ISS – Jupiter Broadcasting https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com Open Source Entertainment, on Demand. Wed, 28 Nov 2018 15:35:00 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.3 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/cropped-favicon-32x32.png ISS – Jupiter Broadcasting https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com 32 32 Skipping Fedora 31 | LINUX Unplugged 277 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/128231/skipping-fedora-31-linux-unplugged-277/ Wed, 28 Nov 2018 07:35:00 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=128231 Show Notes/Links: linuxunplugged.com/277

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Show Notes/Links: linuxunplugged.com/277

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]]> Marijuana & “Exo-Earth” | SciByte 127 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/55667/marijuana-exo-earth-scibyte-127/ Tue, 22 Apr 2014 21:15:11 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=55667 We take a look at marijuana\’s effect on the brain, an \”Earth-like\” exoplanet, the brains distraction controls, a possible new moon for Saturn, spacecraft updates, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week. Direct Download: MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | HD Video | Video […]

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

Direct Download:

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

RSS Feeds:

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

Show Notes:

Marijuana’s and Changes to the Brain

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

— 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

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

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]]> Paraplegic Therapy & Exomoon | SciByte 126 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/55232/paraplegic-therapy-exomoon-scibyte-126/ Tue, 15 Apr 2014 20:09:08 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=55232 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 and more

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

Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | Torrent | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

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

Show Notes:

Breakthrough Paraplegic Therapy

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

— NEWS BYTE —

ExoMoon?

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

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

International Space Station (ISS) Glitch

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

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Lunar Eclipses Tetrad

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

— Updates —

Large Hadron Collider – Beginning of Startup

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

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

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

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]]> Predicting Drive Failures | TechSNAP 136 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/46362/predicting-drive-failures-techsnap-136/ Thu, 14 Nov 2013 17:32:17 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=46362 Preventing data at rest from rotting, Microsoft puts out the warning signal on RC4, and the International Space Station gets infected by malware.

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Preventing data at rest from rotting, Microsoft puts out the warning signal on RC4, and the International Space Station gets infected by malware.

Plus a fantastic batch of your questions, our answers, and much much more!

Thanks to:


\"GoDaddy\"

\"Ting\"

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Show Notes:

6 in 10 malware analysts in US have investigated or addressed a data breach that was never disclosed by their company

  • “The independent blind survey of 200 security professionals dealing with malware analysis within U.S. enterprises was conducted by Opinion Matters on behalf of ThreatTrack Security in October 2013”
  • “These results indicate that known data breaches may be significantly underreported and are putting customers and partners at risk”
  • “according the survey, companies with more than 500 employees are even more likely to have had an unreported breach”
  • A device used by a member of senior management is most likely to be infected by:
  • Clicking on a malicious link in a phishing email (56%)
  • Allowing a family member to use a company-owned device (45%)
  • Visiting a pornographic website (40%)
  • Installing a malicious mobile app (33%)
  • “When asked to identify the most difficult aspects of defending their companies\’ networks from advanced malware, 67% said the complexity of malware is a chief factor; 67% said the volume of malware attacks; and 58% cited the ineffectiveness of anti-malware solutions.”

Microsoft tells developers to drop RC4 from their applications

International Space Station infected by malware

  • The Malware came aboard on a USB stick carried by a Russian Astronaut
  • “Kaspersky revealed that Russian astronauts carried a removable device into space which infected systems on the space station. He did not elaborate on the impact of the infection on operations of the International Space Station (ISS).”
  • “Kaspersky said he had been told that from time to time there were \”virus epidemics\” on the station.”
  • Until recently, the dozens of laptops on the ISS all ran Windows XP
  • Kaspersky also revealed that an unnamed Russian nuclear facility, which is also cut off from the public internet, was infected with the infamous Stuxnet malware.
  • “Russian security expert Eugene Kaspersky has also told journalists that the infamous Stuxnet had infected an unnamed Russian nuclear plant and that in terms of cyber-espionage \”all the data is stolen globally… at least twice.\””
  • Additional Coverage

Feedback:

Round Up:

The post Predicting Drive Failures | TechSNAP 136 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> Kepler & Ancient Water | SciByte 94 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/37576/kepler-ancient-water-scibyte-94/ Tue, 21 May 2013 20:30:15 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=37576 We take a look at sad news for the Kepler space telescope, wireless brain imaging, remote ancient water, cancer genes, sound imaging, and more!

The post Kepler & Ancient Water | SciByte 94 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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We take a look at sad news for the Kepler space telescope, wireless brain imaging, remote ancient water, cancer genes, sound imaging, 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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[asa]B00CTT9646[/asa]

Kepler\’s Last Dance?

  • NASA’s Kepler telescope lost its ability to precisely point toward stars when one of the reaction wheels –devices which enable the spacecraft to aim in different directions without firing thrusters – has failed
  • Launched in 2009, the Kepler mission completed its 3.5-year planned run last year.it monitors some 150,000 sunlike stars in search of transiting planets
  • Reaction Wheels
  • Reaction wheels try to balance the forces from the solar pressure, that’s what forces a wheel to run
  • Last year reaction wheel #2 failed, and now #4 has failed
  • In July 2012 reaction wheel #2 failed, then earlier this year elevated friction was detected in reaction wheel #4, they saw some movement on the wheel but it went back quickly
  • Extending Fuel Supplies
  • They are currently using thrusters to stabilize the spacecraft, and in its current mode, the onboard fuel will last for several months
  • They could extend the fuel to last a period of several years in a “Point Rest State,” where we can park the vehicle
  • Point Rest State is a loosely-pointed, thruster-controlled state that minimizes fuels usage while providing a continuous X-band communication downlink
  • The software to execute that state was loaded to the spacecraft last week
  • There is the possibility of the wheel running in the opposite direction, but running the wheel backward would mean they would need to use more thruster fuel
  • What Lies Ahead
  • The spacecraft needs at least three reaction wheels to be able to point precisely enough to hunt for planets orbiting distant stars, but it might be possible to use the telescope for another purpose that does not require such precise pointing abilities
  • They will continue to analyze the situation to try and get the telescope back online
  • Even if the Kepler spacecraft is unable to make more observations, there are still terabytes of data to pore over with two years of data that has yet to be searched through
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube | Kepler Update on This Week @NASA | NASATelevision
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Kepler mission may be over | Atom & Cosmos | Science News
  • Planet-Hunting Kepler Spacecraft Suffers Major Failure, NASA Says | Space.com
  • Kepler spacecraft\’s planet-hunting days may be over | Phys.org
  • Malfunction Could Mark the End of NASA\’s Kepler Mission – ScienceInsider | ScienceMag.org
  • Kepler Planet-Hunting Mission in Jeopardy | UniverseToday.com

— NEWS BYTE —

Wireless Brain Imaging

  • A new technology is using wireless signals to provide real-time, non-invasive diagnosis of brain swelling or bleeding.
  • The device analyzes data from low energy, electromagnetic waves, similar to the kind used to transmit radio and mobile signals
  • It could potentially become a cost-effective tool for medical diagnostics and to triage injuries in areas where access to medical care, especially medical imaging, is limited
  • The Prototype
  • Engineers fashioned two coils into a helmet-like device, fitted over the heads of the study participants
  • One coil acts as a radio emitter and the other serves as the receiver. Electromagnetic signals are broadcast through the brain from the emitter to the receiver
  • The waves are extremely weak, and are comparable to standing in a room with the radio or television turned on
  • The device\’s diagnoses for the brain trauma patients in the study matched the results obtained from conventional computerized tomography (CT) scans
  • Researchers take advantage of the characteristic changes in tissue composition and structure in brain injuries
  • For brain edema, swelling results from an increase in fluid in the tissue and for brain hematomas, internal bleeding causes the buildup of blood in certain regions of the brain.
  • Because fluid conducts electricity differently than brain tissue, it is possible to measure changes in electromagnetic properties.
  • Then computer algorithms interpret the changes to determine the likelihood of injury.
  • Prototype Testing
  • The researchers tested a prototype in a small-scale pilot study of healthy adults and brain trauma patients admitted to a military hospital for the Mexican Army
  • The study involved 46 healthy adults, ages 18 to 48, and eight patients with brain damage, ages 27 to 70.
  • The results from the healthy patients were clearly distinguishable from those with brain damage, and data for bleeding was distinct from those for swelling
  • Why is it Important?
  • Symptoms of serious head injuries and brain damage are not always immediately obvious, and for treatment, time is of the essence.
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Wireless signals could transform brain trauma diagnostics | MedicalXPress.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Ancient Water Story

  • A UK-Canadian team of scientists has discovered ancient pockets of water, which have been isolated deep underground for billions of years and contain abundant chemicals known to support life
  • Before this finding, the only water of this age was found trapped in tiny bubbles in rock and is incapable of supporting life
  • The Water
  • The crystalline rocks surrounding the water are thought to be around 2.7 billion years old. But no-one thought the water could be the same age, until now
  • Using ground-breaking techniques researchers show that the fluid is at least 1.5 billion years old, but could be significantly older.
  • The interconnected fluid system in the deep Canadian crystalline basement that is billions of years old, and capable of supporting life
  • Scientists say the water found in the Canadian mine pours from the rock at a rate of nearly two litres per minute yet don\’t yet know if the underground system in Canada sustains life
  • Hydrogen, Methane, and Life
  • Researchers have analysed water pouring out of boreholes from a mine 2.4 kilometres beneath Ontario, Canada
  • They have found that the water is rich in dissolved gases like hydrogen, methane and different forms – called isotopes – of noble gases such as helium, neon, argon and xenon
  • The amount of hydrogen in the water is similar to that around hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean, where microbial life has been found
  • The hydrogen and methane come from the interaction between the rock and water, as well as natural radioactive elements in the rock reacting with the water
  • These gases could provide energy for microbes that may not have been exposed to the sun for billions of years.
  • What This Means On a Larger Scale
  • The similarity between the rocks that trapped it and those on Mars raises the hope that comparable life-sustaining water could lie buried beneath the red planet\’s surface
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Billion-year-old water could hold clues to life on Earth and Mars | Phys.org

Flipping Genes for Cancer

  • Researchers at Johns Hopkins have identified a gene that, when repressed in tumor cells, puts a halt to cell growth and a range of processes needed for tumors to enlarge and spread to distant sites
  • The work shows for the first time that switching this gene off in aggressive cancer cells dramatically changes their appearance and behavior
  • The team applied the same techniques to several strains of human breast cancer cells in the laboratory, including the so-called triple negative cells
  • Triple-Negative Breast Cancer
  • Triple-negative breast cancer cells tend to behave aggressively and do not respond to many of our most effective breast cancer therapies
  • Cells with suppressed HMGA1 grow very slowly and fail to migrate or invade new territory
  • The team then implanted tumor cells into mice, the tumors with HMGA1 grew and spread to other areas, such as the lungs, while those with blocked HMGA1 did not grow well in the breast tissue or spread to distant sites.
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Making cancer less cancerous: Blocking a single gene renders tumors less aggressive | MedicalXpress.com

Sound Pictures of Your Car

  • Researchers have created a camera that creates a heat map-like view of machinery, or anything else
  • 30 digital microphones and a high-res camera pick up on what\’s making noise, and an image shows the different levels of noise, organized by a color gradient with blue meaning a little noise, and red is the most extreme level.
  • While this is not the first sound camera, at about 4 pounds it is one of the most portable
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • This Sound Camera Could Help You Fix Your Car | Popular Science

