Hilary Mantel wins Booker prize for fiction

LONDON – A tale of political intrigue set during the reign of King Henry VIII won the prestigious Man Booker prize for fiction Tuesday.

Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" scooped the 50,000-pound ($80,000) prize. Mantel's novel charts the upheaval caused by the king's desire to marry Anne Boleyn, as seen through the eyes of royal adviser Thomas Cromwell.

Mantel's novel beat stiff competition from a shortlist that included previous Booker winners A.S. Byatt and J.M. Coetzee.

Mantel told a London audience that if winning the Booker Prize was like being in a train crash, "at this moment I am happily flying through the air."

The chairman of the Booker prize judges, James Naughtie, said the decision to give "Wolf Hall" the award was "based on the sheer bigness of the book. The boldness of its narrative, its scene setting ... The extraordinary way that Hilary Mantel has created what one of the judges has said was a contemporary novel, a modern novel, which happens to be set in the 16th century."

"Wolf Hall" depicts the chaos that results from the king's longing for a male heir — a desire that led him to leave his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, for Anne Boleyn. The Vatican's refusal to annul the marriage led the king to reject the authority of the pope and install himself as head of the Church of England.

The book centers on the real-life figure of Cromwell, depicted as a ruthless but compelling polymath straining against the certainties of his age.

Mantel said Cromwell was the king's "chief fixer, spin doctor, propagandist for one of the most eventful decades of English history."

"He was a blacksmith's son who ended up Earl of Essex," Mantel told the BBC before winning the prize. "So how did he do it? That's the question driving the book."

The Guardian newspaper said Mantel "persuasively depicts this beefy pen-pusher and backstairs maneuverer as one of the most appealing — and, in his own way, enlightened — characters of the period." The Times of London called "Wolf Hall" a "wonderful and intelligently imagined retelling of a familiar tale from an unfamiliar angle — one that makes the drama unfolding nearly five centuries ago look new again, and shocking again, too."

Both reviewers said they were disappointed to put the book down.

Mantel said it's no surprise we remain fascinated by the time of Henry VIII, recently depicted in TV series "The Tudors" and films like "The Other Boleyn Girl." She said the period "has everything. It has sex and melodrama, betrayal, seduction and violent death. What more could you hope for?"

Mantel, 57, is a former social worker and film critic who has written short stories, the memoir "Giving Up the Ghost" and novels including 2005's "Beyond Black," which was shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction.

She spent five years writing Wolf Hall and is currently working on a sequel.

A Booker win all but guarantees a a big surge in sales. Last year's winner, Aravind Adiga's "The White Tiger," has sold more than half a million copies and been translated into 30 languages. Janine Cook, fiction buyer for Waterstone's book store chain, said Mantel's work was already its best-selling work of all the books on the shortlist, calling it a "perfect winner."

The six shortlisted books included Coetzee's "Summertime," a fictionalized memoir in which a young English biographer works on a book about a dead writer named John Coetzee. The five other finalists were Byatt's "The Children's Book," Adam Foulds' "The Quickening Maze," Simon Mawer's "The Glass Room" and Sarah Waters' "The Little Stranger."

The prize is open to novels in English by writers from Britain, Ireland or the Commonwealth of former British colonies. Apart from South African Coetzee, all this year's finalists were British.

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On the Net: http://www.themanbookerprize.com


By JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press Writer Jill Lawless, Associated Press Writer

2009 Nobel Physics Prize

Three scientists who created the technology behind digital photography and helped link the world through fiber-optic networks shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday.

Charles K. Kao was cited for his breakthrough involving the transmission of light in fiber optics while Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith were honored for inventing an imaging semiconductor circuit known as the CCD sensor.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said all three have American citizenship. Kao also holds British citizenship while Boyle is also Canadian.

The award's 10 million kronor ($1.4 million) purse will be split between the three with Kao taking half and Boyle and Smith each getting a fourth. The three also receive a diploma and an invitation to the prize ceremonies in Stockholm on Dec. 10.

Kao, who was born in Shanghai and is a British citizen, was cited for his 1966 discovery that showed how to transmit light over long distances via fiber-optic cables, which became the backbone of modern communication networks that carry phone calls and high-speed Internet data around the world.

"With a fiber of purest glass it would be possible to transmit light signals over 100 kilometers (62.14 miles), compared to only 20 meters (65.62 feet) for the fibers available in the 1960s," the citation said.

Boyle and Smith worked together to invent the charged-coupled device, or CCD, the eye of the digital camera found in everything from the cheapest point-and-shoot to high-speed, delicate surgical instruments.

