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Mars Base

ScienceShot: Why So Many Homeless Planets? - ScienceNOW - 0 views

news.sciencemag.org/...shot-why-so-many-homeless.html

scibyte30 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 20 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • astronomers reported that extrasolar planets may outnumber stars in our galaxy by almost a two-to-one margin
  • that three-quarters of these worlds are likely to be free-floaters, not bound to any star
  • speculated that many of these homeless planets were slung out of their parent solar systems as a result of gravitationally unstable orbits
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  • new computer simulations blame more exotic causes
  • stars literally pushing the planets into interstellar space after the suns reach the end of their normal hydrogen-burning lives and begin expanding into red giants
  • Other scenarios involve gravitational perturbations, either caused by passing stars, a solar system entering and exiting our galaxy's gravitationally dense spiral arms
  • interactions with dense molecular clouds
  • most likely reason
  • extrasolar planets would simply be ejected by the gravitational forces that result when their parent stars get jostled about inside tightly-packed star clusters
Mars Base

Fun New App: MoonWalking - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...fun-new-app-moonwalking

scibyte29 App moon

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • January 12, 2012
  • app called MoonWalking allows you to bring Tranquility Base down to Earth
  • Using your iPhone or iPad as an interactive
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • you can watch all the action, and even take pictures of the events with your iPhone
  • augmented-reality app that recreates Tranquility Base in your backyard or neighborhood park
  • download it from iTunes for only $.99.
  • is for iPhones and iPads only.
Mars Base

Mystery of Moon's Lost Magnetism Solved? | Magnetic Moon Rocks Caused by Lunar Dynamo |... - 0 views

www.space.com/gnetic-field-lunar-dynamo.html

moon magnetism scibyte21

shared by Mars Base on 10 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • One of the abiding mysteries of our moon is why it apparently once had a magnetic field
  • When Apollo astronauts brought back samples of moon rocks from their lunar landing missions
  • some of them shocked scientists by being magnetic.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • This can happen to rocks with the right minerals inside them, if they cool in the presence of a magnetic field
  • A magnetic field is generated by what's called a dynamo, which is caused by the fluid motion of a conducting material, such as liquid iron
  • the moon isn't large enough for convection to take place
  • In one new proposal
  • The strength of this stirring is determined by the angle between the core and the mantle
  • researchers think this happens because the moon's core and its mantle rotate around slightly different axes
  • suggest that the moon's solid-rock middle layer, called its mantle, stirs up its liquid iron core
  • because the tidal gravitational tug from the Earth causes the moon's mantle to rotate differently than the core
  • This model would explain why the moon used to have a magnetic field, but no longer does
  • researchers estimate the lunar magnetic field might have lasted for about a billion years
  • isn't the only possible solution to the moon's mystery
  • another explanation for the ancient lunar magnetic field.
  • suggests that the moon's mantle might have stirred up the liquid in its core
  • Instead of tidal interactions between the Earth and the moon, the researchers posit that impacts by large space rocks slamming into the moon have changed its rotation rate
  • would induce brief periods of especially strong stirring of the core, creating spikes of a magnetic field on the moon
  • either option may be correct, it's also possible that both mechanisms played a role in causing an ancient magnetic field on the moon
Mars Base

Hot-spring fossils preserve complete Jurassic ecosystem - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...ossils-jurassic-ecosystem.html

scibyte36 fossils

shared by Mars Base on 03 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Scientists are uncovering a beautifully-preserved ecosystem from around a Jurassic hot spring, helping fill a gap in the fossil record of more than 300 million years.
  • Patagonia in southern Argentina, the San Agustin geothermal deposits include animals, plants, fungi and bacteria, preserved in three dimensions and with their internal structure largely intact.
  • date from around 150 million years ago
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • formed around an area where water heated deep underground rose to the surface
  • first time a hot-spring habitat from the Mesozoic era (from about 250 to 65 million years ago) has ever been discovered
  • Hot springs
  • are treasure troves for palaeontologists
  • the dissolved silica in their waters quickly penetrates and preserves the bodies of living things that die there
  • preserved in three dimensions rather than crushed into a two-dimensional film
  • It's a near-intact ecosystem that's beautifully preserved
  • We have the remains of everything from the bacteria living right around the hot spring vents all the way to the plants, crustaceans and insects living in wetlands further away and the trees and ferns from the forests around the margins. We also have evidence of how all these organisms interacted
  • The discovery of a rich assemblage of fossils from between these extremes could transform scientists' understanding of a vital stage in life's development
Mars Base

