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Saturn's rings may be down to its ability to shelter a moon
Research news and discovery
NNASA/JPL
In brief– Whisker vision
limit – the tiny pieces formed the rings instead of dispersing. This could explain why other planets don’t have rings like Saturn’s. Even if other planets had moons within their Roche limits at the birth of the solar system, the team’s WHY are Saturn’s rings so spectacular? It could be that the calculations show that the moons would soon been planet managed to cling onto a moon when all the other dragged down into the planet or unshackled from their gas giants in our solar system had already lost theirs. orbits. Yet Saturn’s rapid rotation meant it could hold a Today’s rings formed when the moon was smashed up. satellite within its Roche limit until the bombardment. Sebastien Charnoz and colleagues at the University of The work will appear in the journal Icarus. Diderot, Paris, suggest it was during the “late heavy Ken Rice from the Institute of Astronomy in Edinburgh, bombardment”, 700 million years after Saturn formed, that UK, says the team’s way of showing Saturn’s uniqueness a chunk of debris collided with one of the planet’s moons. among gas giants is interesting, but that their hypothesis Because the moon was orbiting at just the right distance cannot be proved until we have better ways of modelling from Saturn when it shattered – within the so-called Roche the evolution of the solar system.
How Saturn ran rings round all the other planets
Hot white roofs are height of cool HERE is one greenhouse effect that is welcome: the roofs of hothouse farms in Spain reflect so much sunlight that they may be pushing down local temperatures. Since the 1970s, semi-arid pasture land in Almeria, southeastern Spain, has been replaced by greenhouse horticulture. Today, Almeria has the largest expanse of greenhouses in the world – around 26,000 hectares. www.newscientist.com
Pablo Campra of the University of Almeria and colleagues studied temperature trends from weather stations inside the region, and from other areas of Spain. With the help of satellite data they compared semi-arid pasture land and greenhouses, looking for differences in surface radiation and albedo – the ability to reflect sunlight. In the greenhouse region,
air temperature has cooled by an average of 0.3 °C per decade since 1983. In the rest of Spain it has risen by around 0.5 °C. The satellite data revealed that the white greenhouses were much more reflective than farmland. (Journal of Geophysical Research, DOI: 10.1029/2008JD009912). The team thinks that the white roofs are key to the cooling, demonstrating the potential for placing reflective surfaces in semi-arid regions of the world to offset climate change.
IN PEOPLE who become blind, brain regions that specialise in vision get reassigned to process other senses. Now it appears that in rats other body parts are capable of adaptation as well. Gabriel Gutiérrez-Ospina and colleagues at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City assessed the function of the whisker pads of 6-month-old sighted and blind rats. They found that those from blind rats consumed energy more efficiently and generated different patterns of electric fields (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0808431105). This probably makes whiskers more sensitive, increasing the rats’ ability to discriminate by touch and enhancing exploration strategies, says Gutiérrez-Ospina. “This supports the notion that blindness is associated with whole-body reorganisation, not just brain reorganisation.”
Smart guys are an appealing option WHETHER a woman wants a quick fling or a long-term relationship, she’s still likely to pick brains over a brawn. That’s according to a study of university students. Mark Prokosch at Elon University in North Carolina and his team filmed 15 college men performing a series of tasks, such as reading the news and catching a frisbee. The men also took an intelligence test. The videos were watched by 200 women, who rated the men’s intelligence, looks and relationship appeal. The team found the smarter the man, the higher their appeal (Evolution and Human Behavior, DOI: 10.1016/ j.evolhumbehav.2008.07.004). Not only that, women proved to be good judges of intelligence: the scores predicted for each man generally matched his test results. 11 October 2008 | NewScientist | 15
NNASA/JPL
In brief– Whisker vision
limit – the tiny pieces formed the rings instead of dispersing. This could explain why other planets don’t have rings like Saturn’s. Even if other planets had moons within their Roche limits at the birth of the solar system, the team’s WHY are Saturn’s rings so spectacular? It could be that the calculations show that the moons would soon been planet managed to cling onto a moon when all the other dragged down into the planet or unshackled from their gas giants in our solar system had already lost theirs. orbits. Yet Saturn’s rapid rotation meant it could hold a Today’s rings formed when the moon was smashed up. satellite within its Roche limit until the bombardment. Sebastien Charnoz and colleagues at the University of The work will appear in the journal Icarus. Diderot, Paris, suggest it was during the “late heavy Ken Rice from the Institute of Astronomy in Edinburgh, bombardment”, 700 million years after Saturn formed, that UK, says the team’s way of showing Saturn’s uniqueness a chunk of debris collided with one of the planet’s moons. among gas giants is interesting, but that their hypothesis Because the moon was orbiting at just the right distance cannot be proved until we have better ways of modelling from Saturn when it shattered – within the so-called Roche the evolution of the solar system.
How Saturn ran rings round all the other planets
Hot white roofs are height of cool HERE is one greenhouse effect that is welcome: the roofs of hothouse farms in Spain reflect so much sunlight that they may be pushing down local temperatures. Since the 1970s, semi-arid pasture land in Almeria, southeastern Spain, has been replaced by greenhouse horticulture. Today, Almeria has the largest expanse of greenhouses in the world – around 26,000 hectares. www.newscientist.com
Pablo Campra of the University of Almeria and colleagues studied temperature trends from weather stations inside the region, and from other areas of Spain. With the help of satellite data they compared semi-arid pasture land and greenhouses, looking for differences in surface radiation and albedo – the ability to reflect sunlight. In the greenhouse region,
air temperature has cooled by an average of 0.3 °C per decade since 1983. In the rest of Spain it has risen by around 0.5 °C. The satellite data revealed that the white greenhouses were much more reflective than farmland. (Journal of Geophysical Research, DOI: 10.1029/2008JD009912). The team thinks that the white roofs are key to the cooling, demonstrating the potential for placing reflective surfaces in semi-arid regions of the world to offset climate change.
IN PEOPLE who become blind, brain regions that specialise in vision get reassigned to process other senses. Now it appears that in rats other body parts are capable of adaptation as well. Gabriel Gutiérrez-Ospina and colleagues at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City assessed the function of the whisker pads of 6-month-old sighted and blind rats. They found that those from blind rats consumed energy more efficiently and generated different patterns of electric fields (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0808431105). This probably makes whiskers more sensitive, increasing the rats’ ability to discriminate by touch and enhancing exploration strategies, says Gutiérrez-Ospina. “This supports the notion that blindness is associated with whole-body reorganisation, not just brain reorganisation.”
Smart guys are an appealing option WHETHER a woman wants a quick fling or a long-term relationship, she’s still likely to pick brains over a brawn. That’s according to a study of university students. Mark Prokosch at Elon University in North Carolina and his team filmed 15 college men performing a series of tasks, such as reading the news and catching a frisbee. The men also took an intelligence test. The videos were watched by 200 women, who rated the men’s intelligence, looks and relationship appeal. The team found the smarter the man, the higher their appeal (Evolution and Human Behavior, DOI: 10.1016/ j.evolhumbehav.2008.07.004). Not only that, women proved to be good judges of intelligence: the scores predicted for each man generally matched his test results. 11 October 2008 | NewScientist | 15