Archive by date | February 2013

More details of Russian meteor emerge

More details of Russian meteor emerge

Over the weekend scientists learned more about the meteor that struck the Chelyabinsk region of Russia on 15 February. Ria Novosti is reporting that scientists from Urals State University in Ekaterinburg have made an expedition to Lake Chebarkul, where meteor fragments reportedly fell.  Read more

Letter bomb threat rattles Mexican biotechnology lab

A letter containing explosive material was delivered on 11 February to the Institute of Biotechnology of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Morelos. Federal authorities are investigating whether the attempted attack was connected to the chain of letter-bombs sent to Mexican research institutes beginning in 2011.  Read more

Dark-matter search from the space station continues to tease

Samuel Ting at his press conference

Ting says he has used some 8 million particle events to map the excess across an energy spectrum from 0.5 gigaelectronvolts to 350 gigaelectronvolts, and that he plans to report it in a paper to be sent to a high energy physics journal in a couple of weeks. He does not yet have sufficient data to report the entire energy range that AMS is sensitive to, up to 1 tera-electron volt, in a statistically meaningful way. Ting had reporters hanging on his every word as he appeared at one point to hint that spectrum might drop off at some energy in a way that could be consistent with a theory of dark matter. But then he added in response to direct questions that he might also have no signal.  Read more

Embryo-like stem cells enter first human trial

It will be the first clinical study to put induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells into humans — and where more fitting than Japan, where Shinya Yamanaka garnered a Nobel prize for last December for showing how to take bodily cells and return them to an embryo-like pluripotent state.  Read more

North Korea tests “smaller and lighter” bomb

North Korea tests “smaller and lighter” bomb

This morning North Korea announced that it had conducted a third underground nuclear weapons test. The test was detected by US Geologic Survey seismic monitoring stations and those of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organisation in Vienna, which reported “explosion-like characteristics”. The yield of the test is believed to be between roughly 3 and 10 kilotonnes, according to James Acton, a physicist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC.  Read more

NASA launches Landsat 8 into orbit

NASA launches Landsat 8 into orbit

NASA successfully launched the world’s latest earth-observing satellite aboard an Atlas V rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California today, crystallizing hopes that US scientists will be able to maintain and enhance a continuous environmental monitoring record that dates back more than four decades.  Read more