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Mars Base

February 20 - Today in Science History - Scientists born on February 20th, died, and ev... - 0 views

todayinsci.com/2_20.htm

scibyte120 LookingBackFeb

shared by Mars Base on 15 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Glenn in orbit
  • In 1962, John Glenn piloted the Mercury-Atlas 6 Friendship 7 spacecraft on the first U.S. manned orbital mission. Launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, he completed three-orbits around the earth, at a maximum altitude of approx. 162 miles and an orbital velocity of approx. 17,500 mph. He spotted Perth, Australia, when that city's residents greeted him by switching on their house lights in unison. A four-cent U.S. stamp was put on sale the same day, making it the first U.S. stamp issued on the day of the event it commemorated. Glenn returned to space 36 years later, making 134 more orbits as a crew member of the space shuttle Discovery (29 Oct - 7 Nov 1998) for investigations on space flight and the aging process.
  • In 1986, the Soviet Union launched into orbit Mir, a new space station. Mir, the Russian word for peace, had six docking ports and special laboratories for scientific research. Weeks later, a veteran crew was sent to man the 56-ft-long and 13.6-ft wide station. The core module provided living quarters for the cosmonauts: galley/table, cooking elements and storage, individual crew cabins and personal hygiene area. They also had a working compartment for monitoring and commanding the core systems supported by an electric power system, thermal control system, computer systems, environmental control and life support, communications and tracking systems. Five additional modules were launched between Mar 1987 and April 1996
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  •  Space station Mir
  • In 1937, the first a successful automobile-airplane combination was complete and ready for testing.The first flight took place the next day, 21 Feb 1937. Built by the Westerman Arrowplane Corporation of Santa Monica, Cal., the vehicle was dubbed the Arrowbile, and claimed a top air-speed of 120 mph and 70 mph on a highway. Designed by aeroengineer Waldo Dean Waterman (1894-1976), it evolved from the prototype Arrowplane, a project to design a simple, easy to fly, low cost airplane. The Studebaker Corporation, which supplied the 100 hp engines, eventually took delivery of five Arrowbiles
  • Car airplane
  • Car airplane
Mars Base

Desert Farming Experiment Yields First Results | Science/AAAS | News - 0 views

news.sciencemag.org/...xperiment-yields-first-results

scibyte110 Farming

shared by Mars Base on 17 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • A project to “green” desert areas with an innovative mix of technologies—producing food, biofuel, clean water, energy, and salt
  • A pilot plant built by the Sahara Forest Project (SFP) produced 75 kilograms of vegetables per square meter in three crops annually, comparable to commercial farms in Europe, while consuming only sunlight and seawate
  • The heart of the SFP concept is a specially designed greenhouse. At one end, salt water is trickled over a gridlike curtain so that the prevailing wind blows the resulting cool, moist air over the plants inside
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  • This cooling effect allowed the
  • facility to grow three crops per year, even in the scorching summer
  • At the other end of the greenhouse is a network of pipes with cold seawater running through them
  • Some of the moisture in the air condenses on the pipes and is collected, providing a source of fresh water
  • One of the surprising side effects of such a seawater greenhouse, seen during early experiments, is that cool moist air leaking out of it encourages other plants to grow spontaneously outside
  • Qatar plant took advantage of that effect to grow crops around the greenhouse, including barley and salad rocket (arugula), as well as useful desert plants
  • The pilot plant accentuated this exterior cooling with more “evaporative hedges” that reduced air temperatures by up to 10°C.
  • The third key element of the SFP facility is a concentrated solar power plant
  • This uses mirrors in the shape of a parabolic trough to heat a fluid flowing through a pipe at its focus. The heated fluid then boils water, and the steam drives a turbine to generate power
  • the plant has electricity to run its control systems and pumps and can use any excess to desalinate water for irrigating the plants
  • The fact that this small greenhouse produced such good yields,
  • suggests that a commercial plant—with possibly four crops a year—could do even better
Mars Base

Researchers at Harvard University and MIT discover previously unobserved state of matte... - 0 views

www.ctvnews.ca/...real-life-lightsaber-1.1473318

scibyte104 ViewerFeedback

shared by Mars Base on 27 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • The discovery
  • goes against what scientists previously understood of photons: that elementary light particles are massless loners that do not interact with each other.
  • Most of the properties of light we know about originate from the fact that photons are massless, and that they do not interact with each other
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  • researchers fired a couple of photons into a cloud of rubidium – a chemical element belonging to the metal group – in a vacuum chamber cooled to just a few degrees above absolute zero.
  • When the photons exited the other side of the cloud of atoms
  • were surprised to see the pair emerge as a single molecule.
  • special type of medium in which photons interact with each other
  • so strongly that they begin to act as though they have mass, and they bind together to form molecules
  • Rydberg blockade
  • states that when an atom has energy imparted to it, nearby atoms cannot be excited to the same degree
  • the pair of photons moved through the cloud of atoms, the first photon excited atoms, but had to move forward before the second photon could do the same.
  • the pair of photons pushed and pulled each other through the cloud
  • atomic interaction
  • makes these two photons behave like a molecule
  • team is hoping to use their newly discovered state of matter in the advancement of quantum computing
Mars Base

