Saturn's rings may double up as a moon factory

Many of the moons in the solar system could have been spawned from giant rings around planets. According to a new model, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and even the Earth may have once had ring systems that gave rise to satellites.

We used to think that moons form around planets in the same way as planets form around stars: coalescing from a gaseous disc that surrounded the planet as it formed. That model still applies to some moons, like those of Jupiter.

But Saturn's moons follow a peculiar pattern. Their orbits bunch near the edge of the rings, and the moons get more spread out and more massive as they get further away.

The rings mark Saturn's Roche limit: the distance from the planet beyond which its gravitational tidal forces are weak enough to let moons there survive. Inside the Roche limit, however, Saturn's gravity would pull moons apart and add them to its rings. Some astronomers think this is how the planet gained its rings in the first place.

But theory says that such rings do not remain static. The constituent fragments that lie near the inner, planetary side of the ring should constantly exchange angular momentum with fragments further out. This means the inner fragments lose energy and fall towards Saturn while the outer ones gain energy and retreat from the planet.

Aurélien Crida at the Observatory of the Cote d'Azur in Nice, France, and Sébastien Charnoz at the Denis Diderot University in Paris have now run simulations of this effect. They showed that material leaving the outer edge of the ring would pool into a small moon, which then gradually migrates away from the planet.

When enough material is left in the rings, a second moon would grow where the first moon formed. This moon, too, would gradually move away, allowing a third moon to grow, and so on. The earlier moons would probably be larger, because they had a bigger ring to draw material from than the later moons. The early moons also have more time to collide with each other, fusing into larger satellites. "We see that for Saturn's moons, it fits quite well," Crida says.

Smoking gun

Neither Uranus nor Neptune has a massive ring system today, but the distribution of moons around both planets is similar enough to the Saturn pattern to suggest that they once did – and that the rings gave rise to both of the ice giants' satellites. "We think this is a smoking gun of this process," Crida says. Uranus and Neptune clearly lack big rings today, though, so we would need a better understanding of the ring-forming process to establish whether they might have done in the past.

Surprisingly, even the Earth could have had a ring once. Earth's moon probably formed when a large body collided with the young planet and sent hot mantle material flying into space.

"The process through which this material would eventually form the moon was not investigated in detail so far," Crida says. If the material settled into a massive ring, it could have spread and congealed into a single moon in as little time as a month, he says.

Journal: Science, doi.org/jvw

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Bird flu kills 4,000 wild ducks in Russia

MOSCOW: Around 4,000 wild ducks have been found dead in Russia's southern Krasnodar region, officials said on Friday, blaming H5 bird flu for the mass deaths.

"This is the H5 virus, the strain is being confirmed," a spokeswoman for the Krasnodar region branch of Russian agriculture watchdog Rosselkhoznadzor told AFP.

The birds' remains were now being tested, she added.

The dead birds have been found on lakes near the Black Sea resort town of Anapa.

The region has gone on high alert, with poultry and humans now being vaccinated.

"All of these are protective measures, it's better to be on the safe side," the spokeswoman added.

- AFP/de

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Staples to offer in-store 3D printing on demand

MCOR's Iris 3D printer will be deployed first at Staples stores in Belgium and the Netherlands.

(Credit:
MCOR)

Need a custom architectural or medical model in short order? How about a 3-D map or, um... a handgun? Soon, Staples could be the place for all of the above -- ok, maybe not the gun -- through a new in-store 3-D printing service just announced this week.

The office supply chain's apparent partner in the venture, MCOR Technologies, makes a commercial-class color 3D printer called the Iris that will be deployed first to Staples locations in the Netherlands and Belgium in early 2013. MCOR announced the printing service, dubbed Staples Easy 3D, in a press release, and at the Euromold conference in Germany.

"Customized parts, prototypes, art objects, architectural models, medical models and 3D maps are items customers need today," Wouter Van Dijk, president of the Staples Printing Systems Division in Europe said in the release.

Users would upload product designs online to be printed in-store and picked up, much like Staples currently does with business cards.

