Curiosity Rover – Jupiter Broadcasting https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com Open Source Entertainment, on Demand. Mon, 11 Jul 2022 05:07:24 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.3 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/cropped-favicon-32x32.png Curiosity Rover – Jupiter Broadcasting https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com 32 32 The Night of a Thousand Errors | LINUX Unplugged 466 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/149197/the-night-of-a-thousand-errors-linux-unplugged-466/ Sun, 10 Jul 2022 19:15:00 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=149197 Show Notes: linuxunplugged.com/466

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Show Notes: linuxunplugged.com/466

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]]> Brunch With Brent: Tim Canham | Jupiter Extras 87 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/149177/brunch-with-brent-tim-canham-jupiter-extras-87/ Sun, 10 Jul 2022 10:00:00 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=149177 Show Notes: extras.show/87

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Show Notes: extras.show/87

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]]> Orion Heat Shield & Dragon V2 | SciByte 133 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/58927/orion-heat-shield-dragon-v2-scibyte-133/ Tue, 03 Jun 2014 21:17:47 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=58927 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 | […]

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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 —

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

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

]]> Pyramid Construction & Picturebooks | SciByte 129 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/56872/pyramid-construction-picturebooks-scibyte-129/ Tue, 06 May 2014 21:00:35 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=56872 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. Direct Download: MP3 Audio | OGG […]

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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.

Direct Download:

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

RSS Feeds:

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

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

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

]]> Auditory Nerves & Cartilage | SciByte 128 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/56267/auditory-nerves-cartilage-scibyte-128/ Tue, 29 Apr 2014 20:38:48 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=56267 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 | […]

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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:

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

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

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Opportunity Rover Solar Panel Pictures

— 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

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

]]> Happy Science of 2013 | SciByte 114 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/49107/happy-science-of-2013-scibyte-114/ Tue, 07 Jan 2014 21:16:58 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=49107 We take a look at my top science stories and events of 2013, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

The post Happy Science of 2013 | SciByte 114 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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We take a look at my top science stories and events of 2013, 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

— Book Pic: —

Curiosity | Evidence of Ancient Habitable Water Locations

— NEWS BYTE —

Voyager 1 | “Interstellar Space” Announcement

Exoplanets

International and Private Space Travel

  • India’s Mars Orbiter Mission
  • India’s first ever Mars probe ‘MOM’ successfully fired its main engine on Dec. 1 to begin its nearly yearlong momentous voyage to Mars
  • ISRO’s engineers devised a procedure to get the spacecraft to Mars on the least amount of fuel via six “Midnight Maneuver” engine burns over several weeks – and at an extremely low cost
  • This maneuver increases the ship’s velocity and gradually widens the ellipse eventually raising the apogee of the six resulting elliptical orbits around Earth that eventually injects MOM onto the Trans-Mars trajectory
  • SciByte 111| Memories & International Spacecraft (December 3, 2013)
  • SciByte 109 | ‘Earth-Like’ Planets & Sharks (November 12, 2013)
  • SciByte 107 | Dinosaurs & Satellites (October 29, 2013)
  • Chinese Lunar Lander
  • China had a successful touchdown of the Chang’e-3 probe with the ‘Yutu’ rover on the surface of the Moon on Dec. 14
  • They landed on the lava filled plains of the Bay of Rainbows occurred at about 8:11 am EST or 9:11 p.m. Beijing local time
  • Barely seven hours after the Chang’e-3 mothership touched down on Sunday, Dec. 15, the six wheeled ‘Yutu’, or Jade Rabbit, rover drove straight off a pair of ramps at 4:35 a.m. Beijing local time
  • SciByte 113 | Freshwater Aquifers & Brain Plasticity (December 17, 2013)
  • Bigelow Aerospace’s | Genesis, Inflatable Space Station Modules
  • On Jan 11 NASA announced they have awarded a $17.8 million contract to Bigelow to provide a new inflatable module for the ISS, making it the first privately built module to be added to the space station
  • The outer shell of their module is soft, as opposed to the rigid outer shell of current modules at the ISS, Bigelow’s inflatable modules are more resistant to micrometeoroid or orbital debris strikes it uses multiple layers of Vectran, a material which is twice as strong as Kevlar
  • The company wants to launch and link up several of its larger expandable modules to create private space stations, which could be used by a variety of clients.
  • SciByte 77 | Breath Analysis & Large Structures (January 15, 2013)
  • SpaceX | Geostationary Orbit
  • The Dec 3 liftoff at 5:41 p.m. EST (2241 GMT) marked SpaceX\’s first entry into the large commercial satellite market and its first launch into a geostationary transfer orbit needed for such a mission.
  • Being able to launch into this new orbit will let SpaceX compete against Europe and Russia to haul large telecommunications satellites into orbit.
  • This launch also marks the second of three certification flights needed to certify the Falcon 9 to fly missions for the U.S. Air Force under the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program
  • When Falcon 9 is certified, SpaceX will be eligible to compete for all National Security Space (NSS) missions

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Science Events of 2013

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

  • Jan 11, 1954 : 59 years ago : First UK TV Weather Broadcast : The first in-vision weather forecaster broadcast on BBC television. George Cowling of the Meteorological Office presented from the BBC\’s Lime Grove studios with two hand-drawn weather charts pinned to an easel.

Looking up this week

The post Happy Science of 2013 | SciByte 114 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> Martian Methane & Deep Impact | SciByte 103 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/43602/martian-methane-deep-impact-scibyte-103/ Tue, 24 Sep 2013 20:11:24 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=43602 We take a look at Martian methane, robotic bees, familiar formations on Mercury, viewer feedback, Curiosity news, and more!

The post Martian Methane & Deep Impact | SciByte 103 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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We take a look at Martian methane, robotic bees, familiar formations on Mercury, 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 | Video | Torrent | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

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

[asa]B00BGGDVOO[/asa]

— Show Notes: —

Martian Methane

  • NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover can’t find any sign of methane on the red planet, but the agency emphasized that methane would be only one indicator of possible life
  • No Methane, No Life?
  • Methane only addresses one type of microbial metabolism
  • So while this data reduces the probability of current methane-producing Martian microbes, there are many types of terrestrial microbes that don’t generate methane
  • The Data
  • Curiosity sniffed the atmosphere six times for methane between October 2012 and June 2013
    and didn’t see any sign of the molecule
  • The instrument used would be able to detect minute concentrations
  • Scientists today estimate methane on Mars must be 1.3 parts per billion at the most, which is only one-sixth as much as earlier estimates
  • These results are intriguing given that other teams have spotted methane on Mars as far back as 1999
  • The Mars Global Surveyor, which was working for more than 10 years, charted the evolution of Martian methane over three years
  • NASA Earth-bound observations using spectroscopic measurements reported even greater amounts, as high as 45 parts per billion, in the Martian atmosphere
  • The reports of the highest concentrations of Mars methane came from Earth-based observatories, which might imply that peering through Earth’s atmosphere may have distorted the measurements
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Curiosity Rover Finds No Methane On Mars. What’s Happening? | UniverseToday.com
  • Mars rover fails to find methane | Planetary Science | Science News
  • Mars Mystery Deepens: Curiosity Rover Finds No Sign of Methane | Space.com

— NEWS BYTE —

“Robo-Bees”

  • The Low Down
  • Something is killing off up to half of America\’s bees, and fewer bees not only means less honey, it means less food
  • Researchers at Harvard are working on tiny drones the size of bees
  • These flying robots are designed to be small enough to pollinate a flower (80 milligrams)
  • The wings mimic those of a fly, are also designed to hover, giving them plenty of time to transfer pollen
  • The drone is so small that there is no room for gears, so the researchers are utilizing piezoelectricity
  • Using a special ceramic that contracts when stimulated by electricity they can move the wings
  • The robo-bees\” aren\’t ready at this time yet as they are too tiny for a battery pack for power, and will also need some sort of computer so they can guide themselves in flight
  • Colony collapse disorder (CCD) Also Seen On
  • Unfilter 8 | Meet Monsanto [July 6, 2012]
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube | RoboBees to the Rescue | NOVA PBS
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Colony collapse disorder (CCD) | Wikipedia.org
  • How Robo-Bees Could Save America\’s Crops | Popular Science

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Pictures From Mercury

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

End to the Deep Impact/EPOXI Mission

  • Check This Out!
  • Jupiter Broadcasting Allan, from BSD Now and TechSNAP
  • Deep Impact/EPOXI Mission
  • After almost 9 years in space NASA’s Deep Impact/EPOXI mission has officially been brought to a close.
  • The team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has reluctantly pronounced the mission at an end after being unable to communicate with the spacecraft since Aug. 8
  • Comet Temple 1
  • Orbits the sun every 5.5 years
  • Discovered on April 3, 1867 by Wilhelm Tempel, an astronomer working in Marseille
  • Photographic attempts during 1898 and 1905 failed to recover the comet, it\’s orbit had been changed by Jupiter
  • It was rediscovered in 1967 after British astronomer Brian G. Marsden performed precise calculations of the comet\’s orbit that took into account Jupiter\’s perturbations
  • The Mission
  • Launched in January 2005
  • On July 3, 2005, the spacecraft deployed a coffee table-sized impactor into the path of comet Temple 1’s nucleus on July 4, 2005
  • The impact caused material from below the comet’s surface to be blasted out into space
  • The debris blasted off the nucleus was examined by the telescopes and instrumentation of the flyby spacecraft
  • Sixteen days after that comet encounter, the Deep Impact team placed the spacecraft on a trajectory to fly back past Earth in late December 2007
  • That flyby meant it was able to to put it on course to encounter another comet, Hartley 2 in November 2010
  • Extended Mission
  • The spacecraft’s extended mission included a successful flyby of comet Hartley 2 on Nov. 4, 2010
  • It also observed six different stars to confirm the motion of planets orbiting them and took images and data of the Earth, the Moon and Mars
  • Some of the data taken helped to confirm the existence of water on the Moon, and attempted to confirm the methane signature in the atmosphere of Mars
  • This year in June, it took images of comet ISON this year and collected early images of comet ISON
  • The Deep Impact mission returned around 500,000 images during it\’s total of about 7.58 billion km [4.7 billion mi] traveled
  • What Happened?
  • Mission control spent a couple of weeks trying to uplink commands and reactivate its onboard systems after losing contact
  • The exact cause of the loss is not known for certain; however, analysis has uncovered a potential problem with computer time tagging that could have led to loss of control for Deep Impact’s orientation.
  • The fault protection software might not have been able to read any date after August 11, 2013
  • That would then affect the positioning of its radio antennas, making communication difficult
  • In addition its solar arrays would not be able to point them correctly, which would in turn prevent the spacecraft from getting power
  • It would allow cold temperatures to ruin onboard equipment, essentially freezing its battery and propulsion systems.
  • Multimedia
  • Animated .gif | View from Impacter | Wikipedia
  • Animated .gif | View of Impacter from Spacecraft | Wikipedia
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • NASA.gov
  • NASA – NASA\’s Deep Impact Spacecraft Eyes Comet ISON | NASA.gov
  • NASA\’s Deep Impact Produced Deep Results | NASA.gov
  • Deep Impact (spacecraft) | Wikipedia
  • Temple 1 comet

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

  • Autonomous Driving
  • For the past year, Curiosity has been driving on Mars following instructions from human rover planners called “Autonomous navigation
  • This new capability that’s coming online will let Curiosity drive herself on Mars
  • Humans will still tell her where to go, Curiosity is going to decide how to get there
  • Curiosity takes pictures from the navigation cameras, with the hazard cameras, and it’s able to combine that information, put it all together to define a safe way to get to where we ask her to go
  • The Drive
  • While moving the nav camera\’s to look around it was able to drive about 10 meters [30 feet] at an average speed of about 3 meters/min [10 feet/min]
  • The rover even curved a little bit to the right to avoid some of the small rocks that were directly in front of her.
  • Visual Odometry
  • Visual odometry uses images from the mast cameras to look at the terrain before and after a small drive step.
  • Curiosity will see a few hundred features and see how they move across the step
  • By tracking those features she can know exactly how far she moved, whether she slipped or twisted a little bit during the drive
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube | Curiosity Rover Report (Sept. 19, 2013): Leave the Driving to Autonav | NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
  • Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
  • Social Media
  • Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Transcript | Curiosity Rover Report (Sept. 19, 2013): Leave the Driving to Autonav

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

  • September 25, 1878: 135 years ago : Tobacco Warning : Warning against the use of tobacco, the senior physician to the Metropolitan Free Hospital wrote in The Times newspaper in Britain. Dr. Charles Drysdale pointed to “the enormous consumption of tobacco in all European states.” He estimated that £15,000,000 was spent annually in Great Britain on tobacco. He concluded “that the use of tobacco is one of the most evident of all the retrograde influences of our time.” Years earlier, in 1864, he had published in Med. Circular results of excessive use, such as cases of jaundice in healthy young men smoking 3/4-oz daily, and a young man who smoked 1/2-oz daily having “most distressing palpitation of the heart.” In 1875, he wrote a booklet, Tobacco and the Diseases It Produces.

Looking up this week

  • Keep an eye out for …
  • Thursday | Sept 26 | The Last-quarter Moon will rise around 11 – midnight local time, with Jupiter to its lower left and Orion to it\’s farther right
  • Saturday | Sept 28 | Now Jupiter is much closer to the Moon and is now to it\’s upper left
  • Saturday | Sept 28 | The W-shaped constellation Cassiopeia is about halfway up in the NE sky
  • Sunday | Sep 29 | Now Jupiter sits above the moon in the E
  • Planets
  • Mercury | ~20 min after sunset | It\’s about 22* to the lower right of Jupiter, very close to the fainter star Spica. Tuesday evening Mercury and Spica are only 3/4* apart
  • Venus and Saturn | Twilight | Low in the W-SW, with Saturn moving farther to the right of Venus as the week progresses
  • Mars | ~3am local | Moving to the E as dawn begins, it is to the far lower left of Jupiter. Below Mars is Regulus (actually two binary star pairs.) They are both similar brightness and will be getting closer together as the week moves on.

  • Jupiter | ~5am local | Both the Moon and Jupiter will be high in the Eastern sky. On Thursday it will be far to the lower left of the moon, on Friday the Moon will be closer.

  • 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 Methane & Deep Impact | SciByte 103 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> Strange Exoplanet & Cancer Therapy | SciByte 98 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/39077/strange-exoplanet-cancer-therapy-scibyte-98/ Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:44:46 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=39077 We take a look at a rule breaking exoplanet, non-toxic cancer therapy supplement, hidden antarctic mountains, a new astronaut class, and more!

The post Strange Exoplanet & Cancer Therapy | SciByte 98 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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We take a look at a rule breaking exoplanet, non-toxic cancer therapy supplement, hidden antarctic mountains, a new astronaut class, story 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:

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

Book Pick:

Mysterious ExoPlanet

  • The gap in the cloud seen in the dust surrounding one star, probably arose when a planet under construction swept through the dust and debris in its orbit
  • This small planet (6 to 28 times Earth’s mass) if we can confirm it, shouldn’t be there according to conventional planet-forming theory
  • Current Formation Theories
  • Seeing such a gap follows what we think we know about planetary formation
  • You start with a cloud of debris and gas swirling around a star, then gradually the bits and pieces start colliding, sticking together and growing bigger into small rocks, bigger ones and eventually, planets or gas giant planet cores
  • If there is a planet and there is no dust larger than a grain of sand farther out, that would be a huge challenge to traditional planet formation models
  • How we Think it Should Have Formed vs. How it Appears
  • This planet is far from its star, TW Hydrae, about twice Pluto’s distance from the sun
  • TW Hydrae is a red dwarf star, which lies about 176 light-years from Earth in the constellation Hydra
  • Given that alien systems’ age, that world shouldn’t have formed so quickly.
  • Astronomers believe that Jupiter took about 10 million years to form at its distance away from the sun
  • This planet near TW Hydrae should take 200 times longer to form because the alien world is moving slower, and has less debris to pick up
  • TW Hydrae is only 55 percent as massive as our sun and is believed to be only 8 million years old.
  • What This Might Mean
  • Astronomers are seriously investigating other theories about how this potential planet can to be formed
  • If we can actually confirm that there’s a planet there, we can connect its characteristics to measurements of the gap properties
  • These observations will add to planet formation theories as to how you can actually form a planet very far out
  • One alternative brought up in the press release: perhaps part of the disc collapsed due to gravitational instability
  • If that is the case, a planet could come to be in only a few thousand years, instead of several million
  • Direct collapse” theory, though: astronomers believe it takes a bunch of matter that is one to two times more massive than Jupiter before a collapse can occur to form a planet
  • This world is no more than 28 times the mass of Earth, as best as we can figure and Jupiter itself is 318 times more massive than Earth
  • There are also intriguing results about the gap, the dust grains in this system, orbiting nearby the gap, are still smaller than the size of a grain of sand
  • Astronomers plan to use ALMA and the James Webb Space Telescope, which should launch in 2018, to get a better look
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Should This Alien World Even Exist? This Young Disk Could Challenge Planet-Formation Theories | UniverseToday.com

— NEWS BYTE —

Non-Toxic Cancer Therapy Supplement

  • A research team from the Hyperbaric Biomedical Research Laboratory at the University of South Florida has found that a combination of nontoxic dietary and hyperbaric oxygen therapies effectively increased survival time in a mouse model of aggressive metastatic cancer
  • The research shows the effects of combining two nontoxic adjuvant cancer therapies, the ketogenic diet and hyperbaric oxygen therapy, in a mouse model of late-stage, metastatic cancer
  • This study demonstrates potential cost-effective, nontoxic therapies to contribute to current cancer treatment regimens
  • The Study
  • Metastasis, the spreading of cancer from the primary tumor to distant spots, is responsible for over 90 percent of cancer-related deaths in humans
  • In the study, mice with advanced metastatic cancer were fed either a standard high carbohydrate diet or carbohydrate-restricted ketogenic diet
  • Mice on both diets also received hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which uses a special chamber to increase the amount of oxygen in the tissues
  • Ketogenic Diet
  • The ketogenic diet forces a physiological shift in substrate utilization from glucose to fatty acids and ketone bodies for energy
  • Normal healthy cells readily adapt to using ketone bodies for fuel, but cancer cells lack this metabolic flexibility, and thus become selectively vulnerable to reduced glucose availability
  • Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy
  • Solid tumors also have areas of low oxygen, which promotes tumor growth and metastatic spread
  • Hyperbaric oxygen therapy involves breathing 100 percent oxygen at elevated barometric pressure, saturating the tumors with oxygen
  • The Combination
  • When administered properly, both the ketogenic diet and hyperbaric oxygen therapy are non-toxic and may even protect healthy tissues while simultaneously damaging cancer cells
  • Both therapies slowed disease progression independently, animals receiving the combined ketogenic diet and hyperbaric oxygen therapy lived 78 percent longer than mice fed a standard high-carbohydrate diet
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube | Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Talk| UCLA Health
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Nontoxic cancer therapy proves effective against metastatic cancer | MedicalXPress