Four-winged dinosaur's feathers were black with iridescent sheen - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...feathers-black-iridescent.html

scibyte37 dinosaur

shared by Mars Base on 09 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • team of American and Chinese researchers
  • color and detailed feather pattern
  • Microraptor, a pigeon-sized, four-winged dinosaur that lived about 130 million years ago
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • fossilized plumage, which had hues of black and blue like a crow
  • earliest record of iridescent feather color
  • Although its anatomy is very similar to birds, Mircroraptor is considered a non-avian dinosaur
  • placed in the group of dinosaurs called dromaeosaurs that includes Velociraptor
  • color displayed by many modern birds is produced partially by arrays of pigment-bearing organelles called melanosomes
  • t a hundred of which can fit across a human ha
  • melanosome's structure is constant for a given color
  • imaging power of scanning electron microscopes, paleontologists recently started analyzing the shape of melanosomes in well-preserved fossilized feather imprints
  • comparing these patterns to those in living birds, scientists can infer the color of dinosaurs that lived many millions of years ago
  • Iridescence is widespread in modern birds and is frequently used in displays
  • Statistical analysis of the data predicts that Microraptor was completely black with a glossy, weakly iridescent blue sheen.
  • researchers also made predictions about the purpose of the dinosaur's tail
  • Once thought to be a broad, teardrop-shaped surface meant to help with flight
  • researchers think that the tail feather was ornamental and likely evolved for courtship and other social interactions, not for aerodynamics
  • actually much narrower with two elongate feathers
  • findings also contradict previous interpretations that Microraptor was a nocturnal animal because dark glossy plumage is not a trait found in modern nighttime birds.
Mars Base

Biggest Solar Storm in Years Bombarding Earth Now | Solar Flares & Space Weather | Spac... - 0 views

www.space.com/storm-hitting-earth-today.html

scibyte37 sun

shared by Mars Base on 08 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • the CME did not hit Earth head-on, the material delivered a glancing blow to the planet, and energetic particles will continue to interact with Earth's magnetic field over the course of the day.
Mars Base

Tevatron experiments report latest results in search for Higgs boson - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...atest-results-higgs-boson.html

scibyte37 HiggsBoson

shared by Mars Base on 07 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • New measurements
  • indicate that the elusive Higgs boson may nearly be cornered.
  • two independent experiments see hints of a Higgs boson.
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  • collaborations found excesses in their data that might be interpreted as coming from a Higgs boson with a mass in the region of 115 to 135 GeV.
  • claim evidence of a new particle only if the probability that the data could be due to a statistical fluctuation is less than 1 in 740
  • claimed only if that probability is less than 1 in 3.5 million, or five sigmas.
  • stringent constraints established by earlier direct and indirect measurements made by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the Tevatron, and other accelerators,
  • place the mass of the Higgs boson within the range of 115 to 127 GeV
  • consistent with the December 2011 announcement of excesses seen in that range by LHC experiments, which searched for the Higgs in different decay patterns
  • None of the
  • experiments
  • are strong enough to claim evidence for the Higgs boson
  • This is an important milestone for the Tevatron experiments, and demonstrates the continuing importance of independent measurements
  • the latest result in a decade-long search by teams of physicists at the Tevatron
  • two collaborations independently combed through hundreds of trillions of proton-antiproton collisions recorded by their experiments to arrive at this exciting result
  • Higgs bosons, if they exist, are short-lived and can decay in many different ways.
  • Higgs can decay into different combinations of particles
  • still much work ahead before the scientific community can say for sure whether the Higgs boson exists
  • According to the Standard Model, the theory that explains and predicts how nature’s building blocks behave and interact with each other, the Higgs boson gives mass to other particles
  • Physicists have known for a long time that the Higgs or something like it must exist
  • Higgs boson is created in a high-energy particle collision, it immediately decays into lighter more stable particles
  • physicists retraced the path of these secondary particles and ruled out processes that mimic its signal.
  • Tevatron was a proton/anti-proton collider, with a maximum center of mass energy of 2 TeV,
  • LHC is a proton/proton collider that will ultimately reach 14 TeV
  • two accelerators collide different pairs of particles at different energies and produce different types of backgrounds
  • search strategies are different
  • search for the Higgs boson by the Tevatron and LHC experiments is like two people taking a picture of a park from different vantage points
Mars Base