Staples says that after debuting in the northern European countries, the service will be "rolled out quickly to other countries."

No word on how quick that timeline might be, or which countries could be at the top of the list. There was also no indication of pricing, other than that it would be "low."

Mechanical engineers, please contact me if you have a design for a 3D printer that can be built completely from 3D-printed parts, particularly if you're located in Amsterdam - I have an idea to run by you.

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Pictures: Inside the World's Most Powerful Laser

Photograph courtesy Damien Jemison, LLNL

Looking like a portal to a science fiction movie, preamplifiers line a corridor at the U.S. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (NIF).

Preamplifiers work by increasing the energy of laser beams—up to ten billion times—before these beams reach the facility's target chamber.

The project's lasers are tackling "one of physics' grand challenges"—igniting hydrogen fusion fuel in the laboratory, according to the NIF website. Nuclear fusion—the merging of the nuclei of two atoms of, say, hydrogen—can result in a tremendous amount of excess energy. Nuclear fission, by contrast, involves the splitting of atoms.

This July, California-based NIF made history by combining 192 laser beams into a record-breaking laser shot that packed over 500 trillion watts of peak power-a thousand times more power than the entire United States uses at any given instant.

"This was a quantum leap for laser technology around the world," NIF director Ed Moses said in September. But some critics of the $5 billion project wonder why the laser has yet to ignite a fusion chain reaction after three-and-a-half years in operation. Supporters counter that such groundbreaking science simply can't be rushed.

(Related: "Fusion Power a Step Closer After Giant Laser Blast.")

—Brian Handwerk

Published November 29, 2012

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Fiscal Cliff Creeps Closer With Few Signs of Optimism

"Absurd" -- that's the word one top Republican Hill aide used to describe the plan that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner presented to GOP leaders yesterday to avoid the fiscal cliff.

And an aide to House Speaker Boehner described the White House's offer as "completely unrealistic" and "a break with reality."

Meanwhile, a top Democratic insider complained to ABC's Jonathan Karl that "the Republicans have taken to screaming at us."

Sources familiar with the phone call Wednesday night between Speaker Boehner and President Obama -- which lasted 30 minutes -- told Karl it was as "unproductive" and "blunt." One source said the president did most of the taking, explaining why he will insist that tax rates go up.

Get more pure politics at ABCNews.com/Politics and a lighter take on the news at OTUSNews.com

"No substantive progress has been made over the last two weeks," said House Speaker John Boehner at a press conference yesterday. "It's time for the president and Congressional Democrats to tell the American people what spending cuts they're really willing to make."

With few signs of optimism in Washington and just 33 days before the end-of-the-year fiscal cliff deadline, President Obama is taking his show on the road.

ABC's Mary Bruce notes that the president is bypassing the wrangling between both sides and traveling to Hatfield, Pa. today where he will tour a toy manufacturing facility and speak to workers there.

AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File

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According to the White House, "the President will continue making the case for action by visiting a business that depends on middle class consumers during the holiday season, and could be impacted if taxes go up on 98 percent of Americans at the end of the year."

FROM THE SPEAKER'S OFFICE: Boehner's office gives six reasons why the Obama administration's fiscal cliff offer won't fly:

"1) Twice the Taxes: It's absolutely true that the President ran on a tax plan of raising the top two rates. That's what Americans heard from him. That yields about $800 billion in new tax revenue. He just asked for twice that. 2) Not Even the Votes in His Own Party: The Senate was barely able to pass a bill with $800 billion in new tax revenue a few months ago (51 votes). There is no chance there are votes in the Senate for anything close to $1.6 trillion. 3) Unbalanced: The President also ran on a so-called balanced approach. Apparently his idea of balance is four times as much revenue as spending cuts. 4) No Net Spending Cuts: The spending cuts they are offering (which come later) are wiped out by all the new goodies he's also requesting. (stimulus, UI, payroll, housing, etc). 5) Debt Limit Pipe Dream: Permanently doing away with the debt limit? Come on. Guess what - the debt limit is actually very popular. Raising it to infinity is not. 6) We're Far From Opening Bids: Even as an "opening bid," this offer would be ludicrous. But we're way past that. We had about seven weeks to resolve this. Three of those weeks are gone, and this is what he comes with?"