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Space Station Patch

  • Peter Daintree / \”Korlus\” – Check This Out!
  • Space Station ammonia Leak and Fix
  • Answer
  • Expedition 35 Flight Engineers inspected and replaced a pump controller box on the International Space Station’s far port truss (P6) leaking ammonia coolant
  • Coolant Pump
  • The device contains the mechanical systems that drive the cooling functions for the port truss.
  • The ammonia cools the 2B power channel, one of eight power channels that control the all the various power-using systems at the ISS
  • While the coolant is vital to the operation of the ISS for the electricity-supplying systems, the crew was not in any danger
  • The Fix
  • The spacewalk is the 168th in support of the assembly and maintenance of the space
  • While astronauts on the station prepared in space, Astronauts at NASA’s Johnson Space Center used the Neutral Buoyancy lab – a 12- meter (40 ft.) deep swimming pool with mockups of the space station that simulates the zero-gravity conditions in space – going through the entire expected EVA
  • A little more than 2 1/2 hours into the spacewalk removed the 260-pound pump controller box from the P6 truss and replaced it with a spare that had been stowed nearby
  • What Happened in the \”Down Time\”
  • All the systems that use power from the 2B channel, the problem area, were transferred throughout the day to another channel
  • The 2B channel will eventually shut down when the coolant is depleted, and the power is being diverted in order to keep everything up and running on the station
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube | Station Ammonia Leak Prompts Spacewalk Preps | ReelNASA
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • NASA – Astronauts Complete Spacewalk to Repair Ammonia Leak, Station Changes Command | NASA.gov
  • Emergency Spacewalk Likely for ‘Serious’ ISS Coolant Leak | UniverseToday.com

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

Opportunity’s Driving Marathon

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

  • Second Drilling Location
  • The first drilling location was at a target called \”John Klein\” three months ago
  • The new target Cumberland resembles John Klein and lies about nine feet (2.75 meters) farther west
  • On May 19th Curiosity drilled a hole into Cumberland about an 0.6 inch (1.6 centimeters) in diameter and about 2.6 inches (6.6 centimeters) deep
  • Preliminary findings from analysis of the first site, \”John Klein,\” indicate that the location long ago had environmental conditions favorable for microbial life
  • The science team expects to use analysis of the new material from Cumberland to check against those results
  • ”Blinking Image”
  • Before-and-After Blink of \’Cumberland\’ Drilling | NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
  • This pair of images from the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on NASA\’s Mars rover Curiosity shows the rock target \”Cumberland\” before and after Curiosity drilled into it to collect a sample for analysis
  • The \”before\” image was taken during the 275th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity\’s work on Mars (May 15, 2013).
  • Curiosity drilled into Cumberland on Sol 279 (May 19, 2013) and took the second image later that same sol.
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube | Curiosity Rover Report (May 16, 2013): Rover Readies for Second Drilling | JPLNews
  • Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
  • Social Media
  • Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Mars Science Laboratory: NASA Mars Rover Curiosity Drills Second Rock Target | mars.jpl.nasa.gov

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

  • May 27, 1931 : 82 years ago : Balloon Record : In 1931, Auguste Piccard and Charles Knipfer took man\’s first trip into the stratosphere when they rode their balloon to an altitude of 51,800 feet (nearly 10 miles above the earth). This required the use of a pressurized cabin, which Piccard had designed. On-board experiments included the use of an electroscope to investigate cosmic rays

Looking up this week

The post Kepler & Ancient Water | SciByte 94 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> Bionic Ear & Atomic Movie | SciByte 93 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/37221/bionic-ear-atomic-movie-scibyte-93/ Tue, 14 May 2013 20:41:41 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=37221 We take a look at 3-D printed ears, a tiny movie, a light pollution app, treating grey hair and vitiligo, picture books, and more.

The post Bionic Ear & Atomic Movie | SciByte 93 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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We take a look at 3-D printed ears, a tiny movie, a light pollution app, treating grey hair and vitiligo, picture books, corrections, updates, viewer feedback, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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3D Printing Bionic Ears

  • -Scientists at Princeton University used off-the-shelf printing tools to create a functional ear that can \”hear\” radio frequencies far beyond the range of normal human capability
  • -The primary purpose was to explore an efficient and versatile means to merge electronics with tissue
  • Building Bionics
  • -Previously, researchers have suggested some strategies that typically happens between a 2D sheet of electronics and a surface of the tissue
  • -This new work suggests a new way to build and grow the biology up with the electronics synergistically and in a 3D interwoven format
  • -Creating organs using 3D printers is a recent advance; several groups have reported using the technology for this purpose in the past few months
  • -This project is the team\’s first effort to create a fully functional organ: one that not only replicates a human ability, but extends it using embedded electronics
  • Manufacturing Bionic Ears
  • -Ear reconstruction \”remains one of the most difficult problems in the field of plastic and reconstructive surgery\” so this team turned to a manufacturing approach called 3D printing
  • -Researchers used an ordinary 3D printer to combine a matrix of hydrogel and calf cells with silver nanoparticles that form an antenna. The calf cells later develop into cartilage
  • -Two wires lead from the base of the ear and wind around a helical \”cochlea\” – the part of the ear that senses sound which can connect to electrodes, the finished ear consists of a coiled antenna inside a cartilage structure,
  • -This is the first time that researchers have demonstrated that 3D printing is a convenient strategy to interweave tissue with electronics
  • The Future
  • -Further work and extensive testing would need to be done before the technology could be used on a patient
  • -The ear in principle could be used to restore or enhance human hearing if electrical signals produced by the ear could be connected to a patient\’s nerve endings, similar to a hearing aid
  • -The current system receives radio waves, but he said the research team plans to incorporate other materials, such as pressure-sensitive electronic sensors, to enable the ear to register acoustic sounds
  • Multimedia
  • -YouTube | 3D Printed Bionic Ears Listening to Beethoven in Stereo | McAlpineResearch
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • –Printable \’bionic\’ ear melds electronics and biology | Phys.org

— NEWS BYTE —

It’s a Small, Small Movie

  • -Scientists from IBM have released the world\’s smallest movie, made entirely of atoms
  • The Instrumentation
  • -In order to make the movie, the atoms were moved with an IBM-invented scanning tunneling microscope
  • -The Microscope weighs two tons, and operates at a temperature of negative -450 Fahrenheit / -268 Celsius and magnifies the atomic surface over 100 million times
  • -The IBM Research lab one of the few places in the world where atoms can be moved with such precision.
  • -Remotely operated on a standard computer, IBM researchers used the microscope to control a super-sharp needle along a copper surface to \”feel\” atoms
  • -Only 1 nanometer away from the surface, which is a billionth of a meter in distance, the needle can physically attract atoms and molecules on the surface and thus pull them to a precisely specified location on the surface
  • -Moving atom makes a unique sound that is critical feedback in determining how many positions it\’s actually moved
  • The Movie
  • -Named \”A Boy and His Atom,\” the Guinness World Records -verified movie used thousands of precisely placed atoms to create nearly 250 frames of stop-motion action.
  • -Scientists rendered still images of the individually arranged atoms, resulting in 242 single frames
  • Also From the Team
  • -Recently created the world\’s smallest magnetic bit, answering the question of how many atoms it takes to reliably store one bit of magnetic information: 12.
  • -It takes roughly 1 million atoms to store a bit of data on a modern computer or electronic device, atomic memory could one day store all of the movies ever made in a device the size of a fingernail.
  • Multimedia
  • -YouTube | A Boy And His Atom: The World\’s Smallest Movie | IBM
  • -YouTube | IMB \’The Worlds Smallest Movie\’ Channel
  • -Image | Star Trek Logo made of atoms
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • –IBM researchers make world\’s smallest movie using atoms | Phys.org
  • –Tiny Bubbles: Star Trek Gets An Atomic Look | UniverseToday.com

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Light Pollution App

  • -Researchers from the German \”Loss of the Night\” project have developed an app for Android smart phones, which counts the number of visible stars in the sky
  • The App
  • -The smartphone app will be used by scientists to understand and evaluate sky brightness, also known as light pollution or skyglow, on a worldwide scale
  • -Currently satellites that observe Earth at night measure the light that is radiating into the sky, not the brightness that is experienced by people and other organisms on the ground
  • -The data can be used to map the distribution and changes in sky brightness, and will eventually allow scientists to investigate correlations with health, biodiversity, energy waste and other factors
  • -With this app, people from around the world can collect data on skyglow without needing expensive equipment.
  • -You simply use an interactive view of a portion of the night sky where you can adjust it so that it corresponds to the number of stars you see in the sky
  • -Some of the testers found that without intending too they learned the names of several stars and constellations
  • -Development of the app was sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education, and is based on the widely used Google Sky Map application
  • Website
  • -GoolgePlay | Loss of the Night
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • –Twinkle, twinkle little star: New app measures sky brightness | Phys.org

Reversing Grey Hair and Vitiligo

  • Grey Hair
  • -People who are going gray develop massive oxidative stress via accumulation of hydrogen peroxide in the hair follicle, which causes our hair to bleach itself from the inside out
  • -A new report shows that this massive accumulation of hydrogen peroxide can be remedied with a proprietary treatment described as a topical, UVB-activated compound called PC-KUS (a modified pseudocatalase)
  • Vitiligo
  • -The study also shows that the same treatment works for the skin condition vitiligo, a condition that causes depigmentation of sections of skin
  • -To achieve this breakthrough, Schallreuter and colleagues analyzed an international group of 2,411 patients with vitiligo
  • -They found that for the first time, patients who have a certain nerval distribution involving skin and eyelashes show the same oxidative stress as observed in the much more frequent type of vitiligo
  • -The more common Vitiligo is associated with decreased antioxidant capacities including catalase, thioredoxin reductase, and the repair mechanisms methionine sulfoxide reductases
  • –Further Reading / In the News
  • –Gray hair and vitiligo reversed at the root | MedicalXPress

‘Reading’ Picture Books

  • -Researchers have found that children hear more complex language from parents when they read a storybook with only pictures compared to a picture-vocabulary book
  • -Often, parents dismiss picture storybooks, especially when they are wordless, as not real reading or just for fun
  • -These findings show that reading picture storybooks with kids exposes them to the kind of talk that is really important for children to hear, especially as they transition to school
  • Last time on the … FauxShow?
  • –FauxShow 139 | Story Time | May 9 2013
  • The Study
  • -A graduate student, recorded 25 mothers while they read to their toddlers both a wordless picture storybook and a vocabulary book with pictures
  • -Moms in the study used forms of complex talk when reading the picture storybook to their child more often than the picture vocabulary book
  • -The team was especially interested in looking at the language mothers use when reading both wordless picture storybooks and picture vocabulary books
  • -They paid close attention to see if parents provided extra information to children like relating the events of the story to the child\’s own experiences or asking their child to make predictions.
  • What This Means
  • -The results of the study are significant for both parents and educators because vocabulary books are often marketed as being more educational
  • -This shows that even short wordless picture books provide children with exposure to the kinds of language that they will encounter at school and can lay the foundation for later reading development
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • –Reading wordless storybooks to toddlers may expose them to richer language | MedicalXpress.com