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Buried Antarctic Mountain

  • The British Antarctic Survey, Bedmap2 has used millions of new measurements of the frozen continent\’s surface elevation, ice thickness, and bedrock topography from a wide variety of sources collected over several decades
  • The original Bedmap relied mostly on ground-based measurements, which limited the scientists in terms of how much land they could cover
  • A NASA program called Operation IceBridge sends out airplanes that fly over the entire continent.
  • The airplanes part of Operation IceBridge are equipped with lasers that measure the surface mountains\’ heights and other features, as well as ice-penetrating radar that maps subglacial bedrock-\”giving [scientists] a more 3-D picture of the ice sheet itself
  • The new data has revealed several smaller features-both on Antarctica\’s surface and buried under the ice-that were missed in the previous Bedmap effort
  • Scientists want to know the shapes of mountains and rocks to model how fast ice will move across these features on its way to the ocean, where the ice can melt and contribute to sea level rise
  • Multimedia
  • IMAGE | Interactive Slider of Two Views
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Antarctic\’s Mountains Revealed By Sharpest Map Yet | NationalGeographic.com

New NASA Astronaut Class of 2013

  • The 2013 astronaut candidate class comes from the second largest number of applications NASA ever has received — more than 6,100
  • This group might be among the first to ride commercial spacecraft to the Space Station, or NASA says perhaps even missions to an asteroid or Mars
  • The new astronaut candidates will begin training at NASA\’s Johnson Space Center in Houston in August
  • The Astronauts
  • Josh A. Cassada, Ph. D | A former naval aviator is a physicist by training and currently is serving as co-founder and Chief Technology Officer for Quantum Opus
  • Victor J. Glover, Lt. Commander, U.S. Navy | An F/A-18 pilot and graduate of the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School currently serving as a Navy Legislative Fellow in the U.S. Congress
  • Tyler N. Hague, Lt. Colonel, U.S. Air Force | Currently is supporting the Department of Defense as Deputy Chief of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization
  • Christina M. Hammock | Currently is serving as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Station Chief in American Samoa
  • Nicole Aunapu Mannl, Major, U.S. Marine Corps | Is an F/A 18 pilot, currently serving as an Integrated Product Team Lead at the U.S. Naval Air Station, Patuxent River
  • Anne C. McClain; Major, U.S. Army | Is an OH-58 helicopter pilot, and a recent graduate of U.S. Naval Test Pilot School at Naval Air Station, Patuxent River
  • Jessica U. Meir, Ph.D. | Currently is an Assistant Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston
  • Andrew R. Morgan, M.D, Major, U.S. Army | Has experience as an emergency physician and flight surgeon for the Army special operations community, and currently is completing a sports medicine fellowship
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube NASA Unveils 2013 Astronaut Class | VideoFromSpace
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • NASA Selects 2013 Astronaut Candidate Class | NASA.gov

— Updates —

ARKYD Telescope Upgrade Available

LEGO Curiosity Rover

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

  • Answering Camera Questions
  • The team has received a lot of questions about the cameras on the rovers and are now trying to answer some of them
  • The Curiosity rover actually has 17 cameras on it, which is the most of any NASA planetary mission ever.
  • Many of the black and white images that come back from the rover are black and white, or gray scale, because that\’s all the rover really needs in order to detect rocks and other obstacles
  • Other cameras are color, such as the Mastcam imager, because the scientists use the color information to learn about the soil and the rocks
  • There are 1-megapixel black and white imagers for the engineering cameras and 2-megapixel color imagers for the science cameras
  • Camera Rundown
  • MARDI, or the Mars Descent Imager, took pictures as the rover was landing on Mars
  • MAHLI is the camera mounted on the end of the arm, and that takes close-up, high-resolution color photos
  • Hazard avoidance cameras, or the HazCams, there are four of these in the front and four in the back, and they\’re used to take pictures of the terrain near the wheels and nearby the rover
  • Mast Cameras, which are color imagers, which are used to do geology investigations
  • Navigation Cameras, which take pictures that are used to drive the rover
  • A remote microscopic imager, is part of the ChemCam laser instrument and is used to document the laser spots, that the rover makes on the surface
  • Video
  • In addition to the video taken when the rover was descending to the surface, the team has taken movies of the soil being shaken in the scoop
  • Since video files are pretty large and because they have a limited downlink each day, the scientists prefer to take still images of new targets
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube | Curiosity Rover Report (June 13, 2013): Curiosity\’s Cameras | JPLnews
  • Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
  • Social Media
  • Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Video Transcript: Curiosity\’s Cameras | jpl.nasa.gov

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

  • June (18?), 240 BC : 2253 years ago : Eratosthenes : A Greek astronomer and mathematician, estimated the circumference of the earth. As the director of the great library of Alexandria, he read in a papyrus book that in Syene, approaching noon on the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, shadows of temple columns grew shorter. At noon, they were gone. The sun was directly overhead. However, a stick in Alexandria, far to the north, could cast a pronounced shadow. Thus, he realized that the surface of the Earth could not be flat. It must be curved. Not only that, but the greater the curvature, the greater the difference in the shadow lengths. By measurement on the ground and application of geometry, he calculated the circumference of the earth.

Looking up this week

The post Strange Exoplanet & Cancer Therapy | SciByte 98 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> Dark Matter & Reading Dreams | SciByte 89 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/35066/dark-matter-reading-dreams-scibyte-89/ Tue, 09 Apr 2013 21:06:13 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=35066 We take a look at hint of dark matter, reading your dreams, blackhole snacks, spacecraft updates, Curiosity news, and more!

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We take a look at hint of dark matter, reading your dreams, blackhole snacks, 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:

Hints of Dark Matter

  • After two years a cosmic ray detector (Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, AMS) on the International Space Station has found the first tantalizing evidence of the cosmic footprints that may have been left by dark matter
  • Dark Matter
  • A type of matter hypothesized to account for 26.8% of the total mass in the universe
  • Its existence and properties are inferred from its gravitational effects on visible matter, radiation, and the large-scale structure of the universe
  • First theorized in 1932, the existence of dark matter for 80 years but has never actually observed it directly
  • Accelerators smashing particles together at high speed deep underground with special detectors have had no luck finding them, you can also look in space for the results of rare dark matter collisions
  • Unraveling the mystery of dark matter could help scientists better understand the composition of our universe and, more particularly, what holds galaxies together
  • Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer | AMS
  • The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, AMS, is a 7-ton detector with a 3-foot magnet ring at its core was sent into space in 2011, transmitting its data to CERN, where it is being analyzed
  • Since its installation on 19 May 2011 it has measured over 30 billion cosmic rays at energies up to trillions of electron volts
  • Its permanent magnet and array of precision particle detectors collect and identify charged cosmic rays passing through AMS from the far reaches of space
  • Over its long duration mission on the ISS, AMS will record signals from 16 billion cosmic rays every year and transmit them to Earth for analysis by the AMS Collaboration.
  • Data
  • Currently, the total number of positrons identified by AMS, in excess of 400,000, is the largest number of energetic antimatter particles directly measured and analyzed from space
  • In the initial 18 month period of space operations, from 19 May 2011 to 10 December 2012, AMS analyzed 25 billion primary cosmic ray events
  • Of these, 6.8 million, were unambiguously identified as electrons and their antimatter counterpart, positrons.
  • If particles of dark matter crash and annihilate each other, they should leave a footprint of positrons-the anti-matter version of electrons-at high energy levels
  • The results show evidence that could be dark matter or could be energy could also originate from pulsars
  • By measuring the ratio between positrons and electrons and by studying the behavior of any excess across the energy spectrum, a better understanding of the origin of dark matter and other physics phenomena can be obtained
  • The curve of the plot of those positrons will be a clue as to what these results are, if the curve is one shape, it points to dark matter, while if it\’s another, it points to pulsars
  • While the results aren\’t enough to declare the case closed they expect a more definitive answer in a matter of months
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube | Installing the AMS | Space Station Live: First Findings from the AMS | ReelNASA
  • YouTube | Anouncement | Space Station Instrument Finds Excess Antimatter | NASAtelevision
  • YouTube | Animated Look inside the AMS | Sifting Through the Cosmic Sands for Dark Matter | VideoFromSpace
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Scientists report hint of dark matter in first results from $2 billion cosmic ray detector (Update 4) | Phys.org
  • Cosmic ray detector confirms hints of dark matter | Matter & Energy | Science News
  • Dark Matter Possibly Found by $2 Billion Space Station Experiment | AMS | Space.com
  • Potential Dark Matter Discovery a Win for Space Station Science | Space.com

— NEWS BYTE —

Peering Into Your Dreams

  • A recent study shows that it may be possible to use brain activity patterns to understand something about what a person is dreaming about
  • The Study
  • Researchers recorded brain activity in three adult male volunteers during the early stages of sleep
  • Researchers chose to awaken the subjects in light sleep rather than in deeper \”rapid eye movement\” (REM) sleep solely to make the research easier to do
  • It takes at least an hour to reach first REM stage, it would be difficult to get sleep and dream data from multiple participants
  • Right after being awakened from the early stages of sleep, the researchers asked for detailed reports on what they had seen while sleeping
  • After gathering at least 200 such reports from the three men, the researchers used a lexical database to group the dreamed objects in coarse categories, such as street, furniture and girl
  • They used functional MRI to monitor brain activity of the participants and polysomnography to record the physical changes that occur during sleep
  • Then researchers compared evidence of brain activity when participants were awake and looking at real images to the brain activity they saw when participants were dreaming
  • Computer algorithms sorted through the patterns of brain activity, linking particular patterns with objects
  • On average, the computer could pick which of two objects had appeared in a dream 70 percent of the time
  • What the Results Could Mean
  • The study bolsters the notion that the vivid imagery of dreams, no matter how fantastic, is as real as waking life, from the brain’s perspective
  • Visual experiences you have when dreaming are detectable by the same type of brain activity that occurs when looking at actual images when you\’re awake
  • However it might be hard to remember a dream minutes after waking up, because particular neurotransmitters or brain regions involved in memory are not active during sleep
  • There is also evidence suggesting that the pattern of spontaneous brain activity is relevant to health issues
  • Caution Belief
  • The current approach requires the data of image viewing and sleep within the same person, but methods are being developed for aligning brain patterns across people
  • One expert said the results are intriguing, he was cautious that previous disappointments relating brain activity to complex visual experience and would like to see this replicated
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube | This is your brain on dreams | Digtal Carlisle
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Dream contents deciphered by computer | Body & Brain | Science News
  • Could scientists peek into your dreams? | MedicalXPress

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Blackhole Snacks on a Planet

  • Astronomers using the Integral space observatory were able to watch as the planet was eaten by a blackhole that had been inactive for decades
  • The Galaxy
  • Astronomers were using Integral to study a different galaxy when they noticed a bright X-ray flare coming from another location in the same wide field-of-view
  • The origin was confirmed as NGC 4845, 47 million light-years away, a galaxy never before detected at high energies
  • The blackhole in the center of NGC 4845 is estimated to have a mass of around 300,000 times that of our own Sun
  • The \’Eaten\’ Object
  • The halo of material suggest that the object was approximately 14–30 Jupiter masses, and so the astronomers say the object was either a super-Jupiter or a brown dwarf
  • It is believed that it was a ‘wandering’ planet, which would fit the description of recent studies
  • Astronomers estimate that only the external layers, ~10% total mass, were eaten by the blackhole, and that a denser core has been left orbiting the blackhole
  • The Emissions
  • The emission was traced from its maximum in January 2011, when the galaxy brightened by a factor of a thousand, and then as it subsided over the course of the year
  • Emissions brightened and decayed with a delay of 2–3 months between the object being disrupted and the heating of the debris in the vicinity of the blackhole.
  • By analyzing the characteristics of the flare astronomers were able to determine the source of the emission
  • This data came from a halo of material around the galaxy’s central blackhole as it tore apart and fed on the object
  • Of Note
  • This is the first time where we have seen the disruption of a substellar object by a blackhole
  • This \’event\’ might be similar to what is expected to happen with the supermassive blackhole at the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy
  • Estimates are that events like these may be detectable every few years in galaxies around us
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube | blackhole Snacks On A Super-Jupiter | Animation | VideoFromSpace
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Astronomers Watch as a blackhole Eats a Rogue Planet | UniverseToday.com

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Eyeing Europa

  • **Paul Hill @P_H_9_3 | Check This Out! **
  • Jupiter Europa Mission Funding
  • A resolution was recently passed by the House and Senate outlining the extent of government funding (75,000,000) for pre-formulation and/or formulation activities for a mission that meets the science goals outlined for the Jupiter Europa mission
  • Data recently uncovered the presence of magnesium sulfate salt, Epsom salt, on Europa’s surface which is suggestive of a cycling of Europa’s salty ocean with the surface.
  • Although this is good news, it’s also a reminder that potentially habitable moons don’t only orbit Jupiter, Enceladus the Saturnian moon is known to possess salty liquid water beneath its surface, plus an internal heat source, that generates Enceladus’ famous geysers
  • Europa In Other News
  • According to research Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon Europa has hydrogen peroxide across much of the surface of its leading hemisphere, which could potentially provide energy for life if it has found its way into the moon’s subsurface ocean.
  • The availability of oxidants like peroxide on Earth was a critical part of the rise of complex, multicellular life
  • The highest concentration of peroxide found was on the side of Europa that always leads in its orbit around Jupiter,roughly 20 times more diluted than \’off the shelf\’ hydrogen peroxide, then drops off to nearly zero on the hemisphere of Europa that faces backward in its orbit.
  • The concentration of Hydrogen peroxide was first detected on Europa by NASA’s Galileo mission, which explored the Jupiter system from 1995 to 2003
  • Galileo observations were of a limited region. The new Keck data show that peroxide is widespread across much of the surface of Europa, and the highest concentrations are reached in regions where Europa’s ice is nearly pure water with very little sulfur contamination
  • Scientists think hydrogen peroxide is an important factor for the habitability of the global liquid water ocean under Europa’s icy crust because hydrogen peroxide decays to oxygen when mixed into liquid water
  • With high enough levels of compounds like peroxide could help to satisfy the chemical energy requirement needed for life within the ocean, if the peroxide is mixed into the ocean
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Will the Europa Clipper Cruise to Jupiter\’s Moon? | Discovery News
  • Hydrogen Peroxide Could Feed Life on Europa | UniverseToday.com

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

Reviewing SpaceX’s Dragon Spacecraft Glitch

  • Last Time on SciByte
  • SciByte 84 (March 5, 2013)| HIV & SpaceX Troubles – SpaceX – Dragon Space Station Resupply Mission Glitch
  • March 1, 2013 Launch Glitch
  • Barely 11 minutes after the March 1 blastoff of the Dragon atop the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida contact had been lost
  • Right after spacecraft separation in low Earth orbit, a sudden and unexpected failure of the Dragon’s critical thrust pods had prevented three out of four from initializing and firing
  • What Happened
  • The oxidizer pressure was low in three tanks, which is required to orient the craft for two way communication and to propel the Dragon to the orbiting lab complex
  • The problem was that three of the check valves had a small design change to the check valves by the supplier that would have needed a magnifying glass to see the difference, because of the tiny change they got stuck
  • SpaceX had run the new check valves through a series of low pressurization systems tests and they worked well and didn’t get stuck, but SpaceX did not run the functional tests at higher pressures
  • Solution
  • The team was able to write some new software in real time to build pressure upstream of the check valves and then released that pressure
  • SpaceX had difficulty communicating with the spacecraft because it was in free drift in orbit
  • They worked closely with the Air Force to get higher intensity, more powerful dishes to communicate with the spacecraft and upload the software
  • The solution got the valves unstuck and then they worked well
  • In the meantime SpaceX will revert to the old check valves and run tests to make sure this failure doesn’t happen again
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube SpaceX Dragon Carrying NASA Cargo Arrives at International Space Station | NASATelevision
  • Further Reading / In the News

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

  • Parachute
  • An animation of seven images from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show a “flapping” of the parachute that allowed the Curiosity rover to descend safely through Mars atmosphere images
  • The images were acquired by HiRISE between August 12, 2012 and January 13, 2013
  • The different images show distinct changes in the parachute, which is attached to the backshell that encompassed the rover during launch, flight and descent
  • This type of motion may kick off dust and keep parachutes on the surface bright, to help explain why the parachute from Viking 1 (landed in 1976) remains detectable
  • Argon Readings
  • Curiosity\’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument analyzed an atmosphere sample that found that the Martian atmosphere has about four times as much of a lighter stable isotope (argon-36) compared to a heavier one (argon-38)
  • This data is what we would expect to see with the theory that Mars lost much of its original atmosphere by a process of gas escaping from the top of the atmosphere
  • The results provided the the clearest and most precise measurements ever made of isotopes of argon in the Martian atmosphere, isotopes are variants of the same element with different atomic weights
  • The ratio is much lower than the solar system\’s original ratio, as estimated from argon-isotope measurements of the sun and Jupiter which points to a process at Mars that favored preferential loss of the lighter isotope over the heavier one
  • The data also removes previous uncertainty about the ratio in the Martian atmosphere from 1976 measurements from NASA\’s Viking project and from small volumes of argon extracted from Martian meteorites
  • Daily Atmospheric Measurements
  • Curiosity measures several variables with the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS), daily air temperature
  • While temperature measurements have climbed steadily since the measurements began eight months ago and is not strongly tied to the rover\’s location, the humidity has differed significantly at different places along the rover\’s route
  • In addition the REMS sensors detected many whirlwind patterns during the first hundred Martian days of the mission, though not as many as detected in the same length of time by earlier missions although no trails of dust devils have not been seen inside Gale Crater
  • Upcoming
  • For the rest of April, Curiosity will carry out daily activities for which commands were sent in March, using DAN, REMS and the Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD).
  • Curiosity will be drilling into another rock where the rover is now, but that target has not yet been selected. The science team will discuss this over the conjunction period
  • Multimedia
  • Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
  • Social Media
  • Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Watch Curiosity’s Parachute Flap in the Martian Breeze | UniverseToday.com
  • Remaining Martian Atmosphere Still Dynamic | mars.jpl.nasa.gov

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

  • April 13, 2000 : 13 years ago : Oldest mouse Born : The mouse Yoda was born, and became the world\’s oldest mouse on his fourth birthday in 2004 (which at 1,462-days-old compares to about 136 in human-years). A dwarf mouse, Yoda lives with a larger female cage mate (Princess Leia) to provide him with protective body warmth. The life span of the average laboratory mouse is slightly over two years. Yoda lives in the laboratory of Dr Richard A. Miller, a professor of pathology in the Geriatrics Center of the University of Michigan Medical School, an expert on the genetics and cell biology of aging. For his studies, he has developed strains of mice, derived from wild mice captured in Idaho, that live longer, stay smaller and age more slowly than ordinary mice
  • World\’s Oldest Mouse Reaches Milestone Birthday, Teaches Scientists About Human Aging (Apr 13, 2004) | ScienceDaily

Looking up this week

The post Dark Matter & Reading Dreams | SciByte 89 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> Strange Bacteria & Higgs-Boson | SciByte 85 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/33356/strange-bacteria-higgs-boson-scibyte-85/ Tue, 12 Mar 2013 20:45:31 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=33356 We take a look at dinosaur fight scars, possible sub-glacial bacteria, a robot that can throw, update on the Higgs-Boson, and more!