FROM THE WHITE HOUSE: White House spokesman Josh Earnest: "Right now, the only thing preventing us from reaching a deal that averts the fiscal cliff and avoids a tax hike on 98 percent of Americans is the refusal of Congressional Republicans to ask the very wealthiest individuals to pay higher tax rates. The President has already signed into law over $1 trillion in spending cuts and we remain willing to do tough things to compromise, and it's time for Republicans in Washington to join the chorus of other voices -- from the business community to middle class Americans across the country -- who support a balanced approach that asks more from the wealthiest Americans."

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Junk radio signals track all space debris in one go

Call it Junk FM. Rogue signals from your radio may help warn about space debris on a dangerous collision course with Earth.

Stray FM signals from radios, bouncing back off space junk, could allow astronomers to track the whole population of space debris, suggest preliminary tests conducted this week at the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope in Western Australia.

More than 21,000 pieces of debris larger than 10 centimetres are currently zipping around Earth at speeds of around 7 kilometres per second, according to NASA. Friction created by brushes with Earth's upper atmosphere can sometimes cause pieces of space junk to drop from orbit, creating a small but real risk for humans.

Meanwhile, millions of smaller pieces in orbit present a serious risk to satellites. This space junk is spotted and tracked using traditional radar or lasers, but the system has its limits.

"The best techniques at the moment can track a max of about 200 bits of debris a day," says Steven Tingay, director of the MWA from Curtin University in Western Australia. "If we can get thousands simultaneously, we could almost get the whole population of space debris in a night."

ISS test

The MWA is a set of some 2000 radio antennas spread out over 3 kilometres. Because of its extraordinarily wide field of view, the MWA can continuously track objects rather than just calculate their orbits from snapshots, Tingay says. That will improve our understanding of how much space junk exists and how much more is being created. "We can quickly characterise it after a launch or a collision," he says.

Continuous tracking would also improve orbital modelling in general and allow better protection of space assets, Tingay says.

To test the radio-tracking concept, the team used the MWA to pick up FM signals rebounding off the International Space Station, which is more than 100 metres wide. The team could clearly track the orbiting lab as it moved about 8 kilometres.

"This first observation gives us some great data to work on," says Tingay. Now that they know it works, the technique should be easy to scale down to objects as small as 10 centimetres, he says.

So far, the telescope has been using only a quarter of its antennas at a time, Tingay adds. Next year it will begin operating at full capacity. "The main thing the final instrument will give is four times more sensitivity, which broadly translates to four times smaller space debris," he says.

"It's a great idea," says Fred Watson, head of the Anglo-Australian Observatory at Coonabarabran. "If you're looking at the whole sky you really have the potential to map the space debris. But it's not the total panacea." There would be some lower limit to the size of debris FM signals could track, he says, and bits only a few millimetres wide can still do damage.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

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Some contract manufacturers struggling despite demand for mobile devices: analysts

SINGAPORE : Apple and Samsung are riding high on the growing demand for mobile devices.

Global shipments of smartphones and tablets are expected to reach some 680 million this year, according to Frost & Sullivan.

Analysts have said the success of mobile devices may not necessarily benefit many contract manufacturers.

Some are instead struggling to change their production lines from falling personal computer (PC) shipments.

Japanese tech giants that once dominated the electronics market are finding themselves in an increasing perilous fight for relevance.

Companies like Sony, Sharp and Panasonic are struggling to turn in profits, and close the gap on rivals with innovative products such as smartphones and tablets.

PC makers are also suffering.

Andrew Milroy, vice president of ICT (Asia Pacific) at Frost & Sullivan, said: "All sorts of new devices are emerging - tablets and smartphones are one type that do the the same kind of thing that PCs once did."