Sea turtles 'lost years' mystery starts to unravel - 0 views

phys.org/...urtles-lost-years-mystery.html

scibyte123

shared by Mars Base on 05 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Small satellite-tracking devices attached to sea turtles swimming off Florida's coast have delivered first-of-its-kind data that could help unlock they mystery of what endangered turtles do during the "lost years."
  • "lost years" refers to the time after turtles hatch and head to sea where they remain for many years before returning to near-shore waters as large juveniles
  • The time period is often referred to as the "lost years" because not much has been known about where the young turtles go and how they interact with their oceanic environment
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  • "Before this study, most of the scientific information about the early life history of sea turtles was inferred through genetics studies, opportunistic sightings offshore, or laboratory-based studies
  • With real observations of turtles in their natural environment, we are able to examine and reevaluate existing hypotheses about the turtles' early life history
  • A team of scientists
  • tracked 17 loggerhead turtles for 27 to 220 days in the open ocean using small, solar-powered satellite tags
  • The goal was to better understand the turtles' movements, habitat preferences, and what role temperature may play in early sea turtle life history
  • While the turtles remain in oceanic waters (traveling between 124 miles to 2,672 miles) off the continental shelf and the loggerhead turtles sought the surface of the water as predicted
  • the study found that the turtles do not necessarily remain within the currents associated with the North Atlantic subtropical gyre
  • . It was historically thought that loggerhead turtles hatching from Florida's east coast complete a long, developmental migration in a large circle around the Atlantic entrained in these currents
  • the team's data suggest that turtles may drop out of these currents into the middle of the Atlantic or the Sargasso Sea.
  • The team also found that while the turtles mostly stayed at the sea surface, where they were exposed to the sun's energ
  • the turtles' shells registered more heat than anticipated (as recorded by sensors in the satellite tags
  • a new hypothesis about why the turtles seek refuge in Sargassum. It is a type of seaweed found on the surface of the water in the deep ocean long associated with young sea turtles.
  • propose that young turtles remain at the sea surface to gain a thermal benefit
  • "This makes sense because the turtles are cold blooded animals. By remaining at the sea surface,
  • by associating with Sargassum habitat, turtles gain a thermal refuge of sorts that may help enhance growth and feeding rates, among other physiological benefits.
  • More research will be needed, but it's a start at cracking the "lost years" myster
  • findings are important because the loggerhead turtles along with other sea turtles are threatened or endangered species
  • Florida beaches are important to their survival because they provide important nesting grounds in North America
  • More than 80% of Atlantic loggerheads nest along Florida's coast
  • There are other important nesting grounds and nursing areas for sea turtles in the western hemisphere found from as far north as Virginia to South America and the Caribbean.
  • "There's a whole lot that happens during the Atlantic crossing that we knew nothing abou
  • r work helps to redefine Atlantic loggerhead nursery grounds and early loggerhead habitat use
Mars Base