The post Strange Bacteria & Higgs-Boson | SciByte 85 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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We take a look at dinosaur fight scars, possible sub-glacial bacteria, a robot that can throw, update on the Higgs-Boson, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes:

Dino-Eat-Dino World

  • Scientists say that a scar recently found on the face of a duckbill dinosaur received after a close encounter is the first clear case of a healed dinosaur wound
  • The lucky dinosaur was an adult species of duck billed dinosaur, Edmontosaurus annectens, that lived about 65 to 67 million years ago
  • The Scar
  • A teardrop-shaped patch of fossilized skin about 5×5 inches (12×14 centimeters) that was discovered with the creature\’s bones and is thought to have come from above its right eye
  • Some scientists say that the scar pattern is nearly identical to those found on modern reptiles, including iguanas
  • Other scientists are not convinced, however, they say that the skin injury was not caused by a predator attack
  • They say the size of the scar is relatively small, and it would also be consistent with the skin being pierced in some other accident such as a fall.
  • Skull Injury
  • Paleontologist at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History say the skull also showed signs of trauma, and from the size and shape of the marks on the
  • They determined that the marks on the skull, are more consistent with Tyrannosaur-bitten bones
  • Prior to this discovery, scientists knew of one other case of a dinosaur wound
  • In that case however, it was an unhealed wound that scientists think was inflicted by scavengers after the creature was already dead
  • Escape
  • Although escaping from a T. rex is something that we wouldn\’t normally think might happen, duckbill dinosaurs were not without defenses.
  • They travelled in herds, grew up to 30 feet (9 meters) in length, and could swipe their hefty tail or kick its legs to take down predators, and traveled in herds
  • They also had very powerful running muscles, which would have made them difficult to catch once they\’d taken flight
  • The Puzzle Pieces
  • Figuring out the details of the story is part of what makes paleontology exciting
  • Though still unproven, it is thought that both the skin wound and the skull injury were sustained during the same attack, possibly a T. Rex
  • The wound \”was large enough to have been a claw or a tooth,\”
  • It\’s very likely that this particular dinosaur wasn\’t the only dinosaur to have scars, whether from battle wounds or accidents
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Scarred Duckbill Dinosaur Escaped T. Rex Attack | News.NationalGeographic.com

— NEWS BYTE —

Strange Bacteria From Under the Polar Cap? … Or Momentary Hope

  • Last Time on SciByte
  • SciByte 33 | Sub Glacial Lakes & Updates – Sub Glacial Lakes (February 14, 2012)
  • Collecting the Sample
  • This discovery comes from samples collected in an expedition in 2012 where a Russian team drilled down to the surface of Lake Vostok, the largest subglacial lake in Antarctica
  • Last year the Russian team drilled almost 2.34 miles (4 kilometers) to reach the lake and take the samples.
  • The lake is believed to have been covered by ice for more than a million years but has kept its liquid state.
  • The Sample, the Truth and Fiction
  • A Russian scientist at the genetics laboratory at the Saint Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics had believed they have found a wholly new type of bacteria in the mysterious subglacial Lake Vostok in Antarctica
  • He claimed that one particular form of bacteria whose DNA was less than 86 percent similar to previously existing forms, as far as DNA goes, basically zero
  • The head of the genetics laboratory at the same institute said on Saturday that the strange life forms were in fact nothing but contaminants.
  • New samples of water will be taken from Lake Vostok during a new expedition in May, if the same bacteria are found then the team will be sure that they have found new life on Earth that exists in no database
  • On the “Extra-Terrestrial” Scale
  • \”If this had been found on Mars everyone would have undoubtedly said there is life on Mars. But this is bacteria from Earth.\”
  • Exploring environments such as Lake Vostok allows scientists to discover what life forms can exist in the most extreme conditions
  • Whether life could exist on some other bodies in the solar system.
  • Saturn\’s moon Enceladus and the Jupiter moon Europa as they are believed to have oceans, or large lakes, beneath their icy shells.
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Russia admits no new life form found in Antarctic lake | phys.org
  • Russia finds \’new bacteria\’ in Antarctic lake | Phys.org

Cheap Interplanetary Satellites

  • Two CubeSats, designed by NASA\’s JPL and three university partners, are soon to go where no CubeSats have gone before: beyond Earth orbit.
  • CubeSats are tiny satellites, some no bigger than four inches (10 cm) on each side, sent into orbit as secondary payloads on other launch vehicles
  • The Mission
  • The space agency’s twin satellites will be the first CubeSats to leave Earth\’s orbit for interplanetary space
  • If the interplanetary test launch succeeds, CubeSats could someday blanket the solar system, conducting cheap, high-risk missions to comets, asteroids, moons and planets
  • The INSPIRE project has been approved by NASA to launch sometime between 2014 and 2016, but a specific launch vehicle hasn\’t been selected.
  • Just where the pioneering CubeSats will go is still unclear, however, since it’s not known yet which model rocket will be used for launch
  • The first mission will be basically an escape trajectory in some unknown direction
  • Since they won\’t have much propulsion or scientific instrumentation, the INSPIRE craft are mainly just a test of whether tiny machines can survive the harsh environment of space.
  • The Challenges
  • One of the challenges of the project is figuring how the tiny satellites will communicate with Earth.
  • CubeSats are far cheaper than a traditional space mission but they lack room for complex communications systems or large power sources.
  • As they away from Earth they need larger antennas to communicate with the low-powered craft
  • In addition once they spacecraft leaves the protective magnetic field surrounding Earth, it\’s at risk of failure from solar radiation
  • Traditional satellites are built with more expensive \”radiation-hardened\” components
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Tiny Satellites\’ Big Mission: Going Beyond Earth Orbit | Space.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

“BigDog” Can Throw Things Now Too

— Updates —

Higgs-Boson

  • Last time on SciByte
  • SciByte 53 | Higgs-Boson (July 10, 2012)
  • SciByte 37 | Solar Storms and Higgs Boson
  • Physicists told a conference in La Thuile, Italy, that more analysis is needed before a definitive statement can be made on the Higgs-Boson
  • Inch-by-Inch
  • Since scientists\’ announcement last July that they had found a particle likely to be the Higgs, much data has been analysed, and its properties are becoming clearer
  • Key to a positive identification of the particle is a detailed analysis of its properties and how it interacts with other particles
  • Spin-Zero?
  • The existence of spin angular momentum is where particles are observed to possess angular momentum that cannot be accounted for by orbital angular momentum alone
  • Experiments indicate that the elementary particles are not made up of smaller particles rotating around a center point so the spin of an elementary particle is therefore seen as a truly intrinsic physical property, akin to the particle\’s electric charge and rest mass.
  • Current theories are that these elementary particles spin is simply a physical property, like electrical charge and mass
  • Rotating a spin-1/2 particle by 360 degrees does not bring it back to the same quantum state, but to the state with the opposite quantum phase; this is detectable, in principle, with interference experiments. To return the particle to its exact original state, one needs a 720 degree
  • Rotating a spin-2 particle 180 degrees can bring it back to the same quantum state and a spin-4 particle should be rotated 90 degrees to bring it back to the same quantum state.
  • A spin 0 particle can be imagined as sphere which looks the same after whatever angle it is turned through.
  • Several teams researching the particle determining the Higgs-Boson spin say it must be spin-zero
  • All the analysis conducted so far strongly indicates spin-zero, but it is not yet able to rule out entirely the possibility that the particle has spin-two
  • The Future …?
  • Until physicists can confidently observe the particle\’s spin, the particle will remain Higgs-like
  • New research will have to stop as the Large Hadron Collider is upgraded, but physicists will still have plenty of data to analyze
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Particle looking \’more and more\’ like Higgs, LHC scientists say | Phys.org

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

  • March 16, 1867 : 146 years ago : Antiseptic surgery : The Lancet published a paper by Joseph Lister, the first of a series of articles in the Lancet on his discovery of antiseptic surgery: On a New Method of Treating Compound Fractures, Abscess, &c. Lister applied Louis Pasteur\’s idea that the microorganisms causing gangrene might be controlled with chemical solutions. Since the use carbolic acid (phenol) was known as means of deodorizing sewage, Lister tested the results of using a solution of it for spraying instruments, on surgical incisions, and applied to dressings. Upon finding this procedure substantially reduced the incidence of gangrene, Lister published his results in series of articles in the Lancet on the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery

Looking up this week

The post Strange Bacteria & Higgs-Boson | SciByte 85 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> HIV & SpaceX Troubles | SciByte 84 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/33016/hiv-spacex-troubles-scibyte-84/ Tue, 05 Mar 2013 22:17:22 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=33016 We look at a HIV-infected infant that is "Functionally Cured," a really old star, one big Antarctic meteorite, an update on a private Mars mission and more!

The post HIV & SpaceX Troubles | SciByte 84 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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We take a look at a HIV-infected infant that is \”Functionally Cured,\” a really old star, one big Antarctic meteorite, renaming a NASA center, an update on a private Mars mission and the Dragon space station supply mission, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes:

\”Functional Cure\” in an HIV-Infected Infant

  • A team of researchers from Johns Hopkins Children\’s Center has described the first case of a so-called \”functional cure\” in an HIV-infected infant
  • The infant described in the report underwent remission of HIV infection after receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART) within 30 hours of birth
  • Natural Viral Suppression
  • Natural viral suppression without treatment is an exceedingly rare phenomenon observed in less than half a percent of HIV-infected adults
  • HIV experts have long sought a way to help all HIV patients achieve elite-controller status
  • \”Elite controllers,\” whose immune systems are able to rein in viral replication and keep the virus at clinically undetectable levels
  • Functionally Cured
  • \”Functionally cured,\” a condition that occurs when a patient achieves and maintains long-term viral remission without lifelong treatment and standard clinical tests fail to detect HIV replication in the blood
  • A functional cure occurs when viral presence is so minimal, it remains undetectable by standard clinical tests, yet discernible by ultrasensitive methods
  • Sterilizing Cure
  • A sterilizing cure-a complete eradication of all viral traces from the body
  • A single case of sterilizing cure has been reported so far in an HIV-positive man treated with a bone marrow transplant for leukemia.
  • The bone marrow cells came from a donor with a rare genetic mutation of the white blood cells that renders some people resistant to HIV
  • Such a complex treatment approach, however, HIV experts agree, is neither feasible nor practical for the 33 million people worldwide infected with HIV
  • Medical Details
  • The child described was born to an HIV-infected mother and received combination antiretroviral treatment beginning 30 hours after birth.
  • A series of tests showed progressively diminishing viral presence in the infant\’s blood, until it reached undetectable levels 29 days after birth
  • 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
  • Test for HIV-specific antibodies-the standard clinical indicator of HIV infection-also remained negative
  • Antiviral Treatment
  • Investigators say the prompt administration of antiviral treatment likely led to this infant\’s cure by halting the formation of hard-to-treat viral reservoirs
  • Prompt antiviral therapy in newborns that begins within days of exposure may help infants clear the virus and achieve long-term remission without lifelong treatment by preventing such viral hideouts from forming in the first place
  • Dormant cells are responsible for re-igniting the infection in most HIV patients within weeks of stopping therapy
  • Researchers say they believe this is precisely what happened in the child described in the report
  • What This Means
  • Currently, high-risk newborns-those born to mothers with poorly controlled infections or whose mothers\’ HIV status is discovered around the time of delivery-receive a combination of antivirals at prophylactic doses to prevent infection for six weeks and start therapeutic doses if and once infection is diagnosed
  • This particular case may change the current practice because it highlights the curative potential of very early ART
  • Investigators caution they don\’t have enough data to recommend change right now to the current practice of treating high-risk infants
  • This infant\’s case provides the rationale to start proof-of-principle studies in all high-risk newborns
  • The next step is to find out if this is a highly unusual response to very early antiretroviral therapy or something we can actually replicate in other high-risk newborns
  • Researchers say preventing mother-to-child transmission remains the primary goal as they already have proven strategies that can prevent 98 percent of newborn infections by identifying and treating HIV-positive pregnant women
  • Multimedia
  • Image Scanning electromicrograph of an HIV-infected T cell. (Credit: NIAID) | ScienceDaily.com
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Researchers describe first \’functional HIV cure\’ in an infant | MedicalXpress
  • Synthesized compound flushes out latent HIV | MedicalXpress
  • Researchers Describe First \’Functional HIV Cure\’ in an Infant | ScienceDaily.com

— NEWS BYTE —

A Star That’s Almost as Old as the Universe

  • Results from a new study show that a metal-poor star located merely 190 light-years from the Sun is 14.46+-0.80 billion years old, which implies that the star is nearly as old as the Universe
  • Such metal-poor stars are important to astronomers because they set an independent lower limit for the age of the Universe and can be used to corroborate age estimates inferred by other means
  • Amount of Metal vs Age of Star
  • Metal-poor stars can be used to constrain the age of the Universe because metal-content is typically a proxy for age
  • Heavier metals are generally formed in supernova explosions, which pollute the surrounding interstellar medium.
  • Stars subsequently born from that medium are more enriched with metals than their predecessors with each successive generation becoming increasingly enriched
  • The reliability of the age determined is likewise contingent on accurately determining the sample’s metal content, and is likewise contingent on the availability of a reliable distance
  • Analyses of globular clusters and the Hubble constant yielded vastly different ages, by billions of years, for the Universe, the discrepant ages stemmed partly from uncertainties in the cosmic distance scale
  • HD 140283
  • HD 140283 exhibits less than 1% the iron content of the Sun, which provides an indication of its sizable age.
  • Based on the microwave background and the Hubble constant, it must have formed soon after the big bang
  • This star had been used previously to constrain the age of the Universe, but uncertainties tied to its estimated distance (at that time) made the age determination somewhat imprecise
  • Scientists were recently also to obtain a new and improved distance for HD 140283 using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), namely via the trigonometric parallax approach
  • From that data the distance uncertainty for HD 140283 was significantly reduced by comparison to existing estimates, thus resulting in a more precise age estimate for the star
  • The age of HD 140283 does not conflict with the age of the Universe, 13.77 ± 0.06 billion years, within the errors
  • This study reaffirms that there are old stars roaming the solar neighborhood which can be used to constrain the age of the Universe
  • Multimedia
  • Image A new age estimate for the star HD 140283 implies that it was among the first few generations of stars created in the Universe | NASA, ESA, A. Felid (STScI) | UniverseToday.com
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Nearby Ancient Star is Almost as Old as the Universe | UniverseToday.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Antarctic Meteorite Season Findings

Voting to rename NASA Dryden after Neil Armstrong

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

SpaceX – Dragon Space Station Resupply Mission Glitch

  • The Glitch
  • The problem cropped up immediately following Dragon\’s separation from the rocket upper stage, nine minutes into the flight.
  • Three of the four sets of thrusters on the company\’s unmanned Dragon capsule did not immediately kick in, delaying the release of the solar panels.
  • The problem may have been caused by a stuck valve or a line blockage
  • Dragon\’s twin solar wings swung open two hours later than planned, an hour later, the Dragon was raised with the thrusters to a safe altitude.
  • Working Towards the Solution
  • SpaceX worked to bring up the idled thrusters and keep the capsule on track
  • The Dragon is equipped with 18 thrusters, divided into four sets, and can maneuver adequately even with some unavailable.
  • The capsule is designed to return to Earth with just two good sets of thrusters and, in \”a super worst case situation,\” conceivably just one although it would be \”a bit of a wobbly trip.\”
  • If SpaceX and NASA had determined that more time was needed to gain confidence that Dragon could safely carry out an attempt the Dragon could have stayed in orbit for several additional months if needed
  • By late Saturday afternoon sufficient recovery work had been accomplished to warrant NASA, ISS and SpaceX managers to give the go-ahead for the Dragon to rendezvous with the station early Sunday morning, March 3.
  • Capture
  • The capsule was captured 5:31 am EST (1031 GMT) on Sunday, March 3
  • More than 1 ton of space station supplies aboard this Dragon, which included some much-needed equipment for air purifiers
  • It is scheduled to spend more than three weeks at the space station before being cut loose by the crew
  • Despite the one-day docking delay, the Dragon unberthing and parachute assisted return to Earth will still be the same day as originally planned on March 25.
  • History
  • This has been the first serious trouble to strike a Dragon in orbit, none of the four previous unmanned flights had any thruster issues
  • On the previous flight in October, one of nine first-stage engines on the Falcon rocket shut down too soon, on this flight it performed \”really perfectly\” and that the thruster problem was isolated to the Dragon
  • Future Re-Supply Missions
  • SpaceX plans to launch its next Dragon to the station in late fall.
  • SpaceX says it has 50 launches planned-both NASA missions and commercial flights-totaling about $4 billion in contracts
  • NASA also has a $1.9 billion resupply contract for the station with Orbital Sciences Corporation, which will launch the first test flight of its Antares rocket from a base in Virginia in the coming weeks
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube SpaceX Dragon Carrying NASA Cargo Arrives at International Space Station | NASATelevision
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • SpaceX\’s capsule arrives at ISS | phys.org
  • SpaceX\’s capsule nears ISS for rendezvous on Sunday (Update) | Phys.org
  • SpaceX Dragon Recovers from Frightening Propulsion System Failure – Sunday Docking Set | UniverseToday.com
  • SpaceX rocket launched, but problem with thrusters (Update 3)
  • SpaceX working to fix Dragon capsule\’s thrusters (Update 2) | phys.org
  • SpaceX company fixes Dragon capsule problem | phys.org
  • Dragon Spacecraft Glitch Was \’Frightening,\’ SpaceX Chief Elon Musk Says | Space.com