— CORRECTIONS —

Haiku to Mars Corrections

  • Viewer Feedback – Check This Out
  • -NASA launches the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft in
  • Last Time on SciByte
  • –SciByte 92 | Habitable Exoplanets & Diabetes [May 7, 2013]
  • -I mistakenly attributed this to Curiosity
  • The Mission
  • -NASA launches the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft in November, to gather information that should help scientists figure out what happened to the atmosphere and water that once existed on Mars
  • -The Mission launch window opens on November 18, 2013
  • And Earthly DVD to Mars
  • -The team wants to pack onboard a DVD containing the names of each person who sends a poem, but only the three most popular haikus will be on the DVD
  • -The top three most popular entries will be sent to Mars on board the orbiting MAVEN spacecraft and will be prominently displayed on the MAVEN website
  • Student Art Contest Timeline
  • -Contest Ran from March 15-April 8, Public Voting was between April 16-May 6
  • -Contest Winner Will Be Announced on May 20
  • Send Your Name and Haiku to Mars
  • -Submissions | May 1 – July 1
  • -Public Voting | July 15 – July 29
  • -Message Contest Winner Announced | August 8
  • Haiku
  • -A poem with three lines where the first and the last lines must have exactly five syllables, and the second line must have exactly seven syllables.
  • Example
  • Listening and learning, [5]
  • and information gathering, [7]
  • makes Happy Science [5]
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • –Going to Mars » Send your name & message to Mars!
  • –NASA Wants To Send Your Haiku To Mars | Popular Science

— UPDATES —

Awesome Second-Hand Telescopes

  • -A pair of space telescopes that were donated to NASA from the secretive National Reconnaissance Office could be repurposed for a wide variety of science missions the middle of last year
  • Last Time on SciByte
  • –SciByte 51 | Talking Robots and Voyager 1 – Space Telescope Donations | June 19, 2012
  • The Story of the Telescopes
  • -The two spy scopes were originally built to carry out surveillance missions under a multibillion-dollar NRO program called Future Imagery Architecture
  • -Cost overruns and delays killed the program in 2005, and NASA announced in June 2012 that the NRO had bequeathed the instruments to the space agency
  • -The cost to keep them in storage is about $70,000 a year, which is not insignificant, but it\’s not something that\’s unmanageable
  • -The telescopes\’ 8-foot-wide (2.4 meters) main mirrors are comparable to that of Hubble, the NRO instruments are designed to have a much wider field of view
  • -NASA does not anticipate being able to dedicate any funding to the newly acquired telescopes until the James Webb Space Telescope successfully launches
  • Finding Ideas
  • -When NASA asked scientists to suggest missions for the telescopes, more than 60 serious proposals came in, the most promising of which were presented in early February
  • Seven Big Ideas
  • -Mars-orbiting space telescope
  • -Exoplanet observatory
  • -General-purpose faint object explorer
  • -Advanced, Hubble-like visible light/ultraviolet telescope
  • -Optical communications node in space (which would aid transmissions to and from deep-space assets)
  • -Geospace dynamic observatory (which would study space weather and the sun-Earth system)
  • -Research of Earth\’s upper atmosphere (from a spot aboard the International Space Station)
  • The Future
  • -Whatever missions NASA ultimately assigns to the NRO scopes, the instruments are a long way from launch
  • -There are currently no instruments on the two telescopes right now, just primary and secondary mirrors and the support structures so it would take a while to develop the instruments and integrate them into the structure
  • -The funding to bring the scopes up to speed, launch them into space and maintain their operations has not been granted, and there\’s no guarantee that it will be with current budgetary concerns
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • –NASA Mulling Missions for Donated Spy Telescopes | National Reconnaissance Office | Space.com

Reality TV on Mars [MarsOne]

  • -By May 7th about 78,000 people applied to become Red Planet colonists with the nonprofit organization Mars One since its application process opened on April 22
  • -78,000 applications in two weeks is a good start to their goal of half a million applicants
  • -Mars One estimates that landing four settlers on Mars in 2023 will cost about $6 billion
  • -Plans are to pay most of the bills by staging a global reality-TV event, with cameras documenting all phases of the mission from astronaut selection to the colonists\’ first years on the Red Planet.
  • Last Time on SciByte
  • –SciByte 92 | Habitable Exoplanets and Diabetes – MarsOne and Life on Mars and Science | May 7, 2013
  • –SciByte 61 | ‘Tatooine’ Exoplanets and Eye’s – Martian Reality TV | September 4, 2012
  • Application Process
  • -The application process extends until Aug. 31. Anyone at least 18 years of age can apply, by submitting to the Mars One website a 1-minute video explaining his or her motivation to become a Red Planet settler.
  • -There is an application fee, which ranges from $5 to $75 depending on the wealth of the applicant\’s home country. United States citizens pay $38
  • -Reviewers will pick 50 to 100 candidates from each of the 300 regions around the world that Mars One has identified
  • -By 2015, this pool will be whittled down to a total of 28 to 40 candidates, then the core group will be split into groups of four, which will train for their one-way Mars mission for about seven years
  • -Finally, an audience vote will pick one of these groups to be humanity\’s first visitors to the Red Planet.
  • From All Over the World
  • -People from more than 120 countries have already send in applications
  • -As of May 7 the greatest number of submissions by country are the United States (17,324), China (10,241), and the United Kingdom (3,581)
  • -Russia, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Argentina and India round out the top 10.
  • Multimedia
  • –Mars 2023 – Inhabitants wanted | MarsOneProject
  • -YouTube Channel | Mars One – Human Settlement of Mars
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • –Mars Colony Project Gets 78,000 Applications in 2 Weeks | Mars One | Space.com

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

First Music Video in Space

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

  • After Conjunction Updates
  • -New software was uploaded what was developed and tested on Earth on the \’testbed\’ that will allow more autonomous navigation that will help Curiosity select safe routes by itself
  • -Additional safety checks have been added to the onboard software for the ChemCam instrument to make sure it is never directly pointed at the sun for a long period of time
  • Plans
  • -Calibration data for the navigation cameras, to make sure the B-side computer navigation camera\’s are working properly before moving to a new location
  • Second Drilling Location
  • -The team operating NASA\’s Curiosity Mars rover has selected a second target rock for drilling and sampling. The rover will set course to the drilling location in coming days.
  • -\”Cumberland,\” lies about nine feet (2.75 meters) west of the rock where Curiosity\’s drill first touched Martian stone in February
  • -Both rocks are flat, with pale veins and a bumpy surface. They are embedded in a layer of rock on the floor of a shallow depression called \”Yellowknife Bay.
  • -This second drilling is intended to confirm results from the first drilling, which indicated the chemistry of the first powdered sample from John Klein was much less oxidizing than that of a soil sample the rover scooped up before it began drilling.
  • -Cumberland and John Klein are very similar, Cumberland appears to have more of the erosion-resistant granules that cause the surface bumps, concretions, or clumps of minerals, which formed when water soaked the rock long ago
  • -Mission engineers recently finished upgrading Curiosity\’s operating software following a four-week break rover continued monitoring the Martian atmosphere during the break, but the team did not send any new commands
  • Multimedia
  • -YouTube Curiosity Rover Report (May 9, 2013): \’Spring Break\’ Over: Commanding Resumes | JPL
  • -Image Galleries at JPL and Curiosity Mulimedia
  • Social Media
  • -Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • –Mars Science Laboratory: NASA Curiosity Rover Team Selects Second Drilling Target On Mars | Mars.jpl.nasa.gov
  • –Mars Rover Curiosity Gears Up for Drilling, Epic Drive | Space.com
  • –Bizarre Mars Mountain Possibly Built by Wind, Not Water | Space.com

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

  • May 20, 1901 : 112 years ago : 3D Projector : Claude Grivolas, one of Pathe\’s main shareholders in Paris, France, patented a projector for three-dimensional (stereoscopic) movies viewed wearing spectacles with one red and one blue lens (French patent No. 310,864). He received a British patent on 23 May 1901 (No. 10,695) For filming, he used a dual camera arrangement which photographed images alternately. He then created one composite master film with the left camera images alternated with the right camera image. His projector had a shutter with one red and one blue transparent sections, with opaque quadrants between them. Left-eye images were projected through the blue filter followed by right-eye images in red light. The movie appeared black and white when viewed using red/blue spectacles

Looking up this week

The post Bionic Ear & Atomic Movie | SciByte 93 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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

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

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We take a look at hint of dark matter, reading your dreams, blackhole snacks, spacecraft updates, Curiosity news, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes:

Hints of Dark Matter

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

— NEWS BYTE —

Peering Into Your Dreams

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

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Blackhole Snacks on a Planet

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

— VIEWER FEEDBACK —

Eyeing Europa

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

— SPACECRAFT UPDATE—

Reviewing SpaceX’s Dragon Spacecraft Glitch

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

— CURIOSITY UPDATE —

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

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

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

Looking up this week

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

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

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

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

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Show Notes:

Crazy Quasar

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

— NEWS BYTE —

Suppressing tumors and metastases in breast cancer

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

Peek-a-boo I don’t see you

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

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

The Milky Way in Nine Gigapixels

Mayan Calendar

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

Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope Announcement on Thursday

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

– SPACECRAFT UPDATE –

Increasing the population on the ISS

— Updates —

Oct 17 San Francisco Bay Area Meteor

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

– CURIOSITY UPDATE –

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

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

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

NExt Week Thursday!!!

Looking up this week

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]]> Cool Pavement & Martian Snow | SciByte 63 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/24751/cool-pavement-martian-snow-scibyte-63/ Tue, 18 Sep 2012 21:06:09 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=24751 We take a look at keeping pavements cool, snow on Mars, volcano's, painless shots, updates on the Higgs-Boson, spacecraft updates, and more!

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We take a look at keeping pavements cool, snow on Mars, volcano’s, painless shots, tooth protection, updates on the Higgs-Boson, spacecraft updates, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes

Pavement Temperatures

  • New ‘Cool pavement’ technology could make parking lots cool, literally
  • The low down
  • In a typical city, pavements account for 35 to 50 percent of surface area, half is comprised of streets and about 40 percent of exposed parking lots
  • Pavements reflect as much as 30 to 50 percent of the sun’s energy, compared to only 5 percent for new asphalt (and 10 to 20 percent for aged asphalt)
  • Most of these are constructed with dark materials
  • Dark pavements absorb almost all of the sun’s energy, the pavement surface heats up, which in turn also warm the local air
  • Significance
  • Berkeley Lab scientists have been studying “cool pavement” technologies
  • Like cool roofs, which are lighter-colored roofs that keep the air both inside and outside the building cooler by reflecting more of the sun’s energy
  • Cool pavements can either be made from traditional pavement materials that are lighter in color such as cement concrete or it can consist of cool-colored coatings or surface treatments for asphalt surfaces
  • An ideal design goal would be a pavement with solar reflectance of at least 35 percent
  • Sealcoats are a common maintenance practice for parking lots and schoolyards since the asphalt pavement structure degrades over time
  • scientists will be collecting data from the exhibit to see how the coatings fare over time and at some point they will reach an equilibrium at which the solar reflectance won’t degrade much anymore
  • They are very interested to see what happens when it rains, which may help the coatings self-clean and restore higher reflectance
  • Cool pavement coatings can be used in lieu of a sealcoat, and is a good strategy for cities looking to introduce cool pavement technologies
  • Across an entire city, small changes in air temperature could be a huge benefit as it can slow the formation of smog
  • And just a couple of degrees can also reduce peak power demand, by reducing the energy load from air-conditioning
  • In addition more reflective parking lots could allow building owners and cities to save on energy needed to illuminate streets and parking lots
  • Chicago has already reported energy savings from using solar-reflective pavements in its alleys
  • More field studies are needed however to verify and quantify the results as many of these benefits have been confirmed by scientific models
  • Heat Island Group has converted a portion of a new temporary parking lot at Berkeley Lab into a cool pavement exhibit that will also allow them to evaluate the products over time
  • The exhibit provides an opportunity to feature cool pavement coatings that are applied directly to existing paved surfaces
  • It features six coatings donated by two manufacturers [Emerald Cities Cool Pavement and StreetBond]
  • The team will closely monitor the solar reflectance values and temperatures of 20 x 24 square-foot pavement sections of six different materials on a residential street on the UC Davis campus
  • Scientists hope to better understand how changes in solar reflectance over time affect heat transfer throughout the pavement structure
  • Of Note
  • These studies may assist policymakers and pavement professionals in making informed decisions regarding cool pavement requirements for building codes and project specifications
  • One hurdle is that the benefits of cool pavements are more for the public rather than the building owner as benefits are less immediately tangible than for cool roofs
  • The initial cost premium can potentially be offset over the lifespan of the product with increased durability and less need for ongoing maintenance
  • Cool pavements come in different hues, including green, blue and yellow, and their solar reflectance value depends on both color and material
  • Some colors that look dark but are actually more reflective in the near infrared spectrum
  • Schoolyards are a particular target because of the negative health implications of hot blacktops for schoolchildren
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Heat Island Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
  • ‘Cool pavement’ technologies studied to address hot urban surfaces | Phys.org