Mysterious Extragalactic Explosions Baffle Astronomers | Fast Radio Bursts | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/-radio-explosions-mystery.html

scibyte100 RadioSignal

shared by Mars Base on 07 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • known as fast radio bursts (FRBs), above the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy.
  • These bursts gave off more energy in a millisecond than the sun does in 300,000 years
  • The bursts ranged from 5.5 to 10 billion light-years away, meaning it took the light from some of them 10 billion years to reach Earth. (The Big Bang 
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • occurred 13.8 billion years ago
  • These newfound objects allowed the researchers to calculate that an FRB should occur once every 10 seconds
  • whether the new signals came from inside or outside the Milky Way.
  • they studied how the radio waves were affected by the material they pass through — a technique that could allow these new objects to shed light on the components of space.
  • As radio waves travel in space, they are stretched and slowed by the ionized material through which they move
  • Using models, the team concluded that the FRBs traveled billions of light-years — much farther than the edge of Earth's galaxy
  • the source is likely located in another galaxy
  • They are so bright and narrow that we can limit the size of the emission region at the source to just a few hundred kilometers
  • Although the explosions are brief, the astronomers can pinpoint the bursts' locations pretty accurately
  • No corresponding object could be observed in optical, gamma or X-ray wavelengths, so the explosions' origins remain unknown to scientists
  • Possible sources
  • intersecting magnetic fields from two neutron stars, extremely dense city-size bodies packing the mass of the sun.
  • A special kind of supernova orbited by a neutron star could potentially produce radio bursts as the star's magnetic field interacts with the explosion of the supernova
  • such combinations would be rare
  • favorite explanation is a giant burst from a magnetar, a highly magnetized type of neutron star
  • performed approximately a year after the FRBs were first spotted, looked at whether the objects continued to produce emission, but the signals appear to be nonrepeating
  • Efforts are ongoing at the moment to detect FRBs in close to real time, such that they can be followed up quickly
Mars Base

New Era of Neutrino Astronomy Begins at the South Pole - 0 views

www.scienceworldreport.com/...stronomy-begins-south-pole.htm

scibyte110 Neutrinos

shared by Mars Base on 23 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Astrophysicists have managed to detect and record the mysterious phenomena known as cosmic neutrinos
  • nearly massless particles that stream to Earth at the speed of light from outside our solar system, striking the surface in a burst of energy that can be as powerful as a baseball pitcher's fastball
  • In this particular study, the researchers observed 28 very high-energy particle events with the use of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica
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  • These events constitute the first solid evidence for astrophysical neutrinos from cosmic sources
  • The sources of neutrinos, and the question of what could accelerate these particles, has been a mystery for more than 100 years
  • IceCube is made up of 5,160 digital optical modules suspended along 86 strings embedded in ice beneath the South Pole
  • It detects neutrinos through the tiny flashes of blue light, called Cherenkov light, produced when neutrinos interact in the ice.
  • Computers then collect near-real-time data from the optical sensors and send information about interesting events north via satellite
  • astrophysical neutrinos move in straight lines unimpeded by outside forces, they can act as pointers to the place in the galaxy where they originated
  • This, in turn, can tell astronomers quite a bit out our universe
  • The 28 events recorded so far are too few to point to any particular location
Mars Base

Chinese rover & lander beam back Portraits with China's Flag shining on Moon's Surface - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...-flag-shining-on-moons-surface

scibyte113 ChineseSpaceProgram

shared by Mars Base on 16 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Dec 15
  • Chang’e-3 lunar lander and rover beamed back portraits of one another snapped from the Moon’s surface
  • displayed
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Chinese national flag
  • After rolling all six wheels into the dirt, Yutu
  • drove to a location about nine meters north of the lander, according to CCTV commentators
  • then turned around so that the red Chinese flag emblazoned on the front side would be facing the lander’s high resolution color cameras for the eagerly awaited portraits of one another
  • Yutu is nearly the size of a golf cart. It measures about 1.5 m x 1 m on its sides and stands about 1.5 m (nearly 5 feet) tall
  • Yutu will depart the landing site
  • and begin its own lunar trek that’s expected to last at least 3 months. Remove this ad
  • equipped with eight science instruments including multiple cameras, spectrometers, an optical telescope, ground penetrating radar and other sensors to investigate the lunar surface and composition
  • The radar instrument installed at the bottom of the rover can penetrate 100 meters deep below the surface to study the Moon’s structure and composition in unprecedented detail, according to
  • senior advisor of China’s lunar probe project,
  • A UV camera will study the earth and its interaction with solar wind and a telescope will study celestial objects
  • will also investigate the moon’s natural resources for use by potential future Chinese astronauts
  • Most of the science instruments are working including at least three cameras and the ground penetrating radar
  • the extremely cold lunar night and temperature fluctuations of more than 300 degrees Celsius – a great engineering challenge.
  • The rover will hibernate during the two week long lunar night
  • A radioisotopic heater will provide heat to safeguard the rovers computer and electronics
Mars Base

