Show Notes: linuxunplugged.com/396

The post How Linux Got to Mars | LINUX Unplugged 396 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Hello everyone and welcome back to SciByte!

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

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Show Notes:

Book Pick:

• The Martian Audiobook | Andy Weir | Audible.com

Voyager 1 Sees Another Interstellar Tsunami

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

— NEWS BYTE —

SpaceX Launches Telecom Satellites

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

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

How Many Scientists Publish Papers?

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

— Updates —

HIV Detected in ‘Cured’ ‘Mississippi Baby

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

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

ISEE3 Reboot Project

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

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

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

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

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

Looking up this week

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

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

• Further Reading and Resources

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

— SciByte Summer Hiatus —

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

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

Hello everyone and welcome back to SciByte!

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

Direct Download:

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

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Show Notes:

Exoplanets? … Not So Fast

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

— NEWS BYTE —

Research on Reversing Type 1 Diabetes

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

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

A New Earth-Like Exoplanet

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

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

Opportunity Rover

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

India’s Mars Orbiter Mission

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

ISEE3 Reboot Project

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

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Titans Salty Ocean

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

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

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

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

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

Looking up this week

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

• Saturn | Late Twilight | Highest in the S

• Further Reading and Resources

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

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

Hello everyone and welcome back to SciByte!

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

Direct Download:

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

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Show Notes:

Breaking Planetary Formation Theories Again

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

— NEWS BYTE —

A New Sneaky Star Type

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

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Waves on Saturns Moon?

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

Lunar Formation Theory Evidence?

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

—UPDATE—

Asteroid UQ4 Catalina Turns Comet – Still Looking Promising

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

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

ISEE-3 Reboot Project

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

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

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

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

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

Looking up this week

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

• Saturn | Evening | S sky in the evening

• Further Reading and Resources

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

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

Hello everyone and welcome back to SciByte!

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

Direct Download:

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

RSS Feeds:

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

Show Notes:

Bringing an Abandoned Satellite Back to Life and Use

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

— NEWS BYTE —

Distracted by Classroom Decorations?

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

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Flying With Only A Thought

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

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Jupiter\’s Great Red Spot Shrinking?

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

— Updates —

SciByte

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

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

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

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

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

Looking up this week

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

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

• Further Reading and Resources

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

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

Hello everyone and welcome back to SciByte!

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

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

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Show Notes:

Direct Image of Exoplanet

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

— NEWS BYTE —

Autism Spectrum and Sensory Stimuli

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

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

New Sauropod Dinosaur in Argentina

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

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Greenhouses for Mars

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

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

New Horizons Message

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

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

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

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

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

Looking up this week

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

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

• Further Reading and Resources

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

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

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

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Show Notes:

The Suns Long-Lost brother

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

— NEWS BYTE —

Gaming for Science | Eyewire

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

Old ‘Asteroid’ Now Comet

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

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Mind-Controlled Exoskeleton

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

— Updates —

Comet Siding Spring

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

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Methane Life

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

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

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

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

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

Looking up this week

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

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

• Further Reading and Resources

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

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

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

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Show Notes:

Marijuana’s and Changes to the Brain

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

— NEWS BYTE —

Another Earth-sized Exo-Planet

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

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

The Brains Distraction Control

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

A New Moon for Saturn?

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

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

SpaceX Dragon Delivery Mission

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

New Horizons and Questions About Pluto

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

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

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

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

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

Looking up this week

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

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

• Keep an eye out for …

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

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

• Further Reading and Resources

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

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

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

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Show Notes:

Breakthrough Paraplegic Therapy

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

— NEWS BYTE —

ExoMoon?

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

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

International Space Station (ISS) Glitch

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

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Lunar Eclipses Tetrad

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

— Updates —

Large Hadron Collider – Beginning of Startup

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

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

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

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

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

Looking up this week

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

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

• Further Reading and Resources

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

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

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

Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | Torrent | YouTube

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Show Notes:

Gravity, The Big Bang, and Inflation

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

— NEWS BYTE —

Water Deep in Earth’s Crust

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

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Largest Yellow \”Hypergiant\” Star Discovered

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

Frozen Moss Back to Life

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

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

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

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

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

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

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

Looking up this week

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

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

• Further Reading and Resources

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

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

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

Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | Torrent | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

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

Show Notes:

Evidence of Martian Life?

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

—  NEWS BYTE —

3D Printed Model Heart Helps Save a Life

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

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Controlling Cravings With Tetris

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

—  VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Withdrawing 120 Nonsense Science Papers

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

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

China\’s Yutu Lunar Rover

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

Kepler Data Continues to Show New Exo-Planets

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

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

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

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

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

Looking up this week

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

DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME – Sunday, March 9

• “SPRING” AHEAD

• “Losing” 1 Hour

• Further Reading and Resources

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

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

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

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Show Notes:

Cell-Based Cancer Therapy

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

— NEWS BYTE —

Growing Human Lungs

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

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Radiation Free MRI

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

3D Crime Scanner

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

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

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

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

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

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

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

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

Looking up this week

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

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

• Further Reading and Resources

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

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

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

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MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | Torrent | YouTube

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Show Notes:

Amazing New Canadian Fossil Site

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

— NEWS BYTE —

Prehistoric Cave Pigment Protects ESA Solar Probe

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

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Billion Star Map

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

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

China’s Lunar Yutu Rover

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

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

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

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

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

Looking up this week

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

• Evening | Jupiter rises in the SE

• Further Reading and Resources

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

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

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

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Show Notes:

Sealing a Gunshot Wound in 15 sec

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

— NEWS BYTE —

Blue Light

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

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

New Mars Crater

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

— Updates —

Olympic Torch

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

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

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

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

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

Looking up this week

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

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

• Further Reading and Resources

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

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

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

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Show Notes:

New Titanosaurs Discovery in China

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

— NEWS BYTE —

Synthetic Monopole

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

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Super Glass

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

Mirror Image Scratching

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

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

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

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

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

Looking up this week

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

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

• Further Reading and Resources

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

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

We take a look at breast-cancer therapy research, a new sleep apnea treatment, biomedical glue, spacecraft updates, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | Torrent | YouTube

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— Book Pic: —

• The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Breast-Cancer Therapy Research

• A new breast-cancer therapy partially reverses the cancerous state in cultured breast tumor cells and prevents cancer development in mice, the therapy emerged from a sophisticated effort to reverse-engineer gene networks to identify genes that drive cancer
• Current Treatment Options
• To date the only way to stop cancer cells has been to kill them.
• The treatments that accomplish that, including surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy, often damage healthy tissue, causing harsh side effects
• Many women currently undergo surgery, chemotherapy and radiation as a precaution, who might never develop the disease
• In addition some women with a high hereditary risk of breast cancer have chosen to undergo preemptive mastectomies.
• A therapy that heals rather than kills cancerous tissue could potentially help all these patients, as well as men who develop the disease
• Identifying Problem Genes
• First they had to identify the culprit genes among the thousands that are active in a cell at any moment
• When molecular biologists typically are looking for cancer-causing genes, they search for individual genes that become active as cancer develops, but because genes in cells work in complex networks
• With this process however, cells that are not cancer-causing often get labeled as such as well
• To improve the odds of finding the real culprits, a systems biology expert who has developed a sophisticated mathematical and computational method to reverse-engineer bacterial gene networks.
• Computational Method
• They were able to hone the computational network to work for the first time on the more complex gene networks of mice and humans
• The refined method helped the scientists spot more than 100 genes that acted suspiciously just before milk-duct cells in the breast begin to overgrow
• The team narrowed their list down to six genes that turn other genes on or off, and then narrowed it further to a single gene called HoxA1 that had the strongest statistical link to cancer
• The HocA1 Gene
• Researchers wanted to know if blocking the HoxA1 gene could reverse cancer in lab-grown cells, so they grew healthy mouse or human cells in a nutrient-rich, tissue-friendly gel
• Healthy cells in the gel formed hollow spheres of cells akin to a normal milk duct, cancerous cells, in contrast, packed together into solid, tumor-like spheres.
• When they treated cancerous cells with a short piece of RNA called a small interfering RNA (siRNA) that blocks only the HoxA1 gene the cells reversed their march to malignancy
• It stopped the runaway growth and forming hollow balls as healthy cells do, in addition they specialized as if they were growing in healthy tissue
• The siRNA treatment also stopped breast cancer in a line of mice genetically engineered to have a gene that causes all of them to develop cancer
• Researchers packed the siRNA into nanoparticles called lipidoids that allow for genes to be silenced for weeks inside the body
• When they injected these nanoparticles, the treated mice remained healthy, while untreated mice developed breast cancer
• The Future
• The idea would be to start the treatment early on and sustain it throughout life to prevent cancer development or progression
• The same strategy could lead to many new therapies that disable cancer-causing genes no current drugs can stop, and it also can be used to find therapies for other diseases
• The findings open up the possibility of someday treating patients who have a genetic propensity as more women than ever are undergoing early tests that reveal precancerous breast tissue
• Early diagnosis could potentially save lives; however, few of those lesions go on to become tumors and doctors have no good way of predicting which ones will turn malignant
• Further Reading / In the News
• Novel noninvasive therapy prevents breast cancer formation in mice | MedicalXpress.com