Global shipments of PCs tumbled by 8 per cent year-on-year to 87.5 million units in the third quarter of this year.

Apple and Samsung are currently leading in the market for smartphones and tablets.

In the third quarter of this year, they had a combined marketshare of 46.5 per cent in the smartphone market, and close to 70 per cent in the tablet market.

The success of Apple has turned Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry into the world's largest contract manufacturer.

But other such manufacturers in Southeast Asia have not been so fortunate.

Edison Chen, a tech analyst at DMG & Partners Research, said: "For example, Broadway Industrial, the one making actuator arms for the HDD (hard disk drive) market...they have been trying very hard to diversify..."

Broadway has diversified into making foams, pulps and thermo-formed packaging products, while others have ventured into corporate devices like medical instrument components.

- CNA/ms

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Blackout: Syria vanishes from Internet

A Syrian ducks while passing through a dangerous part of Baba Amr in Homs, Syria.

(Credit:
CBS News)

Syria, the Middle Eastern country ravaged by a vicious civil war, has now lost contact with the outside world.

The country has been experiencing an Internet outage for several hours, and many people on Twitter are also reporting phone lines are down. In addition, some airlines are canceling flights to Damascus.

According to Renesys, which operates a real-time grid that continuously monitors Internet routing data, all 84 of Syria's IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively removing the country from the Internet. The outage started at 10:26 UTC (12:26 p.m. in Damascus or 5:26 a.m. ET), and there doesn't appear to be any end in sight.

The site initially said only 92 percent of the country's routed networks were offline, but the remainder eventually disappeared, as well. Renesys said it's "investigating the dynamics of the outage and will post updates as they become available."

Shutting down Web and phone service is a tactic increasingly pursued by countries to limit the spread of information both within the country and to the outside world. Egypt and Libya switched off Internet access early in their own uprisings last year, but Syria hadn't taken the step despite being embroiled in a bloody war for the past couple years.

The move today could signal even tougher times ahead for Syria and could limit efforts by rebels to coordinate actions against President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

Airlines also are canceling flights to the Syrian capital of Damascus, Reuters reported. That includes EgyptAir and Emirates, with the latter airline noting that "the safety of our passengers and crew is of the highest priority and will not be compromised."

Here's are some of the recent comments on Twitter, via #SyriaBlackout:

(Via AllThingsD)

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Caterpillar Fungus Has Anti-Inflammatory Properties

In the Tibetan mountains, a fungus attaches itself to a moth larva burrowed in the soil. It infects and slowly consumes its host from within, taking over its brain and making the young caterpillar move to a position from which the fungus can grow and spore again.

Sounds like something out of science fiction, right? But for ailing Chinese consumers and nomadic Tibetan harvesters, the parasite called cordyceps means hope—and big money. Chinese markets sell the "golden worm," or "Tibetan mushroom"—thought to cure ailments from cancer to asthma to erectile dysfunction—for up to $50,000 (U.S.) per pound. Patients, following traditional medicinal practices, brew the fungal-infected caterpillar in tea or chew it raw.

Now the folk medicine is getting scientific backing. A new study published in the journal RNA finds that cordycepin, a chemical derived from the caterpillar fungus, has anti-inflammatory properties.

"Inflammation is normally a beneficial response to a wound or infection, but in diseases like asthma it happens too fast and to too high of an extent," said study co-author Cornelia H. de Moor of the University of Nottingham. "When cordycepin is present, it inhibits that response strongly."

And it does so in a way not previously seen: at the mRNA stage, where it inhibits polyadenylation. That means it stops swelling at the genetic cellular level—a novel anti-inflammatory approach that could lead to new drugs for cancer, asthma, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and cardiovascular-disease patients who don't respond well to current medications.

From Worm to Pill

But such new drugs may be a long way off. The science of parasitic fungi is still in its early stages, and no medicine currently available utilizes cordycepin as an anti-inflammatory. The only way a patient could gain its benefits would by consuming wild-harvested mushrooms.

