Right Before Our Eyes

By Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW Daily News
20 February 2008

"When you hear hoofbeats," the old saying goes, "think horse, not zebra." But what if your horse suddenly grows zebra stripes? That's the predicament astronomers faced when a star they were observing--a rapidly spinning remnant of a supernova called a pulsar--started emitting powerful bursts of x-rays considered the hallmark of a much-rarer object called a magnetar. The finding strongly suggests that pulsars, also known as neutron stars, and magnetars are linked and paves the way for a better understanding of stellar evolution.

Pulsars are the dense cores left over after stars of a certain mass explode into supernovae. Weighing as much or more than the sun but only as big as asteroids, they can rotate tens or even hundreds of times a second (versus once a day for Earth). Sky surveys have identified about 1800 pulsars within the Milky Way, most of which emit pulsing radio signals that rise and fall as the pulsars spin.

The stripe-changing pulsar, named PSR J1846-0258, lies about 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Aquila. A team of researchers from NASA and elsewhere were observing it using the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) spacecraft when the star suddenly erupted in a blast of x-rays. The display, reported online today in Science, made PSR J1846-0258 a candidate for being a magnetar--a type of neutron star with an enormously powerful magnetic field. Magnetars, so rare that only a dozen or so have been discovered, routinely emit high-energy x-rays and even gamma rays. But no one had ever observed a pulsar emitting such bursts.

"The bursts were completely unexpected," says astrophysicist and lead author Fotis Gavriil of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Because PSR J1846-0258 is a very young pulsar (a mere 1000 years old) and because its magnetic field strength is considerably lower than those from bona fide magnetars, Gavriil says, the researchers suspect it is still evolving. He says the discovery raises important questions about the two types of stars: Do pulsars behave like magnetars only periodically and then revert? Did all magnetars originate as pulsars? "We really need to follow this source, and others like it, to answer these questions," he says.

Astrophysicist Duncan Lorimer of West Virginia University in Morgantown calls the discovery "fantastic." A decade ago, he says, very little was known about any connections between pulsars and magnetars. Now, Lorimer says, the evolutionary connections between the two are strengthening, and observations like this one will help "elucidate our understanding of what happens to a young neutron star after its birth in a supernova." And astrophysicist Robert Duncan of the University of Texas, Austin, calls the findings "fascinating and important," because they represent the first time that magnetically generated x-rays have been seen coming from a rotationally driven pulsar. Duncan, who developed the theoretical behavior of magnetars in 1992, says he is not so sure the object will turn out to be a magnetar, but "neutron stars are constantly surprising scientists, so future observations ? will certainly be interesting."

Related sites

More about pulsars

More about magnetars

RXTE home page

Navigating Uncertain Seas

By Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW Daily News
11 February 2008

Ocean circulation patterns might well be shifting due to climate change, but one researcher argues that those alterations remain well beyond the capabilities of scientists to detect. If he's right, researchers might have to wait years if not decades for the right answers.

Ever since scientists began worrying about the effects of global warming, they have planted sensing equipment all over the planet designed to help track changes in the air and sea. In many parts of the oceans, such equipment includes arrays of buoys that transmit data on current speed, direction, and depth, along with other measurements. Researchers feed the incoming data into computer models, which churn out predictions about future climate developments. Based on the data and the models, some scientists have concluded that major ocean currents--such as those that slowly circulate deep-ocean water to the surface and back down again--are beginning to change speed and direction, presumably in response to the warming climate. It's a critical issue because significant changes in ocean currents could impact regional weather patterns all over the globe--think El Ni%26ntilde;o.

Not so fast, says oceanographer Carl Wunsch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He has analyzed the available historical data on ocean currents and compared them with calculations predicting the currents' natural variability--or how they change direction, speed, and temperature periodically--without climate-change-induced influences. As Wunsch reports online this week in Nature Geoscience, the data aren't nearly comprehensive enough to permit researchers to draw even a preliminary conclusion about how or if climate change is affecting ocean currents.

The problem, Wunsch explains, is that "the ocean is very noisy," meaning it is "always changing, everywhere, all the time." The behavior of every cubic kilometer of ocean is governed by a combination of Earth's rotation, solar radiation, wind, temperature, salinity, depth, and ocean-floor and shoreline topography, as well as other factors, all responding to very long time scales. But because the historical database is so relatively short, he says, it's almost impossible to find a recognizable trend "that is not just a temporary shift." His recommendation: Researchers need to collect more data and for decades longer.

