Video: NASA's riskiest Mars mission yet

Rover set to land on the surface of Mars late Sunday night and embark on ambitious exploration.

Scientists find more evidence for ancient on Mars

Scientists find more evidence for ancient on Mars.

ScienceDaily — Debate over the origin of large-scale polygons (hundreds of meters to kilometers in diameter) on Mars remains active even after several decades of detailed observations. Similarity in geometric patterns on Mars and Earth has long captured the imagination. In this new article from GSA Today, geologists at The University of Texas at Austin examine these large-scale polygons and compare them to similar features on Earth's seafloor, which they believe may have formed via similar processes.


Understanding these processes may in turn fuel support for the idea of ancient oceans on Mars.

Through examination of THEMIS, MOLA, Viking, and Mariner data and images, planetary scientists have found that areas on the northern plains of Mars are divided into large polygon-shaped portions and that sets of these polygons span extensive areas of the Martian surface. Smaller polygon-shaped bodies are found elsewhere on Mars, but these are best explained by thermal contraction processes similar to those in terrestrial permafrost environments and not likely to form larger polygons.

In the August 2012 issue of GSA Today, Lorena Moscardelli and her colleagues from The University of Texas at Austin present a detailed comparison of the geometric features of these large Martian polygons and similar features found in deep-sea sediments here on Earth. Moscardelli and colleagues note striking similarities.

Should you pay $20 for the new OS X Mountain Lion operating system? (video)

 Should you pay $20 for the new OS X Mountain Lion operating system? (video)

Scientists gain improved understanding of the mechanisms for ocean storage

Scientists gain improved understanding of the mechanisms for ocean carbon storage.

A team of British and Australian scientists has discovered an important method of how carbon is drawn down from the surface of the Southern Ocean to the deep waters beneath. The Southern Ocean is an important carbon sink in the world – around 40% of the annual global CO2 emissions absorbed by the world's oceans enter through this region.

Reporting this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and Australia's national research agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), reveal that rather than carbon being absorbed uniformly into the deep ocean in vast areas, it is drawn down and locked away from the atmosphere by plunging currents a thousand kilometres wide.

Winds, currents and massive whirlpools that carry warm and cold water around the ocean – known as eddies – create localised pathways or funnels for carbon to be stored.

Lead author, Dr Jean-Baptiste Sallée from British Antarctic Survey says, "The Southern Ocean is a large window by which the atmosphere connects to the interior of the ocean below. Until now we didn't know exactly the physical processes of how carbon ends up being stored deep in the ocean. It's the combination of winds, currents and eddies that create these carbon-capturing pathways drawing waters down into the deep ocean from the ocean surface.

Is barefoot running safer?

There are many factors to consider when switching to barefoot running.

ScienceDaily — Ethiopian runner Abebe Bikila made history when he earned a gold medal at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. His speed and agility won him the gold, but it was barefoot running that made him a legend.

When the shoes Bikila was given for the race didn't fit comfortably, he ditched them for his bare feet. After all, that's the way he had trained for the Olympics in his homeland.

Racing shoeless led to success for Bikila, and now, more than 50 years later, runners are continuing to take barefoot strides. Several Olympic runners have followed Bikila and nationally the trend has exploded over the past decade. There's even a national association dedicated to barefoot running. However, scientists are stuck on whether it either prevents or increases injuries.

What she found was striking.

Most people said they turned to barefoot running in the hopes of improving performance and reducing injuries. Ironically, those who said they never tried it avoided it for fear it would cause injuries and slow their times.

However, research shows that there are risks to running no matter what someone puts on his or her feet.

Barefoot runners tend to land on their mid or forefoot as opposed to the heel, which good athletic shoes try to cushion. Keep on reading...

Water strider-like robot (video)

Robotic insect strides on water...

This incredible little robot is the creation of Jie Zhao and his colleagues at Harbin Institute of Technology in China. The water strider-like robot is made with water-repellent nickel. This allows it to “float” on top of the water and then with its robotic legs, it is able to propel itself into the air and leap forward. No, it’s not the fastest thing in the world, but it’s still pretty amazing to see.

Where is the seat of meta-consciousness in the brain?

 Credit: MPI of Psychiatry



Studies of lucid dreaming help the pinpoint the neural basis of human consciousness.