In its citation, the Academy said that Boyle and Smith "invented the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor, a CCD."

It said that technology builds on Albert Einstein's discovery of the photoelectric effect, for which he was awarded the Nobel physics prize in 1921.

The two men, working at Bell Labs in New Jersey, designed an image sensor that could transform light into a large number of image points, or pixels, in a short time.

"It revolutionized photography, as light could now be captured electronically instead of on film," the Academy said.

"Without the CCD, the development of digital cameras would have taken a slower course. Without CCD we would not have seen the astonishing images of space taken by the Hubble space telescope, or the images of the red desert on our neighboring planet Mars," it said.

Boyle, in a phone call to the academy, said he is reminded of his work with Smith "when I go around these days and see everybody using our little digital cameras, everywhere. Although they don't use exactly our CCD, it started it all."

He added that the biggest achievement resulting from his work was when images of Mars were transmitted back to Earth using digital cameras.

"We saw for the first time the surface of Mars," Boyle said. "It wouldn't have been possible without our invention."

The academy said digital image sensors are usually involved when photo, video or television are used for medical applications, such as taking images inside the body.

"It can reveal fine details in very distant and in extremely small objects," the academy said.

The physics award is the second of the 2009 Nobel Prizes to be announced.

On Monday, three American scientists shared the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.

Elizabeth H. Blackburn, who also has Australian citizenship, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak were cited for their work in solving the mystery of how chromosomes, the rod-like structures that carry DNA, protect themselves from degrading when cells divide.

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http://www.nobelprize.org

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.



By MATT MOORE and KARL RITTER Associated Press Writers
STOCKHOLM October 6, 2009 (AP)

3 men share 2009 Nobel physics prize for work in networking society, digital photography

Nobel Prize 2009 For Research On Aging

Three American scientists who made key discoveries about how living cells age have received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The winners are Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco; Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; and Jack Szostak of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

The scientists all study telomeres — structures that act like caps on the ends of chromosomes and protect them when cells divide. Chromosomes are the long strands of DNA that contain a living creature's genetic code.

Their work, together and apart, figured out how telomeres delay the aging of cells, that they are caused by the enzyme telomerase, and that they exist in all species, including humans.

These discoveries are now being used to study how behavior, such as diet or smoking, can determine the levels of telomerase in an individual and therefore influence the aging of his cells. The subject is also being looked at in terms of cancer therapy, as restricting telomeres can hinder the cell division that occurs so rapidly in cancerous tumors.

Each winner will receive one-third of the prize of about $1.4 million.

Elizabeth Blackburn

Blackburn discovered the molecular nature of telomeres, and her research lab now focuses on many different aspects of how telomeres work, including the relationship between accelerated telomere shortening and stress.

Blackburn is the first Australian woman to win Nobel Prize and only the ninth woman to win the prize for physiology or medicine in the past century.

She has outlined a mind/body connection to disease through an enzyme that plays a key role in how cells function and age. Blackburn is studying how diet, exercise and decreasing stress may reduce the risk of disease and even reverse damage due to coronary artery disease.

In a 2006 study, her group found that low levels of telomerase, the enzyme that helps keeps telomeres intact, were associated with smoking, high blood pressure, high blood sugar and pre-diabetes. Her lab is now looking at whether interventions such as a very low-calorie diet or stopping smoking may help repair the damage caused by stress.

In 2004, Blackburn was the focus of controversy over her support of "therapeutic cloning," which uses embryos to develop new treatments from stem cells. Then-President George W. Bush declined to reappoint Blackburn to his bioethics council, a political move in the eyes of many scientists and ethicists.

Blackburn, who grew up in Tasmania, was named one of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World" in 2007.

From her earliest years she was fascinated by small creatures, and that fascination led to her interest in molecular biology. She joined the UCSF faculty in 1990 and lives in San Francisco.

Carol Greider

Greider co-discovered telomerase in 1984 while working as a graduate student with Blackburn at the University of California, Berkeley.

"What intrigues basic scientists like me is that anytime we do a series of experiments, there are going to be three or four new questions that come up when you think you've answered one. Our approach shows that while you can do research that tries to answer specific questions about a disease, you can also just follow your nose," she said after receiving an award for her work in 2006.

Greider's father was a physicist at the University of California, Davis, and she credits him with influencing her to pursue a career in academic science.

While working at McMaster University in 1990, Greider realized that telomere length is related to cellular aging and found that telomerase is activated in cancer cells. That allows the cells to continue to grow and divide. Her work with mice and human cells has confirmed that inhibiting telomerase can limit cancer cells and tumor production.

