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Mars Base

Mars Science Laboratory: Images - 0 views

mars.jpl.nasa.gov/...images

scibyte87 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 25 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • left image is the raw, unprocessed color, as it is received directly from Mars
  • center rendering was produced after calibration of the image to show an estimate of "natural" color, or approximately what the colors would look like if we were to view the scene ourselves on Mars
  • right image shows the result of then applying a processing method called white-balancing, which shows an estimate of the colors of the terrain as if illuminated under Earth-like, rather than Martian, lighting
Mars Base

New Kind of "Runt" Supernovae Could be Lurking Unseen - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...rnovae-could-be-lurking-unseen

scibyte88 Supernova

shared by Mars Base on 27 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Until now, supernovae have come in two main versions
  • In one scenario, a huge star, 10 to 100 times more massive as our Sun, collapses causing a colossal stellar explosion
  • Type Ia supernovae, occurs when material from a parent star streams onto the surface of a white dwarf. Over time, so much material falls onto the white dwarf that it raises the core temperature igniting carbon and causing a runaway fusion reaction. This event completely disrupts the white dwarf and results in a colossal stellar explosion
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Now astronomers have found a third type that is fainter and less energetic than a Type Ia. Called a Type Iax supernova
  • essentially a mini supernova
  • only about one-hundredth as bright as their supernova siblings
  • calculates that Type Iax supernovae are about as third as common as Type Ia supernovae
  • The researchers also did not find them in elliptical galaxies, filled with older stars, suggesting that Type Iax supernovae come from young star systems
  • team identified 25 examples of this new type of supernova
  • Based on observations, the team found that the new Type Iax supernovae come from binary star systems containing a white dwarf and a companion star that has burned all of its hydrogen, leaving an outer layer that is helium rich
  • not sure what triggers the Type Iax supernova
  • One explanation involves the ignition of the outer helium layer from the companion star. The resulting shockwave slams into the white dwarf and disrupts it, causing the explosion.
  • Alternately, the white dwarf might ignite first due to the overlying helium shell it has collected from the companion star.
  • it appears that in many cases the white dwarf survives the explosion unlike in a Type Ia supernova where the white dwarf is completely destroyed
  • Supernovae explosions release so much energy as heat and light that they outshine entire galaxies for brief periods of time
  • The extremely hot conditions naturally create new heavier elements, such as gold, lead, nickel, zinc and copper
  • Type Iax supernovas aren’t rare, they’re just faint
Mars Base

Cholesterol-lowering eye drops could treat macular degeneration - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...s-atherosclerosis-macular.html

scibyte89

shared by Mars Base on 03 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • A new study raises the intriguing possibility that drugs prescribed to lower cholesterol may be effective against macular degeneration, a blinding eye disease.
  • Researchers
  • have found that age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss in Americans over 50, shares a common link with atherosclerosis
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Both problems have the same underlying defect: the inability to remove a buildup of fat and cholesterol
  • researchers shed new light on how deposits of cholesterol contribute to macular degeneration and atherosclerosis and even blood vessel growth in some types of cancer
  • Patients who have atherosclerosis often are prescribed medications to lower cholesterol and keep arteries clear
  • This study suggests that some of those same drugs could be evaluated in patients with macular degeneration
  • we need to investigate whether vision loss caused by macular degeneration could be prevented with cholesterol-lowering eye drops or other medications that might prevent the buildup of lipids beneath the retina
  • The new research centers on macrophages, key immune cells that remove cholesterol and fats from tissues
  • In macular degeneration, the excessive buildup of cholesterol begins to occur as we age, and our macrophages begin to malfunction
  • In the "dry" form of age-related macular degeneration, doctors examining the eye can see lipid deposits beneath the retina
  • As those deposits become larger and more numerous, they slowly begin to destroy the central part of the eye, interfering with the vision needed to read a book or drive a car
  • As aging macrophages clear fewer fat deposits beneath the retina, the macrophage cells themselves can become bloated with cholesterol, creating an inflammatory process that leads to the formation of new blood vessels that can cause further damage
  • Those vessels characterize the later "wet" form of the disease
  • that inflammation creates a toxic mix of things that leads to new blood vessel growth
  • Most of the vision loss
  • is the result of bleeding and scar-tissue formation related to abnormal vessel growth
  • the scientists identified a protein that macrophages need to clear fats and cholesterol
  • As mice and humans age, they make less of the protein, and macrophages become less effective at engulfing and removing fat and cholesterol
  • team found that macrophages, from old mice and in patients with macular degeneration, have inadequate levels of the protein, called ABCA1, which transports cholesterol out of cells
  • As a result, the old macrophages accumulated high levels of cholesterol and couldn't inhibit the growth of the damaging blood vessels
  • when the researchers treated the macrophages with a substance that helped restore levels of ABCA1, the cells could remove cholesterol more effectively, and the development of new blood vessels was slowed
  • able to deliver the drug, called an LXR agonist, in eye drops
  • found that we could reverse the macular degeneration in the eye of an old mouse
  • could focus therapy only on the eyes, and we likely could limit the side effects of drugs taken orally
  • since macrophages are important in atherosclerosis and in the formation of new blood vessels around certain types of cancerous tumors, the same pathway also might provide a target for more effective therapies for those diseases
  • can reverse the disease cascade in mice by improving macrophage function, either with eye drops or with systemic treatments,
  • Some of the therapies already being used to treat atherosclerosis target this same pathway, so we may be able to modify drugs that already are available and use them to deliver treatment to the eye
Mars Base