— NEWS BYTE —

Sleep Apnea Medical Device

• Implantation of a sleep apnea device called Inspire Upper Airway Stimulation (UAS) therapy can lead to significant improvements for patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA)
• Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA)
• Affects more than 8 million men and 4 million women in the U.S. and is twice as common in men
• Is characterized by repeated episodes of upper airway collapse during sleep, due to narrowing or blockage
• Patients with OSA stop breathing, known as apnea, frequently during sleep, often for a minute or longer
• Repeated episodes of apnea can lead to daytime fatigue, and increase a person\’s risk for heart attack, stroke, high blood pressure and even death.
• Current Treatments for OSA
• Include weight loss, upper airway surgeries, oral appliances, and continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), which is considered the primary treatment for OSA
• CPAP is a successful treatment when used on a regular basis
• As many as half of the patients who have been prescribed CPAP are unable to use it regularly, largely due to discomfort with the mask and/or the lack of desire to be tethered to a machine
• Inspire Upper Airway Stimulation (UAS) Therapy
• Differs from other traditional sleep apnea devices and surgical procedures as it targets the muscle tone of the throat rather than just the anatomy
• The device is designed to sense breathing patterns and deliver mild stimulation to a patient\’s airway muscles to keep the airway open during sleep.
• Surgical implantation of the upper-airway stimulation system was performed by otolaryngologists at 22 academic and private centers
• Stimulation electrode was placed on the hypoglossal nerve, which provides innervation to the muscles of the tongue
• The device was implanted in three areas, a sensing lead was placed between rib muscles to detect breathing effort, a neurostimulator was implanted in the upper right chest, just below the clavicle bone
• Two thirds of patients using the Inspire UAS therapy device had successful control of their OSA, even more reported improvement in snoring, daytime sleepiness and quality of life measures
• The Study
• This was the first trial to evaluate the use of upper airway stimulation for sleep apnea
• Conducted at 22 medical centers in the United States and Europe
• From 724 candidates initially screened, the STAR trial implanted and prospectively evaluated 126 moderate-to-severe OSA patients who had difficulty using or adhering to CPAP therapy:
• All patients underwent surgery to implant the device, 83 percent of the participants were men, the mean age was 54.5 years, and the mean body-mass index was 28.4.
• Patients used a \”controller\” to turn on the device at night, so it is only used when the patient sleeps
• Long Term
• Eighty-six percent of patients were still using the device every night at the one year mark, which compares very favorably to CPAP
• Using various sleep-disorder measuring systems, patients were found to experience 68 to 70 percent fewer sleep-apnea episodes per hour
• After one year, patients using the device had an approximately 70 percent reduction in sleep apnea severity, as well as significant reductions in daytime sleepiness
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Dr. Soose explains sleep apnea clinical trial | UPMC
• Further Reading / In the News
• New device can reduce sleep apnea episodes by 70 percent, study shows | MedicalXpress.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Glue for the Heart

• In a preclinical study, researchers developed a bio-inspired adhesive that could rapidly attach biodegradable patches inside a beating heart in the exact place where congenital holes in the heart occur, such as with ventricular heart defects.
• Heart Defect Treatments
• When a child is born with a heart defect such as a hole in the heart, the highly invasive therapies are challenging due to an inability to quickly and safely secure devices inside the heart
• Sutures take too much time to stitch and can cause stress on fragile heart tissue
• Currently available clinical adhesives are either too toxic or tend to lose their sticking power in the presence of blood or under dynamic conditions, such as in a beating heart
• A New Adhesive
• Many creatures in nature have secretions that are viscous and repel water enabling them to attach under wet and dynamic conditions
• Researchers developed a material with these properties that also is biodegradable, elastic and biocompatible
• The degradable patches secured with the glue remained attached even at increased heart rates and blood pressure and it works in the presence of blood and moving structures
• The adhesive was strong enough to hold tissue and patches onto the heart equivalent to suturing, is biodegradable and biocompatible, so nothing foreign or toxic stays in the bodies of these patients
• Its adhesive abilities are activated with ultraviolet (UV) light, providing an on-demand, anti-bleeding seal within five seconds of UV light application
• What This Means
• Researchers note that their waterproof, light-activated adhesive will be useful in reducing the invasiveness of surgical procedures, as well as operating times, in addition to improving heart surgery outcomes
• \”It should provide the physician with a completely new, much simpler technology and a new paradigm for tissue reconstruction to improve the quality of life of patients following surgical procedures.\” | Pedro del Nido, MD, Chief of Cardiac Surgery, Boston Children\’s Hospital, co-senior study author
• Further Reading / In the News
• Bio-inspired glue keeps hearts securely sealed | ScienceDaily.com

Supernova In the Works

• SN 1987A is the closest supernova to that we’ve been able to study since the invention of the telescope and it has provided scientists with good opportunities to study the physical processes of an exploding star
• A nebula with a giant star at its center has striking similarities to SN 1987A.
• Both stars have identical rings of the same size and age, which were travelling at similar speeds; both were located in similar HII regions; and they had the same brightness
• No one can predict when a star will go supernova, but astronomers are certainly hoping they’ll have the chance to watch it happen.
• Further Reading / In the News
• What a Star About to Go Supernova Looks Like | UniverseToday.com

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo (SS2)

• 2014 should be the year that Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo (SS2) brings passengers on suborbital space flights
• The company started off the year by successfully completing its third rocket-powered supersonic flight after dozens of successful subsonic test flights
• Getting to Altitude
• The WhiteKnightTwo (WK2) carrier aircraft brought SS2 to an altitude around 46,000 ft, then SS2 was released, and its rocket motor was ignited, powering the spaceship to a planned altitude of 71,000 ft.
• SS2’s highest altitude to date, and it also reached a speed of Mach 1.4.
• Testing
• They tested the spaceship’s Reaction Control System, the newly installed thermal protection coating on the vehicle’s tail booms, and the “feather” re-entry system.
• The RCS will allow its pilots to maneuver the vehicle in space so that passengers will have great views of Earth, as well as aiding the positioning process for spacecraft re-entry
• The new reflective protection coating on SS2’s inner tail boom surfaces is being evaluated to help maintain vehicle skin temperatures while the rocket motor is firing.
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Stunning video: Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo goes supersonic in test flight | euronews (in English)
• Further Reading / In the News
• SpaceShipTwo Goes Supersonic in Third Rocket-Powered Test Flight | UniverseToday.com

China’s Lunar Lander and Rover Back “Awake”

• According to a BACC statement the Chinese Lunar lander, Chang’e-3, and the Yutu rover have \’woken up\’ from their Lunar night hibernation
• Engineers put them to sleep to conserve energy since there is no sunlight to generate power with the solar arrays during the lunar night.
• Lunar night time environment when temperatures plunged to below minus 180 degrees Celsius, or minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit
• During the nocturnal hiatus they were kept alive by a radioisotopic heat source that maintained at a temperature of about minus 40 degrees Celsius to prevent debilitating damage to the computer and electronics subsystems inside a box below the deck
• Just prior to hibernating, the lander snapped the first image of the Earth taken from the Moon’s surface in some four decades
• The Yutu rover has already resumed roving, and they expect the Chang’e-3 lander should survive at least a year.
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Stunning video: Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo goes supersonic in test flight | euronews (in English)
• Further Reading / In the News
• China\’s Historic Moon Robot Duo Awaken from 1st Long Frigid Night and Resume Science Operations | UniverseToday.com

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• Watching From Orbit
• NASA\’s Curiosity Mars rover and its recent tracks from driving in Gale Crater appear in an image taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA\’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Dec. 11, 2013.
• The tracks show where the rover has zigzagged around obstacles on its route toward the lower slopes of Mount Sharp, its next major destination.
• HiRISE first imaged the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft while it was descending on a parachute
• Mars Orbiter Images Rover and Tracks in Gale Crater | mars.nasa.gov
• Multimedia
• YouTube Curiosity Rover Report JPLnews
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• January 17, 1929 : 85 years ago : Expanding universe : Edwin Hubble communicated the now classic paper that first showed the universe was expanding (and later provided observational evidence for the Big Bang theory). But Hubble explicitly made no such an interpretation. He left that to the reader. His paper was simply titled “A Relation Between Distance and Radial Velocity Among Extra-Galactic Nebulae.” He listed the data that he plotted on a graph. It showed a roughly linear relationship between radial velocity for various galaxies and their distance. It dramatically showed that the the further away the galaxy, the faster it is moving away from the observer. However, stating that future new data might change the interpretation, he discretely wrote that he thought it “premature to discuss in detail the obvious consequences of the present results.