— UPDATES—

Russian Meteorite Chunk Found

Dennis Tito\’s Honeymoon Suite to Mars

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

  • The \’Glitch\’
  • The spacecraft remained in communications at all scheduled communication windows on Wednesday, but it did not send recorded data, only current status information.
  • Status information revealed that the computer had not switched to the usual daily \”sleep\” mode when planned
  • On Thurs, Feb 28, the ground team for NASA\’s Mars rover Curiosity switched the rover to a redundant onboard computer in response to a memory issue on the computer that had been active
  • Flash Memory
  • The condition is related to a glitch in flash memory linked to the other, now-inactive, computer.
  • Diagnostic work in a testing simulation at JPL indicates the situation involved corrupted memory at an A-side memory location used for addressing memory files
  • It appears to have caused the computer to get stuck in an endless loop.
  • Protections and History
  • Curiosity has protections against such high-energy disruptions, but the problem was compounded by what appears to have been the location of the strike-in the directory, or \”table of contents,\” of the computer\’s memory
  • Similar problems were caused by high-energy solar and cosmic ray strikes on other space missions
  • Previous rovers experienced many so-called \”anomalies\” during the early part of their treks
  • Like many spacecraft Curiosity carries a pair of redundant main computers in order to have a backup available if one fails
  • Each of the computers, A-side and B-side, also has other redundant subsystems linked to just that computer
  • Operations
  • Curiosity is now operating on its B-side, as it did during part of the flight from Earth to Mars. It operated on its A-side from before the August 2012 landing through Wednesday.
  • Although scientific investigations by the rover were suspended the team hopes that Curiosity would resume science work in about a week.
  • While resuming operations on the B-side, they are also working to determine the best way to restore the A-side as a viable backup
  • What Happens Next
  • Even if the rover is fully operational again in a week, the amount of science it can perform is limited.
  • The sun comes between Mars and the Earth in early April, partially blocking the path for radio commands for an entire month
  • The Curiosity team had planned to send back science data from Mars during that period-called \”solar conjunction,\” but had decided not to send up any commands.
  • Multimedia
  • Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
  • Image This artist concept features NASA\’s Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover | mars.jpl.NASA.gov
  • Social Media
  • Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Curiosity Rover Has Computer Problems | UniverseToday.com
  • Mars Rover Curiosity Has First Big Malfunction news.NationalGeographic.com
  • Mars Science Laboratory: Computer Swap on Curiosity Rover | mars.jpl.NASA.gov
  • Computer Swap on Curiosity Rover – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory | jpl.nasa.gov

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

  • March 10, 1797: 216 years ago : Thomas Jefferson on paleontology : Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) presented a paper on the megalonyx to the American Philosophical Society. It was published as \”A Memoir on the Discovery of Certain Bones of a Quadruped of the Clawed Kind in the Western Parts of Virginia,\” Transactions of American Philosophical Society 4:255-256, along with an account by Caspar Wistar (1761-1818). This is arguably the first American publication in paleontology, but the only paleontology paper written by Jefferson. In 1822, this huge extinct sloth was named Megalonyx jeffersoni by a French naturalist. (Megalonyx Gr. large claw). It was a bear-sized ground sloth, over 2 meters tall, widespread in North America during the last Ice Age

Looking up this week

  • Keep an eye out for …

  • Mercury, Venus, Mars | Now hidden in the Sun\’s glare

  • Jupiter | High in the S-SW after sunset, moving to the W/SW later in the evening

  • Saturn | ~10-11 pm | Rises in the E-SE moving to high in the Southern skies by dawn

  • Where to Find Comet PanSTARRS

  • 10* is about the width of your fist held at arm\’s length.
  • This diagram is drawn for a viewer near 40* north latitude (Denver, New York, Madrid) 30 minutes after sunset.
  • If you\’re south of there, the comet will be a little higher above your horizon early in the month than shown here.
  • North of 40°, it will be a little lower early in March than shown here.
  • SkyandTelescope.com/panstarrs

Daylight Savings Time

The post HIV & SpaceX Troubles | SciByte 84 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> Meteorites & Asteroids | SciByte 82 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/32102/meteorites-asteroids-scibyte-82/ Tue, 19 Feb 2013 22:04:04 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=32102 We take a look at the Russian Meteorite ‘strike,’ a dark matter announcement, headaches, asteroid flyby, viewer feedback, and more!

The post Meteorites & Asteroids | SciByte 82 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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We take a look at the Russian Meteorite ‘strike,’ a dark matter announcement, headaches, asteroid flyby, viewer feedback, an update on CERN, 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

Picks of the Week:

[asa]B00B7VZN76[/asa]
[asa]B00BAXTY8U[/asa]
[asa]B0060MYM7O[/asa]

Show Notes:

2013 Russian Meteorite Strike

— NEWS BYTE —

Dark Matter Announcement Coming

  • Dark Matter
  • The dark matter theory was born 80 years ago when Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky discovered that there was not enough mass in observable stars or galaxies to allow the force of gravity to hold them together
  • The Standard Model only accounts for only around four or five percent of the stuff in the Universe that we see
  • It could be useful for identifying the stable of particles and forces that regulate our daily life, the Standard Model only tells part of the cosmic story
  • Dark matter, could make up 23 percent, and dark energy, an enigmatic force that appears to drive the expansion of the Universe, could accounts for around 72 or 73 percent
  • Some physics theories suggest that dark matter is made of WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles), a class of particles that are their own antimatter partner particles
  • When matter and antimatter partners meet, they annihilate each other, so if two WIMPs collided, they would be destroyed, releasing a pair of daughter particles – an electron and its antimatter counterpart, the positron, in the process
  • Although we can not explain gravity, although we know how to measure gravity and exploit it for our needs
  • Announcement Coming Up
  • In about two weeks the first paper of results of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a particle collector mounted on the outside of the International Space Station, will be published
  • Researchers have said that the results bear on the mystery of dark matter, that \”It will not be a minor paper\” and that they rewrote the paper 30 times before they were satisfied with it
  • Even with this tease for a \’major announcement\’ scientists still say it represents a \”small step\” in figuring out what dark matter is, and perhaps not the final answer
  • Tracking Cosmic Particles
  • To track these phantom particles, physicists rely on several methods and tools
  • The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, the biggest particle smasher in the world
  • The South Pole Neutrino Observatory, tracks subatomic particles known as neutrinos, which, according to physicists, are created when dark matter passes through the Sun and interacts with protons
  • The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) aboard the International Space Station (ISS), captures gamma rays coming from collisions of dark matter particles.
  • Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer
  • Has the potential to detect the positrons and electrons produced by dark matter annihilations in the Milky Way
  • It was installed on the International Space Station in May 2011, and so far, it has detected 25 billion particle events, including about 8 billion electrons and positrons
  • This will first science paper from this instrument that will report how many of each were found, and what their energies are
  • If the experiment detected an abundance of positrons peaking at a certain energy, that could indicate a detection of dark matter,
  • What it Might Mean for What We Might Find
  • There is a lot of stuff that can mimic dark matter,\”
  • If the experiment detected an abundance of positrons peaking at a certain energy, that could indicate a detection of dark matter,
  • While electrons are abundant in the universe around us, there are fewer known processes that could give rise to positrons
  • The smoking gun signature is a rise and then a dramatic fall\” in the number of positrons with respect to energy
  • The positrons produced by dark matter annihilation would have a very specific energy, depending on the mass of the WIMPs making up dark matter
  • Another telling sign will be the question of whether positrons appear to be coming from one direction in space, or from all around
  • If they\’re from dark matter, scientists expect them to be spread evenly through space, but if they\’re created by some normal astrophysical process, such as a star explosion, then they would originate in a single direction
  • Regardless of whether AMS has found dark matter yet, the scientists said they expected the question of dark matter\’s origin to become clearer soon
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Has Dark Matter Finally Been Found? Big News Soon | Space.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Lightning and Headaches

  • The New Study
  • A new study has found a 31 percent increase of the risk of headache and a 28 percent increased risk of migraine for chronic headache sufferers on days that lightning struck within 25 miles (40 kilometers) of their homes
  • In addition new-onset headaches and migraines increased by 24 percent and 23 percent, respectively
  • The Correlation
  • This is the first study to show a correlation between lightning and associated weather phenomena and the squalls in our heads
  • How exactly lightning might trigger headaches is still unknown but there are a number of possible explanations
  • Electromagnetic waves emitted from lightning could trigger headaches
  • Another explanation might be that lightning produces increases in air pollutants like ozone, and can cause release of fungal spores that might lead to migraine
  • Still Unknown
  • This study does show an apparent link between lightning and headaches; however, the exact mechanisms through which lightning and/or its associated meteorologic factors trigger headache is still unknown
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube Lightning = Headaches? | TheWeatherChannel
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Newsflash: Lightning May Cause Headaches – News Watch | newswatch.nationalgeographic.com

The February 15th Asteroid Fly-By

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Earth/Moon Relationship Simulations/Animations

  • Jason Null
  • What kind of program or software has a virtual model of the Earth and Moon
  • Free JAVA Simulators
  • Moon Phase and the Horizon diagram [free-java]
  • Lunar Phase Simulator [free-java]
  • Jonathan H
  • Why do I seem to see the moon in the sky during the day so often?
  • Different components to this
  • Lunar Phase Simulator [free-java]
  • The moon follow the same ‘orbital path’ as the sun, just as different speeds
  • Click [Start Animation] to the bottom left to get a feel for this
  • Higher latitudes have longer days and nights, which also gives the moon longer or fewer hours to be in the sky.
  • If you think about it each time the Moon sets or rises at night it is doing the opposite for someone on the daytime side of the Earth

— Updates —

CERN, the Higgs-Boson, and Upgrades

  • Upgrades
  • Over the past three years, CERN has slammed protons together more than six million billion times
  • Now seven months after the discovery announcement for a Boson, which they are now 99.9 percent certain is the Higgs-Boson, CERN scientists have brought CERN offline for an 18-month upgrade
  • The upgrade will boost the LHC\’s energy capacity, essential for CERN to confirm definitively that its boson is the Higgs, and allow it to probe new dimensions such as supersymmetry and dark matter
  • The Data
  • Scientists still have vasts amount of data to comb through during this downtime,
  • Even with the shutdown, CERN\’s researchers won\’t be taking a breather, as they must trawl through a vast mound of data
  • They expect that they will have much more information about the data from the last three years, and once they are able to go back through the data they will probably have more questions, some of which will lead to more tests under the new upgrades
  • What’s to Come
  • In 2011 the LHC has able to achieve collisions with an energy level of seven teraelectron volts
  • During 2012 CERN was able to increase to eight teraelectron volts
  • When it comes back online in 2015 after the upgrades are completed they will be able to achieve 13-14
  • It is expected that CERN will then run at those conditions for three to four years before more upgrades are installed
  • Social Media
  • CERN @CERN
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • CERN Website
  • After Higgs Boson, scientists prepare for next quantum leap

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

Space Station Communication

  • NASA\’s Mission Control center in Houston lost communication with the International Space Station at 9:45 a.m. ET (1445 GMT). [19 Feb 2013]
  • They restored contact with the space station at 12:34 p.m. ET (17:34 GMT),
  • A NASA official said \”Flight controllers were in the process of updating the station’s command and control software and were transitioning from the primary computer to the backup computer to complete the software load when the loss of communication occurred,\”
  • A main data relay system malfunctioned, and the computer that controls the station\’s critical functions switched to a backup
  • \”Mission Control Houston was able to communicate with the crew as the space station flew over Russian ground stations before 11:00 a.m. EST and instructed the crew to connect a backup computer to begin the process of restoring communications,\”
  • This is not the first time Mission Control has lost direct communication with the orbiting science laboratory
  • In 2010, the space station briefly lost communication with the ground when a primary computer failed and the backup had to take over. Communications were out for about one hour before NASA restored the connection
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • NASA Restores Contact with Space Station | Space.com
  • Temporary Comm Loss Interrupts Crew’s Day | NASA.gov

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

  • February, 20 1962 : 51 years ago : Glenn in orbit : John Glenn piloted the Mercury-Atlas 6 Friendship 7 spacecraft on the first U.S. manned orbital mission. [The first manned orbital flight was Yu. Gagarin on the the Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961]
    Launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, he completed three-orbits around the earth, at a maximum altitude of approx. 162 miles and an orbital velocity of approx. 17,500 mph. He spotted Perth, Australia, when that city\’s residents greeted him by switching on their house lights in unison. A four-cent U.S. stamp was put on sale the same day, making it the first U.S. stamp issued on the day of the event it commemorated. Glenn returned to space 36 years later, making 134 more orbits as a crew member of the space shuttle Discovery (29 Oct – 7 Nov 1998) for investigations on space flight and the aging process.

Looking up this week

The post Meteorites & Asteroids | SciByte 82 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> Color Blindness & Bionics | SciByte 81 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/31731/color-blindness-bionics-scibyte-81/ Tue, 12 Feb 2013 21:47:20 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=31731 We take a look at color blindness, a bionic man, dinosaur killing asteroids, Smartpens, Alzheimers, and much more!

The post Color Blindness & Bionics | SciByte 81 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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We take a look at color blindness, a bionic man, dinosaur killing asteroids, Smartpens, Alzheimers, 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 | Video | Torrent | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

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

TechSNAP 100 Limited Edition Shirt:

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Show Notes:

Fighting Color Blindness with Glasses

  • The low down
  • A pair of researchers from 2AI Labs have developed a wearable eyeglass device that effectively cures red-green color blindness
  • Most mammals have two dimensions of color, a yellow-blue dimension, and a grayscale (or brightness) dimension
  • Some of us have an extra dimension of color vision: The red-green dimension
  • The researchers created a filter technology that further amplified the eyes\’ ability to see blood under the skin, essentially removing \”visual noise\” from the blood signal
  • The Technology
  • The technology works by leveraging our capacity to see the amount of oxygen in another person\’s blood by simply looking at the hue of their skin
  • This eventually led to the development of eyeglasses that enable wearers to perceive emotions and social cues more clearly
  • As they tested the filters they received surprising feedback from users who were colorblind claiming that one of our technologies blew them away in its ability to \’cure\’ their color blindness
  • Of Note
  • The Oxy-Iso filter isolates and amplifies this signal so that it\’s also exaggerated
  • One important thing to note is that Oxy-Iso since can only work on red-green colorblind people who have some of each of their M and L cones
  • However while it does work at helping color-blind persons see red-green differences it also simultaneously handicaps them in their existing yellow-blue perception
  • Medical Applications
  • The devices can be used in the form of eyewear, or in the form of filters in front of illuminants, bathing the room in the blood-amplifying light
  • Outside of the application to color blindness, the two \”Iso\” filters — Oxy-Iso and Hemo-Iso — are principally intended for medical applications
  • The team is moving to put the technology into prescription eyewear, as well as into sunwear, and into general-purpose lighting,\”
  • They are also considering its application in cosmetic lighting
  • Oxy-Amp does is make the vasculature below the skin more salient, and that\’s just to say that skin appears more transparent — more youthful
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube Color Blindness test – Real ! | VladimirWlado
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • How Mark Changizi Conquered Colorblindness With Glasses | Popular Science

— NEWS BYTE —

Bionic man

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Dinosaurs Might Have Been Taken out with a One-Two punch

  • Binary Asteroids
  • Space scientists estimate that as many as 15 percent of observable asteroids are binaries
  • This observation has caused scientists problems due to the fact that the evidence of binaries striking the Earth is as few as 2 to 4 percent
  • Meteor Craters on Earth
  • A research team now suggests that many of the craters on Earth thought to have been caused by a single asteroid, may in fact have been caused by binaries
  • A binary could cause just one crater if the two asteroids were close enough together when they struck.
  • Computer simulations showing that binary asteroids hitting the Earth that some of the craters were oblong, or irregularly shaped
  • There are some real craters here on Earth where the crater has some asymmetries that could be explained by a binary strike
  • Chicxulub
  • The Chicxulub crater, off the coast of Mexico, is thought by many scientists to be evidence of an asteroid strike that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.
  • A team of researchers from the U.K. and Australia has published a paper suggesting that the crater Chicxulub may have come about due to the impact of binary asteroids
  • If that were the case, it likely that the combined size of the asteroid would have been roughly the same as the calculated size of a single entity
  • Since the crater left behind has a diameter of approximately 112 mi [180 km] they would have a combined diameter of ~4-6 mi [7-10 km]
  • The researchers say, that twin asteroids could have been as far apart as 50 mi [80 km] and still produced a single crater.
  • Re-examination
  • Scientists are now looking at other existing craters on Earth to try to determine if they too are possibly the result of binary strikes and if so, recalculate the percentage of binary strikes
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube | Meteor Impact Site | NationalGeographic
  • YouTube | iSALE3D Binary Asteroid Impact | Helios1234p
  • YouTube | Mutual Events of Binary Asteroid 1999 KW4 | CelestiaDev
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Research group suggests Chicxulub crater may have been caused by binary asteroids | phys.org

Digitizing Pen and Paper

  • When used on special paper, the pens record your every scribble with a built-in camera and can also record audio at the same time and sync that audio with what you write
  • Writing to the Cloud
  • The new pens differ in that they, and the notes they record, are no longer tethered to an individual computer
  • If you are near a hotspot, the Sky pens will begin syncing their notes to Evernote, a Internet-based note taking and storage service, as soon as they stop recording them
  • What it Does
  • Sky pen owners can send up to 500 megabytes of data for free from their smartpens, which is roughly about 70 hours worth of recordings or 10,000 pages of notes
  • Build into the technology is the fact that a a Livescribe player that allows users to see and hear their notes at the same time
  • Evernote arranges the notes by page in their notebook, but when you click or tap on the page, the Livescribe player will collect and display all the pages of notes from that particular recording.
  • The service also scans them for recognizable characters and words so users can search them
  • Drawbacks
  • It can only be used with Evernote and it can be slow to transfer recordings
  • The pen does require company approved paper, although you can print out paper with the proper patterns on it
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube | Sky(TM) wifi smartpen product spot :30 sec (US)
  • YouTube | Sky(TM)wifi smartpen Introduction | nevermissaword
  • Social Media
  • livescribe @livescribe
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • LifeScribe.com
  • Smartpen takes handwritten notes into mobile, cloud era | phys.org