Astronomers Watch as a Black Hole Eats a Rogue Planet - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...black-hole-eats-a-rogue-planet

scibyte89 BlackHole

shared by Mars Base on 03 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Astronomers using the Integral space observatory were able to watch as the planet was eaten by a black hole that had been inactive for decades
  • The observation was
  • from a galaxy that has been quiet for at least 20–30 years
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • the event is a preview of a similar feeding event that is expected to take place with the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy
  • galaxy NGC 4845, 47 million light-years away
  • Astronomers were using Integral to study a different galaxy when they noticed a bright X-ray flare coming from another location in the same wide field-of-view
  • the origin was confirmed as NGC 4845, a galaxy never before detected at high energies
  • the emission was traced from its maximum in January 2011, when the galaxy brightened by a factor of a thousand, and then as it subsided over the course of the year
  • By analyzing the characteristics of the flare, the astronomers could determine that the emission came from a halo of material around the galaxy’s central black hole as it tore apart and fed on an object of 14–30 Jupiter masses, and so the astronomers say the object was either a super-Jupiter or a brown dwarf
  • This object appears to have been ‘wandering,’ which would fit the description of recent studies
  • The black hole in the center of NGC 4845 is estimated to have a mass of around 300,000 times that of our own Sun
  • This is the first time where we have seen the disruption of a substellar object by a black hole
  • estimate that only its external layers were eaten by the black hole, amounting to about 10% of the object’s total mass, and that a denser core has been left orbiting the black hole
  • The flaring event in NGC 4845 might be similar to what is expected to happen with the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy
  • these events will tell astronomers more about what happens to the demise of different types of objects as they encounter black holes of varying sizes
  • Estimates are that events like these may be detectable every few years in galaxies around us
  • the emission brightened and decayed shows there was a delay of 2–3 months between the object being disrupted and the heating of the debris in the vicinity of the black hole.
Mars Base

Could scientists peek into your dreams? (w/ video) - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...2013-04-scientists-peek.html

scibyte89 Dreams

shared by Mars Base on 05 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • small new study suggests
  • Visual experiences you have when dreaming are detectable by the same type of brain activity that occurs when looking at actual images when you're awake
  • The scientists created decoding computer programs based on brain activity measured while wide-awake study participants looked at certain images
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • right after being awakened from the early stages of sleep, the researchers asked the subjects to describe the dream they were having
  • used functional MRI to monitor brain activity of the participants and polysomnography to record the physical changes that occur during sleep
  • compared evidence of brain activity when participants were awake and looking at real images to the brain activity they saw when participants were dreaming
  • the study shows it may be possible to use brain activity patterns to understand something about what a person is dreaming about
  • current approach requires the data of image viewing and sleep within the same [person
  • methods being developed for aligning brain patterns across people
  • there are practical applications to the research
  • evidence suggesting that the pattern of spontaneous brain activity is relevant to health issues
  • researchers chose to awaken the subjects in light sleep rather than in deeper "rapid eye movement" (REM) sleep solely to make the research easier to do
  • it takes at least an hour to reach first REM stage, it would be difficult to get sleep and dream data from multiple participants
  • why it is so hard to remember a dream minutes after waking up
  • thinks it is because particular neurotransmitters or brain regions involved in memory are not active during sleep
  • During sleep and dreaming, part of the brain—the higher visual cortex—is working as if seeing images
  • one expert said the results are intriguing, he was cautious
  • previous disappointments relating brain activity to complex visual experience
  • like to see this replicated
Mars Base