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Wed, Jan 15 | Full Moon, Jupiter is above the Moon in the early evening, moving to the upper right
• Fri, Jan 17 | Just after twilight | Look to the high N skies and you might be able to see what looks like squashed letter M, that\’s the constellation Cassiopeia. It will swing sideways to the NW later in the night
• Planets
• Mercury, Venus | Too near the Sun
• Mars | ~ midnight | Highest in the S just before dawn, with Spica (a blue giant, variable star) to it\’s lower left
• Saturn | Dawn | In the high SE skies to the lower left of Mars and Spica

• Jupiter | Twilight | Rises in the East moving higher all evening, highest in the middle of the night, and moving to the Western skies at Dawn

• Further Reading and Resources

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

The post Sleep Apnea & Heart Defect Treatments | SciByte 115 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We take a look at typing on autopilot, more data on the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, dying silk, bone grafting, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Typing on Autopilot

• A conclusion of a recent study conducted by a team of cognitive psychologists shows that when you are typing away at your computer, you don\’t know what your fingers are really doing
• It found that skilled typists can\’t identify the positions of many of the keys on the QWERTY keyboard and that novice typists don\’t appear to learn key locations in the first place
• The Study
• The researchers recruited 100 university students and members from the surrounding community to participate in an experiment
• The participants completed a short typing test, then they were shown a blank QWERTY keyboard and given 80 seconds to write the letters in the correct location
• On average, they typed 72 words per minute, moving their fingers to the correct keys six times per second with 94 percent accuracy
• By contrast, they could accurately place an average of only 15 letters on a blank keyboard.
• What the Results Mean
• The fact that the typists did so poorly at identifying the position of specific keys didn\’t come as a surprise
• For more than a century, scientists have recognized the existence of automatism: the ability to perform actions without conscious thought or intention
• Automatic behaviors of this type are surprisingly common, ranging from tying shoelaces to making coffee to factory assembly-line work to riding a bicycle and driving a car
• What did come as a surprise, however, was evidence that conflicts with the basic theory of automatic learning which holds that it starts out as a conscious process and gradually becomes unconscious with repetition
• Automating Actions
• According to the widely held theory, when you perform a new task or the first time, you are conscious of each action and store the details in working memory, then as you repeat the task, it becomes increasingly automatic
• This allows you to think about other things while you performing the task but your conscious recollection of the details gradually fades away
• Researchers were surprised when they found evidence that the typists never appear to memorize the key positions, not even when they are first learning to type.
• Evidence for this conclusion came from another experiment included in the study
• The \”Sub-Set Study\”
• The researchers recruited 24 typists who were skilled on the QWERTY keyboard and had them learn to type on a Dvorak keyboard, which places keys in different locations.
• After the participants developed a reasonable proficiency with the alternative keyboard, they were asked to identify the placement of the keys on a blank Dvorak keyboard
• On average, they could locate only 17 letters correctly, comparable to participants\’ performance with the QWERTY keyboard.
• \’Memorizing\’ without Memorizing, One Theory
• According to the researchers, the lack of explicit knowledge of the keyboard may be due to the fact that computers and keyboards have become so ubiquitous that students learn how to use them in an informal, trial-and-error fashion when they are very young
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Automatic Typing | VanderbiltUniversity
• Further Reading / In the News
• Study gives new meaning to \’let your fingers do the walking\’ | MedicalXPress.com

— NEWS BYTE —

2011 Tohoku Earthquake

• In March 2011, a devastating tsunami struck Japan\’s Tohoku region
• Now, researchers have uncovered the cause of this tsunami, shedding light on what displaced the seafloor off the northeastern coast of Japan
• The Study
• Scientists underwent a 50-day expedition on the Japanese drilling vessel Chikyu
• They then drilled three holes in the Japan Trench area in order to study the rupture zone of the 2011 earthquake
• A fault in the ocean floor where two of Earth\’s major tectonic plates meet deep beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean.
• The Conventional View
• Deep beneath the seafloor, where rocks are strong, movements of the plates can generate a lot of elastic rebound
• Closer to the surface of the seafloor, where rocks are softer and less compressed, rebound effect was thought to taper off
• The Tohoku Earthquake
• The largest displacement of plates before the 2011 tsunami occurred in 1960 off the coast of Chile when a powerful earthquake displaced sea floor plates by an average of 20 meters
• The Tohoku earthquake, in contrast, displaced its own plates by 30 to 50 meters.
• The fault itself is very thin–less than five meters thick in the area sampled, making it the thinnest plate boundary on Earth.
• In addition, clay deposits that fill the narrow fault are made of extremely fine sediment, which makes it extremely slippery
• Looking to the Future
• These findings don\’t just show researchers a bit more about the past; they also have implications for the future
• Learning more about the 2011 tsunami and its causes is an important step for monitoring future events and could help researchers provide earlier warnings
• Other subduction zones in the northwest Pacific where this type of clay is present–from Russia\’s Kamchatka peninsula to the Aleutian Islands–may also be capable of generating similar, huge earthquakes
• Further Reading / In the News
• Scientists Identify Cause of Japan\’s Devastating 2011 Tsunami | ScienceWorldReport.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Coloring Silk Worm Silk

• How It’s Done Now
• Coloring fabric normally uses enormous amounts of fresh water
• The water gets contaminated with dangerous chemicals in the process, requiring costly treatment before factories can dump it back into waterways—or wreaking havoc when factory owners dodge cleanup rules
• A New Idea
• A team fed ordinary silkworms mulberry leaves that had been sprayed with fabric dyes.
• Out of seven tested dyes, only one worked, producing a thread that reminded me of pink-dyed hair.
• The worms themselves take on some color before they weave their silk cocoons. Their colorful diets did not affect their growth
• Scientists are just starting to study this idea, however, it remains to be seen if it\’s commercially viable
• In this experiment, the Indian team tested seven azo dyes, which are cheap and popular in the industry
• The scientists found different dyes moved through silkworms\’ bodies differently. Some never made it into the worms\’ silk at all
• Others colored the worms and their cocoons, but the color molecules settled mostly in the sticky protein the worms add to their cocoons
• That sticky stuff gets washed away before the silk is turned into fabric
• Only one dye, named \”direct acid fast red,\” showed up in the final, washed silk threads. By the time it made it there, it was a pleasant, light pink.
• Media
• YouTube | Silkworms Timelapse | mtwlg
• Further Reading / In the News
• Scientists Color Silk By Feeding Silkworms Fabric Dyes | Popular Science

Bone Grafting

• Scientists have now discovered a way to refine sea coral properties so that it is more compatible with natural bone.
• One Biomaterial Problem
• When biomaterials do not biodegrade, they can continuously cause problems
• In extreme conditions, it is possible that the different mechanical properties of the artificial bone graft may cause a re-fracture or become a source for bacterial growth in infection
• Finding Solutions
• In order to get around this issue researchers decided to study the calcium carbonate found in the exoskeleton of sea coral and convert it into coralline hydroxyapatite (CHA)
• They then refined the material to produce coralline hydroxyapatite/calcium carbonate (CHACC)
• This CHACC composition contained 15 percent of CHA in a thin layer around the calcium carbonate
• The strong, porous structure has made CHA commercially successful, but contained significantly improved bio-degrading properties to support natural bone healing.
• Not Ready for Wide Use Quite Yet
• There is a ways to go before the material can match the benefits of an autograft and can be used by the several million people worldwide that undergo bone grafting procedures each year
  +The development of the CHACC material could provide an important step toward creating a biodegradable material that could help patients in the future
• Further Reading / In the News
• Sea Coral in Bone Grafting? How the Material is Made Compatible with Natural Bone | ScienceWorldRepoert.com

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

China’s ‘Yutu’ Lunar Lander

• China’s moon landing probe successfully entered lunar orbit on Friday, Dec. 6
• China’s ‘Yutu’ lunar lander is riding piggyback atop the four legged landing probe
• Chang’e 3 is due to make a powered descent to the Moon’s surface on Dec. 14, firing the landing thrusters at an altitude of 15 km (9 mi) for a soft landing in a preselected area called the Bay of Rainbows or Sinus Iridum region.
• The Bay of Rainbows is a lava filled crater located in the upper left portion of the moon as seen from Earth. The Sea of Tranquility, where Apollo 11 landed is the mid-upper right. Moon Map | Wikipedia
• Further Reading / In the News
• China’s Maiden Moon Rover Mission Chang’e 3 Achieves Lunar Orbit | UniverseToday.com

