The pick of the science news
Get brain-fit for awareness week
Learn how to improve your brain function at a seminar on staying sharp by Trinity College Dublin professor of psychology Ian Robertson next Tuesday.
As part of Brain Awareness Week, Robertson will look at how to boost your brain and memory through exercise, choosing the right foods, ditching stress and using brain power rather than losing it.
Tickets cost €50 (or €90 for two) and Robertson will donate proceeds to the charity Headway. The seminar runs from 7pm to 9pm at the National College of Ireland, IFSC, Dublin 1. Visit www.seminars.ie or telephone 01-2875524.
Saturn moonlet
Scientists have found a tiny moon in one of Saturn's dusty outer rings.
The moonlet, estimated at around half a kilometre across, was spotted in images from Nasa's
Cassinispacecraft.
The diminutive Saturnian moon appears to move within a relatively bright arc in the G ring, one of the outer and more diffuse of the planet's rings.
"Before Cassini, the G ring was the only dusty ring that was not clearly associated with a known moon, which made it odd," says Matthew Hedman, of Cornell University. "The discovery of this moonlet, together with other Cassini data, should help us make sense of this previously mysterious ring."
Women in science
This Sunday is International Women's Day and it sees the launch of a new book profiling a selection of Irish women scientists and pioneers of the last 150 years.
Lab Coats and Lacehighlights the achievements of notable figures, including the mathematical Boole sisters, Dorothy Price and her campaign to save lives with a TB vaccine, and Lilian Bland, the first woman in Ireland to build and fly her own plane.
The book is edited by Mary Mulvihill, includes chapters from
Irish Timeswriters and will be launched at the Dublin Book Festival at City Hall at 1.15pm on March 8th. The event is free and all are welcome.
By numbers
72,000
The estimated distance, in kilometres, between earth and the asteroid 2009 DD45, which flew past on Monday.
7
The number of times more radiation to which American patients are exposed from diagnostic scans, compared to figures from 1980.
Claire O'Connell
e-mail: 1000.claire@gmail.com