Mars Rover Curiosity Proves Some Earth Meteorites are Martian | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/iosity-martian-meteorites.html

scibyte106

shared by Mars Base on 20 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • New data collected by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has pinned down the exact ratio of two forms of the inert gas argon in the Martian atmosphere
  • help confirm the origins of some meteorites
  • could also help researchers understand how and when Mars lost most of its atmosphere
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  • By understanding exactly how much of the lighter isotope argon-36 is present in the Martian atmosphere and comparing it to the heavier isotope, argon-38, scientists were able to confirm what the composition of a Martian meteorite on Earth should be
  • Curiosity found that the argon ratio for Mars is 4.2. The lighter form of argon has escaped more readily than the heavier isotope
  • Before this new study, scientists had placed the argon ratio somewhere between 3.6 and 4.5 by analyzing gas trapped inside Martian meteors on Earth
  • Argon is the clearest signature of atmospheric loss because it's chemically inert and does not interact
  • Curiosity is unable to directly investigate how much atmosphere Mars is losing, NASA's next Mars mission is designed to do just that
  • The MAVEN spacecraft (the name is short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission) will launch toward the Red Planet in November
Mars Base

'Runaway' Star Cluster Breaks Free from Distant Galaxy - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...reaks-free-from-distant-galaxy

scibyte129 StarCluster

shared by Mars Base on 01 May 14 - No Cached
  • discovered dozens of so-called “hypervelocity stars” — single stars that break the stellar speed limit
  • The Virgo Cluster galaxy, M87, has ejected an entire star cluster, throwing it toward us at more than two million miles per hour.
  • Astronomers have found runaway stars before, but this is the first time we’ve found a runaway star cluster
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  • About one in a billion stars travel at a speed roughly three times greater than our Sun
  • at 220 km/s with respect to the galactic center
  • At a speed that fast, these stars can easily escape the galaxy entirely, traveling rapidly throughout intergalactic space.
  • this is the first time an entire star cluster has broken free
  • hypervelocity stars have puzzled astronomers for years. But by observing their speed and direction, astronomers can trace these stars backward, finding that some began moving quickly in the Galactic Center
  • Here, an interaction with the supermassive black hole can kick a star away at an alarming speed
  • Another option is that a supernova explosion propelled a nearby star to a huge speed
  • think M87 might have two supermassive black holes at its center
  • The star cluster wandered too close to the pair, which picked off many of the cluster’s outer stars while the inner core remained intact
  • The black holes then acted like a slingshot, flinging the cluster away at a tremendous speed
Mars Base

Headache Tree Is A Pain In The Brain - Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...he_tree_is_a_pain_in_the_brain

scibyte20 brain headache

shared by Mars Base on 04 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • One whiff of a plant known as the headache tree can spur intense, excruciating pain — and now scientists know why
  • An ingredient in the tree sets off a chain of events that eventually amps up blood flow to the brain’s outer membrane.
  • Other headache triggers
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  • interact with some of the same cellular machinery, suggesting they all work via the same pain-inducing mechanism
  • an international group of researchers extracted the plant compound umbellulone from dried bay laurel leaves
  • Umbellulone tickles the same cellular detector that responds to painfully cold stimuli and the sinus-clearing scent of wasabi and mustard oil
  • triggers the release of a particular protein implicated in migraine headaches
  • This protein prompts blood vessels to swell
Mars Base