— NEWS BYTE —

Let it snow dry-ice on Mars

  • Spacecraft orbiting Mars has detected carbon dioxide snow falling on the Red Planet, making it the only body in the solar system known to show this weather phenomenon
  • The low down
  • Data was gathered by MRO’s Mars Climate Sounder instrument during the Red Planet’s southern winter in 2006–2007
  • The instrument measures brightness in nine different wavelengths of visible and infrared light, allowing scientists to learn key characteristics of the particles and gases in the Martian atmosphere, such as their sizes and concentrations.
  • One large cloud was 300 miles (500 kilometers) wide
  • Significance
  • One line of evidence for snow is that the carbon-dioxide ice particles in the clouds are large enough to fall to the ground during the lifespan of the clouds
  • Another comes from observations when the instrument is pointed toward the horizon
  • The infrared spectra signature of the clouds viewed from an angle clearly showed carbon-dioxide ice particles, and they extend to the surface
  • The snow on Mars fell from clouds around the planet’s south pole during the Martian winter spanning 2006 and 2007
  • The Martian south pole hosts a frozen carbon dioxide – or “dry ice” – cap year-round
  • This new discovery may help explain how it formed and persists, researchers
  • These observations were also the first definitive detections of carbon-dioxide snow clouds
  • The clouds were composed of carbon dioxide, flakes of Martian air, and they are thick enough to result in snowfall accumulation at the surface.
  • Of Note
  • Astronomers still aren’t entirely sure how the dry ice sustaining Mars’ south polar cap – the only place where frozen carbon dioxide exists year-round on the planet’s surface – is deposited.
  • It could come from snowfall, or the stuff may freeze out of the air at ground level, researchers said.
  • The finding of snowfall could mean that the type of deposition (snow or frost) is somehow linked to the year-to-year preservation of the residual carbon dioxide polar cap
  • Dry ice requires temperatures of about minus 193 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 125 Celsius) to fall, reinforcing just how cold the Martian surface is.
  • In 2008, NASA’s Phoenix lander observed water-ice snow, this find means Mars hosts two different kinds of snowfall
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Snow on Mars: ‘Dry Ice’ Snowflakes Discovered by NASA Probe | Space.com

Atlantis Volcano Active?

  • The island that was created 3,600 years ago when a volcano erupted that was the second-largest blast in human history is swelling with lava
  • The low down
  • The eruption that created the island of Santorini may have destroyed the Minoan civilization on nearby Crete, which may have started the myth of Atlantis
  • Santorini locals began to suspect last year that something was afoot with the volcano under their Greek island group
  • Wine glasses occasionally vibrated and clinked in cafes, suggesting tiny tremors, and tour guides smelled strange gasses.
  • Beginning in the January 2011 data, there were more than a thousand small quakes, most of them imperceptible
  • Satellite radar technology has revealed the source of the symptoms
  • A rush of molten rock swelled the magma chamber under the volcano by some 351–702 million cubic ft [13 to 26 million cubic yards] or about 15 times the volume of London’s Olympic Stadium between January 2011 and April 2012
  • This has forced parts of the island’s surface to rise upward and outward by 3 to 5.5 inches [8–14 cm, ) confirmed with satellite radar images and GPS receivers
  • Significance
  • The earthquake activity and the rate of bulging have both slowed right down in the last few months
  • Even with these events the volcano has been quiet for 60 years and recent events don’t indicate an imminent eruption
  • It is quite likely that it could remain quiet for another few years or decades.
  • Since scientists don’t know enough about the lifecycle of large volcanoes in between eruptions to be certain
  • Catastrophic eruptions on Santorini, which produce mostly pumice rather than lava, appear to occur here about 20,000 years apart
  • The last one, in 1950, oozed enough lava to cover a few tennis courts
  • Despite its relative quiet, Santorini is an ideal location to learn more about processes like the magma chamber’s rapid inflation
  • While satellite evidence of swelling magma chambers has rarely been available for an active volcano, the processes the data represent may not be all that unusual
  • Some large volcanoes like Santorini and Yellowstone spend hundreds or thousands of years in a state of what you’d call dormancy and often have these little restless patches
  • These types of phenomena are likely to be common, but you need the right instruments and technology to detect what are usually rather small changes in behavior.
  • Of Note
  • We aren’t any closer to knowing if, or when, the next lava eruption might happen
  • Scientist are comparing the recent events to to someone blowing a big breath into an invisible balloon when you don’t know how small or big the balloon is, and don’t know whether just one more breath will be enough for it to pop or not
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Santorini Bulges as Magma Balloons Underneath | news.nationalgeographic.com

Painless shots

  • A new laser-based system blasts microscopic jets of drugs into the skin could soon make getting a shot as painless as being hit with a puff of air
  • The low down
  • In previous studies, researchers used a laser wavelength that was not well absorbed by the water of the driving liquid which caused the formation of tiny shock waves that dissipated energy and hampered the formation of the vapor bub
  • The laser with a wavelength of 2,940 nanometers, which is readily absorbed by water. This allows the formation of a larger and more stable vapor bubble
  • Hypodermic needles are still the first choice for ease-of-use, precision, and control
  • Significance
  • This type of laser is commonly used by dermatologists, particularly for facial esthetic treatments
  • The laser is combined with a small adaptor that contains the drug to be delivered, in liquid form, plus a chamber containing water that acts as a “driving” fluid
  • A flexible membrane separates these two liquids
  • Each laser pulse, which lasts just 250 millionths of a second, generates a vapor bubble inside the driving fluid.
  • The pressure of that bubble puts elastic strain on the membrane
  • The impacting jet pressure is higher than the skin tensile strength and thus causes the jet to smoothly penetrate into the targeted depth underneath the skin
  • The drug to be forcefully ejected from a miniature nozzle in a narrow jet a mere 150 millionths of a meter (micrometers) in diameter or a little larger than the width of a human hair
  • To test the effectiveness of the drug delivery system, a special gel is used to mimic the behavior of human skin
  • Tests on guinea pig skin show that the drug-laden jet can penetrate up to several millimeters beneath the skin surface, with no damage to the tissue
  • Because of the narrowness and quickness of the jet, it should cause little or no pain and the region of the skin has no nerve endings, so the method "will be completely pain-free
  • Of Note
  • Researchers are now working with a company to produce low-cost replaceable injectors for clinical use
  • Further work would be necessary to adopt it for scenarios like mass vaccine injections for children
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube Laser-powered ‘Needle’ Promises Pain-free Injections | BusinessWire
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Laser-powered ‘needle’ promises pain-free injections | Phys.org

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Tooth protection

  • Japanese scientists have created a microscopically thin film [0.00016 in/0.004 mm]that can coat individual teeth to prevent decay or to make them appear whiter, the chief researcher said
  • The film is a hard-wearing and ultra-flexible material
  • It is made from hydroxyapatite, the main mineral in tooth enamel
  • It could be five or more years before it could be used in practical dental treatment such as covering exposed dentin, the sensitive layer underneath enamel, but it could be used cosmetically within three years
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Japan tooth patch could be end of decay | https://medicalxpress.com

— UPDATES—

Higgs-Boson

  • The announcement two months ago that physicists have discovered a particle consistent with the famous Higgs boson has cleared a formal hurdle with publication in a peer-reviewed journal
  • Although CERN’s announcement was never doubted, it still had to be vetted by peers and then published in an established journal to meet benchmarks of accuracy and openness.
  • Further work is being carried out to confirm whether the new particle is the famous Higgs
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Higgs boson: landmark announcement clears key hurdle | Phys.org

– SPACECRAFT UPDATE –

Shuttle Endeavour

  • There have been a few weather delays so the schedule continues to change so watch my twitter feed and #SpotTheShuttle for the latest updates
  • JB Mars Base
  • [#spottheshuttle](https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23spottheshuttle)

Expedition 32

  • The low down
  • Soyuz spacecraft carrying two Russian cosmonauts and an American spaceflyer (Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka, Sergei Revin and NASA astronaut Joe Acaba) has landed safely back on Earth
  • They landed at 02:54 UTC on Monday, September 17 (8:53 a.m. Kazakhstan time Monday, 10:53 p.m. EDT Sunday, September 16
  • The Mission
  • The Soyuz crew was in good health and spirits
  • The three signed their Soyuz spacecraft, which is destined for a Russian museum
  • Their 125-day spaceflight began in mid-May and included three spacewalks and several robotic cargo ship arrivals
  • The three spaceflyers were originally slated to blast off in March, but a pressure test incident cracked their first Soyuz capsule, causing a six-week delay while another spacecraft was readied.
  • They finally launched on May 14 and just eight days later, SpaceX’s robotic Dragon capsule docked with the station on a historic demonstration mission, becoming the first private vehicle ever to do so.
  • on Sep. 5, crewmates Sunita Williams and Akihiko Hoshide performed an extra spacewalk – the third for the mission
  • They replace a vital power unit on the station’s backbone-like truss. Using improvised tools such as spare parts and a toothbrush to remove a stuck bolt that had delayed the fix a week earlier
  • Expedition 33
  • Expedition 33 is now underway as Commander Suni Williams and Flight Engineers Aki Hoshide and Yuri Malenchenko continue their stay until Nov. 12
  • They will have the station to themselves until mid-October, when three more astronauts will float through the hatch and bring the expedition up to its full complement of six crewmembers.
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube [[ISS] Expedition 32 Safely Landed | SpaceVidsNet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lN-nUBwCWs&t=30s)
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Touchdown! Soyuz Spacecraft Lands Safely with Russian-US Crew | Space.com
  • Expedition 32 Lands Safely in Kazakhstan | UniverseToday.com