Jack Szostak

Szostak is genetics professor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.

He was born in England but grew up in Canada. Szostak was fascinated with learning more about how cells work, which led to discoveries that telomeres in human cells play crucial roles in both cancer and aging.

Szostak's early work with genetics led to key discoveries about telomeres. His interest in telomeres was piqued when he heard of Blackburn's work in 1980. The two then performed an experiment that proved that telomere DNA is present in most plants and animals as a fundamental mechanism.

Szostak is also credited with creating the first yeast artificial chromosome, which led scientists to map the location of genes in mammals and develop techniques for manipulating genes, according to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where he also holds the title of HHMI investigator.

In recent years, Szostak's research has focused on understanding how complex chemicals come together to form simple organisms that can reproduce and evolve. According to Massachusetts General Hospital, the Szostak lab is using the principle of molecular evolution as a tool for drug discovery to treat different types of cancer.


by Jon Hamilton

Ardi Fossil Discovery: New Human-Evolution Puzzle Piece

Figuring out the story of human origins is like assembling a huge, complicated jigsaw puzzle that has lost most of its pieces. Many will never be found, and those that do turn up are sometimes hard to place. Every so often, though, fossil hunters stumble upon a discovery that fills in a big chunk of the puzzle all at once - and simultaneously reshapes the very picture they thought they were building.


The path of just such a discovery began in November 1994 with the unearthing of two pieces of bone from the palm of a hominid hand in the dusty Middle Awash region of Ethiopia. Within weeks, more than 100 additional bone fragments were found during an intensive search-and-reconstruction effort that would go on for the next 15 years and culminate in a key piece of evolutionary evidence revealed this week: the 4.4 million–year–old skeleton of a likely human ancestor known as Ardipithecus ramidus (abbreviated Ar. ramidus). (See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2008.)


In a series of studies published in the Oct. 2 special issue of Science - 11 papers by a total of 47 authors from 10 countries - researchers unveiled Ardi, a 125-piece hominid skeleton that is 1.2 million years older than the celebrated Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) and by far the oldest one ever found. Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, a co-leader of the Middle Awash research team that discovered and studied the new fossils, says, "To understand the biology, the parts you really want are the skull and teeth, the pelvis, the limbs and the hands and the feet. And we have all of them."


That is the beauty of Ardi - good bones. The completeness of Ardi's remains, as well as the more than 150,000 plant and animal fossils collected from surrounding sediments of the same time period, has generated an unprecedented amount of intelligence about one of our earliest potential forebears. The skeleton allows scientists to compare Ardipithecus directly with Lucy's genus, Australopithecus, its probable descendant. Perhaps most important, Ardi provides clues to what the last common ancestor shared by humans and chimps might have looked like before their lineages diverged about 7 million years ago. (See pictures of ancient skeletons.)


Ardi is the earliest and best-documented descendant of that common ancestor. But despite being "so close to the split," says White, the surprising thing is that she bears little resemblance to chimpanzees, our closest living primate relatives. The elusive common ancestor's bones have never been found, but scientists, working from the evidence available - especially analyses of Australopithecus and modern African apes - envisioned Great-Great-Grandpa to have looked most nearly like a knuckle-walking, tree-swinging ape. But "[Ardi is] not chimplike," according to White, which means that the last common ancestor probably wasn't either. "This skeleton flips our understanding of human evolution," says Kent State University anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy, a member of the Middle Awash team. "It's clear that humans are not merely a slight modification of chimps, despite their genomic similarity." (See "Darwin and Lincoln: Birthdays and Evolution.")


So what does that mean? Based on Ardi's anatomy, it appears that chimpanzees may actually have evolved more than humans - in the scientific sense of having changed more over the past 7 million years or so. That's not to say Ardi was more human-like than chimplike. White describes her as an "interesting mosaic" with certain uniquely human characteristics: bipedalism, for one. Ardi stood 47 in. (120 cm) tall and weighed about 110 lb. (50 kg), making her roughly twice as heavy as Lucy. The structure of Ardi's upper pelvis, leg bones and feet indicates she walked upright on the ground, while still retaining the ability to climb. Her foot had an opposable big toe for grasping tree limbs but lacked the flexibility that apes use to grab and scale tree trunks and vines ("Gorilla and chimp feet are almost like hands," says Lovejoy), nor did it have the arch that allowed Australopithecus and Homo to walk without lurching side to side. Ardi had a dexterous hand, more maneuverable than a chimp's, that made her better at catching things on the ground and carrying things while walking on two legs. Her wrist, hand and shoulder bones show that she wasn't a knuckle walker and didn't spend much time hanging or swinging ape-style in trees. Rather, she moved along branches using a primitive method of palm-walking typical of extinct apes. "[Ardi is] a lovely Darwinian creature," says Penn State paleoanthropologist Alan Walker, who was not involved in the discovery. "It has features that are intermediate between the last common ancestor and australopithecines."

