Vast underground glaciers reported on Mars

The findings could present new avenues for the search for life or provide water to support future exploration, scientists claim.

NASA’s Mars Re­con­nais­sance Or­biter has de­tected vast glaciers of wa­ter ice un­der Mar­tian ground, re­search­ers say. The find­ings could pre­s­ent new av­enues for the search for life on Mars, they add, or pro­vide wa­ter to sup­port fu­ture hu­man ex­plora­t­ion.

Sci­en­tists an­a­lyzed da­ta from the space­craft’s ground-penetrating ra­dar and re­port in the Nov. 21 is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Sci­ence that bur­ied glaciers ex­tend for doz­ens of miles (kilo­me­ters) from the edges of moun­tains or cliffs.

A lay­er of rocky de­bris blan­ket­ing the ice may have pre­served the un­der­ground glaciers as rem­nants from an ice sheet that cov­ered mid­dle lat­i­tudes dur­ing a past ice age, sci­en­tists said. This find­ing is si­m­i­lar to mas­sive ice glaciers that have been de­tected un­der rocky cov­er­ings in Ant­arc­ti­ca.

“Al­to­gether, these glaciers al­most cer­tainly repre­s­ent the larg­est res­er­voir of wa­ter ice on Mars that is not in the po­lar caps,” said John W. Holt of the Uni­ver­s­ity of Tex­as at Aus­tin, lead au­thor of the re­port. “Just one of the fea­tures we ex­am­ined is three times larg­er than the city of Los An­ge­les and up to half a mile thick.”

Sci­en­tists have puz­zled over what are known as apron­s—gently slop­ing ar­eas con­tain­ing rocky de­posits at the bas­es of taller geo­graph­i­cal fea­tures—since NASA’s Vi­king or­biters first ob­served them on the Mar­tian sur­face in the1970s. One the­o­ry has been that the aprons are flows of rocky de­bris lu­bri­cat­ed by a small amount ice.


Source: http://www.world-science.net/othernews/081120_mars

Did a modern-day scourge save ancient Earth?

A gas blamed for global warming may once have helped Earth escape a deep freeze, some scientists propose.

The re­search­ers claim Earth nev­er froze over com­pletely dur­ing the so-called Cryo­ge­nian per­i­od. This view con­tra­dicts the “Snow­ball Earth” hy­poth­e­sis, which claims Earth was locked in ice ow­ing to a run­away, plan­et-cooling chain re­ac­tion.

What might have let the plan­et es­cape this fate is un­clear, but the sci­en­tists point to re­cent re­search from the Uni­ver­s­ity of To­ron­to. This spec­u­lates that ad­vanc­ing ice was stalled by the in­ter­ac­tion of the cli­mate sys­tem and the car­bon cy­cle of the ocean, with car­bon di­ox­ide play­ing a key role in in­su­lat­ing the plan­et.

Car­bon di­ox­ide is by the same to­ken to­day blamed for glob­al warm­ing.

The To­ron­to sci­en­tists say that as Earth’s tem­per­a­tures cooled, ox­y­gen was drawn in­to the ocean, where it re­acted chem­ic­ally with or­gan­ic mat­ter, re­leas­ing car­bon di­ox­ide in­to the at­mos­phere.


Source: http://www.world-science.net/othernews/081130_snowball

Scientists say Copernicus' remains, grave found

Researchers said Thursday they have identified the remains of Nicolaus Copernicus by comparing DNA from a skeleton and hair retrieved from one of the 16th-century astronomer's books. The findings could put an end to centuries of speculation about the exact resting spot of Copernicus, a priest and astronomer whose theories identified the Sun, not the Earth, as the center of the universe.

Polish archaeologist Jerzy Gassowski told a news conference that forensic facial reconstruction of the skull, missing the lower jaw, his team found in 2005 buried in a Catholic Cathedral in Frombork, Poland, bears striking resemblance to existing portraits of Copernicus.

The reconstruction shows a broken nose and other features that resemble a self-portrait of Copernicus, and the skull bears a cut mark above the left eye that corresponds with a scar shown in the painting.

Moreover, the skull belonged to a man aged around 70 — Copernicus's age when he died in 1543.

"In our opinion, our work led us to the discovery of Copernicus's remains but a grain of doubt remained," Gassowski said.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081121/ap_on_re_eu/eu_poland_copernicus

New evidence for colored leptons

Dear Vic,

During October I worked out a model of CDF anomaly (new light longlived particle) plus at least three other particles whose masses have been estimated by experimenters.

TGD predicts leptons to have colored excitations and I explained the anomalous production of electron positron pairs in heavy ion collisions observed already at seventies in terms of production of electropions at 1990: the two articles about this were actually my last published papers before the big silence.

CDF anomaly can be understood in terms of production of taupions, both charged and neutral and in free different p-adic mass scales differing powers of 2 and decaying to lighter ones such that decay products are almost at rest in cm system by the kinematics of the situation. The model predicts correctly lifetime of the long lived particle and also masses of the neutral states. Also production cross section comes out correctly using same assumptions as in the original electropion model as well as jet like production of muons.

I summarize the model in article "New evidence for colored leptons".

With Best Regards,

Mat Pitkanen


ps: the article can be found in sciprint.org --> hadron section