Opportunity is still finding new things

  • A strange picture of odd, spherical rock formations on Mars from NASA’s Opportunity rover has scientists wondering what exactly they’re looking at.
  • The low down
  • Opportunity is currently exploring a location known as Cape York along the western rim of a giant Martian crater called Endeavour
  • A recent photo by Opportunity shows a close-up of a rock outcrop covered in blister-like bumps that mission scientists can’t yet explain
  • The rock, called Kirkwood, is chock full of a dense accumulation of these small spherical objects
  • Significance
  • The photo is actually a mosaic of four images taken by a microscope-like imager on its robotic arm
  • At first the formations appear similar to so-called Martian “blueberries”, iron-rich spherical formations first seen by Opportunity in 2004
  • “Blueberries” are actually concretions created by minerals in water that settled into sedimentary rock, they were first spotted by Opportunity soon after its landing in 2004 and has seen them at many of its science site
  • However they actually differ in several key ways, and scientists have never seen such a dense accumulation of spherules in a rock outcrop on Mars
  • In this new photo, many of the strange features are broken, revealing odd concentric circles inside that seem to be seem to be crunchy on the outside, and softer in the middle
  • These bumpy, spherical formations on the Kirkwood rock represent something new
  • The accumulations are different in concentration, structure, composition and in distribution
  • The science team have several theories, but none that truly stand out as the best explanation
  • Making this one of the most extraordinary pictures from the whole mission, showing that Opportunity is still pumping out new discoveries after more than eight years on Mars.
  • Of Note
  • As the spring equinox is approaching on Mars, ensuring increasing levels of sunshine for Opportunity’s solar arrays and are currently at production levels comparable to what they were a full Martian year ago
  • The Kirkwood outcrop is just one science pit stop at Cape York for Opportunity
  • Mission scientists have already picked out another interesting rock outcrop nearby, a pale patch that may contain tantalizing clay minerals, for possibly study after Opportunity completes its current analysis.
  • Social Media
  • Spirit and Oppy ‏ @MarsRovers
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Strange Mystery Spheres on Mars Baffle Scientists | Space.com

–CURIOSITY UPDATE–

  • Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer [APXS] which is used to analyze mineralogy of samples was also tested
  • There is new panorama from Mars where you can zoom in and you can see actual rocks
  • Curiosity has nearly finished robotic arm tests. Once complete, the rover will be able to touch and examine its first Mars rock
  • It will drive some more and try to find the right rock to begin doing contact science with the arm
  • There is also a look ahead to the terrain to get to the foothill of Aeolis Mons, or Mount Sharp where there appear to be big dunes
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube Curiosity Rover Report (Sept. 13, 2012) | JPLNews
  • Image Gallery Mars Science Laboratory
  • Social Media
  • Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Say Ahhh to Mars | UniverseToday.com
  • [Drive Time: Curiosity Rover Ready to Roll toward First Martian Destination: Scientific American Gallery

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

  • September 23, 1846 : 166 years ago : Neptune discovered : The German astronomer Johan G. Galle discovered Neptune after only an hour of searching, within one degree of the position that had been computed by Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier. Independently of the English astronomer John C. Adams, Le Verrier had calculated the size and position of a previously unknown planet, which he assumed influenced the irregular orbit of Uranus, and he asked Galle to look for it.

Looking up this week

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The post Cool Pavement & Martian Snow | SciByte 63 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> Apollo 11 & Spinning Diagnostics | SciByte 54 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/21826/apollo-11-spinning-diagnostics-scibyte-54/ Tue, 17 Jul 2012 21:10:20 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=21826 We take a look at Medical diagnostics on a disk, navigating fish, Pluto, Lunar X Prize, and a peek back at Apollo 11 and up in the sky this week.

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We take a look at Medical diagnostics on a disk, navigating fish, Pluto, Lunar X Prize, spacecraft updates and as always take a peek back into history to Apollo 11 and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes

Upcoming spinning medical diagnostic tool



Credit: SandiaLabs Channel | Credit: Randy Wong (Sandia National Laboratories)

  • The low down
  • Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed a lab-on-a-disk platform that they believe will be faster, less expensive and more versatile than similar medical diagnostic tools
  • The unit can determine a patient’s white blood cell count, analyze important protein markers, and process up to 64 assays from a single sample, all in a matter of minutes.
  • Significance
  • The device uses a spinning disk, much like a CD player, to manipulate a sample. The disks contain commercially available reagents and antibodies specific to each protein marker.
  • The disks cost pennies to manufacture and results can be delivered to the physician’s computer in 15 minutes.
  • Sample take only a pin-prick sample of blood
  • Researchers envisions an approach where the physician could choose a “cardiac disk,” “immune disk” and similar options.
  • Of Note
  • Researchers recently led a National Institutes of Health grant to adapt the lab-on-a-disk platform for toxin diagnostics
  • That device could be the most accurate method available to detect the botulinum toxin
  • Laboratory mice remain the only reliable way to test for botulism, mouse bioassay is primitive, but remains the gold standard due to its sensitivity
  • SpinDx botulinum assay vastly outperformed the mouse bioassay in head-to-head tests, and requires absolutely no animal testing.
  • Although botulism is quite rare, only about 145 cases are reported in the United States each year, the lethality of the toxin brings concerns
  • Multimedia
  • SpinDx technology uses a spinning disk, much like a CD player, to manipulate samples. Image
  • YouTube | SpinDX medical diagnostic tool
  • Social Media
  • Sandia National Labs @SandiaLabs
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Faster, less expensive device gives lab test results in 15 minutes at point-of-care | Phys.org

— NEWS BYTE —

Fish and magnetic fields

  • The low down
  • Previous research has shown that many species of fish, as well as migratory birds, have the ability to detect differences in magnetic field
  • A Rainbow trout can swim straight back to its original hatching ground, following freshwater streams inland even after spending 3 years at sea and traveling up to 186 mi [300 km] away
  • They likely rely partially on their excellent eyesight and smell, they also seem to rely on Earth’s magnetic fields
  • Significance
  • Now for the first time scientists have isolated magnetic cells in the fish that respond to these magnetic fields
  • This study may even help researchers get to the root of magnetic sensing in a variety of creatures, including birds.
  • In addition the magnetism in each cell was tens to hundreds of times stronger than researchers had hypothesized
  • The fish may be able to detect small differences in magnetic field strength that can give them more detailed information about their precise latitude and longitude
  • Of Note
  • When analyzed between one and four cells rotated in turn with the rotating magnetic field
  • The team has now transferred the rotating cells to individual glass slides to study them further under the microscope.
  • Multimedia
  • Magnetite cells (white) found in the noses of rainbow trout, clustered near the cell’s membrane and not near the cell’s nucleus (blue). Image Credit: H. Cadiou
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • A Big Magnet in a Small Fish | ScienceMag.org

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

Plutonian system grows

  • The low down
  • On July 11, almost almost exactly one year after Hubble spotted Pluto’s fourth moon, it discovered a fifth moon orbiting Pluto half as bright as the last moon discovered
  • Image sets were taken on 5 separate occasions in June and July
  • The Plutonian System
  • Pluto – 1433 mi [2,306 km] across : discovered in 1930 : orbiting 39 times farther than Earth
  • Charon – 648 mi [1,043 km] across : discovered in 1978
  • Nix – 20–70 mi [32–113 km] across : discovered in 2005
  • Hydra – 20–70 mi [32–113 km] across : discovered in 2005
  • P4 – 8–21 mi [13–34 km] across : discovered in 2011
  • P5 – 6–15 mi [10–24 km] across : discovered in 2012
  • Of Note
  • The New Horizons missions team is working closely with Hubble to try to find the safest route through the system
  • Multimedia
  • Image: Pluto’s fourth moon, temporarily dubbed P4 Credit: NASA/ESA/M.Showalter
  • Image : Newly discovered moon, designated P5, as photographed by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 on July 7. Credit: NASA/ESA/M. Showalter
  • Social Media
  • NewHorizons2015 @NewHorizons2015
  • Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) twitter anouncement ‏@AlanStern
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Fifth Moon Found Around Pluto | UniverseToday
  • Pluto Has a Fifth Moon, Hubble Telescope Reveals | Space.com
  • Hubble Space Telescope detects fifth moon of Pluto (Update) | Phys.org

Lunar X Prize

  • The low down
  • The Google Lunar X Prize, is a $30 million international challenge to land a robot on the lunar surface, have it travel at least 1,650 feet (500 meters) and send data and images back to Earth.
  • First prize will receive the $20 million grand prize
  • An additional $10 million is set aside for second place and various special accomplishments, such as detecting water, bringing the prizes total purse to $30 million.
  • Significance
  • The engineering director for the Google Books project, Jimi Crawford, has now signed on with Moon Express
  • He will serve as chief technology officer and software architect for a company competing in the Google Lunar X Prize, private race to the moon.
  • Of Note
  • The competition will end whenever all prizes are claimed or the end of 2015, whichever comes first
  • Multimedia
  • How Moon Express envisions its lunar lander can be used on future missions. Image CREDIT: Moon Express
  • YouTube Moon 2.0: Join the Revolution – HD High Definition | GoogleLunarXPRIZE
  • YouTube Channel Google Lunar X PRIZE
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Google Lunar X Prize
  • Ex-Google VIP Joins Private Moon Race Team | Space.com

– SPACECRAFT UPDATE –

Expedition 32



Credit: NASA/Victor Zelentsov | YouTube channel : NASATelevision

  • The low down
  • On July 14, three veteran space travelers from three different countries went to the International Space Station as part of the space station’s Expedition 32
  • Significance
  • NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency spaceflyer Akihiko Hoshide are due to stay for about four months.
  • They will be joining space station: commander Gennady Padalka of Russia, his cosmonaut colleague Sergei Revin, and NASA astronaut Joe Acaba, who have all been in space since May.
  • Of Note
  • Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, is a colonel in the Russian Air Force and will command the Soyuz spacecraft for Russia’s Federal Space Agency. He is making his third trip, his first long-duration spaceflight was aboard Russia’s Mir space station.
  • NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, is a U.S. Navy captain making her second long-duration spaceflight. She also currently holds the world record for most spacewalks by a woman (four) and the most time in space by a female astronaut (195 days)
  • Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Akihiko Hoshide is making his second spaceflight. His first mission involved the delivery of Japan’s huge Kibo laboratory module to the International Space Station.
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube Warm Greetings for New ISS Residents | NASAtelevision
  • Photos: Space Station’s Expedition 32 Mission | Space.com
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Veteran Space Station Crew to Launch Into Orbit Tonight | Space.com

The next chapter in the Dragon spacecraft

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

  • July 21, 1969 | 43 years ago | That’s one small step … | In 1969, Apollo XI astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin blasted off from the moon after 21 1/2 hours on the surface and returned to the command module piloted by Michael Collins. The Lunar module was comprised of two stages. The descent stage had the landing gear, and was used as a launch pad for the ascent stage. The ascent stage was mainly the cabin, and had a fixed thrust engine (15,500-Newton-thrust) to propel it to 2000 m/s in Lunar orbit for docking. The lunar module’s lower section, left behind, has a plaque mounted upon it, reading, “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”
  • YouTube “One small step for man, …”
  • TimeLine
  • Launched from Earth | July 16, 1969 [9:32am EST / 13:32:00 UTC]
  • Landing on the Moon | July 20, 1969 [ 4:17pm EST/ 20:17:40 UTC]
  • First Step on the Moon | July 20, 1969 [ 10:56pm EST / 02:56 UTC]
  • EVA Time | 2 h 36 m 40 s
  • Total time on Surface | 21 h 36 m 21 s
  • Launched from Moon | July 21 [ 13:54 pm EST / 17:54 UTC]
  • Landing on Earth | July 24, 1969, [ 12:50 pm EST / 16:50:35 UTC]
  • Left on the Moon
  • Patch from Apollo 1 [Virgil “Gus” Ivan Grissom, Edward Higgins White, Roger Bruce Chaffee]
  • Medals commemorating pioneering Soviet cosmonauts Vladimir Komarov and Yuri Gagarin, who had died in flight
  • Goodwill messages from 73 world leaders
  • A small gold pin shaped like an olive branch, a symbol of peace.
  • Further Reading and Resources
  • Nixon Greets Astronauts in Quarantine
  • Interactive of Dec 1969 Vinyl supplement of National Geographic magazine
  • Apollo 11 Image Gallery | history.nasa.gov
  • Apollo 11 | nasa.gov
  • The Moon Is Toxic | UniverseToday.com

Looking up this week

The post Apollo 11 & Spinning Diagnostics | SciByte 54 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> Higgs Boson | SciByte 53 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/21481/higgs-boson-scibyte-53/ Tue, 10 Jul 2012 21:39:31 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=21481 We take a look at the latest on the Higgs Boson, dinosaurs,smart headlights, old minerals, Carl Sagan, spacecraft updates and more!