Studies of lucid dreamers visualize which centers of the brain become active when we become aware of ourselves.

Which areas of the brain help us to perceive our world in a self-reflective manner is difficult to measure. During wakefulness, we are always conscious of ourselves. In sleep, however, we are not. But there are people, known as lucid dreamers, who can become aware of dreaming during sleep. Studies employing magnetic resonance tomography (MRT) have now been able to demonstrate that a specific cortical network consisting of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the frontopolar regions and the precuneus is activated when this lucid consciousness is attained. All of these regions are associated with self-reflective functions. This research into lucid dreaming gives the authors of the latest study insight into the neural basis of human consciousness.

The human capacity of self-perception, self-reflection and consciousness development are among the unsolved mysteries of neuroscience. Despite modern imaging techniques, it is still impossible to fully visualise what goes on in the brain when people move to consciousness from an unconscious state. The problem lies in the fact that it is difficult to watch our brain during this transitional change. Although this process is the same, every time a person awakens from sleep, the basic activity of our brain is usually greatly reduced during deep sleep. This makes it impossible to clearly delineate the specific brain activity underlying the regained self-perception and consciousness during the transition to wakefulness from the global changes in brain activity that takes place at the same time.

Friday Fun Video: NASA Water Balloons in Zero G (High Quality)

NASA Water Balloons in Zero G (High Quality)

Crusader treasure found at castle of Arsur

Real life buried treasure found at the Crusader castle of Arsur.

Via PHYSORG:

A team of researchers from Tel Aviv University has uncovered a hoard of real-life buried treasure at the Crusader castle of Arsur (also known as Apollonia), a stronghold located between the ancient ports of Jaffa and Caesarea, in use from 1241 to its destruction in 1265. The hoard, comprised of 108 gold coins, mostly dinars dated to the Fatimid Period (ca. 900 to 1100 AD), was discovered in a pot by a university student. The coins bear the names of sultans and blessings, and usually include a date and a mint name that indicates where a coin was struck.

This fascinating find is the first of its kind, says Prof. Oren Tal, director of the excavation and Chairman of TAU's Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures. "The scientific value is unprecedented. This is the first hoard of gold coins that we have in Israel that we can date to the Crusader period." Prof. Tal believes that the coins provide an important clue to how large-scale economic transactions were made in the Crusader period. "They were not afraid to use older coins in order to complete large transactions and run large-scale businesses," he said, indicating that this "pot of gold" may be one of a group hidden in the castle, remnants of Arsur's role as a business center where industrial and agricultural goods were traded. Read more here...

Video: New video shows killer whale attacking SeaWorld trainer

New video shows killer whale attacking SeaWorld trainer

Two unknown packs of Mexican wolves discovered

Two unknown packs of Mexican wolves discovered.

Instead of a growing population, the number of wild Mexican wolves in Arizona and New Mexico has hung between about 40-60 animals for years now. On top of that the Arizona  government for three years now has refused to release any of captive Mexican wolves that have been held in reserve.

Now, however, two previously unknown male/female pairs of wild Mexican wolves have been discovered.  Technically these might be considered to be packs because they will more than likely produce pups next spring. This last spring  18 pups were born.  However, the previous year the pup number was higher than that and yet half of them died or were killed before the end of their first year.

The Mexican wolf was extinct in the wild.  That last handful in the wild were captured to put them in a number of breeding facilities to build up a population for re-release in the wild. In the facilities great care is taken to conserve what little genetic diversity exists in the captive population.

Bobbing waves may have dominated early universe

Image credit: Amin, et al. ©2012 American Physical Society

Bobbing waves may have dominated early universe.

(Phys.org) -- Localized waves that bob up and down without dissipating their energy, called “oscillons,” may have dominated the early universe shortly after inflation. A collaboration of physicists from MIT, Yale University, and Stanford University has discovered that copious amounts of oscillons arise in simulations based on several realistic inflationary models and could have caused novel gravitational effects in the early universe, although it is unclear whether the effects could be directly observed today.

