Hello everyone and welcome back to SciByte!

We take a look at Voyager 1 reading a tsunami wave from the sun, SpaceX launching satellites into space and testing new reusable systems, story and spacecraft updates, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes:

Book Pick:

• The Martian Audiobook | Andy Weir | Audible.com

Voyager 1 Sees Another Interstellar Tsunami

• NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has experienced a new “tsunami wave” from the sun as it sails through interstellar space
• Such waves are what led scientists to the conclusion, in the fall of 2013, that Voyager had indeed left our sun’s bubble, entering a new frontier
• Interstellar Tsunami
• “Normally, interstellar space is like a quiet lake,But when our sun has a burst, it sends a shock wave outward that reaches Voyager about a year later. The wave causes the plasma surrounding the spacecraft to sing.” | Ed Stone of the California Institute of Technology
• Data from this newest tsunami wave generated by our sun confirm that Voyager is in interstellar space
• Coronal Mass Ejection
• Our sun goes through periods of increased activity, where it explosively ejects material from its surface, flinging it outward
• These events, called coronal mass ejections, generate shock, or pressure, waves.
• Three such waves have reached Voyager 1 since it entered interstellar space in 2012
• The first was too small to be noticed when it occurred and was only discovered later, but the second was clearly registered by the spacecraft’s cosmic ray instrument in March of 2013
• In 2013, thanks to the second tsunami wave, the team acquired evidence that Voyager had been flying for more than a year through plasma that was 40 times denser than measured before – a telltale indicator of interstellar space
• Now, the team has new readings from a third wave from the sun, first registered in March of this year
• Frequency
• The plasma wave instrument can detect oscillations of the plasma electrons
• “The tsunami wave rings the plasma like a bell … While the plasma wave instrument lets us measure the frequency of this ringing, the cosmic ray instrument reveals what struck the bell – the shock wave from the sun.” | Ed Stone of the California Institute of Technology
• This ringing of the plasma bell is what led to the key evidence showing Voyager had entered interstellar space, denser plasma oscillates faster, the team was able to figure out the density of the plasma
• Of Note
• These data show that the density of the plasma is similar to what was measured previously, confirming the spacecraft is in interstellar space
• The mission has not left the solar system, it has yet to reach a final halo of comets surrounding our sun, but it broke through the wind-blown bubble, or heliosphere, encasing our sun
• Further Reading / In the News
• Sun sends more ‘tsunami waves’ to Voyager 1 | Phys.org

— NEWS BYTE —

SpaceX Launches Telecom Satellites

• SpaceX successfully launched six ORBCOMM advanced telecommunications satellites into orbit on Monday, July 14, to significantly upgrade the speed and capacity of their existing data relay network.
• Testing the Rocket Booster Reentry
• They also used this launch opportunity to try and test the reusability of the Falcon 9′s first stage and its landing system while splashing down in the ocean
• However, the booster did not survive the splashdown. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk reported that the rocket booster reentry, landing burn and leg deployment worked well, the hull of the first stage “lost integrity right after splashdown
• Musk tweeted. “Detailed review of rocket telemetry needed to tell if due to initial splashdown or subsequent tip over and body slam.”
• SpaceX wanted to test the “flyback” ability to the rocket, slowing down the descent of the rocket with thrusters and deploying the landing legs for future launches so the first stage can be reused
• The previous test of the landing system was successful, but the choppy seas destroyed the stage and prevented recovery
• The Future
• The six satellites launched are the first part of what the company hopes will be a 17-satellite constellation. They hope to have all 17 satellites in orbit by the end of the 2014
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Orbcomm OG2 | Falcon 9 Satellite Launch | Launch
• YouTube | Orbcomm OG2 | Falcon 9 Satellite Launch | Seperation
• YouTube | Orbcomm OG2 | Falcon 9 Satellite Launch | In Space
• Further Reading / In the News
• SpaceX Launches Six Commercial Satellites on Falcon 9; Landing Test Ends in “Kaboom” | UniverseToday.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

How Many Scientists Publish Papers?

• A new study finds that very few scientists – fewer than 1% manage to publish a paper every year.
• But these scientists dominate the research journals, having their names on 41% of all papers.
• They looked at papers published between 1996 and 2011 by 15 million scientists worldwide in many disciplines
• This research, published on 9 July in PLOS ONE, was led by epidemiologist John Ioannidis of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, with analysis of Elsevier’s Scopus database by colleagues Kevin Boyack and Richard Klavans at SciTech Strategies
• By The Numbers
• The ranks of scientists who repeatedly published more than one paper per year thin out dramatically
• Two or more: 68,221
• Three or more: 37,953
• Four or more: 23,342
• Five or more: 15,464
• 10 or more: 3269
• How Does That Make Sense?
• Many of these prolific scientists are likely the heads of laboratories or research groups; they bring in funding, supervise research, and add their names to the numerous papers that result
• Others may be scientists with enough job security and time to do copious research themselves from highly productive labs
• There is also a lot of grunt work behind these papers, for example doctoral students may be enrolled in high numbers, offering a cheap workforce
• Those doctoral students might only get their name published on only one or a few papers and may spend years on research that yields
• Further Reading / In the News
• The 1% of scientific publishing | Science/AAAS | News

— Updates —

HIV Detected in ‘Cured’ ‘Mississippi Baby

• Last Time on SciByte …
• SciByte 84 | HIV & SpaceX Troubles | March 5, 2013
• SciByte 123 | HIV Treatment & European Dinosaur | March 11, 2014](https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/53247/hiv-treatment-european-dinosaur-scibyte-123/
• The child known as the ‘Mississippi baby’ — an infant seemingly cured of HIV that was reported as a case study of a prolonged remission of HIV infection now has detectable levels of HIV after more than two years of not taking antiretroviral therapy without evidence of virus
• History
• The child was born prematurely in a Mississippi clinic in 2010 to an HIV-infected mother who did not receive antiretroviral medication during pregnancy and was not diagnosed with HIV infection until the time of delivery
• Because of the high risk of HIV exposure, the infant was started at 30 hours of age on liquid, triple-drug antiretroviral treatment.
• Testing confirmed within several days that the baby had been infected with HIV. At two weeks of age, the baby was discharged from the hospital and continued on liquid antiretroviral therapy
• The baby continued on antiretroviral treatment until 18 months of age, when the child was lost to follow up and no longer received treatment
• When the child was again seen by medical staff five months later, blood samples revealed undetectable HIV levels (less than 20 copies of HIV per milliliter of blood (copies/mL)) and no HIV-specific antibodies
• The child continued to do well in the absence of antiretroviral medicines and was free of detectable HIV for more than two years
• Unfortunate New Findings
• During a routine clinical care visit earlier this month, the child, now nearly 4 years of age, was found to have detectable HIV levels in the blood
• Repeat viral load blood testing performed 72 hours later confirmed this finding
• Additionally, the child had decreased levels of a key component of a normal immune system, and the presence of HIV antibodies — signals of an actively replicating pool of virus in the body.
• Based on these results, the child was again started on antiretroviral therapy.
• To date, the child is tolerating the medication with no side effects and treatment is decreasing virus levels
• Genetic sequencing of the virus indicated that the child’s HIV infection was the same strain acquired from the mother
• What This Means
• In light of the new findings, researchers must now work to better understand what enabled the child to remain off treatment for more than two years without detectable virus or measurable immunologic response
• Researchers are hoping to find out what might be done to extend the period of sustained HIV remission in the absence of antiretroviral therapy. Since typically, when treatment is stopped, HIV levels rebound within weeks, not years
• “The prolonged lack of viral rebound, in the absence of HIV-specific immune responses, suggests that the very early therapy not only kept this child clinically well, but also restricted the number of cells harboring HIV infection,” said Katherine Luzuriaga, M.D., professor of molecular medicine, pediatrics and medicine at the University of Massachusetts
• The results to indicate that early antiretroviral treatment in this HIV-infected infant did not completely eliminate the reservoir of HIV-infected cells that was established upon infection
• The Clinical Trial
• At the same time the results were announced in March, a clinical study was announced that would follow a similar treatment
• The researchers planning the clinical trial will now need to take this new development into account, the case may have considerably limited its development and averted the need for antiretroviral medication over a considerable period
• “Scientifically, this development reminds us that we still have much more to learn about the intricacies of HIV infection and where the virus hides in the body. The NIH remains committed to moving forward with research on a cure for HIV infection.” | NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D.
• Further Reading / In the News
• ‘Mississippi Baby’ now has detectable HIV, researchers find | ScienceDaily
• Researchers Describe First ‘Functional HIV Cure’ in an Infant | ScienceDaily.com

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

ISEE3 Reboot Project

• The Low Down
• The previous ‘problems’ with the propulsion tanks were turned loose upon the internet looking for experts in various fields to help come up with ideas and solutions
• One idea that came up was that that there would have been some ‘vapor lock’ where come fuel gasified in the lines
• The team then used those experts to come up with a plan to heat and pulse the propulsion systems to hopefully clear the lines.
• The current window of opportunity to test this is Wed, July 16
• [Recently in ISEE-3 Reboot Project Category | SpaceCollege.org(https://spacecollege.org/isee3/)
• Twitter | ISEE3 Reboot Project ‏@ISEE3Reboot
• 10 Jul 2014 | We have spent the day consulting with world class propulsion experts and have some solid plans for tackling our #ISEE3 propulsion issues.
• 11 Jul 2014 | Now focusing on more heating of hydrazine tanks & long sequences of thruster firing attempts to (possibly) clear #ISEE3 prop system
• 11 Jul 2014 | We did not have a successful #DSN ranging session today. DSN was unable to get a consistent lock on #ISEE3 – updates later today.
• 11 Jul 2014 | #ISEE3 is in Science Mode and is broadcasting telemetry which you can view in near real-time at https://www.amsat-dl.org
• 11 Jul 11 2014 | Our propulsion experts say it is unlikely that we’ve lost Nitrogen &/or Hydrazine reserves. Most likely some gas in the lines #ISEE3 1/2
• 11 Jul 2014 | Some additional heating and a few hundred thruster pulse firings might clear the lines. Working up a plan now for next week #ISEE3 2/2
• 12 Jun 2014 | the Voyager team reprogrammed both spacecraft billions of miles away. Nearby space plumbing on #ISEE3 is easy by comparison
• 12 Jun 2014 | we want to heat the fuel tanks and then fire the engines several hundred times to clear gas out of the lines. #ISEE3
• 13 Jul 2014| We’re focusing on heating hydrazine tanks & then making long series of thruster firing attempts to clear the lines. More info soon. #ISEE3
• 14 Jul 2014 | We’re putting final touches on #ISEE3 propulsion repair process to be implemented this week. We think there is still plenty of fuel for TCM
• 14 Jul 2014 | All we are waiting for now is a confirmed window from our friends at Arecibo & we’re ready to do some deep space plumbing repairs on #ISEE3
• 15 Jul 2014 | If you’ve ever had to clean out your car’s carburetor & fuel line then you have an idea of what our plan is to try & fix #ISEE3 tomorrow

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• Mission Info
• Curiosity still has about another 2.4 miles (3.9 kilometers) to go to reach the entry way at a gap in the dunes at the foothills of Mount Sharp sometime later this year
• To date, Curiosity’s odometer totals over 5.1 miles (8.4 kilometers) since landing inside Gale Crater on Mars in August 2012. She has taken over 162,000 images
• Multimedia
• YouTube Curiosity Rover Report JPLnews
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• July 17, 709 BC : 2723 years ago : Earliest Record Solar Eclipse. : In 709 BC, the earliest record of a confirmed total solar eclipse was written in China. From: Ch’un-ch’iu, book I: “Duke Huan, 3rd year, 7th month, day jen-ch’en, the first day (of the month). The Sun was eclipsed and it was total.” This is the earliest direct allusion to a complete obscuration of the Sun in any civilisation. The recorded date, when reduced to the Julian calendar, agrees exactly with that of a computed solar eclipse. Reference to the same eclipse appears in the Han-shu (‘History of the Former Han Dynasty’) (Chinese, 1st century AD): “…the eclipse threaded centrally through the Sun; above and below it was yellow.” Earlier Chinese writings that refer to an eclipse do so without noting totality.

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Fri, Jul, 18 | Last-Quarter Moon
• Sat, Jul 19 | Mars is still less than 3* (two fingers widths at arms length) from Spica, but sinking lower in the SW at dusk
• Planets
• Mercury | Dawn | Low in the glow of sunrise, Mercury is just 7* to the lower left of Venus all week. (A little over the width of all your fingers held at arms length)
• Venus | Dawn | Low in the E-NE
• Mars | Dusk | High in the SW with Spica very near it. Although they will start to slowly drift apart now, on Sat Jul 19 they are still less than 3* apart.
• Jupiter | Hidden in sunset

• Saturn | Twilight | Highest during twilight in the S-SW to the left/upper left of Mars/Spica

• Further Reading and Resources

• Sky&Telescope
• SpaceWeather.com
• StarDate.org
• For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au
• Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org
• Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz
• AstronomyNow
• HeavensAbove

— SciByte Summer Hiatus —

• For Science and Show Updates
• Heather / Mars_Base Twitter | @JB_Mars_Base
• Chris Fisher @ChrisLAS

The post Voyager 1 & SpaceX | SciByte 136 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Hello everyone and welcome back to SciByte!

We take a look at adding and subtracting exoplanets, diabetes research, spacecraft updates, viewer feedback, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | HD Video | Video | Torrent | YouTube

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Show Notes:

Exoplanets? … Not So Fast

• The controversial existence of two possible planets located in the habitable zone of a star now have a ‘final’ ending to their story
• Last Time on SciByte, … well J@N
• Planet Zarmina | J@N | 10.6.10
• Gliese 581 System
• Planets were first announced around the system in 2007
• September 30, 2010 | Gliese 581d and 581g
• There was the possible discovery of the closest Earth-sized planet found found at that time that also existed in the habitable zone
• Quotes from one of the scientists involved in the discovery
• “Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say, my own personal feeling is that the chances of life on this planet are 100 percent” “I have almost no doubt about it.”
• It was phrased unfortunately, and the media have jumped on it, of course
• This led to many headline grabbing stories, concepts of alien worlds and a J@N episode
• The 581d and 581g Controversy
• Both 581d and 581g were considered to be in the “habitable” region around the dwarf star they orbited
• About two weeks after the discovery, another team said it could not find indications
• Two years later another research team saying that analysis of an “extended dataset” from HARPS did show Gliese 581g
• A press release at the time from the Planetary Habitability Laboratory the discovery would continue to be controversial
• An Ending to the Story of 581d and 581g?
• As of this week both 581d and 581g are crossed off
• A new study shows that the two potentially habitable planets in the Gliese 581 system are just false signals arising out of the star’s activity and rotation
• The uncertainty arises from the delicacy of looking for signals of small planets around much larger stars
• Astronomers typically find planets through watching them pass across the face of a star, or measuring the tug that they exert on their parent star during their orbit
• Researchers now say that only three planets exist around this star.
• Further Reading / In the News
• A Brief History Of Gliese 581d and 581g, The Planets That May Not Be | UniverseToday.com
• Could Chance for Life on Gliese 581g Actually Be “100%”? | UniverseToday.com
• Controversial clues of two ‘Goldilocks planets’ that might support life are proven false | ScienceDaily

— NEWS BYTE —

Research on Reversing Type 1 Diabetes

• Investigators at the University of Cincinnati (UC) have found a therapy that reverses new onset Type 1 diabetes in mouse models and may advance efforts in combating the disease among humans.
• Type 1 Diabetes
• In Type 1 diabetes, the body does not produce sufficient insulin, which is central to glucose metabolism: without insulin, blood glucose rises
• Type 1 diabetes is usually diagnosed in children and young adults and affects about 5 percent of all people with diabetes
• There is no cure for Type 1 diabetes though it can be controlled with insulin therapy
• Immune System
• In Type 1 diabetes, autoimmunity causes the body’s T-cells to attack its insulin-producing beta cells.
• There are two parts to the immune system: the innate immune system, which we are born with and attempts to fight infection straight away
• And the adaptive immune system, which takes time to mount a response that is more specific to the particular pathogen
• The innate immune system includes a group of cells known as dendritic cells that send messages to the adaptive immune system
• Previous studies have already established that non-obese diabetic mice have faulty innate immune cells, and that this could be partly due to a defect in TLR4, which many suspect helps to prevent type 1 diabetes when it functions normally
• Treatment
• By using an antibody to stimulate a specific molecule in the innate immune system the researchers can reverse, with a high rate of success, new onset diabetes in mice that have already developed the symptoms of diabetes
• The cause of this reversal is a preservation of the endocrine pancreatic beta cells that produce insulin
• These cells are preserved from the autoimmune attack which is the hallmark of Type 1 diabetes
• This approach differs from most in combating Type 1 diabetes because his team’s therapies in mice do not directly interact with T-cells
• Treatment of autoimmunity has often been directed at suppressing an over-zealous adaptive immune response by eliminating autoreactive T-cells
• There are two arms of the immune system, this treatment is targeting a different part of the immune system
• The innate system tends to have a stereotypical response. this new research is targeting a receptor that is found mostly on the innate immune cells, such as dendritic cells.
• The Future
• The key to reversing Type 1 diabetes in mice, is catching the disease at its onset, which is typically within a very short time window
• The time frame would be longer in humans, but it is still a relatively short time from new onset to end-stage Type 1 diabetes
• While the TLR4 pathway in humans is similar to that of mice, there are some differences, so further study is required to see if the treatment will work in humans.
• There is also a chance, if the therapy works in humans, that it will do so with an agonistic anti-TLR4 agent that is already approved, or under development
• Further Reading / In the News
• Reversal of type 1 diabetes in mice may eventually help humans | MedicalXPress.com
• Type 1 diabetes ‘reversed’ in mice | MedicalNewsToday.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

A New Earth-Like Exoplanet

• A potentially habitable Earth-like planet that is only 16 light years away has been discovered
• Discovery
• The planet was discovered from its gravitational pull on its parent star, which causes the star to wobble slightly
• This team had previously found, in 2009, that the star has a cold Jupiter-like planet with a near-circular orbit of about nine years, called Gliese GJ b.
• “Earth-Like” Planet
• The “super-Earth” planet, GJ 832 c, takes 16 days to orbit its red-dwarf star and has a mass at least five times that of Earth.
• It receives about the same average stellar energy as Earth does, because red dwarfs shine more dimly than our Sun, and may have similar temperatures to our planet
• These characteristics put it among the top three most Earth-like planets, according to the Earth Similarity Index developed by scientists at the University of Puerto Rica in Arecibo
• Possible Atmosphere
• The research group says that if the planet has a similar atmosphere to Earth it may be possible for life to survive, although seasonal shifts would be extreme
• “However, given the large mass of the planet, it seems likely that it would possess a massive atmosphere, which may well render the planet inhospitable” | Head of UNSW’s Exoplanetary Science research group, Professor Chris Tinney
• “A denser atmosphere would trap heat and could make it more like a super-Venus and too hot for life,” | Head of UNSW’s Exoplanetary Science research group, Professor Chris Tinney
• Further Reading / In the News
• Potentially habitable Earth-like planet discovered; May have similar temperatures to our planet | ScienceDaily

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

Opportunity Rover

• Opportunity rover has reached a long sought after region of aluminum-rich clay mineral outcrops at a new Endeavour where ancient water once flowed billions of year ago.
• The crater ridge is now “named ‘Pillinger Point’ after Colin Pillinger the Principal Investigator for the [British] Beagle 2 Mars lander
• The Beagle 2 lander was built to search for signs of life on Mars
• Opportunity’s Road Trip
• The new photo mosaic above captured by Opportunity peering out from ‘Pillinger Point’ ridge on June 5, 2014 (Sol 3684) and showing a panoramic view around the eroded mountain ridge and into vast Endeavour crater
• The crater spans 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter
• For the past several months, the six wheeled robot has been trekking southwards from Solander towards the exposures of aluminum-rich clays
• The rover mission scientists ultimate goal is travel even further south to ‘Cape Tribulation’ which holds a motherlode of the ‘phyllosilicate’ clay minerals
• “The idea is to characterize the outcrops as we go and then once we reach the valley travel quickly to Cape Tribulation and the smectite valley, which is still ~2 km to the south of the present rover location,” | Prof. Ray Arvidson, Deputy Principal Investigator for the rover
• Of Note
• June 16 marked the 3696th Sol or Martian Day. Over 193,400 images have been taken during the 24.51 miles (39.44 kilometers) since touchdown on Jan. 24, 2004
• Further Reading / In the News
• Opportunity Peers Out from ‘Pillinger Point’ – Honoring British Beagle 2 Mars Scientist Where Ancient Water Flowed | UniverseToday.com

India’s Mars Orbiter Mission

• Last Time on SciByte …
• SciByte 111 | Memories & International Spacecraft (December 3,
  2013)
• SciByte 109 | ‘Earth-Like’ Planets & Sharks (November 12, 2013)
• SciByte 107 | Dinosaurs & Satellites (October 29, 2013)
• The Low Down
• Mars Orbiter Mission or MOM, has now celebrated 100 days and 100 million kilometers out from Mars on June 16, until the crucial Mars Orbital Insertion (MOI) engine firing
• Mars Orbiter Mission or MOM
• India’s MOM probe will study the atmosphere and sniff for signals of methane.
• MOM was designed and developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) at a cost of $69 Million and marks India’s maiden foray into interplanetary flight
• The probe has flown about 70% of the way to Mars, traveling about 466 million kilometers out of a total of 680 million kilometers (400 million miles) overall, with about 95 days to go.
• One way radio signals to Earth take approximately 340 seconds
• ISRO reports the spacecraft and its five science instruments are healthy. It is being continuously monitored by the Indian Deep Space Network (IDSN) and NASA JPL’s Deep Space Network (DSN).
• Trajectory Correction Maneuvers (TMSs)
• Before reaching Mars, mission navigators must keep the craft on course from Earth to Mars through a series of in flight Trajectory Correction Maneuvers (TMSs).
• The second TCM was just successfully performed on June 11 by firing the spacecraft’s 22 Newton thrusters for a duration of 16 seconds
• TCM-1 was conducted on December 11, 2013 by firing the 22 Newton Thrusters for 40.5 seconds
• Two additional TCM firings are planned in August and September 2014.
• Indian Space Research Organization and NASA
• Although they were developed independently and have different suites of scientific instruments, the MAVEN and MOM science teams will “work together” to unlock the secrets of Mars atmosphere and climate history, MAVEN’s top scientist
• Working together, MOM and MAVEN will revolutionize our understanding of Mars atmosphere, dramatic climatic history and potential for habitability
• “We have had some discussions with their science team, and there are some overlapping objectives,” “At the point where we [MAVEN and MOM] are both in orbit collecting data we do plan to collaborate and work together with the data jointly,” | MAVEN’s principal Investigator
• Further Reading / In the News
• India’s 1st Mars Mission Celebrates 100 Days and 100 Million Kilometers from Mars Orbit Insertion Firing – Cruising Right behind NASA’s MAVEN | UniverseToday.com

ISEE3 Reboot Project

• The Ups and Downs
• This is the first #ISEE3 Delta V maneuver since 1986
• First burn completed ! #ISEE3
• Command received. #ISEE3 TCM Segment 2a burn initiated.
• TCM Segment 2a burn completed. Accelerometers not showing anything – yet. #ISEE3
• Current #ISEE3 signal. Definitely seeing Doppler delta as a result of firings. About 6 Hz so far.
• Go for initiate. Command sent. #ISEE3. Command accepted. We see acceleration but not as expected.
• Either we are low on fuel in System A or latch valve A is not working. FSS and accelerometers not indicating thrust #ISEE3
• Team is reviewing data from today’s TCM efforts. #ISEE3
• The velocity change is apparent in signal. Doppler corrected but using pre-burn velocity from NASA. #ISEE3
• Formulating a plan for another TCM burn attempt tomorrow. Our window at Arecibo opens at 12:39 pm EDT and extends to 3:26 pm EDT

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Titans Salty Ocean

• Twitter | Kenny MacLeod ‏@siabost9deas
• @JB_Mars_Base “Ocean on Saturn moon could be as salty as the Dead Sea” https://phys.org/news/2014-07-ocean-saturn-moon-salty-dead.html … #Cassini #Space #Titan #SaltySea
• The Low Down
• Scientists analyzing data from NASA’s Cassini mission have firm evidence the ocean inside Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, might be as salty as the Earth’s Dead Sea.
• The new results come from a study of gravity and topography data collected during Cassini’s repeated flybys of Titan during the past 10 years
• Salty Ocean or Brine
• Researchers found that a relatively high density was required for Titan’s ocean in order to explain the gravity data
• This indicates the ocean is probably an extremely salty brine of water mixed with dissolved salts likely composed of sulfur, sodium and potassium
• The density indicated for this brine would give the ocean a salt content roughly equal to the saltiest bodies of water on Earth
• “Knowing this may change the way we view this ocean as a possible abode for present-day life, but conditions might have been very different there in the past.” | Giuseppe Mitri of the University of Nantes in France
• Icy Shell / Crust
• Using the Cassini data, researchers presented a model structure for Titan, resulting in an improved understanding of the structure of the moon’s outer ice shell
• The additional findings support previous indications the moon’s icy shell is rigid and in the process of freezing solid
• Cassini data also indicate the thickness of Titan’s ice crust varies slightly from place to place.
• The researchers said this can best be explained if the moon’s outer shell is stiff, as would be the case if the ocean were slowly crystallizing, and turning to ice.
• Methane
• A further consequence of a rigid ice shell, according to the study, is any outgassing of methane into Titan’s atmosphere must happen at scattered “hot spots”- like the hot spot on Earth that gave rise to the Hawaiian Island chain
• Titan’s methane does not appear to result from convection or plate tectonics recycling its ice shell.
• How methane gets into the moon’s atmosphere has long been of great interest to researchers, as molecules of this gas are broken apart by sunlight on short geological timescales
• Titan’s present atmosphere contains about five percent methane. This means some process, thought to be geological in nature, must be replenishing the gas
• “Our work suggests looking for signs of methane outgassing will be difficult with Cassini, and may require a future mission that can find localized methane sources,” said Jonathan Lunine, a scientist on the Cassini mission at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
• Further Reading / In the News
• Ocean on Saturn moon could be as salty as the Dead Sea | Phys.org

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• Driving Test Course
• Curiosity rover has what is often referred to as a stunt double here on Earth, called ‘Scarecrow,’ that engineers use to test drive on different types of terrain
• Scarecrow has a full-size version of Curiosity’s wheels and other driving equipment, but doesn’t have the “brains.”
• Engineers have been scouring the Dumont Dunes area and look for the best spot to practice driving over dunes like those Curiosity may drive over on Mars
• Recently engineers created a course of sand ripples for the Scarecrow rover to drive over to test the rover’s driving skills on soft sand ripples
• On Mars, the Curiosity rover may cross similar sand ripples on its way to Mount Sharp
• Another Travelling Milestone
• After traversing 82 meters on June 27, 2014, Sol 672, the rover stopped because it determined that it was slipping too much
• The rover automatically stopped when it encountered soft sand and sensed that it wasn’t making enough progress
• “Coincidentally, the rover stopped right on the landing ellipse, a major mission milestone” | Mission scientist Ken Herkenhoff
• Mission Info
• Curiosity still has about another 2.4 miles (3.9 kilometers) to go to reach the entry way at a gap in the dunes at the foothills of Mount Sharp sometime later this year
• To date, Curiosity’s odometer totals over 5.1 miles (8.4 kilometers) since landing inside Gale Crater on Mars in August 2012. She has taken over 162,000 images
• Multimedia
• YouTube Curiosity Rover Report JPLnews
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News
• Trekking Mars – Curiosity Roves Outside Landing Ellipse! | UniverseToday.com
• ‘Scarecrow’ Rover Goes Off-Roading in Dumont Dunes – Mars Science Laboratory | mars.jpl.nasa.gov

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• July 14, 1965 : 49 years ago : First Close-Up Photo of Mars : The Mariner 4 satellite sent a transmission of the first close-up photograph of Mars. It consisting of 8.3 dots per second of varying degrees of darkness. The transmission lasted for 8.5 hours and depicted the regions on Mars known as Cebrenia, Arcadia, and Amazonis. The satellite was 134 million miles away from earth and 10,500 miles from Mars. The 574-pound spacecraft had been launched at 9:22am on 28 Nov 1964, from Cape Canaveral, FL, by a two-stage Atlas-Agena D rocket. In addition to its camera with digital tape recorder (about 20 pictures), it carried instruments for studying cosmic dust, solar plasma, trapped radiation, cosmic rays, magnetic fields, radio occultation and celestial mechanics

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Fri, July 11 | At dusk you can see Mars and Spica in the SW sky just under 2* apart [1* is the width of your pinky held at arms length]
• Sat, July 12 | Full Moon
• Sun, July 13 | At dusk Mars and Spica are now just 1.3* apart
• Planets
• Mercury | Sunrise | low in the glow of sunrise to the lower left of Venus
• Venus | Dawn | Low in the E
• Mars | Dusk | High in the SW at dusk with Spica, a little fainter, closing in on it each day reaching their closest point on Sunday
• Jupiter is lost in the sunset

• Saturn | Late Twilight | Highest in the S

• Further Reading and Resources

• Sky&Telescope
• SpaceWeather.com
• StarDate.org
• For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au
• Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org
• Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz
• AstronomyNow
• HeavensAbove

The post Exoplanets & Diabetes | SciByte 135 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Hello everyone and welcome back to SciByte!

We take a look at a theory breaking exoplanet, a theory confirming star, Saturn moon Titan, lunar formation theories, story and spacecraft updates, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | HD Video | Video | Torrent | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | Video Feed | Torrent Feed | iTunes

Show Notes:

Breaking Planetary Formation Theories Again

• Astronomers have announced that they have discovered a new type of planet – a rocky world weighing 17 times as much as Earth
• Past theories believed such a world couldn’t form because anything so hefty would grab hydrogen gas as it grew and become a Jupiter-like gas giant
• This planet; however. is solid and much bigger than previously discovered “super-Earths,” making it a “mega-Earth.”
• Kepler-10c
• It is located about 560 light-years from Earth in the constellation Draco
• It’s orbit lasts 45 days
• The system also hosts a 3-Earth-mass “lava world,” Kepler-10b, in a remarkably fast, 20-hour orbit
• Discovery
• Kepler-10c was originally spotted by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft.
• By measuring the amount of dimming, astronomers can calculate the planet’s physical size or diameter
• However, Kepler can’t tell whether a planet is rocky or gassy
• Kepler-10c was known to have a diameter 2.3 times as large as Earth
• This suggested it fell into a category of planets known as mini-Neptunes, which have thick, gaseous envelopes
• It’s a Rocky Planet
• The team used the HARPS-North instrument on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) in the Canary Islands to measure the mass of Kepler-10c
• They found that it weighed 17 times as much as Earth – far more than expected, this showed that Kepler-10c must have a dense composition of rocks and other solids.
• It is so massive that it would have been able to hold onto an atmosphere if it ever had one
• Planetary Formation Theories
• Planet formation theories have a difficult time explaining how such a large, rocky world that need elements like silicon and iron, could develop
• The Kepler-10 system is about 11 billion years old, which means it formed less than 3 billion years after the Big Bang
• The early universe contained only hydrogen and helium
• Heavier elements are created and scattered through the universe when a star goes supernova, when help create later generations of stars and planets
• This process should have taken billions of years; however, Kepler-10c shows that the universe was able to form such huge rocks even during the time when heavy elements were scarce.
• What This Means
• This tells us that rocky planets could form much earlier than we thought
• This research implies that astronomers shouldn’t rule out old stars when they search for Earth-like planets
• If old stars can host rocky Earths too, then we have a better chance of locating potentially habitable worlds in our cosmic neighborhood
• Further Reading / In the News
• Astronomers find a new type of planet: The ‘mega-Earth’ | Phys.org

— NEWS BYTE —

A New Sneaky Star Type

• A Thorne-Zytkow Object, or TZO are actually two stars in one: a binary pair where a superdense neutron star has been absorbed into its less dense supergiant
• Thorne-Zytkow Object
• First theorized in 1975 they are difficult to find in real life because of their similarity to red supergiants, it is only through detailed spectroscopy that the particular chemical signatures can be identified.
• While normal red supergiants derive their energy from nuclear fusion in their cores, TOs are powered by the unusual activity of the absorbed neutron stars in their cores
• Discovery
• The astronomers were examining the spectrum of light emitted from apparent red supergiants, which tells them what elements are present
• When the spectrum of one star, HV 2112, was analyzed the scientists were quite surprised by some of the unusual features
• They took a close look at the subtle lines in the spectrum they found that it contained excess rubidium, lithium and molybdenum
• Past research has shown that normal stellar processes can create each of these elements; however, high abundances of all three of these at the temperatures typical of red supergiants is a unique signature of TŻOs
• Only by absorbing a much hotter star – such as a neutron star left over from the explosive death of a more massive partner – is the production of such elements presumed to be possible
• Formation Theory
• TOs are thought to be formed by the interaction of two massive stars-a red supergiant and a neutron star formed during a supernova explosion-in a close binary system
• The much more massive red supergiant essentially swallows the neutron star, which spirals into the core of the red supergiant
• Scientists are careful to point out that HV 2112 displays some chemical characteristics that don’t quite match theoretical models
• There are some minor inconsistencies between some of the details of what we found and what theory predicts, but the theoretical predictions are quite old, and there have been a lot of improvements in the theory since then
• What This Might Mean
• Studying these objects represents a completely new model of how stellar interiors can work
• In these interiors we also have a new way of producing heavy elements in our universe
• Further Reading / In the News
• Astronomers discover first Thorne-Zytkow object, a bizarre type of hybrid star | ScienceDaily
• Astronomers Find Evidence of a Strange Type of Star | UniverseToday.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Waves on Saturns Moon?

