Bonobos (Pan paniscus) are our closest relatives. They are a kind of apes, and are found only in the Congo River basin, and hence are highly endangered :(. We share 98.4% of our DNA, and a lot of what many of us think as exclusively human traits (emotions, tool-making, intelligence, language, consciousness, social bonds, morality, love) are found in bonobo societies as well. Pioneering research by Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Takayoshi Kano have helped open a window into the behavior of these apes, and helped show (along with Chimp researchers such as Jane Goodall) that we humans are not so unique after all.

Kanzi, the Bonobo (Courtesy: Wikipedia)Now scientists are planning a really ambitious attempt that might shine new light on bonobos, and how much we humans share with them. A group of eight bonobos will take part in a unique language research, at the Great Ape Trust near Des Moines, Iowa.
Panbanisha, 19, and her son, Nyota, 7, will arrive first. Later, the matriarch of the group, Matata, will move in with Kanzi, Nathan, Elikya, Maisha and P-Suke (peace-kay). These particular bonobos can speak with symbols, play music, work video games with a joystick, draw and role-play. They like it when the scientists wear animal masks and when they play "tickle," Savage-Rumbaugh said.
The scientists will test the bonobos' musical abilities, counting abilities, moral decisions, love, communication skills, and so on. The bonobos will control access to part of their building, flush their own toilets, help cook meals in their own kitchen, select their own videos to watch and lounge in their own spa-sized tub complete with waterfall :D:D.

A NASA funded study has found a decline in winter and spring snow cover over Southwest Asia and the Himalayan mountain range is creating conditions for more widespread blooms of ocean plants in the Arabian Sea.
The decrease in snow cover has led to greater differences in both temperature and pressure systems between the Indian subcontinent and the Arabian Sea. The pressure differences generate monsoon winds that mix the ocean water in the Western Arabian Sea. This mixing leads to better growing conditions for tiny, free-floating ocean plants called phytoplankton.

Chlorophyll concentration (Courtesy: NASA)When winter and spring snow cover is low over Eurasia, the amount of solar energy reflected back into the atmosphere is less. A decline in the amount of snow cover means less of the sun's energy goes towards melting of snow and evaporation of wet soil. As a result the land mass heats up more in summer creating a larger temperature difference between the water of the Arabian Sea and the Indian subcontinent landmass.
The temperature difference is responsible for a disparity in pressure over land and sea, creating a low pressure system over the Indian subcontinent and a high pressure system over the Arabian Sea. This difference in pressure causes winds to blow from the Southwest Arabian Sea bringing annual rainfall to the subcontinent from June to September. In the Western Arabian Sea, these winds also cause upwelling of cooler nutrient-rich water, creating ideal conditions for phytoplankton to bloom every year during summer.
While large blooms of phytoplankton can enhance fisheries, exceptionally large blooms could be detrimental to the ecosystem. Increases in phytoplankton amounts can lead to oxygen depletion in the water column and eventually to a decline in fish populations.
All this can start a downward spiral in the health of the marine ecosystem; as fish die, larger fish and mammals die, and this decreases the oxygen content further, since the decomposing bacteria start flourishing. It might take a while for the ocean systems to recover from such a downward trend, and in the meantime, economies around the world might take a beating.
Happy Earth Day, everyone ;)

Scientists at the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) have designed microscopic refrigerators, that are capable of reaching temperatures as low as 0.1 Kelvin (-273.06°C). These chip-sized refrigerators have been used to cool a cube of Germanium. The solid-state refrigerators have applications such as cooling cryogenic sensors in highly sensitive instruments for semiconductor defect analysis and astronomical research. The work is presented in the April 25, 2005, issue of Applied Physics Letters.

Cool Germanium! (Courtesy: NIST)The refrigerators are 25 microns x 15 microns (1 micron = 0.0001 cm) in size, and are sandwiches of a normal metal, an insulator and a superconducting metal. When a voltage is applied across the sandwich, the hottest electrons "tunnel" from the normal metal through the insulator to the superconductor. The temperature in the normal metal drops dramatically and drains electronic and vibrational energy from the objects being cooled. Tunneling is a quantum mechanical phenomenon, which allows the electrons to jump the insulator barrier, and directly go to the superconductor.
Four pairs of such sandwiches were used to cool a cube of Germanium (250 microns on a side), which was in placed on a Silicon Nitrate membrane (450 microns size). Both the membrane and the cube were cooled down to about 0.1 Kelvin. The cube is about 1,000 times larger than the combined volume of the refrigerators. This is equivalent to having a refrigerator the size of a person cool an object the size of the Statue of Liberty :D.
The refrigerators are made using common lithography techniques (used to 'print' circuits on a semiconductor chip), which makes a large-scale production very much possible in the near future. Such refrigerators might also have applications in draining heat from high-speed chips, and cauterizing small nerves/blood vessels during operations :).

Detailed new images of the starbirth nursery in the Omega Nebula (M17) have revealed a multi component structure in the envelope of dust and gas surrounding a very young star. The stellar newborn, called M17-SO1, has a flaring torus of gas and dust, and thin conical shells of material above and below the torus. Shigeyuki Sako from University of Tokyo and a team of astronomers from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Japan Aeorospace Exploration Agency, Ibaraki University, Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Chiba University obtained these images and analyzed them in infrared wavelengths in order to understand the mechanics of protoplanetary disk formation around young stars.

