| MIND Reviews: The Soloist The Soloist Paramount Pictures. DVD available Fall 2009 [More] rss.sciam.com |
New species galore in discoveries around the world I usually write about species that we're about to see for the last time, but the past few weeks have brought news of literally hundreds of newly discovered species. Some of these may not be around for long, though, so here are some introductions while they can still be made: [More] rss.sciam.com |
Dark Side of Black Holes: Dark Matter Could Explain the Early Universe's Giant Black Holes Black holes one billion times the sun’s mass or more lie at the heart of many galaxies, driving their spin and development. Common today, some 14 billion years after the big bang, such supermassive black holes were rare in the early universe--or at least they were supposed to be. Evidence of supermassive black holes existing when the universe was less than one billion years old has stumped scientists, because current theories of stellar evolution suggest that such giants should take much longer to grow. Now it seems this enigma could be solved by a mystery substance--dark matter.The puzzle of early supermassive holes took shape in 2003, when the Sloan Digital Sky Survey detected roughly half a dozen of them. According to conventional thinking, the first regular stars were born when the universe was about 200 million years old, but given the state of the universe at the time, they could have formed black holes at most only about 100 times the sun’s mass. It would simply take too long to merge and make the billion-year-old, billion-solar-mass monsters seen by the Sloan survey. [More] rss.sciam.com |
High-Tech Tour of the Caves of Nottingham A project uses laser technology to create an archaeological record of the caves and create a 3D model that visitors can explore on the Internet. nytimes.com |
Bugs and plants and mice (oh my) join hundreds of new creatures discovered in New Guinea In the rugged, remote reaches of Papua New Guinea live a multitude of strange species that scientists are just starting to catalogue. A recent initiative, the results of which were announced October 5, reports some 26 potentially new animal species, nine previously undescribed plants and some 200 likely new bug species. [More] rss.sciam.com |