Physical oceanographer Brian Arbic of the University of Texas, Austin, says the paper is important because it takes the first "quantitative look at a large potential source of error" in the database of ocean currents. Wunsch's findings demonstrate how difficult it is to "directly estimate changes in the ocean's overturning circulation," adds physical oceanographer Terrence Joyce of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. The results are bound to be bad news for "government end users and popular media wanting quick, simple answers" on global warming's impact, he says.

Related site

More about ocean currents

Yahoo Says Rhapsody Will Handle Its Digital Music

Internet media company Yahoo said on Monday its music service will now be handled by Rhapsody America, an on-demand subscription service run by RealNetworks and Viacom. According to Yahoo, which previously said it would replace its in-house built Yahoo Music Unlimited service, it would migrate customers to Rhapsody over the coming months, while allowing subscribers to access their music library from a new Rhapsody account. The strategic partnership was announced after Microsoft made a $44.6 billion bid on Friday to take over Yahoo. It raises questions about whether RealNetworks and Yahoo will be able to execute their new partnership if Microsoft succeeds in buying Yahoo. Microsoft and RealNetworks were locked in a bitter and protracted antitrust dispute for eight years until Microsoft agreed to settle with RealNetworks for $761 million in October 2005. RealNetworks Founder and CEO Rob Glaser is a former Microsoft executive. In addition, Microsoft already has a comprehensive range of digital media products and services, including an online music store and its Zune digital media players. Dan Sheeran, a senior vice president at RealNetworks, said any conflicts with Microsoft are two years old and both companies would proceed with their agreement. Like Microsoft, RealNetworks sees the value of a partnership with Yahoo as a way to get in front of more than 23 million monthly Internet users. "This really works to make Rhapsody much more available to a much wider audience," said Sheeran. Yahoo Music's monthly subscribers, who currently pay around $9 a month, will eventually be charged around $12.99 a month for Rhapsody when their existing contracts expire. But paid services have to compete with an increasing array of free music services such as social radio site Last.fm and Imeem.com, which both offer variations of on-demand services. They also compete against illegal free services. Sheeran said that although Rhapsody has become more flexible and offers more free music on a limited Web service, it has no intention of dropping its paid subscription business. In August, Viacom's MTV Networks, RealNetworks and Verizon Communications said they would create a digital music service called Rhapsody America, which would compete with Apple's successful iTunes online store. Verizon Wireless, jointly owned by Verizon and Vodafone Group, is the exclusive wireless distributor for Rhapsody's digital content. Yahoo also said on Monday it acquired privately held FoxyTunes, a company that developed a toolbar plug-in application that enables users to control more than 30 desktop and Web-based music players.

Vista SP1, Windows 2008 'Released to Manufacturing'

Microsoft announced this week it has released both Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows Server 2008 to manufacturing %26#150; the final stage before a product actually gets into users' hands. In the case of SP1, at least, there is one catch. If you're waiting on the edge of your seat, you still have a while to sit on your hands -- until mid-March. Meanwhile, Windows Server 2008 %26#150; Vista's server counterpart -- has also been released to manufacturing (RTM) and will be available for purchase to new customers starting March 1, the company said in a statement. Volume licensing customers with Software Assurance or Enterprise Agreements can download the server near the end of February. "Vista SP1 is something all of our customers on the business side have been waiting for %26#91;so%26#93; we can now ring the SP1 bell," CEO Steve Ballmer said during a meeting with financial analysts Monday morning that was Web cast. Ballmer was referring to enterprise customers' penchant for waiting for the first service pack of a major Microsoft operating system upgrade before beginning wide-scale deployment. Officially, Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008 will be launched at Microsoft's planned "Heroes Happen Here" event in Lost Angeles on February 27. Visual Studio 2008 became generally available last week. At the same time, delivery of SQL Server 2008, the third product being launched at the end of this month, has been postponed until the third quarter, the company disclosed late last month. Meanwhile, after more than four months of testing, and repeated test releases, it's a little hard for some analysts to get excited about the final release of Vista SP1, but it's important nonetheless, not least because Vista and Windows Server 2008 have been positioned by Microsoft as complementary operating systems offerings. Gaining synergy "It's a good sign that they're done, and done at the same time, particularly for those people who want to gain any synergies from running the two products together," Michael Cherry, lead analyst for operating systems at researcher Directions on Microsoft, told InternetNews.com. Both Vista and Windows Server 2008 share the same software core, as well as having some key interlocking features such as Network Address Protection or NAP, which quarantines new devices on the network until they have met specified security requirements. Microsoft has seemingly taken its time getting Windows Server 2008 done. The first "release candidate" or RC of the server software was released to testers simultaneously last fall with the first beta test copies of Vista SP1. The delay in providing Vista SP1 to customers has to do with coordinating availability across various distribution channels, according to a posting on the Windows Vista Team Blog Monday by Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Windows product management. That includes PC OEMs, retail packaged product, and download sites. "In mid-March, we will release Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Update (in English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese) and to the download center on microsoft.com. Customers who visit Windows Update can choose to install Service Pack 1," Nash's post read. "In mid-April, we will begin delivering Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Vista customers who have chosen to have updates downloaded automatically," he added. However, a small set of specific device drivers known to not follow Microsoft's guidelines for driver installation can cause problems for some users, and thus the delay. "We will begin making SP1 available through Windows Update in mid-March, giving us time to work with some of our hardware partners to make adjustments to the installation process for the affected drivers," Nash said. Besides its connection with Vista, the release of Windows Server 2008 is important for another key strategic reason. "This starts the countdown clock for Hyper-V," Microsoft's hypervisor-based virtualization technology, Directions on Microsoft's Cherry said. Hyper-V, Microsoft's challenge to VMware and Citrix's XenSource virtualization hypervisors, is due out 180 days after availability of Windows Server 2008. "Now, you can start to calculate availability of Hyper-V," Cherry added.