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• 100,000 ChemCam Laser Shots
• Chemistry and Camera instrument (ChemCam) uses the infrared laser to excite material and analyzes the spectrum of light to identify elements in the target
• As of the start of December, ChemCam has fired its laser on Mars more than 102,000 times, at more than 420 rock or soil targets, and has also returned more than 1,600 images taken by its remote micro-imager camera
• Each pulse delivers more than a million watts of power for about five one-billionths of a second
• The 100,000th shot was one of a series of 300 to investigate 10 locations on a rock called \”Ithaca\” in late October
• The shots were at a distance of 13 feet, 3 inches (4.04 meters) from the laser and telescope on rover\’s mast
• More Habitable Lake Information
• Curiosity rover has discovered evidence that an ancient Martian lake had the right chemical ingredients that could have sustained microbial life
• The shallow ancient lake may have been about 30 miles long by 3 miles wide (50 by 5 kilometers)
• The research team estimates that the lake existed for at least tens of thousands of years, as recent as 3.7 Billion years ago, perhaps even longer on an off-and-on basis, even when the lake might have been dry, the groundwater\’s still there
• It could have potentially supported a class of microbes called chemolithoautotrophs, which obtain energy by breaking down rocks and minerals
• Here on Earth, chemolithoautotrophs are commonly found in habitats beyond the reach of sunlight, such as caves and hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor
• Cold Lake
• The lack of weathering on Gale Crater\’s rim suggests that the area was cold when the lake existed
• It\’s possible that a layer of ice covered the lake on a permanent or occasional basis
• Even with that it still is a entirely viable habitable environments for chemolithoautotrophs
• Mission Shift
• Researchers announced that they are shifting the missions focus from searching for habitable environments to searching for organic molecules – the building blocks of all life as we know it.
• The team believes they have found a way to increase the chance of finding organics preserved in the sedimentary rock layers
• This means that the mission is now dedicated to the search for that subset of habitable environments which also preserves organic carbon
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Curiosity Rover Report (Dec. 9, 2013): Dating Younger Rocks | NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News
• Laser Instrument on NASA Mars Rover Tops 100,000 Zaps | mars.jpl.nasa.gov
• Ancient Mars Lake Could Have Supported Life, Curiosity Rover Shows | Space.com
• Curiosity Discovers Ancient Mars Lake Could Support Life | UniverseToday.com

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• Dec 14, 1962 : 51 years ago : Mariner 2 Venus Mission : The U.S. space probe Mariner 2 approached within about 34,000 kilometers (21,600 miles) of Venus, transmitting first time information about this planet. Launched 27 Aug 1962 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on an Atlas- Agenda rocket, the Mariner 2 was the world\’s first successful interplanetary spacecraft. It sent back new information about interplanetary space and the very hot, heavy, mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere. The temperature was found to be about 500 ºC (900 ºF). Also for the first time, the spacecraft\’s solar wind experiment measured the density, velocity, composition and variation over time of the solar wind. It discovered that Venus lacks a strong magnetic field and radiation belts. Contact was lost 3 Jan 1963.

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Fri, Dec 15 | starting 9-10pm local |The Geminid meteor shower should be at its peak tonight, from 9 or 10 p.m. until dawn Saturday morning. The best viewing time is after your local moonset: in the hour before the beginning of morning twilight on the 14th.
• Planets
• Venus | \”Evening Star\” | Rising after dusk in the SW, Venus won\’t set until more than an hour after dark
• Mars | rises ~1am loca | Rising to the high S skies by dawn
• Jupiter | After Dark | Rises in the E-NE, with Castor and Pollux to it\’s left

• Saturn |Dawn | Low in the SE, to the far lower left of Mars

• 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 Typing & Dying Silk | SciByte 112 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We take a look at lava under Antarctica, teaching artificial intelligence, neutrino data, greenhouses in the desert, studying the Moon\’s atmosphere, hope for Kepler, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Eyeing Magma Under the Antarctic Ice

• Marie Byrd Land is a desolate region of Antarctica buried deep beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet now researchers have shown that molten rock still stirs deep underground
• Lava?
• Historic eruptions have punctured the ice sheet, creating a chain of volcanoes amid the ice
• Only the largest eruptions could melt all the ice above them and poke through to the surface, but even smaller eruptions could potentially cause global sea level to rise, although no one knows how big the rise might be
• The crust is thinned by the West Antarctic Rift System, a series of giant rift valleys beneath the ice sheet
• \”Data in the Data\”
• Erupted lava from underground magma chambers has burst through the ice repeatedly over geological history as the plates moved over the top
• No one knew whether magma was still stirring until seismic monitoring stations were installed on the ice between 2007 and 2010.
• Researchers built the stations to essentially to weight the ice sheet to help study the shifting crustal blocks of the West Antarctic Rift System
• One way to do that is to measure how the Earths crust responds to the weight of the ice, and would depend on weather it was hot and fluid or cool and vicious, but seismologist found another use
• They noticed a series of small earthquakes, mainly occurring during two “seismic swarms” in January and February 2010 and March 2011
• These earthquakes were unusual: The ground was shaking much more slowly during the quakes (2-4/sec) than one would expect from the plates grinding against each other (10-20/sec)
• The Earthquakes
• Researchers looked at two different types of waves that come in-the P wave, which is the primary wave, and the S wave, which is the secondary wave
• Calculations revealed that the waves had come from 25 to 40 kilometers below Earth\’s surface and were centered approximately at a point that followed a linear trend of volcanoes to the south
• The exact cause of these deep quakes is not understood, but they are thought to result from the movement of magma deep below active or soon-to-be active volcanoes
• Other Data
• The area showed a slightly higher magnetic field than the surrounding area and that there was a bump in the crust-common signals of magmatic activity
• Radar mapping also indicated a layer of volcanic ash embedded in the ice, probably from an eruption of Mount Waesche about 8000 years ago-very recent geological history
• There is no evidence of an actual eruption since then, but, because magma is still moving deep under the Earth, an eruption could occur at any time
• What About Now?
• The current center of volcanic activity is covered by at least 1 kilometer of ice, and it would take an exceptionally large eruption to melt all this
• An eruption could make its presence felt in subtler ways. As fresh snow adds to their own mass, ice sheets flow downward into the sea
• Melting the base of the ice sheet, an eruption could speed up this flow, potentially raising the level of the ocean. No one knows how significant such a rise might be
• Any effect on the ice sheet above, and thus any effect on the oceans, would probably be quite small; however, a proper study is needed to find out how significant volcanic activity could be to future sea levels
• Multimedia
• YouTube | S and P waves | Atkinson Physics
• YouTube | Mount Erebus: clip from BBC\’s Volcano Live | Clive Oppenheimer
• YouTube | Volcano: Mount Etna erupts for the 16th time this year sending lava 600 metres into the air | ITN
• Further Reading / In the News
• Wikipedia | Seismic wave | Usefulness of P and S waves in locating an event
• Magma Boils Beneath Antarctic Ice | Science/AAAS
• Active Volcano Discovered Under Ice Sheet in West Antarctica Sci-News.com

— NEWS BYTE —

A.I. Common Sense

• “Researchers are trying to teach common sense to an artificial intelligence by watching the internet”
• What they are doing is to let the artificial intelligence browse millions of pictures and decide for itself what they all mean
• Never Ending Image Learning, NEIL
• The system at Carnegie Mellon University is called NEIL, short for
• In mid-July, it began searching the Internet for images 24/7 and, in tiny steps, is deciding for itself how those images relate to each other
• The goal is to recreate what we call common sense-the ability to learn things without being specifically taught
• In just over four months, the network of 200 processors identified 1,500 objects and 1,200 scenes and has connected the dots to make 2,500 associations
• NEIL leverages recent advances in computer vision that enable computer programs to identify and label objects in images, to characterize scenes and to recognize attributes, such as colors, lighting and materials, all with a minimum of human supervision
• Humans vs Computers
• Having a computer make its own associations is an entirely different type of challenge than programming a supercomputer to do one thing very well, or fast
• Humans constantly make decisions using \”this huge body of unspoken assumptions,\” while computers don
• Humans can also quickly respond to some questions that would take a computer longer to figure out
• \”Could a giraffe fit in your car?\” | Humans can have an answer without having made the precise calculations that a computer would do
• Some of NEIL\’s Computer-Generated Associations
• \”Rhino can be a kind of antelope,\”
• \”Actor can be found in jail cell\”
• \”News anchor can look similar to Barack Obama.\”
• Searches and Categorizing
• The computers have figured out that zebras tend to be found in savannahs and that tigers look somewhat like zebras
• A search for \”apple\” might return images of fruit as well as laptop computers
• The team had no idea that a search for F-18 would identify not only images of a fighter jet, but also of F18-class catamarans
• As its search proceeds, NEIL develops subcategories of objects
• Tricycles can be for kids, for adults and can be motorized, or cars come in a variety of brands and models
• It begins to notice associations – that zebras tend to be found in savannahs, for instance, and that stock trading floors are typically crowded
• The Future
• In the future, NEIL will analyze vast numbers of YouTube videos to look for connections between objects
• Further Reading / In the News
• NEIL: Never Ending Image Learner
• Carnegie Mellon computer searches web 24/7 to analyze images and teach itself common sense | Phys.org
• New research aims to teach computers common sense | Phys.org

