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  July 19, 2004: Highlights

Photo of meteorite.
Image Credit: ANSMET / Case Western University

New Martian Meteorite Found in Antarctica
While rovers and orbiting spacecraft scour Mars searching for clues to its past, researchers have uncovered another piece of the Red Planet in Antarctica. The new specimen was found by a field party from the U.S. Antarctic Search for Meteorites program (ANSMET) on Dec. 15, 2003, on an icefield in the Miller Range of the Transantarctic Mountains, roughly 750 kilometers (466 miles) from the South Pole. This 715.2 gram (1.5 pound) black rock, officially designated MIL 03346, was one of 1358 meteorites collected by ANSMET during the 2003-2004 austral summer. Scientists at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History involved in classification of Antarctic finds said the mineralogy and texture of the meteorite are unmistakably Martian. The new specimen is the seventh recognized member of a group of Martian meteorites called the nakhlites, named after the first known specimen that fell in Nakhla, Egypt in 1911.
More... (posted July 22, 2004)


An image of the bed of Lake Vostok
An image of the contours of the bed of Lake Vostok from data obtained by gravity measurements.
Credit: Michael Studinger / National Science Foundation

New Map Reveals Hidden Features of Ice-Buried Antarctic Lake—Measurement Shows that Two Distinct Ecosystems May Exist
Scientists from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) at Columbia University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York State have developed the first-ever map of water depth in Lake Vostok, which lies between 3,700 and 4,300 meters (more than 2 miles) below the continental Antarctic ice sheet. The new comprehensive measurements of the lake—roughly the size of North America's Lake Ontario—indicate it is divided into two distinct basins that may have different water chemistry and other characteristics. The findings have important implications for the diversity of microbial life in Lake Vostok and provide a strategy for how scientists study the lake’s different ecosystems should international scientific consensus approve exploration of the pristine and ancient environment.
More... (posted July 19, 2004)


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image of ocean

Impact of Earth’s Rising Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Found in World Oceans

An international team of scientists has completed the first comprehensive study of the ocean storage of carbon dioxide derived from human activity, called anthropogenic CO2, based on a decade-long survey of global ocean carbon distributions in the 1990s. The findings, along with those detailed in a companion paper on the impacts of anthropogenic CO2 on the chemistry of the oceans and the potential response of marine animals and plants to changes in CO2 levels, were published in the July 16 issue of the journal Science.
More... (posted July 19, 2004)


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Microhotplates crafted of silicon carbide
Two views of a silicon surface, one taken using a conventional scanning tunneling microscope (or STM), the other using the newly developed "color-filtered STM."

Colored Filtered Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (from the New Additions Section in the NSF Image Library)

Image A is the kind that would be obtained using a conventional STM equipped with a metal tip. What shows up in the image are the atoms (shown in blue) that have the highest energy electrons associated with them. Image B is a color- or energy-filtered image in which the researchers have suppressed the blue atoms and can now observe others that have electronic states at lower energy (shown in red). This silicon surface is actually a special case in which the 'red' atoms actually lie sort of beneath the blue ones. Via energy filtering, researchers can thus "see through" the blue atoms and selectively image the red ones!
More... (posted July 19, 2004)


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