• Cameras on NASA’s spacecraft Cassini recently saw what appear to be waves on one of Titan’s largest methane lakes, if confirmed, the discovery would mark the first time waves have been seen outside Earth.
• What Did They See?
• The team found patterns in the sunlight reflecting off a northern lake called Punga Mare that they interpret as two-centimeter-high waves
• It may simply be a mudflat instead of a deep lake, and a shallow film of liquid on top may be the cause of the unique light signature
• What it Might Mean
• Waves on Titan would confirm that the lakes actually are deep reservoirs of methane and ethane,
• If life on Titan exists, the best place to look is in large bodies of liquid, the kind that form waves
• True liquid bodies would also make a robotic spacecraft mission to explore Titan’s habitability more feasible
• More Certainty
• By 2017 scientists should know for certain whether what they are seeing is indeed caused by waves
• Cassini has been observing the moon during its northern winter, when weak winds are at work
• As spring starts over the next few years, it brings stronger winds to kick up seas, so the probe should capture more definitive evidence of waves if they exist
• Further Reading / In the News
• Lake on Saturn’s Largest Moon May Have Waves | Scientific American

Lunar Formation Theory Evidence?

• Current Lunar Formation Theory
• According to one lunar formation theory billions of years ago a Mars-sized body (sometimes called “Theia”) smashed into Earth
• Earth survived and the fragments from the crash gradually coalesced into the Moon that we see today
• The problem with this was that no evidence had been found of “Theia”
• Scientists now believe they have found traces of Theia in lunar rocks pulled from the Apollo missions
• Oxygen Isotopes
• Before, the “resolution” of microscopes couldn’t find any significant differences isotopes or types of oxygen of any of the Lunar samples of the Moon brought back by the Apollo missions
• New research appears to show a difference between the Earth and the Moon which implies that a body of different composition caused the changes
• The new data reveals the moon rocks have 12 parts per million more oxygen-17 than the Earth rocks
• “The differences are small and difficult to detect, but they are there,” | lead researcher Daniel Herwartz
• What This Means
• First, scientists can now be reasonably sure that the giant collision took place
• Second, it gives us an idea of the geochemistry of Theia
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Where Did The Moon Come From? – Do We Really Need the Moon? – Preview – BBC Two | BBC
• Further Reading / In the News
• The work was published in Science and will also be presented at the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in California on June 11.
• Hulk Smash! Collision That Formed Our Moon Shows Up In Lunar Rocks, Study Says | UniverseToday.com
• New isotopic evidence supporting moon formation via Earth collision with planet-sized body | phys.org

—UPDATE—

Asteroid UQ4 Catalina Turns Comet – Still Looking Promising

• Last Time on SciByte …
• SciByte 130 | Solar Sibling & Comets | May 13, 2014
• Asteroid Turns Comet
• On October 23, 2013, astronomers with the Catalina Sky Survey picked up a very faint asteroid with an unusual orbit more like a that of a comet than an asteroid
• 2013 UQ4 belongs to a class of objects known as damocloids, these are thought to be inactive varieties of comet nuclei
• By May 7, the asteroid had grown a little fuzz, making the move to comethood, soon afterwards it displayed a substantial coma or atmosphere
• It is brightening on schedule and should be a binocular object greater than +10th magnitude by the end of June
• It will reach perihelion on July 6th only four days before its closest approach to the Earth
• At that point, the comet will have an apparent motion of about 7 degrees a day — that’s the span of a Full Moon once every 1 hour and 42 minutes
• Further Reading / In the News
• Asteroid-Turned-Comet 2013 UQ4 Catalina Brightens: How to See it This Summer | UniverseToday.com

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

ISEE-3 Reboot Project

• The team is now receiving information from the spacecraft’s magnetometer
• Last Time on SciByte …
• SciByte 132 | ISEE-3 Back To Life | May 27, 2014
• SciByte 133 | Orion Heat Shield & Dragon V2 | June 3, 2014
• What ISEE-3 Really Looks Like
• Spacecraft Mass: 479 kg [1,056 lb]
• Spacecraft Dimensions: 16-sided body 1.7m [5.6ft] diameter, 1.6m [5.2ft] high
• Spacecraft Power: solar cells
• Maximum Power: 173.0 W (nominal power)
• It has 4 large antennas that span 91 meters and it spins ~ once every 3 seconds
• The spacecraft is spinning at 19.16 rpm, the mission specification is 19.75 +/- 0.2 rpm so the spin rate of spacecraft is slightly below what it should be
• Image | ISEE-3 Status Report 5 June 2014 (Morning) | Space College
• Image | ISEE-3 Propulsion System Overview | Space College
• Using GNU Radio to Talk to ISEE-3
• The amazing accomplishment of successfully designing a deep-space uplink modulator in a couple of days was accomplished through a lot of team work, strong leadership, and generous support from the community at large
• The uplink commands to the spacecraft uses products like the Ettus Research USRP, the open source SDR framework GNU Radio have made this exceedingly easy
• Transmitting Rate Change
• On Just 9, the team was able to switch ISEE-3’s B transmitter to a data rate of 64 bps, they hope to eventually leave it this way so as to allow dishes smaller than Arecibo to complete the link and have solid two-way communication with ISEE-3.
• After this they were able to detect signals from the craft with an 8 foot dish
• Telemetry Data
• On June 12, telemetry from ISEE-3 indicating that its entire suite of science instruments is powered up and has been powered up since NASA last commanded the spacecraft many years ago
• The engineers are getting data back from the magnetometer that indicates that science data is coming back; however, just because an instrument is powered up doesn’t mean that it is functioning normally
• Some of the ISEE-3 instruments had begun to fail or become partially functional as early as 1982
• Spinning Up
• The team plans to briefly fire two of the spacecraft’s thrusters on 21 June so as to spin it up from 19.16 rpm to the mission specification of 19.75 +/- 0.2 rpm [the spin-up target is 19.733 rpm]
• This optimal spin rate is required in order to properly fire the axial thrusters during the much longer trajectory correction maneuver (TCM) we need to perform to adjust the spacecraft’s course
• Multimedia
• Image | ISEE-3 Status Report 5 June 2014 (Morning) | Space College
• Twitter | @ISEE3Reboot
• YouTube | ISEE-3 Reboot Channel
• Further Reading / In the News
• Space College: ISEE-3 Reboot Project Archives
• Contact With 36-Year Old Spacecraft Results in Dancing, Hugs. Now Comes Even Bigger Challenge | UniverseToday.com

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• The Road Trip Continues
• Curiosity is currently driving toward Mount Sharp, the layered mountain at the middle of Mars’ Gale Crater.
• The rover is carrying with it some of the drilled powdered sample material from the Windjana location that can be delivered for additional internal laboratory analysis during pauses in the drive.
• Mercury Transit
• The observations were made on June 3, 2014
• Mercury fills only about one-sixth of one pixel as seen from such great distance, so the darkening does not have a distinct shape, but its position follows Mercury’s expected path based on orbital calculations.
• This is the first transit of the sun by a planet observed from any planet other than Earth, and also the first imaging of Mercury from Mars
• The same Mastcam frames show two sunspots approximately the size of Earth. The sunspots move only at the pace of the sun’s rotation, much slower than the movement of Mercury.
• Mercury and Venus transits are visible more often from Mars than from Earth, the next Mercury transit visible from Earth will be May 9, 2016.
• Mercury Passes in Front of the Sun, as Seen From Mars – Mars Science Laboratory | Mars.jpl.nasa.gov
• Testing Future Landing Technologies
• Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) | nasa.gov
• The Low Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) will gather data about landing heavy payloads on Mars and other planetary surfaces
• As NASA plans increasingly ambitious robotic missions to Mars, laying the groundwork for even more complex human science expeditions to come, accommodating extended stays for explorers on the Martian surface will require larger and heavier spacecraft
• This test will use a helium balloon (that, when fully inflated, would fit snugly into Pasadena’s Rose Bowl) to lift the vehicle to 120,000 feet
• A fraction of a second after dropping from the balloon, and a few feet below it, four small rocket will stabilize the saucer
• A half second later, a solid-fueled rocket engine will send the test vehicle to the edge of the stratosphere
• “Our goal is to get to an altitude and velocity which simulates the kind of environment one of our vehicles would encounter when it would fly in the Martian atmosphere,” | Ian Clark, principal investigator of the LDSD project at JPL
• Two supersonic decelerator technologies that will be thoroughly tested during two LDSD flight tests next year.
• The SIAD-R, is essentially an inflatable doughnut that increases the vehicle’s size and, as a result, its drag to quickly slow the vehicle
• A second system being tested is the largest supersonic parachute ever flown, to be used when the craft first hits the supersonic flow
• NASA’s flying saucer-shaped test vehicle was not able to be flight tested during the reserved testing launch period unfavorable weather conditions, NASA is continuing to look at options for a future launch window.
• Multimedia
• YouTube Curiosity Rover Report JPLnews
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News
• Mercury Passes in Front of the Sun, as Seen From Mars – Mars Science Laboratory | Mars.jpl.nasa.gov
• NASA’s LDSD ‘Flying Saucer’ Test–Update – Mars Science Laboratory | mars.jpl.nasa.gov

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• June 25, 1997 : 17 years ago : Space Station Mir Accident : The space-station Mir suffered a near-fatal mishap when a Progress ferry being docked via remote control by Russian cosmonaut Vasily Tsibliyev accidentally rammed into the Spektr science module, putting a hole in the pressure vessel and damaging its solar arrays beyond use. To salvage the station, which consisted of a core, a connecting node, and five science modules, crew members severed electrical and data connections between Spektr and the rest of the station and then sealed off the module. They saved the station but lost about half of their electrical power
• The One Martian Year Birthday to Curiosity June 24, 2014. The length of time for Mars to complete one orbit around the Sun is its sidereal year, and is about 686.98 Earth solar days.

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Planets
• Mercury | Hidden by the sunrise
• Venus | Dawn | Low in the East
• Mars | Twilight | High in the SW, with the Blue-White giant star Spica to its left. Mars sets in the W ~ 1AM DST
• Jupiter | Twilight | Low in the W-NW in twilight, setting by nightfall

• Saturn | Evening | S sky in the evening

• Further Reading and Resources

• Sky&Telescope
• SpaceWeather.com
• StarDate.org
• For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au
• Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org
• Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz
• AstronomyNow
• HeavensAbove

The post Super-Earth & Lunar Formation | SciByte 134 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Hello everyone and welcome back to SciByte!

We take a look at NASA testing the world’s largest heat shield, ancient evidence of lyme disease, sign language on glasses, story and spacecraft updates, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | HD Video | Video | Torrent | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | Video Feed | Torrent Feed | iTunes

Show Notes:

Testing NASA\’s Orion Spacecraft Heat Shield

• Technicians at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida have attached the world’s largest heat shield to a pathfinding version of NASA’s Orion crew capsule
• **Delta IV Heavy Rockets***
• The Delta IV Heavy is the only rocket with sufficient thrust to launch the Orion EFT-1 capsule and its attached upper stage to its intended orbit of 3600 miles altitude above Earth
• That is 15 times higher than the International Space Station (ISS) and farther than any human spacecraft has journeyed in 40 year
• Orion Spacecraft
• Orion is NASA’s next generation human rated vehicle now under development to replace the now retired space shuttle
• “The Orion heat shield is the largest of its kind ever built. Its wider than the Apollo and Mars Science Lab heat shields,” | Todd Sullivan, heat shield senior manager
• Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1)
• The initial test flight later this Fall on a crucial mission dubbed Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1)
• One of the primary goals of NASA’s eagerly anticipated Orion EFT-1 uncrewed test flight is to test the efficacy of the heat shield in protecting the vehicle – and future human astronauts
• At the conclusion of the two-orbit, four- hour EFT-1 flight, the detached Orion capsule plunges back and re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere at 20,000 MPH (32,000 kilometers per hour).
• “That’s about 80% of the reentry speed experienced by the Apollo capsule after returning from the Apollo moon landing missions,” Scott Wilson, NASA’s Orion Manager of Production Operations
• The big reason to get to those high speeds during EFT-1 is to be able to test out the thermal protection system
• A trio of parachutes will then unfurl to slow it down for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean
• The Heat Shield
• The heat shield is constructed from a single seamless piece of Avcoat ablator and measures 16.5 ft (5 m) in diameter
• The ablative material will wear away as it heats up during the capsules atmospheric re-entry thereby preventing the 4000* F (2204*C) heat from being transferred to the rest of the capsule
• Numerous sensors and instrumentation have been specially installed on the EFT-1 heat shield and the back shell tiles to collect measurements of things like temperatures, pressures and stresses during the extreme conditions of atmospheric reentry
• The Future
• Data gathered during the flight will aid in confirming. or refuting, design decisions and computer models as the program moves forward to the first flight in late 2017 on the EM-1 mission and more human crewed missions thereafter
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Early in the Process | Textron Team Readies Orion Heat Shield for Shipment to Kennedy Space Center | ReelNASA
• Further Reading / In the News
• World Largest Heat Shield Attached to NASA\’s Orion Crew Capsule for Crucial Fall 2014 Test Flight | UniverseToday.com

— NEWS BYTE —

Ancient Lyme Disease

• New discoveries of ticks fossilized in amber show that the bacteria which cause Lyme disease may have been lurking around for 15 million years
• Lyme Disease
• In the United States, Europe and Asia, ticks are a more important insect vector of disease than mosquitos
• It is a stealthy, often misdiagnosed disease that was only recognized about 40 years ago and can cause problems with joints, the heart and central nervous system
• **Amber***
• Plant and animal life forms found preserved in amber are very efficient at maintaining populations of microbes in their tissues, and can infect mammals, birds, reptiles and other animals
• Bacteria
• The findings were made when scientists studied 15-20 million-year-old amber
• They offer the oldest fossil evidence ever found of Borrelia, a type of spirochete-like bacteria that to this day causes Lyme disease
• This is the oldest fossil evidence of ticks associated with such bacteria
• In a separate report, scientists announced the first fossil record Rickettsia bacteria, the cause of Rocky Mountain spotted fever and related illnesses
• **What This Might Mean*
• In 30 years of studying diseases revealed in the fossil record, the scientist has documented the ancient presence of such diseases as malaria, leishmania, and others.
• It\’s now worth considering that these tick-borne diseases may be far more common than has been historically appreciated
• Evidence suggests that dinosaurs could have been infected with Rickettsial pathogens
• Rickettsia species are carried by many chiggers, ticks, fleas, and lice, and cause diseases in humans such as typhus, spotted fever group, and others
• Further Reading / In the News
• Amber discovery indicates Lyme disease is older than human race | Phys.org
• Lyme Disease Bacteria Found in 15-Million-Year-Old Amber | Paleontology | Sci-News.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

\”Signglasses\”

• Students at Brigham Young University recently launched the \”Signglasses\” project in an attempt to develop a better system of sign language for narration through several types of glasses, including Google Glass.
• By coincidence, the only two deaf students to ever take Professor Jones’ computer science class signed up just as the National Science Foundation funded Jones’ signglasses research
• “Having a group of students who are fluent in sign language here at the university has been huge\” | Professor Mike Jones
• The team tested their system during a field trip visit to the Jean Messieu School for the deaf, where it was revealed that the signer should be displayed in the center of the lens
• Deaf participants could then look straight through the signer as they focused on a planetarium show.
• This was particularly surprising for researchers as they believed that deaf students would prefer to have a video displayed at the top, as Google Glass normally presents itself
• The Future
• Jones will publish the full results of their research in June at Interaction Design and Children
• Researchers hope that with further studies, this tool can also be used for literary guidance
• One idea is when you\’re reading a book and come across a word that you don\’t understand, you point at it, push a button to take a picture
• Multimedia
• YouTube | BYU Signglasses Project | Austin Balaich
• Further Reading / In the News
• Google Glass adaptation opens the universe to deaf students | news.byu.edu/
• \’Signglasses\’ System Helps Deaf Literacy | ScienceWorldReport.com

— Updates —

ISEE-3 Reboot

• Last Time on SciByte …
• SciByte 132 | ISEE-3 Back To Life | May 27, 2014
• The Low Down
• Approval from NASA to attempt contact, and that go-ahead came on May 29th
• The ISEE-3 Reboot Project has announced that it has achieved two-way communication with the ISEE-3 at a transmission rate of 512 bits per second.
• “We have been able to verify modulated data through ground stations in Germany, Morehead State in Kentucky, and the SETI Allen Array in California.” | project member Keith Cowing
• Eventual goal is to actually change its current trajectory into one that will enable more frequent communication with the probe
• Transponders
• The spacecraft has two transponders, transponder A and Transponder B
• Transponder B is normally the engineering telemetry transponder and transponder A is the ranging transponder
• The final state of the spacecraft before was to have both of the transponders transmitters active and that is what people around the world have been tracking.
• Communication
• The team tried several times to command the spacecraft\’s B transponder into the mode where it normally sends engineering telemetry but that did not work
• They then tried the same process on transponder A, the initial command was just to turn engineering telemetry, which was successful so they were able to commanded the spacecraft into engineering telemetry mode.
• Through the A transponder receiver we commanded through the B transponder command decoder to output engineering telemetry through transponder B\’s transmitter
• The team tried to command the spacecraft into 64 bits/second mode, which was a mode that is much more complicated to set up and they did not get working successfully during the limited time that the spacecraft is visible from Arecibo
• They need to do this so that the smaller dishes at Morehead State and Bochum will have a positive signal margin so that we can record several hours of data
• When they later processed the first day\’s data dump from the spacecraft they received 49 full frames of data at a bitrate of 512 bits/second, and there were no errors on the downlink
• Verified so Far the Following Systems on the Spacecraft

1. Transponder A receiver
2. Transponder A\’s Command Decoder and Data Handling Unit
3. Transponder B\’s Command Decoder and Data Handling Unit

+ Milestones Related to Commanding and Receiving Data
1. Successful commanding multiple times of ISEE-3/ICE
2. Received engineering telemetry from both data multiplexing units on the spacecraft
3. Successful demodulation on the ground of the received data, through the output of bits
4. Verification of good data at 512 bits/sec, including frame synchronization, correct number of bits/frame, and with no errors, showing a very strong 30+ db link margin through Arecibo
+ The Future
+ If they can maneuver the spacecraft by June 17th they can get the very small delta V number, however if this starts to climb rapidly as the spacecraft gets closer to the moon they cannot at this time rule out a lunar impact.
+ Multimedia
+ Image | \”ISEE-3 Mission Control\” | Space College: ISEE-3 Reboot Project Archives | spacecollege.org
+ YouTube | ISEE-3 Reboot | Mike Loucks Mike
+ Twitter | ISEE3 Reboot Project (ISEE3Reboot)
+ YouTube | ISEE-3 Reboot | Mike Loucks
+ YouTube | ISEE-3 Reboot Project – Recovering a 30 year old space probe Scott Manley
+ Further Reading / In the News
+ Space College: ISEE-3 Reboot Project Archives | spacecollege.org
+ Citizen Scientists Take Command Of Decades-Old NASA Probe | Forbes.com
+ 35-year-old ISEE 3 Craft Phones Home | Sky & Telescope

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

SpaceX Dragon V2

• The previous version of the Dragon capsule was flightworthy enough to deliver supplies, its life support system wasn’t reliable for human passengers
• Dragon V2, on the other hand, will be able to carry seven astronauts for seven days.
• General Capabilities
• The vehicle holds seats for 7 passengers, and includes an Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) that provides a comfortable environment for crewmembers
• When the capsule reaches the ISS, it will dock with the station autonomously. Unlike its predecessor, it won’t need the ISS’s robotic arm to reach out and grab it
• To land back on Earth, a backup technique for the new capsule is to slow its speed with parachutes before splashing into the ocean
• The main technique for landing uses its engines to land propulsively which will will make it quickly reusable
• “You’ll be able to land anywhere on Earth with the accuracy of a helicopter,” | SpaceX CEO Elon Musk
• The Future
• Dragon V2’s robust thermal protection system is capable of lunar missions, in addition to flights to and from Earth orbit
• According to Ars Technica, NASA pays Russia about $71 million per astronaut for trips to the ISS. Musk thinks he can drop that number to $20 million or less.
• Multimedia
• YouTube | SpaceX Dragon V2 | Flight Animation | spacexchannel·
• Further Reading / In the News
• Dragon V2: SpaceX\’s Next Generation Manned Spacecraft | SpaceX
• Inside The New Dragon Spacecraft | Popular Science

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• Driving on and Science
• Curiosity is resuming driving toward Mount Sharp, the layered mountain at the middle of Mars\’ Gale Crater.
• The rover is carrying with it some of the powdered sample material from Windjana that can be delivered for additional internal laboratory analysis during pauses in the drive.
• Multimedia
• YouTube Curiosity Rover Report JPLnews
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News
• What\’s New – Mars Science Laboratory | mars.jpl.nasa.gov

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• June 7, 1958 : 56 years ago : Ultrasound Article : A seminal article that launched the widespread use of ultrasound in medical diagnosis was published in The Lancet by Ian Donald, an English physician. After a few years developing the experimental use of ultrasound, Donald had applied it to treat patients in his hospital. In the Lancet article, Investigation of Abdominal Masses by Pulsed Ultrasound, he described how he was able to make the life-saving diagnosis of a huge, easily removable, ovarian cyst in a woman who had been diagnosed by others as having inoperable stomach cancer. Donald knew about sonar from his service in WW II, and industrial use of reflected ultrasound waves for flaw detection in materials, and with help from others, he launched its use in medicine

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Thurs, June 5 | First-quarter Moon
• Thurs, June 5 | After Dark | The easy to spot constellation \”Cassiopeia\” that looks like a W is near the north horizon
• Planets
• Mercury | Twilight | Low in the west-northwest both fading and sinking lower to the horizon
• Venus | \”Morning Star\” | Low in the E during dawn
• Mars | Late Twilight | Appears high in the S, setting in the W ~2-3 am DST
• Jupiter | Twilight | Shines in the W in twilight setting soon after dark

• Saturn | Evening | Is in the SE in the evening, moving to its highest point in the S skies ~11-12

• Further Reading and Resources

• Sky&Telescope
• SpaceWeather.com
• StarDate.org
• For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au
• Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org
• Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz
• AstronomyNow
• HeavensAbove

The post Orion Heat Shield & Dragon V2 | SciByte 133 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Hello everyone and welcome back to SciByte!

We take a look at resurrecting a space probe, classroom decorations, brain control, viewer feedback, a three year look back at SciByte, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | HD Video | Video | Torrent | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | Video Feed | Torrent Feed | iTunes

Show Notes:

Bringing an Abandoned Satellite Back to Life and Use

• An independent team of engineers recovering old imagery on magnetic tape reels from the first lunar orbiter missions decided to accomplish a landmark achievement: to turn on, command and maneuver a NASA spacecraft long ago abandoned
• Original mission : Sun/Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3)
• Originally the mission was cooperative effort between NASA and ESRO/ESA to study the interaction between the Earth’s magnetic field and the solar wind.
• Examine in detail the structure of the solar wind near the Earth and the shock wave that forms the interface between the solar wind and Earth\’s magnetosphere
• Investigate motions of and mechanisms operating in the plasma sheets, and continue the investigation of cosmic rays and solar flare emissions in the interplanetary region near 1 AU
• Second mission: International Cometary Explorer
• On June 10, 1982, after completing its original mission, ISEE-3 was repurposed. It was renamed the International Cometary Explorer (ICE)
• The primary scientific objective of ICE was to study the interaction between the solar wind and a cometary atmosphere
• ICE carried no cameras. It instead carried instruments for measurements of energetic particles, waves, plasmas, and fields
• It was sent on a trajectory intercepting that of Comet Giacobini-Zinner and on 11 September 1985, the craft passed through the plasma tail of Comet Giacobini-Zinner
• It transited between the Sun and Comet Halley in late March 1986, when other spacecraft were in the vicinity of Comet Halley, ICE flew through the tail
• Heliospheric mission
• This phase of the mission was approved by NASA in 1991, which consisted of investigations of coronal mass ejections in coordination with ground-based observations
• End of mission
• On May 5, 1997, NASA ended the ICE mission, and ordered the probe shut down, with only a carrier signal left operating
• Further contact
• In 1999, NASA made brief contact with ICE to verify its carrier signal and discovered that it had not been powered off after the last contact
• On September 18, 2008 a status check revealed that all but one of its 13 experiments were still functioning, and it still has enough propellant
• Bringing It Back to Life?
• Earlier in 2014, officials with the Goddard Space Flight Center had said that the Deep Space Network equipment necessary to transmit signals to the spacecraft had been decommissioned in 1999, and that replacing it was not economically feasible
• An independent team of engineers recovering old imagery on magnetic tape reels from the first lunar orbiter missions decided to accomplish a landmark achievement: to turn on, command and maneuver a NASA spacecraft long ago abandoned
• They began to study the feasibility and challenges involved in reviving the \’dead\’ satellite
• A team webpage said, \”We intend to contact the ISEE-3 (International Sun-Earth Explorer) spacecraft, command it to fire its engine and enter an orbit near Earth, and then resume its original mission…If we are successful we intend to facilitate the sharing and interpretation of all of the new data ISEE-3 sends back via crowdsourcing.\”
• Crowdsourcing
• To cover the costs of writing the software to communicate with the probe, searching through the NASA archives for the information needed to control the spacecraft, and buying time on the dish antennas
• On May 15, 2014, the project reached its crowdfunding goal, and they further met a \’stretch\’ goal of $150,000
• Window of Opportunity
• The team needed to contact the spacecraft before the end of May because the next close approach to the Earth won’t be until 30-40 years
• The ISEE-3/ICE spacecraft was never really designed to be an interplanetary cruiser and thus the thrusters on board are very small
• The project members are working on deadline: if they get the spacecraft to change its orbit by late May or early June 2014, it can use the Moon\’s gravity to get back into a useful halo orbit.
• The team estimates that if they wait until mid-June to do the course correction that it will take 17 hours of thrusting to get the course change of about 40 meters/second that they will need at that time
• Hardware and Software
• It has been 30 years since the original project was started and and documents and magnetic tapes have disappeared.
• The software and hardware to program, command and transmit to ISEE-3 are long gone
• Amateur radio operators now have technology sufficient to acquire the signal and through the internet are also a part of the recovery effort
• Even without the original hardware transmitter, today’s high-speed electronics are able to emulate in software the hardware from 36 years ago
• Project members obtained the needed hardware (power amplifier, modulator/demodulator and installed it on the 305-meter Arecibo dish antenna on May 19, 2014
• Technical Progress
• This is an ongoing process and the team has dug some of the pertinent information out of 35 year old IEEE or AIAA papers that are publicly available
• Most of the best information the team found was from the people who worked on the project in the 1980\’s when the spacecraft was fully operational
• They also obtained several documents from NASA as part of the development of thier Space Act Agreement
• Since there is no computer on board the ISEE-3 spacecraft the task is actually much easier since we are going to be directly commanding various subsystems
• Non-Reimbursable Space Act Agreement
• Although NASA is not funding the project, it made advisors available and gave approval to try to establish contact
• On May 21, 2014, NASA announced that it had signed a Non-Reimbursable Space Act Agreement with the ISEE-3 Reboot Project
• \”This is the first time NASA has worked such an agreement for use of a spacecraft the agency is no longer using or ever planned to use again,\” officials said
• Multimedia
• Twitter | ISEE3 Reboot Project (ISEE3Reboot)
• YouTube | ISEE-3 Reboot | Mike Loucks
• YouTube | ISEE-3 Reboot Project – Recovering a 30 year old space probe Scott Manley
• Further Reading / In the News
• NASA Signs Agreement with Citizen Scientists Attempting to Communicate with Old Spacecraft | NASA.gov
• ISEE-3 Reboot Project Status and Schedule for First Contact | Space College
• Guest Post: No turning back, NASA ISEE-3 Spacecraft Returning to Earth after a 36 Year Journey | UniverseToday.com
• International Cometary Explorer – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• ISEE-3 Reboot Project | Astronomy News | NinePlanets.org
• ISEE-3 Reboot Project: Stretch Goal – NASA Watch
• ISEE-3 Reboot Project by Space College, Skycorp, and SpaceRef | RocketHub

— NEWS BYTE —

Distracted by Classroom Decorations?

• New research from Carnegie Mellon University shows that too much materials covering a classroom wall may end up disrupting attention and learning in young children
• The Low Down
• Researchers looked at whether classroom displays affected children\’s ability to maintain focus during instruction and to learn the lesson content
• They found that children in highly decorated classrooms were more distracted, spent more time off-task and demonstrated smaller learning gains than when the decorations were removed
• The Study
• 24 kindergarten students were placed in laboratory classrooms for six introductory science lessons on topics they were unfamiliar with
• Three lessons were taught in a heavily decorated classroom, and three lessons were given in a sparse classroom.
• Results
• The results showed that while children learned in both classroom types, they learned more when the room was not heavily decorated
• Children\’s accuracy on the test questions was higher in the sparse classroom (55 percent correct) than in the decorated classroom (42 percent correct).
• When the researchers tallied all of the time children spent off-task in both types of classrooms, the rate of off-task behavior was higher in the decorated classroom (38.6 percent time spent off-task) than in the sparse classroom (28.4 percent time spent off-task)
• The Future
• The researchers are interested in finding out if the visual displays were removed, whether the children\’s attention would shift to another distraction
• Additional research is needed to know what effect the classroom visual environment has on children\’s attention and learning in real classrooms
• They say that they do not suggest by any means that this is the answer to all educational problems but that teachers should consider whether some of their visual displays may be distracting
• Further Reading / In the News
• Heavily decorated classrooms disrupt attention and learning in young children | ScienceDaily.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Flying With Only A Thought

• Scientists have now demonstrated the feasibility of flying via brain control, with astonishing accuracy
• First Breakthrough
• Seven subjects took part in the flight simulator tests
• They had varying levels of flight experience, including one person without any practical cockpit experience whatsoever
• The accuracy with which the test subjects stayed on course by merely thinking commands would have sufficed, in part, to fulfill the requirements of a flying license test
• Several of the subjects also managed the landing approach under poor visibility
• In The Future
• Scientists are now focusing in particular on the question of how the requirements for the control system and flight dynamics need to be altered to accommodate the new control method
• Normally, pilots feel resistance in steering and must exert significant force when the loads induced on the aircraft become too large
• This feedback is missing when using brain control
• The researchers are thus looking for alternative methods of feedback to signal when the envelope is pushed too hard, for example
• Further Reading / In the News
• Using thoughts to control airplanes | ScienceDaily.com

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Jupiter\’s Great Red Spot Shrinking?

