Mamas, Be Good to Your Sons

A close relationship with their mothers can help keep boys from acting out, according to a 2010 study. A warm, attached relationship with mom seems important in preventing behavior problems in sons, even more so than in girls, the research found. The findings, published in the journal Child Development, highlight the need for "secure attachment" between kids and their parents, a style in which kids can go to mom and dad as a comforting "secure base" before venturing into the wider world.
The mommy bond may also make for better romance later in life, as another study reported in 2010 showed that a close relationship with one's mother in early adolescence (by age 14) was associated with better-quality romantic relationships as young adults. "Parents' relationships with their children are extremely important and that's how we develop our ability to have successful relationships as adults, our parents are our models," study researcher Constance Gager, of Montclair State University in New Jersey, said at the time. "So if kids are not feeling close with their parents then they're probably not going to model the positive aspects of that relationship when they reach adulthood."

California Meteor Broke Speed Record For Atmospheric Entry

Posted: December 21, 2012

A meteor that flew through the California sky in April broke the speed record for atmospheric entry as it streaked through the sky as a massive fireball.
The incident took place on April 22 over northern California’s gold country, reports the Scientific American. Meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens took the opportunity to search for pieces of the meteorite to study.
The meteorite was picked up by Doppler radar stations, allowing researchers to pinpoint the spot where it landed. Jenniskens and other researchers were able to pick up 77 pieces of the meteorite, though they were only a fraction of the object’s original mass.
The Scientific American notes that the meteor astronomer and his colleagues believe that the meteor hit the atmosphere at about 28.6 kilometers per second — or about 64,000 miles per hour. At that speed, the meteor broke the record as the highest entry velocity ever recorded for a recovered meteorite.
Named the Sutter’s Hill meteorite for it’s recovery area, the researchers were able to discover that the massive meteor was a rare variety called a carbonaceous chondrite. The Latino Post notes that the fragments recovered by Jenniskens and his colleagues may hold clues to the early stages of the universe.
The space rock is believed to have formed about 4.5 billion years ago and was part of a Jupiter-family comet that broke off around 50,000 years ago, according to The Latino Post. The meteor’s landing in April released the energy equivalent of about four kilotons of TNT, or about one-fourth the impact of the atomic bomb released on Hiroshima. Ed Allen, a resident in the area who heard the meteor land, recalled:

“I was out on my hillside burning some branches and so forth, and I heard this sonic boom. It wasn’t just one boom. It was a series of booms, literally right over my head.”

The meteor that broke the speed record displays “considerable diversity” of mineraology, petrography, and isotope and organic chemistry, according to Jenniskens. The meteor astronomer’s study about the California meteor will appear in the journal Science on Friday.

Scientists decode why universe is dominated by matter

PTI : Washington, Thu Dec 27 2012, 13:28 hrs

Scientists have solved the puzzle of the universe being dominated by matter rather than its close relative anti-matter.
Physicists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison made a precise measurement of elusive, nearly massless particles, and obtained a crucial hint as to why the universe is dominated by matter.
The particles, called anti-neutrinos, were detected at the underground Daya Bay experiment, located near a nuclear reactor in China.
Anti-particles are almost identical twins of sub-atomic particles (electrons, protons and neutrons) that make up our world. When an electron encounters an anti-electron, for example, both are annihilated in a burst of energy.
Failure to see these bursts in the universe tells physicists that anti-matter is vanishingly rare, and that matter rules the roost in today's universe.
"At the beginning of time, in the Big Bang, a soup of particles and anti-particles was created, but somehow an imbalance came about," says Karsten Heeger, a professor of physics at UW-Madison.
"All the studies that have been done have not found enough difference between particles and anti-particles to explain the dominance of matter over anti-matter.
"But the neutrino, an extremely abundant but almost massless particle, may have the right properties, and may even be its own anti-particle, Heeger said in a statement.
"And that's why physicists have put their last hope on the neutrino to explain the absence of anti-matter in the universe," he said.
Reactors, Heeger says, are a fertile source of anti-neutrinos, and measuring how they change during their short flights from the reactor to the detector, gives a basis for calculating a quantity called the "mixing angle", the probability of transformation from one flavour into another.
The measurement of the Daya Bay experiment even before the last set of detectors was installed, showed a surprisingly large angle, Heeger said.
"People thought the angle might be really tiny, so we built an experiment that was 10 times as sensitive as we ended up needing.