Mars' History Is A Fluid Situation - Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/..._history_is_a_fluid_situation_

scibyte20 mars water

shared by Mars Base on 04 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Four billion years ago, the Martian surface may have been cold and dry — not warm, watery and more Earthlike than it is today, as many scientists have suggested.
  • fluids appeared only occasionally, quickly shaping channels and other landforms that bear watery footprints
  • beneath the planet’s reddish, rocky sands lurked a warm and wet subterranean environment, a potential incubator powered by hydrothermal activity
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  • the picture painted by a review paper in the November 3 issue of Nature
  • an international team of researchers crafted this tale of Mars’ parched, frigid history
  • If the authors are right, scientists hunting for evidence of past Martian life might be better off using a shovel
  • concluded that Mars’ most ancient clay minerals
  • roughly 3.7 billion and 4.1 billion years ago
  • formed within the planet’s crust when warm water interacted with rock five to 10 kilometers below the surface
  • Normally buried, ancient hydrated minerals are revealed by erosion or impact events, and craters house the majority of observed crustal clays in their walls, central peaks, or ejected material
  • Opportunity is exploring a mysterious mineral vein that might provide even more evidence for warm subsurface processes.
  • Clay minerals forming nearer the surface, exposed to the atmosphere and with water more mobile than trapped, are different
  • The question is how long that surface water stuck around for, and where the most stable long-term water supplies were
  • Water-carved landscapes, like snaking channels and river deltas, played a large role in producing the current view of a warm and watery Martian past
  • “It will be interesting to try and figure out how these channels fit in,” notes planetary scientist Ray Arvidson of Washington University
  • “I don’t think we can fully discount long-term stable surface water,”
  • While the evidence for subterranean hydrothermal activity is strong, Bishop says it’s unlikely that transient or small amounts of surface water quickly crafted some of the river features, valley networks, or layered beds seen across Mars.
  • In September, NASA announced that Opportunity had found a rock at the edge of Endeavour Crater
  • that looked as though it had been formed in a subterranean hydrothermal system
  • We are seeing a record of warm, circulating, subsurface water
  • Whether life might have evolved in the Martian subsurface is an open question. But on Earth, even multicellular organisms can live in the deep. “
Mars Base

International Cometary Explorer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...nternational_Cometary_Explorer

scibyte132 ISEE-3

shared by Mars Base on 25 May 14 - No Cached
  • Original mission: International Sun/Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3)
  • to investigate solar-terrestrial relationships at the outermost boundaries of the Earth's magnetosphere
  • to examine in detail the structure of the solar wind near the Earth and the shock wave that forms the interface between the solar wind and Earth's magnetosphere
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  • investigate motions of and mechanisms operating in the plasma sheets
  • continue the investigation of cosmic rays and solar flare emissions in the interplanetary region near 1 AU
  • Second mission: International Cometary Explorer
  • On June 10, 1982, after completing its original mission, ISEE-3 was repurposed. It was renamed the International Cometary Explorer (ICE)
  • The primary scientific objective of ICE was to study the interaction between the solar wind and a cometary atmosphere
  • a series of lunar orbits over the next 15 months. Its last and closest pass over the Moon, on December 22, 1983, was a mere 119.4 km above the Moon's surface. By the beginning of 1984, ICE was in heliocentric orbit
  • Giacobini-Zinner encounter
  • on a trajectory intercepting that of Comet Giacobini-Zinner.
  • On 11 September 1985, the craft passed through the plasma tail of Comet Giacobini-Zinner
  • ICE carried no cameras. It instead carried instruments for measurements of energetic particles, waves, plasmas, and fields
  • Halley encounter
  • transited between the Sun and Comet Halley in late March 1986, when other spacecraft
  • were in the vicinity of Comet Halley
  • ICE flew through the tail
  • Heliospheric mission
  • mission was approved by NASA in 1991
  • consisting of investigations of coronal mass ejections in coordination with ground-based observations
  • End of mission
  • On May 5, 1997, NASA ended the ICE mission, and ordered the probe shut down, with only a carrier signal left operating
  • Further contact
  • In 1999, NASA made brief contact with ICE to verify its carrier signal. On September 18, 2008
  • NASA, with the help of KinetX, located ICE using the Deep Space Network after discovering that it had not been powered off after the 1999 contact
  • status check revealed that all but one of its 13 experiments were still functioning, and it still has enough propellant
  • Reboot effort
  • A team webpage said, "We intend to contact the ISEE-3 (International Sun-Earth Explorer) spacecraft, command it to fire its engine and enter an orbit near Earth, and then resume its original mission...If we are successful we intend to facilitate the sharing and interpretation of all of the new data ISEE-3 sends back via crowd sourcing."
  • Sometime after NASA's interest in the ICE waned
  • A team of engineers, programmers, and scientists
  • realized that the spacecraft might be steered to pass close to another comet
  • began to study the feasibility and challenges involved
  • On May 15, 2014, the project reached its crowdfunding goal
  • which will cover the costs of writing the software to communicate with the probe, searching through the NASA archives for the information needed to control the spacecraft, and buying time on the dish antennas
  • The project then set a 'stretch' goal of $150,000
  • The project members are working on deadline: if they get the spacecraft to change its orbit by late May or early June 2014, it can use the Moon's gravity to get back into a useful halo orbit.
  • Earlier in 2014, officials with the Goddard Space Flight Center had said that the Deep Space Network equipment necessary to transmit signals to the spacecraft had been decommissioned in 1999, and that replacing it was not economically feasible
  • oject members obtained the needed hardware (power amplifier, modulator/demodulator[12]), and installed it on the 305-meter Arecibo dish antenna on May 19, 2014
  • Although NASA is not funding the project, it made advisors available and gave approval to try to establish contact
  • On May 21, 2014, NASA announced that it had signed a Non-Reimbursable Space Act Agreement with the ISEE-3 Reboot Project
  • "This is the first time NASA has worked such an agreement for use of a spacecraft the agency is no longer using or ever planned to use again," officials said
Mars Base