• Twitter | Michael Thalleen ‏@ThalleenM
• Jupiter\’s Great Red Spot Shrinks to Smallest Size Ever Seen
• The Great Red Spot
• “Recent Hubble Space Telescope observations confirm that the spot is now just under 10,250 miles (16,500 km) across, the smallest diameter we’ve ever measured,” said Amy Simon of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
• Using historic sketches and photos from the late 1800s, astronomers determined the spot’s diameter then at 25,475 miles (41,000 km) across
• Changes
• Starting in 2012 amateur observations revealed a noticeable increase in the spot’s shrinkage rate
• They showed that the spot’s “waistline” is getting smaller by just under 620 miles (1,000 km) per year while its north-south extent has changed little
• This has caused the spot to become more circular in shape
• Cause
• There are no firm answers yet as to what is causing the drastic downsizing,
• New observations however show that very small eddies are feeding into the storm which may be responsible for the accelerated change by altering the internal dynamics of the Great Red Spot
• The storm appears to be conserving angular momentum by spinning faster the same way an ice skater spins up when they pulls in their arms
• The faster winds might also help shrink the spot further or bring about its rejuvenation.
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Jupiter\’s Great Red \’Shrinking\’ Spot Spied By Hubble | VideoFromSpace
• Further Reading / In the News
• [Hubble Sees Jupiter\’s Red Spot Shrink to Smallest Size Ever | UniverseToday.com(https://www.universetoday.com/111907/hubble-sees-jupiters-red-spot-shrink-to-smallest-size-ever/)

— Updates —

SciByte

• Hosts
• Jeremy | Co-Hosted for ep 1-13
• Nikki | Summer SciByte | August 06, 2013; August 13, 2013; August 27, 2013; July 23, 2013; SciByte September 03, 2013
• Chris | Episodes 14+ [minus a few \”Summer SciByte\” or \”Summer SciByte Style\” with Nikki]
• Formats Over the Years
• Totally edited video in a virtual studio with Jeremy
• Totally video in a virtual studio with Chris
• Video once a month and \”Enhance Audio\” with Chris
• \”Enhanced Audio\” with Chris
• Google Hangout\’s with Nikki
• Science as an Adjective, a Noun, and a Verb
• Adjective = \’describing\’ a word; Noun = person, place, thing, animal, idea; Verb = conveys an action
• \”Science is Sad\” | Large Hadron Collider | SciByte 8
• Watching Science Progres
• Private Space Travel Advances | From an idea, to engineering, to testing, to implementation [i.e. SpaceX and Virgin Galactic]
• Mars Landers | Opportunity (continuing science and solar panel ‘cleaning’ events) and Curiosity (Confirmation of running/standing water in Mars history, ancient habitable locations, drilling into rocks, switching to searching for the building blocks of life)
• Watching science progress | Alzheimer\’s research, Voyager 1, Exoplanets, medical research helping senses
• Breaking Science | \’Faster Than Light Neutrinos\’, Higgs-Boson Particle
• Further Reading / In the News
• SciByte | JupiterBroadcasting.com

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• The Image from Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI)
• Shows the rock target \”Windjana\” and its immediate surroundings after inspection of the site by the rover
• The researchers drilled a test hole and a sample collection hole produced the mounds of drill cuttings that are markedly less red than the other visible surfaces
• This preparatory \”mini drill\” hole, to lower right from the open hole, was drilled on Sol 615 (April 29, 2014) and subsequently filled in with cuttings from the sample collection drilling.
• The open hole from sample collection is 0.63 inch (1.6 centimeters) in diameter. It was drilled on Sol 621 (May 5, 2014).
• The vigorous activity of penetrating the rock with the rover\’s hammering drill also resulted in slides of loose material near the rock
• Gathering Samples
• Since then, the 1 ton robot carefully scrutinized the resulting 2.6 inches (6.5 centimeters) deep borehole, the scientists then hit the fresh bore hole with a pinpoint series of parting laser blasts
• The mound of dark grey colored drill tailings, much darker and greyer that the exterior of the rock, that are piled around for an up close examination of the texture and composition with the MAHLI camera and spectrometers
• The team has successfully delivered pulverized and sieved samples to the pair of onboard miniaturized chemistry labs [Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument (CheMin) and Sample Analysis at Mars instrument (SAM)] for chemical and compositional analysis.
• Researchers decided that one drill campaign into Kimberley was enough, so the rover will not be drilling into any other rock targets at this location
• There will be further analysis of the ‘Windjana’ sample along the way since there’s plenty of leftover sample material stored in the CHIMRA sample processing mechanism to allow future delivery of samples when the rover periodically pauses during driving.
• The Future
• It may be a very long time before the next drilling when the rover arrives at the foothills of Mount Sharp
• The current location, Windjama, lies some 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) southwest of Yellowknife Bay
• It still has about another 4 kilometers to go to reach the foothills of Mount Sharp sometime later this year
• Multimedia
• Images – Mars Science Laboratory | mars..jpl.nasa.gov
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News
• Curiosity says \’Goodbye Kimberley\’ after Parting Laser Blasts and Seeking New Adventures Ahead | UniverseToday.com

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• May 29, 1919 : 95 years ago : Einstein\’s Relativity Theory Proved : A solar eclipse permitted observation of the bending of starlight passing through the sun\’s gravitational field, as predicted by Albert Einstein\’s theory of relativity. Separate expeditions of the Royal Astronomical Society travelled to Brazil and off the west coast of Africa. Both made measurements of the position of stars visible close to the sun during a solar eclipse. These observations showed that, indeed, the light of stars was bent as it passed through the gravitational field of the sun. This was a key prediction of Albert Einstein\’s theory that gravity affected energy as in addition to the familiar effect on matter. The verification of predictions of Einstein\’s theory, proved during the solar eclipse was a dramatic landmark scientific event.

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Wed, May 28 | New Moon (exact at 2:40 p.m. EDT)
• Fri, May 30 | 20-30 min after sunset | | Very low in the W-NW you can see the hairline crescent Moon with Mercury to its right, they both set fairly quickly. You can see Jupiter to the far upper left.
• Sat, May 31 | ~1hr after sunset | Jupiter stands to the upper right of the Moon in the early evening
• Sun, Jun 03 | ~1hr after sunset | Jupiter is now to the left and slightly higher than the moon
• Planets
• Mercury | Twilight | It is at it\’s highest point for 2014 for mid-N lat, and is fading this week. As twilight deepens, look for it in the W-NW to the lower right of bright Jupiter as it fades this week
• Venus | Dawn | The \”Morning Star\” is low in the E during dawn, moving to it\’s highest point in the south in late twilight
• Mars | Is at it\’s highest point in the S in late twilight, it sets in the W around 3 or 4 a.m. DST
• Jupiter | Twilight | Is in the west at twilight, sinking during the evening and sets around 11 or midnight. Jupiter is on the far side of the Sun from us and is nearly its minimum apparent size that we see

• Saturn | Evening | Appears SE in the evening moving to it\’s highest point in the S ~11-12

• Further Reading and Resources

• Sky&Telescope | Sky at a Glance
• SpaceWeather.com
• StarDate.org
• For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au
• Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org
• Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz
• AstronomyNow
• HeavensAbove

The post ISEE-3 Back To Life | SciByte 132 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Hello everyone and welcome back to SciByte!

We take a look at an exoplanet picture, Autism Spectrum and sensory stimuli, a giant dinosaur in Argentina, viewer feedback, spacecraft updates, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | HD Video | Video | Torrent | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | Video Feed | Torrent Feed | iTunes

Show Notes:

Direct Image of Exoplanet

• This week, an international team of researchers announced the discovery and direct image of an exoplanet 155 light years away
• The few planets for which we have an actual image are interesting because we can analyze their light directly, and thus learn much more about them
• The Exoplanet GU Psc B
• The primary star, GU Psc A, is an M3 red dwarf weighing in at 35% the mass of our Sun and is just 100 million years old
• It orbits its host star 2,000x farther than the distance from Earth to the Sun once every 80,000 Earth years
• It is also one of the “coolest” planets that have been directly imaged, showing methane absorption
• It is certainly the most distant exo-planet to a main-sequence star that has been found so far
• A Exo-Planet?
• The exoplanet is estimated to be 11 times the mass of Jupiter, just under the lower mass limit for brown dwarf status
• This distance makes GU Psc b very interesting from a theoretical point of view, because it’s hard to imagine how it could have formed in the protoplanetary disk of its star
• The current working definition of an exoplanet is based solely on mass (<13 Jupiter masses), so GU Psc b probably formed in a way that is more similar to how stars formed
• How Do We Know That They Are \’Together\’?
• The host star, GU Psc is relatively nearby; it displays a significant apparent proper motion relative to distant background stars and galaxies.
• On images taken one year apart with WIRCam on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, they observed that the companion displays the same big proper motion, i.e. they move together in the plane of the sky, while the rest of the stars in the field don’t
• The Technique
• Researchers targeted GU Psc after it was determined to be a member of the AB Doradus moving group of relatively young stars, which are prime candidates for exoplanet detection
• The fact that GU Psc B was captured by direct imaging at 155 light years distant is amazing
• Most planet hunting techniques using direct imaging involve state-of-the-art adaptive optics systems, but we the researchers ‘standard’ imaging without any exotic techniques
• The team was able to view the exoplanet by utilizing observations from the W.M. Keck observatory, the joint Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, the Gemini Observatory and the Observatoire Mont-Mégantic in Québec.
• To find this planet, they used very sensitive ‘standard’ imaging, and carefully chose the wavelengths where planets display colors that are unlike most other astrophysical objects such as stars and galaxies
• Further Reading / In the News
• Direct Image of an Exoplanet 155 Light Years Away | UniverseToday.com

— NEWS BYTE —

Autism Spectrum and Sensory Stimuli

• A new small study shows certain areas in the brains of children diagnosed with autism spectrum overreact to sensory stimuli [i.e. touch of a scratchy sweater or loud traffic noises]
• The finding helps to explain why autistic kids are five times more likely than other children to be overwhelmed by everyday sensations
• The Low Down
• The finding helps to explain why kids with autism spectrum are five times more likely than other children to be overwhelmed by everyday sensations
• It\’s a condition called sensory over-responsivity, and it was recognized as one of the core features of autism spectrum disorder
• The Study
• Researchers recruited 32 children and teens. Half the group had been diagnosed as autism spectrum. The others were typically developing kids who were matched in age
• Scientists had them rest in a fMRI machine, a kind of scanner that can see brain activity in real time
• They touched the kids with a scratchy wool sweater, played loud traffic noises or did both at the same time. Each condition was repeated four times for 15 seconds
• Results
• The brains of children with autism spectrum reacted much more strongly to the sensory stimulation than did the brains of typically developing kids
• The two areas that seemed to be the most hyperactive were the primary sensory cortex, which is responsible for initially processing sensory information, and the amygdala, which is involved in emotional regulation.
• \”Typical kids, have an initial response almost immediately, then by the second time around, that response goes way down\” | Shula Green, Ph.D. candidate
• \”In kids with autism, that response really stays high throughout the scan. They\’re not getting used to it\” | Shula Green, Ph.D. candidate
• The hyperactivity the researchers saw on the brain scans became most intense when kids with autism spectrum experienced the two sensations at the same time
• \”I think if anybody ever had a doubt that this was just some sort of odd pickiness or something like that in people with autism spectrum,this shows, no, there really is a brain basis for this,\” | Dr. Paul Wang
• Further Reading / In the News
• Study probes why kids with autism are oversensitive to touch, noise | MedicalXPres

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

New Sauropod Dinosaur in Argentina

• Leinkupal Laticauda
• Scientists have identified a new diplodocid sauropod from the early Cretaceous period in Patagonia, Argentina — the first diplodocid sauropod discovered in South America
• Diplodocids are part of a group of sauropod dinosaurs known for their large bodies, as well as extremely long necks and tails
• Though the bones are fragmentary, scientists found differences between this species and other diplodocid species from North America and Africa in the vertebrae where the tail connects to the body
• These differences suggest to the authors that it may warrant a new species name, Leinkupal laticauda, and that it apparently lived much later than its North American and African cousins
• This existence suggests that the supposed extinction of the Diplodocidae around the end of the Jurassic or beginning of the Cretaceous period didn\’t occur globally and that they survived in South America at least during part of the Early Cretaceous.
• Multimedia
• YouTube | World\’s heaviest dinosaur bones discovered in Argentina, BBC News | MOSTNEWS©
• Further Reading / In the News
• First diplodocid sauropod from South America found -| ScienceDaily

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Greenhouses for Mars

• Contact form | Mark
• Mars Plant Experiment (MPX) Contribution to Mars 2020 Rover
• Mars Plant Experiment (MPX)
• Researchers have proposed putting a plant-growth experiment on NASA\’s next Mars rover scheduled to launch in mid-2020 and land on the Red Planet in early 2021, known as the Mars Plant Experiment (MPX),
• The designers of the MPX team say the project could help lay the foundation for the colonization of Mars,
• They aren\’t suggesting that the 2020 Mars rover should digging a hole with its robotic arm and planting seeds in the Red Planet\’s dirt.
• The experiment would be entirely self-contained, eliminating the chance that Earth life could escape and perhaps get a foothold on Mars.
  • MPX would employ a clear \”CubeSat\” box which would be affixed to the exterior of the 2020 rover
• This box would hold Earth air and about 200 seeds of Arabidopsis, a small flowering plant that\’s commonly used in scientific research
• The seeds would receive water when the rover touched down on Mars, and would then be allowed to grow for two weeks or so.
• MPX would provide an organism-level test of how Earth life deals with the Red Planet\’s relatively high radiation levels and low gravity, which is about 40 percent as strong as that of Earth,
• It also would be the first multicellular organism to grow, live and die on another planet
• Further Reading / In the News
• NASA May Put Tiny Greenhouse on Mars in 2021 | Space.com

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

New Horizons Message

• At the Smithsonian Future Is Here Festival in Washington, D.C., that NASA has agreed to upload a digital crowd-sourced message to the New Horizons spacecraft, New Horizons Message Initiative
• Last Time on SciByte …
• SciByte 104 | Fear & Lunar Formation | October 1, 2013
• SciByte 30 | Solar Storms & Private Space Flight | Jan 24, 2012
• Messages to Interstellar Space
• If all goes according to plan, New Horizons will become the fifth man-made object to travel beyond the solar system-after Pioneers 10 and 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2, it\’s the only one of the five not to launch with a message
• The Pioneer spacecrafts bore plaques on their sides, and the Voyagers each carried golden records (and the means to play them).
• When New Horizons\’ journey was being planned other missions had been scrapped and the budget was extremely tight and they didn\’t have the bandwidth for a message
• Now it doesn\’t cost massive amounts because there\’s no hardware, just uplinking ones and zeroes
• Jon Lomberg, who worked closely with Carl Sagan on the Voyager golden record in 1977, had an epiphany last year about sending the message digitally
• Lomberg approached Allan Stern, Principle investigator of New Horizons, who advised him that NASA would need evidence of public support
• In September 2013, Lomberg launched a website with a petition to NASA. By February 2014, 10,000 people from over 140 countries had signed it.
• Not a Prefect System
• \”As long as the spacecraft is healthy and the radio is working,\” \”there\’s no particular rush to send it\” but \”The spacecraft is so far away,\” \”that download times are like dial-up Internet.\”| Jon Lomberg,
• The New Horizons message won\’t last nearly as long as the metal missives attached to Pioneer and Voyager as cosmic radiation may eventually corrupt the spacecraft\’s electronic memory
• The Actual Message
• The project will officially launch August 25, 2014
• This message will be very different from the one Lomberg designed with Sagan almost 40 years ago, the 21st-century version will be a global self-portrait, pieced together by many willing hands
• Anyone on Earth will be able to upload potential content (images, sounds, software-the formats haven\’t been finalized) then everyone will be able to vote on what to include
• \”Our team is going to provide the overall architecture of the message,\” \”but we\’ll try to keep ourselves open to what we will send.\” | Jon Lomberg
• A National Geographic emerging explorer will have to figure out how to compress a planet\’s worth of opinions into the roughly 100 MB of memory New Horizons will have available on its computer.
• When Will It Be Sent?
• The message itself will be transmitted sometime after New Horizons does a flyby of Pluto in 2015 and sends back the scientific data that it collects
• The computer won\’t have any room in its memory until the data from Pluto are transmitted back to Earth, which could take more than a year
• There are also hopes that the spacecraft will have a shot at a flyby of another object in the Kuiper Belt of the solar system, if that happens, the message upload will be delayed
• Multimedia
• Twitter | NewHorizonsMsg: WE DID IT! – GLOBAL \”SELFIE\” | @NewHorizonsMsg
• Twitter | NewHorizonsMsg: .@NASA approved our petition! | @NewHorizonsMsg
• Further Reading / In the News
• New Horizons Web Site
• One Earth: New Horizons Message
• Global \”Selfie\” to Be Beamed to Outer Space | news.NationalGeographic.com
• Want to Phone Aliens? Help Get Your Messages On NASA\’s Pluto-Bound Spacecraft | Space.com

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• Analyzing the Drilled Hole
• NASA\’s Curiosity Mars rover used the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) instrument on its robotic arm to illuminate and record a nighttime view of the sandstone rock target \”Windjana.\”
• The rover had previously drilled a hole to collect sample material from the interior of the rock and then zapped a series of target points inside the hole with the laser of the rover\’s Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument
• That instrument provides information about the target\’s composition by analysis of the sparks of plasma generated by the energy of the laser beam striking the target
• This view combines eight separate MAHLI exposures, taken at different focus settings to show the entire scene in focus
• The exposures were taken after dark on the 628th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity\’s work on Mars (May 13, 2014)
• Using MAHLI light-emitting diodes as well as a color camera yields an image of the hole\’s interior with less shadowing than would be seen in a sunlit image
• The camera\’s inspection of the interior of the hole provides documentation about what the drill bit passed through as it penetrated the rock — for example, to see if it cut through any mineral veins or visible layering
• Multimedia
• Preparing for drilling, Navcam Left B | mars.jpl.nasa.gov
• Preparing for drilling, Front Hazcam: Right B | mars.jpl.nasa.gov
• Nighttime Image of Laser Sharpshooting on Mars | mars.jpl.nasa.gov
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• May 26, 1676 : 338 years ago : Leeuwenhoek\’s Animalcules : Antonie van Leeuwenhoek applied his hobby of making microscopes from his own handmade lenses to observe some water running off a roof during a heavy rainstorm. He finds that it contains, in his words, “very little animalcules.” The life he has found in the runoff water is not present in pure rainwater. This was a fundamental discovery, for it showed that the bacteria and one-celled animals did not fall from the sky. When a ball of molten glass is inflated like a balloon, a small droplet of the hot fluid collects at the very bottom the bubble. Leeuwenhoek used these droplets as microscope lenses to view the animalcules. Despite their crude nature, those early lenses enabled Leeuwenhoek to describe an amazing world of microscopic life | Antonie van Leeuwenhoek | Wikipedia

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Thurs, May 22 | Fading Twilight | Mercury is low in the W-NW about 2.5 fist widths to the lower right of Jupiter
• Fri, May 23 | ~3am EDT | Possible new meteor shower, of unknown quality. Earth will pass through the debris trail of Comet 209P/Linear that will make closest approach on May 29 but will still be very faint
• Planets
• Mercury | Fading Twilight | In the W-NW to the lower right of Jupiter and will be fading as the week progresses
• Venus | \”Morning Star\” | Lower in the E

• Mars | Twilight | High in the S skies, setting in the West before dawn, Spika is to the far lower left

• Further Reading and Resources

• Sky&Telescope
• SpaceWeather.com
• StarDate.org
• For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au
• Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org
• Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz
• AstronomyNow
• HeavensAbove

The post Exoplanet Image & Autism Spectrum | SciByte 131 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We take a look at a solar sibling, mapping neurons with crowdsourcing, comets, an exoskeleton to help a paralyzed teen walk, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes:

The Suns Long-Lost brother

• A team of researchers has identified the first \”sibling\” of the Sun — a star that was almost certainly born from the same cloud of gas and dust as our star
• The Suns \”Sibling\” | HD 162826
• The solar sibling the team identified is a star called HD 162826, a star 15 percent more massive than the Sun, located 110 light-years away in the constellation Hercules
• The star is not visible to the unaided eye, but easily can be seen with low-power binoculars, not far from the bright star Vega.
• Data in the Data
• By coincidence this star has been studied by the McDonald Observatory Planet Search team for more than 15 years
• Combining the data from those studies, together with new calculations has ruled out any \”hot Jupiters\” — massive planets orbiting close to the star
• The studies indicate that it\’s unlikely that a Jupiter analog orbits the star, either, but they do not rule out the presence of smaller terrestrial planets.
• **Identifying***
• The team identified HD 162826 as the Sun\’s sibling by following up on 30 possible candidates found by several groups around the world looking for solar siblings.
• All of these observations used high-resolution spectroscopy to get a deep understanding of the stars\’ chemical make-up.
• Several factors are needed to really pin down a solar sibling, in addition to chemical analysis, his team also included information about the stars\’ orbits, where they had been and where they are going in their paths around the center of the Milky Way galaxy
• Combining information on both chemical make-up and dynamics of the candidates narrowed the field down to one: HD 162826.
• Narrowing Down the Suspects
• Even with information on more stars to work with, it\’s not straightforwards to identify potential stellar siblings
• What the researchers are looking at is spectrographic analysis, certain key chemical elements that are going to be very useful
• Elements are ones that vary greatly among stars which otherwise have very similar chemical compositions, but the team has identified the elements barium and yttrium as particularly useful for differentiating star of interest
• Project Goals
• The project has a larger purpose: to create a road map for how to identify solar siblings
• \”The idea is that the Sun was born in a cluster with a thousand or a hundred thousand stars. This cluster, which formed more than 4.5 billion years ago, has since broken up,\” | Ivan Ramirez, McDonald Observatory
• The member stars have broken off into their own orbits around the galactic center, taking them to different parts of the Milky Way today. A few, like HD 162826, are still nearby. Others are much farther
• Learning More About the Sun
• The newly developed methods for locating the Sun\’s \’siblings\’ will help other astronomers find other \”solar siblings,\” work that could lead to an understanding of how and where our Sun formed, and how our solar system became hospitable for life
• To reach that goal, the dynamics specialists will make models that run the orbits of all known solar siblings backward in time, to find where they intersect: their birthplace.
• Further Reading / In the News
• Astronomers find sun\’s \’long-lost brother,\’ pave way for family reunion | ScienceDaily

— NEWS BYTE —

Gaming for Science | Eyewire

• A team of researchers working at MIT has used data supplied by gamers on EyeWire to help explain how it is that the retina is able to process motion detection
• The team describes how they worked with gamers at EyeWire and then used the resulting mapped neural networks to propose a new theory to describe how it is the eye is able to understand what happens when something moves in front of it.
• What We Know
• Scientists have known for quite some time that light enters the eye and strikes the back of the eyeball where photoreceptors respond
• Those photoreceptors send information they receive to another type of neural cell known as bipolar cells
• They in turn convert received signals to another signal format which is then sent to what are known as starburst amacrine cells (SACs)
• Signals from the SAC are sent via the optic nerve to the brain
• Scientists believe they have a pretty good idea about how the whole process works for static images, they have not been able to get a handle on what happens when images sent to the eyeball have information about things that are moving
• New Research
• The problem with figuring out how nerve cells work in the eye, of either mice or humans, is the inability to watch what happens in action-everything is too tiny and intricate
  +To get around that problem, researchers have been building three dimensional models on computers, but even that gets untenable when considering the complexity and numbers of nerves involved
• In this new effort, the researchers sought to do just that-via assistance from thousands of gamers on the EyeWire game playing site
• That\’s where the EyeWire gamers came in, a game was created that involved gamers creating mouse neural networks-the better they were at it the more points they got
• EyeWire
• In EyeWire you are given a cube to analyze, they have a basic idea of the shape of the Neuron they are looking for
• That shape comes from sequential slices where the computer tries to fill in layer by layer how the neuron moves from slide to slide creating a basic shape
• From that shape the user can scroll up and down the cube going slice by slice to visually correct anything that is not filled in or is filled in too much by the program
• By using ‘crowdsourcing’ the speed in which it moves forward is increased based on the number of people playing
• In addition to helping the scientists directly, they are also using the results to teach the program so that it’s processing ability also increases as the projects goes forward
• The result was the creation of a model that the researchers believe is an accurate representation of the cells involved in processing vision, and the networks that are made up of them
• Results So Far
• They noted that in the model, there were different types of bipolar cells connecting to SACs-some connected to dendrites close to the cells center, and others connected to dendrites that were farther away
• Prior research had shown that some bipolar cells take longer to process information than others
• The researchers believe that the bipolar cells that connect closer to the center are of the type that take longer to process signals
• This, they contend, could set up a scenario where the center of the SAC receives information from both types of bipolar cells at the same time-and that, they suggest, could be how the SAC comes to understand that motion-in one direction-is occurring
• The researchers suggest their theory can be real-world tested in the lab, and expect other teams will likely do so
• If they are right, the mystery of how our eyes detect motion will finally be solved.
• Multimedia
• YouTube | How To Play EyeWire | EyeWire
• YouTube | Gamers Help Solve Neuroscience Mystery | EyeWire
• Further Reading / In the News
• About EyeWire, A Game to Map the Brain
• EyeWire gamers help researchers understand retina\’s motion detection wiring | MedicalXPress.com

Old ‘Asteroid’ Now Comet

• On October 23, 2013, astronomers with the Catalina Sky Survey picked up a very faint asteroid with an unusual orbit more like a that of a comet than an asteroid
• At the time 2013 UQ4 was little more than a stellar point with no evidence of a hazy coma or tail that would tag it as a comet
• The Comet C/2013 UQ4, Formally Known As The Asteroid 2013 UQ4
• On May 7 a remote telescope located in Siding Spring, Australia to take photos of 2013 UQ4 shortly before dawn in the constellation Cetus and they noticed that the asteroid had grown a little fuzz, making the move to comethood
• Assuming the now renamed C/2013 UQ4 continues to spout dust and water vapor, it should brighten to magnitude +11 by month’s end as it moves northward across Pisces and into a dark morning sky
• It currently displays a substantial coma or atmosphere, but no tail is visible yet
• Studies of the comet/asteroid’s light indicate that it is a very dark but rather large object some 4-9 miles (7-15 km) across.
• It’s estimated that it takes at least 500 years to make one spin around the sun
• C/2013 UQ4, belongs to a special category of asteroids called damocloids
• Damocloids
• Damocloids are thought to be comets that have lost \”all their fizz\”
• Their volatile ices spent from previous trips around the sun, they stop growing comas and tails and appear identical to asteroids
• They have orbits resembling the Halley-family comets with long periods, fairly steep inclinations and highly eccentric orbits (elongated shapes)
• Occasionally, one comes back to life. It’s happened in at least four other cases and appears to be happening with C/2013 UQ4 as well.
• Observing
• Perihelion occurs on June 5 with the comet reaching magnitude +8-9 by month’s end
• Peak brightness of 7th magnitude is expected during its close approach of Earth on July 10 at 29 million miles (46.7 million km).
• It’s still bright enough to see in a 12-inch telescope under dark skies
• This should be a great summer comet, plainly visible in binoculars from a dark sky
• It is moving at a very quick pace, at the rate of some 7 degrees per night!
• That’s 1/3 of a degree per hour or fast enough to see movement through a telescope in a matter of minutes when the comet is nearest Earth
• Multimedia
• YouTube | An Unusual Asteroid | NormalLifeIsNotReal
• Further Reading / In the News
• Asteroid 2013 UQ4 Suddenly Becomes a Dark Comet with a Bright Future | UniverseToday.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Mind-Controlled Exoskeleton

• The World Cup opening ceremony on June 12 a mind-controlled exoskeleton designed to enable a paralyzed person to walk is to make its debut.
• Opening Ceremony
• A BBC report provided the latest developments in the robotic suit. \”If all goes as planned,\” wrote Alejandra Martins, \”the robotic suit will spring to life in front of almost 70,000 spectators and a global audience of billions of people.\”
• The (DiVE) website talks about the day when \”the first ceremonial kick in the World Cup game may be made \”by a paralyzed teenager, who, flanked by the two contending soccer teams, will saunter onto the pitch clad in a robotic body suit.\”
• According to the BBC, since November, Nicolelis has been training eight patients at a lab in Sao Paulo, amidst \”media speculation that one of them will stand up from his or her wheelchair and deliver the first kick of this year\’s World Cup.\”
• The Exoskeleton
• The exoskeleton was developed by an international team of scientists, part of the Walk Again Project, and described by the BBC report as a \”culmination\” of over 10 years of work
• The exoskeleton is being controlled by brain activity and it is relaying feedback signals to the patient.
• The patient wears a cap which picks up brain signals and relays them to a computer in the backpack, decoding the signals and sending them to the legs.
• A battery in the backpack allows for around two hours\’ use. The robotic suit is powered by hydraulics.
• Many different companies helped to build the skeleton\’s components
• They used a lot of 3-D printing technology for purposes of both speed and achieving strong but light materials, along with using standard aluminum parts
• \”When the foot of the exoskeleton touches the ground there is pressure, so the sensor senses the pressure and before the foot touches the ground we are also doing pre-contact sensing. It\’s a new way of doing skin sensing for robots\” | Dr Gordon Cheng, at the Technical University of Munich
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Paralysed teen in exoskeleton to kick off World Cup | Truthloader
• Further Reading / In the News
• Demo of mind-controlled exoskeleton planned for World Cup | Phys.org

— Updates —

Comet Siding Spring

• This October, a comet will brush by Mars giving scientists a chance to study how it possibly interacts with a planetary atmosphere
• An impact of the comet on the surface of the Red Planet has long been ruled out; however, there is now an interesting possibility of possible interactions of the coma of A1 Siding Spring and the tenuous atmosphere of Mars
• Last Time on SciByte …
• SciByte 117 | Asteroid Belt Water | January 29, 2014
• SciByte 90 | Alzheimer’s & Mars Missions | April 16, 2013
  • The Discovery
• The comet C/2013 A1 was discovered in the beginning of 2013 by comet-hunter Robert McNaught at the Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales, Australia
• When the discovery was initially made, astronomers looked back over their observations to find “pre recovery” images of the comet dating back to Dec. 8, 2012.
• These observations placed the orbital trajectory of comet C/2013 A1 right through Mars orbit on Oct. 19, 2014
• Spacecraft Safety
• Orbiters are designed with the risk of space-dust collisions in mind
• Over a five-year span for a Mars orbiter, NASA figures on a few percent chance of significant damage to a spacecraft from the background level of impacts from such particles, called meteoroids
• If managers choose to position orbiters behind Mars during the peak risk, the further in advance any orbit-adjustment maneuvers can be made, the less fuel will be consumed
• Mars “Fly-By”
• With a nominal passage of 138,000 km [85,750 mi] from Mars, that is about one third the distance from Earth to the Moon, and 17 times closer than the nearest recorded passage of a comet to the Earth, Comet D/1770 L1 Lexell in 1780.
• Although the nucleus will safely pass Mars, the brush with its extended atmosphere might just be detectable by the fleet of spacecraft and rovers in service around Mars
• Spacecraft Involved
• NEOWISE (The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) and Hubble are already monitoring the comet for enhanced activity
• Currently on Mars, Curiosity rover is continuing science, the Opportunity rover is also still functioning, and Mars Odyssey and ESA’s Mars Express are still in orbit around the Red Planet and sending back data
• India’s Mars Orbiter Mission and NASA’s MAVEN orbiter arrive just before the comet.
• MAVEN was designed to study the upper atmosphere of Mars, and carries an ion-neutral mass spectrometer (NGIMS) which could yield information on the interaction of the coma with the Martian upper atmosphere and ionosphere.
• Other, Earth Based Observations
• Proposals for using Earth-based assets for further observations of the comet prior to the event in October are still pending
• Amateur observers will be able to follow the approach telescopically
• It’s also interesting to consider the potential for interactions of the coma with the surfaces of the moons of Mars as well, though the net amount of water vapor expected to be deposited will not be large
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) near Mars | SpaceObs
• Further Reading / In the News
• Interesting Prospects for Comet A1 Siding Spring Versus the Martian Atmosphere | UniverseToday.com