The physicists have published their paper on the possibility of oscillons existing after inflation in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters. As the scientists explain in their paper, oscillons are massive, long-lived excitations of a scalar field that are localized, i.e., they do not dissipate like ripples produced by dropping a pebble in a calm pond. Instead, an oscillon switches between being a hill and a crater, alternately rising above and sinking below the spatially uniform state of the field. In previous experiments, scientists have created oscillons by vertically vibrating a plate with a sufficiently thick layer of granular particles. As long as they’re not disturbed, oscillons will continue to move up and down for hundreds of thousands of oscillations.

Testing is underway for Orion capsule to send crews to red planet

Via FOX News:

It has been more than 40 years since the famed Apollo missions, when humans stepped into deep space. And at last, NASA intends to get back to its exploration roots.

"This is the first time we've had a vehicle that will truly send us where we've always dreamed of going," NASA's Josh Byerly told Fox News.

The Orion capsule is a part of what NASA had planned as the sprawling and ambitious Constellation project that would offer a replacement for the space shuttle -- and a means to ferry humans into outer space and back to the moon. In under 10 years, it will ride a rocket and take astronauts to places like Mars, NASA hopes.

But it must first endure rigorous testing over the Arizona desert.

Astronomy Pic of the Day: A hole in Mars

A Hole in Mars
Image Credit: NASA, JPL, U. Arizona

Explanation: What created this unusual hole in Mars? The hole was discovered by chance on images of the dusty slopes of Mars' Pavonis Mons volcano taken by the HiRISE instrument aboard the robotic Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter currently circling Mars. The hole appears to be an opening to an underground cavern, partly illuminated on the image right. Analysis of this and follow-up images revealed the opening to be about 35 meters across, while the interior shadow angle indicates that the underlying cavern is roughly 20 meters deep.

Video of Thursday's massive solar flare

M7.7 Solar Flare and CME (7/19/2012)


Via MSNBC:

A gigantic sunspot unleashed an intense solar flare early Thursday, though the solar storm shouldn't pose any serious problems to us here on Earth, scientists say.

The flare erupted from a sunspot known as AR 1520 at 1:13 a.m. ET Thursday and peaked about 45 minutes later. The outburst qualifies as an M7.7-class solar flare, meaning it's a bit weaker than the sun's most powerful blast, X-class flares.

Women now have higher IQ than men?

Expert on intelligence testing claims women are now smarter than men...

(Medical Xpress) -- Psychologist James Flynn, who resides in New Zealand and is considered one of the foremost experts on intelligence testing, has aroused people’s attention around the world by proclaiming that women are now smarter than men, at least according to a standardized IQ test. He’s been making the rounds, speaking to various reporters in hopes of spurring sales of a new book he’s written.

Flynn, who has been researching IQ level data covering the past century, says that most everyone in developed countries has been getting smarter over the years, about three points more on average; which is significant in itself of course. He points out that when IQ tests first came on the scene, women tended to score well below men, oftentimes as much as five points lower. Since that time however, women have been growing smarter at a faster rate than men and now average a point higher. He bases his assertions on the Raven's Progressive Matrices IQ test, which has been given to subjects ranging from ten years of age to thirty, though in this recent go round he’s restricted his research to just those fifteen to eighteen years old, presumably the age at which full intelligence has developed, but prior to being degraded by environmental factors.

Timelapse video of Earth and space from the International Space Station (video)

Timelapse video of Earth and space from the International Space Station (video)

Video: Thousands of tiny purple crabs wash ashore in Hawaii

Old-timers say they have never seen anything like it.
Hawaii News Now - KGMB and KHNL

What are the best candidates for potentially habitable exoplanets?

Five known potential habitable worlds...

(Phys.org) -- New data suggest the confirmation of the exoplanet Gliese 581g and the best candidate so far of a potential habitable exoplanet. The nearby star Gliese 581 is well known for having four planets with the outermost planet, Gliese 581d, already suspected habitable. This will be the first time evidence for any two potential habitable exoplanets orbiting the same star. Gliese 581g will be included, together with Gliese 667Cc, Kepler-22b, HD85512, and Gliese 581d, in the Habitable Exoplanets Catalog of the PHL @ UPR Arecibo as the best five objects of interest for Earth-like exoplanets.

Doubts about the existence of Gliese 581g appeared only two weeks after its announcement on September 29, 2010 by astronomers of the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey. Scientists from the HARPS Team from the Geneva Observatory, which discovered all the previously known four planets around Gliese 581, were not able to detect Gliese 581g out of their own data, which included additional observations. Further analysis by others scientists also questioned the existence of Gliese 581g in the last two years.

