Poor Mojo's Newswire

Forget blasting out your favourite tunes, you could now use speakers to put out a fire. A new video from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) shows how to extinguish burning fuel by trapping it in an acoustic field generated by surrounding speakers. By using specific frequencies, a fire is killed in a two-pronged attack. First, sound increases the air speed, thinning the layer where combustion occurs and thus making it easier to disrupt the flame. But the acoustics also disturb the surface of the fuel which increases vaporisation, widening the flame and cooling its overall temperature. Whereas typical firefighting techniques disrupt chemical reactions involved in combustion, DARPA has been looking at approaches like this one that exploit physics.

Palaeontologists answer many tricky questions about dinosaurs - but perhaps the most interesting is how did 30-ton animals larger than four-storey buildings have sex. A surprising amount of research has been devoted to the subject - and most researchers have concluded that dinosaurs made love like dogs 'All dinosaurs used the same basic position to mate,' said Dr Beverly Halstead, an English researcher who was one of the first to tackle the subject. 'Mounting from the rear, he put his forelimbs on her shoulders, lifting one hind limb across her back and twisting his tail under hers.'

Scientists have for the first time pinpointed what they believe to be starless galaxies, also known as dark galaxies — gas-filled clusters without much light that are theorized to have been important features of the early universe, leading to the development of the multitude of bright, star filled galaxies that now populate the Universe. The discovery of 12 distinct dark galaxies located some 11 billion light years from Earth, announced Wednesday, was achieved using the Very Large Telescope (VLT), a series of visible-light and infrared telescope instruments located in the mountains of northern Chile which are managed by the European Southern Observatory. A trio of scientists, one based out of Switzerland, another the UK and the third California, found the dark galaxies — which are extremely difficult to detect as a result of their low light emissions — by using one of the most brilliantly lit objects in the known Universe: a quasar, or a distant galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its center, which spits out energy and light as it sucks in the stars and matter around it. . . .

PAOLA, Kan. -- Mark Nelson muscles a shovel into a row between spindly soybean plants. Finally, six or more inches into the ground he hits some clay that holds a hint, but just a hint, of moisture. “It’s just not enough,” said the farmer who works about 2,000 acres in Miami County with his son-in-law. “If we don’t get some rain pretty soon …” His voice trails off. It’s so dry here, as the old joke goes, that trees are bribing dogs. In Nelson’s corn fields — the plants more vulnerable to drought than beans — crops look like corpses. Hair-dryer winds have given way to more moderate breezes this week, yet the ground remains kiln-dry. Spring rains quit early in the Midwest. In fact, they barely came. Summer storms never struck with enough moisture to keep soil from turning to dust and some corn and soybean fields from going bust. The parching of the region has already led some growers to cut their corn for silage, the farmer’s version of salvage. That same scorching of America’s grain belt could bump up prices at the pump and the grocery store.