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Methane Life

• + Twitter | Kenny MacLeod ‏@siabost9deas
• \”Probing the Depths of the Methane World\” Implications for life on worlds like Titan?
• The Low Down
• In 2011, Jennifer Glass joined a scientific cruise to study a methane seep off of Oregon\’s coast
• In these cold, dark depths, microbes buried in the sediment feast on methane that seeps through the seafloor
• The Eco-System
• A product of their metabolism, bicarbonate, reacts with calcium in seawater to form tall rocky deposits
• The chemical energy these organisms extract from methane supports a vibrant underworld
• The group found evidence of a new microbial enzyme that seems to use the trace metal tungsten instead of molybdenum, the metal more commonly found in cold seep environments
• Previously, tungsten had only been found in microbes living at high temperatures, such as the boiling waters of hydrothermal vents
• \”It\’s a very unique chemical environment, with a lot of sulfur,\” \”We think that tungsten might just be more bioavailable in these highly sulfidic conditions.\” | Jennifer Glass
• These systems don\’t depend on oxygen, so the microbe-methane relationship likely developed early in Earth\’s history before the rise of oxygen
• What This Means for Exobiology
• They could also serve as analogues for worlds beyond our Earth.
• Methane has been detected in the atmosphere of other planets. Methane lakes have also been spotted on Titan, Saturn\’s largest moon, making it an intriguing candidate for life elsewhere.
• Further Reading / In the News
• Probing the Depths of the Methane World | AstroBio.net

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• Third Drilling Event
• The full-depth hole for sample collection is close to a shallower test hole drilled last week in the same rock, which gave researchers a preview of the interior material as tailings around the hole
• \”The drill tailings from this rock are darker-toned and less red than we saw at the two previous drill sites,\” said Jim Bell
  , deputy principal investigator for Curiosity\’s Mast Camera (Mastcam)
• \”This suggests that the detailed chemical and mineral analysis that will be coming from Curiosity\’s other instruments could reveal different materials than we\’ve seen before.
• Sample material from Windjana will be sieved, then delivered to onboard laboratories for determining the mineral and chemical composition
• One motive for the team\’s selection of Windjana for drilling is to analyze the cementing material that holds together sand-size grains in this sandstone.
• Multimedia
• YouTube Curiosity Rover Report JPLnews
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• May 17, 1954 : 60 years ago : CERN Groundbreaking : The official ground-breaking took place at the Meyrin site of the new CERN Laboratory in Geneva. A recommendation had been adopted 12 Dec 1949 at the European Cultural Conference for a European Institute of Nuclear Physics. By 1952, the third session of its provisional Council decided to locate in Switzerland. In Jun 1953, the host community, the canton of Geneva, gave strong approval in a referendum passing with 16539 votes to 7332. On 29 Sep 1954, twelve founding Member States ratified CERN (Centre Européenne de Recherche Nucléaire): Federal Republic of Germany, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Sweden, Switzerland and Yugoslavia.
• The acronym CERN originally stood in French for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research), which was a provisional council for setting up the laboratory, established by 12 European governments in 1952
• The acronym was retained for the new laboratory after the provisional council was dissolved, even though the name changed
• Soon after the laboratory\’s establishment, its work went beyond the study of the atomic nucleus into higher-energy physics
• The NeXT Computer used by British scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN became the first Web server, and a Cisco Systems router at CERN was probably one of the first IP routers deployed in Europe

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Wed, May 14 | Full Moon (exact at 3:16 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.) Look for Saturn to its upper right
• Fri, May 16 | Twilight | Look for Mercury low in the west-northwest, far to the lower right of Jupiter
• Planets
• Mercury | Twilight | Is starting to become visible in evening twilight low in the W-NW to the far lower right of Jupiter about 40-60 min after sunset
• Venus | \”Morning Star\” | Is low in the E during dawn
• Mars | Just after dark | Highest in the S with Spica to the far lower left
• Jupiter | Twilight | High in the W at twilight sinking towards the horizon and setting around midnight

• Saturn | Opposition was on May 10 | At rises at sunset in the SE, is highest in the S around 12-1 am and setting at morning in the W

• Further Reading and Resources

• Sky&Telescope
• SpaceWeather.com
• StarDate.org
• For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au
• Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org
• Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz
• AstronomyNow
• HeavensAbove

The post Solar Sibling & Comets | SciByte 130 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Hello everyone and welcome back to SciByte!

We take a look at Egypt\’s pyramids construction, infants with picture books, a USB charger in your shoes, a superspeedy star cluster, story updates, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes:

The Pyramids Stones Over Wet Sand

• Scientists have discovered that the ancient Egyptians moistened the sand over which the sledge moved to make it easier to transport heavy pyramid stones by sledge
• Building the Pyramids
• For the construction of the pyramids, the ancient Egyptians had to transport heavy blocks of stone and large statues across the desert
• The Egyptians therefore placed the heavy objects on a sledge that workers pulled over the sand
• Research has revealed that the Egyptians probably made the desert sand in front of the sledge wet
• Experiments have demonstrated that the correct amount of dampness in the sand halves the pulling force required
• Experiment
• Physicists placed a laboratory version of the Egyptian sledge in a tray of sand and determined both the required pulling force and the stiffness of the sand as a function of the quantity of water in the sand.
• To determine the stiffness they used a rheometer, which shows how much force is needed to deform a certain volume of sand
• Experiments revealed that the required pulling force decreased proportional to the stiffness of the sand
• Capillary bridges arise when water is added to the sand. These are small water droplets that bind the sand grains together
• In the presence of the correct quantity of water, wet desert sand is about twice as stiff as dry sand
• A sledge glides far more easily over firm desert sand simply because the sand does not pile up in front of the sledge as it does in the case of dry sand.
• A wall painting in the tomb of Djehutihotep clearly shows a person standing on the front of the pulled sledge and pouring water over the sand just in front of it.
• By using the right quantity of water they could halve the number of workers needed
• Modern Day Applications
• The results are also interesting for modern-day applications because we still do not fully understand the behaviour of granular material like sand
• The research results could therefore be useful for examining how to optimise the transport and processing of granular material, which at present accounts for about ten percent of the worldwide energy consumption
• Further Reading / In the News
• Ancient Egyptians transported pyramid stones over wet sand | Phys.org

— NEWS BYTE —

Infants and Pictures

• Researchers have found that babies can learn about the connection between pictures and real objects, such as a toy from a photograph of it, by the time they are nine-months-old
• \”The study should interest any parent or caregiver who has ever read a picture book with an infant,\” | Dr Jeanne Shinskey, from the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway
• Experiment
• To test an infants\’ simple object recognition researchers familiarized 30 eight and nine-month-olds with a life-sized photo of a toy for about a minute
• The babies were then placed before the toy in the picture and a different toy and researchers watched to see which one the babies reached for first.
• In one condition, the researchers tested infants\’ simple object recognition for the target toy by keeping both objects visible, drawing infants\’ attention to the toys and then placing the toys inside clear containers
• In another condition, they tested infants\’ ability to create a continued mental idea of the target toy by hiding both toys from view then drawing infants\’ attention to the toys and then placing the toys inside opaque containers
• Results
• When the toys were visible in clear containers, babies reached for the one that had not been in the picture, suggesting that they recognized the pictured toy and found it less interesting than the new toy because its novelty had worn off
• When the toys were hidden in opaque containers, babies showed the opposite preference and reached more often for the one that had been in the photo, suggesting that they had formed a continued mental idea of it.
• What This Means
• This demonstrates that experience with a picture of something can strengthen babies\’ ideas of an object so they can maintain it after the object disappears
• These findings suggest that, well before their first birthdays and their first words, babies are capable of learning about the real world indirectly realistic images like photographs or from picture books
• Further Reading / In the News
• Psychologists discover babies recognize real-life objects from pictures as early as nine months | ScienceDaily

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Power in Steps

• The impact of a hiker’s heel releases enough energy to illuminate a light bulb, an engineer and avid backpacker, Matt Stanton, created a shoe insole that stores it as electricity
• Instead of using piezoelectric and other inefficient, bulky methods of generating electricity, the pair shrunk down components similar to those found in hand-cranked flashlights.
• The result is a near standard–size removable insole that weighs less than five ounces, including a battery pack, and charges electronics via USB.
• The current version, to be released later this year, requires a lengthy 15-mile walk to charge a smartphone.
• The company is working toward a design that can charge an iPhone after less than five miles of hiking and withstand about 100 million footsteps of wear and tear.
• How It Works
• A drivetrain converts the energy of heel strikes into rotational energy, spinning magnetic rotors
• The motion of the rotors induces an electrical current within coils of wire
• Electricity travels along a wire and into a lithium-ion polymer battery pack on a wearer’s shoelaces
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Solepower – Power by Walking (HD) | PIXEL PLANET
• Further Reading / In the News
• SolePower Tech
• Invention Awards 2014: Charge Gadgets With Your Footsteps | Popular Science | PopSci.com

Runaway Star Cluster

• The Virgo Cluster galaxy, M87, has ejected an entire star cluster, throwing it toward us at more than two million miles per hour.
• Astronomers have found \”runaway stars\” before, but for the first time they have now found an entire star cluster
• Hypervelocity
• About one in a billion stars travel at a speed roughly three times greater than our Sun
  , these stars can easily escape the galaxy entirely, traveling rapidly throughout intergalactic space.
• At 220 km/s [137 mi/s] with respect to the galactic center this is the first time an entire star cluster has broken free
• Hypervelocity stars have puzzled astronomers for years, but by observing their speed and direction, astronomers can trace these stars backward, finding that some began moving quickly in the Galactic Center
• What Could Have Caused An Entire Star Cluster to Reach Hypervelocity
• An interaction with the supermassive black hole can kick a star away at an alarming speed
• Another option is that a supernova explosion propelled a nearby star to a huge speed
• Some astronomers think M87 might have two supermassive black holes at its center and that the star cluster wandered too close to the pair, which picked off many of the cluster’s outer stars while the inner core remained intact
• Then the black holes then acted like a slingshot, flinging the cluster away at a tremendous speed
• Further Reading / In the News
• \’Runaway\’ Star Cluster Breaks Free from Distant Galaxy | UniverseToday.com

— Updates —

Sealing GunShot Wounds

• Last Time on SciByte …
• SciByte 119 | Medical Tech & Martian Crater | February 11, 2014
• The Low Down
• When a soldier is shot on the battlefield a medic must pack gauze directly into the wound cavity
• A startup called RevMedx, a small group of veterans, scientists, and engineers are working on a better way to stop bleeding
• It has now won a Popular Science Invention Awards 2014
• XStat
• XStat is a modified syringe that injects specially coated sponges into wound faster and more efficiently than gauze.
• Early efforts were inspired by Fix-a-Flat foam for repairing tires
• After seeing early prototypes, the U.S. Army gave the team $5 million to develop a finished product
• The final material would need to be sterile, biocompatible, and fast-expanding
• The team settled on a sponge made from wood pulp and coated with chitosan, a blood-clotting, antimicrobial substance that comes from shrimp shells
• In just 15 seconds, they expand to fill the entire wound cavity, creating enough pressure to stop heavy bleeding
• A tricky part was getting the sponges into a wound, they needed a lightweight, compact way to get the sponges deep into an injury
• To ensure that no sponges would be left inside the body accidentally, they added X-shaped markers that make each sponge visible on an x-ray image.
• Applicator
• A 30 mm-diameter, [1.2 in] polycarbonate syringe that stores with the handle inside to save space
• To use the applicator, a medic pulls out the handle, inserts the cylinder into the wound, and then pushes the plunger back down to inject the sponges as close to the artery as possible.
• Three single-use XStat applicators would replace five bulky rolls of gauze in a medic’s kit
• RevMedx also designed a smaller version of the applicator, with a diameter of 12 mm, for narrower injuries
• Each XStat will likely cost about $100, Steinbaugh says, but the price may go down as RevMedx boosts manufacturing
• FDA Approval
• The pocket-sized XStat has received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a first-of-its-kind medical dressing
• This means that the U.S. Army, which funded development of the sponge-filled syringe, can now purchase XStat to be carried by military medics
• The FDA says the sponges are safe to leave in the body for up to four hours, allowing enough time for a patient to get to an operating room
• What\’s Next?
• RevMedx, along with Oregon Health and Science University, is now developing a version of the device to stop postpartum bleeding
• Multimedia
• YouTube | USA: Revolutionary new dressing heals bullet wounds in seconds | RuptlyTV
• Further Reading / In the News
• RevMedx | XSTAT
• Simple Invention For Sealing Gunshot Wounds Gets FDA Approval | Popular Science
• Invention Awards 2014: Seal Combat Wounds In 15 Seconds | Popular Science

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• Prepping for Drilling
• The rover used several tools to examine the candidate site, such as a wire-bristle brush (Dust Removal Tool) to clear away dust from a patch on the rock
• In the brushed spot, scientists could see that the rock is fine-grained, its true color is much grayer than the surface dust and that some portions of the rock are harder than others, creating the interesting bumpy textures
• Before Curiosity can drill deeply enough for collection of rock-powder sample, scientists perform a \”mini-drill\” operation on the target, as a further check for readiness
• The \”mini-drill\” operation produced a hole about 0.8in (2 cm) deep, in a \”mini-drill\” operation, on Tuesday, April 29, on the rock target under consideration for the mission\’s third sample-collection drilling
• Curiosity\’s hammering drill collects powdered sample material from the interior of a rock, and then the rover prepares and delivers portions of the sample to laboratory instruments onboard
• Multimedia
• YouTube Curiosity Rover Report JPLnews
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News
• Target on Mars Looks Good for NASA Rover Drilling – Mars Science Laboratory | mars.jpl.nasa.gov

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• May 11, 868 : 1146 years ago : First Printed Book : In 868, The first known dated printed (not oldest) book was the Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist scripture. It was made as a 16-ft scroll with six sheets of text printed from wood blocks and one sheet with a woodcut showing the Buddha with disciples and a pair of cats.
  The sheets measured 12\” by 30\” and were pasted together. The date is known from a colophon at the end stating it was \”printed on 11 May 868, by Wang Chieh, for free general distribution\” and that it was dedicated to his parents. The scroll was one of about 1,130 bundles of manuscripts found a thousand years later, walled up in one of the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas in Turkestan. It is now one of the great treasures in the British Library

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Venus | \”Morning Star\” | Look to the E before and during dawn
• Mars | High in the SE after dark, with Spica below it, both will be at their highest point around local 11pm DST moving towards the NE as dawn approaches. On Fri, May 9, and Sat, May 10, Mars and Spica will be to the left of the Moon.
• Jupiter | Twilight | High in the SW sinking towards the W horizon as the night progresses, setting around 1am

• Saturn | Early Evening | Rises in the SE, setting in the NW. Saturn will be at opposition on Sat, May 10

• Further Reading and Resources

• Sky&Telescope
• SpaceWeather.com
• StarDate.org
• For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au
• Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org
• Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz
• AstronomyNow
• HeavensAbove

The post Pyramid Construction & Picturebooks | SciByte 129 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Hello everyone and welcome back to SciByte!

We take a look at regrowing auditory nerves, growing cartilage, a cold stellar neighbor, viewer feedback on Opportunity rover, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | HD Video | Video | Torrent | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

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Show Notes:

Gene Therapy with Cochlear Implants

• Researchers have for the first time used electrical pulses delivered from a cochlear implant to deliver gene therapy, thereby successfully regrowing auditory nerves
• \”People with cochlear implants do well with understanding speech, but their perception of pitch can be poor, so they often miss out on the joy of music,\” | UNSW Professor Gary Housley
• **Cochlear Implants **
• The work centres on regenerating surviving nerves after age-related or environmental hearing loss, using existing cochlear technology
• The cochlear implants are \”surprisingly efficient\” at localised gene therapy in the animal model, when a few electric pulses are administered during the implant procedure.
• It has long been established that the auditory nerve endings regenerate if neurotrophins – a naturally occurring family of proteins crucial for the development, function and survival of neurons – are delivered to the auditory portion of the inner ear, the cochlea.
• Until now, research has stalled because safe, localised delivery of the neurotrophins can\’t be achieved using drug delivery, nor by viral-based gene therapy
• New Research
• Researchers have developed a way of using electrical pulses delivered from the cochlear implant to deliver the DNA to the cells close to the array of implanted electrodes.
• These cells then produce neurotrophins the neurotrophin production dropped away after a couple of months which
• Ultimately the changes in the hearing nerve may be maintained by the ongoing neural activity generated by the cochlear implant.
• \”We think it\’s possible that in the future this gene delivery would only add a few minutes to the implant procedure\” | Jeremy Pinyon, PhD is based on this work
• \”The surgeon who installs the device would inject the DNA solution into the cochlea and then fire electrical impulses to trigger the DNA transfer once the implant is inserted.\” | Jeremy Pinyon, PhD is based on this work
• The Future
• Integration of this technology into other \’bionic\’ devices such as electrode arrays used in deep brain stimulation, the treatment of Parkinson\’s disease and depression, for example) could also afford opportunities for safe, directed gene therapy of complex neurological disorders
• \”Gene therapy has been suggested as a treatment concept even for devastating neurological conditions and our technology provides a novel platform for safe and efficient gene transfer into tissues as delicate as the brain.\” | Professor Matthias Klugmann
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Bionic ear delivers DNA to regrow auditory nerve cells | UNSWTV
• Further Reading / In the News
• Hearing quality restored with bionic ear technology used for gene therapy | MedicalXPress.com

— NEWS BYTE —

Creating Cartilage

• The first example of living human cartilage grown on a laboratory chip has been created by scientists
• The researchers ultimately aim to use their innovative 3-D printing approach to create replacement cartilage
• Who it Could Help
• Artificial cartilage built using a patient\’s own stem cells could offer enormous therapeutic potential for patients with osteoarthritis or joint injuries
• Osteoarthritis is marked by a gradual disintegration of cartilage, a flexible tissue that provides padding where bones come together in a joint and is one of the leading causes of physical disability in the United States
• Some treatments can help relieve arthritis symptoms, there is no cure. Many patients with severe arthritis ultimately require a joint replacement
• Replacement cartilage could also be a game-changer for people with debilitating joint injuries, such as soldiers with battlefield injuries
• The Process
• Creating artificial cartilage requires three main elements: stem cells, biological factors to make the cells grow into cartilage, and a scaffold to give the tissue its shape
• This 3-D printing approach achieves all three by extruding thin layers of stem cells embedded in a solution that retains its shape and provides growth factors
• Other researchers have experimented with 3-D printing approaches for cartilage,
• This method represents a significant step forward because it uses visible light, while others have required UV light, which can be harmful to living cells.
• In another significant step this process uses the 3-D printing method to produce the first \”tissue-on-a-chip\” replica of the bone-cartilage interface
• Housing 96 blocks of living human tissue 4 millimeters across by 8 millimeters deep, the chip could serve as a test-bed for researchers to learn about how osteoarthritis develops and develop new drugs
• The Future
• As a next step, the team is working to combine their 3-D printing method with a nanofiber spinning technique they developed previously
• They hope combining the two methods will provide a more robust scaffold and allow them to create artificial cartilage that even more closely resembles natural cartilage
• The ultimate vision is to give doctors a tool they can thread through a catheter to print new cartilage right where it\’s needed in the patient\’s body
• Further Reading / In the News
• Cartilage, made to order: Living human cartilage grown on lab chip — ScienceDaily | ScienceDaily.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

A Cold New Stellar Neighbor

• A \”brown dwarf\” star that appears to be the coldest of its kind as frosty as Earth\’s North Pole-has been discovered just 7.2 light-years away, making it the fourth closest system to our Sun
• Brown Dwarf vs Massive Planet
• Brown dwarfs start their lives like stars, as collapsing balls of gas, but they lack the mass to burn nuclear fuel and radiate starlight
• At an estimated 3 to 10 times the mass of Jupiter, it would be one of the least massive brown dwarfs known.
• With such a low mass, it could be a gas giant similar to Jupiter that was ejected from its star system. But scientists estimate it is probably a brown dwarf rather than a planet since brown dwarfs are known to be fairly common
• Observing It
• The newfound coldest brown dwarf, has a temperature between minus 54 and 9 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 48 to minus 13 degrees Celsius).
• Cool objects like brown dwarfs can be invisible when viewed by visible-light telescopes, but their thermal glow-even if feeble-stands out in infrared light.
• NASA\’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Spitzer Space Telescopes was able to spot the rare object because it surveyed the entire sky twice in infrared light
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Coldest Brown Dwarf Star Discovered by NASA | GeoBeats News
• Further Reading / In the News
• NASA\’s Spitzer, WISE Find Sun\’s Close, Cold Neighbor | jpl.nasa.gov
• Star is discovered to be a close neighbor of the Sun and the coldest of its kind | ScienceDaily
• Star is discovered to be a close neighbor of the Sun and the coldest of its kind | Phys.org

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Opportunity Rover Solar Panel Pictures

• Twitter Post of Article
• Michael Thalleen ‏@ThalleenM
• Last Time on SciByte …
• SciByte 125 | Cancer Drug & New Planet | April 8, 2014
• Cleaning Event
• Opportunity rover on Mars has gotten a 70% boost in power over the past few weeks from a partial cleaning of dust from its solar panels
• Combined, with the seasonal effect and multiple dust-cleaning events have increased the amount of energy available each day from the rover\’s solar array by more than 70 percent compared with two months ago
• A good portion of that comes from the fact that its springtime in Mars’ southern hemisphere where Oppy now sits, so the Sun is now shining longer and higher in the sky.
• Several recent gusts of wind – or perhaps small dust devils – have also cleaned much of the dust off the rover’s solar panels.
• The rover team reported that between Sols 3605 and 3606 (March 15 and March 16, 2014), there was a dust cleaning event which resulted in about a 10% improvement in power production to 574 watt-hours, another cleaning event this week has put the power output to 615 watt-hours
• Multimedia
• Self-Portrait by Opportunity Mars Rover in January 2014 | photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov
• Self-Portrait by Freshly Cleaned Opportunity Mars Rover in March 2014 | photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov
• Further Reading / In the News
• Opportunity: The Amazing Self-Cleaning Mars Rover (Photos) | Space.com | Space.com

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• First Ever Asteroid Images from Mars
• The Curiosity rover has captured the first images of asteroids even taken by a Human probe from the surface of the Red Planet during night sky imaging.
• “This imaging was part of an experiment checking the opacity of the atmosphere at night in Curiosity’s location on Mars, where water-ice clouds and hazes develop during this season,” | Camera team member Mark Lemmon
• “The two Martian moons were the main targets that night, but we chose a time when one of the moons was near Ceres and Vesta in the sky.” | Camera team member Mark Lemmon
• The two asteroids, Ceres and Vesta, were snapped by Curiosity’s high resolution Mastcam camera on Sunday, April 20, 2014
• Ceres and Vesta appear as streaks since the Mastcam image was taken as a 12 second time exposure.
• Ceres, the largest asteroid, is about 590 miles (950 kilometers) in diameter. Vesta is the third-largest object in the main belt and measures about 350 miles (563 kilometers) wide.
• The tinier of Mars’ moons, Deimos, was also caught in that same image.
• Mars largest moon Phobos as well as Jupiter and Saturn were also visible that same Martian evening, although in a different direction
• The two asteroids and three stars would be visible to someone of normal eyesight standing on Mars.
• Analysing a Possible Drilling Location
• The team operating NASA\’s Curiosity Mars rover is telling the rover to use several tools this weekend to inspect a sandstone slab being evaluated as a possible drilling target
• If this target meets criteria set by engineers and scientists, it could become the mission\’s third drilled rock, and the first that is not mudstone
• The planned inspection, designed to aid a decision on whether to drill includes observations with the camera and X-ray spectrometer at the end of the rover\’s arm, use of a brush to remove dust from a patch on the rock, and readings of composition at various points on the rock with an instrument that fires laser shots from the rover\’s mast.
• The first two Martian rocks drilled and analyzed this way were mudstone slabs neighboring each other in Yellowknife Bay, about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) northeast of the rover\’s current location
• Those two rocks yielded evidence of an ancient lakebed environment with key chemical elements and a chemical energy source that provided conditions billions of years ago favorable for microbial life.
• Scientists hope to learn more about the wet process that turned sand deposits into sandstone here and how the composition of the fluids that bound the grains together
• Understanding why some sandstones in the area are harder than others also could help explain major shapes of the landscape where Curiosity is working inside Gale Crater.
• Erosion-resistant sandstone forms a capping layer of mesas and buttes. It could even hold hints about why Gale Crater has a large layered mountain, Mount Sharp, at its center.
• Multimedia
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News
• Curiosity Captures First Ever Asteroid Images from Mars Surface | UniverseToday.com
• Drill Here? NASA\’s Curiosity Mars Rover Inspects Site – Mars Science Laboratory | mars.jpl.nasa.gov

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• May 2, 1775 : 239 years ago : Gulf Stream : Benjamin Franklin completed the first scientific study of the Gulf Stream. His observations began in 1769 when as deputy postmaster of the British Colonies he found ships took two weeks longer to bring mail from England than was required in the opposite direction. Thus, Franklin became the first to chart the Gulf Stream
• YouTube | The Gulf Stream & Climate Change | Kurzgesagt

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Venus | \”Morning Star\” | Look to the E as daylight approaches
• Mars | High in the SE after dark, with Spica below it, both will be at their highest point around local 11pm DST moving towards the NE as dawn approaches
• Jupiter | Twilight | High in the SW sinking towards the W horizon as the night progresses, setting around 1am

• Saturn | End of Twilight | Highest in the S around 1am. Saturn will be at opposition next week.

• Further Reading and Resources

• Sky&Telescope
• SpaceWeather.com
• StarDate.org
• For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au
• Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org
• Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz
• AstronomyNow
• HeavensAbove

The post Auditory Nerves & Cartilage | SciByte 128 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We take a look at marijuana\’s effect on the brain, an \”Earth-like\” exoplanet, the brains distraction controls, a possible new moon for Saturn, spacecraft updates, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | HD Video | Video | Torrent | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | Video Feed | Torrent Feed | iTunes

Show Notes:

Marijuana’s and Changes to the Brain

• Young adults who used marijuana only recreationally showed significant abnormalities in two key brain regions that are important in emotion and motivation
• The Study
• This is the first study to show casual use of marijuana is related to major brain changes
• Through different methods of neuroimaging, scientists examined the brains of young adults ages 18 to 25, from Boston-area colleges; 20 who smoked marijuana and 20 who didn\’t. Each group had nine males and 11 females
• The users underwent a psychiatric interview to confirm they were not dependent on marijuana
• The changes in brain structures indicate the marijuana users\’ brains are adapting to low-level exposure to marijuana
• Results
• The degree of brain abnormalities in these regions is directly related to the number of joints a person smoked per week, the more joints a person smoked, the more abnormal the shape, volume and density of the brain regions
• Some of these people only used marijuana to get high once or twice a week thinking a little recreational use shouldn\’t cause a problem; however, data directly says this is not the case
• Scientists examined the nucleus accumbens and the amygdala-key regions for emotion and motivation, and associated with addiction-in the brains of casual marijuana users and non-users
• Researchers analyzed three measures: volume, shape and density of grey matter to obtain a comprehensive view of how each region was affected.
• Both these regions in recreational pot users were abnormally altered for at least two of these structural measures and the degree of those alterations was directly related to how much marijuana the subjects used
• What is Means
• The study results fit with animal studies that show when rats are given tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) their brains rewire and form many new connections. THC is the mind-altering ingredient found in marijuana
• Think when people are in the process of becoming addicted, their brains from these new connections
• In animals, these new connections indicate the brain is adapting to the unnatural level of reward and stimulation from marijuana. These connections make other natural rewards less satisfying
• The brain changes suggest that structural changes to the brain are an important early result of casual drug use
• Researchers did not know the THC content of the marijuana, which can range from 5 to 9 percent or even higher, the THC content is much higher today than the marijuana during the 1960s and 1970s, which was often about 1 to 3 percent
• Further Reading / In the News
  • Casual marijuana use linked to brain abnormalities in students | MedicalXPress

— NEWS BYTE —

Another Earth-sized Exo-Planet

• The first Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting within the habitable zone of another star has been confirmed by observations with both the W. M. Keck Observatory and the Gemini Observatory
• The initial discovery, made by NASA\’s Kepler Space Telescope, is one of a handful of smaller planets found by Kepler and verified using large ground-based telescopes
• The System
• The host star, Kepler-186, is an M1-type dwarf star relatively close to our solar system, at about 500 light years and is in the constellation of Cygnus
• The star is very dim, being over half a million times fainter than the faintest stars we can see with the naked eye and is cooler than the Sun
• Five small planets have been found orbiting this star, four of which are in very short-period orbits and are very hot
• This Earth-sized planet, one of five orbiting this star, which is cooler than the Sun, resides in a temperate region where water could exist in liquid form
• Observations
• Neither Kepler (nor any telescope) is currently able to directly spot an exoplanet of this size and proximity to its host star all they can do is eliminate essentially all other possibilities so that the validity of these planets is really the only viable option
• With such a small host star, the team employed a technique that eliminated the possibility that either a background star or a stellar companion could be mimicking what Kepler detected
• Differential Speckle Survey Instrument (DSSI)
• The team obtained extremely high spatial resolution observations from the eight-meter Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii using a technique called speckle imaging, as well as adaptive optics (AO) observations from the ten-meter Keck II telescope
• The Gemini \”speckle\” data directly imaged the system to within about 400 million miles (about 4 AU, approximately equal to the orbit of Jupiter in our solar system) of the host star and confirmed that there were no other stellar size objects orbiting within this radius from the star
• It works on a principle that utilizes multiple short exposures of an object to capture and remove the noise introduced by atmospheric turbulence producing images with extreme detail
• The System
• Kenny MacLeod ‏@siabost9deas
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Kepler-186f : First Earth-size Planet Discovered in the Habitable Zone of Another Star [HD] | The Mars Underground
• Further Reading / In the News
• First potentially habitable Earth-sized planet confirmed: It may have liquid water | Phys.org

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

The Brains Distraction Control

• A new study to reveals that our brains rely on an active suppression mechanism to avoid being distracted by salient irrelevant information when we want to focus on a particular item or task
• This discovery opens up the possibility that environmental and/or genetic factors may hinder or suppress a specific brain activity that the researchers have identified as helping us prevent distraction.
• These results show clearly that this is only one part of the equation and that active suppression of the irrelevant objects is another important part
• Psychologists say their discovery could help scientists and health care professionals better treat individuals with distraction-related attentional deficits
• Distraction is a leading cause of injury and death in driving and other high-stakes environments
• Disorders associated with attention deficits, such as ADHD and schizophrenia, may turn out to be due to difficulties in suppressing irrelevant objects rather than difficulty selecting relevant ones
• Researchers are now turning their attention to understanding how we deal with distraction and why we can\’t suppress potentially distracting objects, whether some of us are better at doing so and why that is the case.
• Further Reading / In the News
• ADHD: Scientists discover brain\’s anti-distraction system | ScienceDaily

A New Moon for Saturn?