Now the original discoverers of Gliese 581g, led by Steven S. Vogt of UC Santa Cruz, present a new analysis with an extended dataset from the HARPS instrument that shows more promising evidence for its existence. The new analysis strength their original assumption that all the planets around Gliese 581 are in circular and not elliptical orbits as currently believed. It is under this likely assumption that the Gliese 581g signal appears in the new data.

Read more here...

Glacier twice the size of Manhattan snaps off Greenland ice sheet (video)

Glacier twice the size of Manhattan snaps off Greenland ice sheet (video)

Astronomers astounded by early spiral galaxy

Spiral galaxies weren't supposed to exist only three billion years after the Big Bang.

(Phys.org) -- Astronomers have witnessed for the first time a spiral galaxy in the early universe, billions of years before many other spiral galaxies formed. In findings reported July 19 in the journal Nature, the astronomers said they discovered it while using the Hubble Space Telescope to take pictures of about 300 very distant galaxies in the early universe and to study their properties. This distant spiral galaxy is being observed as it existed roughly three billion years after the Big Bang, and light from this part of the universe has been traveling to Earth for about 10.7 billion years.

"As you go back in time to the early universe, galaxies look really strange, clumpy and irregular, not symmetric," said Alice Shapley, a UCLA associate professor of physics and astronomy, and co-author of the study. "The vast majority of old galaxies look like train wrecks. Our first thought was, why is this one so different, and so beautiful?" Galaxies in today's universe divide into various types, including spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way, which are rotating disks of stars and gas in which new stars form, and elliptical galaxies, which include older, redder stars moving in random directions. The mix of galaxy structures in the early universe is quite different, with a much greater diversity and larger fraction of irregular galaxies, Shapley said. "The fact that this galaxy exists is astounding," said David Law, lead author of the study and Dunlap Institute postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto's Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics. "Current wisdom holds that such 'grand-design' spiral galaxies simply didn't exist at such an early time in the history of the universe." A 'grand design' galaxy has prominent, well-formed spiral arms. Read more here...

Video: Beaver attacks 2 girls in Virginia

Beavers are dangerous?

Dolphins use nonlinear math?

Dolphins have a facility absent in man-made sonar.

Via (PHYSORG):

Research from the University of Southampton, which examines how dolphins might process their sonar signals, could provide a new system for man-made sonar to detect targets, such as sea mines, in bubbly water.

When hunting prey, dolphins have been observed to blow 'bubble nets' around schools of fish, which force the fish to cluster together, making them easier for the dolphins to pick off. However, such bubble nets would confound the best man-made sonar because the strong scattering by the bubbles generates 'clutter' in the sonar image, which cannot be distinguished from the true target.

Taking a dolphin's sonar and characterising it from an engineering perspective, it is not superior to the best man-made sonar. Therefore, in blowing bubble nets, dolphins are either 'blinding' their echolocation sense when hunting or they have a facility absent in man-made sonar.

The study by Professor Tim Leighton, from the University's Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR), and colleagues examined whether there is a way by which dolphins might process their sonar signals to distinguish between targets and clutter in bubbly water.

In the study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, Professor Leighton along with Professor Paul White and student Gim Hwa Chua used echolocation pulses of a type that dolphins emit, but processed them using nonlinear mathematics instead of the standard way of processing sonar returns. This Biased Pulse Summation Sonar (BiaPSS) reduced the effect of clutter by relying on the variation in click amplitude, such as that which occurs when a dolphin emits a sequence of clicks. Read more here...

Thousands of engineers still unemployed after Obama outsources NASA

How did we go from being 1st in space exploration to 3rd? Former President Bush made the decision to retire the space shuttle program. He did fund an alternative, but not at an effective level. President Obama doubled-down and completely cancelled the replacement. Now we are forced to hitchhike with the Russians. How embarrassing... 

Hubble snaps new image of the Needle Galaxy

Hubble snaps new image of the Needle Galaxy.

(Phys.org) -- This image snapped by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveals an exquisitely detailed view of part of the disc of the spiral galaxy NGC 4565. This bright galaxy is one of the most famous examples of an edge-on spiral galaxy, oriented perpendicularly to our line of sight so that we see right into its luminous disc. NGC 4565 has been nicknamed the Needle Galaxy because, when seen in full, it appears as a very narrow streak of light on the sky.