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We take a look at the latest on the Higgs Boson, dinosaurs,smart headlights, old minerals, Carl Sagan, spacecraft updates and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes

To Higgs-Boson or not to Higgs-Boson



YouTube Channel : linktv | YouTube Channel : minutephysics

— NEWS BYTE —

Warm Blooded Dinosaurs?



Credit: Walter Myers /Stocktrek Images/Corbis | Credit:Meike Köhler

Smart Headlight



YouTube Channel : LabEquipment

  • The low down
  • In rain and snow conditions headlights reflect off of the precipitation back to driver
  • Carnegie Mellon professor and his team are working on ‘smart’ headlights that can streamlight in between the drops
  • Significance
  • The system consists of a co-located imaging and illumination system– camera, projector, and beamsplitter
  • The camera uses a 5 ms exposure time and the system has a total latency of 13 ms when the system runs at 120Hz. with an operating range about 13 feet in front of the headlights
  • The camera images the precipitation at the top of the field of view, the processor can tell where the drops are headed and sends a signal to the headlights, headlights then make their adjustments and react to dis-illuminate the particles all in about about 13 ms.
  • Simulations
  • Computer simulations predict system effectiveness for different systems set ups during a heavy rainstorm [25 mm/hr] on a vehicle traveling 30 km/hr
  • Simulations show that a system operating near 1,000 Hz, with a total system latency of 1.5 ms, and exposure time of 1 ms can achieve 96.8% accuracy, with 90% light throughput expected
  • The system would still have a significant [>= 70%] visibility improvement at 400 Hz
  • A prototype system has already validated simulations on laboratory-generated rain operating at 120 Hz
  • Simulations show that it is possible to maintain light throughput well above 90 percent for various precipitation types
  • Of Note
  • The prototype consists of a camera with gigabit ethernet interface (Point Grey, Flea3), DLP projector (Viewsonic, PJD62531), and desktop computer with Intel architecture (Intel i7 quad core processor).
  • The team says that it may take three to four more years of development and “commercializing it as a product will take additional years.”
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube : Smart Headlights Improve Visibility in Rain | LabEquipment
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Smart headlights let drivers see between the raindrops | Phys.org

— TWO-BYTE NEWS —

New mineral in old rock

  • The low down
  • A meteorite that fell in 1969 as an exploding fireball in the skies over Mexico, scattered thousands of pieces of meteorites across the state of Chihuahua
  • It is largest carbonaceous chondrite ever found on our planet and is considered by many the best-studied meteorite in history
  • Scientists have now discovered a new mineral embedded in that meteorite
  • Panguite is an especially exciting discovery since it is not only a new mineral, but also a material previously unknown to science
  • The mineral could be among the first solid objects formed in our solar system, dating back to over 4 billion years ago, before the formation of Earth and the other planets.
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • New Mineral Found in Meteorite is From Solar System’s Beginnings | UniverseToday.com

Carl Sagan’s personal archive

– SPACECRAFT UPDATE –

ISS Crew Returns to Earth



Credit: | Credit:

Full Fuselage Trainer finds new home

SCIENCE CALENDAR

Looking back

  • July 16, 1994 : 18 years ago : Shoemaker-Levy Comet : The first of 21 asteroids, major fragments of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 broken-up 2 years earlier, hit Jupiter, creating a 1200-mile wide fireball 600 miles high to the joy of astronomers awaiting the celestial fireworks, giving scientists their first chance to observe such a collision as it happened, and others through July 22. Jupiter is a gas giant, made up mostly of hydrogen and helium in gas and liquid form.When we observe Jupiter, we are looking not at a solid surface, but a banded atmosphere with swirling clouds and huge storms.

Looking up this week

The post Higgs Boson | SciByte 53 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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

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

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Show Notes:

Mayan prediction for end of the world?



YouTube channels : NationalGeographic | AP

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

*— NEWS BYTE — *

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



Credit: YouTube Channel VideoNSF

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

—TWO-BYTE NEWS—

New cancer research

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

M2-F2 lifting body crash of 1967

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

Light from another planet

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

Eye see you

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

The water of Earth

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

SPACECRAFT UPDATE

Opportunity Rover



Credit: marsrover.nasa.gov

Curiosity Rover

SpaceX Dragon



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

SCIENCE CALENDER

Looking back

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

Looking up this week

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

]]> Egyptian Astronomy & Smog | SciByte 45 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/19382/egyptian-astronomy-smog-scibyte-45/ Tue, 08 May 2012 21:23:32 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=19382 How the Egyptians are helping astronomical models today, a star being eaten, strange smog contributors, the upcoming Venus transit, SpaceX spacecraft update

The post Egyptian Astronomy & Smog | SciByte 45 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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We take a look at how the Egyptians are helping astronomical models today, a star being eaten, strange smog contributors, the upcoming Venus transit, viewer feedback, SpaceX spacecraft update, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes:

Egyptian Astronomy helping further today’s models



Credit: astro.physics.uiowa.edu | Credit: nightskyinfo.com

*— NEWS BYTE — *

Black hole munching on stars



Image Credit: NASA, S. Gezari, A. Rest, and R. Chornock

See smog, think cows



Credit: NASA | Credit : USDA.gov

  • The low down
  • People typically blame Southern California’s smog on automobiles, a new study suggests that cows may be just as responsible, if not more so
  • A large fraction of the region’s smog, especially the particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, is ammonium nitrate
  • Ammonia is generated by cars with certain types of catalytic converters and by bacteria that consume cattle waste
  • When the ammonia reacts with nitrogen oxides that are produced in large quantities in automobile emissions
  • Significance
  • Data gathered during low-altitude flights in and around the Los Angeles basin in May 2010 suggest that the region’s 9.9 million autos generate about 62 metric tons of ammonia each day
  • White ammonia emissions from dairy farms in the eastern portion of the basin—home to about 298,000 cattle—range between 33 and 176 metric tons per day
  • * Of Note*
  • In addition ammonia emissions from the dairy farms are concentrated, boosting atmospheric levels of the gas to more than 100 times background levels
  • So efforts to curb the farms’ emissions (perhaps by feeding the animals different diets) might reduce smog more than those targeting cars.
  • Also theorized to contribute are vapors from paint, fumes from outdoor barbecues, and even the fresh scent emitted by trees
  • Multimedia
  • California Smog | NASA.gov
  • Cow | USDA.gov [Photo by N. Wade Snyder]
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Smog: It’s Not All Cars’ Fault | Science Magazine
  • ScienceShot: There’s Cow in Your Smog | news.sciencemag.org

*— TWO-BYTE NEWS — *

Venus Transit Upcoming on June 5th / 6th


  • * Last time on SciByte*
  • Meteorites & Lasers | SciByte 38 – Venus Transit [March 20, 2012]
  • Curiosity Rover | SciByte 22 – Science Calender [November 22, 2011]
  • The low down
  • On June 5 (June 6 in Australia and Asia), it will pass between the Earth and Sun… an event which only happens about twice and century and won’t happen again until the year 2117!
  • The transit this year will last about 6.5 hours and will be visible from more than half of the Earth’s surface
  • The Sun will set while the transit is still in progress from most of North America, the Caribbean, and northwest South America
  • It will also already be in progress at sunrise for observers in central Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and eastern Africa
  • No portion of the transit will be visible from Portugal or southern Spain, western Africa, and the southeastern 2/3 of South America
  • Between each occurrence is happens at uneven occurrences at 121.5, then 8 then 105.5, then 8 years again. So only four times every 243 years and only in early Dec or early June
  • The next pair of Venus transits occur over a century from now on 2117 Dec 11 and 2125 Dec 08
  • * Of Note*
  • You can start preparations now to view the transit of Venus
  • Many retailers, like amazon, are are carrying special eclipse/transit viewing glasses and lenses
  • Make sure all glasses are sealed and that no sunlight can enter
  • Binoculars and telescopes require special lenses, if you have those you might want to practice before the event
  • Start thinking about what time it will occur in your area
  • Even the Hubble space telescope is getting in on the transit action by looking away from the Sun, more information on that in the SciByte near the transit.
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube VIDEO : NE Live – Transit of Venus Promo for Sun-Earth Day 2012 | SunEarthDay
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Sun Earth Day
  • 2012 Venus Transit – The Countdown Is On! | UniverseToday.com

*— VIEWER FEEDBACK — *

  • SOFTWARE : MetalFreak
  • “Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go."
  • Screenshots
  • On stellarium.org you can download in Linux, Mac, or Windows
  • [on cnet](https://download.cnet.com/Stellarium/3000–2054_4–10072276.html
  • on Softpedia

SPACECRAFT UPDATE

SpaceX Dragon flight delay

  • * Last time on SciByte*
  • Mining Asteroids & Shuttle Discovery | SciByte 44 – SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket [May 1, 2012]](https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/19186/mining-asteroids-shuttle-discovery-scibyte–44/)
  • Solar Storms & Private Space Flight | SciByte 30 – SpaceX Space Station resupply mission resceduled [January 24, 2012]](https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/16276/solar-storms-private-space-flight-scibyte–30/)
  • The low down
  • On May 2nd it was announced that the launch will likely shift to a later date, possibly May 10
  • A SpaceX spokesperson said that “SpaceX is continuing to work through the software assurance process with NASA. We will issue a statement as soon as a new launch target is set.”
  • The flight was previously delayed from an April 30 launch date to allow more time for tests of Dragon’s flight software. The new delay is also meant to allow for further checkouts.
  • Social Media
  • SpaceX @SpaceX
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • SpaceX
  • SpaceX Says Delay Likely for 1st Private Launch to Space Station | Space.com

SCIENCE CALENDER

Looking back

  • May 9, 1893 : 119 years ago : First motion picture
     : The first motion picture exhibition was given by Thomas Alva Edison in Brooklyn, New York to an audience of 400 people at the Dept of Physics, Brooklyn Institute, Brooklyn, N.Y. using Edision’s Kinetograph. An optical lantern projector showed moving images of a blacksmith and his two helpers passing a bottle and forging a piece of iron. Each filmstrip had 700 images, each image being shown for 1/92 sec. The event was reported in the Scientific American of 20 May 1893.
  • May 9, 1962 : 50 years ago : Moon reached by laser light : A laser beam was bounced off the moon from earth by MIT scientists. The area of the light beam on the surface was estimated at a diameter of 4 miles.

Looking up this week

The post Egyptian Astronomy & Smog | SciByte 45 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> Meteorites & Lasers | SciByte 38 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/18136/meteorites-lasers-scibyte-38/ Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:43:26 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=18136 We take a look at more Lego’s into space and near space, Venus transit, a meteorite that crashed through a cabin, guiding lightning with lasers, and more!