• A bright clump spotted orbiting Saturn at the outermost edge of its A ring may be a brand new moon in the process of being born
• The effects of this now 1,200-kilometer-long, 10-kilometer-wide arc of icy material were first seen in May 2012 traveling along the edge of the A ring
• The arc is thought to be the result of gravitational perturbations caused by an as-yet unseen embedded object about a kilometer wide – possibly a miniature moon in the process of formation
• The half-mile-wide object has been unofficially named “Peggy,” eventually it may coalesce into a slightly larger moon and move outward, establishing its own orbital path around Saturn
• This is how many of Saturn’s other moons are thought to have formed much further back in the planet’s history
• While it is possible that the bright perturbation is the result of an object’s breakup rather than formation, researchers are still looking forward to finding out more about its evolution.
• Further Reading / In the News
• Is Saturn Making a New Moon? | UniverseToday.com
• NASA Cassini Images May Reveal Birth of New Saturn Moon | NASA.gov
• NASA Cassini Missiom Page

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

SpaceX Dragon Delivery Mission

• Last Time on SciByte …
• SciByte 126 | Paraplegic Therapy & Exomoon – International Space Station (ISS) Glitch | April 15, 2014
• Latest Delivery
• The SpaceX 3 Dragon commercial cargo freighter successfully arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) on Easter Sunday morning, April 20
• The mission is the company’s third cargo delivery flight to the station and is loaded with nearly 2.5 tons of science experiments, it will remain attached to the station until May 18
• There are over 150 science experiments loaded aboard the Dragon capsule for research to be conducted by the crews of ISS Expeditions 39 and 40
• CRS-3 mission will deliver some 5000 pounds of science experiments, a high definition Earth observing imaging camera suite (HDEV), a pair of hi tech legs for Robonaut 2, a laser optical communications experiment (OPALS) and essential gear, the VEGGIE lettuce growing experiment, spare parts, crew provisions, food, clothing and supplies to the six person crews
• Included in this delivery is equipment needed for the repair of the Multiplexer-Demultiplexer (MDM) that controls a robotics mobile transporter, but also radiators and a joint to move the station’s solar arrays, among other things.
• Multimedia
• YouTube | U.S. SpaceX Dragon Ship Arrives at the International Space Station with Important cargo | NASA
• Further Reading / In the News
• Easter Sunday Space Station Rendezvous and Berthing for SpaceX Dragon Freighter Succeessful | UnivrseToday.com

New Horizons and Questions About Pluto

• Compositional Model Theories
• Two space researchers have published a paper where they describe three possible interior models of the former planet Pluto
• The possibilities include: an undifferentiated rock/ice mixture, a differentiated rock/ice mixture, and an ocean covered with ice, the third possibility suggests the likelihood, they claim, of tectonic action on the dwarf planet
• Scientists believe that Pluto came to exist as it does today, in part due to a collision billions of years ago that led also to the formation of its moon Charon
• When celestial bodies collide, not only do they knock each other around, they produce heat—heat, the researchers suggest that could still be evident today
• A theory that suggests that shortly after impact, Pluto and Charon were much closer together where the gravity attraction between them would have caused both to be egg shaped.
• As time passed, melted ice from the impact would have created an icy crust on top of an ocean on Pluto
• As Charon moved farther away, the attractive pull would have diminished, causing ice plates to form and crack against one another, a form of tectonics.
• If that were the case, the two add, then in all likelihood, when New Horizons begins sending back images, they should see evidence of such tectonic action—plate edges thrust into the air
• Pluto circles the sun in an elliptical orbit, thus sometimes it\’s much closer to the sun than other times, when near, it has a defined atmosphere, when far away however, its atmosphere actually freezes to its surface
• Something that could hide ridges in the ice and thus evidence of both tectonic activity and an ocean beneath the crust of ice
• New Horizons will arrive during a time when its atmosphere is frozen to the surface, it might be difficult to determine which of the three proposed models actually describes the relationship between its exterior and interior
• Further Reading / In the News
• Research pair offer three possible models of Pluto ahead of New Horizons visit | Phys.org
• New Horizons | NASA

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• New Science Location
• Scientists using NASA\’s Curiosity Mars rover are eyeing a rock layer surrounding the base of a small butte, called \”Mount Remarkable,\” as a target for investigating with tools on the rover\’s robotic arm
• The butte stands about 16 feet (5 meters) high. Curiosity\’s science team refers to the rock layer surrounding the base of Mount Remarkable as the \”middle unit\” because its location is intermediate between rocks that form buttes in the area and lower-lying rocks that show a pattern of striations
• Depending on what the mission scientists learn from a close-up look at the rock and identification of chemical elements in it, a site on this middle unit may become the third rock that Curiosity samples with its drill
• Multimedia
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News
• NASA Mars Orbiter Spies Rover Near Martian Butte | mars.jpl.nasa.gov

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• April 25, 1990 : 24 years ago : Hubble Space Telescope : In 1990, the $2.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope was deployed in space from the Space Shuttle Discovery into an orbit 381 miles above Earth. It was the first major orbiting observatory, named in honour of American astronomer, Edwin Powell Hubble. It was seven years behind schedule and nearly $2 billion over budget. In orbit, the 94.5-in primary mirror was found to be flawed, giving blurred images and reduced ability to see distant stars. However, correcting optics were successfully installed in 25 Dec 1993. The telescope 43-ft x 14-ft telescope now provides images with a clarity otherwise impossible due to the effect of the earth\’s atmosphere. Instrument packages capture across the electromagnetic spectrum.

Looking up this week

• Solar Eclipse
• On April 29th, an annular solar eclipse occurs over a small D-shaped 500 kilometre wide region of Antarctica
• 2014 has the minimum number of eclipses possible in one year, with four: two partial solars and two total lunars
• This month’s solar eclipse is also a rarity in that it’s a non-central eclipse with one limit, where the center of the Moon’s shadow – known as the antumbra during an annular eclipse – will juuuust miss the Earth and instead pass scant kilometres above the Antarctic continent
• Out of 3,956 annular eclipses occurring from 2000 BCE to 3000 AD, only 68 (1.7%) are of the non-central variety
• An annular eclipse occurs when the Moon is too distant to cover the disk of the Sun, resulting in a bright “annulus” or “ring-of-fire” eclipse
• Several southern Indian Ocean islands and all of Australia will still witness a fine partial solar eclipse from this event, a scattering of islands in the southern Indian Ocean will see a 55% eclipsed Sun.
• In Australia, Perth will see a 55% eclipsed Sun and Sydney will be able to see a 50% partial eclipse low to the horizon in west at sunset
• Don\’t Forget to Use Safe Viewing Practices
• The safest way | Pinhole camera/projector and telescope — pinhole projector
• Optical Filters | Eclipse glasses, welder\’s goggles rated at 14
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Safely See the Sun — Build a Shoebox Pinhole Camera | VideoFromSpace
• YouTube | The April 29th, 2014 Annular Eclipse: Sims from Space | astroguyz
• Further Reading / In the News

• Our Guide to the Bizzare April 29th Solar Eclipse UniverseToday.com

• Keep an eye out for …

• Fri, April 25 | Dawn | The thin crescent Moon is low in the E and left of Venus
• Planets
• Venus | \”Morning Star\” | Look to the E-SE as daylight approached
• Mars | Just past opposition you can see it most of the night. In the evening is is in the SW with Spica below it, both will be at their highest point around local 12pm DST moving towards the NE as dawn approaches
• Jupiter | Twilight | High in the SW sinking towards the W horizon as the night progresses

• Saturn | End of Twilight | Highest in the S around 2am

• Further Reading and Resources

• Sky&Telescope
• SpaceWeather.com
• StarDate.org
• For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au
• Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org
• Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz
• AstronomyNow
• HeavensAbove

The post Marijuana & “Exo-Earth” | SciByte 127 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We take a look at a new treatment for paralysis, spying a possible exomoon, troubles with the Space Station, Viewer Feedback, the Large Hadron Collider, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | Torrent | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | Video Feed | Torrent Feed | iTunes

Show Notes:

Breakthrough Paraplegic Therapy

• The belief that no recovery is possible and complete paralysis is permanent has been challenged now that four young men who have been paralyzed for years are now able to move their legs, as a result of epidural electrical stimulation of the spinal cord
• Epidural Electrical Stimulation
• In epidural stimulation, an electrical current is applied at varying frequencies and intensities to specific locations on the lumbosacral spinal cord
• The stimulator delivers a continuous electrical current to the participants\’ lower spinal cords, mimicking signals the brain normally transmits to initiate movement in the dense neural bundles that largely control the movement of the hips, knees, ankles and toes
• With the participants, once the signal was triggered, the spinal cord reengaged its neural network to control and direct muscle movements.
• In an initial study, published in May 2011 scientists evaluated the effects of epidural stimulation in the first participant who recovered a number of motor functions as a result of the intervention
• The New Study
• The four paralyzed participants ranged in neurological level, two of them had absolutely no sensation or cognition below the site of their injury with no chance of recovery and all were at least two years post-injury at the time of the intervention
• What is revolutionary is that the second, third and fourth participants were able to execute voluntary movements immediately following the implantation and activation of the stimulator.
• Over the course of the study, the researchers noted that the participants were able to activate movements with less stimulation, demonstrating the ability of the spinal network to learn and improve nerve functions
• Results
• The study surprised the scientists, who believed at least some of the sensory pathway must be intact for epidural stimulation to be successful.
• The participants\’ results and recovery time were unexpected, which led researchers to speculate that some pathways may be intact post-injury and therefore able to facilitate voluntary movements.
• All four men were able to bear weight independently, as reported by the team
• Beyond regaining voluntary movement, the research participants have displayed a myriad of improvements in their overall health
• Increases in muscle mass and regulation of their blood pressure, as well as reduced fatigue and dramatic improvements to their sense of well-being.
• This is groundbreaking for the entire field and offers a new outlook that the spinal cord, even after a severe injury, has great potential for functional recovery.
• Widespread Use
• When they first learned that the first patient in 2011 had regained voluntary control as a result of the therapy, scientists remained cautiously optimistic
• Now that spinal stimulation has been successful in four out of four patients, there is evidence to suggest it could work on more individuals who previously had little realistic hope of any meaningful recovery from spinal cord injury
• The implications of this study for the entire field are quite profound, and we can now envision a day when epidural stimulation might be part of a cocktail of therapies used to treat paralysis
• Since this effect was observed this in four out of four people it suggests that this is actually a common phenomenon in those diagnosed with complete paralysis
• The Future
• The study offers hope that clinical therapies can be developed to advance treatment for the nearly 6 million Americans living with paralysis, including nearly 1.3 million with spinal cord injuries.
• This study changes how we see motor complete spinal cord injury as it indicates that we don\’t have to necessarily rely on regrowth of nerves in order to regain function
• The scientists are optimistic that the therapy intervention will continue to result in improved motor functions
• Based on observations from the research, there is strong evidence that with continued advancements of the epidural stimulator, individuals with complete spinal cord injuries will be able to bear weight independently, maintain balance and work towards stepping
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Paraplegics Get Leg Function Back With Electrical Stimulation | News All Time News All Time
• YouTube | Kent Stephenson on his recovery | ReeveFoundation
• YouTube | Rob Summers on his recovery | ReeveFoundation
• YouTube | Dustin Shillcox on his recovery ReeveFoundation
• YouTube | Drew Meas on his recovery | ReeveFoundation
• Further Reading / In the News
• The Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation
• Breakthrough therapy allows four paraplegic men to voluntarily move their legs | MedicalXPress.com
• Reawakening Limbs After Years of Paralysis | ScienceFriday.com
• \’Milestone\’ Therapy Produces Leg Movement in Paraplegics | consumer.healthday.com/

— NEWS BYTE —

ExoMoon?

• NASA-funded researchers have spotted the first signs of an \”exomoon,\” and though they say it\’s impossible to confirm its presence
• Discovery
• The discovery was made by watching a chance encounter of objects in our galaxy, which can be witnessed only once so they won\’t have a chance to observe the exomoon candidate again
• Scientists expect we can expect more unexpected finds like this.
• It was discovered with an international study using a telescope technique, called gravitational microlensing, takes advantage of chance alignments between stars
• When a foreground star passes between us and a more distant star, the closer star can act like a magnifying glass to focus and brighten the light of the more distant one
• These brightening events usually last about a month
• If the foreground star, or what astronomers refer to as the lens, has a planet circling around it, the planet will act as a second lens to brighten or dim the light even more
• Free Floating Planets
• Microlensing surveys have discovered dozens of exoplanets so far, in orbit around stars and free-floating
• A previous NASA-funded study, also led by the MOA team, was the first to find strong evidence for planets the size of Jupiter roaming alone in space, presumably after they were kicked out of forming planetary systems
• The new exomoon candidate, if real, would orbit one such free-floating planet.
• The Object
• By carefully scrutinizing these brightening events, astronomers can figure out the mass of the foreground star relative to its planet.
• In the new study, the nature of the foreground, lensing object is not clear. The ratio of the larger body to its smaller companion is 2,000 to 1.
• That means the pair could be either a small, faint star circled by a planet about 18 times the mass of Earth—or a planet more massive than Jupiter coupled with a moon weighing less than Earth
• One possibility is for the lensing system to be a planet and its moon
• A lower-mass pair closer to Earth will produce the same kind of brightening event as a more massive pair located farther away
• Once a brightening event is over, it\’s very difficult to take additional measurements of the lensing system and determine the distance
  The true identity of the exomoon candidate and its companion, a system dubbed MOA-2011-BLG-262, will remain unknown
• In The Future
• Astronomers have no way of telling which of these two scenarios is correct, the answer to the mystery lies in learning the distance to the circling duo
• In the future, it may be possible to obtain these distance measurements during lensing events
• NASA\’s Spitzer and Kepler space telescopes, both of which revolve around the sun in Earth-trailing orbits, are far enough away from Earth to be great tools for the parallax-distance technique.
• The basic principle of parallax can be explained by holding your finger out, closing one eye after the other, and watching your finger jump back and forth
• A distant star, when viewed from two telescopes spaced really far apart, will also appear to move
• When combined with a lensing event, the parallax effect alters how a telescope will view the resulting magnification of starlight
• Though the technique works best using one telescope on Earth and one in space, such as Spitzer or Kepler, two ground-based telescopes on different sides of our planet can also be used
• Multimedia
• YouTube | MOA-2009-BLG-319b – Gravitational microlensing – iPad Exoplanet App | Hanno Rein
• YouTube | Dark Jupiter Detection | TelescopeFeed
• YouTube | Gravitational Microlensing | Kowch737
• Further Reading / In the News
• Faraway moon or faint star? Possible exomoon found | Phys.org

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

International Space Station (ISS) Glitch

• April 11
• It was confirmed Friday night (April 11) that a backup computer on the exterior of the International Space Station (ISS) called a Multiplexer-Demultiplexer (MDM) was not responding to commands
• The primary computer continued to work so the crew was safe and there were no “immediate” change to space station operations,
• The failure was uncovered Friday “during a routine health check” of a box called EXT-2, which backs up a primary component that sits outside on the S0 truss (near the station’s center)
• It was decided that tf the computer did need to be replaced, crew members of Expedition 39 would need to do at least one spacewalk
• NASA is allowing contingency spacewalks in American spacesuits to go forward as the agency addresses problems raised in a report about a life-threatening spacesuit leak in July
• Multiplexer-Demultiplexer (MDM)
• This primary MDM not only controls a robotics mobile transporter, but also radiators and a joint to move the station’s solar arrays, among other things.
• NASA needs to reposition the arrays when a vehicle approaches because plumes from the thrusters can put extra “loads” or electrical power on the system.
• Luckily, the angle of the sun is such these days that the array can sit in the same spot for a while, at least two to three weeks
• NASA configured the station so that even if the primary computer fails, the array will automatically position correctly
• NASA also will move a mobile transporter on station today so that the station’s robotic arm is ready to grasp the Dragon when it arrives, meaning that even if the primary computer fails the transporter will be in the right spot
• April 12
• NASA began preparing a contingency spacewalk to deal with a broken backup computer component
• April 13
• NASA doesn’t want to go ahead with a space walk until spare spacesuit parts arrive, in the aftermath of a life-threatening suit leak that took place last summer.
• Those parts are on board the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft
• The Dragon is carrying a new spacesuit, components to fix an existing spacesuit, critical research experiments and food for the six crew members of Expedition 39.
• If Dragon is delayed again, the next launch opportunity is April 18 and the spacewalk would be pushed back
• Multimedia
• YouTube | NASA and the International Space Station Help Show It\’s a Small World After all | NASA
• Further Reading / In the News
• Backup Computer Glitches On Space Station But Crew Safe, NASA Says | UniverseToday.com
• Failed Space Station Computer Spurs Contingency Spacewalk Plans | UniverseToday.com
• Contingency Spacewalk Planned Next Week, But Dragon Must Arrive At Space Station First | UniverseToday.com

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Lunar Eclipses Tetrad

• For people in the United States, a lunar eclipses tetrad is about to begin, when a series of 4 consecutive total eclipses occurring at approximately six month intervals
• Check This Out | Lunar Eclipse Tetrad
• Brian McCoskey, Nogal
• Types of Lunar Eclipse
• On average, lunar eclipses occur about twice a year, but not all of them are total. There are three types
• Penumbral eclipse | The Moon passes through the pale outskirts of Earth’s shadow. It’s so subtle, sky watchers often don’t notice an eclipse is underway
• Partial eclipse | Is more dramatic that a penumbral as the Moon dips into the core of Earth’s shadow, but not all the way, so only a fraction of Moon is darkened.
• Total eclipse | The entire Moon is shadowed, is best of all. The face of the Moon turns sunset-red for up to an hour or more as the eclipse slowly unfolds.
• Lunar Eclipse Tetrad
• The total eclipse of April 15, 2014, will be followed by another on Oct. 8, 2014, and another on April 4, 2015, and another on Sept. 28 2015.
• Usually, lunar eclipses come in no particular order
• Occasionally, though, the sequence is more orderly. When four consecutive lunar eclipses are all total, the series is called a tetrad.
• During the 21st century, there are 9 sets of tetrads so it is a frequent occurrence in the current pattern of lunar eclipses, although during the three hundred year interval from 1600 to 1900, for instance, there were no tetrads at all
• The most unique thing about the 2014-2015 tetrad is that all of them are visible for all or parts of the USA
• Why red?
• Imagine yourself standing on a dusty lunar plain looking up at the sky. Overhead hangs Earth nightside down, completely hiding the sun behind it when the eclipse is underway
• As you scan your eye around Earth\’s circumference, you\’re seeing every sunrise and every sunset in the world, all of them, all at once
• This incredible light beams into the heart of Earth\’s shadow, filling it with a coppery glow and transforming the Moon into a great red orb.
• Multimedia
• YouTube | NASA | Understanding Lunar Eclipses | NASA Goddard
• Further Reading / In the News
• NASA Eclipse Web Site
• A Tetrad of Lunar Eclipses – NASA Science | science.nasa.gov

— Updates —

Large Hadron Collider – Beginning of Startup

• Scientists working at CERN\’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) facility has reported that the process of restarting the massive experimental mechanism has begun, though it won\’t finish until sometime next year
• Last Time on SciByte …
• The Shutdown | SciByte 82 | Meteorites & Asteroids | February 19, 2013
• The Upgrade
• The facility is in the process of an upgrade, which has been in the planning stages for several years and will include upgrades to several pieces and parts of the facility that support the LHC as well as the main accelerator itself
• The team recognized that the facility had begun to suffer from diminishing returns and that many parts could be improved due to the development of new technology and improvements on old ways of doing things.
• The collider will have to be restarted in pieces to ensure that each is operating properly before the next can be brought online
• The team has successfully restarted the part they call the source, the piece of equipment responsible for stripping electrons off of hydrogen atoms for use in producing protons.
• What\’s Next?
• Team members have made much of the complete upgrade to the control system that integrates all of the systems and which of course will be central to a successful reboot.
• The team plans to fire up Linac2, an accelerator whose job it is to give protons their initial push
• After that a booster will be started that will be used to push the protons even faster, for the LHC to be used in its proper context, it must receive protons that are already moving exceedingly fast.
• In addition to swapping out parts for new and improved technology, technicians will also be replacing worn cables or other minor but necessary components
• If all goes well, the LHC should be ready and back in business sometime early 2015.
• Multimedia
• YouTube | CERN in 3 minutes CERN
• Image |
• Social Media
• CERN @CERN
• Further Reading / In the News
• CERN Website
• Large Hadron Collider team announces beginning of restart | Phys.org

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• Bright Spot In Image
• Possible explanations include a glint from a rock or a cosmic-ray hit.
• \”In the thousands of images we\’ve received from Curiosity, we see ones with bright spots nearly every week,\” said Justin Maki, leader of the team that built and operates the Navigation Camera.
• The bright spots appear in images from the right-eye camera of the stereo Navcam, but not in images taken within one second of those by the left-eye camera.
• Arriving at New Science Location
• The reached a vantage point last week for its cameras to survey four different types of rock intersecting in an area called \”the Kimberley\”
• The science team expects to take several weeks for observations, sample-drilling and onboard laboratory analysis of the area\’s rocks
• Multimedia
• Image | Bright Spot Toward Sun in Image from NASA\’s Curiosity Mars Rover Right B campera| mars.jpl.nasa.gov
• Image | Image was taken by Navcam: Left B (NAV_LEFT_B)
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News
• Images From NASA Mars Rover Include Bright Spots | mars.jpl.nasa.gov

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• April 22, 1575 : 439 years ago : Surgery Book : The printing of Ambroise Paré\’s book Oeuvres Complètes (Complete Works) was finished, but its publication was opposed by establishment physicians. His previous texts on surgery had popularized a new way to treat gunshot wounds without cauterisation, reintroduced the ligature in amputation, and improved midwifery techniques. These many writings were gathered together in this one new volume, which spread his teachings throughout the world. It remained in print for a century and ran to thirteen editions. He wrote in French instead of Latin with practical, common sense so that many barber-surgeons, who (like Paré) were unable to interpret Latin, had access to medical knowledge otherwise unavailable from Latin texts
• Ambroise Paré\’s was a French physician, one of the greatest surgeons of the European Renaissance, known as the \”father of modern surgery\” for his many innovations in operative methods. While an army surgeon, he introduced the method of treating wounds by ligature of arteries instead of cauterisation with red-hot irons or boiling oil. Paré also invented prostheses. \”Le Petit Lorrain\” was a hand, operated by springs and catches, for a French Army Captain, which he then used in battle. Paré also invented a kneeling peg leg and foot prosthesis. It had an adjustable harness, knee lock control, and other engineering features used today. He was surgeon to Henry II and his three successors. He wrote books on anatomy, surgery, plague, obstetrics, and deformities

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Venus | \”Morning Star\” | Early dawn Venus is in the E-SE
• Mars | Twilight | Rises in the SE, with Spica 6* to its right. The two are their highest point around 1am
• Jupiter | At twilight it is high in the SE, it crosses nearly overhead (for skywatchers at mid-northern latitudes) around 8 or 9 p.m. and sets in the West around 2am.

• Saturn | 9-10pm | Rises around 9-10pm or and is highest in the south around 3am. By then it\’s far to the left of Mars and Spica

• Further Reading and Resources

• Sky&Telescope
• SpaceWeather.com
• StarDate.org
• For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au
• Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org
• Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz
• HeavensAbove

The post Paraplegic Therapy & Exomoon | SciByte 126 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We take a look at a new cancer drug, a dwarf planet, new dinosaur, spacecraft updates, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | Torrent | YouTube

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Show Notes:

Possible New Cancer Drug

• A new study has developed a new drug, ZL105, that can manipulate the body\’s natural signalling and energy systems, allowing the body to attack and shut down cancerous cells
• Medicine Based on Precious Metals
• Platinum-based drugs are used in nearly 50% of all chemotherapeutic regimens, they damage DNA and cannot select between cancerous and noncancerous cells
• This new drug based on the precious metal iridium is specifically designed not to attack DNA and has a novel mechanism of action, means that it could not only dramatically slow down and halt cancer growth, but also significantly reduce the side effects
• Treatment
• Existing cancer treatments often become less effective after the first course, as cancer cells learn how they are being attacked, the newly developed drug is a catalyst and is active at low doses
• The energy-producing machinery in cancer cells works to the limit as it attempts to keep up with quick proliferation and invasion, this makes cancer cells susceptible to minor changes in the cell \’power-house\’
• This drug pushes cancer cells over the limit causing them to slow and shut down, whilst normal cells can cope with its effects
• It can attack cancer cells in multiple ways at the same time, so the cancer is less able to adapt to the treatment, which means the new drugs could be much more effective than existing treatments
• Effectiveness and the Future
• Preliminary data indicate that the novel drug may be ten times more effective in treating ovarian, colon, melanoma, renal, and some breast cancers, according to data obtained by the US National Cancer Institute
• Researchers now aim to expand the study to cancers that are inherently resistant to existing drugs and to those which have developed resistance after a first round of chemotherapy treatments.
• Further Reading / In the News
• New drug raises potential for cancer treatment revolution | MedicalXPress.com

— NEWS BYTE —

A Possible New Dwarf Planet

• Astronomers have discovered a probable dwarf planet that orbits the Sun far beyond Pluto
• Discovery
• Astronomers been hunting for distant objects with the Dark Energy Camera, a 520-megapixel camera on the 4-meter Blanco telescope in Chile
• They captured 2012 VP113 during their first observing run, in November 2012, on the fifth image of the hundreds they would eventually snap, for months they tracked the object, until its full orbit became more apparent
• There have been a number of similar objects similar to this that have been found in the last decade that probably belong to the inner part of the Oort cloud
• **The New Object [2012 VP113] **
• The newfound object\’s official name is 2012 VP113, but the discovery team calls it VP for short, or just \’Biden\’ — after US Vice-President Joe Biden
• It is roughly 450 kilometers across, just one-fifth Pluto\’s, if Pluto were as big as a basketball, this new world a mere golf ball
• It\’s orbit takes it from 80 to 452 AU from the sun, never approaching Neptune (30 AU) or Pluto (39.5 AU).
• Pluto orbits the sun every 248 years, the new world requires 4340 years
• In several years time, after observations have pinned down its orbit, the scientists will submit a name for consideration by the International Astronomical Union (IAU)
• Origins
• Astronomers now have to come up with ideas to explain how these objects remain tightly gravitationally bound to the Sun when they orbit so far away.
• There are several competing ideas for how objects such as Sedna and 2012 VP113 got to where they are today
• One leading hypothesis proposes that in the Solar System’s infancy, a nearby star gravitationally perturbed the coalescing system and dragged some fragments out towards the edge
• Another possibility is that a massive rogue planet passed through at some point, kicking objects from the Kuiper belt outwards into the inner Oort cloud.
• Further Reading / In the News
• New Dwarf Planet Has Most Distant Trajectory Known | Scientific American
• ScienceShot: Small World Spotted Far Beyond Pluto | Science/AAAS
• Discovery! Possible Dwarf Planet Found Far Beyond Pluto\’s Orbit | UniverseToday.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

New Dinosaur Found in the Dakota’s

• Scientists unveiled the discovery, naming and description of a sharp-clawed, 500-pound, bird-like dinosaur that roamed the Dakotas with T. rex 66 million years ago
• New Dinosaur, Anzu
• Three partial skeletons of the dinosaur – almost making up a full skeleton – were excavated from the uppermost level of the Hell Creek rock formation in North and South Dakota
• Like many \”new\” dinosaurs, Anzu wyliei fossils were discovered some years ago, and it took more time for researchers to study the fossils and write and publish a formal scientific description
• The new dinosaur was 11.5 feet long, almost 5 feet tall at the hip and weighed an estimated 440 to 660 pounds
• Its jaws were tipped with a toothless beak, and its head sported a tall, rounded crest similar to that of a cassowary (a large ground bird native to Australia and New Guinea)
• The neck and hind legs were long and slender, also comparable to a cassowary or ostrich, the forelimbs of Anzu were tipped with large, sharp claws, and the tail was long and robust
• The researchers believe Anzu, with large sharp claws, was an omnivore, eating vegetation, small animals and perhaps eggs while living on a wet floodplain
• Studies of the rocks in which several of the most complete caenagnathid skeletons have been found show that these strata were laid down in humid floodplain environments
• Two skeletons show signs of trauma, one with a broken and healed rib, the other has an arthritic toe bone that may have been caused by an avulsion fracture (where a tendon ripped a piece off the bone to which it was attached).
• Whether these injuries were the result of combat between two individuals or an attack by a larger predator remains a mystery
• Further Reading / In the News
• Nearly complete \’chicken from hell,\’ from mysterious dinosaur group | ScienceDaily
• A \’chicken from hell\’ dinosaur: Large feathered dinosaur species discovered in North America | Phys.org

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

European Space Agencies Cometary Spacecraft Rosetta

• ESA sent a wake-up call to the 100-kg (220-lb) lander riding aboard the Rosetta spacecraft, bringing it out of its nearly 33-month-long slumber and beginning its preparation for its upcoming
• Philae Lander
• The lander, Philae, will touch down on the surface of a comet in November of 2014 and is received a “personal wake-up call” from Earth, 655 million kilometers away.
• A confirmation signal from the lander was received by ESA five and a half hours after the initial signal was sent
• Multimedia
• YouTube Philae touch down | European Space Agency, ESA European Space Agency, ESA
• Twitter | ESA Rosetta Mission Verified account @ESA_Rosetta
• Further Reading / In the News
• ESA Awakens Rosetta\’s Comet Lander | UniverseToday.com

Opportunity Rover Power Boost

• Opportunity rover on Mars has gotten a 70% boost in power over the past few weeks from a partial cleaning of dust from its solar panels
• Combined, with the seasonal effect and multiple dust-cleaning events have increased the amount of energy available each day from the rover\’s solar array by more than 70 percent compared with two months ago
• A good portion of that comes from the fact that its springtime in Mars’ southern hemisphere where Oppy now sits, so the Sun is now shining longer and higher in the sky.
• Several recent gusts of wind – or perhaps small dust devils – have also cleaned much of the dust off the rover’s solar panels.
• The rover team reported that between Sols 3605 and 3606 (March 15 and March 16, 2014), there was a dust cleaning event which resulted in about a 10% improvement in power production to 574 watt-hours, another cleaning event this week has put the power output to 615 watt-hours
• Further Reading / In the News
• Mars Exploration Rover Mission | MarsRover.nasa.gov
• Opportunity Rover Gets Power Boost from Wind Events on Mars | UniverseToday.com

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• Arriving at New Science Location
• The rover has reached a vantage point for its cameras to survey four different types of rock intersecting in an area called \”the Kimberley\”
• This is the spot on the map the team has been headed for, on a little rise that gives a great view for context imaging of the outcrops at the Kimberley
• The science team expects to take several weeks for observations, sample-drilling and onboard laboratory analysis of the area\’s rocks
• The mission\’s investigations at the Kimberley are planned as the most extensive since Curiosity spent the first half of 2013 in an area called Yellowknife Bay
• Researchers plan to use Curiosity\’s science instruments to learn more about habitable past conditions and environmental changes.
• Multimedia
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News
• NASA Mars Rover Curiosity Scoping Out Next Study Area – Mars Science Laboratory | mars.jpl.nasa.gov

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• April 9, 1959 : 55 years ago : First astronauts selected : NASA announced the selection of America\’s first seven astronauts for project Mercury. Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard and Donald Slayton were chosen from 110 applicants. Their training program at Langley, which ranged from a graduate-level course in introductory space science to simulator training and scuba-diving. Project Mercury, NASA\’s first high profile program, was an effort to learn if humans could survive in space. NASA required astronaut candidates to be male, not over 40 years old, not more than 5\’ 11\” height and in excellent physical condition. On 5 May 1961, Shepard became the first American in space

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Planets
• Venus | \”Morning Star\” | Early dawn Venus is in the E-SE
• Mars | Twilight | Rises in the SE, with Spica 6* to its right. The two are their highest point around 1am Mars is at opposition [opposite the Sun] on Tues April 8 so it will be visible all night long.
• Jupiter | At twilight it is high in the SE, it crosses nearly overhead (for skywatchers at mid-northern latitudes) around 8 or 9 p.m. and sets in the West around 2-3am.

