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Mars Base

Researchers describe first 'functional HIV cure' in an infant - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...-03-functional-hiv-infant.html

scibyte84 HIVTreatment

shared by Mars Base on 04 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • A team of researchers from Johns Hopkins Children's Center
  • describe the first case of a so-called "functional cure" in an HIV-infected infant
  • The infant described in the report underwent remission of HIV infection after receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART) within 30 hours of birth
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • investigators
  • investigators say the prompt administration of antiviral treatment likely led to this infant's cure by halting the formation of hard-to-treat viral reservoirs
  • Prompt antiviral therapy in newborns that begins within days of exposure may help infants clear the virus and achieve long-term remission without lifelong treatment by preventing such viral hideouts from forming in the first place
  • dormant cells responsible for reigniting the infection in most HIV patients within weeks of stopping therapy
  • researchers say they believe this is precisely what happened in the child described in the report
  • "functionally cured," a condition that occurs when a patient achieves and maintains long-term viral remission without lifelong treatment and standard clinical tests fail to detect HIV replication in the blood
  • a sterilizing cure—a complete eradication of all viral traces from the body
  • a functional cure occurs when viral presence is so minimal, it remains undetectable by standard clinical tests, yet discernible by ultrasensitive methods
  • The child described
  • was born to an HIV-infected mother and received combination antiretroviral treatment beginning 30 hours after birth.
  • A series of tests showed progressively diminishing viral presence in the infant's blood, until it reached undetectable levels 29 days after birth
  • The infant remained on antivirals until 18 months of age, at which point the child was lost to follow-up for a while
  • Ten months after discontinuation of treatment, the child underwent repeated standard blood tests, none of which detected HIV presence in the blood
  • Test for HIV-specific antibodies—the standard clinical indicator of HIV infection—also remained negative
  • Currently, high-risk newborns—those born to mothers with poorly controlled infections or whose mothers' HIV status is discovered around the time of delivery—receive a combination of antivirals at prophylactic doses to prevent infection for six weeks and start therapeutic doses if and once infection is diagnosed
  • this particular case
  • may change the current practice because it highlights the curative potential of very early ART
  • natural viral suppression without treatment is an exceedingly rare phenomenon observed in less than half a percent of HIV-infected adults
  • HIV experts have long sought a way to help all HIV patients achieve elite-controller status
  • "elite controllers," whose immune systems are able to rein in viral replication and keep the virus at clinically undetectable levels
  • investigators caution they don't have enough data to recommend change right now to the current practice of treating high-risk infants
  • but the infant's case provides the rationale to start proof-of-principle studies in all high-risk newborns
  • next step is to find out if this is a highly unusual response to very early antiretroviral therapy or something we can actually replicate in other high-risk newborns
  • A single case of sterilizing cure has been reported so far
  • in an HIV-positive man treated with a bone marrow transplant for leukemia. The bone marrow cells came from a donor with a rare genetic mutation of the white blood cells that renders some people resistant to HIV
  • Such a complex treatment approach, however, HIV experts agree, is neither feasible nor practical for the 33 million people worldwide infected with HIV
  • researchers say preventing mother-to-child transmission remains the primary goal
  • Prevention really is the best cure, and we already have proven strategies that can prevent 98 percent of newborn infections by identifying and treating HIV-positive pregnant women
Mars Base

DARPA Wants Amateur Help Tracking Space Junk | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/k-darpa-amateur-astronomy.html

scibyte72 Darpa

shared by Mars Base on 21 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • The U.S. military is launching a far-out neighborhood watch. But instead of warding off burglars, these  amateur watchdogs are tracking orbital debris and possible satellite collisions in Earth orbit.
  • The sky-monitoring project, called SpaceView, is a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program that enrolls the talents of amateur astronomers
  • SpaceView should provide more diverse data from different geographic locations
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • SpaceView is envisioned as a long-term partnership. This could potentially include time-sharing on telescopes, upgraded hardware at the astronomer’s site or financial compensation
  • SpaceView hopes to engage amateur astronomers by purchasing remote access to an already in-use telescope or by providing a telescope to selected astronomers
  • Telescopes used for astrophotography, asteroid hunting or simply high-quality astronomy are well suited for SpaceView’s needs
  • this new program provides the means to upgrade a skywatcher’s site to a state-of-the-art fully automated obser
  • in late 2013, the process will start to select the first dozen members of the project
Mars Base