Scientists know this because they've studied not only Ardi's fossils but also 110 other remnants they uncovered, which belonged to at least 35 Ar. ramidus individuals. Combine those bones with the thousands of plant and animal fossils from the site and they get a remarkably clear picture of the habitat Ardi roamed some 200,000 generations ago. It was a grassy woodland with patches of denser forest and freshwater springs. Colobus monkeys chattered in the trees, while baboons, elephants, spiral-horned antelopes and hyenas roamed the terrain. Shrews, hares, porcupines and small carnivores scuttled in the underbrush. There were an assortment of bats and at least 29 species of birds, including peacocks, doves, lovebirds, swifts and owls. Buried in the Ethiopian sediments were hackberry seeds, fossilized palm wood and traces of pollen from fig trees, whose fruit the omnivorous Ar. ramidus undoubtedly ate.


This tableau demolishes one aspect of what had been conventional evolutionary wisdom. Paleoanthropologists once thought that what got our ancestors walking on two legs in the first place was a change in climate that transformed African forest into savanna. In such an environment, goes the reasoning, upright-standing primates would have had the advantage over knuckle walkers because they could see over tall grasses to find food and avoid predators. The fact that Lucy's species sometimes lived in a more wooded environment began to undermine that theory. The fact that Ardi walked upright in a similar environment many hundreds of thousands of years earlier makes it clear that there must have been another reason.


No one knows what that reason was, but a theory about Ardi's social behavior may hold a clue. Lovejoy thinks Ar. ramidus had a social system found in no other primates except humans. Among gorillas and chimps, males viciously fight other males for the attention of females. But among Ardipithecus, says Lovejoy, males may have abandoned such competition, opting instead to pair-bond with females and stay together in order to rear their offspring (though not necessarily monogamously or for life). The evidence of this harmonious existence comes from, of all things, Ardipithecus' teeth: its canine teeth are relatively stubby compared with the sharp, dagger-like upper fangs that male chimps and gorillas use to do battle. "The male canine tooth," says Lovejoy, "is no longer projecting or sharp. It's no longer weaponry."


That suggests that females mated preferentially with smaller-fanged males. In order for females to have had so much power, Lovejoy argues, Ar. ramidus must have developed a social system in which males were cooperative. Males probably helped females, and their own offspring, by foraging for and sharing food, for example - a change in behavior that could help explain why bipedality arose. Carrying food is difficult in the woods, after all, if you can't free up your forelimbs by walking erect. (Read "Ida: Humankind's Earliest Ancestor! [BRACKET {Not Really.)}]")


Deducing such details of social behavior is, admittedly, speculative - and several researchers are quick to note that some of the authors' other major conclusions need further discussion as well. One problem is that some portions of Ardi's skeleton were found crushed nearly to smithereens and needed extensive digital reconstruction. "Tim [White] showed me pictures of the pelvis in the ground, and it looked like an Irish stew," says Walker. Indeed, looking at the evidence, different paleoanthropologists may have different interpretations of how Ardi moved or what she reveals about the last common ancestor of humans and chimps.


But Science doesn't put out special issues very often, and the extraordinary number and variety of fossils described in these new papers mean that scientists are arguing over real evidence, not the usual single tooth here or bit of foot bone there. "When we started our work [in the Middle Awash]," says White, "the human fossil record went back to about 3.7 million years." Now scientists have a trove of information from an era some 700,000 years closer to the dawn of the human lineage. "This isn't just a skeleton," he says. "We've been able to put together a fantastic, high-resolution snapshot of a period that was a blank." The search for more pieces continues, but the outlines of the puzzle, at least, are coming into focus.


By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK AND ANDREA DORFMAN Michael D. Lemonick And Andrea Dorfman

Spot the Space Station: Twitter Tells You When

The International Space Station (ISS) is easy to spot with the naked eye if you know when and where to look. A new notification service on Twitter will tell you exactly when to go out and look up.


As with many data services and applications (or apps, as developers call them) these days, this one was created by a couple guys who were interested in the topic.


Dutch science reporter Govert Schilling and journalist/web developer Jaap Meijers created @twisst, a Twitter service that will tell you when the space station will fly over your location.