• Saturn | 10pm | Rises around 10pm or and is highest in the south around 3am. By then it\’s far to the left of Mars and Spica

• Further Reading and Resources

• Sky&Telescope
• SpaceWeather.com
• StarDate.org
• For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au
• Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org
• Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz
• AstronomyNow
• HeavensAbove

The post Cancer Drug & New Planet | SciByte 125 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We take a look at evidence of inflation at the start of the Universe, water in the Earths crust, giant stars, frozen moss, spacecraft updates, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | Torrent | YouTube

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Show Notes:

Gravity, The Big Bang, and Inflation

• As the last untested prediction of Einstein\’s Theory of General Relativity, finding gravitational waves is a big deal.
• Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in the US have announced what they believe is the indirect detection of gravitational waves in the afterglow of the Big Bang.
• Two People of Note
• Alan Guth, the originator of the inflationary universe theory | Wikipedia
• Andrei Linde, one of the main authors of the inflationary universe theory | Wikipedia
• Looking Back at the Universe
• Alternative theories to inflation do not produce gravitational waves so this is strong evidence not only of the gravitational wave background but also inflation itself.
• The BICEP discovery provides further indirect evidence for the existence of gravitational waves
• Before this announcement we could measure the universe back to about a minute after the Big Bang.
• The finding has allowed us to study the universe when it was a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old
• There has still been no direct detection of the gravitational radiation, the first direct detection should follow in a few months
• It is envisaged that the experiment will directly detect gravitational radiation coming from astrophysical sources from nearby galaxies
• Q: Can you explain the theory of cosmic inflation first put forth in 1980? | Alan Guth
• The theory of cosmic inflation describes the propulsion mechanism that drove the universe into the period of tremendous expansion that we call the Big Bang, usually describe inflation as a theory of the \”bang\” of the Big Bang
• It is a prequel to the era that cosmologists call the Big Bang, although it of course occurred after the origin of the universe, which is often also called the Big Bang.
• — In Further Detail —
• The original Big Bang theory was really a theory of the aftermath of the bang described how the universe was cooled by the expansion, and how the expansion was slowed by the attractive force of gravity
• Inflation proposes that the expansion of the universe was driven by a repulsive form of gravity.
• According to Newton, gravity is a purely attractive force, but this changed with Einstein and the discovery of general relativity
• General relativity describes gravity as a distortion of spacetime, and allows for the possibility of repulsive gravity
• Modern particle theories strongly suggest that at very high energies, there should exist forms of matter that create repulsive gravity
• Inflation proposes that at least a very small patch of the early universe was filled with this repulsive-gravity material
• During the period of exponential expansion, any ordinary material would thin out, with the density diminishing to almost nothing
• The repulsive-gravity material actually maintains a constant density as it expands, no matter how much it expands
• While this appears to be a violation of conservation energy it actually has a peculiar feature of gravity, the energy of a gravitational field is negative
• As the patch expands at constant density, more and more energy, in the form of matter, is created, at the same time, more and more negative energy appears in the form of the gravitational field that is filling the region
• The total energy remains constant, as it must, and therefore remains very small.
• It is possible that the total energy of the entire universe is exactly zero, with the positive energy of matter completely canceled by the negative energy of gravity
• At some point the inflation ends because the repulsive-gravity material becomes metastable and decays into ordinary particles, producing a very hot soup of particles that form the starting point of the conventional Big Bang
• At that point the repulsive gravity turns off, but the region continues to expand in a coasting pattern for billions of years to come
• Q: What is the new result announced, and how does it provide critical support for your theory? | Alan Guth
• The early universe, as we can see from the afterglow of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, was incredibly uniform
• To have structure form at all, there needed to be small nonuniformities at the end of inflation, the tiny nonuniformities that did exist were then amplified by gravity
• Temperature nonuniformities, which can correlate to density differences, in the cosmic microwave background were first measured in 1992 by the COBE satellite
• These have not generally been seen as proof of inflation, in part because it is not clear that inflation is the only possible way that these fluctuations could have been produced.
• The geometry of space also fluctuates on small scales, due to the physics of quantum theory, and inflation also stretches these fluctuations, producing gravity waves in the early universe.
• The new result, is a measurement of these gravity waves, at a very high level of confidence.
• They do not see the gravity waves directly, but instead they have constructed a very detailed map of the polarization of the CMB in a patch of the sky.
• They have observed a swirling pattern in the polarization (called \”B modes\”) that can be created by gravity waves in the early universe
• This is the first time that even a hint of these primordial gravity waves has been detected, it is also the first time that any quantum properties of gravity have been directly observed
• Q: How would you describe the significance of these new findings, and your reaction to them? | Alan Guth
• These gravity waves can tells us a lot about the details of inflation that we did not already know, it determines the energy density of the universe at the time of inflation, which is something that previously had a wide range of possibilities.
• By determining the energy density of the universe at the time of inflation, the new result also tells us a lot about which detailed versions of inflation are still viable, and which are no longer viable
• While the current result is not by itself conclusive, it does points in the direction of the very simplest inflationary models that can be constructed.
• Of Note
• This is not the first evidence os gravitational waves | The 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor for finding a double pulsar that strongly supported \”ripples\” in spacetime
• The 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the discovery of tiny changes in temperature in the Cosmic Background Radiation that were discovered by the COBE satellite
• The is not the first discovery of the polarization within the cosmic microwave background, or even the first observations of this type of polarization
• This IS evidence of primordial gravitational waves, that would only be caused by inflation during the early moments of the Universe
• While these results are very credible they have not been peer reviewed yet
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Stanford Professor Andrei Linde celebrates physics breakthrough | StanfordUniversity
• YouTube | A Polarizing Discovery About the Big Bang! | minutephysics
• Further Reading / In the News
• Kenny MacLeod ‏@siabost9deas | RT @grahamfarmelo: Primordial gravity waves discovery-Nobel 2 follow 4 inflation pioneer Alan Guth? https://nyti.ms/1ivEk8k
• First hints of gravitational waves in the Big Bang\’s afterglow | Phys.org
• Alan Guth on new insights into the \’Big Bang\’ | Phys.org
• We\’ve Discovered Inflation! Now What? | UniverseToday.com
• That Moment When the \”Father of Inflation\” Learns of the Detection of Gravitational Waves | UniverseToday.com

— NEWS BYTE —

Water Deep in Earth’s Crust

• The first terrestrial discovery of ringwoodite confirms the presence of massive amounts of water 400 to 700 kilometers beneath Earth\’s surface
• Ringwoodite
• Ringwoodite is a form of the mineral peridot, believed to exist in large quantities under high pressures in the transition zone
• It is notable for being able to contain water within its structure, present not as a liquid but as hydroxide ions (oxygen and hydrogen atoms bound together).
• Ringwoodite has been found in meteorites but, until now, no terrestrial sample has ever been unearthed because scientists haven\’t been able to conduct fieldwork at extreme depths
• The Discovery
• The discovery was almost accidental in that the team had been looking for another mineral when they purchased a three-millimetre-wide, dirty-looking, commercially worthless brown diamond
• The diamond had been brought to the Earth\’s surface by a volcanic rock known as kimberlite — the most deeply derived of all volcanic rocks.
• The ringwoodite itself is invisible to the naked eye, buried beneath the surface, so it was fortunate that it was found
• The sample underwent years of analysis using Raman and infrared spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction before it was officially confirmed as ringwoodite
• Significance
• This discovery confirms about 50 years of theoretical and experimental work by geophysicists, seismologists and other scientists trying to understand the makeup of the Earth\’s interior.
• One of the world\’s leading authorities in the study of deep Earth diamond host rocks, said that the discovery ranks among the most significant of his career
• Scientists have been deeply divided about the composition of the transition zone and whether it is full of water or desert-dry, analysis of the mineral shows it contains a significant amount of water — 1.5 per cent of its weight
• Finding that confirms scientific theories about vast volumes of water trapped 410 to 660 kilometres beneath Earth\’s surface, between the upper and lower mantle.
• This sample really provides extremely strong confirmation that there are local wet spots deep in the Earth, the transition zone, might have as much water as all the world\’s oceans put together
• Knowing water exists beneath the crust has implications for the study of volcanism and plate tectonics, affecting how rock melts, cools and shifts below the crust
• Further Reading / In the News
• Water-rich gem points to vast \’oceans\’ beneath Earth\’s surface, study suggests — ScienceDaily | ScienceDaily.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Largest Yellow \”Hypergiant\” Star Discovered

• A recent analysis of the star HR 5171 A in the south hemisphere constellation of Centaurus, has revealed the nature of a massive yellow \”hypergiant\” star as one of the largest stars known
• Hypergiant
• These latest measurements place HR 5171 A firmly in the “Top 10” for largest stars in terms of size known, as well as the largest yellow hypergiant star known
• If it was placed into the center of our own solar system, and it would extend out over 6 astronomical units (A.U.s) past the orbit of Jupiter
• Only eight yellow hypergiants have been identified in our Milky Way galaxy but are some of the brightest stars known, if you placed a star like HR 5171 A 32 light years from the Earth, it would easily cast a shadow.
• Companion Star
• The relatively small companion star orbitis across our line of sight once every 1300 days, and is a large star in its own right at around six solar masses and 400 solar radii in size.
• The discovery of a companion around such a bright star was a big surprise since any ‘normal’ star should at least be 10,000 times fainter than the hypergiant
• What we see is not the companion itself, but the regions gravitationally controlled and filled by the wind from the hypergiant
• The System
• The binary system weighs in at a combined 39 solar masses, has a radius of over 1,300 times that of our Sun, and is a million times as luminous
• The surface-to-surface distance for the A and B components of the system are “only” about 2.8 A.U.s apart
• This all means that these two massive stars are in physical contact, with the expanded outer atmosphere of the bloated primary contacting the secondary, giving the pair a distorted peanut shape.
• Further Reading / In the News
• Astronomers Identify the Largest Yellow \”Hypergiant\” Star Known | UniverseToday.com

Frozen Moss Back to Life

• Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey and Reading University have demonstrated that, after over 1,500 years frozen in Antarctic ice, moss can come back to life and continue to grow
• The Discovery
• This is the first study to show such long-term survival in any plant; similar timescales have only been seen before in bacteria
• This moss would already have been at least decades old when it was first frozen
• The team took cores of moss from deep in a frozen moss bank in the Antarctic then placed it in an incubator at a normal growth temperature and light level and after only a few weeks, the moss began to grow
• Using carbon dating, the team identified the moss to be at least 1,530 years of age, and possibly even older, at the depth where the new growth was seen.
• Further Reading / In the News
• Back to life after 1,500 years: Moss brought back to life after 1,500 years frozen in ice | ScienceDaily.com

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

• Images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show a new channel in the southern hemisphere region of Terra Siernum that appeared between November 2010 and May 2013, this particular feature is likely not due to that liquid
• Images
  • This pair of images shows that material flowing down from an alcove at the head of a gully broke out of an older route and eroded a new channel
• Gullies or ravinea landforms are common on Mars, particularly in the southern highlands, these ravines tend to happen in the southern highlands and other mid-latitude regions on
• It’s unclear in what season the activity occurred because the observations took place more than a Martian year apart
• This type of activity generally occurs in winter, at temperatures so cold that carbon dioxide, rather than water, is likely to play the key role
• Further Reading / In the News
• New Gully Appears On Mars, But It\’s Likely Not Due To Water | UniverseToday.com

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• NASA’s Curiosity rover has just pulled into terrain chock full of curvy rock outcrops at Kimberly that’s suitable for contact science and drilling action
• The robot’s arm has been deployed to investigate the most scientifically productive spots, and is conducting contact science with the cameras and spectrometers on the terminus of the 7 foot long robotic arm
• The mast mounted ChemCam laser and high resolution cameras are being used to determine the best spot for drilling and sampling.
• The team commanded Curiosity to clean out the arms CHIMRA sample handling mechanism in anticipation of boring into the Martian outcrops and delivering samples of cored Martian rocks to the SAM and CheMin miniaturized chemistry labs
• Scientists directed Curiosity on a pinpoint drive to Kimberly after their interest was piqued by orbital images taken NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) where they see three terrain types exposed and a relatively dust-free surface
• The missions science focus has shifted to “search for that subset of habitable environments which also preserves organic carbon
• To date Curiosity’s odometer stands at 6.2 kilometers and has somewhat over another 4 kilometers to go to reach the base of Mount Sharp
• It may arrive at the lower reaches of Mount Sharp sometime in mid 2014, but must first pass through a potentially treacherous dune field
• Multimedia
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News
• Curiosity Pulls into Kimberly and Spies Curvy Terrain For Drilling Action | UniverseToday.com

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• Mar 28, 1949 : 65 years ago : “Big Bang” Coined : Fred Hoyle unintentionally coined the term “Big Bang” as a household name, in a scripted radio broadcast on the BBC Third Programme. His talk was printed in the The Listener (7 Apr 1949). He compared his own belief in a “steady state” universe, saying, “earlier theories … were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past.” He repeated its use in a 1950 broadcast published in The Listener (9 Mar 1950): “One [idea] was that the Universe started its life a finite time ago in a single huge explosion… This big bang idea seemed to me to be unsatisfactory.” His critics found the “big bang” term pejorative, yet Hoyle has said his intention was to make a vivid description for the radio audience. The term stuck

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Thurs, Mar 26 | ~1 hour before dawn | Venus is near the thin moon in the E-SE
• Planets
• Venus | \”Morning Star\” | Before and during dawn Venus is in the SE
• Mars | 9pm | Rises in the SE, with Spica 6* to its right. The two are their highest point around 2am with Spica now 5-6* to the lower right
• Jupiter | Is the only planet visible right now in the evenings and is high in the SE, it crosses nearly overhead (for skywatchers at mid-northern latitudes) around 8 or 9 p.m. and sets in the West around 3am

• Saturn | 11pm | Rises around 11 or and is highest in the south around 4am. By then it\’s far to the left of Mars and Spica

• Further Reading and Resources

• Sky&Telescope
• SpaceWeather.com
• StarDate.org
• For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au
• Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org
• Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz
• AstronomyNow
• HeavensAbove

The post Inflation & Frozen Moss | SciByte 124 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We take a look at an infant possibly cured of HIV, a new dinosaur in Europe, antibiotics, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes:

2nd Infant Possibly Cured of HIV

• A second American baby born with the AIDS virus may have had her infection put into remission and possibly cured by very early treatment, in this instance, four hours after birth.
• Last Time on SciByte …
• Scibyte 84 | HIV & SpaceX Troubles | March 5, 2013
• The \’First Case\’
• The girl was born in LA a month after researchers announced the first case in Mississippi last year that led doctors worldwide to rethink how fast and hard to treat infants born with HIV
• The Mississippi baby is now 3 1/2 and seems HIV-free despite no treatment for about two years although she is still getting AIDS medicines, so the status of her infection is not as clear.
• Treatment
• Most HIV-infected moms in the U.S. get AIDS medicines during pregnancy, which greatly cuts the chances they will pass the virus to their babies
• The LA baby was born mother was not taking her HIV medicines although the mom was given AIDS drugs during labor to try to prevent transmission of the virus
• Doctors started the baby on AIDS drugs within a few hours after birth before test results came back, tests later confirmed she had been infected
• The infant remained on antivirals until 18 months of age, at which point the child was lost to follow-up for a while
• Ten months after discontinuation of treatment, the child underwent repeated standard blood tests, none of which detected HIV presence in the blood
• Tests
• A host of sophisticated tests at multiple times suggest the LA baby has completely cleared the virus
• Doctors are cautious about suggesting she has been cured, instead of being in remission but it looks like a cure
• The baby\’s signs are different from what doctors see in patients whose infections are merely suppressed by successful treatment
• Adult AIDS-related Development
• Only about 1 percent of people have two copies of the gene that gives this protection
• Scientists have modified genes in the blood cells of a dozen adults to help them resist HIV from a donor with natural immunity to the virus
• HIV usually infects blood cells through a protein on their surface called CCR5. A California company, Sangamo BioSciences Inc., makes a treatment that can knock out a gene that makes CCR5.
• They tested it in 12 HIV patients who had their blood filtered to remove some of their cells. The treated cells were infused back into the patients
• Four weeks later, half of the patients were temporarily taken off AIDS medicines to see the gene therapy\’s effect
• The virus returned in all but one of them; that patient turned out to have one copy of the protective gene
• Researchers knew that the virus was going to come back in most of the patients, but the hope is that the modified cells eventually will outnumber the rest and give the patient a way to control viral levels without medicines
• Further Reading / In the News
• Doctors hope for cure in a second baby born with HIV | MedicalXPress.com

— NEWS BYTE —

Tracking SeaTurtles

• Small satellite-tracking devices attached to sea turtles swimming off Florida\’s coast have delivered first-of-its-kind data that could help unlock the mystery of what endangered turtles do during the \”lost years.\”
• \”Lost Years
• \”Lost years\” refers to the time after turtles hatch and head to sea where they remain for many years before returning to near-shore waters as large juveniles
• The time period is often referred like this because not much has been known about where the young turtles go and how they interact with their oceanic environment
• Before this study, most of the scientific information about the early life history of sea turtles was inferred through genetics studies, opportunistic sightings offshore, or laboratory-based studies
• With real observations of turtles in their natural environment, scientists are able to examine and reevaluate existing hypotheses about the turtles\’ early life history
• Tracking
• A team of scientists tracked 17 loggerhead turtles for 27 to 220 days in the open ocean using small, solar-powered satellite tags
• The goal was to better understand the turtles\’ movements, habitat preferences, and what role temperature may play in early sea turtle life history
• While the turtles remain in oceanic waters (traveling between 124 miles to 2,672 miles) off the continental shelf and the loggerhead turtles sought the surface of the water as predicted
• The Study
• The study found that the turtles do not necessarily remain within the currents associated with the North Atlantic subtropical gyre
• It was historically thought that loggerhead turtles hatching from Florida\’s east coast complete a long, developmental migration in a large circle around the Atlantic entrained in these currents
• The team\’s data suggest that turtles may drop out of these currents into the middle of the Atlantic (Sargasso Sea)
• The team also found that while the turtles mostly stayed at the sea surface, where they were exposed to the sun\’s energy, the turtles\’ shells registered more heat than anticipated (as recorded by sensors in the satellite tags
• Hiding in the Seaweed
• A new hypothesis about why the turtles seek refuge in seaweed (Sargassum). It is a type of seaweed found on the surface of the water in the deep ocean long associated with young sea turtles.
• Scientists propose that young turtles remain at the sea surface to gain a thermal benefit, which makes sense because the turtles are cold blooded animals by remaining at the sea surface
• By associating with Sargassum habitat, turtles gain a thermal refuge of sorts that may help enhance growth and feeding rates, among other physiological benefits.
• The Importance
• Findings are important because the loggerhead turtles along with other sea turtles are threatened or endangered species
• Florida beaches are important to their survival because they provide important nesting grounds in North America, more than 80% along Florida\’s coast
• There are other important nesting grounds and nursing areas for sea turtles in the western hemisphere found from as far north as Virginia to South America and the Caribbean.
• There\’s a whole lot that happens during the Atlantic crossing that we knew nothing about and this work helps to redefine Atlantic loggerhead nursery grounds and early loggerhead habitat use
• Further Reading / In the News
• Sea turtles \’lost years\’ mystery starts to unravel | Phys.org

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

New European Dinosaur

• A new dinosaur species found in Portugal may be the largest land predator discovered in Europe, as well as one of the largest carnivorous dinosaurs from the Jurassic
• Torvosaurus Gurneyi
• Scientists discovered bones belonging to this dinosaur north of Lisbon, they were originally believed to be a dinosaur species from North America
• Closer comparison of the shin bone, upper jawbone, teeth, and partial tail vertebrae suggested a new species, Torvosaurus Gurneyi
• The mouth bones have a different shape and structure, the number of teeth, as well as size and shape of the mouth, may differentiate the European and the American
• It had blade-shaped teeth up to 10 cm long, which indicates it may have been at the top of the food chain in the Iberian Peninsula roughly 150 million years ago
• Scientists estimate that the dinosaur could reach 10 meters long and weigh around 4 to 5 tons
• With a skull of 115 cm, it would be one of the largest terrestrial carnivores at this era
• An active predator that hunted other large dinosaurs, as evidenced by blade shape teeth up to 10 cm
• Evidences of closely related dinosaurs suggest that this large predator may have already been covered with proto-feathers
• Further Reading / In the News
• New dinosaur found in Portugal, largest terrestrial predator from Europe — ScienceDaily | ScienceDaily.com
• Torvosaurus gurneyi: New Giant Dinosaur Discovered in Portugal | sci-news.com

New Antibiotic to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria

• A team of researchers have discovered a new class of antibiotics to fight drug-resistant bacteria
• Oxadiazoles, was discovered in silico (by computer) screening and has shown promise in the treatment of MRSA in mouse models of infection
• Researchers screened 1.2 million compounds found that the oxadiazole inhibits a penicillin-binding protein
• The oxadiazoles are also effective when taken orally, currently there is only one marketed antibiotic for MRSA that can be taken orally.
• Further Reading / In the News
• New class of antibiotics discovered by chemists — ScienceDaily |ScienceDaily.com

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• Continuing On
• Engineers will now occasionally commanding Curiosity to drive backwards in a newly tested bid to minimize serious damage to the six 20 inch diameter wheels
• Curiosity is well on the way to her next near term goal, which is a science waypoint, named Kimberly (formerly called KMS-9), which lies about half a mile ahead.
• \”Kimberley,\” features ground with striations and is where researchers plan to suspend driving for a period of science investigations
• The map shows the route driven by NASA\’s Mars rover Curiosity through the 561st Martian day, or sol, of the rover\’s mission on Mars (March 5, 2014)
• Multimedia
• Big-Context Traverse Map Through Sol 561 | mars.jpl.nasa.gov
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back | March 13

• 1781 : 233 years ago : Uranus : Sir William Herschel announced his discovery of Uranus, the first planet discovered with a telescope. At the time of discovery he labeled it as a comet, by 1783 he finally acknowledged it was a planet, and by 1787, he had also observed the Uranian satellites Titania and Oberon (11 Jan 1787), which were later given these names by his son, John Herschel.
• 1930 : 84 years ago : Pluto : Clyde W. Tombaugh telegraphed the discovery of Pluto to the Harvard College Observatory. After nearly a year of searching, Tombaugh discovered a possible moving object on photographic plates taken on January 21, 23 and January 29 confirmed the movement and discovery of Pluto.

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Thurs, March 13 | ~hour after sunset | To the lower left of the Moon you can see the star Regulus (actually two binary stars). Regulus is the bottom star of the handle of the sickle of the constellation Leo (looks like a backwards question mark)
• Fri, Mar 14 | Tonight Regulus is above the moon
• Planets
• Venus | \”Morning Star\” | Before and during dawn Venus is in the SE
• Mars | 9pm | Rises in the SE, with Spica 6* to its right. The two are their highest point around 2am with Spica now 5-6* to the lower right
• Jupiter | Is the only planet visible right now in the evenings and is high in the SE, it crosses nearly overhead (for skywatchers at mid-northern latitudes) around 8 or 9 p.m. and sets in the West before dawn

• Saturn | 11pm | Rises around 11 or and is highest in the south at the beginning of dawn. By then it\’s far to the left of Mars and Spica

• Further Reading and Resources

• Sky&Telescope
• SpaceWeather.com
• StarDate.org
• For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au
• Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org
• Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz
• AstronomyNow
• HeavensAbove

The post HIV Treatment & European Dinosaur | SciByte 123 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We take a look at possible evidence of Martian life, 3D printing a heart, Tetris, spacecraft updates, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes:

Evidence of Martian Life?

• A team of scientists has found evidence of past water movement throughout a Martian meteorite, reviving debate in the scientific community over life on Mars.
• The team reports that newly discovered different structures and compositional features within the larger Yamato meteorite suggest biological processes might have been at work on Mars hundreds of millions of years ago.
• Mars On Earth?
• Martian meteoritic material is distinguished from other meteorites and materials from Earth and the moon by the composition of the oxygen atoms within the silicate minerals and trapped Martian atmospheric gases
  • Robotic missions to Mars continue to shed light on the planet\’s history, the only samples from Mars available for study on Earth are Martian meteorites
• On Earth, we can utilize multiple analytical techniques to take a more in-depth look into meteorites
• In 1996, a group of scientists published an article in Science announcing the discovery of biogenic evidence in the Allan Hills 84001(ALH84001) meteorite.
• The History of as Yamato 000593 (Y000593).
• Scientists are now focused on structures deep within a 30-pound (13.7-kilogram) Martian meteorite known as Yamato 000593 (Y000593).
• Analyses found that the rock was formed about 1.3 billion years ago from a lava flow on Mars
• Around 12 million years ago, an impact occurred on Mars which ejected the meteorite from the surface of Mars.
• The meteorite traveled through space until it fell in Antarctica about 50,000 years ago.
• The rock was found on the Yamato Glacier in Antarctica by the Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition in 2000
• Scientists are now focused on two distinctive sets of features associated with Martian-derived clay
• Tunnel and Micro-Tunnel Structures
• Tunnel and micro-tunnel structures that thread their way throughout Yamato 000593
• The observed micro-tunnels display curved, undulating shapes consistent with bio-alteration textures observed in terrestrial basaltic glasses
• These type of structures have previously been reported by researchers who study interactions of bacteria with basaltic materials on Earth
• Nanometer- to-Micrometer-Sized Spherules
• The second set of features consists of nanometer- to-micrometer-sized spherules
• Similar spherical features have been previously seen in the Martian meteorite Nakhla that fell in 1911 in Egypt.
• Composition measurements of the Y000593 spherules show that they are significantly enriched in carbon compared to the nearby surrounding iddingsite layers.
• What This Might Mean
• These two sets of features in Y000593, recovered from Antarctica after about 50,000 years residence time, are similar to features found in Nakhla, an observed fall collected shortly after landing.
• Scientists cannot exclude the possibility that the carbon-rich regions in both sets of features may be the product of abiotic mechanisms
• Textural and compositional similarities to features in terrestrial samples, which have been interpreted as biogenic, imply the intriguing possibility that the Martian features were formed by biotic activity.
  +The features are evidence of aqueous alterations as seen in the clay minerals, and the presence of carbonaceous matter associated with the clay phases which show that Mars has been a very active body in its past
• It also reveals the presence of an active water reservoir that may also have a significant carbon component.
• The nature and distribution of Martian carbon is one of the major goals of the Mars Exploration Program
• What Now?
• The small sizes of the carbonaceous features within the Yamato 000593 meteorite present major challenges to any analyses attempted by remote techniques on Mars
• While these new features are no \”smoking gun,\” they are nonetheless interesting and show that further studies of these meteorites should continue
• Further Reading / In the News
• Evidence of water in meteorite revives debate over life on Mars | Phys.org

—  NEWS BYTE —

3D Printed Model Heart Helps Save a Life

• While heart surgery on a 14 month old is not unheard of, recently a surgeon was able to map out his surgical approach using a nearly exact model of the patients heart printed on a 3D printer.
• Laying Out A Surgery Plan
• The 14 month old infant was born with four congenital heart defects, doctors had known since before he was born that his heart had problems
• Fixing them all would prove to be a challenge., when it came time to plan the surgery surgeons found each of them had different ideas on the best way to fix the heart
• The ideal approach would involve the least amount of cutting and suturing—but that can be hard to plan using only conventional scanning techniques
• 3D Printed Model
• Researchers worked with radiologists to provide heart to data that could be used with a 3D printer.
• They used CT scanning data, which seemed to a perfect match as CT scanning uses the same basic idea as 3D printing
• CT scanning takes pictures of slices and puts them together on a computer screen to form a whole, and 3D printing is achieved by laying down one layer or \”slice\” of material at a time.
• They decided to print the heart (in three pieces) at twice its normal size
• It was also used a flexible type of plastic known as \”Ninja Flex\” instead of the often used ABS (used in LEGO bricks)
• This allowed the surgeon to bend the finished heart in ways that resembled a real human heart.
• The Surgery
• Printing the heart took approximately 20 hours at a cost of roughly $600, it allowed for a single surgery and greatly reduced cutting and suturing, which ultimately led to a much quicker recovery
• The surgery happened on Feb 10, and by all accounts is now doing just fine
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Doctors prepare for heart surgery with 3D printing | News On Here
• Further Reading / In the News
• Doctor uses printed 3D heart to assist in infant heart surgery | MedicalXPress.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Controlling Cravings With Tetris

• A recent study suggests that Tetris could actually help dieters reduce cravings
• The Study
• Researchers created two study groups: One that played Tetris for three minutes while the other group was told that the game was loading but they never received the chance to play
• Participants were then asked to rate their cravings for cigarettes, food and alcohol based on the vividness, intrusiveness and strength of those cravings.
• The Tetris group showed a 24 percent reduction in cravings following their activity with the game
• The other group who did not get to play Tetris did not experience any craving reductions.
• The Power of Tetris
• \”Feeling in control is an important part of staying motivated, and playing Tetris can potentially help the individual to stay in control when cravings strike\” | Professors Jackie Andrade | University\’s Cognition Institute
• Tetris is something a person can quickly access, and can replace the feeling of stress caused by the craving, and could be used while at work or home
• Scientists are constantly looking for things to help fight against such cravings through healthy activities, like exercise
• They label Tetris as a neutral activity that has a positive impact so it is a good alternative for now
• Further Reading / In the News
• Could the Video-Game Tetris Curb Cravings for Food, Cigarettes and Alcohol? | ScienceWorldReport.com

—  VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Withdrawing 120 Nonsense Science Papers

• Martin (lowfatty)
• The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.
• Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers : Nature News & Comment | Nature.com
• Computer-Generated Papers
• Over the past two years computer-generated papers have made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013
• Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE),
• Among the works a paper published as a proceeding from the 2013 International Conference on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering, held in Chengdu, China.
• Most of the conferences took place in China, and most of the fake papers have authors with Chinese affiliations.
• The authors of the paper, entitled ‘TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce’, in the abstract that they “concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact”.
• One of the named authors replied that he does not know why he was a listed co-author on the paper and first learned of the article when conference organizers notified his university in December 2013
• SCIgen
• One way to automatically detect manuscripts composed by a piece of software called SCIgen, which randomly combines strings of words to produce fake computer-science papers
• SCIgen was invented in 2005 by researchers to prove that conferences would accept meaningless papers — and, as they put it, “to maximize amusement”
• A related program generates random physics manuscript titles on the satirical website arXiv vs. snarXiv.
• SCIgen is free to download and use, and it is unclear how many people have done so, or for what purposes
• SCIgen’s output has occasionally popped up at conferences, when researchers have submitted nonsense papers and then revealed the trick.
• The papers are quite easy to spot,” says Labbé, who has built a website where users can test whether papers have been created using SCIgen.
• Automatically identifying these papers involves searching for characteristic vocabulary generated by SCIgen
• **History of Fake Papers
• In April 2010, someone used SCIgen to generate 102 fake papers by a fictional author called Ike Antkare to show how easy it was to add these fake papers to the Google Scholar database
• There is a long history of journalists and researchers getting spoof papers accepted in conferences or by journals to reveal weaknesses in academic quality controls