Tau Ceti: Sun-like star only twelve light years away may have a habitable planet - 0 views

phys.org/...ceti-sun-like-star-twelve.html

scibyte76 HabitablePlanet

shared by Mars Base on 23 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • An international team of astronomers has discovered that Tau Ceti, one of the closest and most Sun-like stars, may host five planets, including one in the star's habitable zone
  • twelve light years from Earth and visible to the naked eye in the evening sky, Tau Ceti is the closest single star that has the same spectral classification as our Sun
  • five planets are estimated to have masses between two and six times the mass of the Earth,
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • the lowest-mass planetary system yet detected.
  • One of the planets lies in the star's habitable zone
  • and has a mass around five times that of Earth
  • making
  • the smallest planet found to be orbiting in the habitable zone of any Sun-like star
  • The international team of astronomers
  • combined more than six-thousand observations from three different instruments and intensively modeled the data
  • Using new techniques, the team has found a method to detect signals half the size previously thought possible
  • We are now beginning to understand that nature seems to overwhelmingly prefer systems that have multiple planets with orbits of less than 100 days
  • researchers chose Tau Ceti for this noise-modeling study because they had thought it contained no signals
  • As it is so bright and similar to our Sun, it is an ideal benchmark system to test out our methods for the detection of small planets
  • Tau Ceti is one of our nearest cosmic neighbors and so bright that we may be able to study the atmospheres of these planets
  • researchers discovered this planetary system using data from three state-of-the-art spectrographs
Mars Base

Online Game on How Earth's Moon Formed Nabs Honors | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/oon-formation-online-game.html

scibyte80 LunarGame

shared by Mars Base on 01 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • An online game that allows players to build their own moon and sculpt its features has won big praise in science art competition
  • "Selene: A Lunar Construction GaME,"
  • measures how and when players learn as they discover more about how the Earth's moon formed
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • by extension, the solar system.
  • received an honorable mention in the 2012 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge
  • When they look at the moon, players are seeing what actually created those features
  • It makes moon observations more meaningful
  • Named for the Greek goddess of the moon, Selene works in two parts
  • In the first round, players aim asteroids of varying sizes, densities, and radiations so that they collide with one an
  • Too much force, and the rocks ricochet off one another
  • even if you overshoot your target, the gravity of the growing moon may tug just enough to pull the new piece into the pack
  • participants a chance to watch accretion in action
  • developing moon is constantly compared to the real-life one, and players strive to make as close a match as possible
  • After all of the small asteroids have melted together to form a smooth new moon, it's time to scratch up the surface
  • Players can aim asteroids of varying sizes at the body, and select areas where lava breaks through the crust
  • Because the accretion and surface-sculpting processes for the moon echo that of the rest of the planets, players also develop an understanding of how the early solar system formed
  • kids ages nine and up engage in the game, they build concrete knowledge that can be applied into any learning environment that they later experience, a process that serves to make learning more intuitive
  • Though the game is effective for high school and college students, and slanted to match the national standards for those age ranges
  • was more attractive to middle school students
  • One of the primary goals of Selene is to allow
  • team to analyze the learning process
  • means the game requires a login, and for minors, parental permission must be given.
  • analyzation takes time
  • able to provide a quick overview of my game play
  • can tell from looking at your data what your experiences were
  • That under-the-hood ability to study learning is why the project was so attractive in terms of funding to NASA and the National Science Foundation
  • d a prototype of the game was developed by CyGaMEs in May of 2007.
  • first version was released in 2010. But the game is constantly being improved as the understanding of the learning process grows
  • also looking at expanding it to mobile platforms in the near future.
  • recognition is of course a great honor and encouragement — but more importantly, may drive more players to the website so that we can collect more data
  • More players, of course, means more information that can be gathered about how participants learn
  • At the same time, more people can learn about how the moon formed, growing their understanding of the nearest celestial body.
  • http://selene.cet.edu/
Mars Base