Altering amyloid protein in Alzheimer\’s

  • A recent study shows that the natural chemicals found in green tea and red wine may disrupt a key step of the Alzheimer\’s disease pathway
  • Amyloid Protein Clumps
  • Alzheimer\’s disease is characterised by a distinct buildup of amyloid protein in the brain that clumps together to form toxic, sticky balls of varying shapes
  • These amyloid balls latch on to the surface of nerve cells in the brain by attaching to proteins on the cell surface called prions
  • New Research
  • This research was looking at whether the precise shape of the amyloid balls is essential for them to attach to the prion receptors
  • If it is then scientists could prevent the amyloid balls binding to prion by altering their shape, as this would stop the cells from dying
  • Recent research has shown that the extracts of red wine and green tea can re-shape amyloid proteins, such that they can no longer harm nerve cells
  • The research team formed amyloid balls in a test tube and added them to human and animal brain cells
  • When they added the extracts from red wine and green tea, which recent research has shown to re-shape amyloid proteins
  • The amyloid balls no longer harmed the nerve cells because their shape was distorted, so they could no longer bind to prion and disrupt cell function
  • What This Means for the Future
  • This research has showed, for the first time, that when amyloid balls stick to prion, it triggers the production of even more amyloid
  • The researchers are now trying to understand exactly how the amyloid-prion interaction kills off neurons
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Green tea and red wine extracts interrupt Alzheimer\’s disease pathway in cells | MedicalXPress.com

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Metric vs. Standard

  • Jason aka Tubsta
  • Shouldn’t you use metric measurements on a science show?
  • The answer
  • They are nearly always in the show notes.
  • Should probably include them in the show more often …
  • A majority of the audience is from the US, where metric measurements are not tangible
  • Although outside of the US standard measurements are probably not too tangible
  • I haven’t doubled up on the measurements in the past due to it taking it a bit longer, In the future I will make an effort to state both standard and metric more often
  • Hopefully combining the two might help people better understand both

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

  • Feb 15, 1951 : 62 years ago : Nuclear medical therapy : The first atomic reactor to be used in medical therapy treated its first patient at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY. The Brookhaven Graphite Research Reactor (BGRR) began the experimental treatment of brain cancer using neutrons from the reactor. In the following two years, ten patients were treated with boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT). The BGRR also supplied radioisotopes for use by other research organizations, including medical uses, among others. The reactor, the world\’s first dedicated to peaceful exploration of atomic energy operated 1950-68, and was used for research other than medical uses. It was followed by the Brookfield Medical Research Reactor, which reached critically 15 Mar 1959

Looking up this week

The post Color Blindness & Bionics | SciByte 81 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> Multitasking & Tractor Beams | SciByte 79 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/30961/multitasking-tractor-beams-scibyte-79/ Tue, 29 Jan 2013 22:12:40 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=30961 We take a look at multitasking abilities, red pens, tractor beams, bicycle airbags, tracking twitter, spacecraft updates, viewer feedback, and more.

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We take a look at multitasking abilities, red pens, tractor beams, bicycle airbags, tracking twitter, spacecraft updates, viewer feedback, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes:

Multitasking Proficiency

  • The low down
  • Most people believe they can multitask effectively, but a new study indicates that people who multitask the most – including talking on a cell phone while driving – are least capable of doing so.
  • The Study
  • The study participants were 310 University of Utah psychology undergraduates – 176 female and 134 male with a median age of 21 – who volunteered for their department\’s subject pool in exchange for extra course credit.
  • The subjects were put through a battery of tests and questionnaires to measure actual multitasking ability, perceived multitasking ability, cell phone use while driving, use of a wide array of electronic media, and personality traits such as impulsivity and sensation-seeking.
  • Research suggests that people who engage in multitasking often do so not because they have the ability, but because they are less able to block out distractions and focus on a singular task
  • The more people multitask by talking on cell phones while driving or by using multiple media at once, the more they lack the actual ability to multitask, and their perceived multitasking ability \”was found to be significantly inflated
  • The Results
  • To measure actual multitasking ability, participants performed a test named Operation Span, or OSPAN.
  • The test involves two tasks: memorization and math computation where participants must remember two to seven letters, each separated by a math equation that they must identify as true or false
  • A simple example of a question: \”is 2+4=6?, g, is 3-2=2?, a, is 4×3=12.\” Answer: true, g, false, a, true.
  • Participants also ranked their perceptions of their own multitasking ability by giving themselves a score ranging from zero to 100, with 50 percent meaning average, 70 percent of participants thought they were above average at multitasking
  • Study subjects reported how often they used a cell phone while driving, and what percentage of the time they are on the phone while driving
  • Subjects also completed a survey of how often and for how many hours they use which media, including printed material, television and video, computer video, music, nonmusic audio, video games, phone, instant and text messaging, e-mail, the Web and other computer software such as word processing
  • Multitasking, including cell phone use while driving, correlated significantly with sensation-seeking, indicating some people multitask because it is more stimulating, interesting and challenging, and less boring – even if it may hurt their overall performance
  • Of Note
  • The data suggest the people talking on cell phones while driving are people who probably shouldn\’t.
  • In fact the people who are most likely to multitask harbor the illusion they are better than average at it, when in fact they are no better than average and often worse
  • People who score high on a test of actual multitasking ability tend not to multitask because they are better able to focus attention on the task at hand
  • Study participants also reported spending 13 percent of their driving time talking on a cell phone, which Strayer says roughly squares with federal estimates that one in 10 drivers are on the phone at any given time
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube Automated Operation Span Tutorial | zupef
  • Image Driving simulator they use in some research | David Strayer, University of Utah
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Frequent multitaskers are bad at it: Motorists overrate ability to talk on cell phones when driving | MedXPress.com

— NEWS BYTE —

Attack of the red pens

  • The low down
  • Sociologists claim in a paper they\’ve had published that when teachers use a red pen to add comments to student papers, students perceive them more negatively than if they use another color pen
  • The Study
  • The two researchers enlisted the assistance of 199 undergraduate students – each was given four versions of an already graded essay by an unknown instructor
  • The graded remarks were deemed as high or low in quality with some written in red, others in blue
  • Students were asked to read the essay and the remarks given by the instructor and then to rate how they felt about what the instructor had written and to suggest what grade they would have given the essay
  • They were also asked how they felt about the instructor that had written the original remarks
  • The Results
  • After they\’d finished with their opinions, each was also given a questionnaire designed to provide the researchers with more concrete data.
  • The researchers found that the student volunteers didn\’t seem to be impacted one way or another by pen color when they agreed with the instructor\’s comments and grade
  • When they disagreed; however, there were definitely some differences – mainly negative
  • When the instructors\’ comments were written in red versus blue the volunteers judged them more harshly and as a result, rated them lower in \”bedside manner.\”
  • The volunteers didn\’t seem to judge the quality of the comments any differently – their negative feelings were aimed at the person that had written the remarks when they wrote in red ink
  • Of Note
  • The researchers theorize that red ink is akin to using all caps when writing e-mail or text messages – it\’s like shouting at a person
  • Those being graded naturally feel a little bit abused and respond by growing angry or sad, which, they note, doesn\’t really promote the learning process
  • The team suggest instructors stop using red pens and go with a shade of blue instead
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Study shows red pen use by instructors leads to more negative response | phys.org

Tractor Beams a reality?

  • Although light manipulation techniques have existed since the 1970s, this is the first time a light beam has been used to draw objects towards the light source, albeit at a microscopic level.
  • What is it?
  • Researchers have found a way to generate a special optical field that efficiently reverses radiation pressure of light.
  • The new technique could lead to more efficient medical testing, such as in the examination of blood samples
  • The team discovered a technique which will allow them to provide \’negative\’ force acting upon minuscule particles
  • The technique
  • Normally when matter and light interact the solid object is pushed by the light and carried away in the stream of photons
  • Such radiation force was first identified by Johanes Kepler when observing that tails of comets point away from the sun
    Over recent years researchers have realised that while this is the case for most of the optical fields, there is a space of parameters when this force reverses.
  • Scientists have now demonstrated the first experimental realisation of this concept together with a number of exciting applications for biomedical photonics and other disciplines
  • What does it mean to todays science?
  • The occurrence of negative force is very specific to the properties of the object, such as size and composition
  • This allows optical sorting of micro-objects in a simple and inexpensive device
  • Optical fractionation has been identified as one of the most promising biomedical applications of optical manipulation allowing
  • Scientists identified certain conditions, in which objects held by the \”tractor\” beam force-field, rearranged themselves to form a structure which made the beam even stronger
  • Multimedia
  • Image Example of comet with two tails | SpacePlace.nasa.gov
  • First video reveals working tractor beam in action | newscientist.com
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Star Trek\’s \’tractor\’ beam created in miniature by researchers | phys.org

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Bicycle Airbags

HIggs-Boson Twitter Rumors and Following

  • Last time on SciByte
  • SciByte 53 | Higgs Boson – To Higgs-Boson or not to Higgs-Boson | July 10, 2012
  • The low down
  • For the first time scientists have been able to analyse the dynamics of social media on a global scale before, during and after the announcement of a major scientific discovery.
  • The model is based on the spread of gossip on Twitter prior to the Higgs boson discovery announcement
  • The Data
  • According to the analysed data, the rumours that the Higgs boson had been discovered started around 1st July 2012
  • That means it was one day before the announcement at Tevatron, and three days before the official announcement from CERN on 4th July.
  • The research shows that rumours started to spread on Twitter firstly in the USA, UK, Spain, Canada, Australia, as well as Italy, France, Switzerland and Germany, all countries with strong scientific connections to the experiments at the LHC.
  • What it means
  • Other researchers on the project are also interested in how information spreads on social media
  • This is really useful for practical applications such as marketing, for example if you want to run a global marketing campaign you can identify key people on social media to help you to spread your message
  • Once you have identified these key advocates, you can change and steer the message in a different direction, potentially modifying opinions of millions of people or keep the interest in the topic going
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube The Anatomy of a Scientific Gossip – World View | networkedsystemslab
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Scientists analyse global Twitter gossip around Higgs boson discovery | phys.org

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE —

Opportunity rover still on the move

  • Last time on SciByte
  • SciByte 61 | ‘Tatooine’ Exoplanets & Eye’s – Opportunity, Driving Distance and life | September 4, 2012
  • Nine Years of Service
  • NASA\’s Opportunity rover landed on Mars the night of Jan. 24, 2004 PST (just after midnight EST on Jan. 25), three weeks after its twin, Spirit, touched down
  • Spirit and Opportunity were originally supposed to spend three months searching for evidence of past water activity on the Red Planet
  • Spirit finally stopped communicating with Earth in March 2010, after getting mired in soft sand and failing to maneuver into a position that would allow it to slant its solar panels toward the sun over the 2009-2010 Martian winter. NASA declared the rover dead in 2011 after 7 years of service
  • Opportunity, after 9 years of service, is currently inspecting clay deposits along the rim of Mars\’ huge Endeavour Crater. Clays form in relatively neutral (as opposed to acidic or basic) water, so
  • Rover road trips
  • So far, robotic rovers have been to the moon and Mars, with astronauts actually driving a lunar car on the moon during NASA\’s Apollo program
  • Soviet-era Lunakhod 2 : In the lead for total distance travelled the farthest is the the Soviet-era Lunakhod 2, which drove 23 miles (37 kilometers) during its 1973 mission
  • NASA\’s Apollo 17 moon rover : The next rover with the most driving distance is NASA\’s Apollo 17 moon rover, which was driven 22.3 miles (35.89 km) by astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt in 1972
  • Opportunity rover : Next, in a close third, is the Opportunity rover, which has been driving across the plains of Meridiani Planum on the Red Planet since 2004 and has driven more than 22.03 miles (35.46 km) and is still going today
  • This means that Opportunity is a mere one third of a mile (0.4 km) to being the second farthest driven, and a little under a mile (1.5 km) to being the farthest
  • I estimate, barring any delays for science or equipment and based on past mileage, that in the next 2 months it might overtake the distance travelled by Apollo 17 rover, and the distance by the Lunokhod in the next 6 months.
  • The latest to enter the race is Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity, which is just getting started with only 0.4 mile (0.7 km) traveled so far.
    the area may once have been capable of supporting primitive microbial life
  • Multimedia
  • Distances Driven on Other Worlds Infographic | Space.com
  • Social Media
  • Spirit and Oppy @MarsRovers
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Distance Traveled, Extraterrestrial Vehicles | Wheeled Vehicles, Moon & Mars | Space.com
  • NASA\’s Opportunity Rover Begins Year 10 on Mars | Space.com

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Dyscalculia

  • Last time on SciByte
  • SciByte 78 | Dyscalculia & the Flu – Dyscalculia | January 22, 2013
  • James Lewis
  • Suggests a concern that there is an overdiagnosis of \’labels\’
  • Could simply be that you could learn differently
  • Response
  • Almost certainly “the system” can over-diagnose students
  • Are you or were you “diagnosed”? If so learn what exemptions, etc, that you qualify for should you choose to utilize them
  • Try different ways of learning outside the classroom that can help in the classroom or supplement

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

THIS WEEK

  • NASA – Day of Remembrance
  • Apollo 1 | January 27, 1967 | Command Pilot Virgil \”Gus\” Grissom, Senior Pilot Edward H. White and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee
  • Challenger | January 28, 1986 | Francis R. Scobee – Mission Commander, Michael J. Smith – Pilot, Ellison S. Onizuka – Mission Specialist 1, Judith A. Resnik – Mission Specialist 2, Ronald E. McNair – Mission Specialist 3, Christa McAuliffe – Payload Specialist 1, Gregory B. Jarvis – Payload Specialist 2
  • Columbia | February 1, 2003 | Rick Husband, Commander; William C. McCool, Pilot; Michael P. Anderson, Payload Commander; David M. Brown, Mission Specialist 1; Kalpana Chawla, Mission Specialist 2; Laurel Clark, Mission Specialist 4; and Ilan Ramon, Payload Specialist 1

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

  • Feb 01, 1972 : 40 years ago : Hand-held calculator : The first scientific handheld calculator was introduced for $395 by Hewlett- Packard, named the HP-35 for having 35 keys. It was the first handheld calculator able to perform logarithmic and trigonometric functions with one keystroke. The red LED display could give scientific notation up to 10 digits mantissa and 2 digits exponent. The price was reduced several times, eventually to $195. By Feb 1975 (when production of the model was discontinued), 300,000 had been sold. The numbers and functions for calculations were entered in “Reverse Polish Notation”(RPN), which used an “ENTER” key but needed no parentheses or “=” key. It ran on rechargeable batteries and had electronics with several integrated circuits in a 3.1\” x 5.8\” x 1.4\” (79 ×147×34 mm) case.
  • Image author : Seth Morabito | originally posted to Flickr as HP 35 Calculator

Looking up this week

The post Multitasking & Tractor Beams | SciByte 79 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> Breast Cancer & Mayan Calender | SciByte 69 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/26761/breast-cancer-mayan-calender-scibyte-69/ Tue, 30 Oct 2012 20:38:10 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=26761 We take a look at strange quasars, fighting breast cancer, peek-a-boo, Mayan Calendar, and up in the sky this week.