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

China\’s Yutu Lunar Rover

• Last Time on SciByte …
• sciByte 111 | Yutu Launch | Memories & International Spacecraft | December 3, 2013
• SciByte 113 | Yutu Landing | Aquifers & Brain Plasticity | December 17, 2013
• SciByte 115 | Yutu Wakes Up on Second Lunar Day | Sleep Apnea & Heart Defect Treatments | January 14, 2014
• SciByte 120 | Canadian Fossils & Yutu Rover | February 18, 2014
• Control Circuit Malfunction
• “Yutu suffered a control circuit malfunction in its driving unit,” according to a newly published report on March 1 by the state owned Xinhua news agency.
• A functioning control circuit is required to lower the rovers mast so the malfunction prevented Yutu from entering the second dormancy as planned
• The panel driving unit also helps maneuver the panels into position to efficiently point to the sun to maximize the electrical output
• They must be folded down into a warmed electronics box to shield them from the damaging effects of the Moon’s nightfall when temperatures plunge dramatically to below minus 180 Celsius, or minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit.
• Lunar Day 3
• The 140 kilogram rover was unable to move during Lunar Day 3 due to the mechanical glitches so only carried out fixed point observations during its third lunar day
• It was able to complete some limited scientific observations. And fortunately the ground penetrating radar, panoramic and infrared imaging equipment all functioned normally.
• Chinese space engineers engaged in troubleshooting to try and identify and rectify the technical problems in a race against time to find a solution before the start of Lunar Night 3.
• Lunar Night 3 and the Future
• The issue with the control circuit malfunction in its driving unit remains unresolved and a still threatens the outlook for Yutu’s future exploration.
• Yutu and the companion Chang’e-3 lander have again gone into sleep mode during Lunar Night 3 on Feb. 22 and Feb 23 respectively, local Beijing time.
• Yutu is now nearing its planned 3 month long life expectancy
• Further Reading / In the News
• China\’s Yutu Moon Rover Unable to Properly Maneuver Solar Panels | UniverseToday.com

Kepler Data Continues to Show New Exo-Planets

• More Planets
• The Kepler Space Telescope has been inactive since May of 2013, but the probe\’s data has led astronomers to discover 715 new planets
• The 715 new planets are said to be distributed among 305 different star systems bringing the number of known planets beyond our solar system has increased to almost 1,700
• The number of Earth-sized planets has increased by 400% and four of the newly discovered planets are about 2.5 times wider than Earth
• Another four [Kepler 174d, Kepler 296f, Kepler 298d, and Kepler 309c] are also said to be located in a habitable zone where water may exist in liquid form
• Further Reading / In the News
• NASA Nearly Doubles Discovery of Known Planets Without Active Kepler Space Telescope | ScienceWorldReport.com

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• NASA\’s Curiosity Mars rover has reached an area where orbital images had piqued researchers\’ interest in patches of ground with striations all oriented in a similar direction
• The six wheeled rover paused during the planned Feb. 19 drive of 328 feet (100 meters) to capture the imagery, on Feb. 20 (Sol 549), she also completed her second 100 meter drive in reverse.
• The foreground rocks are in an outcrop called \”Junda,\” which the rover passed during a drive of 328 feet (100 meters) on Feb. 19.
• Engineers will now occasionally commanding Curiosity to drive backwards in a newly tested bid to minimize serious damage to the six 20 inch diameter wheels
• Curiosity is well on the way to her next near term goal, which is a science waypoint, named Kimberly (formerly called KMS-9), which lies about half a mile ahead.
• \”Kimberley,\” features ground with striations and is where researchers plan to suspend driving for a period of science investigations
• Multimedia
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News
• Curiosity Rover pauses mid-drive and captures Spectacular Martian Mountain Snapshot | UniverseToday.com
• Mars Science Laboratory: NASA\’s Curiosity Mars Rover Views Striated Ground | mars.jpl.naga.gov

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• March 06, 1950 : 64 years ago : Silly Putty : Silly Putty was introduced as a toy by Peter Hodgson, a marketing consultant, who packaged one-ounce portions of the rubber-like material in plastic eggs. It could be stretched, rolled into a bouncing ball, or used to transfer colored ink from newsprint. The original discovery was made in 1943 by James Wright who combined silicone oil and boric acid at the laboratories of General Electric. He was researching methods of making synthetic rubber, but at the time no significant application existed for the material. However, it was passed around as a curiosity. Hodgson saw a sample and realized its potential simply for entertainment and coined its name for marketing it as a toy. Its popularity made him a millionaire

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Thurs, March 6 | ~hour after sunset | Aldebaran, an orange giant star, is to the upper left of the Moon and the Pleiades star cluster is to the Moon\’s upper right
• Fri, Mar 7 | Tonight Aldebaran is below the Moon
• Sat, Mar 8 | Dusk | The first-quarter Moon stands above Orion high in the south, with Jupiter to the upper left of the Moon
• Planets
• Venus | \”Morning Star\” | Before and during dawn Venus is in the SE
• Mars | 10pm | Rises in the SE, with Spica 6* to its right. The two are their highest point around 3-4am with Spica now to the lower right
• Jupiter | Is the only planet visible right now in the evenings and is high in the SE, it crosses nearly overhead (for skywatchers at mid-northern latitudes) around 8 or 9 p.m. and sets in the West before dawn
• Saturn | 11pm-Midnight | Rises around 11 or and is highest in the south at the beginning of dawn. By then it\’s far to the left of Mars and Spica

DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME – Sunday, March 9

• “SPRING” AHEAD

• “Losing” 1 Hour

• Further Reading and Resources

• Sky&Telescope
• SpaceWeather.com
• StarDate.org
• For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au
• Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org
• Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz
• AstronomyNow
• HeavensAbove

The post Martian Life & Tetris | SciByte 122 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We take a look at cell-based cancer therapy, growing lungs, radiation free MRI’s, 3D crime scene scanners, spacecraft updates, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

Direct Download:

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Show Notes:

Cell-Based Cancer Therapy

• The largest clinical study ever conducted to date of patients with advanced leukemia found that 88 percent achieved complete remissions after being treated with genetically modified versions of their own immune cells.
• Adult B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL)
• Is a type of blood cancer that develops in B cells, is difficult to treat because the majority of patients relapse.
• Patients with relapsed B-ALL have few treatment options; only 30 percent respond to salvage chemotherapy.
• Cell-Based Therapies
• Cell-based, targeted immunotherapy is a new approach to treating cancer that harnesses the body\’s own immune system to attack and kill cancerous cells.
• Unlike with a common virus such as the flu, our immune system does not recognize cancer cells as foreign and is therefore at a disadvantage in eradicating the disease.
• Researchers have been exploring ways to reengineer the body\’s own T cells to recognize and attack cancer.
• In 2003, they were the first to report that T cells engineered to recognize the protein CD19, which is found on B cells, could be used to treat B cell cancers in mice.
• In March 2013, the same team of researchers first reported the results of five patients with advanced B-ALL who were treated with cell therapy. Remarkably, all five patients achieved complete remissions.
• In the current study, 16 patients with relapsed B-ALL were given an infusion of their own genetically modified immune cells, called T cells.
• The cells were \”reeducated\” to recognize and destroy cancer cells that contain the protein CD19.
• One of the first patients to receive this treatment more than two years ago. He was able to successfully undergo a bone marrow transplant and has been cancer-free and back at work teaching theology since 2011
• The Current Study : Bone Marrow Transplantation Following Treatment
• Historically, only 5 percent of patients with relapsed B-ALL have been able to transition to bone marrow transplantation.
• The study consisted of 16 patients, who were able to follow the treatment with the standard care and curative option, bone marrow transplantation
• Seven [44%] were able to successfully undergo bone marrow transplantation
• Three [19%] were ineligible due to failure to achieve a complete remission following treatment.
• Three [19%] were ineligible due to preexisting medical conditions
• Two [13%] declined the treatment
• One [6%] is still being evaluated for a potential bone marrow transplant.
• Who Is Right For The Treatment
• The study also provides guidelines for managing side effects of cell therapy, which can include severe flu-like symptoms such as fever, muscle pain, low blood pressure, and difficulty breathing
• The researchers developed diagnostic criteria and a laboratory test that can identify which patients are at greater risk for developing this syndrome.
• The Future
• Additional studies to determine whether cell therapy can be applied to other types of cancer are already underway
• Studies to test whether B-ALL patients would benefit from receiving targeted immunotherapy as frontline treatment are being planned.
• Further Reading / In the News
• Cell therapy shows remarkable ability to eradicate cancer in clinical study | MedicalXPress

— NEWS BYTE —

Growing Human Lungs

• A team of researchers has, for the first time, successfully grown a human lung in a lab
• Organs That Have Been Done
• Windpipes, for example, have been successfully grown and implanted into human patients, and just last spring
• A team of researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston successfully implanted lab grown kidneys into rats
• Current Study
• Lungs from two deceased juveniles were obtained
• The first lung was stripped of all of its cells leaving just a scaffolding of elastin and collagen
• Healthy cells were then taken from the second lung and applied to the scaffolding
• The lung-to-be was placed in a glass tank full of a nutrient-rich solution where it soaked for four weeks.
• During that time, new cell growth filled in the scaffolding resulting in a new lung.
• The team repeated the whole exercise with another set of lungs and found the same result.
• The researchers don\’t know how well the newly grown lung might work if it were implanted into a person, if at all
• The Future
• They are confident that they are on the right track in growing lungs in a lab that will eventually be used to replace damaged lungs in actual patients
• The don\’t however expect lab-grown lungs to be transplanted into humans for at least a dozen years
• The team next plans to repeat the process with pig lungs and then to implant the results into a live pig to see how well they actually work
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Texas scientists successfully grow human lungs in their lab | KTNV Channel 13 Action News KTNV Channel 13 Action News
• Further Reading / In the News
• Research team successfully grows human lung in lab | MedicalXPress

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Radiation Free MRI

• Researchers have discovered that MRI-based imaging techniques may be just as effective as other conventional scanning methods minus the radiation risks that come with cancer detection
• PET-CT Scanning
• Medical officials often must send radioactive traces through the body as part of PET-CT scans that expose a patient to the equivalent of 700 chest X-rays
• For pediatric patients, this can be particularly risky, where radiation exposure could potentially lead to secondary forms of cancer later in life.
• In fact it have been showed that exposure can almost triple the risk of cancer in children, compared to those over 30
• The Study
• The study-composed of 22 children with malignant lymphomas or sarcomas
• The team worked to investigate the safety and effectiveness of an MRI-based approach that mimics the PET-CT scan\’s results, via an iron supplement
• The study shows that an iron supplement can increase the visibility on traditional MRI scans with no adverse reactions from ferumoxytol supplements.
• A larger group of patients will need to be tested in order to confirm the validity of the results
• Further Reading / In the News
• Radiation-Free MRI Scans Now Viable to Assess Cancer in Children | ScienceWorldReport.com

3D Crime Scanner

• Police in Queensland Australia have reported that they now have and are using a hand held and can be used to laser scan a crime scene in just a matter of minutes for creation of a 3D image
• Current Scanning Tech
• LIDAR is a remote sensing technology that works by sending out a laser beam and then reading what is bounced back.
• Geologists use a similar scanner to map the insides of caves, and planet scientists have been using it to map the surface of the Earth from satellites.
• A similar device was also used recently to map the interior of the leaning tower of Pisa to gain a better understanding of its structure or to help in repair should it start to topple.
• Zebedee is based on that technology that has been put to a variety of uses over the past several years
• Zebedee scanner
• Zebedee extends LIDARs capabilities (which are 2D) by affixing it to the top of a spring
• Bouncing (and spinning) the laser around atop the spring, the beam strikes objects in every direction. A computer then connects all the 2D readings together to create a 3D image
• Police Use
• Police in New Mexico have recently begun using a scanner they call the Faro 3D scanner system, it\’s based on the same basic technology
• The police have been using the device to faithfully recreate an entire crime scene in as little as 20 minutes
• The data captured can be looked at later by investigators or even people sitting in a jury box to get a better sense of what occurred at a crime scene.
• The Zebedee has thus far been most useful for crime scenes that are difficult to access
• Also where there are bad weather or at automobile accident scenes, which of course completely disappear once the cars are towed away
• The next step, is to put a Zebedee on a drone of some sort to allow for recreating scenes from above or from longer distances.
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Mobile Mapping Indoors and Outdoors with Zebedee | AutonomousSystemsLab AutonomousSystemsLab
• YouTube | Next Media: Australian police adopt 3D mapping scanner to fight crime | The Malay Mail Online The Malay Mail Online
• YouTube | Accident Reconstruction with the FARO Focus3D | FAROTechnologies FAROTechnologies
• Further Reading / In the News
• Australian police get hand-held 3D crime scene laser scanner | Phys.org

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

Opportunity Rover | Solving the Story of the ‘Mystery Rock’

• ‘Pinnacle Island’ had suddenly appeared out of nowhere in a set of before/after pictures taken by Opportunity’s cameras on Jan, 8, 2014 (Sol 3540) in the exact same spot had been vacant of debris in photos taken barely 4 days earlier.
• Pinnacle Island measures only about 1.5 inches wide (4 centimeters) with a noticeable white rim and red center
• Last Time on SciByte …
• SciByte 116 | Migraines & John Dobson | January 21, 2014
• Solving the Riddle of ‘Pinnacle Island’ (A.K.A. the ‘Jelly Doughnut’)
• The Martian riddle was finally resolved when Opportunity roved a tiny stretch and took some look back photographs to document the ‘mysterious scene’ for further scrutiny
• New pictures showed another fragment of the rock – dubbed ‘Stuart Island’ – eerily similar in appearance to the ‘Pinnacle Island’ doughnut.
• “Once we moved Opportunity a short distance, after inspecting Pinnacle Island, we could see directly uphill an overturned rock that has the same unusual appearance,” said Opportunity Deputy Principal Investigator
• It turns out that the six wheeled Opportunity unknowingly ‘created’ the mystery herself when she drove over a larger rock, crushing it with the force from the wheels and her 400 pound (185 kg) mass.
• Fragments were sent hurtling across the summit of the north facing Solander Point, one piece unwittingly rolled downhill.
• Orbital View
• The highly detailed image was freshly taken on Feb. 14 (Valentine’s Day 2014) by the telescopic High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)
• The orbital image shows not only rover Opportunity at her location today, but some of the wheel tracks created as she climbed from the plains below up to near the peak of Solander Poin
• The scene is narrowly focused on a spot barely one-quarter mile (400 meters) wide.
• The purpose was to “check the remote possibility that a fresh impact by an object from space might have thrown this rock to its new location
• No fresh crater impacting site was found in the new image
• Further Reading / In the News
• Opportunity rover Spied atop Martian Mountain Ridge from Orbit – Views from Above and Below | UniverseToday.com

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• Driving in Reverse
• As a means to help combat the wear and tear on the wheels engineers have started driving the rover in reverse
• The reverse drive validated feasibility of a technique developed with testing on Earth to lessen damage to Curiosity\’s wheels when driving over terrain studded with sharp rocks.
• On Tuesday, Feb. 18, the rover covered 329 feet (100.3 meters), the mission\’s first long trek that used reverse driving and its farthest one-day advance of any kind in more than three months.
• Next Destination
• The rover team used images taken from orbit to reassess possible routes, after detecting in late 2013 that holes in the vehicle\’s aluminum wheels were accumulating faster than anticipated.
• The mission\’s destinations remain the same: a science waypoint first and then the long-term goal of investigating the lower slopes of Mount Sharp, where water-related minerals have been detected from orbit.
• The science waypoint, which may be where Curiosity next uses its sample-collecting drill, is an intersection of different rock layers about two-thirds of a mile (about 1.1 kilometers) ahead on the planned route
• Multimedia
• YouTube Curiosity Rover Report JPLnews
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News
• Mars Science Laboratory: Curiosity Adds Reverse Driving for Wheel Protection | mars.jpl.nasa.gov

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• March 1, 1966 : 48 years ago : Soviet spacecraft reaches Venus surface : The mission of the Soviet Union\’s unmanned spacecraft Venera 3 (Venus 3) was a partial success when it reached Venus and automatically released a small landing capsule intended to explore the planet\’s atmosphere during a parachute descent. However, contact had been lost since 16 Feb 1966. Although no data was returned before the capsule impacted, it became the first man-made object to touch the surface of another planet. The Soviet Union issued a commemorative stamp to mark the achievement. Venera 3 was launched on 16 Nov 1965. The landing capsule (0.9-m diam., about 300-kg) had been designed to collect data on pressure, temperature, and composition of the Venusian atmosphere. Failure is believed due to overheating of internal components and the solar panels
• Venera 3 | Wikipedia

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Planets
• Venus | Is visible before and during dawn to the SE. It\’s at its brightest this week.
• Mars | 10pm | Rises in the SE, with Spica 6* to its right. The two are their highest point 3-4am with Spica now to the lower right
• Jupiter | Is high southeast in early evening, crosses nearly overhead (for skywatchers at mid-northern latitudes) around 8 or 9 p.m. and sets in the West before dawn

• Saturn | 12-1 am | Rises around midnight or 1 a.m. and is highest in the south at the beginning of dawn. By then it\’s far to the left of Mars and Spica

• Further Reading and Resources

• Sky&Telescope
• SpaceWeather.com
• StarDate.org
• For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au
• Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org
• Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz
• AstronomyNow
• HeavensAbove

The post Immunotherapy & Growing Lungs | SciByte 121 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We take a look at a new Canadian fossil site, protecting spacecraft with cave pigment, a picture worth a billion stars, spacecraft updates, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | Torrent | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

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Show Notes:

Amazing New Canadian Fossil Site

• Scientists say that a new treasure trove of fossils chiseled out of a canyon in Canada\’s Kootenay National Park rivals the famous Burgess Shale, the best record of early life on Earth
• Burgess Shale Fossil Quarry
• The Burgess Shale refers to both a fossil find and a 505-million-year-old rock formation made of mud and clay
• Burgess Shale fossil quarry, a UNESCO World Heritage site located in Yoho National Park, is in a glacier-carved cliff in the Canadian Rockies.
• The fossils were discovered in 1909. Since then, several other fossil sites have been found in the Burgess Shale, but none as rich as the original.
• The fossils are extraordinary because they preserve soft parts of ancient animals in exceptional detail, soft parts are less likely to be imprinted in stone than harder parts, like bones
• More than 200 animal species have been identified at the 1909 fossil site
• New Site
• The new site is also in the Burgess Shale formation, and seems to rival the 1909 original in fossil diversity and preservation
• In just two weeks, the research team collected more than 3,000 fossils representing 55 species, fifteen of those species are new to science.
• There is a high possibility that they will eventually find more species here than at the original Yoho National Park site, and potentially more than from anywhere else in the world
• The Fossils
• The new fossils were spotted in a mountain cliff, in Marble Canyon, about 42 km [26 miles] southeast of the original Burgess Shale site
• The newly discovered rocks are probably about 100,000 years younger than those at the first Burgess Shale site
• Many of the fossils at the new site are better preserved than their quarry counterparts
• The new fossils reveal the internal organs of several different arthropods, the most common type of animal in both the new and old Burgess Shale locations.
• Retinas, corneas, neural tissue, guts and even a possible heart and liver were found and is the first time we\’re seeing these details
• Species
• About half of the 55 species discovered at Marble Canyon so far are also found at the original Burgess Shale site
• Some of the original site\’s rare species are more abundant in the canyon
• Some species at Marble Canyon are also found in China\’s Chengjiang fossil beds, which are 10 million years older than the Burgess Shale
• Until now, researchers thought these Cambrian animals went extinct by the time the Burgess Shale formed.
• Their discovery in Canada means that many Cambrian life forms were more widespread and longer-lived than previously thought
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Burgess Shale | Royal Ontario Museum
• Gallery Amazing Cambrian Fossils from Canada\’s Marble Canyon | LiveScience
• Further Reading / In the News
• \’Mother Lode\’ of Fossils Discovered in Canada | Scientific American

— NEWS BYTE —

Prehistoric Cave Pigment Protects ESA Solar Probe

• Burnt bone charcoal, also used in prehistoric cave paintings, will be used by scientists in the titanium heat shield of European Space Agency\’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft.
• ESA Solar Orbiter
• The Solar Orbiter, due to launch in 2017, will carry a range of instruments in order to conduct high-resolution imaging of the Sun
• It will orbit slightly more than a quarter of the distance to Earth, where the temperatures will be as high as 520* C [968* F]
• The main body of the spacecraft takes cover behind a heat shield
• The Shielding
• \”To go on absorbing sunlight, then convert it into infrared to radiate back out to space, its surface material needs to maintain constant \’thermo-optical properties\’ – keep the same colour despite years of exposure to extreme ultraviolet radiation\” | Andrew Norman, a materials technology specialist
• The shield cannot shed material or outgas vapour, because of the risk of contaminating Solar Orbiter\’s highly sensitive instruments
• \”It also has to avoid any build-up of static charge in the solar wind because that might threaten a disruptive or even destructive discharge\” | Andrew Norman, a materials technology specialist
• The engineers ruled out carbon fiber fabric, their first choice, as it is a light polymer.
• The CoBlast Technique
• One company makes titanium medical implants, they use the CoBlast technique that is best suited for reactive metals like titanium, aluminium and stainless steel, basically metals that have a surface of oxide layer.
• They spray the metal surface with abrasive material to grit-blast this layer and also include a second \’dopant\’ material possessing whatever characteristics are needed
• The simultaneous sprays takes the place of the oxide layer being stripped out,
• The new layer gets bonded and effectively becomes a part of the metal. The company will apply \’Solar Black\’, to the outer titanium sheet of the probe\’s multi layered heatshield
• Solar Black is a type of black calcium phosphate that is developed from burnt bone charcoal.
• Further Reading / In the News
• ESA\’s Solar Probe to be Protected Using Prehistoric Cave Pigment | ScienceWorldReport.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Billion Star Map

• A new European spacecraft tasked with mapping a billion stars in the night sky has beamed its first picture back to Earth.
• Gaia Spacecraft
• Gaia launched into space on Dec. 19 and it will spend five years studying the precise positions, motions and properties of 1 billion stars in the Milky Way
• It will measure physical characteristics of the stars, including their brightness, temperature and chemical makeup, with the goal of creating the most accurate 3D map to date of our home galaxy
• Gaia has two telescopes that can stare out at two different patches of the sky simultaneously that feed data to the camera
• The camera, is the highest-resolution image sensor ever flown in space with about 1 billion pixels.
• Gaia will measure an average of 2 million stars per hour, or about 50 gigabytes of data each day and will eventually compile more than million gigabytes of data (about 200,000 fully loaded DVDs)
• Of Note
• The first test image only covers an area less than 1 percent of Gaia\’s full field of view
• Although it will be able to capture all one billion of its targets during its first six months in operation, the spacecraft will measure each of its stars an average of 70 times throughout the course of its five-year mission
• Counting 1 star a second it would take around 31 years 8 months.
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Inside Gaia\’s billion-pixel camera | European Space Agency, ESA
• Further Reading / In the News
• ESA Science & Technology: Gaia
• Europe\’s Billion-Star Mapping Spacecraft Snaps 1st Photo | Space.com

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

China’s Lunar Yutu Rover

• Last Time on SciByte …
• sciByte 111 | Yutu Launch | Memories & International Spacecraft | December 3, 2013
• SciByte 113 | Yutu Landing | Aquifers & Brain Plasticity | December 17, 2013
• SciByte 115 | Yutu Wakes Up on Second Lunar Day | Sleep Apnea & Heart Defect Treatments | January 14, 2014
• The Malfunction
• As night fell on Jan. 25, the rover entered its second two week long period of dormancy just as the rover “experienced a mechanical control abnormality,” according to a report by China’s official government newspaper, The People’s Daily.
• The cause of the pre-hibernation malfunction may perhaps be traced back to a buildup of abrasive lunar dust, but no one knows at this time.
• At that time experts were concerned that it might not be able to survive the extremely low temperatures during the lunar night
• Each lunar day and night lasts for alternating periods of 14 Earth days
• During each long night, the Moon’s temperatures plunge dramatically to below minus 180 Celsius, or minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit
• Failure to Call Home
• On Monday, Feb. 10, when daylight returned to the rovers Moon landing site at Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains) at the start of what would have been Lunar Day 3 for the mission.
• At the time it was thought that Yutu froze to death due to a pre-hibernation mechanical malfunction and failed to wake up and communicate with China’s mission controllers
• The rover was reported to have been lost after it failed to communicate with Chinese mission controllers, and various media outlets around the world filed an obituary for the lunar rover after Xinhua reported its alleged death
• The apparently unfortunate and sad breaking news was reported in an ultra brief dispatch by the English language version of Chinadaily – with the headline “Loss of lunar rover.”
• Signals Found
• On Feb. 12 amateur radio operators at UHF-satcom reported detection of a signal from Yutu.
• On Feb 13 China\’s state news agency, Xinhua, reported that the rover had recovered from its previous non-responsive state and is now fully awake and able to receive signals | China\’s lunar program spokesman Pei Zhaoyu told Xinhua
• On Feb 10th some nice signals were detected from the Lunar Lander but nothing from the Lunar Rover, at that time several news outlets report that the Rover has had a failure after its Lunar sleep, and that it was not expected to become alive again
• The radio group UHF Satcom thought that it was thought possible to hear any command uplink signals and searched for the various downlink frequencies for signs of life from the \’dead\’ Lunar Lander
• On Feb 12th there was no evidence that a communications session with the Lunar Lander was not progressing and nothing was heard
• They did however reveal another huge signal, this time an uplink to the Lunar Rover – China was attempting to talk it back into life
• Immediately the dual band converter was switched and to everyone\’s surprise, the Lunar Rover was in full chat mode, the Rover had survived and was not dead after all
• On Feb 13 China\’s state news agency, Xinhua, reported that the rover had recovered from its previous non-responsive state and is now fully awake and able to receive signals | China\’s lunar program spokesman Pei Zhaoyu told Xinhua
• Further Reading / In the News
• China\’s Jade Rabbit Lunar Rover Comes Back to Life After Malfunction | ScienceWorldReport.com
• UHF-Satcom.com – Chang\’e 3 & Yutu reception
• Earth Bids China\’s Yutu Moon Rover Farewell Forever! | UniverseToday.com
• China\’s Yutu Moon Rover Alive and Awake for 3rd Lunar Day of Exploration despite Malfunction | UniverseToday.com

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• Traversing the Sand Dune Video
• Curiosity reached the eastern side of a dune on Jan. 30 and returned images that the rover team is using to guide decisions about upcoming drives
• NASA\’s Curiosity Mars rover is continuing its traverse toward enticing science destinations after climbing over a dune spanning a gap in a ridge.
• They have now released an animated sequence of images from the low-slung Hazard-Avoidance Camera on the rear of the vehicle documents the up-then-down crossing of the dune
• Multimedia
• Animated Sequence | Traversing the Sand Dune
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News
• Mars Science Laboratory: NASA\’s Curiosity Drives On After Crossing Martian Dune | mars.jpl.nasa.gov

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• Feb 20, 1937 : 77 years ago : Car airplane : The first a successful automobile-airplane combination was complete and ready for testing.The first flight took place the next day, 21 Feb 1937. Built by the Westerman Arrowplane Corporation of Santa Monica, Cal., the vehicle was dubbed the Arrowbile, and claimed a top airspeed of 120 mph and 70 mph on a highway. Designed by aeroengineer Waldo Dean Waterman (1894-1976), it evolved from the prototype Arrowplane, a project to design a simple, easy to fly, low cost airplane. The Studebaker Corporation, which supplied the 100 hp engines, eventually took delivery of five Arrowbiles

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Wed, February 19 | after 11pm | Around the time the Moon rises in the in the E-SE you will be able to see Mars and Spica to its right
• Thurs, February 20 | dawn | The waning Moon will be in the south with Saturn to its left. Off to their right are Mars and Spica
• Planets
• Venus | Is visible before and during dawn to the SE. It\’s at its brightest this week.
• Mars | 10-11pm | Rises in the SE, with Spica 5-6* to its right. The two are their highest point about 1.5 hours before dawn with Spica now to the lower right
• Jupiter | Is high southeast in early evening, crosses nearly overhead (for skywatchers at mid-northern latitudes) around 8 or 9 p.m. and sets in the West before dawn
• Saturn | 12-1 am | Rises around midnight or 1 a.m. and is highest in the south at the beginning of dawn. By then it\’s far to the left of Mars and Spica
• Morning / Evening
• Morning | 1.5 hours pre dawn, Mars/Spica high in the S. Venus is rising in the SE with Jupiter setting in the W

• Evening | Jupiter rises in the SE

• Further Reading and Resources

• Sky&Telescope
• SpaceWeather.com
• StarDate.org
• For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au
• Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org
• Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz
• AstronomyNow
• HeavensAbove

The post Canadian Fossils & Yutu Rover | SciByte 120 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We take a look at treating a gunshot wound in 15 sec, fatigue and light, a new Martian crater, the Olympic torch, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Sealing a Gunshot Wound in 15 sec

• When a soldier is shot on the battlefield a medic must pack gauze directly into the wound cavity
• A startup called RevMedx, a small group of veterans, scientists, and engineers are working on a better way to stop bleeding
• XStat
• XStat is a modified syringe that injects specially coated sponges into wound faster and more efficiently than gauze.
• Early efforts were inspired by Fix-a-Flat foam for repairing tires
• After seeing early prototypes, the U.S. Army gave the team $5 million to develop a finished product
• The final material would need to be sterile, biocompatible, and fast-expanding
• The team settled on a sponge made from wood pulp and coated with chitosan, a blood-clotting, antimicrobial substance that comes from shrimp shells
• In just 15 seconds, they expand to fill the entire wound cavity, creating enough pressure to stop heavy bleeding
• A tricky part was getting the sponges into a wound, they needed a lightweight, compact way to get the sponges deep into an injury
• To ensure that no sponges would be left inside the body accidentally, they added X-shaped markers that make each sponge visible on an x-ray image.
• Applicator
• A 30 mm-diameter, [1.2 in] polycarbonate syringe that stores with the handle inside to save space
• To use the applicator, a medic pulls out the handle, inserts the cylinder into the wound, and then pushes the plunger back down to inject the sponges as close to the artery as possible.
• Three single-use XStat applicators would replace five bulky rolls of gauze in a medic’s kit
• RevMedx also designed a smaller version of the applicator, with a diameter of 12 mm, for narrower injuries
• Each XStat will likely cost about $100, Steinbaugh says, but the price may go down as RevMedx boosts manufacturing
• The Future
• When RevMedx submitted its application to the FDA, the U.S. Army attached a cover letter requesting expedited approval
• In the future, RevMedx hopes to create biodegradable sponges that don’t have to be removed from the body
• They are also working on an applicator that could cover large by using expanding gauze made of the same material as XStat sponges
• Further Reading / In the News
• How A Simple New Invention Seals A Gunshot Wound In 15 Seconds | Popular Science

— NEWS BYTE —

Blue Light

• According to researchers they\’ve found that exposure to short wavelength, or blue light, during the day can improve alertness and overall performance.
• Previous research has shown that blue light is able to improve alertness during the night, but new data demonstrates that these effects also extend to daytime
• The Study
• Researchers measured wavelengths of light that were most effective in warding off fatigue via the development of specialized light equipment
• They compared the effects of blue light exposure to an equal amount of green light on alertness and performance in 16 study participants for 6.5 hours over a day.
• Participants were rated based on how they felt through reaction times that measured electrodes to assess changes going on in the brain due to light exposure.
• Results
• Results showed that participants exposed to blue light consistently rated themselves as less sleepy with quicker reaction times and fewer attention relapses.
• They also showed changes in brain activity patterns that indicated a more alert state.
• The Future
• This opens up a new range of possibilities for using light to improve human alertness, productivity and safety by
  helping to improve alertness in day shift workers in addition to night workers
• A better quality lighting that would not only help them see better but also make them more alert
• The next big challenge is to determine how to deliver better lighting in many places such as schools, homes and workplaces that could provide a more productive and alert atmosphere.
• Further Reading / In the News
• Could Blue Light Help Fight Fatigue? Study | ScienceWorldReport.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