Painted ancient Maya numbers reflect calendar reaching well beyond 2012 (w/ Video) - 0 views

phys.org/...-05-ancient-maya-calendar.html

SciByte MayanCalender

shared by Mars Base on 11 May 12 - No Cached
  • The mural represents the first Maya art to be found on the walls of a house
  • tiny glyphs all over the wall, bars and dots representing columns of numbers
  • the kind of thing that only appears in one place — the Dresden Codex, which the Maya wrote many centuries later
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • supported by a series of grants from the National Geographic Society, Saturno and his team launched an organized exploration and excavation of the house, working urgently to beat the region’s rainy seasons, which threatened to erase what time had so far preserved.
  • Maya glyphs near his face call him “Younger Brother Obsidian,” a curious title seldom seen in Maya text. Based on other Maya sites, Saturno theorizes he could be the son or younger brother of the king and possibly the artist-scribe who lived in the house. “The portrait of the king implies a relationship between whoever lived in this space and the royal family,” Saturno said.
Mars Base

Data support theory on location of lost Leonardo da Vinci painting - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...ry-lost-leonardo-da-vinci.html

scibyte38 art daVinci

shared by Mars Base on 14 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Evidence uncovered during research conducted in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio late last year appears to support the theory that a lost Leonardo da Vinci painting existed on the east wall of the Hall of the 500, behind Giorgio Vasari's mural "The Battle of Marciano."
  • data supporting the theoretical location of the da Vinci painting "The Battle of Anghiari" was obtained through the use of an endoscopic probe that was inserted through the wall on which the Vasari fresco was painted
  • Using endoscopic technology
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • researchers were able to view the wall behind the Vasari mural and obtain samples for analysis
  • data from chemical analysis, while not conclusive, suggest the possibility that the da Vinci painting, long assumed to have been destroyed in the mid-16th century when the Hall of the 500 was completely remodeled, might exist behind the Vasari.
  • Although we are still in the preliminary stages
  • data are very encouraging
  • still a lot of work to be done to solve this mystery
  • evidence does suggest that we are searching in the right place."
  • team report four lines of evidence supporting the hypothesis that the lost Leonardo painting is located behind the Vasari mural
  • sample containing a black material was analyzed with SEM-EDX
  • scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy), which identifies the chemical elements present in a sample
  • material found behind the Vasari wall shows a chemical composition similar to black pigment found in brown glazes on Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" and "St. John the Baptist," identified in a recently published scientific paper by the Louvre, which analyzed all the da Vinci paintings in its collection.
  • Flakes of red material were found
  • these samples seems to identify them as organic material, which could be associated with red lake (lacquer). This type of material is unlikely to be present in an ordinary plastered wall.
  • research team confirmed the existence of an air gap, originally identified through radar scans conducted of the Hall, between the brick wall on which Vasari painted his mural and the wall located behind
  • finding suggests that Vasari may have preserved da Vinci's masterpiece by building a wall in front of it at this location. No other location in the Hall presented this type of air gap.
  • opportunity to conduct an endoscopic investigation through the Vasari wall
  • identified 14 areas to be explored
  • six points of entry were ultimately implemented
  • chosen by the restorers of the Opificio delle Peitre Dure in areas free of original Vasari paint
  • including cracked or previously restored areas, to ensure that drilling would not cause any damage to the original Vasari mural
  • Testing on those samples was conducted with portable instruments on the scaffolding itself
  • The painting commemorated the 1440 victory of the battle on the plain of Anghiari between Milan and the Italian League led by the Republic of Florence
  • 1503, da Vinci was commissioned
  • to paint the "The Battle of Anghiari"
Mars Base