MySpace Unveils Developer Platform

MySpace plans to celebrate the launch of its Developer Platform Site today with a gala event at its new San Francisco offices, offering developers a sandbox full of APIs to develop and test their widgets, before they become available to the public a month later. "The goals for the platform at this point are to make sure that developers have all the information they need to start really developing" a robust stack of applications in advance of the public rollout in March, said Kyle Brinkman, vice president and general manager of MySpace's developer platform. That way, when MySpace users first access the Application Gallery next month, it will already be populated with thousands of tested, secure widgets they can add to their pages, Brinkman told InternetNews.com. In addition to being listed in the gallery, each widget will have a profile page, so users will be able to "befriend" applications. Users will be able to embed applications on their pages so all their friends can see them, or keep them invisible so they are only for their own use. MySpace formally announced that it would create a "sandbox" for developers in October, following on the tremendous success that its smaller but faster-growing rival Facebook has enjoyed with its own platform. Last week, the company opened its developer site for pre-registration, promising a live test environment to work out the bugs. MySpace will support third-party efforts with a blog to provide news, product updates and the opportunity to interact with its own development team. Additionally, outside developers will be able to talk with each other on a forum section of the site. The tools that MySpace is giving its developers fall into three categories: OpenSocial APIs with specific MySpace extensions for JavaScript and HTML applications; action scripts to enable flash to run with APIs; and a RESTful (DEFINE:REST) back end for server-to-server communication to accelerate processing speeds. The platform site will take all comers, from independent developers to large companies, and Brinkman said that the thousands of pre-registrations that MySpace has already processed run the spectrum. At this point, security is the only reason why MySpace would block a developer from placing a widget on the site. "The only thing we're going to be screening for is a security review," Brinkman said. In advance of the public launch, MySpace will scan every application for malicious code. Once the platform goes live, MySpace might not be able to come through the code of every widget developers submit, but it will deploy a new security tool developed by Google to safeguard against malicious applications. The product is called Caja, and Brinkman described it as a "JavaScript sanitizer." The MySpace development platform will be a coming out party for Caja; Google expects the tool to guarantee trusted content of third-party applications on sites across the social Web. The goal is to ensure security without watering down the functionality of JavaScript -- the "lingua franca of Web applications," Brinkman said. Applications will be governed by the same privacy controls that are in place for members," MySpace CTO Aber Whitcomb said in a statement. "An application will never have access to information that cannot be found on any member's profile page," he added, taking care to point out that MySpace would not engage in the behavioral tracking that Facebook built into its controversial Beacon ad program. However, monetization is an important part of MySpace's long-awaited developer platform. At first, developers will have to place ads themselves on the "canvas," or primary page of their application, keeping 100 percent of the revenues themselves. Soon after the widgets go live, Brinkman said that MySpace will offer developers its own HyperTargeting and SelfServe applications to help monetize their widgets through managed ad inventory, with MySpace taking a slice of the revenue. Following today's developer event in San Francisco, MySpace will hold similar kickoff rallies in London and Berlin.