Google Glass adaptation opens the universe to deaf students - 0 views

news.byu.edu/archive14-may-signglasses.aspx

scibyte133 SignLanguage

shared by Mars Base on 02 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • the only two deaf students to ever take Professor Jones’ computer science class
  • signed up just as the National Science Foundation funded Jones’ signglasses research
  • “Having a group of students who are fluent in sign language here at the university has been huge,
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Professor Mike Jones
  • Jones
  • Jones will publish the full results of their research in June at Interaction Design and Children
Mars Base

Reversal of type 1 diabetes in mice may eventually help humans - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...es-mice-eventually-humans.html

scibyte135 Diabetes

shared by Mars Base on 15 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Investigators at the University of Cincinnati (UC) have found a therapy that reverses new onset Type 1 diabetes in mouse models and may advance efforts in combating the disease among humans.
  • Type 1 diabetes is usually diagnosed in children and young adults and affects about 5 percent of all people with diabetes
  • . In Type 1 diabetes, the body does not produce sufficient insulin, which is central to glucose metabolism: without insulin, blood glucose rises
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  • There is no cure for Type 1 diabetes though it can be controlled with insulin therapy
  • by using an antibody to stimulate a specific molecule in the innate immune system we can reverse—with a high rate of success—new onset diabetes in mice that have already developed the symptoms of diabetes
  • The cause of this reversal is a preservation of the endocrine pancreatic beta cells that produce insulin
  • These cells are preserved from the autoimmune attack which is the hallmark of Type 1 diabetes
  • The key to reversing Type 1 diabetes in mice,
  • is catching the disease at its onset, which is typically within a very short time window
  • The time frame would be longer in humans, but it is still a relatively short time from new onset to end-stage Type 1 diabetes
  • Ridgway says this approach differs from most in combating Type 1 diabetes because his team's therapies in mice do not directly interact with T-cells
  • treatment of autoimmunity has often been directed at suppressing an over-zealous adaptive immune response by eliminating auto-reactive T-cells
  • In Type 1 diabetes, autoimmunity causes the body's T-cells to attack its insulin-producing beta cells.
  • targeting a different part of the immune system
  • There are two arms of the immune system.
  • respond to many different antigens
  • The innate system tends to have a stereotypical response. We are targeting a receptor that is found mostly on the innate immune cells, such as dendritic cells.
  • Additional study will be required, but the therapy may hold promise because one agonistic anti-TLR4 agent is already FDA approved and others are under development
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