The feeding habits of teenage galaxies - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...3-habits-teenage-galaxies.html

scibyte38 galaxies

shared by Mars Base on 14 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • New observations made with ESO’s Very Large Telescope are making a major contribution to understanding the growth of adolescent galaxies
  • biggest survey of its kind astronomers have found that galaxies changed their eating habits during their teenage years - the period from about 3 to 5 billion years after the Big Bang
  • start of this phase smooth gas flow was the preferred snack, but later, galaxies mostly grew by cannibalising other smaller galaxies.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Astronomers have known for some time that the earliest galaxies were much smaller than the impressive spiral and elliptical galaxies that now fill the Universe
  • employing the state-of-the-art instruments on ESO's Very Large Telescope an international team is unravelling what really happened
  • more than one hundred hours of observations the team has collected the biggest ever set of detailed observations of gas-rich galaxies at this early stage of their development.
  • Two different ways of growing galaxies are competing
  • violent merging events when larger galaxies eat smaller ones
  • smoother and continuous flow of gas onto galaxies
  • zoom sequence starts
  • Smooth gas flow (eso1040) seems to have been a big factor in the building of galaxies in the very young Universe, whereas mergers became more important later.
Mars Base

Listen to solar storm activity in new sonification video - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...-storm-sonification-video.html

scibyte38 solar flare

shared by Mars Base on 14 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • What does a solar storm sound like
  • Take a listen
  • sonification of the recent solar storm activity turns data from two spacecraft into sound
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • measurements from the NASA SOHO spacecraft and the University of Michigan's Fast Imaging Plasma Spectrometer (FIPS) on NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft at Mercury
  • creator is Robert Alexander, a design science doctoral student at the University of Michigan and NASA fellow.
  • a composer with a NASA fellowship to study how representing information as sound could aid in data mining.
  • raw information to an audio waveform
  • To sonify the data
  • in its original sampling rate of 44,100 hertz, it played back in less than a quarter of a second
  • benefits of sonifying data. You can zip through days' worth of information in an instant
  • Sonification is the process of translating information into sound
  • used in Geiger counter radiation detectors, which emit clicks in the presence of high-energy particles
  • not typically used to pick out patterns in information, but scientists on the U-M Solar and Heliospheric Research Group are exploring its potential in that realm. They're looking to Alexander to make it possible.
  • used to looking at wiggly-line plots and graphs, but humans are very good at hearing things. We wonder if there's a way to find things in the data that are difficult to see."
  • his approach led to a new discovery
  • a particular ratio of carbon atoms that scientists had not previously keyed in to can reveal more about the source of the solar wind than the ratios of elements they currently rely on. The solar wind is a squall of hot plasma, or charged particles, continuously emanating from the sun.
  • hopes to build a bridge between science and art.
  • movies were silent and people just accepted that that's the way it
  • this high res footage of what's happening on the surface of the sun, and it's silent. I'm creating a soundtrack
Mars Base

Apollo 11′s Rocket Engines Found on the Bottom of the Ocean - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...und-on-the-bottom-of-the-ocean

scibyte40 Apollo

shared by Mars Base on 28 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has located the Apollo 11 F-1 rocket engines and plans to recover them
  • using state-of-the-art deep sea sonar, the team has found the Apollo 11 engines lying 14,000 feet below the surface
  • making plans to attempt to raise one or more of them from the ocean floor
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • don’t know yet what condition these engines might be in
  • they hit the ocean at high velocity and have been in salt water for more than 40 years
  • The Saturn V used five F-1 engines in the first stage
  • F-1 is still the most powerful single-chamber liquid-fueled rocket engine ever developed
  • producing one and a half million pounds of thrust, burning 6,000 pounds of rocket grade kerosene and liquid oxygen every second
  • On July 16, 1969, Apollo 11 was launched and the five F-1s burned for just a few minutes, and then plunged back to Earth into the Atlantic Ocean.
  • the engines remain the property of NASA
  • hopes that the space agency would allow the recovered engines to be displayed at the Smithsonian or another museum
  • no public funding will be used to attempt to raise and recover the engines, as it’s being undertaken by him privately
Mars Base

