Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Most Fascinating Science News Of The Week: July 20, 2010

Here is a list of interesting science news headlines that I have found the most interesting this week. All headline links go to sciencedaily.com. 


Triceratops and Torsaurus were same dinosaur at different stages -
ScienceDaily (2010-07-14) -- Triceratops and Torosaurus were the same dinosaur at different stages of growth, according to new research. Since the late 1800s, scientists have believed that Triceratops and Torosaurus were two different types of dinosaurs. Triceratops had a three-horned skull with a rather short frill, whereas Torosaurus had a much bigger frill with two large holes through it.

Mayan king's tomb discovered in Guatemala -
ScienceDaily (2010-07-17) -- A well-preserved tomb of an ancient Mayan king has been discovered in Guatemala. The tomb is packed with carvings, ceramics, textiles, and the bones of six children, who may have been sacrificed at the time of the king's death.

Fly's brain -- a high-speed computer: Neurobiologists use state-of-the-art methods to decode the basics of motion detection -
ScienceDaily (2010-07-13) -- The minute brains of flies process visual movements in only fractions of a second. Just how the brain of the fly manages to perceive motion with such speed and precision is predicted quite accurately by a mathematical model.

Juno spacecraft armored up to go to Jupiter -
ScienceDaily (2010-07-14) -- NASA's Juno spacecraft will be forging ahead into a treacherous environment at Jupiter with more radiation than any other place NASA has ever sent a spacecraft, except the sun. In a specially filtered cleanroom in Denver, where Juno is being assembled, engineers recently added a unique protective shield around its sensitive electronics.

Stellar explosions provide the key to understanding the fate of the universe -
ScienceDaily (2010-07-13) -- The mysteries of the universe and how we came to be are set to be unlocked by a technique for modeling fluids, similar to one which is becoming increasingly popular within the film industry to improve the realism of special effects.


Fascinating images from a new world: Close-ups of the asteroid Lutetia - Gabriel's Pick
ScienceDaily (2010-07-14) -- The ESA space probe Rosetta flew past the Lutetia planetoid on July 10, 2010. The OSIRIS camera system provided unique images of this rendezvous. They not only show a large number of craters on the surface of the celestial body, but also individual rocks and parallel grooves.

Record-breaking X-ray blast briefly blinds space observatory -
ScienceDaily (2010-07-14) -- A blast of the brightest X-rays ever detected from beyond our Milky Way galaxy's neighborhood temporarily blinded the X-ray eye on NASA's Swift space observatory earlier this summer, astronomers now report. The X-rays traveled through space for 5-billion years before slamming into and overwhelming Swift's X-ray Telescope. The blinding blast is by far the brightest light source ever seen in X-ray wavelengths at cosmological distances.

Unravelling the mystery of massive star birth: All stars are born the same way -
ScienceDaily (2010-07-14) -- Astronomers have obtained the first image of a dusty disc closely encircling a massive baby star, providing direct evidence that massive stars form in the same way as their smaller brethren.


Super-hot planet with unique comet-like tail discovered -
ScienceDaily (2010-07-15) -- Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have confirmed the existence of a baked object that could be called a "cometary planet." The gas giant planet, named HD 209458b, is orbiting so close to its star that its heated atmosphere is escaping into space. Observations taken with Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) suggest powerful stellar winds are sweeping the cast-off atmospheric material behind the scorched planet and shaping it into a comet-like tail.