Viral Video: Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror

Via YouTube:

Team members at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory share the challenges of the Curiosity Mars rover's final minutes to landing on the surface of Mars.

Scientists develop million-year data storage system

By using two thin disks of industrial sapphire, molecularly fused, and a thin layer of inscribed platinum, scientists have made a date disc that can last one million years.

(Phys.org) -- A sapphire hard disk can last one million years and resolve a problem worrying archaeologists. Thursday, Patrick Charton of the French nuclear waste management agency ANDRA, presented a way out of data storage problems, an information-engraved sapphire disk using platinum. The disk is being called the ultimate, if not ultimately unaffordable, HDD. The disk was announced at this week’s Euroscience Open Forum, a pan-European event drawing researchers, as a way to provide information for future archaeologists.

The solution is in the form of two thin disks of industrial sapphire, molecularly fused, with a thin layer of inscribed platinum. The disks were immersed in acid to test their durability and to simulate aging. With the sapphire disk, up to 40,000 miniaturized pages of text or images etched can be inscribed in the platinum. The information would be read with microscope. A key application would be as a solution for how future societies will be able to identify areas of buried nuclear waste.

Nuclear reactors produce radioactive waste that needs to be safely stored for up to one million years. Once a disposal method is determined, future societies will need to know where the waste is buried. According to Science magazine. Finland, France, and Sweden are the furthest advanced in the process of finding a geologically suitable site. While designers of such repositories are confident the waste can be buried safely, the fear is that future archaeologists may dig in t he wrong places. Markers would be a way to allow them to know the sites where they should not dig.

With a sapphire disk, the warning message could be encoded into varied forms of written human communication, including words, pictograms, and diagrams, and in turn linguists and artists are involved in the project. The researchers say thus far they have no idea what language to use.

Playing Pong using just your eyes (video)

Playing Pong using just your eyes


Via YouTube:

Millions of people suffering from Multiple Scleorosis, Parkinson's, muscular dystrophy, spinal cord injuries or amputees could soon interact with their computers and surroundings using just their eyes thanks to a new device that costs just £43.

Comprised of off-the-shelf materials, the new device, can work out exactly where a person is looking by tracking their eye movements, allowing them to control a cursor on a screen just like a normal computer mouse.

The researchers demonstrated the device by getting students to play the computer game Pong using just their eyes. ia YouTube:

Millions of people suffering from Multiple Scleorosis, Parkinson's, muscular dystrophy, spinal cord injuries or amputees could soon interact with their computers and surroundings using just their eyes thanks to a new device that costs just £43.

Comprised of off-the-shelf materials, the new device, can work out exactly where a person is looking by tracking their eye movements, allowing them to control a cursor on a screen just like a normal computer mouse.

The researchers demonstrated the device by getting students to play the computer game Pong using just their eyes.

Wolverines use natural refrigeration to store food as a survival trait

Wolverines use natural refrigeration to store food as a survival trait.

ScienceDaily  — Wolverines live in harsh conditions; they range over large areas of cold mountainous low-productivity habitat with persistent snow. The paper suggests wolverines take advantage of the crevices and boulders of the mountainous terrain, as well as the snow cover to cache and "refrigerate" food sources such as elk, caribou, moose and mountain goat carrion, ground squirrels and other food collected during more plentiful times of year.

These cold, structured chambers provide protection of the food supply from scavengers, insects and bacteria. In addition, the refrigerated caches increase the predictability of available food resources, reduce the energy spent by females searching for food while in lactation phase, and decrease the time mothers spend away from cubs.

The paper appears in the current edition of the Journal of Mammalogy and was co-authored by Robert M. Inman of WCS, Audrey J. Magoun of Wildlife Research and Management, Jens Persson of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, and Jenny Mattisson of the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research.

"People don't normally think of insects and microbes as being in competition for food with wolverines," said lead author Robert Inman of the Wildlife Conservation Society's North America Program. "But in fact, bacteria will devour an unprotected food source if that source is available."