Kepler Explorer app puts distant planets at your fingertips - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...lorer-app-distant-planets.html

scibyte41 Kepler app

shared by Mars Base on 04 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Kepler Explorer app puts distant planets at your fingertips
  • Kepler Explorer challenges users to design a planet that matches the Kepler data
  • Armchair explorers of the cosmos can now have at their fingertips the nearly 2,000 distant planetary systems discovered by NASA's Kepler Mission
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • innovative app for iPads and iPhones
  • available for free
  • brought together faculty and students in astrophysics, art, and technology for a summer institute last year
  • team quickly settled on the idea to create an app, and also developed it into an exhibit that provides additional information and shows the app's output on a large screen
  • scheduled for long-term installation in the Lick Observatory visitors gallery later this month
  • Kepler Explorer starts with drop-down menus listing all the Kepler-discovered planetary systems, plus our own solar system
  • selected system is displayed in a view that shows the planet or planets in their orbits around the host star
  • Shown in real time the planets look motionless, but moving a slider increases the speed until the planets zip around their star
  • lets users zoom in and move around the system, and tapping on an individual planet brings it up for further exploration. Another view shows the relative sizes of the individual planets compared to their host star
  • when viewing individual planets
  • The user can manipulate the composition of the planet and its atmosphere and see which mixtures of components (iron, rock, water, and hydrogen) are consistent with Kepler's observations
  • represents graphically the type of in-depth analysis that Fortney does for the Kepler Mission
  • the app allows anyone to explore the properties of many different planets very quickly
  • only measures the radius of a planet, or how big it is. In most cases, the mass of the planet is unknown
  • there may be different combinations of components that result in a planet of a given size
  • 's interactive graphics show how this works
  • sliders for different components and how they are partitioned in the core and the atmosphere, and as you move the sliders the image of the planet grows and shrinks, based on hundreds of calculations
  • the app tells you when the size of your planet matches the observations
  • calculations involved took hours of computer time, but the results are stored in tables so the app can use them on the fly.
Mars Base

Ancient sea reptile with gammy jaw suggests dinosaurs got arthritis too - 0 views

phys.org/...ent-sea-reptile-gammy-jaw.html

scibyte47 dinosaur arthritis

shared by Mars Base on 16 May 12 - No Cached
  • scientists at the University of Bristol has found signs of a degenerative condition similar to human arthritis in the jaw of a pliosaur, an ancient sea reptile that lived 150 million years ago
  • Such a disease has never been described before in fossilized Jurassic reptiles.
  • has been kept since its discovery in the collections of the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • 8 metre long pliosaur was a
  • crocodile-like head, a short neck, whale-like body and four powerful flippers to propel it through water in pursuit of prey.
  • huge jaws and 20 cm long teeth
  • this particular individual was the unfortunate victim of an arthritis-like disease.
  • eroded its left jaw joint, displacing the lower jaw to one side
  • evidently lived with a crooked jaw for many years, because there are marks on the bone of the lower jaw where the teeth from the upper jaw impacted on the bone during feeding
  • the animal was still able to hunt in spite of its unfortunate condition.
  • signs on the skeleton to suggest that the animal could have been an old female who had developed the condition as part of the aging process
  • large size, and the fused skull bones
  • possibly female because its skull crest is quite low – presumed males had a higher crest.
  • In the same way that aging humans develop arthritic hips, this old lady developed an arthritic jaw, and survived with her disability for some time
  • unhealed fracture on the jaw indicates that at some time the jaw weakened and eventually broke
  • With a broken jaw, the pliosaur would not have been able to feed
  • They were at the top of their food chains, so there would not have been any predators to take advantage of an aging, disabled pliosaur – except for another pliosaur.
  • You can see these kinds of deformities in living animals, such as crocodiles or sperm whales and these animals can survive for years as long as they are still able to feed
Mars Base