There are other online sites that provide spotting information. What's new is to get the notifications through Twitter, a social network site that's turning out to be much more.


The new service is in a test phase, according to a statement from Schilling. Twitter users can follow it at @twisst (twitter.com/twisst). Others can learn about it at a regular web site.


As with other satellites that are easy to spot in the evening or pre-dawn sky, the space station is visible only for a few minutes on each pass.


The orbiting outpost constantly passes over different parts of the planet as it circles Earth every 90 minutes or so. It flies at an average altitude of 216 miles (348 km) and speeds along at 17,200 mph (27,700 kph). It is about as big as a football field and has highly reflective solar panels. It's the reflection of sunlight that makes it visible from Earth.


Europe will enjoy several passes this week, Schilling said. Good passes will occur for the United States on July 7 and East Asia on July 10.

How to Spot Satellites
More Skywatching Features

Original Story: Spot the Space Station: Twitter Tells You When

Leap second: More time added to 2008

Eager for this year to end? Bad news: you'll have to wait an extra second for 2009. On December 31, the planet's official timekeepers will add a “leap second” to the coordinated universal time scale (UTC) followed around the world. The additional second makes up for the difference in two clocks – one based on Earth’s rotation and the other on the more precise atomic time of the UTC.

In the U.S., the extra second will be added by the U.S. Naval Observatory at 6:59:59 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (11:59:59 p.m. Universal time). It will be the 24th “leap second” tacked on to the universal time scale since 1972.

Universal time is based on atomic energy, with one second defined as the length of 9,192,631,770 energy transitions of the cesium atom. Before the era of atomic time, seconds were based on the speed of Earth’s rotation – but that’s been slowing by 2 milliseconds per day per century because of tidal friction.

To keep the time scales within 0.9 seconds of each other, the International Earth Rotation Reference Systems Service, which tracks the differences between the clocks, periodically inserts or subtracts a second to Universal time. The last one was added on New Year’s Eve three years ago.

The “leap second” is different from “leap year,” which occurs every four years on February 29. Leap years are based on the fact that it takes Earth 365 days plus six hours to completely circle the sun, according to Reuters.

Thanksgiving sky: Jupiter, Venus, moon together

WASHINGTON – It's not just families that are getting together this Thanksgiving week. The three brightest objects in the night sky — Venus, Jupiter and a crescent moon — will crowd around each other for an unusual group shot.

Starting Thanksgiving evening, Jupiter and Venus will begin moving closer so that by Sunday and Monday, they will appear 2 degrees apart, which is about a finger width held out at arm's length, said Alan MacRobert, senior editor at Sky and Telescope magazine. Then on Monday night, they will be joined by a crescent moon right next to them, he said.

Look in the southwestern sky around twilight — no telescope or binoculars needed. The show will even be visible in cities if it's a clear night.

"It'll be a head-turner," MacRobert said. "This certainly is an unusual coincidence for the crescent moon to be right there in the days when they are going to be closest together."

The moon is the brightest, closest and smallest of the three and is 252,000 miles away. Venus, the second brightest, closest and smallest, is 94 million miles away. And big Jupiter is 540 million miles away.

The three celestial objects come together from time to time, but often they are too close to the sun or unite at a time when they aren't so visible. The next time the three will be as close and visible as this week will be Nov. 18, 2052, according to Jack Horkheimer, director of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium.

But if you are willing to settle for two out of three — Venus and the crescent moon only — it will happen again on New Year's Eve, MacRobert said.

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein, Ap Science Writer – Tue Nov 25, 4:21 pm ET

Cave bears killed by Ice Age, not hunters: study

OSLO (Reuters) - Giant cave bears froze to death during the last Ice Age in Europe about 28,000 years ago, according to a study on Wednesday that cleared human hunters of driving them to extinction thousands of years later.

The largely vegetarian bears, weighing up to a tonne and bigger than modern polar bears or Kodiak bears, apparently died off as a sharp cooling of the climate led to a freeze that killed off the fruits, nuts and plants they ate.

The bears vanished 27,800 years ago, or about 13,000 years earlier than previously believed, the scientists in Austria and Britain said in a study of bear remains using radiocarbon dating including at hibernation sites in the Alps.

"There is little convincing evidence so far of human involvement in extinction of the cave bear," they wrote in the journal Boreas. Some past reports have suggested that the cave bears' demise was linked to over-hunting.

Cave bears ranged from what is now Spain to the Ural Mountains, and were one of several large creatures -- such as the woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, giant deer and cave lion -- to vanish during the Ice Age that ended 10,000 years ago.