Cool Video: Speedo Uses ANSYS to Develop Fastskin Racing System

Cool Video: Speedo Uses ANSYS to Develop Fastskin Racing System 

New Record: 500 terawatt laser shot

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility succeeds in a 500 terawatt laser shot.

(Phys.org) -- Fifteen years of work by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (NIF) team paid off on July 5 with a historic record-breaking laser shot. The NIF laser system of 192 beams delivered more than 500 trillion watts (terawatts or TW) of peak power and 1.85 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to its target. Five hundred terawatts is 1,000 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time, and 1.85 megajoules of energy is about 100 times what any other laser regularly produces today.

The shot validated NIF's most challenging laser performance specifications set in the late 1990s when scientists were planning the world's most energetic laser facility. Combining extreme levels of energy and peak power on a target in the NIF is a critical requirement for achieving one of physics' grand challenges -- igniting hydrogen fusion fuel in the laboratory and producing more energy than that supplied to the target.

In the historic test, NIF's 192 lasers fired within a few trillionths of a second of each other onto a 2-millimeter-diameter target. The total energy matched the amount requested by shot managers to within better than 1 percent. Additionally, the beam-to-beam uniformity was within 1 percent, making NIF not only the highest energy laser of its kind but the most precise and reproducible. "NIF is becoming everything scientists planned when it was conceived over two decades ago," NIF Director Edward Moses said. "It is fully operational, and scientists are taking important steps toward achieving ignition and providing experimental access to user communities for national security, basic science and the quest for clean fusion energy."

Video: 83 percent of doctors thinking about quitting?

Survey shows deep discontent after health care law

Scientists find magnetic sensing cells in Rainbow Trout

Scientists are a step closer to learning how animals navigate by the Earth's magnetic system.

(Phys.org) -- For nearly half a century scientists have known that some animals are able to navigate using the earth’s magnetic field and for nearly thirty years, it’s been assumed that at least some of those animals that are able to “feel” the weak magnetic field are able to do so because of small amounts of iron material in their tissue. Now, a team of researchers led by Michael Winklhofera of Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, have discovered a way to find individual cells that respond to a magnetic field in one species of migrating fish. As they describe in their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, all it took was the introduction of a rotating artificial magnetic field.

Finding the parts of the body that are able to sense a magnetic field, called magnetoreception, has been difficult because of the nature of magnetism. Like sound or light, it strikes the entire body, but unlike the other two stimuli, it can also penetrate the skin and keep on going, meaning receptors could reside virtually anywhere in an organism. Logically though, such receptors would be more likely to reside in the head somewhere, in close proximity to the brain. In migrating fish, the suspicion has been that a good place for such cells would be inside the nose, as fish seem to follow it as they swim.

To find out if this is the case with rainbow trout, the team took a sample of olfactory epithelium from the snout of one such specimen and placed it inside a ring of rotating magnets. Then they looked at the specimen under a microscope and found individual cells that spun around on their axis following the artificially induced magnetic field. Upon closer inspection of the cells, the team found iron-rich crystals, most likely single-domain magnetite sitting at just one end of the cell, very near the membrane; which makes sense. To cause a spin, the magnetite would need to be at the tip of a cell just as it is on the tip of a needle in a compass. Only a few of the cells were found, leading the researchers to estimate that the tissue likely holds just one such cell out of ten thousand capable of responding to a magnetic field.

Of course the finding doesn’t actually prove that the cells are responsible for the fish’s ability to navigate long distances, but it does seem likely to be the case. The trick now will be to show how cells that move in response to a magnetic field are able to convey a message to the brain. Keep on reading...

Video: Strange Vortex Discovered on Titan

  ................................................ Via Space.com:

A NASA spacecraft has spied a vortex swirling in the atmosphere high above the south pole of the Saturn moon Titan, hinting that winter may be coming to the huge body's southern reaches. NASA's Cassini probe photographed the polar vortex — or mass of swirling gas — during a flyby of Titan on June 27. The vortex appears to complete one full rotation in nine hours, while it takes Titan about 16 days to spin once around its axis.

Science Video: Journey to the Edge of the Universe [Full - HD 1080p]

Journey to the Edge of the Universe [Full - HD 1080p] 

Scientists create an “MRI” of the Sun’s interior plasma motions

Credit: NASA

Scientists create an “MRI” of the Sun’s interior plasma motions.