January 26 - Today in Science History - Scientists born on January 26th, died, and events - 0 views

www.todayinsci.com/...1_26.htm

scibyte116 LookingBack

shared by Mars Base on 18 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Canadian earthquake   In 1700, an earthquake, the most intense Canada has ever seen, hit the sea floor off the British Columbia coast. Long before Europeans first landed on Vancouver Island, native legend tells of a great disaster. The sea rose in a heaving wave, and landslides buried a sleeping village. Myth was resolved with science in 2003 by government research. Earthquakes of that intensity cause tidal waves, and Japanese written history tells of a massive tsunami striking fishing villages the next day along the coast of Honshu, killing hundreds. Coupled with geological evidence of the level 9 quake, the connection was clear. Mythology and seismology came together to validate history.
Mars Base

January 23 - Today in Science History - Scientists born on January 23rd, died, and events - 0 views

www.todayinsci.com/...1_23.htm

scibyte116 LookingBack

shared by Mars Base on 18 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Pluto photographed (source)   In 1930, Clyde Tombaugh photographed the planet Pluto, the only planet discovered in the twentieth century, after a systematic search instigated by the predictions of other astronomers. Tombaugh was 24 years old when he made this discovery at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz.
Mars Base

March 10 - Today in Science History - Scientists born on March 10th, died, and events - 0 views

www.todayinsci.com/...3_10.htm

shared by Mars Base on 01 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Syzygy
  •   In 1982, a syzygy occurred when all nine planets aligned on the same side of the Sun. The planets are spread out over 98 degrees on this date. The four major planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, span an arc of some 73 degrees.
Mars Base

Missing Piece of Long-Neck Dinosaur Finally Discovered: Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

scibyte110 dinosaur

shared by Mars Base on 14 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • The enamel is too thin and th
  • are way too long and skinny
  • The fossil teeth were embedded in a loose boulder that had eroded out of the hillside
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • evidence that passersby were chipping away at the exposed dinosaur bones in the rock, taking souvenirs.
  • Morrison sandstone surrounding the fragile fossils was so hard that Mossbrucker and his colleagues were afraid that trying to remove the rock would irreparably damage the bone.
  • in 2011, the museum acquired some state-of-the-art pneumatic tools that can remove hard rock without transmitting damaging vibrations to fossils embedded insid
  • cheeckbone nestles against the Apatosaurus maxilla and premaxillae, the bones of the snout, and tiny specks of fish bone surround the larger assemblage
  • snout is highlighting unknown anatomical features
  • including a large
  • hollow space in the skull, which would have influenced the tone of the Apatosaur's calls
  • Other long-necks had this space
  • but A. ajax's was particularly large
  • The discovery also reveals that Lakes' long-ago excavations were close to discovering yet another Apatosaur
  • Teeth found
  • were declared by Marsh in 1884 to belong to Diplodocus lacustris, another long-neck species
  • But those teeth, now held in Yale's collections, look just like Kevin's
  • , Diplodocus lacustris didn't exist — instead, Lakes found part of Kevin and missed the rest.
  • a slew of museum volunteers are still working to coax more of Kevin from its boulder
  • The specimen got its name simply because museum staff and guests found it amusing
  • The current plan is to cleave the block in half so that the pieces can be scanned with micro-CT (computed tomography
  • s technology would allow paleontologists to see inside the block and even to 3D-print a perfect copy of the bones inside without having to remove them physically
  • don't have to put the specimen at any more risk
  • and we still get the data we need
  • The process is slow going, however, in part because the team keeps finding bones in what they expected to be just rock
  • expects to publish his findings in about a year
Mars Base