New Mars Crater

• Researchers used HiRISE to examine a site after the orbiter\’s Context Camera had revealed a change in appearance here between observations in July 2010 and May 2012
• Before-and-after imaging that brackets appearance dates of fresh craters on Mars has indicated that impacts producing craters at least 12.8 feet (3.9 meters) in diameter occur at a rate exceeding 200 per year globally
• The impact crater dominates the image taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA\’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Nov. 19, 2013.
• It shows a 30-meter-wide crater with a rayed blast zone and far-flung surrounding secondary material and debris as far as 15 kilometers [9.3 miles] in distance.
• In examining ejecta distribution, scientists can learn more about the impact event
• Also Seen By
• Michael Thalleen ‏@ThalleenM
• Further Reading / In the News
• Space Images: A Spectacular New Martian Impact Crater – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory | jpl.nasa.gov
• Brand New Impact Crater Shows Up on Mars | UniverseToday.com

— Updates —

Olympic Torch

• Last Time On SciByte …
• SciByte 109 | ‘Earth-Like’ Planets & Sharks | November 12, 2013
• Olympic Torch in Space
• Ever since the first relay for the 1936 summer Olympic games in Berlin, Olympic torches have traditionally been used to carry a burning flame from Greece to the host country’s stadium
• On Nov. 6, 2013 (Nov. 7 UT) a Soyuz TMA-11M rocket launched with the Expedition 38/39 crew on the ISS and an Olympic torch
• The Olympic Torch was taken on a space walk for the first time on Nov 9, 2013 handed off from one cosmonaut to the other in a symbolic relay in orbit [the torch was not lit during its time aboard the ISS or, obviously, while in space]
• The real reason for the spacewalk is to do some routine Russian maintenance outside the station
• The ISS travels around the Earth 16 times each day, and the torch spent nearly four days in space [~64 orbits]
• That particular torch
• The torch was given back to Olympic officials and was the one used to light the 2014 Olympic cauldron during the Opening Ceremony in Sochi on Feb. 7.
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Raw: Spacewalkers Hand Off Olympic Torch | AssociatedPress
• Further Reading / In the News
• The Olympic Torch That Went Around the World… Literally | UniverseToday.com

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• Traversing Sand Dunes
• Image of Wheel
• Up close view of hole in one of rover Curiosity\’s six wheels caused by recent driving over rough Martian rocks.
• Mosaic assembled from Mastcam raw images taken on Dec. 22, 2013 (Sol 490).
• Credit: NASA/JPL/MSSS/Ken Kremer – kenkremer.com/Marco Di Lorenzo
• Sand Dune
• Curiosity reached the eastern side of a dune on Jan. 30 and returned images that the rover team is using to guide decisions about upcoming drives
• Before giving the go ahead to move forward, engineers took a few days to carefully assess the dune’s integrity and physical characteristics
• Curiosity was able to pass over the dune in Dingo Gap without difficulty
• The rovers science instruments and cameras to insure there wasn’t the potential to get irretrievably stuck in a deep sand trap.
• The team even commanded Curiosity to carry out a toe dip by gently rolling the 20 inch (50 cm) diameter wheels back and forth over the crest on Tuesday, Feb. 4 to insure it was safe to mount
• Previous Images of Earth
• NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit imaged Earth from the surface in March 2004, soon after landing
• Mars Global Surveyor in 2003 and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2007
• NASA’s Cassini orbiter at Saturn captured the Earth and Moon in 2013
• Earth Images
• New images from NASA\’s Curiosity Mars rover show Earth shining brighter than any star in the Martian night sky and it even includes our moon, just below Earth
• The images, taken on Jan. 31, 2014 about 80 minutes after sunset, used both of her high resolution color mast mounted cameras to collect the series of Earth/Moon images
• The distance between Earth and Mars when Curiosity took the photo was about 99 million miles (160 million kilometers).
• “A human observer with normal vision, if standing on Mars, could easily see Earth and the moon as two distinct, bright “evening stars,” said NASA
• Multimedia
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News
• Curiosity Crosses Dingo Gap Dune – Gateway to Valley and Mountain Destinations Beyond | UniverseToday.com
• Mars Science Laboratory: NASA Mars Rover Curiosity Sees \’Evening Star\’ Earth | mars.jpl.nasa.gov
• Mars Science Laboratory: NASA Mars Rover Curiosity Sees \’Evening Star\’ Earth | mars.jpl.nasa.gov

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• Feb 15, 2013 : 1 year ago : Chelyabinsk Meteor : A meteor exploded in the sky over Chelyabinsk , Russia. It produced a shock wave so intense that about 1,000 people were reported injured, mostly by flying glass fragments. To view the meteor streaking across the sky, many people were at their windows when the sonic boom shattered the glass panes. The meteor was estimated to be 2 meters in diameter, with a mass of about 10 tons. It entered the Earth\’s atmosphere at a hypersonic speed of at least 33,000 mph when it was viewed by residents of Chelyabinsk (a city of 1 million about 930 miles east of Moscow) at about 9:20 am local time, just after sunrise. They saw a thick, white contrail and an intense flash of light ending with a loud thundering sound as the shattering of the meteor blew apart with several kilotons of energy (equivalent to an atomic bomb)
• YouTube | Meteorite crash in Russia: Video of meteor explosion that stirred panic in Urals region | RT
• Last Time on SciByte
• SciByte 82 | Meteorites & Asteroids | February 19, 2013
• SciByte 83 | Tiny Exo-planet & Medical Glue | February 26, 2013
• SciByte 84 | HIV & SpaceX Troubles | March 5, 2013

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Friday, February 14 | Full Moon (exactly full at 6:53 p.m. EST). Regulus in constellation Leo to the Moon\’s left during evening. You might be able to see part of Leo that looks like a backwards question mark, with Regulus being the period
• Planets
• Venus | Dawn | \”Morning Star\” in the SE
• Mars | ~10-11 pm | Spica, blue giant variable star, 5* to it\’s left. They are highest in the sky around 3-4am, with Spica now to the lower right. [5* ~ 3 middle fingers held at arms length
• Jupiter | Early evening | Eastern Sky, crossing overhead around 9pm and setting in the W before dawn

• Saturn | ~1am | Rises in the E-SE, moves to its highest in the S at dawn.

• Further Reading and Resources

• Sky&Telescope
• SpaceWeather.com
• StarDate.org
• For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au
• Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org
• Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz
• AstronomyNow
• HeavensAbove

The post Medical Tech & Martian Crater | SciByte 119 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We take a look at a new dinosaur discovery, a synthetic monopole, strong glass, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes:

New Titanosaurs Discovery in China

• Paleontologists has characterized a new dinosaur based on fossil remains found in northwestern China
• The species, a plant-eating sauropod named Yongjinglong datangi, roamed during the Early Cretaceous period, more than 100 million years ago
• This Discovery
• At roughly 50-60 feet long, the Yongjinglong individual discovered was a medium-sized Titanosaur, anatomical evidence, however, points to it being a juvenile; adults may have been larger.
• An unfused portion of the shoulder blade indicated to the researchers that the animal under investigation was a juvenile or subadult, a full-grown adult might be larger than this 50-60 foot long individual
• Unique Characteristics
• The shoulder blade was nearly 2 meters [6 ft], with sides that were nearly parallel, unlike many other Titanosaurs whose scapulae bow outward
• The scapula was so long, indeed, that it did not appear to fit in the animal\’s body, if placed in a horizontal or vertical orientation.
• This suggest the bone must have been oriented at an angle of 50 degrees from the horizontal.
• **Anatomical Features ***
• The anatomical features of the bones bear some resemblance to another Titanosaur that had been discovered by paleontologists in China in 1929
• The ulna and radius were well preserved, enough so that the researchers could identify grooves and ridges they believe correspond with the locations of muscle attachments in the dinosaur\’s leg
• The vertebrae had large cavities in the interior that the team believes provided space for air sacs in the dinosaur\’s body
• It\’s believed that dinosaurs, like birds, had air sacs in their trunk, abdominal cavity and neck as a way of lightening the body
• The longest tooth they found was nearly 15 centimeters long
• **Titanosaurs **
• The discovery point to the fact that Titanosaurs encompass a diverse group of dinosaurs,
• It was once thought that sauropods dominated herbivorous dinosaur fauna during the Jurassic but became almost extinct during the Cretaceous
• In other parts of the world, particularly in South America and Asia, sauropod dinosaurs continued to flourish in the Cretaceous
• Further Reading / In the News
• Dinosaur fossils from China help researchers describe new \’Titan\’ | ScienceDaily

— NEWS BYTE —

Synthetic Monopole

• Physicists predicted the possibility of magnetic monopoles nearly 85 years, now scientists have identified and photographed synthetic magnetic monopoles
• The groundbreaking accomplishment paves the way for the detection of the particles in nature
• \”The creation of a synthetic magnetic monopole should provide us with unprecedented insight into aspects of the natural magnetic monopole-if indeed it exists,\” | Physics Professor David S. Hall \’91 and Aalto University (Finland)
• Magnetic Monopole
• Ordinarily, magnetic poles come in pairs: they have both a north pole and a south pole
• A magnetic monopole is a magnetic particle possessing only a single, isolated pole-a north pole without a south pole, or vice versa
• In 1931, a pater was published that explored the nature of these monopoles in the context of quantum mechanics
• Despite extensive experimental searches since then, in everything from lunar samples-moon rock-to ancient fossilized minerals, no observation of a naturally-occurring magnetic monopole has yet been confirmed
• The Investigation
• The team adopted an innovative approach to investigating
• An artificial magnetic field generated by a Bose-Einstein condensate, an extremely cold atomic gas tens of billionths of a degree warmer than absolute zero.
• The team relied upon theoretical work that suggested a particular sequence of changing external magnetic fields could lead to the creation of the synthetic monopole
• Their experiments subsequently took place in the atomic refrigerator built in a basement laboratory in the Merrill Science Center
• After resolving many technical challenges, the team was rewarded with photographs that confirmed the monopoles\’ presence at the ends of tiny quantum whirlpools within the ultracold gas.
• **What It Means To Science*
• Modern interest in the concept stems from particle theories, notably the grand unified and superstring theories, which predict their existence
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Making Monopoles – Synthetic Magnetic Monopole Finally Observed | Aalto University
• Further Reading / In the News
• Physicists create synthetic magnetic monopole predicted more than 80 years ago | Phys.org
• Magnetic monopole | Wikipedia

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Super Glass

• Engineers intrigued by the toughness of mollusc shells, which are composed of brittle minerals, have found inspiration in their structure to make glass 200 times stronger than a standard pane
• What Has Been Tried So Far
• Previous attempts to copy the sturdy structure of mollusc shells had focused on creating new materials by assembling miniscule \”building blocks\”-like building a microscopic wall
• The shiny, inner shell layer of some molluscs, known as nacre or mother of pearl, is some 3,000 times tougher than the minerals it is made of
• Cracks Make it Stronger?
• The glass is strengthened by introducing a network of microscopic cracks, the secret lies in the fact that the minerals are bound together into a larger, tougher unit.
• The binding means the shell contains abundant tiny fault lines called interfaces, in practice it is a masterful deflector of external pressure.
• The glass could absorb impacts better-yielding and bending slightly instead of shattering
• The team used a 3D laser to engrave microscopic fissures into glass slides, filled them with a polymer, and found it made them 200 times tougher
• The engraved glass can \”stretch\” by almost five percent before snapping-compared to a strain capacity of only 0.1 percent for standard glass
• The stronger glass may find application in bullet-proof windows, glasses, or even smartphone screens
• Further Reading / In the News
• Mollusc shells inspire super-glass | Phys.org

Mirror Image Scratching

• A study of mirrors and the tricks they can play on the mind has led to a finding that people scratching a mirror image of an arm instead of the one that truly itches, can provide some relief
• Other experiments that have shown that the use of mirrors can cause strange behavior in people
• The Study
• 26 healthy male volunteers who agreed to participate in their study
• All of the volunteers were injected on the underside of their forearms with a chemical known to cause a certain amount of itching
• It also causes a small red bump to appear. Each of the volunteers had a similar looking dot printed in the same location on their other arm
• The experiment consisted of scratching each of the volunteers individually on the actual injection site and on the site of the non-injected red mark on the other arm then asking them as to whether the scratching provided any relief
• Using Mirrors
• None of the volunteers reported receiving any relief from the scratching on the non-injected arm and all reported relief from scratching on the read injection site.
• Next, all of the volunteers were placed individually in a position with a mirror between their arms-the arm with the chemical injection was hidden from view-the reflection of the other arm took its place.
• Once in place, the volunteers were asked to focus their attention on the red dot on their arm-the one drawn there by the researchers-as the researchers once again scratched both of the red marks
• After this all of the volunteers reported some degree of relief from the itching when the non-injected spot was scratched, and also, of course when the real site was scratched, despite it being out of their view.
• What It Means
• The amount of relief felt on the non-injected site wasn\’t equal to the real site, of course-all told it amounted to approximately 25 percent of the real deal
• This indicates, the researchers claim, that visual cues can oftentimes override information from other senses when there is conflicting information.
• Further Reading / In the News
• Study shows mirror image scratching offers some relief | MedicalXPress

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• The team operating NASA\’s Mars rover Curiosity is considering a path across a small sand dune to reach a favorable route to science destinations
• Wheel Wear and Tear
• A favorable route would skirt some terrain with sharp rocks considered more likely to poke holes in the rover\’s aluminum wheels
• There has been an accumulation of punctures and rips in the wheels accelerated in the fourth quarter of 2013
• Some of the wheel damage may result from the force of rear wheels pushing middle or front wheels against sharp rocks, rather than simply the weight of the rover driving over the rocks
• Much like rolling your wheeled luggage over a curb, you can feel the difference between trying to push it over the curb or pull it over the curb
• Precautions
• The team now drives the rover with added precautions, thoroughly checks the condition of Curiosity\’s wheels frequently, and is evaluating routes and driving methods that could avoid some wheel damage
• To prepare for destinations farther ahead, engineers are using a test rover at JPL to check the rover\’s ability to tolerate slight slippage on slopes while using its drill
• With the drill bit in a rock, tests simulating slips of up to about 2 inches (5 centimeters) have not caused damage
• Other testing at JPL is evaluating possible driving techniques that might help reduce the rate of wheel punctures, such as driving backwards or using four-wheel drive instead of six-wheel drive.
• The Dune Route
• A candidate drilling site lies about half a mile (800 meters / 0.5 mi) away by straight line, but considerably farther by any of the driving routes assessed, the area is appealing because we can see terrain units unlike any that Curiosity has visited so far.
• A dune about 1 meter [3 feet] high spans the gap between two scarps that might be a gateway to a southwestward route over relatively smooth ground
• Other routes have also been evaluated for getting Curiosity from the rover\’s current location to a candidate drilling site
• Curiosity reached the eastern side of the dune on Jan. 30 and returned images that the rover team is using to guide decisions about upcoming drives
• Multimedia
• YouTube Curiosity Rover Report JPLnews
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News
• Mars Science Laboratory: NASA Mars Rover\’s View of Possible Westward Route | mars.jpl.nasa.gov
• Mars Science Laboratory: Curiosity Mars Rover Checking Possible Smoother Route | mars.jpl.nasa.gov

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• Feb 11, 1801 : 231 years ago : Ceres observation interruption : Giuseppe Piazzi made a 24th observation of the position of Ceres, the asteroid he discovered between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, on 1 Jan 1801. It was the first and largest of the dwarf planets now known. After this, it moved into the light of the Sun, and was lost to view for most of the rest of the year. To mathematically relocate Ceres, Carl Gauss, age 24, took up the challenge to calculate its orbital path, based on the limited number of observations available. His method was tedious, requiring 100 hours of calculation. He began with a rough approximation for the unknown orbit, and then used it to produce a refinement, which became the subject of another improvement.. And so on. Astronomers using them found his results in close agreement as they located Ceres again 25 Nov-31 Dec 1801
• Kepler had already noticed the gap between Mars and Jupiter in 1596. In 1772, it first suggested that an undiscovered planet could exist between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter Giuseppe Piazzi at the Academy of Palermo discovered Ceres on 1 January 1801. While he was looking for a star, Piazzi had found a moving star-like object, which he first thought was a comet. Piazzi observed Ceres a total of 24 times, the final time on 11 February 1801, when illness interrupted his observations. The information about his discovery was published in the September 1801 Ceres (dwarf planet) | Wikipedia

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Thursday, February 6 | First-quarter Moon
• Saturday, February 8 | Evening Twilight | Below the Moon stands Orion
• Planets
• Mercury | Evening Twilight | Low in the west-southwest, fading rapidly
• Venus | Dawn | In the SE
• Mars | Around 11 p.m | Rising in the E, it\’s about 4* or 5* from lesser Spica, blue giant variable star, to its lower right. They are highest in the south around 4 a.m., with Spica now under Mars. [5* is roughly the same distance as your 3 middle fingers held at arms length]
• Jupiter | Early Evening | Rises in the E, moving to nearly overhead (for mid-northern observers) around 9 or 10 p.m then moving towards the W as you near morning

• Saturn | 1-2 a.m. | Rises in the ESE, it moves to the high S skies to the far left of Mars and Spica at dawn

• Further Reading and Resources

• Sky&Telescope
• Astronomy Essentials | EarthSky
• SpaceWeather.com
• StarDate.org
• For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au
• Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org
• Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz
• AstronomyNow
• HeavensAbove

The post Titanosaurus & Monopoles | SciByte 118 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We take a look at water vapor on a Dwarf Planet, driverless taxis, evening smartphone use, sensors in football helmets, spacecraft updates, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes:

Water on a Dwarf Planet in the Asteroid Belt

• Scientists have made the first definitive detection of water vapor on the largest and roundest object in the asteroid belt, Ceres.
• Plumes of water vapor are thought to shoot up periodically from Ceres when portions of its icy surface warm slightly
• A Viewer Also Pointed Out This Story
• Michael Thalleen ‏@ThalleenM
• Ceres
• Ceres was known as the largest asteroid in our solar system
• When it first was spotted in 1801, astronomers thought it was a planet orbiting between Mars and Jupiter
• The materials making up Ceres likely date from the first few million years of our solar system\’s existence and accumulated before the planets formed.
• The International Astronomical Union is the governing organization responsible for naming planetary objects reclassified it as a dwarf planet, a solar system body bigger than an asteroid and smaller than a planet.
• They reclassified Ceres as a dwarf planet because of its large size. It is roughly 590 miles (950 kilometers) in diameter
• Until now, ice had been theorized to exist on Ceres but had not been detected conclusively
• NASA\’s Dawn Mission
• Is on its way to Ceres now after spending more than a year orbiting the large asteroid Vesta is scheduled to arrive at Ceres in the spring of 2015, where it will take the closest look ever at its surface.
• There it will map the geology and chemistry of the surface in high resolution
• Intermediate Water Vapor
• Scientists used far-infrared vision to see, finally, a clear spectral signature of the water vapor, but they did not see water vapor every time it looked
• They were able to see the water vapor four different times, on one occasion there was no signature
• What scientists now think is happening is when Ceres swings through the part of its orbit that is closer to the sun, a portion of its icy surface becomes warm enough to cause water vapor to escape in plumes
• When Ceres is in the colder part of its orbit, no water escapes
• The strength of the signal also varied over hours, weeks and months, with water vapor plumes rotating in and out of Herschel\’s views as the object spun on its axis
• This enabled the scientists to localize the source of water to two darker spots on the surface of Ceres
• Previously seen by NASA\’s Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes, the dark spots might be more likely to outgas because dark material warms faster than light material.
• Dwarf Planets, Asteroids and Comets
• \”This is the first time water vapor has been unequivocally detected on Ceres or any other object in the asteroid belt and provides proof that Ceres has an icy surface and an atmosphere,\” | Michael Küppers of ESA in Spain
• Scientists now believe Ceres contains rock in its interior with a thick mantle of ice that, if melted, would amount to more freshwater than is present on all of Earth
• \”The lines are becoming more and more blurred between comets and asteroids\” | Seungwon Lee of JPL
• \”We knew before about main belt asteroids that show comet-like activity, but this is the first detection of water vapor in an asteroid-like object.\” | Paul von Allmen, JPL
• Further Reading / In the News
• Telescope spies water plumes on dwarf planet Ceres | Phys.org
• Herschel Discovers Water Vapor Spewing from Ceres | UniverseToday.com

— NEWS BYTE —

Driverless Taxis

• Driverless taxis will be carrying passengers during demonstration projects in five European cities as of February 2014
• EU-funded CityMobil2 project, is one of a number of research initiatives that are testing out specially designed self-driving road vehicles as the technology required to navigate them becomes cheaper and more reliable
• Visual Odometry
• Cybercars have traditionally sensed the world through expensive gyroscopes, microwaves and laser beams
• Currently, cheap cameras and fast image-recognition algorithms has led to a new technique known as visual odometry
• Visual odometry uses images to look at the terrain before and after a small drive step
• By tracking specific features they can tell how far they have moved, the position and orientation of the vehicle.
• Sound Familiar? Curiosity Rover is using the same technology for some of it\’s automated driving
• SciByte 103 | Martian Methane & Deep Impact | September 24, 2013
• V-Charge Project
• Car manufacturers are already making automated piloting features of their own – radar-based cruise control, anti-braking systems (ABS) and lane-control assistance
• Cables and hydraulic pressure valves which previously linked the controls of the vehicle to its working parts are gradually being replaced with electronic circuits
• The V-Charge Project is a consortium of companies and universities which is working on fully automated low-speed driving in cities using only cameras and other low-cost sensors mounted on standard cars
• The consortium is working to produce detailed maps and a perception system that allows a vehicle to recognize its location and identify nearby pedestrians and vehicles, all using only stereoscopic or fisheye cameras.
• The team has taken this a step further, pioneering a guidance system that works economically by using a single camera.
• How Soon is Soon?
• While companies such as Google see autonomous cars in a couple of decades the people with the CityMobil2 project think that they could be hitting the road sooner than that
• The team believes that, in addition to teaching cars to respond autonomously to traffic conditions, traffic should be adapted to automated cars
• In their current state of development, cybercars can already drive safely in pedestrian areas and designated lanes
• The first CityMobil project shuttled passengers across the car park of London Heathrow airport in a fleet of driverless pods
• CityMobil2, now brings specially designed automated vehicles to designated roads inside the city centre
• Future Plans
• The project plans to procure two sets of automated vehicles which will tour five cities in a series of demonstration projects each lasting six to eight months
• Investors are at present deterred by their high initial investment and perceived risks.
• CityMobil2 is bringing together experts from ministries in each member state to agree on technical requirements by the time the project concludes in 2016 that could feed into a future European directive on the issue
• Further Reading / In the News
• Driverless Taxis in European Cities from 2014 | ScienceWorldRepoer.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Nighttime Smartphone Use

• In a pair of studies surveying a broad spectrum of U.S. workers found that people who monitored their smart phones for business purposes after 9 p.m. were more tired and were less engaged the following day on the job.
• Productivity and Sleep
• More than half of U.S. adults own a smartphone and many consider the devices to be among the most important tools ever invented when it comes to increasing productivity of knowledge-based work
• The National Sleep Foundation says only 40 percent of Americans get enough sleep on most nights a commonly cited reason is smartphone usage for work.
• The Studies
• The first study, the researchers had 82 upper-level managers complete multiple surveys every day for two weeks.
• The second study surveyed 161 employees daily in a variety of occupations — from nursing to manufacturing and from accounting to dentistry
• They showed that nighttime smartphone usage for business purposes cut into sleep and sapped workers\’ energy the next day in the office
• The second study also compared smartphone usage to other electronic devices and found that smartphones had a larger negative effect than watching television and using laptop and tablet computers
• In addition to keeping people mentally engaged at night, smartphones emit \”blue light\”
• Blue light is the most disruptive of all colors of light and is known to hinder melatonin, a chemical in the body that promotes sleep
• Nighttime use of smartphones appears to have both psychological and physiological effects on people\’s ability to sleep and on sleep\’s essential recovery functions
• Johnson, MSU assistant professor of management
• \”There may be times in which putting off work until the next day would have disastrous consequences and using your smartphone is well worth the negative effects on less important tasks the next day,\”
• \”But on many other nights, more sleep may be your best bet.\”
• Further Reading / In the News
• Nighttime smartphone use zaps workers\’ energy | ScienceDaily.com

Football Helmet Safety Tech

• The CDC estimates that between the 1.6 million and 3.8 million Americans suffer sports-related concussions every year, these concussions occur after what seems like a pretty mild blow to the head
• In football, the risk of concussion has been a hot-button issue
• Sensors
• Sensors within helmets can catch what human eyes often miss, alerting people on the sidelines that a player may need to be taken out of play and screened for a concussion
• Jake Merrell, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at Brigham Young University created a smart foam that works within football helmets to measure how hard a player just got hit
• Motion sensors transmit data wirelessly to a tablet or computer when the foam in the helmet is compressed by the player\’s head, measuring the force and acceleration of the impact.
• What\’s Out Now
• The helmet manufacturer Riddell debuted a similar concussion-alert product this year, called the InSite Impact Response System which is being used by some high school teams in the 2013 season.
• Sensors inside the player\’s helmet lining measure the severity of a head impact and send an alert to the sidelines if a player has sustained a potentially concussion-inducing hit
• Although this system only works in Riddell\’s Revolution Speed helmet so far.
• What\’s Next
• \”A coach will know within seconds exactly how hard their player just got hit\” | Jake Merrell, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at Brigham Young University
• He plans to submit his project to the Head Health Challenge sponsored by GE and the NFL
• Further Reading / In the News
• Smart Foam In Football Helmets Measures Impact Of Each Hit | Popular Science

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

Chinese Lander, Chang’e 3, Panorama

• Color of the Lunar Soil
• The lander beamed back a series of new photos taken with its panoramic camera. stitched together, they give us a more detailed and colorful look of the rover’s surroundings in northern Mare Imbrium
• Color images of the moon’s surface by the Apollo astronauts along with their verbal descriptions indicate a uniform gray color punctuated in rare spots by patches of more colorful soils
• Apollo visited six different moonscapes – all essentially gray
• One thing that stands out is the brown color of the lunar surface soil or regolith, it\’s possible that it is simply that the color balance in the Chinese images might be off. Or did Chang’e 3 just happen to land on browner soils
• Multimedia
• The six wheeled Yutu rover, which means ‘Jade Rabbit’, has “experienced a mechanical control abnormality” in a new report by China’s official government newspaper, The People’s Daily
• ‘Jade Rabbit’ was traversing southwards from the landing site as the incident occurred just days ago – about six weeks into its planned 3 month moon roving expedition
• Very few details have emerged or been released by the Chinese government about Yutu’s condition or fate
• The abnormality occurred due to the “complicated lunar surface environment,” said the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence
• Based on unofficial accounts, it appears that one of the solar panels did not fold back properly over Yutu’s mast after it was lowered to the required horizontal position into a warmed box to shield and protect it from the extremely frigid lunar night time temperatures
• This could potentially spell doom for the mast mounted instruments and electronic systems, including the color and navigation cameras and the high gain antenna, if true
• The event took place just prior to the beginning of the 2nd lunar night and ‘dormancy’ for both ‘Jade Rabbit’ and the Chang’e-3 each Lunar night also lasts approximately 14 Earth days
• There is no communication possible during sleep mode, no one will know until the resumption of daylight some two weeks from now – around Feb. 8 to 9.
• Further Reading / In the News
• Yutu rover Suffers Significant Setback at Start of 2nd Lunar Night | UniverseToday.com+ Chang\’e 3 Lander Beams Back New Lunar Panorama Photos | UniverseToday.com

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• Comet C/2013 A1 Siding Spring
• On Oct. 19, 2014 comet C/2013 A1 Siding Spring will buzz Mars about 10 times closer than any identified comet has ever flown past Earth
• Spacecraft at Mars might get a good look at the nucleus of comet Siding Spring as it heads toward the closest approach, roughly 86,000 miles (138,000 kilometers) from the planet
• Dust particles that the comet nucleus sheds this spring could threaten orbiting spacecraft at Mars in October
• The level of risk won\’t be known for months, but NASA is already evaluating possible precautionary measures as it prepares for studying the comet
• Observations of comet Siding Spring are planned using resources on Earth, orbiting Earth, on Mars and orbiting Mars, and some are already underway
• Infrared imaging reveals a comet that is active and dusty, even though still nearly three-fourths as far from the sun as Jupiter is
• Comet Viewing Experience
• Researchers using spacecraft at Mars gained experience at trying to observe comet ISON approached Mars
• That flyby distance was about 80 times farther than Siding Spring\’s will be
• The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA\’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter could provide imagery with resolution of dozens of pixels across the diameter of the nucleus, when HiRISE observed comet ISON, the nucleus was less than one pixel across
• Cameras on the Mars rovers Curiosity and Opportunity might watch for meteors in the sky that would be an indication of the abundance of particles in the comet\’s tail, though the geometry of the flyby would put most of the meteors in daytime sky instead of dark sky
• The degree to which Siding Spring brightens this spring will be an indicator of how much hazard it will present to spacecraft at Mars
• The path the nucleus will take is now known fairly well. The important unknowns are how much dust will come off the nucleus, when it will come off, and the geometry of the resulting coma and tail of the comet.
• Spacecraft Safety
• Orbiters are designed with the risk of space-dust collisions in mind
• Over a five-year span for a Mars orbiter, NASA figures on a few percent chance of significant damage to a spacecraft from the background level of impacts from such particles, called meteoroids
• If managers choose to position orbiters behind Mars during the peak risk, the further in advance any orbit-adjustment maneuvers can be made, the less fuel will be consumed
• Multimedia
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News
• Mars Science Laboratory: NASA Preparing for 2014 Comet Watch at Mars | Mars.NASA.gov

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• February 1, 1811 : 203 years ago : Bell Rock Lighthouse Lit : The Bell Rock Lighthouse was lit for the first time. Using 24 lanterns, it began flashing its warning light, 11 miles out off the east coast of Scotland atop a white stone tower rising over 30m (100ft) high. It was built by Robert Stevenson on a treacherous sandstone reef, which, except at low tides, lies submerged just beneath the waves. Since then, no repair has been necessary to its stonework. It is the oldest sea-washed lighthouse in existence. It was Stevenson\’s finest achievement, regarded by many as the finest lighthouse ever built, the most outstanding engineering achievement of the 19th century. In the centuries before, the dangerous Bell Rock had claimed thousands of lives, as vessels were wrecked on its razor-sharp serrated rocks. Bell Rock Lighthouse | Wikipedia

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Planets
• Mercury | ~45 after sunset | You can see Mercury in the lower W-SW skies, the Moon moving by Mercury changing each day
• Venus | Dawn | In the E-SE, getting higher each day
• Mars | ~11pm | About 5* to the lower right of Spica, blue giant variable star. Both are highest in the sky around 4am, with Mars above Spica
• Jupiter | Eastern sky in evening, overhead around 10pm, Western sky in morning

• Saturn | ~1-2am | Rises in the S-SW to the far left of Mars and Spica

• Further Reading and Resources

• Sky&Telescope
• SpaceWeather.com
• StarDate.org
• For the Southern hemisphere: SpaceInfo.com.au
• Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere : astronomyonline.org
• Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand : rasnz.org.nz
• AstronomyNow
• HeavensAbove

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