Short Science, March 9, 2014
You can't spend bitcoins at Amazon.com or to pay your mortgage but, as the Winklevoss twins showed, you can use them to book a trip into suborbital space. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss said they used bitcoins to buy tickets for a high-altitude voyage on billionaire Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic commercial spaceflight venture.
Australian scientists aim to prevent a real-life version of the space disaster scenario portrayed in Oscar-winning film by removing extraterrestrial debris with lasers. "We now want to clean up space to avoid the growing risks of collisions," said Matthew Colless, head of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University. In the film, two astronauts played by George Clooney and Sandra Bullock are left drifting in the void after a collision between satellite debris and their spacecraft. A new Space Environment Management Co-operative Research Centre will this year begin research on how to better track tiny pieces of debris and predict their trajectories. It will ultimately aim to knock them off their paths by hitting them with lasers. AFP
The females of an Asian swallowtail butterfly species known as the common mormon often mimic the appearance of another species of butterfly that is toxic for predators to eat, with strikingly similar coloration and markings on the wings. This bit of evolutionary skulduggery tricks birds that otherwise would be happy to munch these insects but instead keep them off the menu, thinking they are inedible. Researchers led by Marcus Kronforst, a professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, said they had identified the gene responsible for the mimicry in these butterflies. Kronforst said many experts had assumed that something as complex as this mimicry would be controlled by multiple genes. "We, in fact, find that it's just one gene," said Kronforst. Reuters