Direct Image of an Exoplanet 155 Light Years Away - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...exoplanet-155-light-years-away

scibyte131 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 15 May 14 - No Cached
  • This week, an international team of researchers
  • announced the discovery of an exoplanet
  • 155 light years
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • world is estimated to be 11 times the mass of Jupiter — placing it just under the lower mass limit for brown dwarf status
  • orbits its host star 2,000x farther than the distance from Earth to the Sun once every 80,000 (!) years
  • The primary star, GU Psc A, is an M3 red dwarf weighing in at 35% the mass of our Sun and is just 100 million years old
  • researchers targeted GU Psc after it was determined to be a member of the AB Doradus moving group of relatively young stars, which are prime candidates for exoplanet detection
  • The fact that GU Psc B was captured by direct imaging at 155 light years distant is amazing
  • The team was able to discern this curious planet by utilizing observations from the W.M. Keck observatory, the joint Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, the Gemini Observatory and the Observatoire Mont-Mégantic in Québec.
  • there are not a lot of exoplanets that were detected ‘directly’ so far
  • The few planets for which we have an actual image are interesting because we can analyze their light directly, and thus learn much more about them
  • researcher Marie-Ève Naud and her co-advisor Étienne Artigau
  • also one of the “coolest” planets that have been directly imaged, showing methane absorption
  • it is certainly the most distant exoplanet to a main-sequence star that has been found so far
  • This distance makes GU Psc b very interesting from a theoretical point of view, because it’s hard to imagine how it could have formed in the protoplanetary disk of its star
  • current working definition of an exoplanet is based solely on mass (<13 Jupiter masses), so GU Psc b probably formed in a way that is more similar to how stars formed
  • how are astronomers certain that PU Psc b is related to its host and not a foreground or background object?
  • As the host star, GU Psc is relatively nearby; it displays a significant apparent proper motion
  • relative to distant background stars and galaxies.
  • On images taken one year apart with WIRCam on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, we observed that the companion displays the same big proper motion, i.e. they move together in the plane of the sky, while the rest of the stars in the field don’t
  • most planet hunting techniques using direct imaging involve state-of-the-art adaptive optics systems, but we used ‘standard’ imaging without any exotic techniques
  • To find this planet, we used very sensitive ‘standard’ imaging,
  • we chose carefully the wavelengths where planets display colors that are unlike most other astrophysical objects such as stars and galaxies
Mars Base

Curiosity Pulls into Kimberly and Spies Curvy Terrain For Drilling Action - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...vy-terrain-for-drilling-action

scibyte124 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 23 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • NASA’s Curiosity rover has just pulled into
  • terrain chock full of curvy rock outcrops at Kimberly that’s suitable for contact science and drilling action
  • The robot’s arm has been deployed to investigate the most scientifically productive spots
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • the mast mounted ChemCam laser and high resolution cameras to determine the best spot for drilling and sampling.
  • the art robot is conducting contact science with the cameras and spectrometers on the terminus of the 7 foot long robotic arm
  • The team commanded Curiosity to clean out the arms CHIMRA sample handling mechanism in anticipation of boring into the Martian outcrops and delivering
  • samples of cored Martian rocks to the SAM and CheMin miniaturized chemistry labs
  • Scientists directed Curiosity on a pinpoint drive to Kimberly after their interest was piqued by orbital images taken
  • NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)
  • see three terrain types exposed and a relatively dust-free surface
  • The missions science focus has shifted to “search for that subset of habitable environments which also preserves organic carbon,”
  • To date Curiosity’s odometer stands at 6.2 kilometers
  • has somewhat over another 4 kilometers to go to reach the base of Mount Sharp
  • may arrive at the lower reaches of Mount Sharp sometime in mid 2014, but must first pass through a potentially treacherous dune field
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