"Our work shows that the cave bear ... was one of the earliest to disappear," Martina Pacher, one of the co-authors at the University of Vienna, said in a statement.

"Other, later extinctions happened at different times within the last 15,000 years," she said. Previous studies had errors in dating samples and sometimes confused remains of cave bears with those of brown bears, which still survive.

"A fundamental question to be answered by future research is: why did the brown bear survive to the present day, while the cave bear did not?" said Anthony Stuart, the other author at the Natural History Museum in London.

Answers might involve differing diets, hibernation habits, geographical ranges, habitat and perhaps hunting by people, he said


By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

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 Roman 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.

So, in the next stage, Swedish genetics expert Marie Allen analyzed DNA from a vertebrae, a tooth and femur bone and matched and compared it to that taken from two hairs retrieved from a book that the 16th-century Polish astronomer owned, which is kept at a library of Sweden's Uppsala University where Allen works.

"We collected four hairs and two of them are from the same individual as the bones," Allen said.

Gassowski is head of the Archaeology and Anthropology Institute in Pultusk, in central Poland, and Allen works at the Rudbeck Laboratory of the Genetics and Pathology Department of Uppsala University.

Copernicus was known to have been buried in the 14th-century Frombork Cathedral where he served as a canon, but his grave was not marked. The bones found by Gassowski were located under floor tiles near one of the side altars.

Gassowski's team started his search in 2004, on request from regional Catholic bishop, Jacek Jezierski.

"In the two years of work, under extremely difficult conditions — amid thousands of visitors, with earth shifting under the heavy pounding of the organ music — we managed to locate the grave, which was badly damaged," Gassowski said.

Copernicus is believed to have come up with his main idea of the Sun at the center of the universe between 1508 and 1514, and during those years wrote a manuscript commonly known as Commentariolus (Little Commentary).

His final thesis was only published, however, in the year of his death. His ideas challenged the Bible, the church and past theories, and they had important consequences for future thinkers, including Galileo, Descartes and Newton.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.


By MONIKA SCISLOWSKA Associated Press Writer
WARSAW, Poland November 20, 2008

Polish, Swedish scientists say they have identified Copernicus' remains, grave

First Extrasolar Planets Caught On Camera

Morning Edition, November 14, 2008 · Astronomers are getting their first real glimpses of planets in orbit around distant stars.

Over the past decade, more than 300 otherworldly worlds have been detected indirectly — typically their gravitational pull makes their host-stars wobble and astronomers can pick up that wobble. But the most recent planet discoveries are actual photo-ops.

For the first time, scientists have produced images of multiple planets orbiting a star other than our own sun. There have been three reports in the past two months purporting to show images of planets in solar systems around nearby stars.

Science Express published two of the new finds online Thursday. One involves a planet that appears to be orbiting just inside a giant ring of gas that encircles a star known as Fomalhaut, a mere 25 light-years from Earth. Paul Kalas of the University of California, Berkeley, suspects the planet is shepherding the star's massive gas ring and keeping it organized, much the way "shepherd moons" circle the rings of Saturn and keep them tidy.

The planet, dubbed Fomalhaut b, is a gas giant that is much bigger than Jupiter and apparently is surrounded by rings of its own. It's more than 100 times farther from its star than Earth is from the sun.

Meanwhile, an international team of astronomers say they've seen not just a single planet, but a small solar system around a star called HR 8799 (The name might sound like a personnel form, because astronomers sometimes can't decide whether to be scientific or romantic.)

These three planets in this system also appear to be gas giants, and all are at least five times bigger than Jupiter. Their orbits aren't too different from the orbits of our own outermost planets. And that makes this solar system somewhat like our own — though the star and its planets are much younger than our 5 billion-year-old solar system.

"Not only is it exciting just because we have pictures for the first time, but also because these pictures are revealing an entirely new population of planets that were not accessible to the previously used method for planet detection," says Ray Jayawardhana, an astronomer at the University of Toronto. He was part of a team that in September announced yet another image of what it claims is a planet at a nearby star.

But astronomers have not found what they would dearly like to see: an earth-like planet around a sun-like star.

"That's a little ways away, I'm afraid," Jayawardhana says.

We'll probably have to wait for the space telescope that will replace Hubble sometime in the coming decade.

Space station trash plunging to Earth

A piece of space station trash the size of a refrigerator is poised to plunge through the Earth's atmosphere late Sunday, more than a year after an astronaut tossed it overboard.