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Neutrinos Spotted

• Astrophysicists have managed to detect and record the mysterious phenomena known as cosmic neutrinos
• The nearly massless particles that stream to Earth at the speed of light from outside our solar system, striking the surface in a burst of energy that can be as powerful as a baseball pitcher\’s fastball
• Cosmic Rays
• Scientists have pondered the source of cosmic rays, which contain the energy of a rifle bullet in a single atomic nucleus
• It\’s thought that objects such as supernovas, black holes or gamma ray bursts may produce cosmic rays, but their origin is difficult to detect
• Instead, scientists look for neutrinos – subatomic particles with no charge and very little mass – produced when cosmic rays interact with their surroundings
• Neutrinos
• Astrophysical neutrinos move in straight lines unimpeded by outside forces, they can act as pointers to the place in the galaxy where they originated this, in turn, can tell astronomers quite a bit out our universe
• The 28 events recorded so far are too few to point to any particular location
• Billions of neutrinos pass through a square centimeter of Earth every second, and only a tiny fraction of them interact with matter
• The Study
• In this particular study, the researchers observed 28 very high-energy particle events with the use of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica
• These events constitute the first solid evidence for astrophysical neutrinos from cosmic sources
• IceCube
• IceCube is located inside a cubic kilometer of ice beneath the South Pole.
• It is made up of 5,160 digital optical modules suspended along 86 strings embedded in ice beneath the South Pole
• It detects neutrinos through the tiny flashes of blue light, called Cherenkov light, produced when neutrinos interact in the ice.
• Computers then collect near-real-time data from the optical sensors and send information about interesting events north via satellite
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Chasing the Ghost Particle From the South Pole to the Edge of the Universe | IceCube Neutrino
• YouTube | A 10-millisecond view of IceCube | IceCube Neutrino
• YouTube | Francis Halzen On the first evidence for astrophysical neutrinos from cosmic accelerators | IceCube Neutrino
• Further Reading / In the News
• Neutrino Detector Finds Elusive Extraterrestrial Particles in \’Major Breakthrough\’ | Space.com
• New Era of Neutrino Astronomy Begins at the South Pole | ScienceWorldReport.com
• Neutrino Detection Could Help Paint an Entirely New Picture | UniverseToday.com

Desert Farming

• A pilot plant built by the Sahara Forest Project (SFP) produced 75 kilograms of vegetables per square meter in three crops annually, comparable to commercial farms in Europe, while consuming only sunlight and seawater
• This is not particularly a recent publication but was recently found by me and I thought it was interesting
• The Plant
• The heart of the SFP concept is a specially designed greenhouse. At one end, salt water is trickled over a grid like curtain so that the prevailing wind blows the resulting cool, moist air over the plants inside
• This cooling effect allowed the facility to grow three crops per year, even in the scorching summer
• At the other end of the greenhouse is a network of pipes with cold seawater running through them
• Some of the moisture in the air condenses on the pipes and is collected, providing a source of fresh water
• The third key element of the SFP facility is a concentrated solar power plant
• This uses mirrors in the shape of a parabolic trough to heat a fluid flowing through a pipe at its focus. The heated fluid then boils water, and the steam drives a turbine to generate power
• The plant has electricity to run its control systems and pumps and can use any excess to desalinate water for irrigating the plants
• Bonus Effects
• One of the surprising side effects of such a seawater greenhouse, seen during early experiments, is that cool moist air leaking out of it encourages other plants to grow spontaneously outside
• Qatar plant took advantage of that effect to grow crops around the greenhouse, including barley and salad rocket (arugula), as well as useful desert plants
• The pilot plant accentuated this exterior cooling with more “evaporative hedges” that reduced air temperatures by up to 10°C.
• The Future
• The fact that this small greenhouse produced such good yields, suggests that a commercial plant-with possibly four crops a year-could do even better
• Much larger greenhouses are being looked at to test whether or not this could be a long term solution and how much it would take to grow nearly or as much as the imported foods that could be grown there
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Feeding 9 Billion: Turning the Desert Green – Qatar |Journeyman Pictures
• Further Reading / In the News
• Desert Farming Experiment Yields First Results | Science/AAAS

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

LADEE Starts to Study the Lunar Atmosphere

• NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) has descended to its planned low altitude orbit and begun capturing science data on the Moon’s ultra tenuous atmosphere and dust
• The purpose of LADEE is to collect data that will inform scientists in unprecedented detail about the ultra thin lunar atmosphere, environmental influences on lunar dust and conditions near the surface
• The Mission
• The approximately 100 day long mission length is dictated by the residual fuel available for thruster firings.
• By circling in a very low altitude equatorial orbit, the washing machine sized probe will make frequent passes crossing from lunar day to lunar night
• This will enable it to precisely measure changes and processes occurring within the moon’s tenuous atmosphere while simultaneously sniffing for uplifted lunar dust in the lunar sky
• These data will lead to a better understanding of other planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond
• Maybe Solving a Mystery
• By studying the raised dust, scientists also hope to solve a 40 year old mystery
• Why did the Apollo astronauts and early unmanned landers see a glow of rays and streamers at the moon’s horizon stretching high into the lunar sky
• Multimedia
• YouTube | NASA Ames LADEE Mission Animation: Science Collection / Orbital Variation / Lunar Atmosphere |NASA Ames Research Center
• Further Reading / In the News
• NASA\’s LADEE Probe Starts Science Study of Thin Lunar Atmosphere and Dusty Mystery | UniverseToday.com

The Return of Kepler?

<img src=”https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/226xvariable_height/public/kepler-2nd-light_12x12_300_22nov_2.jpg?itok=VdzrPlp-\” width=250 align=right>

• The Kepler Space telescope may soon start searching the sky again.
• A new mission concept, dubbed K2, would continue Kepler\’s search for other worlds, and introduce new opportunities to observe star clusters, young and old stars, active galaxies and supernovae
• Last Time on SciByte
• SciByte 94 | Kepler & Ancient Water | Kepler’s Last Dance? – May 21, 2013
• The Original Mission
• For four years, the space telescope simultaneously and continuously monitored the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, recording a measurement every 30 minutes.
• In May, the Kepler spacecraft lost the second of four gyroscope-like reaction wheels, which are used to precisely point the spacecraft,
• Gyroscope Problems
• The loss of the additional gyroscope ended new data collection for the original mission, which required three functioning wheels to maintain the precision pointing necessary to detect the signal of small Earth-sized exoplanets
• With the failure of a second reaction wheel, the spacecraft can no longer precisely point at the mission\’s original field of view. The culprit is none other than our own sun which pushes the spacecraft around
• Pressure is exerted when the photons of sunlight strike the spacecraft
• Without a third wheel to help counteract the solar pressure, the spacecraft\’s ultra-precise pointing capability cannot be controlled in all directions.
• A Possible Solution
• Kepler mission and Ball Aerospace engineers have developed an innovative way of recovering pointing stability by maneuvering the spacecraft so that the solar pressure is evenly distributed across the surfaces of the spacecraft
• To achieve this level of stability, the orientation of the spacecraft must be nearly parallel to its orbital path around the sun
• This technique of using the sun as the \’third wheel\’ to control pointing is currently being tested on the spacecraft and early results are already coming in
• Initial Test
• During a pointing performance test in late October, a full frame image of the space telescope\’s full field of view was captured showing part of the constellation Sagittarius
• Photons of light from a distant star field were collected over a 30-minute period and produced an image quality within five percent of the primary mission image quality
• Additional testing is underway to demonstrate the ability to maintain this level of pointing control for days and weeks.
• The Future
• A decision to proceed to the 2014 Senior Review – a biannual assessment of operating missions – and propose for budget to fly K2 is expected by the end of 2013
• The K2 mission concept has been presented to NASA Headquarters
• Further Reading / In the News
• A Sunny Outlook for NASA Kepler\’s Second Light | NASA