Mars Science Laboratory: Laser Instrument on NASA Mars Rover Tops 100,000 Zaps - 0 views

mars.jpl.nasa.gov/...index.cfm

scibyte112 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 06 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Curiosity
  • has passed the milestone of 100,000 shots fired by its laser.
  • The 100,000th shot was one of a series of 300 to investigate 10 locations on a rock called "Ithaca" in late October
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  • at a distance of 13 feet, 3 inches (4.04 meters) from the laser and telescope on rover's mast
  • Chemistry and Camera instrument (ChemCam) uses the infrared laser to excite material in a pinhead-size spot on the target into a glowing, ionized gas, called plasma.
  • ChemCam observes that spark with the telescope and analyzes the spectrum of light to identify elements in the target
  • As of the start of December, ChemCam has fired its laser on Mars more than 102,000 times, at more than 420 rock or soil targets
  • The instrument has also returned more than 1,600 images taken by its remote micro-imager camera
  • Each pulse delivers more than a million watts of power for about five one-billionths of a second
  • The technique used by ChemCam, called laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, has been used to assess composition of targets in other extreme environments, such as inside nuclear reactors and on the sea floor
Mars Base

How Our Brain Balances Old and New Skills - 0 views

www.scienceworldreport.com/...alances-old-and-new-skills.htm

scibyte113 BrainTraining

shared by Mars Base on 12 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • To learn new motor skills, the brain must be plastic: able to rapidly change the strengths of connections between neurons, forming new patterns that accomplish a particular task
  • if the brain were too plastic, previously learned skills would be lost too easily.
  • A new computational model developed by MIT neuroscientists explains how the brain maintains the balance between plasticity and stability
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  • and how it can learn very similar tasks without interference between them.
  • The key
  • is that neurons are constantly changing their connections with other neurons
  • not all of the changes are functionally relevant - they simply allow the brain to explore many possible ways to execute a certain skill, such as a new tennis stroke
  • As the brain learns a new motor skill, neurons form circuits that can produce the desired output
  • according to this theory
  • As the brain explores different solutions, neurons can become specialized for specific tasks
  • brain is always trying to find the configurations that balance everything so you can do two tasks, or three tasks, or however many you're learning
  • Perfection is usually not achieved on the first try, so feedback from each effort helps the brain to find better solutions
  • complications arise when the brain is trying to learn many different skills at once
  • Because the same distributed network controls related motor tasks, new modifications to existing patterns can interfere with previously learned skills.
  • particularly tricky when you're learning very similar things
  • such as two different tennis strokes
  • computer chip,
  • instructions for each task would be stored in a different location on the chip.
  • the brain is not organized like a computer chip. Instead, it is massively parallel and highly connected - each neuron connects to, on average, about 10,000 other neurons
  • That connectivity offers an advantage, however, because it allows the brain to test out so many possible solutions to achieve combinations of tasks
  • neurons
  • have a very low signal to noise ratio, meaning that they receive about as much useless information as useful input from their neighbors
  • The constant changes in these connections,
  • researchers call hyperplasticity
  • balanced by another inherent trait of
  • Most models of neural activity don't include noise, but the MIT team says noise is a critical element of the brain's learning ability
  • This model helps to explain how the brain can learn new things without unlearning previously acquired skills
  • the paper shows is that, counterintuitively, if you have neural networks and they have a high level of random noise, that actually helps instead of hindering the stability problem
  • Without noise, the brain's hyperplasticity would overwrite existing memories too easily
  • low plasticity would not allow any new skills to be learned, because the tiny changes in connectivity would be drowned out by all of the inherent noise
  • The constantly changing connections explain why skills can be forgotten unless they are practiced often, especially if they overlap with other routinely performed tasks
  • skills such as riding a bicycle, which is not very similar to other common skills, are retained more easily
  • Once you've learned something, if it doesn't overlap or intersect with other skills, you will forget it but so slowly that it's essentially permanent
  • researchers are now investigating whether this type of model could also explain how the brain forms memories of events, as well as motor skills
Mars Base

