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Exoplanets & Social Media | SciByte 29

chris

We take a look at all the new and exciting exoplanet news, how social media can help science, news about the Space Station and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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The exoplanets never stop coming

*— NEWS BYTE — *

Science helped by social media

  • The low down

  • Official tracking of infectious or communicable diseases can takes weeks to compile and be distributed
    +This process can lead to delayed responses, further infections, and deployment of needed drugs and doctors.

  • New reports show that we might be able to look to the Internet and social media to get more up to the minute reports of these kind of diseases

  • Significance

  • In late 2010, clinics and hospitals started sending reports of Cholera to the Ministry of Heath who started tracking the data.

  • Research published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, found that online news reports, Twitter messages, Research.ly, and the website HealthMap.org did a good job of tracking this data as well.

  • Researchers found that the informal data from Twitter and HealthMap provided indications of the cholera outbreak up to two weeks before official government public health reports.

  • For tracking the flu, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine compared data from Google Flu Trends to statistics of number of patients in emergency departments and laboratory tests for the flu.

  • The data have shown to be an excellent tracking system that can get fairly accurate tracking data seven to ten days earlier than the CDC’s tracking network.

  • Google Flu Trends, visualizes this for various countries and regions.

  • New reports show that the Google data might even be able to predict patient volumes to individual hospitals.

  • * Of Note*

  • Social and online means of tracking communicable diseases are not 100% accurate, and will not replace laboratory tracking methods, they are a powerful addition to current surveillance systems.

  • Social Media

  • Twitter Results for [#cholera](https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23cholera)

  • Twitter Results for [#flu](https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23flu)

  • Further Reading / In the News

  • Researchers Tap Google, Twitter To Help Track Disease Outbreaks @ ihealthbeat.org

  • Social Media Tracks Haiti’s Cholera Epidemic @ voanews.com

  • Google.org Flu Trends

  • HealthMap.org

  • Google Helps Emergency Room Docs to Predict Flu Trends@ healthland.time.com

  • Outbreak.com: Using the Web to Track Deadly Diseases in Real Time @ time.com

Fun & Games with the moon

Space Station avoidance maneuver

  • The low down

  • In 2009 one of the Iridium 33 communications satellites, collided with a defunct Russian Cosmos spacecraft

  • This collision created a cloud thousands of pieces of debris now orbiting the Earth.

  • Clouds of debris like this can sometimes pose collision hazards to space craft

  • Significance

  • A piece of the Iridium 33 satellite about 4in [10cm] was due to pass within 0.6–15 miles [1–24km] of the International Space Station

  • Collision avoidance maneuvers for the ISS require approximately 30 hours, using Rusian thruster, to plan and execute

  • The collision avoidance maneuver, does eliminate the need for the planned reboost of the station next week, to maintain an altitude for docking later this month with Progress cargo ship.

  • * Of Note*

  • This is the 13th time since 1998 that this kind of collision avoidance maneuver has been executed.

  • There are millions of pieces of debris orbiting the Earth that are to small to be tracked; 500,000 larger than a marble; and 20,000 debris larger than a softball.

  • Some collision avoidance procedures would require the to close window hatches and hatches between the various modules of the space station

  • In 2011 there was a chance that the station crew-member would have to retreat to the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, further analysis of the debris would be farther then initial estimates showed.

  • Social Media

  • Twitter Results for [#spacestation](https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23spacestation)

  • Further Reading / In the News

  • ISS to perform debris avoidance manoeuvre @ https://blogs.esa.int

  • Space Station Dodges Space Junk from Satellite Crash @ Space.com

  • Space station to move to avoid approaching junk @ AP

  • Station Performs Debris Avoidance Maneuver @ NASA

  • Space Debris and Human Spacecraft @ NASA

‘Breaking’ Science News

SPACECRAFT UPDATE

SCIENCE CALENDER

Looking back

Jan 18, 1911 : 101 years ago : Into the wild blue yonder ocean : A mere 11 years after the Wright brothers first flight, Lt. Eugene B. Ely made the first landing of an aircraft on a ship. He used a 50-hp Curtiss pusher biplane to safely land onto a wooden platform on the deck of the U.S.S. Pennsylvania. To land on the shorter runway he used landing gear with hooks used to catch secured ropes stretched across the landing platform. Improved versions of this are still in use today.

Jan 22, 1997 : 15 years ago : The sky was actually falling : In 1969 there were reports of of pieces of space debris, assumed to be of Soviet origin, that hit a Japanese ship injuring five sailors. However on Jan 22, 1997 Lottie Willians was hit on the shoulder with what looked to be a blackened metallic metal. It was later confirmed to be consistent with fiber glass fabric used on a Delta II rocket, launched nine months before, that had crashed into the atmosphere half an hours earlier. Making her the first human in the world to be hit by confirmed man-made space debris. YouTube VIDEO : Tulsa Woman Hit By Space Junk

Looking up this week