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• Operations Temporarily Suspended
• Science observations by NASA\’s Mars rover Curiosity were suspended for a few days while engineers ran tests to check possible causes of a voltage change detected on Nov. 17
• \”The vehicle is safe and stable, fully capable of operating in its present condition, but we are taking the precaution of investigating what may be a soft short,\” said Mars Science Laboratory Project Manager
• The electrical issue did not cause the rover to enter a safe-mode status, in which most activities automatically cease pending further instructions, and there is no indication the issue is related to a computer reboot that triggered a \”safe-mode\” earlier this month
• \”Soft Short\”
• The team detected a change in the voltage difference between the chassis and the 32-volt power bus that distributes electricity to systems throughout the rover, from about 11 volts to about 4
• The rover\’s electrical system is designed with the flexibility to work properly throughout that range and more, \”floating bus.\”
• A soft short can cause such a voltage change
• A \”soft\” short is a leak through something that\’s partially conductive of electricity, rather than a hard short such as one electrical wire contacting another
• Soft shorts reduce the level of robustness for tolerating other shorts in the future, and they can indicate a possible problem in whichever component is the site of the short
• Curiosity had already experienced one soft short on landing day in August 2012, that one was related to explosive-release devices used for deployments shortly before and after the landing
• It lowered the bus-to-chassis voltage from about 16 volts to about 11 volts but has not affected subsequent rover operations
• Diagnosis and the Cause
• Analysis determined that the change appeared intermittently three times during the hours before it became persistent
• The work to determine the cause of the voltage change gained an advantage from an automated response by the rover\’s onboard software when it detected the voltage change
• The rover stepped up the rate at which it recorded electrical variables, to eight times per second from the usual once per minute, and transmitted that engineering data in its next communication with Earth
• The likely cause is an internal short in Curiosity\’s power source, the Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator
• The short does not affect operation of the power source or the rover
• Similar generators on other spacecraft, including NASA\’s Cassini at Saturn, have experienced shorts with no loss of capability
• Testing of another Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator over many years found no loss of capability in the presence of these types of internal shorts
• In subsequent days, the rover performed diagnostic activities commanded by the team, such as powering on some backup hardware to rule out the possibility of short circuits in certain sensors
• Early Nov. 23 the rover had returned to its pre-Nov. 17 voltage level, this reversal is consistent with their diagnosis of an internal short in the generator on Nov. 17, and the voltage could change again
• Return to Science
• Science operations were suspended for six days while this analysis took priority when the team made a list of potential causes, and then eliminated the possible causes one by one
• The decision to resume science activities resulted from the success of work to diagnose the likely root cause of the Nov. 17 change in voltage
• Activities after analysis resumed included the use of Curiosity\’s robotic arm to deliver portions of powdered rock to a laboratory inside the rover
• The powder has been stored in the arm since the rover collected it by drilling into the target rock \”Cumberland\” six months ago
• Several portions of the powder have already been analyzed. The laboratory has flexibility for examining duplicate samples in different ways
• Multimedia
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News
• Mars Science Laboratory: Curiosity Resumes Science After Analysis of Voltage Issue | mars.jpl.nasa.gov
• Mars Science Laboratory: Rover Team Working to Diagnose Electrical Issue | mars.jpl.nasa.gov
• Mars Rover Curiosity Sidelined by Electrical Glitch | Space.com

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• Dec 03, 1732 : 281 years ago : Artificial respiration : James Blair was rescued from a fire in a coal mine. William Tossach, a Scottish surgeon, found that “there was not the least pulse in either heart or arteries, and not the least breathing could be observed: So that he was in all appearance dead. I applied my mouth close to his, and blowed my breath as strong as I could… I blew again my breath as strong as I could, raising his chest fully with it; and immediately I felt six or seven very quick beats of the heart.”This appears to be the first recorded use of the ventilation technique since it was commented upon by 16th century Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius, who investigated the effect on an animal upon which he had performed a tracheotomy and related ventilation to heart function
• The technique is believed to have been in use from ancient times, so Tossach was probably not the first to utilize expired air ventilation. However, he left what appear to be the first clinical description of the procedure in the medical literature, which he wrote twelve years later.

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Fri, Nov 29 | ~45 before sunrise | The star Spica will be to the lower left of the Moon
• Planets
• Venus / \”Evening Star\” | Dusk | In the SW and setting more than an hour after dark, it is at its highest and brightest that it will be for the rest of the year
• Mars | ~1am local | Rises around 1 am moving to the upper SE skies by dawn

• Jupiter | ~8pm local | Rises in the E-NE, with two stars from the constellation Gemini, Castor and Pollux, to it\’s left. It will be at it\’s highest point in the night at ~3am local. Jupiter will be in opposition, directly opposite the sun, on Jan 5th

• 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 Glacial Lava & Artificial Intelligence | SciByte 110 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We take a look at counting Earth-like planets, what musical training does for your brain, the Olympic torch, viewer feedback about sharks, a spacecraft update on India’s Mars Orbiter Mission, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | Torrent | YouTube

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How Common Are \’Earth-Like\’ Planets?

• Astronomers have analyzed all four years of Kepler data in search of Earth-size planets in the habitable zones of sun-like stars
• Based on the analysis, they estimate that 22 percent of stars like the sun have potentially habitable Earth-size planets, though not all may be rocky or have liquid water
• Kepler Space Telescope
• Launched in 2009 its mission was to look for planets around other stars by looking for a \’dip\’ in the brightness of a star, about one hundredth of one percent, indicating that something was passing in front of it
• After 3 consecutive dips in light from the star it is labeled a exoplanet candidate
• About 150,000 stars were photographed every 30 minutes for four years leading to the current reported number of more than 3,000 planet candidates
• Kepler had to be pointed with such precision in order to find these planets that it would be like steadily looking at a grain of salt from a 0.4 km [1/4 mi] away
• The Keck Telescopes in Hawaii helps astronomers to determine each star\’s true brightness and calculate the diameter of each transiting planet, with an emphasis on Earth-diameter planets.
• \”Habitability\”
• The team\’s defined habitable as a planet that receives between four times and one-quarter the amount of light that Earth receives from the sun
• Earth-size planets in Earth-size orbits are not necessarily hospitable to life, even if they orbit in the habitable zone of a star where the temperature is not too hot and not too cold
• Some of those planets may have thick atmospheres, making it so hot at the surface that DNA-like molecules would not survive
• A habitable planet would have a rocky surfaces that could harbor liquid water suitable for living organisms
• Narrowing Down The Data
• The team focused on the 42,000 stars that are \’sun-like\’ and found 603 candidate planets orbiting them
• Of those only 10 were Earth-size, that is, one to two times the diameter of Earth and orbiting their star at a distance where they are heated to lukewarm temperatures suitable for life
• Extrapolating
• All of the potentially habitable planets found in their survey are around K stars, which are cooler and slightly smaller than the sun although analysis shows that the result for K stars can be extrapolated to G stars like the sun
• In order to get a better idea of the number of stars with planets around them you have to account for missed planets, as well as the fact that only a small fraction of planets are oriented so that they cross in front of their host star as seen from Earth
• Adding in those numbers led them to believe that roughly 22 percent of all sun-like stars in the galaxy have Earth-size planets in their habitable zones.
• The astronomers in this study defined sun-like stars to be of two class types, Class G (like our sun) and Class K
• Class G and K stars make up roughly 19.5% of all stars, 22% of those stars gives 4.3% of ALL stars have potentially habitable Earth-size planets. (1 out of 25)
• Multimedia
• YouTube | One in Five Sun-Like Stars Have \’Goldilocks\’ Planets | VideoFromSpace
• Further Reading / In the News
• Prevalence of Earth-size planets orbiting Sun-like stars | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
• Astronomers answer key question: How common are habitable planets? | Phys.org

— NEWS BYTE —

Musical Training and the Brain

• Older adults who took music lessons as children but haven\’t actively played an instrument in decades have a faster brain response to a speech sound than individuals who never played an instrument
• The Brains Response Time
• As people grow older, they often experience changes in the brain that compromise hearing and show a slower response to fast-changing sounds, which is important for interpreting speech
• Previous studies have show such age-related declines are not inevitable, in fact recent studies of musicians suggest lifelong musical training may offset these and other cognitive declines
• The Study
• This recent study, explored whether limited musical training early in life is associated with changes in the way the brain responds to sound decades later
• For the study, 44 healthy adults, ages 55-76, listened to a synthesized speech syllable (\”da\”) while researchers measured electrical activity in the auditory brainstem
• The brainstem is the region of the brain processes sound and is a hub for cognitive, sensory, and reward information
• Results
• The results showed that the more years study participants spent playing instruments as youth, the faster their brains responded to a speech sound.
• In fact none of the study participants had played an instrument in nearly 40 years, so it wasn\’t simply a recent or \’maintenance\’ result
• Participants who completed 4-14 years of music training early in life had the fastest response to the speech sound (on the order of a millisecond faster than those without music training).
• A millisecond faster may not seem like much, but the brain is very sensitive to timing and a millisecond compounded over millions of neurons can make a real difference
• Further Reading / In the News
• Just a few years of early musical training benefits the brain later in life | MedicalXPress.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Olympic Torch in Space