NASA and the U.S. Space Surveillance Network are tracking the object — a 1,400-pound (635-kilogram) tank of toxic ammonia coolant thrown from the international space station — to make sure it does not endanger people on Earth. Exactly where the tank will inevitably fall is currently unknown, though it is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere Sunday afternoon or later that evening, NASA officials said.

"This has got a very low likelihood that anybody will be impacted by it," said Mike Suffredini, NASA's space station program manager, in an interview. "But still, it is a large object and pieces will enter and we just need to be cautious."

NASA astronaut Clayton Anderson threw the ammonia tank from the tip of the space station's Canadian-built robotic arm during a July 23, 2007, spacewalk. He tossed away an unneeded video camera stand overboard as well, but that 212-pound (96-kilogram) item burned up harmlessly in the atmosphere early this year, Suffredini said.

NASA expects up to 15 pieces of the tank to survive the searing hot temperatures of re-entry, ranging in size from about 1.4 ounces (40 grams) to nearly 40 pounds (17.5 kilograms).

If they reach all the way to land, the largest pieces could slam into the Earth's surface at about 100 mph (161 kilometers per hour). But a splashdown at sea is also possible, as the planet is two-thirds ocean.

"If anybody found a piece of anything on the ground Monday morning, I would hope they wouldn't get too close to it," Suffredini said.

Known as the Early Ammonia Servicer, or EAS, the coolant tank is the largest piece of orbital trash ever tossed overboard by hand from the space station. Larger unmanned Russian and European cargo ships are routinely destroyed in the Earth's atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean after their space station deliveries, but those disposals are controlled and preplanned.

The recent destruction of the European Space Agency's Jules Verne cargo ship was eagerly observed by scientists hoping to glean new information on how objects behave as they enter Earth's atmosphere. Observers aboard two chase planes caught photographs and video of the double-decker bus-sized spacecraft's demise, but no such campaign is possible with the returning ammonia tank.

The last object to re-enter Earth's atmosphere with prior notice was a small asteroid the size of a kitchen table that exploded in midair as it flew over Africa on Oct. 7.

It's taken more than year for the ammonia tank to slowly slip down toward Earth due to atmospheric drag. During its time aboard the station, the tank served as a coolant reservoir to boost the outpost's cooling system in the event of leaks. Upgrades to the station last year made the tank obsolete, and engineers were concerned that its structural integrity would not withstand a ride back to Earth aboard a NASA space shuttle.

Instead, they tossed it overboard, or "jettisoned" it in NASA parlance.

Suffredini said that while astronauts have accidentally lost a tool or two during spacewalks, the planned jettison of larger items is done with the utmost care to ensure the trash doesn't hit the station or any other spacecraft as it circles the Earth. Engineers also make sure the risk to people on Earth is low, as well.

"As a matter of course, we don't throw things overboard haphazardly," Suffredini said. "We have a policy that has certain criteria we have to meet before you can throw something overboard."

In the event the tank re-enters over land, NASA advised members of the public to contact their local authorities, or the U.S. Department of State via diplomatic channels if outside the U.S., if they believe they've found its remains.

© 2007 Space.com. All rights reserved. More from Space.com

Tank of toxic ammonia coolant thrown from station more than a year ago

By Tariq Malik
Senior editor

Space Litter To Hit Earth Tomorrow

A refrigerator-sized tank of toxic ammonia, tossed from the international space station last year, is expected to hit earth tomorrow afternoon or evening. The 1,400-pound object was deliberately jettisoned — by hand — from the ISS's robot arm in July 2007. Since the time of re-entry is uncertain, so is the location.
"NASA expects up to 15 pieces of the tank to survive the searing hot temperatures of re-entry, ranging in size from about 1.4 ounces (40 grams) to nearly 40 pounds (17.5 kilograms). ... [T]he largest pieces could slam into the Earth's surface at about 100 mph (161 kph). ...'If anybody found a piece of anything on the ground Monday morning, I would hope they wouldn't get too close to it,' [a NASA spokesman] said."


Posted by kdawson on Saturday November 01, @05:39PM
from the leave-only-memories-take-only-footprints dept

NASA probe shows Mercury more dynamic than thought

WASHINGTON – Earth's first nearly full look at Mercury reveals that the tiny lifeless planet took a far greater role in shaping itself than was thought, with volcanoes spewing "mysterious dark blue material."

New images from NASA's Messenger space probe should help settle a decades-old debate about what caused parts of Mercury to be somewhat smoother than it should be. NASA released photos Wednesday, from Messenger's fly-by earlier this month, that gave the answer: Lots of volcanic activity, far more than signs from an earlier probe.