Device Gives New Meaning to "Power Walking"

By Devin Powell
ScienceNOW Daily News
7 February 2008

The latest fad in self-powered wrist wear is the kinetic watch, a device that converts the momentum of a swinging arm into milliwatts. But researchers have unveiled a new accessory for your knees that puts the trendy timepiece to shame. Generating more than 1000 times more energy, the "Biomechanical Energy Harvester" may provide a green way to power the portable devices of the future.

Every time you take a step, you use two different groups of powerful muscles connected to the knee. The first group pushes to kick the lower leg out. Just before full extension, the second group pulls to put the brakes on. But for Max Donelan, director of the Simon Fraser University Locomotion Laboratory in Burnaby, Canada, and his colleagues, this braking process is just useful energy going to waste. His team has created a modified knee brace with a drive train that converts the mechanical energy into electricity. "A similar principle is used in hybrid cars to make electricity when you press the brakes; it's called generative braking," says Donelan.

Six volunteers wore the braces while they walked on treadmills. Embedded sensors detected the angle and velocity of their legs, switching the device on only during the braking phase of each swing. As the team reports tomorrow in Science, the braces produced 5 watts of power--enough to run 10 cell phones. And although it took a bit more effort to swing the added weight of the brace--the prototype weighs 1.6 kg--the walkers didn't have to work harder when the power-harvesting mechanism was turned on. The amount of oxygen they consumed--a measure of metabolism and effort--didn't increase. "Our generator actually helps your muscles out," says Donelan, "by decelerating your limbs for you."

If the researchers can lighten the load of the device, the first users will likely be people whose lives depend on reliable, portable power: patients with insulin pumps, for example. Douglas Weber, a team member and mechanical engineer at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in Pennsylvania, believes that it will also be incorporated into the design of cutting-edge neuroprostheses--artificial limbs directly controlled by brainwaves and deep-brain stimulators for Parkinson's disease patients. Eventually, the device might prove useful for anyone off the main power grid: soldiers, relief workers, hikers, even normal folks with cell phones and personal digital assistants.

According to Lawrence Rome, a biologist at the University of Pennsylvania who designed a biomechanical backpack years ago (ScienceNOW, 8 September 2005), this is the most sophisticated attempt to harness biomechanical energy to date. "Other people have thought about trying to get energy out of joints," says Rome, "but only Donelan and his team saw the opportunity to use braking motion." He wonders what other powerful joints we could tap for energy--shoulders, maybe, or even elbows.

Related sites

More on the biomechanics of muscles

Biomechanical shoes

More about neural prostheses

NIH Environmental Institute Chief Resigns

By Jocelyn Kaiser
ScienceNOW Daily News
8 February 2008

David Schwartz, the embattled director of the National Institutes of Health's (NIH?s) environmental health institute, resigned today after a stormy 3-year tenure to head a research program in Colorado. He explained that he could not serve as an effective leader of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) after "disenfranchising" some scientists.

Schwartz, a pulmonary disease researcher, drew controversy soon after he left Duke University in 2005 to head the nearby NIEHS in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Environmentalists, scientists, and some lawmakers protested when he wanted to privatize the institute's journal and shift funds from disease prevention to clinical studies. But the real trouble began when an inquiry by Congress revealed that Schwartz was consulting for law firms and had built up a large personal lab despite concerns from NIH ethics officials. Schwartz temporarily stepped down as director in August and had been serving in an advisory role to NIH Director Elias Zerhouni while the agency reviewed NIEHS management (ScienceNOW, 20 August 2007).

In an e-mail today to NIEHS staff, Schwartz explained that his reasons for leaving were "simple": NIEHS "would be more successful with new leadership," he wrote, and he "would have a greater impact in environmental health by working as a physician-scientist." In addition, Schwartz wrote, "our community has not universally embraced the scientific direction or strategies that I have implemented" and that he had "inadvertently disenfranchised segments of our community," for which "I sincerely apologize."

Schwartz has apparently landed on his feet. He is leaving this spring for the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, Colorado, a world-renowned center for research on respiratory diseases. He will head a new genetics research center and also direct the pulmonary and critical-care division. Gilbert Omenn of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who served on a search committee that recommended Schwartz for NIEHS director, says his problems there were "unfortunate" but that his move to Denver is "terrific for National Jewish and terrific for him."

Although no longer director, Schwartz will continue running his lab at NIH until he leaves for Colorado, probably in late May, said NIH spokesperson John Burklow. Acting director Samuel Wilson remains in charge of NIEHS until a new director is appointed. "We're looking at next steps and hope to fill the position quickly," says Burklow. He says NIH's review of NIEHS management should be released soon.

Related site

NIEHS