The post Meteorites & Lasers | SciByte 38 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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We take a look at more Lego’s into space and near space, Venus transit, a meteorite that crashed through a cabin, guiding lightning with lasers, updates on Encyclopedia Britannica, near-orbital skydiving, check in on the latest news on Neutrinos and solar storms and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes:

Legoooo’s in Spaaaace … again

  • *The shuttle *
  • Raul Oaidia from Romania launched a Lego space shuttle into the stratosphere on the back of a weather balloon
  • Lego space shuttle model (set number 3367!) and a video camera to capture the voyage
  • Originally he was looking for someone to support project, found a businessman on twitter, who after discussing options decided that a launching something on a weather balloon
  • Launching in Romania required problematic flight clearance and waiting times, while Germany where his father worked had much looser regulations
  • He and his father traveled to Germany to launch the balloon, since that country’s regulations on this sort of project are more relaxed than those in Romania
  • The balloon lofted Lego shuttle flew to an altitude of about 114,800 ft [35,000 m]
  • Lego’s to Jupiter
  • Specially-constructed LEGO mini-figures are of the Roman god Jupiter, his wife Juno, and “father of science” Galileo Galilei.
  • Jupiter (who was the equivalent of “Zeus” to the Greeks) drew a veil of clouds around himself to hide his mischief. While Juno was able to peer through the clouds and reveal Jupiter’s true nature
  • Galileo Galilei first to point a telescope at the sky to make astronomical observations and discovered the four largest satellites of Jupiter – named the Galilean moons in his honor.
  • Juno and the mini-figures are scheduled to arrive in July 2016 and orbit Jupiter for a year (33 revolutions) before intentionally crashing into the giant gas planet
  • Made out of space-grade aluminum the figures, basically the size of the normal LEGO figures, were prepared in a very special way
  • * Lego Station*
  • While the actual Space Station (ISS) took more than 200 astronauts from 12 countries more than a dozen years to build an astronaut from Japan, matched that feat in just about two hours, at least in LEGO form
  • The Lego station would not be able to bear it’s own weight under gravity
  • The Lego station was used as a demonstration for a series of recorded videos aimed at engaging and educating children about living and working in space
  • Building Lego’s in space are much harder to put together in space, to keep the bricks contained it had to be put together inside a glove box
  • Because of the difficulty of putting it together in a glove box, some pieces of the model were launched partially-preassembled
  • In space you have to worry about the little pieces getting loose and becoming either lost or potentially getting jammed in equipment or even becoming a flammability hazard
  • There are flammability concerns about the Lego’s; due to the flammability hazards, the toy bricks could only be exposed to the open cabin air for two hours
  • Other building brick sets that were launched last year, the LEGO space station was part of an educational collaboration between the Danish toy company and NASA
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube VIDEO : Lego Space Shuttle
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Lego Space Shuttle Takes Flight, Returns to Earth Undamaged @ PCWorld.com
  • Astronaut Builds LEGO Space Station Inside Real-Life Space Station
  • What would you like to see in space? @ microblade.blogspot.com

*— NEWS BYTE — *

Venus Transit

  • The low down
  • Transits of Venus are when it passes in between the Earth and the sun and are among the rarest of planetary alignments
  • Between each occurrence is happens at uneven occurrences at 121.5, then 8 then 105.5, then 8 years again. So only four times every 243 years and only in early Dec or early June
  • Only six Venus transits have occurred since the invention of the telescope (1631, 1639, 1761, 1769, 1874
  • The last transit occurred in 2004
  • Observations
  • Your location north or south on Earth slightly affects the apparent path you see Venus taking south or north across the Sun
  • The transit this year will last about 6.5 hours and will be visible from more than half of the Earth’s surface; northwestern North America, Hawaii, the western Pacific, northern Asia, Japan, Korea, eastern China, Philippines, eastern Australia, and New Zealand.
  • The Sun will set while the transit is still in progress from most of North America, the Caribbean, and northwest South America
  • It will also already be in progress at sunrise for observers in central Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and eastern Africa
  • No portion of the transit will be visible from Portugal or southern Spain, western Africa, and the southeastern 2/3 of South America.
  • Significance
  • Edmund Halley first realized that transits of Venus could be used to measure the Sun’s distance which established the absolute scale of the solar system from Kepler’s third law
  • Accurately timing the transit from the surface of the Earth past a certain degree of accuracy due to atmospheric conditions and diffraction
  • The Venus transits in 1761 and 1769 were still able to give Astronomers their first good value for the Sun’s distance.
  • * Of Note*
  • The next pair of Venus transits occur over a century from now on 2117 Dec 11 and 2125 Dec 08.
  • Mercury, the other planet with an orbit between the sun and Earth undergoes transits about 13 or 14 transits of Mercury each century, and fall within several days of 8 May and 10 November
  • Multimedia
  • IMAGE : 2012 Venus Transit Map @ skyandtelescope.com
  • IMAGE : A line plotted of the transit as seen from Earth’s center, with Universal Times @ skyandtelescope.com
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Transit of Venus: June 5–6, 2012 @ skyandtelescope.com
  • 2004 and 2012 Transits of Venus @ nasa.gov

The sky, well a meteorite, fell in Norway right into a cabin

  • The low down
  • Norwegian family arrived at their holiday cabin in Oslo recently for the first time all winter, to discover that a meteorite had apparently fallen through their roof
  • Significance
  • No one is sure when the meteorite actually crashed through the cabin’s roof, because the cabin had been closed during the winter.
  • Although it is thought is may have fallen during a wave of meteor sightings over Norway on March 1
  • The 1.3 pound [585 gram] meteorite was found split in two
  • Cross-section’s of the meteorite show that it contains bits of many different particles that are compressed together
  • Identified as a rare type of breccia meteorite, which is a conglomerate of smaller fragments of minerals
  • These type of meteorites indicates that another, larger meteorite smashed rock on another planet before being propelled into outer space
  • * Of Note*
  • Meteorites rarely fall in populated areas
  • According to Views and News from Norway, only 14 meteorites have been found in the Scandinavian country since 1848
  • Photos and Video of the meteorite in local news site
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Meteorite smashed through Oslo roof @ newsinenglish.no
  • Norwegian Family Finds Meteorite Crashed Through Their Roof
  • Fikk meteorittstein gjennom taket i kolonihagen @ vg.no

Directing lightning with lasers

  • The low down
  • New research has shown that brief bursts of intense laser light can redirect lightning
  • Significance
  • Researchers in France have successfully directed coaxed laboratory-generated lightning into striking the same place, not just twice, but over and over
  • The researchers pulses of laser light, femtosecond (one quadrillionth of a second) long to create a virtual lightning rod out of a column of ionized gas
  • It has also been confirmed with other experiments that a femtosecond laser could produce an ultra-short filaments of ionized gas that act like electrical guide
  • Further studies revealed that these filaments could function over long distances, potentially greater than 164ft [50 m]
  • The research team sent a laser beam skimming past a spherical electrode to an oppositely charged planar electrode
  • The laser then stripped away the outer electrons from the atoms along its path
  • The resulting plasma filament channeled an electrical discharge from the planar electrode to the spherical one
  • The researchers then added a longer, pointed electrode to their experiment
  • With no laser the discharge obeyed normal rules and always struck the taller, pointed electrode
  • Then researchers used the later the discharge was redirected, following the filaments and striking the spherical electrode instead, even when they turned it on after the initial path of the discharge began to form
  • Multimedia
  • An illustration of how lightning occurs when two streamers meet. @ Wikipedia
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Laser lightning rod: Guiding bursts of electricity with a flash of light @ physorg.com

*— TWO-BYTE NEWS — *

Encyclopaedia Britannica, in print no more

  • The low down
  • Encyclopaedia Britannica has been in print since it was first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768.
  • Significance
  • It was announced on Tuesday, March 13, 2012 that after 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print, instead focusing on its online encyclopedia
  • The President of Encyclopaedia Britannica said “This has to do with the fact that now Britannica sells its digital products to a large number of people.”
  • The final hardcover encyclopedia set is available for sale at Britannica’s website for $1,395.
  • * Of Note*
  • The top year for the printed encyclopedia was 1990, when 120,000 sets were sold
  • just six years later in 1996, that number fell to 40,000
  • The company started exploring digital publishing in the 1970s.
  • The first CD-ROM edition was published in 1989 and a version went online in 1994.
  • They made the contents of the website available for one week
  • Multimedia
  • YouTube VIDEO : Totally Digital: The Encyclopaedia Britannica Now
  • Social Media
  • Encyclo. Britannica@Britannica
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Last entry for Encyclopaedia Britannica book form

Skydiving at the orbital extreme

*— Updates — *

Neutrinos loop back around again

The Sun will not sit quietly

SCIENCE CALENDER

Looking back

  • March 26, 1859: 153 years ago : Vulcan Discovered? : In 1859, Lescarbault, a French medical doctor and amateur astronomer reported sighting a new planet in an orbit inside that of Mercury which he named Vulcan. He had seen a round black spot on the Sun with a transit time across the solar disk 4 hours 30 minutes. He sent this information and his calculations on the planet’s movements to Jean LeVerrier, France’s most famous astronomer. Le Verrier had already noticed that Mercury had deviated from its orbit. A gravitational pull from Vulcan would fit in nicely with what he was looking for. However, it was not consistently seen again and it is now believed to have been a “rogue asteroid” making a one-time pass close to the sun. [Or this is the non-prime universe and it was destroyed, que Bryan crying out in anguish]
  • March 25, 1970: 42 years ago : Concorde Flew : In 1970, the prototype British-built airplane Concorde 002 made its first supersonic flight (700 mph; 1,127 kph). A few months earlier, the French prototype, Concorde 001, had broken the sound barrier on 1 Oct 1969. Mach 2 was achieved by Concorde 001 on 4 Nov 1970, and by Concorde 002, a few days later on 12 Nov 1970. The combined number of supersonic flights by the two aircraft reached 100 by January of the following year, 1971.

Looking up this week

The post Meteorites & Lasers | SciByte 38 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> NASA Hacked 5,400 Times? | TechSNAP 47 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/17571/nasa-hacked-5400-times-techsnap-47/ Thu, 01 Mar 2012 20:20:13 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=17571 NASA loses the keys to the International Space Station, Microsoft can’t figure out what day it is, and laugh over the lack of security at Stratfor.

The post NASA Hacked 5,400 Times? | TechSNAP 47 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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NASA loses the keys to the International Space Station, Microsoft can’t figure out what day it is, and I laugh myself to tears over the lack of security at Stratfor

All that and more, on this week’s TechSNAP!