• The Olympic Torch was taken on a space walk for the first time on Nov 9, 2013
• Russian officials made it clear that the torch would remain unlit at all times for safety reasons.
• The Olympic torch was carried into space ahead of the 1996 and 2000 Olympics in Atlanta and Sydney but has never before been taken on a spacewalk
• In an usual situation, when the new crew arrived there were nine crew members and three Soyuz vehicles at the ISS, there have not been nine crew members on the ISS since 2009.
• The new crew brought the unlit torch along, then the space station’s current crew, took the torch out on a spacewalk, the three returning crew members brought the torch back to Earth
• The real reason for the spacewalk is to do some routine Russian maintenance outside the station
• The torch was given back to Olympic officials and it will be used in the opening ceremonies of the February games
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Raw: Spacewalkers Hand Off Olympic Torch | AssociatedPress
• Further Reading / In the News
• Russia launches Sochi Olympic torch into space | Phys.org
• Crew Launches to Space Station with Olympic Torch | UniverseToday.com

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

New Shark Species

• Michael Thalleen ‏@ThalleenM
• Two new shark species have been discovered
• Carolina Hammerhead
• Rare New Species of Carolina Hammerhead Shark Discovered | ScienceWorldReport.com
• Scientists have now announced that they\’ve discovered a new species of rare shark, the Carolina hammerhead
• The Carolina hammerhead has long eluded discovery due to the fact that it is outwardly indistinguishable from the common scalloped hammerhead
• The new species, named Sphyrna gilberti, was actually discovered as scientists were looking for more common hammerheads.
• South Carolina is a well-known pupping ground for several species of sharks, which means that researchers were collecting samples there for study
• The scalloped hammerheads that they were collecting had two different genetic signatures in both the mitochondrial and nuclear genomes
• The scientists found that the anomalous scalloped hammerhead had been described in 1967 and had 10 fewer vertebrae than the normal scalloped hammerhead. Intrigued
• In the end, the scientists found that there was genetic evidence to show that this hammerhead was, in fact, a new species.
• At this point scientists aren\’t sure exactly how many individuals still exist in the wild
• \’Walking\’ Shark
• New \’Walking\’ Shark Species Caught on Video | LiveScience
• YouTube | New species of \”walking\” shark found in Indonesia – Conservation International (CI) – 2013 | ConservationDotOrg
• A new species of \”walking\” shark has been discovered in a reef off a remote Indonesian island
• Hemiscyllium halmahera, named after the eastern Indonesian island of Halmahera where it was found
• These sharks don\’t always rely on \”walking\” to move about — often, they only appear to touch the seafloor as they swim using their pectoral and pelvic fins in a walk like gait
• The shark grows up to 70 cm [27 in] long and is harmless to humans
• The animals lay eggs under coral ledges, after which the young sharks lead relatively sedentary lives until adulthood
• These sharks do not cross areas of deep water and are found in isolated reefs

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

India’s Mars Orbiter Mission

• Last time on SciByte
• SciByte 107 | Dinosaurs & Satellites (October 29, 2013)
• The Trip to Mars
• India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) safely injected into its initial elliptical Earth parking orbit on Nov. 5
• India’s PSLV rocket is not powerful enough to send MOM on a direct flight 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
• The goal is to gradually maneuver MOM – India’s 1st mission to the Red Planet – into a hyperbolic trajectory so that the spacecraft will
• The spacecraft was initial in an elliptical orbit around Earth, it then proceeds to fire its engines when it is at its closest point in orbit above Earth.
• 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
• They expected to achieve escape velocity on Dec. 1 and depart Earth’s sphere of influence tangentially to Earth’s orbit to begin the 300 day (10 month) voyage to Mars
• Estimates are that it will arrive in the vicinity of Mars on September 24, 2014
• Small Glitch
• During a fourth repositioning, on Mon Nov 11, that was to take it 100,000 kilometres (62,000 miles) from Earth, the thruster engines briefly failed, leading the autopilot to take over.
• The supplemental burn on Nov 12 successfully raised it to the proper orbit
• The Other Mars Mission
• NASA\’s MAVEN orbiter remains on target to launch on Nov. 18 – from Cape Canaveral, Florida
• It\’s goal is to \”Study the Martian atmosphere , unlock the mysteries of its current atmosphere and determine how, why and when the atmosphere and liquid water was lost\”
• Both Mission Goals
• The main aim of MOM is to detect methane in the Martian atmosphere, which could provide evidence of some sort of life form
• Both MAVEN and MOM’s goal are to study the Martian atmosphere
• MOM science teams have said they will “work together” with NASA\’s MAVEN team to unlock the secrets of Mars atmosphere and climate history
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Mars Mission Isro successfully completes first midnight manoeuver | rajnews41
• Further Reading / In the News
• Indian Mars mission on track, makes first engine burns | Phys.org
• India\’s Mars Orbiter Mission Rising to Red Planet – Glorious Launch Gallery | UniverseToday.com
• Indian Mars mission suffers glitch but \’no setback\’ | Phys.org

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

• Warm Reset
• NASA\’s Mars rover Curiosity experienced an unexpected software reboot (also known as a warm reset) on the 7th
• During a communications pass as it was sending engineering and science data to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, for later downlinking to Earth
• occurred about four-and-half hours after new flight software had been temporarily loaded into the rover\’s memory
• At the time the event occurred, Curiosity was in the middle of a scheduled, week-long flight software update and checkout activity
• A warm reset is executed by flight software when it identifies a problem with one of its operations
• The reset restarts the flight software into its initial state. Since the reset, the rover has been performing operations and communications as expected
• This is the first time that Curiosity has executed a fault-related warm reset during its 16-plus months of Mars surface operations
• Multimedia
• YouTube Curiosity Rover Report JPLnews
• Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
• Social Media
• Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
• Further Reading / In the News
• Mars Science Laboratory: Curiosity Performs Warm Reset | mars.jpl.nasa.gov

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• Nov 16, 1972 : 41 years ago : Skylab III : Skylab III, carrying a crew of three astronauts, was launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on an 84-day mission that remained the longest American space flight for over two decades (until Norm Thagard broke it aboard Mir in 1995 and Shannon Lucid, Feb 2002-Sep 2003). The Skylab III crew, Gerald P. Carr, William R. Pogue and Edward C. Gibson, maintained their physical condition by walking treadmills and riding an on-board stationary bicycle. Among the thousands of experiments conducted during this flight, the astronauts took four space walks, including one on Christmas Day to observe the comet Kohoutek. After 1214 orbits, the crew returned to Earth, splashing down on 8 Feb 1974. Skylab 3 | Wikipedia

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Friday, Nov 15 | After dark | The Summer Triangle | You can see the bright star Vega high in the W-NW after dark this month, the brightest star above it is Deneb with the dimmer Altair to the lower left.
• Planets
• Venus | Dusk | In the SW setting at least and hour after dark
• Mars | 1-2am local | High in the SE, still moving E against the background stars moving farther to the lower left of Regulus

• Jupiter | 9pm local | Rises in the E-NE with the stars Castor and Pollux to its left.

• Further Reading and Resources

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

The post ‘Earth-Like’ Planets & Sharks | SciByte 109 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We take a look at a strange exo-planet, SpaceX rocket testing, an Australian ‘lost world’, simulating dinosaurs walk, viewer feedback about human regeneration, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | Torrent | YouTube

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Hot Exoplanet is NOT a \’New Earth\’

• A team of astronomers have discovered an earth-like blazing hot planet that shouldn\’t exist
• No matter what the headlines say, just because an exoplanet has somewhat like Earth in density or size, it doesn\’t mean it\’s habitable.
• The Star Kepler 78
• A sun-like G-type star
• It is located 400 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus
• Discovered using data from NASA\’s Kepler Space Telescope with follow up observations were made using W.M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii
• Kepler 78-b
• First known Earth-sized planet with an Earth-like density
• Diameter of 9,200 miles, 1.2 times the size of Earth
• Mass is 1.7 times more than Earth
• Composed of iron and rock
• Orbit Length | 8.5 hours
• Distance from star | 1.6 km / 1 mi
• Kepler 78-b Mass Measurements
• Two independent research teams have now confirmed the planet’s mass and density by measuring “wobbles” of its sun-like host star, seen as the exoplanet orbits around it
• Generally it is difficult to measure the mass of planets that Kepler finds because it is hard for ground-based telescopes to spot the subtle wobble of the star
• In the case of Kepler 78-b since it orbits so close to its star, the planet exerts a greater gravitational pull on the star that it would if it were as far as Earth is from our sun
• Breaking The Rules
• When this planetary system was forming, the young star was larger than it is now meaning that it would have been inside the swollen star
• The planet couldn’t have formed farther out and migrated inward, because it should have been drawn straight into the star
• One of the more exotic possibilities is that it is the remnant core of a disrupted gas giant
• The extreme gravitational pull from its star will draw it ever closer in, ripping the entire planet apart in about three billion years
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Earth-like planet Kepler 78b | Nature Newsteam
• Further Reading / In the News
  +New Earth-Like Blazing Hot Planet ‘Kepler-78b’ Discovered | ScienceWorld.com
• New-found Earth-size Exoplanet Doomed – News Watch | Newswatch.NationalGeographic.com
  +Kepler Discovers Earth-Sized Mystery Planet – Popular Mechanics

