 1920s that the universe is expanding. Most assumed that gravity would slow this expansion gradually, or even cause the universe to begin contracting one day. [8 Baffling Astronomy Mysteries]

But in 1998, two separate teams of researchers discovered that the universe's expansion is actually speeding up. In the wake of this shocking find — which earned three of the discoverers the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011 — researchers proposed the existence of dark energy, an enigmatic force pushing the cosmos apart.

Dark energy is thought to make up 73 percent of the universe, though no one can say exactly what it is. (Twenty-three percent of the universe is similarly strange dark matter, scientists say, while the remaining 4 percent is "normal" matter that we can see and feel.)

Still, not all astronomers are convinced that dark energy is real, and many have been trying to confirm its existence for the past decade or so. More >>

Análisis temporal ambiental en la zona costera de Santa Fe, La Habana

Santa Fe, Hurricane Wilma. See in Google Earth

Autores: José F. Alcaide-Orpí, Bárbara Polo-González, María G. Valdés-Hernández, José L. Cuevas-Ojeda/
Departamento de Geología Ambiental, Geofísica y Riesgo, Instituto de Geofísica y Astronomía

RESUMEN
En el Consejo Popular Santa Fe, perteneciente al municipio Playa, se ha observado un progresivo deterioro de los ecosistemas costeros como expresión de un incremento de ocupación del territorio y de los impactos ocasionados por los eventos meteorológicos extremos. El trabajo persigue como objetivo identificar y cuantificar las pérdidas de arena y de bosques de manglar de todo el litoral, como una expresión de las evidencias del retroceso de la línea de costa. Sus principales consecuencias
se aprecian en la zona de playa La Puntilla y en los Bajos de Santa Ana, que en el análisis temporal de los periodos analizados, se han cuantificado pérdidas de áreas de arena de hasta un 96 % y de un 45 % de vegetación costera. Para el logro de los resultados se empleó como metodología, el análisis digital de fotos aéreas e imágenes satelitales, digitalizando, procesando y cuantificando los cambios ocurridos.

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