The post Breast Cancer & Mayan Calender | SciByte 69 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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We take a look at strange quasars, fighting breast cancer, peek-a-boo, Mayan Calendar, updates on stories, spacecraft and Curiosity and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes:

Crazy Quasar

  • What are Quasars?
  • Quasars (short for quasi-stellar object) are the brilliant cores of galaxies where infalling material fuels a supermassive black hole
  • The black hole is so engorged that some of the energy escapes as powerful blasts of radiation from the surrounding disk of accreting material
  • They are thought to be roughly 10–10,000 times the Schwarzschild radius of the black hole
  • The quasar can appear as a jet-like feature and if the beam shines in Earth’s direction and it can appear as a quasar that can outshine its surrounding galaxy a hundred or a thousand times.
  • They are among the most luminous, powerful, and energetic objects known in the universe emitting up to a thousand times the energy output of the Milky Way.
  • More than 200,000 quasars are known and only a handful of these very distant ultra-luminous quasars were found by the SDSS in about one quarter of the whole sky
  • The low down
  • Quasars have been the best and most easily observed beacons for astronomers to probe the distant Universe
  • Now, one of the most distant and brightest quasar is providing a bit of a surprise
  • Astronomers studying a distant galaxy, dubbed J1148+5251 and which contains a bright quasar, are seeing only the quasar and not the host galaxy itself
  • Significance
  • It has been thought that the quasar has been feeding on a handful of stars every year in order to bulk up to its size of three billion solar masses over just a few hundred million years.
  • However, we can not see the galaxy where all the stars would be
  • Near infrared views with the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 are only providing hints of what might be taking place
  • It is believed that the galaxy is so enshrouded with dust that none of the starlight can be seen and only the bright, glaring quasar shines through
  • Observations
  • The quasar was first identified in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the follow-up submillimeter observations showed significant dust but not how and where
  • Astronomers used Hubble to very carefully subtract light from the quasar image and look for the glow of surrounding stars.
  • Even after subtracting the quasar’s light remarkably Hubble didn’t find any of the underlying galaxy
  • Of Note
  • The early universe was dust-free until the first generation of stars started making dust through nuclear fusion most early galaxies contain hardly any dust
  • In order to make that much dust in an early galaxy it would need to make lots of short-lived massive stars earlier on that would lose their mass at the end of their lifetime
  • Because we don’t see the stars, we can rule out that the galaxy that hosts this quasar is a normal galaxy
  • This would be among the dustiest galaxies in the universe, so widely distributed that not even a single clump of stars is peeking through
  • Multimedia
  • Image An artist’s rendering of the most distant quasar | ESO.org | ESO/M. Kornmesser
  • Image Chandra Scores A Double Bonus With A Distant Quasar | chandra.harvard.edu | NASA/CXC/A.Siemiginowska(CfA)/J.Bechtold(U.Arizona)
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Ancient Quasar Shines Brightly, But All the Galaxy’s Stars Are Missing | UniverseToday.com
  • Quasar may be embedded in unusually dusty galaxy | Phys.org

— NEWS BYTE —

Suppressing tumors and metastases in breast cancer

  • The protein that is necessary for lactation, Elf5, in mammals inhibits the critical cellular transition that is an early indicator of breast cancer and metastasis
  • The low down
  • This is the first confirmed report that this protein, called Elf5, is a tumor suppressor in breast cancer
  • These findings provide new avenues to pursue in treating and diagnosing breast cancer and possibly cancers of other organs as well
  • Promising is that this includes findings from both animal and human breast cancer models.
  • Significance
  • Under normal circumstances, Elf5 is a transcription factor that controls the genes that allow for milk production
  • Elf5 keeps normal breast cells in their current shape and restricts their movement
  • When Elf5 levels are low or absent, epithelial cells become more like stem cells, morphing into mesenchymal cells
  • Mesenchymal cells, changing their shape and appearance and migrating elsewhere in the body which is how cancer spreads
  • The protein works suppressing the epithelial-mesenchymal transition by directly repressing transcription of Snail2, a master regulator of mammary stem cells known to trigger the EMT
  • Elf5 loss is frequently detected early and is also found that little or no Elf5 in human breast cancer samples correlated with increased morbidity.
  • Experiments conducted also show that this could also be an important diagnostic tool
  • Of Note
  • Research shows that the EMT-Snail 2 pathway is a valuable one to target for early breast cancer intervention
  • One way would be designing something to recapture the repressive effect of Elf5 or a drug that could mimic Elf5 activity
  • This is just one molecule, part of a big network, scientists are now creating a detailed map of this molecule and its associated partners in order to give a better idea of what to look for\
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Lactation protein suppresses tumors and metastasis in breast cancer, scientists discover | MedicalXPress.com

Peek-a-boo I don’t see you

  • The low down
  • Why do children think they can render themselves invisible if they cover their eyes, and why have nearly all young children come to this same conclusion?
  • Researchers at the University of Cambridge performed a variety of simple tests on groups of 3 and 4-year-old children to try and figure this out
  • Significance
  • They first placed children in eye masks and asked them whether they could be seen by the researchers
  • The researchers could see other adults if those adults were wearing eye masks
  • In addition nearly all the children felt that an adult would not be seen by other adults if those adults were wearing eye masks
  • Another test with a second group of children had them wearing one of two different sets of goggles
  • The first set of goggles were blacked out completely and the second set were one-way-mirrored
  • Most of the children wearing the mirrored goggles didn’t properly grasp the idea of one-way-mirrors
  • Those who did get it all thought they were hidden from view regardless of whether they were wearing blacked out goggles or the mirrored pair
  • When pressed on exactly what their invisibility meant, the children in both of the aforementioned phases of the study admitted that, their bodies were still visible when their eyes were covered
  • However their “self” that was hidden, or at least that is the implication
  • Of Note
  • The children in the study seem to draw a distinction between body and “self”
  • Self seems to be universally described as living in the eyes in some sense–unless the eyes of two people meet, they cannot actually perceive each other.
  • Another study seems to back this conclusion up
  • Researchers looked directly at the child subjects while the children averted their eyes and another group the with child looking on and researcher averting their gazes
  • In both instances, the children largely felt they were not being seen as long as the eyes didn’t meet
  • Now you know why your toddler won’t look at you when you’re delivering a scolding. The look-away is the perfect getaway
  • Multimedia
  • Peekaboo I see you. doctorlizardo via Flickr
  • Image Gallery |
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Why Do Children Think Covering Their Eyes Makes Them Invisible? | popsci.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

The Milky Way in Nine Gigapixels

Mayan Calendar

  • Guatemala’s Mayan people have accused the government and tour groups of perpetuating the myth that their calendar foresees the imminent end of the world for monetary gain
  • The low down
  • The Culture Ministry is hosting a massive event in Guatemala City—which as many as 90,000 people are expected to attend and tour groups are promoting doomsday-themed getaways.
  • Maya leader Gomez urged the Tourism Institute to rethink the doomsday celebration, which he criticized as a “show” that was disrespectful to Mayan culture.
  • Oxlajuj Ajpop is holding events it considers sacred in five cities to mark the event and Gomez said the Culture Ministry would be wise to throw its support behind their real celebrations
  • Of Note
  • The Mayan calendar has 18 months of 20 days each plus a sacred month, “Wayeb,” of five days
  • B’aktun" is the largest unit in the time cycle system, and is about 400 years
  • The broader era spans 13 B’aktun, or about 5,200 years
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Maya demand an end to doomsday myth | phys.org
  • Maya calendar | Wikipedia

Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope Announcement on Thursday

  • The low down
  • NASA is planning to announce a discovery from its Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope on Thursday (Nov. 1) that will shed light on the early universe, officials said.
  • The announcement will “discuss new measurements using gamma rays to investigate ancient starlight,”
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • NASA to Announce Early Universe Findings Thursday | Space.com

– SPACECRAFT UPDATE –

Increasing the population on the ISS

— Updates —

Oct 17 San Francisco Bay Area Meteor

  • Last time on SciByte
  • Exoplanets & Universal Translator | SciByte 68 [October 23, 2012]
  • The low down
  • A Novato, Calif. resident read about the fireball and recalled hearing a sound on her roof that night, she and neighbors found a ding on the roof
  • On closer inspection, that crust was thought to be a product of weathering of a natural rock, not from the heat of entry
    +When a second similar find 2.5 miles from that location was found, that person cut the rock in half which confirmed the meteor classification
  • Scientists are currently analyzing both unusual and hard to identify meteorites
  • Of Note
  • If you are in Marin or Sonoma counties W or NW of the San Pablo Bay area, check the map in the Show Notes to see if you are in the flight path
  • There is a map of the projected band (light area) where meteorites of different size may have fallen
  • If you live North-North-East of Novato and you saw an airship over (or within a few miles from) your property Friday, chances are that you could be the owner of a space rock.
  • The airship was following the path of the falling meteorites as calculated from the NASA/CAMS meteor video surveillance project.
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance | cams.seti.org
  • Meteorite From California Fireball Is Meteor-wrong, Scientist Says | Space.com

– CURIOSITY UPDATE –

  • MastCam
  • On Oct. 24, it was used to view soil material on the rover’s observation tray.
  • These observations will help assess movement of the sample on the tray in response to vibrations from sample-delivery and sample-processing activities of mechanisms on the rover’s arm.
  • CheMin
  • A sieved portion from the fourth scoop of soil it collected at the “Rocknest” patch was delivered
    ChemCam
  • Did its very first depth profile, in which we shot the laser 600 times in a single location, in order to tunnel through the surface of the rock making a hole about 0.04 in [1 mm]
  • This can help scientists understand how the composition of the sample changes from the surface to the interior.
  • SAM [Sample Analysis at Mars]
  • Material from the fourth scoop is also being used to scrub internal surfaces of the rover’s sample-processing mechanisms in preparation for delivery of a sample from a later scoop to SAM
  • Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) / Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS)
  • Both monitoring of environmental conditions and analysis of an atmosphere sample
  • "Rocknest Analysis
  • One of the rocks in the area if called Zephyr, t is interesting because it appears to be made of 2 different types of materials.
  • A harder, more resistant material on the top about 1 in. long, capping it, and then beneath it has a lighter colored softer material that appears to erode more easily
  • When they went to analyze the material with the ChemCam they used 9 points instead of just 2, just to make sure we would hit the material of interest
  • They ended up hitting both the dark and the light material and found that there was indeed a compositional difference
  • In addition to composition, they have also been able to make a three-dimensional model of the surface of this target using images from the Remote Micro-Imager part of ChemCam
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube Curiosity Rover Report (Oct. 26, 2012): Working with Curiosity’s ChemCam Laser | JPLNewshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDgv14Qtl1c
  • Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
  • Social Media
  • Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Assessing Drop-Off to Mars Rover’s Observation Tray | mars.jpl.nasa.gov
  • Working with Curiosity’s ChemCam Laser | nasa.gov
  • Working with Curiosity’s ChemCam Laser | nasa.gov

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

  • Nov 2, 2000 | 12 years ago | International Space Station| An American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts became the first permanent residents of the international space station, at the start of their four-month mission. After their Soyuz spacecraft linked up at 11:00am GMT, William Shepherd, Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko entered the station, turned on the lights and life support systems, and proceeded to set up a live television link with the Russian mission control to confirm that the move-in was going well. They were confined to two of the space station’s three rooms until space shuttle Endeavor arrived in early Dec. with giant solar panels that would provide all the necessary power.

NExt Week Thursday!!!

Looking up this week

The post Breast Cancer & Mayan Calender | SciByte 69 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> Future Olympic Tech & Fast Cheetahs | SciByte 58 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/23131/future-olympic-tech-fast-cheetahs-scibyte-58/ Tue, 14 Aug 2012 21:50:33 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=23131 We take a look at the possibilities for future Olympic technology, land speed records not at the olympics, discoveries from Flickr, Curiosity update and more!

The post Future Olympic Tech & Fast Cheetahs | SciByte 58 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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We take a look at the possibilities for future Olympic technology, land speed records not at the olympics, discoveries from Flickr, spacecraft updates, Curiosity update and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes

A horse is a horse

  • The low down
  • The first successfully cloned horse was born in 2003
  • Today, there are only a few hundred equine clones, created mainly for breeding
  • In 2007 the FEI’s general assembly decided that cloning was "potentially against the spirit of sport in that it was unfair
  • Significance
  • July 2012 the Féderation Equestre Internationale (FEI) lifted a ban on cloned horses and their progeny competing in the Olympic Games
  • The FEI has been careful to emphasize that cloning is a breeding technique only
  • A key factor in the decision was the high price of cloning, which has since come down
  • The federation determined that the clones were only 98 percent copies of the originals, the 2 percent margin was what ultimately caused the FEI to overturn the ban
  • Currently the American Quarter Horse Association won’t allow clones, neither does the Jockey Club, which registers thoroughbreds in North America
  • A key factor in the decision was the high price of cloning, which has since come down
  • The federation determined that the clones were only 98 percent copies of the originals, the 2 percent margin was what ultimately caused the FEI to overturn the ban
  • Currently the American Quarter Horse Association won’t allow clones, neither does the Jockey Club, which registers thoroughbreds in North America
  • A top stallion for in vitro fertilization can go for tens of thousands of dollars
  • The cloning process can cost more than a hundred thousand U.S. dollars, and there are no guarantees that the clone will match the talent of the original
  • The most common use for cloned horses is to perpetuate genetic material, while the original horse can travel and compete
  • Most male horses in high-level competitions are geldings and a mare can bear only so many foals
  • Of Note
  • In the end only 300-odd horses compete in the Olympics, and clones would have to battle their way to the top just as traditionally bred horses do.
  • Needless of any cloning ruling it is widely agreed that environment, training, nutrition, and relationship with the rider have an incalculable impact on the horse’s performance
  • Multimedia
  • IMAGE Prometea the world’s first cloned horse with her mother in 2003 | National Geographic, Photograph by Giovanna Lazzara, AP
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Cloned Horses Coming to the Olympics? | National Geographic

— NEWS BYTE —

Possible Olympic tech for the future



Credit: John MacNeill | Credit: John MacNeill

  • Holographic Obstacles
  • In Olympic equestrian events 100 riders are injured in eventing falls every year, and when a multi million-dollar horse goes down, even a minor injury like a twisted ankle can end its career
  • Line-of-sight infrared beams could monitor the edges of the obstacles; if the horse breaks the beam, the system would instantly alert the judges, and the crowd, to the fault
  • Smart Landing Pads
  • Scoring the exact length of a long or triple jump can be imprecise and time-consuming when landing in a sand pit
  • Researchers at Arizona State University have developed a 2,016-pressure-sensor array to map where an athlete hits the ground
  • Underneath the sand in the landing pit, a dozen or so of the mats could record the exact point of touchdown where computer could automatically calculate the length of the jump
  • Head-up Goggles
  • During events swimmers are not able to see where they stand in the event
  • With an integrated head-up display could broadcast a live view of the competition and help racers to better pace themselves
  • Automatic Goalkeeper
  • German researchers have developed an automated goal-tracking system for american soccer (football)
  • Actuators around the net generate a magnetic field across the face of the goal.
  • When the ball passes through that field, a chip embedded in the ball sends a signal to the ref’s watch within one tenth of a second.
  • Retractable Diving Board
  • On a good day, a diver’s head misses the board by a couple of inches
  • In the one second a typical diver is airborne above the plane of the board, it could retract as much as three feet
  • Multimedia
  • IMAGE | PopSci.com Credit :John MacNeill
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Summer Olympics: 2020 – How technology is going to make the 2020 Olympics better, safer, and more exciting | PopSci.com

Land speed record



YouTube channel : NationalGeographic | Credit: Ken Geiger, National Geographic

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

New species on Flickr

  • The low down
  • While randomly flipping through images posted on the online database an entomologist spotted a previously unknown species of lacewing
  • The new lacewing, which has a 30-millimeter wingspan, were taken in a forested park north of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, by an amateur photographer and then posted online
  • The entomologist suspected the creature was an undescribed species; however, the the photographer had released the insect after taking its picture
  • Researchers had to wait until the shutterbug revisited the area and collected a specimen before they could officially write up their discovery
  • Multimedia
  • IMAGE New Lacewings species, Semachrysa jade | Credit: Guek Hock Ping
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • ScienceShot: New Species Discovered, Thanks to Flickr | https://news.sciencemag.org

– SPACECRAFT UPDATE –

Slowly but surely inch by inch Voyager 1 eyes the edge of the Solar System

Morpheus setback

  • The low down
  • The Morpheus project is what one former project manager called ““Home Depot engineering”
  • They are designed as low-budget projects using off-the-shelf parts to build something very quickly that gets 80 percent of the answer and allows the project to keep moving forward
  • These type of projects partner with non-traditional aerospace companies
  • Significance
  • The Morpheus is designed to deliver about 1,100 pounds (500 kg) of cargo to the moon, burn liquid oxygen and methane fuel
  • Designed and built by engineers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, the insect-like vehicle, had previously made several flights attached to a crane before the attempted free-flight on August 9, 2012
  • The engines, appeared to ignite as planned, lifting the vehicle into the air. But a few seconds later, Morpheus rolled over on its side and plummeted to the ground.
  • Of Note
  • An investigation is currently underway to determine the cause
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube Morpheus Landing Explodes on First KSC Free Flight Test | SpaceVidsNet
  • Social Media
  • Morpheus Lander @MorpheusLander
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Project Morpheus
  • Morpheus Lander Crashes and Burns | UniverseToday.com
  • NASA’s Morpheus lander in fiery crash at Cape Canaveral | Reuters.com

– CURIOSITY UPDATE –

Curiosity Rover Update



Credit: JPLnews | Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

  • Aug 19, 1887 : 125 years ago : Eclipse by baloon : Mendeleeff observes eclipse | Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834–1907) used a balloon to ascend above the cloud cover to an altitude of 11,500 feet (3.5 km) to observe an eclipse in Russia. He made the solo ascent above Klin without any prior experience. While his family was rather concerned, he paid no attention to controlling the balloon until after he had completed his observations, at which time he worked out how to land it. Mendeleev is the Russian chemist known for the ordering of the Periodic Table of the Elements. Yet, he was interested in many fields of science. He studied problems associated with Russia’s natural resources, such as coal, salt, metals, and the petroleum industry. In 1876, he visited the U.S. to observe the Pennsylvania oil fields.

Looking up this week

The post Future Olympic Tech & Fast Cheetahs | SciByte 58 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> Olympic Science & Red Bull Stratos | SciByte 56 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/22486/olympic-science-red-bull-stratos-scibyte-56/ Tue, 31 Jul 2012 21:48:53 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=22486 We take a look at olympic science, an innovative writing technique, morse code, music, and more!