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Show Notes:

NASA laptop stolen, contained control algorithms for the International Space Station

  • In 2010 and 2011 NASA reported 5,408 computer security incidents ranging from the installation of malware on a computer, through the theft of devices and cyber attacks suspected to be from foreign intelligence agencies.
  • 47 incidents were identified as Advance Persistent Threat attacks, and of these, 13 were successful in compromising the agency’s computer systems
  • In an example of such an incident, attackers from Chinese-based IP addresses gained full access to a number of key JPL systems giving them the ability to:
  • Modify, copy or delete sensitive files
  • Add, modify or delete user accounts for mission critical systems
  • Upload hacking tools (keyloggers, rootkits) to steal user credentials and thereby compromise other NASA systems
  • Modify or corrupt the system logs to conceal their actions
  • Some of the breaches have resulted in the unauthorized release of Personally Identifiable Information, the disclosure of sensitive export-controlled data and 3rd party intellectual property
  • Inspector General Testimony before Congress re: IT Security
  • Discovery News Coverage

Windows Azure suffers worldwide outage

  • The Microsoft Azure Cloud service was down for most of the day on February 29th
  • The Service Management system was down for over 9 hours
  • Azure Data Sync was down form 2012–02–29 08:00 through 2012–03–01 03:00 UTC
  • Microsoft says that the outage appears to have been caused by a leap year bug
  • “28 February, 2012 at 5:45 PM PST Windows Azure operations became aware of an issue impacting the compute service in a number of regions,”
  • “While final root cause analysis is in progress, this issue appears to be due to a time calculation that was incorrect for the leap year.”
  • Microsoft Azure Service Dashboard
  • The outage also effected the UK Government’s ‘G-Cloud’ CloudStore
  • TechWeek Europe Coverage
  • Slashdot Coverage – Outage – Root Cause
  • PCWorld – Previous Microsoft problems with Leap Years

Wikileaks releases the data stolen in the StratFor compromise

Feedback:

Q: Robert Bishop Writes: Can I Secure my network with multiple NAT routers to isolate a system?

War Story:

This is a war story with a difference, as it didn’t involve some crazy user doing some bat shit crazy thing with their computer. It was simply a call to one of the tech support agents where the user wanted to know the following:

“What is the exact chemical composition of the battery in the Thinkpad 760 XD?”
“What are the recommended disposal procedures for said battery?”
“Can you tell me what would happen to the battery if it ruptured in a vacuum environment?”
“If the battery were to overheat, how volatile would the liquid effluent be?”

I doubt the user could have even gotten the questions out and taken a breath before the agent put them on hold and ran for help. The agent walked over to the second level support area rather than call as per procedure. After a good five minutes of talking, nobody could really answer the questions and worse, we couldn’t figure out what part of the company might actually have those answers.

As with all good tech support strategies we decided a two pronged approach – the agent would get back on with the user and stall for time while the rest of us would frantically hunt down any possible source of information that could help. We told the agent to ask why the user needed such detailed information and if it was a weak answer to push for a callback to buy even more time.

Some twenty minutes later the agent came back over to us with some interesting details on what was going on. It was all a misunderstanding. The user was supposed to call some private support number at IBM and not the public number. Our enterprising young agent did pull a fast one and offer to transfer the user to the number directly. The user provided the number and the agent promptly connected the call, then hit mute and stayed on the line. An American accent answered, the user responded and provided an account code upon request.

The tech on the private number acknowledged that the user was calling from NASA – Blackhawk Technologies Subsidiary. Apparently the shuttle program had 4 of those laptops on each mission – 1 primary and 3 redundant backups just in case. Suddenly the tricky questions all made sense. And eavesdropping can kill curiosity can never be a bad thing, right?

Round Up:

The post NASA Hacked 5,400 Times? | TechSNAP 47 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

]]> Space Station and Lizards | SciByte 19 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/13418/space-station-and-lizards-scibyte-19/ Tue, 01 Nov 2011 21:35:47 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=13418 We take a look at the Space Station resupply mission, dinosaurs, Mars, Snake Oil, Asteroids, cryptography, and take another peek at what’s up in the sky.

The post Space Station and Lizards | SciByte 19 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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Hello everyone and welcome back to SciByte!

We take a look at the Space Station resupply mission, dinosaurs, Mars, Snake Oil, Asteroids, cryptography, and take another peek at what’s up in the sky this week.

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Show Notes:

Audible.com:

The Master Swtich: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

Space Station Re-Supply Mission

— NEWS BYTE —

Migrating Dinosaurs

  • The low down
  • studying chemical variations in the teeth of the chewing-challenged sauropod
  • When animals drink water, the oxygen in that water gets incorporated into the blood stream and eventually into tooth enamel
  • water from a mountain tarn and water from a lowland swamp will have different amounts of a particular form, or isotope, of oxygen that has two extra neutrons in its nucleus
  • Significance
  • oxygen isotopes extracted from the tooth enamel of eight fossils remains from the western United States, and then compared the enamel isotope levels to those of minerals found in nearby sediments
  • isotopic variation suggests, that they were moving around
  • Multimedia
  • By comparing the levels of a chemical tracer found in the enamel of sauropod teeth
  • Social Media
  • Twitter account for Colorado College @ColoradoCollege
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Giant dinosaurs may have migrated
Mars feels the Suns Wrath

Snake Oil
  • The low down
  • snakes naturally enlarge their own hearts by some 40 percent in two to three days after eating one of their huge but rare meals
  • A mix of compounds called fatty acids identified in pythons can spur an exercise-like boost in the size of mouse hearts
  • three fatty acids identified in the blood of Burmese pythons boosted the mass of a heart chamber in lab mice by 10 percent in just a week
  • Significance
  • Enlarging heart tissue can be a danger sign for humans
  • the growth seen in the mice looks more like an athlete’s healthful heart growth than a heart disease patient’s worrisome one
  • These ubiquitous compounds perform a variety of functions in reptiles and humans alike. Just the right mix of three of them — myristic, palmitic and palmitoleic acid — turns out to trigger a quick upsizing in heart muscle cells
  • many questions remain about how the snakes’ fatty acids actually work to trigger heart muscle cells to bulge
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Python’s heart-restoring elixir works in mice
Story of a Molten Asteroid

  • The low down
  • Lutetia and its asteroid cousins are thought to be relics from the early solar system
  • rocky fossils that have recorded a history of the solar system’s early days in their pits and fractures
  • In July 2010, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft flew within 3,200 kilometers of Lutetia, peered at the asteroid and attempted to read its stony story.
  • Images from the OSIRIS camera reveal that parts of Lutetia’s surface are around 3.6 billion years old. Other parts are young by astronomical standards, at 50–80 million years old.
  • Astronomers estimate the age of airless planets, moons, and asteroids by counting craters.
  • Lutetia’s weak gravity tugged on Rosetta. The slight change in Rosetta’s path was reflected in radio signals received back at Earth
  • Significance
  • Scientists now think it is a leftover planetary seed, booted into the main belt
  • Lutetia turns out to have one of the highest densities of any known asteroid: 3400 kg per cubic metre.
  • The density implies that Lutetia contains significant quantities of iron, but not necessarily in a fully formed core.
  • The only explanation appears to be that Lutetia was subjected to some internal heating early in its history but did not melt completely and so did not end up with a well-defined iron core.
  • Multimedia
  • ESA Rosetta Images of Lutetia
  • ESA Rosetta Images of Lutetia
  • Social Media
  • Twitter account for ESA Science Team @esascience
  • Twitter Results for [#Lutetia](https://twitter.com/#%21/search?q=%23Lutetia)
  • Further Reading / In the News
  • Chronicles of Lutetia
  • Asteroid Lutetia: postcard from the past @ ESA
Cracking a 250 year old puzzle

SCIENCE CALENDER

Looking back this week
  • Nov 06, 1572 – 439 years ago : Tycho’s Supernova – A supernova was first noted in the W-shaped constellation of Cassiopeia but was seen by many observers throughout Europe and in the Far East. 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 and change colour, from bright white to yellow and orange to faint reddish light. It was visible to the naked eye for about 16 months
  • Nov 08, 1895 – 116 years ago : X-rays – Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays during an experiment at Würzburg University
  • Nov 07, 1908 – 103 years ago : Single atom – Prof. Ernest Rutherford announced in London that he had isolated a single atom of matter
  • Nov 07, 1918 – 93 years ago : Goddard rocket – Goddard demonstrated a tube-launched solid propellant rocket, using a music stand as his launching platform,. Goddard began work for the Army in 1917 to design rockets to aid in the war effort.
  • Nov 04–05, 1922 – 89 years ago : Tutankhamen’s tomb – The entrance to King Tutankhamen’s tomb was discovered in Egypt in the Valley of the Kings where the English archaeologist Howard Carter had been making extended excavations. One of Carter’s labourers stumbled upon a stone step, the first step in a sunken stairway that ran down into the rock. Howard Carter excavated a further 11 steps and exposed a large part of a plastered and sealed doorway to Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor, Egypt. The tomb was the most complete ancient Egyptian royal tomb ever found.
  • Nov 07, 1940 – 71 years ago : Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse – at approximately 11:00 am, the first Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge collapsed due to wind-induced vibrations. Situated on the Tacoma Narrows in Puget Sound, near the city of Tacoma, Washington, the bridge had only been open for traffic a few months. Video of Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse “Gallopin’ Gertie”
  • Nov 02, 1947 – 64 years ago : Spruce Goose – Howard Hughes piloted his huge wooden airplane, known as the Spruce Goose on its only flight, which lasted about a minute over Long Beach Harbor in California. It was the first test of a U.S. plane with eight engines. Wing span was 319 feet, 11 inches. Originally conceived by Henry J. Kaiser, a steelmaker and builder of Liberty ships, the aircraft was designed and constructed by Hughes and his staff. The original proposal for the enormous, 400,000-pound wooden flying boat, with its spectacular 320-foot wingspan, came from the U.S. government in 1942. The entire airframe and surface structures are composed of laminated wood (primarily birch, not spruce).
  • Nov 03, 1957 – 54 years ago : Laika – Sputnik 2 was launched, with the first live animal sent into space – a Siberian husky dog, Laika (“barker” in Russian). By design, the craft which was built in only 4 weeks. Biological data, the first data of its kind, was transmitted back to Earth while she lived. The data showed scientists how Laika was adapting to space – information important to the imminent planned manned missions. The 508-kg satellite remained in orbit 162 days. The true cause and time of Laika’s death was not made public until 2002, Laika likely died within hours after launch from overheating.
  • Nov 05, 1963 – 48 years ago : Vikings in America – Archaeologists found Viking ruins in Newfoundland predating Columbus by 500 years. Leif Ericson, Icelandic explorer, second son of Eric the Red, is believed by most historians to have been the first European to reach the North American mainland.
Looking up this week

  • You might have seen …

  • A small comet dove into the sun during the late hours of Oct. 30th. Watch the movie to see what SOHO saw

  • Keep an eye out for …

  • Wednesday, Nov. 2 : 1st Quarter Moon

  • Thursday, Nov. 3 : Look lower left of the Moon this evening, by two or three fist-widths at arm’s length, for Fomalhaut, the Autumn Star.

  • Friday, Nov. 4 : Jupiter’s Great Red Spot should be crossing the planet’s central meridian.

  • Sat November 5, 2011 : The planet Saturn is quite low in the east at first light. It looks like a golden star, with the true star Spica to its lower right. Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is visible through modest telescopes as a tiny “star” quite near Saturn.

  • Mars, the red planet, is a morning object among the stars of Leo during November

  • In the Southern Hemisphere : Mercury and Venus get together in the evening sky

  • Early November : The Taurids meteor shower is active in early November and although rates are not high with no well-defined peak, around five meteors per hour can be expected with hopefully some unusually bright and slow moving events. Although Eastern Europe and the Middle East are most favoured, it is essential that observers head out as soon as the Sun is a few degrees below the horizon also be aware you will

  • Saturday, Nov. 5 : Daylight-saving time ends (for most of North America) at 2 a.m. Sunday morning. Clocks “fall back” an hour.

  • More on whats in the sky this week

  • Sky&Telescope

  • AstronomyNow

  • SpaceWeather.com

  • HeavensAbove

  • StarDate.org

The post Space Station and Lizards | SciByte 19 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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