ScienceDaily  — A team of scientists has created an “MRI” of the Sun’s interior plasma motions, shedding light on how it transfers heat from its deep interior to its surface. The result, which appears in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, upends our understanding of how heat is transported outwards by the Sun and challenges existing explanations of the formation of sunspots and magnetic field generation.

The work was conducted by researchers from NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and its Department of Physics, Princeton University, the Max Planck Institute, and NASA.

The Sun’s heat, generated by nuclear fusion in its core, is transported to the surface by convection in the outer third. However, our understanding of this process is largely theoretical—the Sun is opaque, so convection cannot be directly observed. As a result, theories largely rest on what we know about fluid flow and then applying them to the Sun, which is primarily composed of hydrogen, helium, and plasma.

Developing a more precise grasp of convection is vital to comprehending a range of phenomena, including the formation of sunspots, which have a lower temperature than the rest of the Sun’s surface, and the Sun’s magnetic field, which is created by its interior plasma motions. Keep on reading...

Video: Hunting UFOs

It's more than just fruits and nuts in the Valley--- many people say they've spotted UFOs.

NASA's 'new arsenic form of life' claim was false?

According to two new papers, the sample NASA used was contaminated...

Two new scientific papers have disproved a controversial claim made by NASA-funded scientists in 2010 that a new form of bacterial life had been discovered that could thrive on arsenic.

"Contrary to an original report, the new research clearly shows that the bacterium, GFAJ-1, cannot substitute arsenic for phosphorus to survive," said a statement by the US journal Science, a prestigious, peer-reviewed magazine.

Science published Sunday the much-hyped initial study in December 2010, with lead researcher Felisa Wolfe-Simon, then a fellow in NASA's astrobiology program, announcing that a new form of life had been scooped from a California lake.[...]

While Wolfe-Simon and colleagues acknowledged that there were very low levels of phosphate within their study samples, they concluded that this was a level of contamination that was insufficient to permit GFAJ to grow.

Two separate Science articles "now reveal that, in fact, her medium did contain enough phosphate contamination to support GFAJ-1's growth," said a statement by the magazine issued late Sunday.

U.S. Army's Robotics Rodeo (video)

Dust cloud around star TYC 8241 2652 disappears

Credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA artwork by Lynette Cook



Astronomers are baffled...

ScienceDaily  — Astronomers report a baffling discovery never seen before: An extraordinary amount of dust around a nearby star has mysteriously disappeared.

"It's like the classic magician's trick -- now you see it, now you don't," said Carl Melis, a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Diego and lead author of the research. "Only in this case, we're talking about enough dust to fill an inner solar system, and it really is gone!"

"It's as if the rings around Saturn had disappeared," said co-author Benjamin Zuckerman, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy. "This is even more shocking because the dusty disc of rocky debris was bigger and much more massive than Saturn's rings. The disc around this star, if it were in our solar system, would have extended from the sun halfway out to Earth, near the orbit of Mercury."

The research on this cosmic vanishing act, which occurred around a star some 450 light years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Centaurus, appears July 5 in the journal Nature.[...]

The dust had been present around the star since at least 1983 (no one had observed the star in the infrared before then), and it continued to glow brightly in the infrared for 25 years. In 2009, it started to dim. By 2010, the dust emission was gone; the astronomers observed the star twice that year from the Gemini Observatory in Chile, six months apart. An infrared image obtained by the Gemini telescope as recently as May 1 of this year confirmed that the warm dust has now been gone for two-and-a-half years.

Video: NASA rover 'Curiosity' due to land on Mars next month

Mars is about t get a new rover.

Scientists study how zebrafish repair spinal cord damage

How do zebrafish repair spinal cord damage?

Via MedicalXpress:

Scientists in Australia are studying the mechanisms of spinal cord repair in zebrafish, which unlike humans and other mammals can regenerate their spinal cord following injury. Their findings suggest a family of molecules called fibroblast growth factors could be a therapeutic target for encouraging nerve regeneration.

Yona Goldshmit, Ph.D., is a former physical therapist who worked in rehabilitation centers with spinal cord injury patients for many years before deciding to switch her focus to the underlying science.

"After a few years in the clinic, I realized that we don't really know what's going on," she said.