Astronomers used to dismiss Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, as mere "dead rock," little more than a target for cosmic collisions that shaped it, said MIT planetary scientist Maria Zuber.

"Now, it's looking a lot more interesting," said Zuber, who has experiments on the Messenger probe. "It's an awful lot of volcanic material."

New images of filled-in craters — one the size of the Baltimore-Washington area and filled in with more than a mile deep of cooled lava — show that 3.8 to 4 billion years ago, Mercury was more of a volcanic hotspot than the moon ever was, Zuber said.

But it isn't just filled-in craters. Using special cameras, the probe showed what one scientist called "the mysterious dark blue material." It was all over the planet. That led Arizona State University geologist Mark Robinson to speculate that the mineral is important but still unknown stuff ejected from Mercury's large core in the volcanic eruptions.

That material was seen with NASA's first partial view of Mercury by Mariner 10 in the 1970s. It was spotted again in Messenger's first images of Mercury's unseen side earlier this year. The latest Messenger images, added to earlier photos show about 95 percent of the planet, and the blue stuff was in many places, more than astronomers had anticipated.

Although Robinson described the material as "dark blue," it only looks that way to special infrared cameras. In normal visible light, it would have "a soft blue tinge and it would be less red" than the rest of Mercury, he said.

It's too early to tell what that material is, but it may have iron in it, Robinson said. That would be a surprise because Mariner 10 didn't find much iron, he said


By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein, Ap Science Writer – 2 hrs 39 mins ago

India launches unmanned moon mission

SRIHARIKOTA, India, Oct 22 - India launched its first unmanned moon mission on Wednesday following in the footsteps of rival China, as the emerging Asian power celebrated its space ambitions and scientific prowess.

Chandrayaan-1 (Moon vehicle), a cuboid spacecraft built by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) blasted off from a southern Indian space centre shortly after dawn in a boost for the country’s ambitions to gain more global space business.

Chinese astronauts were feted as national heroes last month after their country’s first space walk, and India did not want to be left behind.

”What we have started is a remarkable journey,” G. Madhavan Nair, chairman of ISRO, told reporters.

India’s national television channels broadcast the event live. Some scientists thumped their chests, hugged each other and clapped as the rocket shot up into space.

Greeted with patriotism in the media, the launch appeared to have helped India regain its self-confidence, which has taken a beating in recent weeks amid signs of an economic slowdown as well as international criticism over Hindu attacks on Christians. Perhaps remarkably in a country where hundreds of millions of people still live in desperate poverty and millions of children remain malnourished, the cost of the moon mission has scarcely been questioned.

”Destination Moon ... Historic Day For India” blazed one TV channel on its screen.

Barring any technical failure, the spacecraft will reach the lunar orbit and spend two years scanning the moon for any evidence of water and precious metals.

A gadget called the Moon Impactor Probe will detach and land on the moon to kick up some dust, while instruments in the craft analyse the particles, ISRO says.

A principal objective is to look for Helium 3, an isotope which is very rare on earth but is sought to power nuclear fusion and could be a valuable source of energy in the future, some scientists believe.

It is thought to be more plentiful on the moon, but still rare and very difficult to extract.

The project cost $79m, considerably less than the Chinese and Japanese probes in 2007 and ISRO says the moon mission will pave the way for India to claim a bigger chunk of the global space business.

The mission is also expected to carry out a detailed survey of the moon to look for precious metals and water.

For many Indians, the launch is another notch in India’s ambitions to be a global player. India recently signed a civil nuclear deal with the United States, effectively making it a defacto nuclear power.

In April India sent 10 satellites into orbit from a single rocket, and ISRO says it is planning more launches before a proposed manned mission to space and then onto Mars in four years time.

ISRO is collaborating with a number of countries, including Israel on a project to carry an ultra-violet telescope in an Indian satellite within a year.

It is also building a tropical weather satellite with France, collaborating with Japan on a project to improve disaster management from space, and developing a heavy lift satellite launcher, which it hopes to use to launch heavier satellites by 2010.

India has launched 10 remote sensing satellites since 1998, has several broadcast satellites in space to control 170 transponders and has also launched light-weight satellites for Belgium, Germany, Korea, Japan and France.

Finland's Martti Ahtisaari Wins Nobel Peace Prize

Morning Edition, October 10, 2008 · The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced Friday that Finland's former president Martti Ahtisaari has won the Nobel Peace Prize. He was cited for his long career of peace mediation work including a 2005 accord between Indonesia and rebels in its Aceh province.

by Rob Gifford and Renee Montagne