— NEWS BYTE —

SpaceX Will Be Renting Test Space From NASA

• SpaceX has signed a contract to research, develop and test Raptor methane rocket engines at the NASA Stennis Space Center in southern Mississippi
• Testing
• SpaceX currently does most of its rocket testing in Texas
• Now the plan is to use the E-2 test stand at Stennis, which is able to support both vertical and horizontal rocket engine tests
• The E-2 stand is big enough for components, but SpaceX would need a bigger stand for the whole Raptor
• Reportedly SpaceX is working out a Space Act agreement to establish user fees, amongst other things, once an agreement is finalized the testing can begin as early as next year
• Used For?
• There is little information on SpaceX’s website about what the Raptor engine is or specific development plans
• Space News reports that it would be used for deep-space missions
• There are multiple reports that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has mentioned the engine previously when talking about Mars missions
• Raptor Rocket Engine, What We Know
• Intended to power a higher performance upper stage for SpaceX launch vehicles, powered by methane and liquid oxygen (LOX)
• Designed to produce more than 661,000 lbf (2,940 kN) thrust in vacuum, which is the space environment that the Raptor second-stage engine is designed for.
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Methane Rocket | Christopher Martinez
• Further Reading / In the News
• Stennis Space Center
• SpaceX Signs Pact To Start Rocket Testing At NASA Stennis | UniverseToday.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Australian \’Lost World\’

• An expedition to a remote part of northern Australia has uncovered three new vertebrate species isolated for millions of years
• The Discovery
• James Cook University and a National Geographic film crew were dropped by helicopter onto the rugged Cape Melville mountain range on Cape York Peninsula
• Cape Melville, a plateau of boulder-strewn rainforest on top
• The virtually impassable mountain range is home to millions of black granite boulders the size of cars and houses piled hundreds of metres high
• National Geographic, the team plans to return to Cape Melville within months to search for more new species, including snails, spiders, and perhaps even small mammals
• What Was Found
• Leaf-tail gecko, a gold-coloured skink-a type of lizard-and a brown-spotted, yellow boulder-dwelling frog, none of them ever seen before
• The Cape Melville Leaf-tailed Gecko, which has huge eyes and a long, slender body, is highly distinct from its relatives
• A small boulder-dwelling frog, the Blotched Boulder-frog, which during the dry season lives deep in the labyrinth of the boulder-field where conditions are cool and moist. The tadpoles even develop within the egg and a fully formed frog hatches out in the absence of water
• Further Reading / In the News
• \’Lost world\’ discovered in remote Australia | Phys.org
• Leaf-tailed gecko, golden-coloured skink and boulder-dwelling frog: New species found in Australia\’s lost world | independent.co.uk
• Spectacular New Species Found in \”Lost World\” | news.nationalgeographic.com

How Dinosaurs Walked

• Researchers have managed to use an advanced computer model to recreate the walking and running movements of the vast Cretaceous Argentinosaurus dinosaur
• Argentinosaurus
• The dinosaur lived on the then-island continent of South America somewhere between 97 and 94 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous
• Not much of Argentinosaurus has been recovered, but the proportions of the bones found and comparisons with other sauropod relatives allow paleontologists to estimate the its size
• The dinosaur weighed about 80 tons, making it one of the largest known dinosaurs, and the model showed that it would have reached about 5 mph when it walked across the Earth
• The Computer Model
• To create this computer model, the researchers laser scanned a 40 meter-long skeleton of Argentinosaurus
• The simulation used the equivalent of 30,000 desktop computers to allow the dinosaur to take its first steps in over 94 million years
• The digitization of such vast dinosaur skeletons using laser scanners brings Walking with Dinosaurs to life…this is science not just animation
• Currently, the researchers plan to use this same computer technique in order to model the steps of other dinosaurs, such as the Triceratops, Brachiosaurus and T. rex.
• Multimedia
• YouTube | Argentinosaurus dinosaur digital reconstruction The University of Manchester: Dr Bill Sellers | Alison Barbuti
• YouTube | Argentinosaurus – Planet Dinosaur – Episode 5 | BBC
• Further Reading / In the News
• Scientists Digitally Reconstruct Movements of Largest Dinosaur in the World (Video) | Phys.org
• Argentinosaurus | Wikipedia

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Human Regeneration … Soon-ish?

• Michael Thalleen ‏@ThalleenM
• Regrowing human body parts: The dream comes within reach | nbcnews.com
• Sometime in the next few decades, humans may be able to regrow a finger, toe, or among the most promising targets, maybe even fresh patches of beating heart tissue
• Research
• A decade ago scientists demonstrated that zebrafish have the ability to repair a badly damaged heart, thanks to a particular protein that regulates the regenerative process
• Young mice are able to regenerate toes, and the salamander can regrow a whole arm below the joint
• In 2010, one lab showed it was possible to enhance that same regenerative response in adult mice
• Researchers have been studying mouse toes to understand how a similar regrowth mechanism can be reactivated or imitated in adult humans
• In Humans
• Humans already have demonstrated some ability to regenerate body parts, very young children can fill out the tips of chopped off fingers and toes
• In August researchers from the Gladstone Institutes showed that they could turn human scar tissue into electrically conductive tissue in a lab dish by fiddling with just a few key genes
• Among the hurdles that lie ahead: taking that technique out of the lab and applying it to living human hearts
• Researchers are still cautious about predicting how studies of animal regeneration will be applied to humans and it\’s dangerous to say, \’Yes, we expect to regenerate a limb\’ although the field is reaching a turning point

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

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+ NASA\’s Mars rover Curiosity completed its first two-day autonomous drive Monday, Oct 28
+ During an autonomous drive the rover chooses a safe route to designated waypoints by using its onboard computer to analyze stereo images that it takes during pauses in the drive
+ The autonomous drive brought Curiosity to about 80m (262 ft) from \”Cooperstown,\” an outcrop bearing candidate targets for examination with instruments on the rover\’s arm.
+ Cooperstown is about one-third of the way along the route to Mount Sharp
+ Improvements
+ A key activity planned for this week, week of Nov. 4, is uploading a new version of onboard software the third such upgrade since landing
+ Include what information the rover can store overnight to resume autonomous driving the next day.
+ It also expands capabilities for using the robotic arm while parked on slopes
+ Multimedia
+ Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
+ Social Media
+ Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
+ Further Reading / In the News
+ Mars Science Laboratory: NASA\’s Curiosity Mars Rover Approaches \’Cooperstown\’ | mars.jlp.nasa.gov

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

• November 11, 1572 : 441 years ago : Tycho\’s Supernova / SN1572 : Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe began his meticulous observations of the supernova discovered in the W-shaped constellation of Cassiopeia. (Brahe was at the beginning of his career in 1572, and it was this supernova that inspired him to devote his lifetime to making accurate measurements of the positions of the stars and planets.) First noted by Wolfgang Schuler*of Wittenberg, for two weeks it was brighter than any other star in the sky and visible in daytime. By month\’s end, it began to fade but it remained visible to the naked eye for about 16 months until Mar 1574. Thus 16th-century astronomers learned that the heavens were not immutable, as had been believed. Brahe\’s book on his observations, De Nova Stella, originated the word “nova.”
• SN 1572 | Wikipedia

Looking up this week

• Keep an eye out for …
• Wed, Nov 6 | Evening | Venus and the crescent Moon are close in the SW sky
• Sat, Nov 9 | First-quarter Moon to the SW
• Planets
• Venus | dusk | Is in the SW around dusk moving to set in the E-NE near the stars Castor and Pollux of the constellation Gemini
• Mars | Rises around 1-2am standard | Moves E, opposite to the stars, moving farther away from Regulus (blue-white star) and by dawn both are high in the S sky
• Comet ISON | Just before dawn | Below mars, but still only a telescopic object

• Jupiter | 9-10am standard | Rises in the E-NE moving to the high Southern sky by dawn

• Further Reading and Resources

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

The post “Hot-Earths” & New Species | SciByte 108 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.