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We take a look at olympic science, an innovative writing technique, morse code, music, an update on the Red Bull Stratos mission, spacecraft update and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes

Olympic Science



Credit: International Olympic Committee for 2012 Summer Olympics

  • Measuring times
  • Time is measured in 1,000th of a second that has to be that close to both actual time and consistent
  • Races are started by electronic starter guns, with starting blocks that indicate when a runner reacts faster than humans can respond, making the runners re-start the race
  • More than 2,000 digital frames a second aid the timing system for the most accurate and precise system possible
  • For longer racing event with a lot of competitors RFID, Radio Frequency Identification, attached to shoes or bicycles allow accurate timing and tracking for each competitor
  • Technology
  • Some Long Jumpers utilize stereoscopic cameras, from BMW, to measure speed and angles of launch
  • Swimmers usitize fluid dynamic measurements so that they can train and compete in the most aerodynamic way as possible to
  • Runners can also use treadmill technology that provides support to minimize the weight of the athlete affecting the legs by creating a pressure bubble that can support part of the athletes weight
  • The Olympic pool utilize a number of different technologies to minimize waves including adjustable depth, gutters along the edges of the pool and lane lines
  • Mechanical engineers analyze top athletes to be able to both help athletes improve their technique and expand knowledge that could help provide information to be used for people with movement disorders, it can also used design more realistic and stronger robotic arms
  • Changing Technology Rules
  • The LZR Racer Suit is a line of extremely high-end swimsuits manufactured by Speedo using a high-technology swimwear fabric composed of woven elastane-nylon and polyurethane.
  • Swimmers wearing the LZR suit at the 2008 Beijing Olympics consisted of : 94% of all swimming races won, 98% of all medals won, and 23 out of the 25 world records broken
  • By 24 August 2009, 93 world records had been broken by swimmers wearing a LZR Racer
  • These results prompted FINA to reevaluate suit policies making the LZR banned for use in competitions
  • Fédération Internationale de Natation (FINA) is the International Federation (IF) recognized by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for administering international competition in the aquatic sports
  • **Oscar Pistorius
  • South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius is the first double-amputee athlete to compete at the Olympics.
  • Pistorius is competing in the regular olympics using prosthetics Carbon fiber spring-like prosthetics designed for sprinter
  • Although the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) deemed him ineligible for the 2008 Summer Olympics based on the belief that he held an unfair advantage further scientific studies have shown he hold no advantage or able-bodied athletes
  • Safety Equipment
  • Safety headgear in different for each sport it will be used in dependent upon the specific needs for the sport
  • Helmet safety foam comes in both the stiff and flexible to maximize the needed protection and comfort
  • Paralympics
  • Paralympic wheelchairs are specifically designed for each sport. With designs for speed, mobility, toughness, etc.
  • Of Note
  • A google search for “London 2012 _” will show a display of the schedule and results of competition on the right side of the window
    Multimedia
  • Video Gallery Science Of The Summer Olympics: Engineering In Sports | Science360
  • Social Media
  • London 2012 @London2012
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • 2012 London Olympics official page
  • Science Of The Summer Olympics: Engineering In Sports | Science360.gov
  • Fina extends swimsuit regulations | news.bbc.co.uk
  • High-Tech Swimsuits: Winning Medals Too | time.com
  • Fast Times: Speedo, Like Michael Phelps, Goes For World Domination in an LZR Suit | The Wall Street Journal: Sports
  • Phelps secures his place in the history books after landing his eighth gold medal! | Speedo.com
  • Best Inventions of 2008 | TIME

— NEWS BYTE —

Writing with your eyes



Credit: YouTube channel h2so4hurts | Credit: Lorenceau et al., Current Biology

  • The low down
  • People “locked in” by paralyzing disorders have long relied on blinks or facial twitches to build sentences one letter at a time
  • Jean Lorenceau of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris may have a new technology might allow people who have almost completely lost the ability to move their arms or legs to communicate freely
  • Significance
  • Eye-writing technology tricks the neuromuscular machinery into doing something that is usually impossible: to voluntarily produce smooth eye movements in arbitrary directions
  • Smooth pursuit, this eye motion is different from saccadic motion, in which we rapidly shift our eyes to, say, skim lines of text or scan a crowd
  • Smooth movements are normally impossible to control those movements smoothly in any direction
  • Lorenceau found by accident with another experiment that he was able to learn to do so.
  • To determine if other people could learn to do this he designed his own reverse-phi display with 200 disks that switch between black and white and are projected on a gray background.
  • When we see two images that are the photographic negatives (dark to light & light to dark) in rapid succession our brain sees the object in the image moving away from the negative image
  • This gives us the impression of motion when there is none
  • Over three 30-minute sessions, he was able to trained six volunteers
  • For the volunteers, who couldn’t see what they were writing, it was like writing with a pen that had run out of ink
  • Although some participants had a harder time of learning to control their eye movements than others by the end of the sessions most could freely draw legible letters and numbers
  • Of Note
  • This technology might also help to improve eye movement control in people with certain conditions such as dyslexia or ADHD and/or for experts, such as athletes or surgeons, whose activities strongly rely on eye movements
  • Now working on a better version of his eye writer, tests should start next year
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube Writing in Cursive with Your Eyes Only | h2so4hurts
  • YouTube Reverse Phi Motion | porrophagus
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Writing in cursive with your eyes only | MedicalXPress
  • Write to Me Only With Thine Eyes | ScienceMag.org

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Morse Code in space



Credit: fit.ac.jp

Musical Variety

  • The low down
  • The Million Song Dataset is a freely-available collection of audio features and metadata for a million contemporary popular music tracks.
  • The songs come from nearly 45,000 artists with only 2,650 songs released between 1955 and 1959 and 177,808 songs released between 2005 and 2009.
  • Quantitative analysis for this study examined three aspects of those songs; timbre, pitch, and loudness of nearly half a million songs
  • Timbre accounts for the sound color, texture, or tone quality
  • Pitch roughly corresponds to the harmonic content of the piece, including its chords, melody, and tonal arrangements
  • Timbral variety peaked in the 1960’s and has been in steady decline to the present day and implies a homogenization of the overall timbral palette, which could point to less diversity in instrumentation and recording techniques
  • While it may be no surprise that music has gotten louder the same notes and chords that were popular in decades past are popular today
  • Musicians today seem to be less adventurous in moving from one chord or note to another, instead following the paths well-trod
  • Of Note
  • The Million Song Dataset, huge as it is, may not provide a representative slice of pop music, especially for old songs
  • The database draws on what’s popular now, as well as what has been digitized and made available for download
  • The older digitised music may not be the same that people enjoyed when those songs first came out.
  • Million Song Dataset

— Updates —

Red Bull Stratos dives again



Red Bull Stratos

— Spacecraft Updates —

Curiosity Rover lands on Sunday … stay tuned next week for more

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

  • August 1, 1774 : 238 years ago : Oxygen : Joseph Priestley, British Presbyterian minister and chemist, identified a gas which he called “dephlogisticated air” – later known as oxygen. Priestley found that mercury heated in air became coated with “red rust of mercury,” which, when heated separately, was converted back to mercury with “air” given off. Studying this “air” given off, he observed that candles burned very brightly in it. Also, a mouse in a sealed vessel with it could breathe it much longer than ordinary air. A strong believer in the phlogiston theory, Priestley considered it to be “air from which the phlogiston had been removed.” Further experiments convinced him that ordinary air is one fifth dephlogisticated air, the rest considered by him to be phlogiston

Looking up this week

Keep an eye out for …

  • Wed | Aug 1 | Full Moon

  • Wed | Aug 1 | Before Dawn | Jupiter will the the

  • Fri | Aug 3 | Evening | The Summer Triangle approaches its greatest height. Face east and look almost straight up after nightfall. The brightest star there is Vega. Toward the northeast from Vega (by two or three fist-widths at arm’s length) is Deneb. Toward the southeast from Vega by a greater distance is Altair.

  • Before Dawn | Jupiter & Venus are in the East they are now about the distance of you pinky finger to your pointer finger stretched out at arm’s length, 14*. Venus is the brighter of the two to the lower left, making Jupiter the higher of the two.

  • Before Dawn | Betelgeuse, the red giant star, is still to the lower right of Venus by about the same distance apart as Jupiter and Venus

  • At Dusk | Mars & Saturn are low in the west-southwest. Saturn is above Spica, by about three finger widths are are nearly the same brightness

  • Further Reading and Resources

  • More on what’s in the sky this week

  • 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 Olympic Science & Red Bull Stratos | SciByte 56 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> Mayan Calendar & Cancer Research | SciByte 46 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/19587/mayan-calendar-cancer-research-scibyte-46/ Tue, 15 May 2012 22:46:13 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=19587 We take a look at a new archeological site concerning the Mayan calendar, a new use for breathalyzers, cancer research, and more!

The post Mayan Calendar & Cancer Research | SciByte 46 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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We take a look at a new archeological site concerning the Mayan calendar, a new use for breathalyzers, cancer research, exoplanet, retinal prostheses, spacecraft updates,and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes:

Mayan prediction for end of the world?



YouTube channels : NationalGeographic | AP

  • Thanks for making sure I saw this story Michael Henriques
  • 6 Maya Apocalypse Myths Debunked
  • Magnetic Flip : while magnetic evidence in rocks confirms that continents have undergone such drastic rearrangement, the process took millions of years slow enough that humanity wouldn’t have felt the motion
  • Planet X crash : if there were a ( planet / brown dwarf / etc ) that was going to be in the inner solar system three years from now, astronomers would have been studying it, and it would be visible to the naked eye by now
  • Galactic Alignment : some worry the path of the sun in the sky would appear to cross through what, from Earth, looks to be the midpoint of our galaxy, but there is no alignment in 2012. A type of “alignment” occurs during every winter solstice, when the sun, as seen from Earth, appears in the sky near what looks to be the midpoint of the Milky Way.
  • End of Calendar : During the 2012 winter solstice, time runs out on the current era of the Long Count calendar, which began on what the Maya saw as the dawn of the last creation period
  • Sun to Savage Earth : While the sun isn’t always on schedule; the peak of solar activity this cycle probably won’t happen for a year or two
  • Predictions Calendar : The Maya did pass down a graphic end-of-the-world scenario, it was undated
  • The low down
  • Just 6 square miles (16 square kilometers) of jungle floor the Mayan city now known as Xultun was first discovered in 1915 in northeast Guatemala, and less than 0.1 percent of the city has been explored to date
  • Looters damaged much of the ancient city in the 1970s losing much of historical significance; archaeologists still don’t even know how far the boundaries of the town extend.
  • In 2010, archeologists (from Boston University) were mapping the city when one undergraduate student while looking into an old trench dug by looters, reported seeing traces of faint red and black lines of ancient paint.
  • Paint doesn’t preserve well in the rain forest climate of Guatemala, so it was assumed the find would not yield much information
  • In the end the professor decided he should excavate the room looters had tried to reach if only to be able to report the size of the structure along with the paint finding.
  • The Murals
  • They were shocked to run into a 1,200-year-old 6×6 foot room with a brilliantly painted portrait: a Mayan king, sitting on his throne, wearing a red crown with blue feathers flowing out behind him.
  • Other figures in the room are three loincloth-clad figures sit, wearing feathered headdresses and a man painted in brilliant orange wearing jade bracelets reaches out with a stylus
  • Unfortunately the name of the king pictured in the mural room has been lost, but the scribe and king are referred to as Older/Senior & Younger/Junior Obsidian
  • In front of the mural of the king talking to a kneeling attendant is a plaster bench that resembles those used by Mayan rulers at royal court meetings
  • The murals only survived, because, instead of collapsing the room, Mayan engineers filled it with rubble and then built on top of it.
  • The Calendars
  • Along the north and east walls of the room researchers noticed several barely visible hieroglyphic texts, painted and etched
  • The team scanned all of the paintings and numbers, digitally stitched them together, the images were then sent the images to a epigrapher who specializes in studying Maya inscriptions
  • Analysis revealed that at least five of the numerical columns were topped by hieroglyphs that Maya scribes once used to record lunar data
  • The numbers on the wall were calculations that scribes could refer to, much like those in the back of textbooks, to help them track vast amounts of time
  • The books the scribe would have written using these references would have been filled with elaborate calculations intended to predict the city’s fortunes.
  • The calendars mentioned are the 260-day ceremonial calendar, the 365-day solar calendar, the 584-day cycle of the planet Venus and the 780-day cycle of Mars.
  • Symbols of gods head the top of each lunar cycle, suggesting that each cycle had its own patron deity.
  • Near the calendars is a “ring number”-something previously known only from much later Maya books, where it was used as part of a backward calculation in establishing a base date for planetary cycles.
  • These newly discovered astronomical tables are 600 years older than the previous known examples.
  • The markings also suggest dates more than 7,000 thousand years in the future
  • Of Note
  • Until now, Maya astronomical tables were known from bark-paper books, the ‘Dresden Codex,’ created 400 years or more after the ancient civilization’s demise
  • Researchers believe that both these calculations and the ‘Dresden Codex’ came from earlier books that long ago rotted away
  • This room was likely the ancient workroom of a Maya scribe, a record-keeper of Xultún
  • This space is where someone important was living, this important household of the noble class, and here you also have a mathematician working in that space which shows how closely those roles were connected in Mayan society
  • It is likely that this type of room exists at every Maya site in certain periods of the Mayan civilization, but it’s currently the only example thus far
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube VIDEO : Mysterious Maya Calendar & Mural Uncovered | NationalGeographic
  • YouTube VIDEO : Doomsday Delayed? New Maya Calendar Unearthed | AP
  • VIDEO : History News: Mysterious Maya Calendar & Mural Uncovered | nationalgeographic.com
  • VIDEO : Explorers Journal | nationalgeographic.com (vimeo)
  • IMAGES : New Maya Mural, Calendars Debunk 2012 Myth | nationalgeographic.com
  • IMAGE : Calender | LiveScience.com
  • IMAGE GALLERY : Maya Murals: Stunning Images of King & Calendar
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Ancient Maya Astronomical Tables from Xultun, Guatemala | sciencemag.org
  • Painted ancient Maya numbers reflect calendar reaching well beyond 2012 (w/ Video) | phys.org
  • Looting Leads Archaeologists to Oldest Known Mayan Calendar | news.sciencemag.org
  • Nevermind the Apocalypse: Earliest Mayan Calendar Found | news.discovery.com
  • Mayan Ruins Describe Dates Beyond 2012 ‘Doomsday’ | news.discovery.com
  • Unprecedented Maya Mural Found, Contradicts 2012 “Doomsday” Myth | nationalgeographic.com
  • 2012 Pictures: 6 Maya Apocalypse Myths Debunked | nationalgeographic.com
  • End of the World Averted: New Archeological Find Proves Mayan Calendar Doesn’t End | universetoday.com
  • Painted ancient Maya numbers reflect calendar reaching well beyond 2012 (w/ Video) | phys.org
  • Maya wall calendar discovered | ScienceNews.org

*— NEWS BYTE — *

A breathalyzer that does more than find out how much you’ve had to drink



Credit: YouTube Channel VideoNSF

  • The low down
  • Blow into the Single Breath Disease Diagnostics Breathalyzer, and you get tested for a biomarker, a sign of disease
  • The unit is about half the size of your typical shoe box and weighs less than one pound
  • Lights on top of the box will give you an instant readout
  • Green light means you pass (bad breath is not indicative of an underlying disease; perhaps it’s just a result of the raw onions you ingested recently)
  • Red light means you might need to take a trip to the doctor’s office to check if something more serious is an issue.
  • Significance
  • Inside is a sensor chip that is coated with tiny nanowires that look like microscopic spaghetti and are able to detect minute amounts of chemical compounds in the breath
  • The nanowires enable the sensor to detect just a few molecules of the disease marker gas in a ‘sea’ of billions of molecules of other compounds that the breath consists of
  • The nanowires can be rigged to detect infectious viruses and microbes like Salmonella, E. coli or even anthrax
  • Of Note
  • Individual tests such as an acetone-detecting breathalyzer for monitoring diabetes and an ammonia-detecting breathalyzer to determine when to end a home-based hemodialysis treatment–are still being evaluated clinically now
  • Researchers envision developing the technology so that a number of these tests can be performed with a single device
  • It might be possible self-detect a whole range of diseases and disorders, including lung cancer, by just exhaling into a handheld breathalyzer.
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube : Science Nation – This Breathalyzer Reveals Signs of Disease | VideoNSF
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • This breathalyzer reveals signs of disease (w/ Video) | cdn.physorg.com

—TWO-BYTE NEWS—

New cancer research

  • Cancer Inhibitor
  • Bowman-Birk Protease Inhibitor (BBI), has shown promise for preventing certain forms of cancer in clinical trials.
  • BBI is derived from the large amounts of soybeans in traditional Japanese diets might underpin low cancer mortality rates in Japan
  • The current method of extracting BBI from soybeans is time-consuming and involves harsh chemicals
  • Scientists have now found that soybean seeds incubated in water at 122 degrees Fahrenheit naturally release large amounts of BBI that can easily be harvested from the water
  • The protein appeared to be active, with tests showing that it stopped breast cancer cells from dividing in a laboratory dish.
  • Surviving chemotherapy
  • Some cancers are resistant to chemotherapy because they harbor an overactive gene called MGMT, which repairs the cancer cells after chemotherapy damages them.
  • To counteract the gene, physicians sometimes add an MGMT-blocking drug, benzylguanine, but is also makes healthy blood and bone marrow cells easy to kill.
  • Scientists wondered what would happen if healthy cells had mutated version of MGMT called P140K
  • Researchers inserted the P140K gene into the patient’s blood stem cells in bone marrow
  • Immediately after a chemotherapy session the team infused the tweaked stem cells back into each patient.
  • Within weeks, the stem cells had developed into mature blood and marrow cells, with 40% to 60% of them carrying the mutated gene.
  • The chemoresistant healthy cells helped patients undergo the benzylguanine treatments
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Soybeans soaked in warm water naturally release key cancer-fighting substance | phys.org
  • A Shield Against Chemotherapy | news.sciencemag.org

M2-F2 lifting body crash of 1967

  • The low down
  • A Lifting body is a fixed wing aircraft that is designed so that it produces its own lift, where a flying wing has no fuselage a lifting body does
  • On May 10, 1967, the NASA lifting body M2-F2 launched
  • When attempting roll maneuvers the craft unfortunately had a soft feel, which caused the pilot to overcompensate trying to bring the plane under control
  • This lead to “Pilot induced oscillations”, and while the pilot did eventually get control, the aircraft crashed when the pilot saw a rescue helicopter that seemed to pose a collision threat
  • While trying to land in a lakebed, altitude was very hard to judge and the aircraft hit the ground before the landing gear was fully deployed and locked
  • The pilot actually survived and recovered from the crash, but lost vision in his right eye due to infection
  • Significance
  • Portions of the video from that flight from the ground video of the oscillations and the pilot camera were seen in the TV movie The Six Million Dollar Man
  • A brief shot of a later HL–10 model was also seen as it released from its carrier plane
  • Of Note
  • The M2-F2, was reborn as the M2-F3, and was later given to Smithsonian Air and Space Museum You can see it hanging there now.
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube VIDEO : M2-F2 03 | knightwizz
  • YouTube VIDEO : The Six Million Dollar Man TV Intro | The1970sChannel
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • A Crash Made Famous on TV | blog.nasm.si.edu

Light from another planet

  • The low down
  • In 2004, scientists discovered one of the first known stars to host an extrasolar planet, 55 Cancri, via radial velocity measurements
  • Infrared light from ’Hot Jupiters" has been seen from Spitzer, Hubble and Kepler telescopes
  • Spitzer became the first telescope to detect light from a planet beyond our solar system, when it saw the infrared light of a “hot Jupiter
  • When a telescope gazes at a star as a planet circles behind it, the planet disappears from view, the light from the star system dips ever so slightly, but enough that astronomers can determine how much light came from the planet itself
  • The information does however reveal the temperature of a planet, and, in some cases, its atmospheric components
  • Other current planet-hunting methods obtain indirect measurements of a planet by observing its effects on the star.
  • Now for the first time that same method has been used to detect light from a “SuperEarth”
  • At about 8.57 Earth masses Cancri e is tidally locked, so one side always faces the star
  • It was a radius 1.63 times that of Earth, a density is 10.9 ± 3.1 g cm–3 (the average density of Earth is 5.5 g cm–3)
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Light From a ‘SuperEarth’ Detected for the First Time | universetoday.com

Eye see you

  • The low down
  • A handheld computer processes images from a video camera that sits on specialized goggles.
  • Lasers using infrared light inside the goggles send that information to photovoltaic chips implanted in the eye, one-third as thin as a strand of hair
  • Electric currents from the photodiodes on the chip would then trigger signals in the retina, which then flow to the brain, enabling a patient to regain vision.
  • Scientists tested the process in rat retinas in vitro and how they elicited electric responses, which are widely accepted indicators of visual activity, from retinal cells
  • They are now testing the system in live rats, taking both physiological and behavioral measurements
  • There are several other retinal prostheses being developed, and at least two of them are in clinical trials.
  • Those devices require coils, cables or antennas inside the eye to deliver power and information to the retinal implant
  • This new device uses near-infrared light to transmit images, thereby avoiding any need for wires and cables, and making the device thin and easily implantable
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Solar-panel-like retinal prosthesis could better restore sight to blind | phys.org
  • Retinal implants could restore partial vision | sciencenews.org

The water of Earth

  • The low down
  • Although oceans of water cover about 70 percent of Earth’s surface, these oceans are shallow compared to the Earth’s radius
  • This illustration shows what would happen is all of the water on or near the surface of the Earth were bunched up into a ball
  • Further Reading / Media
  • All the Water on Planet Earth | Astronomy Picture of the Day; nasa.gov

SPACECRAFT UPDATE

Opportunity Rover



Credit: marsrover.nasa.gov

Curiosity Rover

SpaceX Dragon



Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems

SCIENCE CALENDER

Looking back

  • May 16, 1866 : 146 years ago : Rootbeer : Charles Elmer Hires a pharmacist from Pennsylvania formulated the eponymous Hires Root Beer. Some say Hires discovered root beer on his honeymoon in New Jersey where the woman who ran his honeymoon hotel served root tea. Hires thought that “root beer” would be more appealing to the working class. Originally, Hires packaged the mixture in boxes and sold it to housewives and soda fountains. They needed to mix in water, sugar, and yeast.He became a millionaire just for selling drinks.
  • May 18 1980 : 32 years ago : Mt. St. Helens : Following a weeklong series of earthquakes and smaller explosions of ash and smoke, the long-dormant Mount St. Helens volcano erupted in Washington state, U.S., hurling ash 15,000 feet into the air and setting off mudslides and avalanches. The eruptions caused minimal damage in the sparsely populated area, but about 400 people – mostly loggers and forest rangers – were evacuated. The explosion was characterized as the equivalent of 27,000 atomic bombs. The cloud of ash eventually circled the globe

Looking up this week

The post Mayan Calendar & Cancer Research | SciByte 46 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> Neutrinos & Leap Year | SciByte 35 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/17493/neutrinos-leap-year-scibyte-35/ Tue, 28 Feb 2012 22:24:58 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=17493 We take a look at the “are they / aren’t they travelling faster than the speed of light” Neutrino’s, the science of leap year, and more!