Now a scientist working with Peter Currie, Ph.D., at Monash University in Australia, Dr. Goldshmit is studying the mechanisms of spinal cord repair in zebrafish, which, unlike humans and other mammals, can regenerate their spinal cord following injury. On June 23 at the 2012 International Zebrafish Development and Genetics Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, she described a protein that may be a key difference between regeneration in fish and mammals.

One of the major barriers to spinal regeneration in mammals is a natural protective mechanism, which incongruously results in an unfortunate side effect. After a spinal injury, nervous system cells called glia are activated and flood the area to seal the wound to protect the brain and spinal cord. In doing so, however, the glia create scar tissue that acts as a physical and chemical barrier, which prevents new nerves from growing through the injury site.

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Carnegie Mellon professor develops smart headlight that sees around rain and snow

Carnegie Mellon professor develops smart headlight that sees around rain and snow.

(Phys.org) -- A Carnegie Mellon professor and his team have developed a prototype headlight system, or “smart headlights” designed to help you make your way safely home if driving through a downpour or snowstorm where visibility is threatened. During low-light conditions, drivers rely mainly on headlights to see the road but the same headlights reduce visibility when light is reflected off of precipitation back to the driver. The prototype smart headlights work in such a way so that lights help, not hinder, the stressed-out driver.

In difficult weather conditions, headlights make raindrops and snowflakes appear as bright flickering streaks. The university team sought to “dis-illuminate” the distracting lights. The headlight beams shine around rather than on the drops. The headlights are in turn enabling the driver to see though the rain and snow and avoid the distressing glare that goes with standard headlights.

Computer science professor Srinivasa Narasimhan, whose research focuses on computer vision and computer graphics at Carnegie Mellon, wanted to see if he and his team could stream light in between the drops. Their answer consists of a co-located imaging and illumination system-- camera, projector, and beamsplitter. The idea of the design is to integrate an imager and processing unit with a light source. The beamsplitter (50/50) permits optically co-locating the camera and projector to eliminate the need for stereo reconstruction, according to team site comments about the project, reducing computations and increasing system speed.

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, which make their adjustments and react to dis-illuminate the particles. The entire action, starting from capture to reaction, takes about 13 ms. (The system runs at 120 Hz. The camera uses a 5 ms exposure time and the system has a total latency of 13 ms.) Keep on reading...

Video: Plans to map asteroids that could hit Earth

Non-profit organization has plan to try and save the Earth from asteroid impact.

Who Is Up For Micro-Machines Making Medicine Inside Our Bodies?

Get ready for medical nanotechnology...

Via Gizmo Crazed:

We have all seen nanotechnology in movies and television shows over the years, from the nanoprobes in Star Trek to the Nanomites in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Now these are some examples of nefarious uses of nano tech but a group of scientists from MIT and the University of British Columbia have struck one for the good guys.

They have created “mini-factories” that can be programmed to produce different types of proteins and, when implanted into living cells, it should distribute those proteins throughout the body. The scientists have initially triggered these “factories” into action through the use of a laser light to relay the message of which proteins to produce.

The medical functions of this technology is nearly endless in treating and perhaps curing numerous diseases, from diabetes to cancer...

Ants farm?

 

Ants farm root aphid clones in subterranean rooms.

The yellow meadow ant, Lasius flavus, farms root aphids for sugar (honeydew) and nitrogen (protein). In turn these species of aphids have developed distinctive traits never found in free living species such as the 'trophobiotic organ' to hold honey dew for the ants. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology shows that over half of ant mounds contained only one of the three most common species of aphid, and two thirds of these has a single aphid clone. Even in mounds which contained more than one species of aphid 95% of the aphid chambers contained individuals of a single clone.

Aphid farming by ants is considered to be mutualistic. The ants cultivate and protect the aphids which in turn provide food for the ants. In farming mutualism, monocultures may reduce competition and are perhaps the result of husbandry (caused by the ants selecting the best aphids for their needs).

Researchers from the University of Copenhagen, University of Groningen and Rockefeller University used DNA microsatellite analysis to look at the genetic similarity of the three most common species of root aphids (Geoica utricularia, Tetraneura ulmi, and Forda marginata) within L. flavus nests, soil samples within nests, and single aphid chambers.

When Wild Turkeys Attack (video)

Payback...

 

Big birds attack New Jersey residents