Group items tagged

Here we go: we might not need liquid water after all on mars to get some nice flowering plants there! ... and terraform ? :-) Thirsty plants can extract water from the crystalline structure of gypsum, a rock-forming mineral found in soil on Earth and Mars.

Some plants grow on gypsum outcrops and remain active even during dry summer months, despite having shallow roots that cannot reach the water table. Sara Palacio of the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology in Jaca, Spain, and her colleagues compared the isotopic composition of sap from one such plant, called Helianthemum squamatum (pictured), with gypsum crystallization water and water found free in the soil. The team found that up to 90% of the plant's summer water supply came from gypsum.

The study has implications for the search for life in extreme environments on this planet and others.

Nature Commun 5, 4660 (2014)

Very interesting indeed. Attention is to be put on the form of calcium sulfate that is found on Mars. If it is hydrated (gypsum Ca(SO4)*2(H2O)) it works, but if it is dehydrated there is no water for the roots to take in. The Curiosity Rover tries to find out, but has uncertainty in recognising the hydrogen presence in the mineral: Copying : "(...) 3.2 Hydration state of calcium sulfates Calcium sulfates occur as a non-hydrated phase (anhydrite, CaSO4) or as one of two hydrated phases (bassanite, CaSO4.1/2H2O, which can contain a somewhat variable water content, and gypsum, CaSO4.2H2O). ChemCam identifies the presence of hydrogen at 656 nm, as already found in soils and dust [Meslin et al., 2013] and within fluvial conglomerates [Williams et al., 2013]. However, the quantification of H is strongly affected by matrix effects [Schröder et al., 2013], i.e. effects including major or even minor element chemistry, optical and mechanical properties, that can result in variations of emission lines unrelated to actual quantitative variations of the element in question in the sample. Due to these effects, discriminating between bassanite and gypsum is difficult. (...)"

forgot the reference http://www.msl-chemcam.com/doc/documents/577/Nachon%20et%20al%20Calcium%20sulfate%20veins%20characterized%20by%20ChemCam%20Curiosity%20at%20Gale%20Crater%20Mars_2013.pdf

Mortality rates in several Mediterranean countries decline in September, due in part to environmental factors but possibly linked to summer vacations. - What does this teach us?

An interesting research centre in California! Focus areas: Business Services Electronic Materials, Devices, & Systems Information & Communication Technologies Biomedical Systems Cleantech

XEROX PARC was definitely heavily involved in computer development: eg. mouse, GUI, ethernet, OO programming, all came out of PARC, and all that without focusing on computers but printers...

aaah its the XEROX centre, didn't know. Yep they made the mouse and then handed it over nicely to Apple after IBM thought it was useless

you propably already know,I post it for the twitter account and for your comments

but in any case, according to the apple guru, Java is a dying technology, so their project might as well ...

They participate under the name "The Java Pathfinder Team" (http://babelfish.arc.nasa.gov/trac/jpf/wiki/events/soc2010). It is actually a very useful project for both education and industry (Airbus created a consortium on model checking soft, and there is a lot of research on it) As far as I know, TAS had some plans of using Java onboard spacecrafts, 2 years ago. Not sure the industry is really sensible about Jobs' opinions ;) particularly if there is no better alternative!

"The forecasts were the product of a series of "summer studies" led by NASA's Ames Research Centre and Stanford University, at which top academics, scientists, and engineers gathered to imagine how future space colonies could look. Artists gave life to the blueprints, producing a stunning series of images that look like a cross between CGI real-estate models (complete with would-be residents smugly sipping wine) and the fantastical worlds of Isaac Asimov."

We managed to convince ESA it was a good idea after all :)

ok - not space related ... but its the summer ...

At the link below you find additional information about the projects: Education: Ten weeks to save the world http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100915/full/467266a.html

well, most good ideas probably take only a second to be formulated, it's the details that take years :-)

I do not think the point of the SU is to formulate new ideas (infact there is nothing new in the projects chosen). Their mission is to build and maintain a network of contacts among who they believe will be the 'future leaders' of space ... very similar to our beloved ISU.

a nice review on the wonders of Hierarchical Bayesian models. It cites a paper on probabilistic programming languages that might be relevant given our recent discussions. At Hippo's farewell lunch there was a discussion on how kids are able to learn something as complex as language from a limited amount of observations, while Machine Learning algorithms no matter how many millions of instances you throw at them, don't learn beyond some point. If that subject interested you, you might like this paper.

Had an opportunity to listen to JBT and TLG during one summer school.. if they're half as good in writing as they are in speaking, should be a decent read...

a place to go?

yup, for me next summer...

post here more of these if you see them ....

Greenwich could lose its place at the centre of global time if a move to "atomic time" is voted in by the International Telecommunication Union in Geneva in January 2012.

Haha this is really a British article... Already since 1972 we don't use GMT but UTC, which is based on atomic clocks. However British continue to call it GMT... The question is to drop the leap second in UTC, and France is definitely for this change (for scientific motives of course...;) I don't see how this is connected to winter time however... And they shouldn't worry Greenwich is still the beginning of the world with 0 degree longitude !

"the end of GMT as an international standard could accelerate the move to keep British Summer Time into the winter, letting us have lighter evenings." As I understand it, if GMT looses its "prestigious" status, then it would be easier to push through all-year BST in UK.

Bifurcations, patterns and other visualised mathematical problems for zen. Even found an oscillatory chemical reaction "Belousov-Zhabotinsky". Had no idea such a thing existed :-)