De Moor cautions against this practice. "I can't recommend taking wild-harvested medications," she says. "Each sample could have a completely different dose, and there are mushrooms where [taking] a single bite will kill you."

Today 96 percent of the world's caterpillar-fungus harvest comes from the high Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayan range. Fungi from this region are of the subspecies Ophiocordyceps sinensis, locally known as yartsa gunbu ("summer grass, winter worm"). While highly valued in Chinese traditional medicine, these fungi have relatively low levels of cordycepin. What's more, they grow only at elevations of 10,000 to 16,500 feet and cannot be farmed. All of which makes yartsa gunbu costly for Chinese consumers: A single fungal-infected caterpillar can fetch $30.

Brave New Worm

Luckily for researchers, and for potential consumers, another rare species of caterpillar fungus, Cordyceps militaris, is capable of being farmed—and even cultivated to yield much higher levels of cordycepin.

De Moor says that's not likely to discourage Tibetan harvesters, many of whom make a year's salary in just weeks by finding and selling yartsa gunbu. Scientific proof of cordycepin's efficacy will only increase demand for the fungus, which could prove dangerous. "With cultivation we have a level of quality control that's missing in the wild," says de Moor.

"There is definitely some truth somewhere in certain herbal medicinal traditions, if you look hard enough," says de Moor. "But ancient healers probably wouldn't notice a 10 percent mortality rate resulting from herbal remedies. In the scientific world, that's completely unacceptable." If you want to be safe, she adds, "wait for the medicine."

Ancient Chinese medical traditions—which also use ground tiger bones as a cure for insomnia, elephant ivory for religious icons, and rhinoceros horns to dispel fevers—are controversial but popular. Such remedies remain in demand regardless of scientific advancement—and endangered animals continue to be killed in order to meet that demand. While pills using cordycepin from farmed fungus might someday replace yartsa gunbu harvesting, tigers, elephants, and rhinos are disappearing much quicker than worms.

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Death at School: Parents Protest Dangerous Discipline for Autistic, Disabled Kids

Thousands of autistic and disabled schoolchildren have been injured and dozens have died after being restrained by poorly trained teachers and school aides who tried to subdue them using at times unduly harsh techniques, an ABC News investigation has found.

With no agreed upon national standards for how teachers can restrain an unruly child, school officials around the country have been employing a wide array of methods that range from sitting on children, to handcuffing them, even jolting them with an electric shock at one specialized school. Some have locked children in padded rooms for hours at a time. One Kentucky teacher's aide is alleged to have stuffed 9-year-old Christopher Baker, who is autistic and was swinging a chair around him, into a draw-string duffle bag.

"When I got to the end of the hall and saw the bag, I stood there like, 'Hmmm, what in the world?'" the boy's mother, Sandra Baker, recalled in an interview with ABC News. She had arrived at the school to find her son wriggling inside the "sensory bag." "It was really heartbreaking to walk up and see him in that."

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Earlier this year, Sheila Foster's son Corey, 16, was the latest child to die at school, when staff members at a special needs facility in Yonkers, New York held him face down for allegedly refusing to get off the basketball court. Sheila Foster said witnesses later informed her that Corey told the staffers he couldn't breathe, but they allegedly persisted, reportedly telling him, "If you can talk, you can breathe." The school said this account is not substantiated.

PHOTOS: Kids Hurt, Killed by Restraints at School

In an interview that will air on "Nightline" Thursday, Sheila Foster said she watches the time-lapse security video of her son nearly every day, hoping for a different ending. "Every time just looking at these pictures, I know I won't feel him hug me anymore, or say, 'I love you mommy,'" she said. "That was the last time he was alive and I want to see that."

How to safely handle an out-of-control student has been a longstanding issue for parents whose children attend special schools for those with autism or with behavioral or developmental problems. But experts told ABC News it has become increasingly vexing for officials in traditional public schools as they have sought to accommodate children with special needs. Many of the schools provide little or no training to teachers and staff for how to intervene when the student misbehaves. That has left teachers and school administrators to find their own solutions, at times with terrible outcomes.

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