Drill Here? NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover Inspects Site - Mars Science Laboratory - 0 views

mars.jpl.nasa.gov/...index.cfm

scibyte128 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 28 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • The team operating NASA's Curiosity Mars rover is telling the rover to use several tools this weekend to inspect a sandstone slab being evaluated as a possible drilling target
  • If this target meets criteria set by engineers and scientists, it could become the mission's third drilled rock, and the first that is not mudstone
  • The planned inspection, designed to aid a decision on whether to drill
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  • includes observations with the camera and X-ray spectrometer at the end of the rover's arm, use of a brush to remove dust from a patch on the rock, and readings of composition at various points on the rock with an instrument that fires laser shots from the rover's mast.
  • The first two Martian rocks drilled and analyzed this way were mudstone slabs neighboring each other in Yellowknife Bay, about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) northeast of the rover's current location
  • Those two rocks yielded evidence of an ancient lakebed environment with key chemical elements and a chemical energy source that provided conditions billions of years ago favorable for microbial life.
  • learn more about the wet process that turned sand deposits into sandstone here
  • the composition of the fluids that bound the grains together
  • Understanding why some sandstones in the area are harder than others also could help explain major shapes of the landscape where Curiosity is working inside Gale Crater.
  • Erosion-resistant sandstone forms a capping layer of mesas and buttes. It could even hold hints about why Gale Crater has a large layered mountain, Mount Sharp, at its center.
Mars Base

Cartilage, made to order: Living human cartilage grown on lab chip -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...140427185157.htm

scibyte128 MedicalTreatment

shared by Mars Base on 28 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • The first example of living human cartilage grown on a laboratory chip has been created by scientists
  • The researchers ultimately aim to use their innovative 3-D printing approach to create replacement cartilage
  • Osteoarthritis is marked by a gradual disintegration of cartilage, a flexible tissue that provides padding where bones come together in a joint
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  • is one of the leading causes of physical disability in the United States
  • some treatments can help relieve arthritis symptoms, there is no cure. Many patients with severe arthritis ultimately require a joint replacement
  • artificial cartilage built using a patient's own stem cells could offer enormous therapeutic potential
  • replacement cartilage could also be a game-changer for people with debilitating joint injuries, such as soldiers with battlefield injuries
  • Creating artificial cartilage requires three main elements: stem cells, biological factors to make the cells grow into cartilage, and a scaffold to give the tissue its shape
  • Tuan's 3-D printing approach achieves all three by extruding thin layers of stem cells embedded in a solution that retains its shape and provides growth factors
  • The ultimate vision is to give doctors a tool they can thread through a catheter to print new cartilage right where it's needed in the patient's body
  • other researchers have experimented with 3-D printing approaches for cartilage,
  • method represents a significant step forward because it uses visible light, while others have required UV light, which can be harmful to living cells.
  • In another significant step
  • used the 3-D printing method to produce the first "tissue-on-a-chip" replica of the bone-cartilage interface
  • the chip could serve as a test-bed for researchers to learn about how osteoarthritis develops and develop new drugs
  • Housing 96 blocks of living human tissue 4 millimeters across by 8 millimeters deep
  • As a next step, the team is working to combine their 3-D printing method with a nanofiber spinning technique they developed previously
  • They hope combining the two methods will provide a more robust scaffold and allow them to create artificial cartilage that even more closely resembles natural cartilage
Mars Base

Astronomers Find Evidence of a Strange Type of Star - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...ence-of-a-strange-type-of-star

scibyte134 ThorneZytkowStar

shared by Mars Base on 05 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • a Thorne-Zytkow Object, or TZO
  • the outward appearance of
  • red supergiants
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  • actually two stars in one: a binary pair where a super-dense neutron star has been absorbed into its less dense supergiant
  • First theorized in 1975
  • difficult to find in real life because of their similarity to red supergiants,
  • It’s only through detailed spectroscopy that the particular chemical signatures
  • can be identified.
  • Only by absorbing a much hotter star — such as a neutron star left over from the explosive death of a more massive partner — is the production of such elements presumed to be possible
Mars Base

Health check on the road - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...2011-11-health-road.html

scibyte20 health

shared by Mars Base on 04 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • A research team at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), in collaboration with researchers at the BMW Group
  • develop a sensor system integrated into the steering wheel that can monitor the driver's state of health while driving
  • the device might be used recognize the onset fainting spells or heart attacks.
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  • monitors vital signs such as heart rate, skin conductance and oxygen saturation in the blood via simple sensors in the steering wheel
  • A driver's skin conductance, for instance, reveals whether he or she is under severe stress, or whether his or her blood pressure exceeds a critical value
  • "When a stress situation is detected by means of skin conductance values, phone calls can be blocked, for instance, or the volume of the radio turned down automatically.
  • With more serious problems the system could turn on the hazard warning lights, reduce the speed or even induce automated emergency braking."
  • Two commercially available sensors are key elements of the integrated vital signs measurement system
  • One of them shines infrared light into the fingers and measures the heart rate and oxygen saturation via reflected light
  • second measures the electric conductance of the skin at contact
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