Stellar Envelope (Courtesy: NAOJ)Their work is described in a detailed article in the April 21, 2005 edition of Nature. The near-infrared observations reveal the structure of the surrounding envelope with unprecedented levels of detail. The observations show that the envelope has multiple components instead of one simple structure. The discovery of the multi-component structure puts new constraints on how an envelope feeds material to a protostellar disk forming within its boundaries.
The Sun and the solar system formed from a dense cloud of gas and dust similar to M17-SO1 some 4.6 billion years ago. All the material that makes up the Earth and the creatures that live upon it originated in that primordial cloud. Once the Sun formed, its gravity pulled gas and dust inward. When the Sun's gravitational pull and the centrifugal force of the infalling material balanced, the remaining material settled into orbit around the Sun. The resulting disk of gas and dust was a protoplanetary disk. Repeated collisions of gas and dust within this disk led to the formation of the planets. To understand what the early solar system was like, and to understand how planetary systems form in general, astronomers are actively studying stars that could be similar to the Sun as it was 4.6 billion years ago.
The observations regarding this planetary envelope can be substantial in extending our understanding of the proto-disk that once surrounded our Sun.

All matter around us is composed of atoms. Each atom is made up of yet smaller parts, protons, neutrons, and electrons. More fundamentally, protons and neutrons are made up of quarks (3 quarks each). The force that binds the protons and neutrons inside the nucleus of an atom is called the strong nuclear force, and has a particle equivalent called the gluon. Scientists believe that at the time of the creation of our Universe (that is, the Big Bang), the energies were so high that protons and neutrons were melted into constituent quarks and gluons, thus forming a Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). Now for the first time, such primordial matter might have been created in a lab :).

Quark Gluon Plasma (Courtesy: PPARC)An international team of physicists working at the RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory says it has found strong evidence for the QGP. Interestingly, instead of behaving like free particles, the quarks, antiquarks, and gluons behaved more like a liquid! The results were presented at the April meeting of the American Physical Society.
RHIC uses accelerators to increase the energies of gold atoms up to 100 billion electron volts inside a 4-kilometre ring and then collides them together. When a gold nucleus collides with another gold nucleus the constituent protons and neutrons are thought to melt together to form a QGP. The new material formed deviates from our current understanding of how a QGP should behave. This is exciting news, as it means that there are some things that are still not clear, and therefore more study is necessary to understand the underlying processes that govern our world at its smallest!

Albert Einstein died on April 18, 1955 (exactly 50 years ago). His papers on (Special and General) Relativity had a huge impact on 20th century physics and philosophy. One of the predictions of this theory relates to Gravitational Waves, which are ripples in space-time, caused by motions of matter. Imagine a ball on a rubber sheet, causing the sheet to deform. As the ball moves on the sheet, the deformation of the sheet changes. This change in deformation (ripples) will be felt by say, an ant standing on the sheet some distance away! Similarly, motions of stars and planets (any mass for that matter) should create ripples in 3D space, and should be detectable by sensitive instruments.

Proof mass on one craft (Courtesy: Max-Planck Institute)The joint ESA-NASA LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) mission hopes to detect gravitational waves in space. To be launched in 2013, the LISA mission will use laser interferometers - very sensitive tools to measure tiny variations in the distance between objects – and proof masses on board three spacecraft flying in formation. The three crafts will be flown in a triangular formation, each 5 million kms away from the other two. The setup will fly some 50 million kms from the Earth, so as to not get affected by Earth's gravity.
Infrared lasers will be beamed between the spacecraft, arriving on small 2-kilogram proof masses, 4-centimetre cubes made of Gold and Platinum. As the setup flies through gravitational waves (created by the blast from the Big Bang, by Earth, Sun, the planets, and so on), the lasers will fluctuate as the triangle gets deformed (imagine a triangle moving on a curved surface). The fluctuations will be measured, and the measurements relayed back to Earth.
Since gravitational waves are extremely weak (gravity is the weakest force in nature), extreme sensitivity is required. For example, the lasers need to measure fluctuations of an order of a 10th of the radius of an atom! The setup will also be able to measure the direction from where the waves are coming, which will help it locate perhaps some dark matter and other exotic sources.

Toshiba announced a new technology that allows 3D images on a flat-screen display, without the need of any special goggles. The technology will be marketed for video arcades by end of 2006, and for consumer appliances (televisions etc.) by 2010. The 3D displays have small lenses in front of each pixel, allowing different images to be seen depending on the point of view. That way, different images are sent to different viewpoints, thus creating a 3D effect. The technology will be displayed at the 1st International FPD Expo in Tokyo next week.

Drinks, anyone? (Courtesy: GeekBlue)In the real world, we are able to see true 3D (which includes depth perception), since our two eyes get slightly different images. Also the brain enhances our perception, by using past memories/experiences. 3D goggles operate on the same principle, by supplying slightly different images to the two eyes.
The prototype 3D screens (15.4-inch 480x400 pixels, and 24-inch 480x300 pixels) use 12 or 16 slightly different views of the same object or scene. The different views are then processed, and projected onto the lens in front of the pixels, which sends slightly different scenes in different directions. Currently, the technology only supports pictures, but Toshiba will soon extend it to videos, both real/live and computer-generated.
This technology promises to revolutionize gaming, as it is simple, and yet manages to give a much more immersive experience :):).