The post Neutrinos & Leap Year | SciByte 35 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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We take a look at the “are they / aren’t they travelling faster than the speed of light” Neutrino’s, a Legged Squad support robot that is both awesome and frightening, the science of leap year, tornadoes on the sun, space craft updates and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes:

*— UPDATE — *

Neutrino News

*— NEWS BYTE — *

Legged Squad Support System (LS3)

*— TWO-BYTE NEWS — *

Science of Leap Year

  • The low down
  • A day, defined by how long it takes for a star to appear in the same place again, is 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds.
  • During that time the Earth has moved forward one day in it’s orbit of the sun in order to keep up with this so that the Sun appears the in same place you have to add about 3min 56 seconds, and that’s where 24 hours comes from.
  • Earths orbit is not precisely circular, it is actually a eccentric circle
  • Average Year is 365.242374 days long, that’s 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes, 12 seconds
  • Significance
  • Adding a day every fours years makes the average 365.25, which gets closer than the calenders 365
  • Leap year are there to keep the calender aligned so that roughly noon on Dec 21 (solstice) the same point on the Earth is tilted towards the sun.
  • To get even closer every 100 years is not a leap year but every 400 years is a leap year.
  • * Of Note*
  • Related to the Year 2000 computer program, many programs would have calculated leap year incorrectly
  • For example, 1600 and 2000 were leap years, but 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not. Similarly, 2100, 2200, 2300, 2500, 2600, 2700, 2900 and 3000 will not be leap years, but 2400 and 2800 will be.
  • Multimedia
  • IMAGE : Gregorian Calendarleap solstice @ Wikipedia
  • Social Media
  • Twitter Results for [#LeapYear](https://twitter.com/#!/search/leapyear)
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Earth’s Orbit Creates More Than A Leap Year: Orbital Behaviors Also Drive Climate Changes, Ice Ages @ ScienceDaily
  • How could the year 2000 be a leap year when 1900 was not? @ HowStuffWorks.

Solar Tornado

SPACECRAFT UPDATE - Solar Dynamics Observatory

* SPACECRAFT UPDATE - Opportunity*

SCIENCE CALENDER

Looking back

  • Mar 06, 1869 : 143 years ago : Periodic Table : Dmitry Mendeleev published his first version of the periodic table of the elements. He was a Russian chemist who developed the periodic classification of the elements. In his final version of the periodic table (1871) he left gaps, foretelling that they would be filled by elements not then known and predicting the properties of three of those elements. The Periodic Table | SciByte 10 (Aug 3, 2011)
  • Mar 06, 1950 : 62 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

The post Neutrinos & Leap Year | SciByte 35 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> Sub Glacial Lakes & Updates | SciByte 33 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/16951/sub-glacial-lakes-updates-scibyte-33/ Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:27:22 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=16951 We take a look at sub-glacial lakes and updates on Alzheimer's, balloons arsenic life the future of NASA’s space exploration, spacecraft updates, and more!

The post Sub Glacial Lakes & Updates | SciByte 33 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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We have a Rockin’ Roller coaster of a show as we take a look at sub-glacial lakes and updates on Alzheimer’s, balloons arsenic life the future of NASA’s space exploration, spacecraft updates, viewer feedback and take a peek back into history..

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Show Notes:

Sub Glacial Lakes

  • *Sub Glacial Lakes? *
  • The idea of lakes hidden under Antarctic ice was first put forward by Russian scientist Prince Pyotr Kropotkin
  • Russian geographer noted the likely location of the lake
  • It wasn’t until 1994 that Russian and British scientists got
    sonar and satellite imagining to reveal one of the world’s largest undisclosed fresh water reservoirs
  • These kind of lakes would be kept from freezing into a solid block by the mammoth crust of ice across it that acts like a blanket, keeping in heat generated by geothermal energy underneath.
  • * Meet Lake Vostok *
  • Lake Vostok is 160 miles [250 kilometers] long and 30 miles [50 km] across at its widest point, similar in area to Lake Ontario
  • Making Lake Vostok the largest of nearly 400 sub glacial lakes in Antarctica
  • Hidden under ice for millions of years beneath an almost impenetrable layer of ice if will provide a unique closed ecosystem captured in time below four kilometers of ice
  • According to Russian scientists the quantity of oxygen there exceeds that on other parts of our planet by 10 to 20 times
  • * The opposition *
  • There have been fears of any expedition reaching and possible contaminating the lakes
  • The Russian team has been using 60 metric tons (66 tons) of lubricants and antifreeze used in the drilling
  • There were many fears and concerns that those lubricating fluids could contaminate the pristine lake
  • The Russian team had waited for several years to receive international approval for it’s drilling technology before proceeding and was doing its best “to try really hard to do it right” and avoid contamination
  • * The Russian Journey *
  • Lake Vostok is about 800 mi [1,300 km] southeast of the South Pole in the central part of the continent.
  • At –126 F [–89C] and more than 11,000ft [3.300m] above sea level surface conditions mean that there is a limited window of opportunity to work each year
  • After more than two decades of drilling in Antarctica the head of Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute likened ii to the race to the moon
  • In February 2011 after drilling 3720 meters last February, time ran out for the team and the project was stymied just 29.5 meters from its destination as winter set in.
  • With the Antarctic summer season nearing it’s end this year, some reports had the team going silent for a week
  • Then the news started trickling in that they had achieved breakthrough
  • They knew they had breakthrough when about 50 cubit ft [1.5 cubic m] of kerosene and freon poured up to the surface tanks from the bore-shaft, proof that the lake water streamed up from underneath, froze and then blocked the hole, sealing off the chance that any toxic chemicals could contaminate.
  • Scientists will return during the next Antarctic summer season, in December, to remove the frozen sample for analysis
  • * Other Expeditions *
  • American and British teams are drilling to reach their own smaller and younger sub glacial Antarctic lakes
  • British scientists that hopes to retrieve samples next year from another sub glacial lake, Lake Ellsworth in West Antarctica
  • Americans scientists are drilling at Lake Whillans, west of the South Pole
  • Another U.S. team is seeking to reach the river-fed Whillans Ice Stream, also in West Antarctica
  • * Of Note *
  • Russian ice cores retrieved so far have suggested the presence of heat-loving microorganisms called thermophiles, suggesting hot geothermal vents like those in the ocean may exist at the bottom of the lake
  • If a life form could exist here, it could also exist in similar environments such as Jupiter’s satellite, Europa.
  • In the future, Russian researchers plan to explore the lake using an underwater robot equipped with video cameras that would collect water samples and sediments from the bottom of the lake, a project still awaiting the approval of the Antarctic Treaty organization.
  • Multimedia
  • IMAGE : National Science Foundation IMAGE : The Subglacial Lake Vostok System @ NASA.gov @https://www.nasa.gov/images/content/170956main_SubglacialLakesVostok_lg.jpg
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Ancient Antarctic Ice Sampled In Lake Vostok Drill @ UniverseToday.com
  • In scientific coup, Russians reach Antarctic lake @ PhysOrg.com
  • Russians Drill Into Subglacial Antarctic Lake Vostok @ ScienceMagazine.org

*— NEWS BYTE— *

Another exciting step against Alzheimer’s

  • * Last time on SciByte*
  • SciByte 24 | Habitable Planets & Chimps
    (Dec 07, 2011)
  • The low down
  • Studies have identifies a link between the primary genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease and a potential therapy to address it.
  • Humans have three forms of ApoE: ApoE2, ApoE3, and ApoE4. Possession of the ApoE4 gene greatly increases the likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
  • It has been seen that the main cholesterol carrier in the brain, Apolipoprotein E (ApoE), facilitates the clearance of the amyloid beta proteins
  • New hope is now coming from a drug that has been used to treat T-cell lymphoma often after other treatments have failed for more then a decade
  • Significance
  • The study mentioned before was using a synthetic liver x-receptor to remove amyloid beta from the brain.
  • Bexarotene acts by stimulating retinoid X receptors (RXR), which control how much ApoE is produced and seems to be reprogramming the brain’s immune cells to “eat” or phagocytose the amyloid deposits.
  • Researchers were struck by the speed with which bexarotene improved memory deficits and behavior even as it also acted to reverse the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease.
  • Just hours after treatment levels started falling, with 25% clearing after 24 hours, more than half within 72 hours and 75% after 14 days.
  • Even more impressive, the effect lasted as long as three days.
  • * Of Note*
  • The next step is to ascertain if it acts similarly in humans.
  • Since this drug has already been approved by the FDA and has a good safety and side-effect profile it likely to move into human trials much quicker than a new drug would.
  • Correct dosing presents another challenge as giving bexarotene over several doses appeared to be less effective than giving it once.
  • One reason may be that the drug degrades itself within the body.
  • Multimedia
  • IMAGE : A mouse brain with A-beta plaques (red) and after 3 days of treatment @ Sciencenews.org
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • FDA-approved drug rapidly clears amyloid from the brain, reverses Alzheimer’s symptoms in mice
  • Cancer drug may have Alzheimer’s benefits

Baloons iiin spaaaace

  • * Last time on SciByte*
  • SciByte 31 | Feedback & Space Lego’s
    (jAN 31, 2012)
  • The low down
  • The Canadian teens were inspired by a similar near-space photography experiment by a pair of MIT students, who captured impressive views of the stratosphere with a digital camera attached to a helium balloon that 16 miles [25 kilometers]
  • Significance
  • MIT has been sending out acceptance letters to students in tubes, and the school challenged the potential newcomers to “hack” them in creative ways.
  • One ecstatic studens who had worked on balloon experiments before and is a Ham Radio operator in her spare time, came up with the idea to turn her tube into a high-altitude balloon experiment.
  • * Of Note*
  • The canister was equipped with tracking devices and an onboard camera,.
  • It reached a maximum altitude of approximately 17.2 miles [27.7 kilometers]
  • She predicted the path very accurately using a software algorithm to predict the wind patterns based on current weather information from regional airports
  • It only 75 miles east of its launch site after a two-hour flight
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube VIDEO :MIT’16 EA Tube goes to Near Space!
  • Show Excerpt of YouTube VIDEO :
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Ecstatic Student Launches MIT Acceptance Letter Near Edge of Space

Arsenic life forms?

  • * Last time on J@N*
  • J@N | World Changing Fail
  • The low down+ They found microbes in a lake HERE ON EARTH that have arsenic in their protein structure in the place of phosphorous.
  • This is akin to the science-fiction theory that lifeforms could thrive replacing carbon with silicon
  • Scientists attempting to duplicate the finding have come up empty-handed
  • Significance
  • One problem was that the original team didn’t do certain experiments, such as attaching a radioactive tag to the arsenate and locating exactly where it turned up in GFAJ–1’s DNA.
  • The microbe in question clearly thrives in the presence of the usually toxic substance, there is no evidence that the bacterium requires arsenic to live or incorporates the element in its DNA
  • The original team did note that there sample could have been contaminated by a little phosphate.
  • When the new team did so, GFAJ–1 grew in densities similar to those reported before
  • * Of Note*
  • The researcher who lead the original team has reported much of her work on her research blog as it was being conducted, said the samples did contain trace amounts of arsenate.
  • Any microbe that can tolerate a bit of arsenic here or there without any serious effects would incorpersate some arsenate
  • The original researcher won’t comment further until the details of the new paper are published in a peer reviewed paper.
  • She also said that the original paper never actually claimed that arsenate was being incorporated in GFAJ–1’s DNA, and that other had ‘jumped to that conclusion’
  • This is again an issue that some of the scientific community the point discussion is essentially over, while others sill still wait for further results to clarify the issue.
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Arsenic-based life finding fails follow-up @ sciencenews.org
  • Is This New Study the Nail in the Coffin of “Arsenic Life”? @ popsci.com

The future of space

SPACECRAFT UPDATE – Curiosity Rover

*— VIEWER FEEDBACK — *

6 Myths Everyone Believes about Space (Thanks to Movies) | Cracked.com

  • Angela, from the FauxShow

  • Asteroid Belts Are Deadly

  • In the media : Many times in movies or television shows the characters are dodging and weaving through colliding rocks of death.

  • In reality : Asteroids are actually not at all that packed together. Scientists at NASA have said that the odds of one of their probes traveling through the asteroid belt colliding with as asteroid were less than one in a billion. Some calculations provide an average of 400,000 square miles for each asteroid.

  • Black Holes Are Cosmic Vacuum Cleaners

  • In the media : They eat planets, and in general are trying to eat everything in the universe.

  • In reality : If we replaces our sun with a black hole of the same mass? … It would get colder. Something the mass of the sun, even a black hole, can not exert any more gravitational force.

  • The Sun Is Yellow

  • In the media : Get your crayons, draw the sun … hope you grabbed yellow …

  • In reality : The sun, at a warm 6,000K, has to be white. It’s the Earths atmosphere bends the light that keeps yellow crayons in business. The pictures we get from space are color enhanced based often based on composition, approximations or color filters.

  • Meteorites Are Hot

  • In the media : Oh no! A huge ball of flaming rock with a huge trail of smoke is headed for … fill in city/building/location here

  • In reality : In space they are about 3K, and have been so for billions and billions of years. They spend a few minutes in our atmosphere, and generally land lukewarm. What about the bright light you see when they are coming down? As the meteor comes down it is pushing the air in front of it away, the compression heats the air to the point where the air catches on fire.

  • People Explode in the Vacuum of Space

  • In the media : In space no can hear you scream … or explode … or at least have your eyes try to pop out.

  • In reality : Our skin actually does a pretty good job of protecting us. If you were in space your skin would keep you from exploding, and your blood would continue too pump until space absorbed enough of your body heat. Breathing is the real issue, and lung trauma. You will still die in space, but nothing as exciting as the movies would like you to believe

  • There Is a Permanent Dark Side of the Moon

  • In the media : In the dark wastelands of the dark side of the moon, which we never see ancient alien technology can remain frozen forever …

  • In reality : The moon may be in a tidally locked orbit so that we only see one side. There is a far side of the moon, that we never wee, it does the light of day .. or space. Simply speaking when there is a solar ecplise the moon blocks the sun from view, and is only one side of the moon ever faces us, the far side of the moon is completely bathed in the light of the sun.

  • Further Reading / In the News

  • 6 Myths Everyone Believes about Space (Thanks to Movies) | Cracked.com

  • New Horizons Crosses The Asteroid Belt @ SpaceDaily.com

  • List of named asteroid’s

SCIENCE CALENDER

Looking back

  • Feb 16, 1923 : 89 years ago : Tutankhamen says Hello World : Archaeologist Howard Carter opened the sealed doorway to the sepulchral chamber of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in Thebes, Egypt. A group of invited visitors and officials was present, including Lord Carnarvon, the aristocratic Englishman who had funded the excavation. On 18 Feb 1923, the Queen of the Belgians and numerous visitors attended an official opening. The following day, the press was admitted. The pharoah reigned around 1350 B.C. The famous “Yes, wonderful things” quote came when they breached the tomb and peered in the door the November before
  • Feb 21, 1953 : 59 years ago : Deoxyribose Nulclei what? : Francis Crick and James Watson reached their conclusion about the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. They made their first announcement on Feb 28, and their paper, A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid, was published in the 25 Apr 1953 issue of journal Nature.
  • Feb 18, 1977: 35 years ago : The Enterprise takes a test drive : The first space shuttle orbiter prototype, the Enterprise, was flight tested for two hours in “inert captive mode,” attached to the top of a 747 jumbo jet. The flight was the first of five captive flights in the nine-month-long Approach and Landing Test testing program (Feb-Nov 1977) at the Dryden Flight Research Facility. The orbiter was originally to be known as Constitution (to honour the U.S. Constitution’s Bicentennial). However, a write-in campaign by fans of the TV show Star Trek convinced the White House to name the vehicle Enterprise. PIC : Inert Flying Mode
    Historical topics from TodayInSci.com

The post Sub Glacial Lakes & Updates | SciByte 33 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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