Gone perhaps, but Kepler won't soon be forgotten | Atom & Cosmos | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/..._Kepler_wont_soon_be_forgotten

scibyte95 Kepler

shared by Mars Base on 25 May 13 - No Cached
  • When scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics scheduled a conference called “Exoplanets in the Post-Kepler Era,” they figured that era would still be several years away
  • . When
  • Kepler into space
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • astronomers knew that the galaxy contained at least 350 exoplanets, nearly all of them the size of Jupiter or larger
  • Kepler’s then spent four years
  • added nearly 3,000 planets
  • It will take at least several weeks before they beam commands up to the $600-million telescope, and they admit that a fix is a long shot.
  • Kepler engineers
  • strategizing about how to remotely repair one of two broken reaction wheels that precisely point the telescope
  • astronomers are convinced that the Milky Way contains hundreds of billions of planets, roughly one for every star, with at least 17 billion of them Earth-sized
  • NASA’s next exoplanet-hunting mission, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which is scheduled for a 2017 launch
  • Whereas Kepler has fixed its gaze on distant stars, TESS will focus on bright, nearby stars so that powerful telescopes like the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will be able to probe the atmospheres of planets that TESS discovers
  • s TESS
  • while less sensitive than Kepler, will nonetheless uncover plenty of planets in our neighborhood, including a handful of Earth-sized worlds
  • Astronomers
  • Other astronomers
  • are still optimistic. They have a year of data from the telescope left to analyze
  • quite possibly including an Earth-sized planet orbiting a sunlike star at a distance suitable for life
  • Astronomers hope to pair size measurements of planets observed by telescopes such as TESS with mass readings from ground-based scopes that look for subtle wobbles in stars’ motion caused by the gravitational pull of orbiting planets.
  • Several years ago
  • radial velocity, could pick out only hulking planets that delivered a hard yank to their stars
  • lately the technology has improved so drastically that in October 2012, the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher instrument
  • spotted what appears to be a planet only slightly heavier than Earth tightly orbiting Alpha Centauri B, a sunlike star a mere 4.4 light-years away
  • Kepler’s main goal was to determine the frequency of Earthlike planets in the galaxy
  • have enough data to make an intelligent extrapolation about what that number is, but
  • actually determining that number
Mars Base

Mosses frozen in time come back to life | Life | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...ozen_in_time_come_back_to_life

scibyte96 FrozenLife

shared by Mars Base on 28 May 13 - No Cached
  • After hundreds of years buried under ice, mosses can regrow
  • The revived plants come from Canada’s Ellesmere Island, where the Teardrop Glacier has retreated since the end of a cold period in 1550 to 1850 known as the Little Ice Age
  • On recently exposed ground
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  • found clumps of mosses that looked dead. But among the brown tangles, the team noticed a few green sprigs
  • The team took brown moss samples back to the lab and used radiocarbon dating to determine that they had lived about 400 years ago
  • Based on the glacier’s retreat rate, the researchers estimated the plants had been uncovered for less than two years.
  • the team ground up some of the plants and gave them nutrients, water and light
  • From seven of 24 samples, a total of four moss species grew
  • The budding plants didn’t come from seeds or spores
  • In moss
  • any cell can be reset, almost like a stem cell, to grow a new plant
  • how long a moss cell can stay viable is “anyone’s guess,”
  • the findings suggest that the regenerated mosses may help repopulate ecosystems after glaciers retreat
Mars Base

Conductive paint lands in pens and pots for creatives - 0 views

phys.org/...13-05-pens-pots-creatives.html

scibyte96

shared by Mars Base on 28 May 13 - No Cached
  • The substance allows the painting of "liquid wiring" on any surface. Except for skin
  • Nontoxic and drying at room temperature, the product has caught on with educators, DIY makers and inventors
  • Radio Shack stocks their paint pen
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  • they hope to appeal to a wide creative gamut of hobbyists, artists, and engineers for innovative ways to use their products
  • are Paint, they emphasized, is the first non-toxic electrically conductive paint available
  • the substance is child friendly, which opens the door to educational projects, including toys, and touch-sensitive paper drawings that play sounds
  • According to the company, Bare Paint has a surface resistivity of approximately 55 ohms/square at 50 microns layer thickness
  • The product is water-based but it is not waterproof
  • generally split applications into two simple classifications, signaling and powering
  • Signaling could include using the Paint as a potentiometer while interfacing with a micro-controller, as a conduit in a larger circuit or as a capacitive sensor
  • Powering a device would include lighting LED's or driving small speakers
Mars Base

Saturn-Like Alien Planet Found by Little Telescope | KELT-6b | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/-saturn-like-alien-planet.html

scibyte97 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 05 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Tiny telescopes in Arizona and South Africa have spotted a Saturn-like planet in orbit around a star about 700 light-years from Earth.
  • the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) and other ground-based tools spied the alien planet as it passed in front of its star
  • KELT-6b, can be seen from the surface of Earth for five hours as it transits
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • year lasts only about 7.8 days
  • KELT-6b has no rings, its mass and size resemble the planet Saturn
Mars Base

'Space Selfie' Telescope Could Hunt Alien Planets … If It Raises A Cool $2M - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...planets-if-it-raises-a-cool-2m

scibyte98 CrowdSourcing Arkyd

shared by Mars Base on 12 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • A crowdfunded telescope
  • is now considering a search for alien planets.
  • Planetary Resources Inc. (the proposed asteroid miners) announced a new “stretch goal” for its asteroid-hunting Arkyd-100 telescope.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • If the company can raise $2 million — double its original goal — it promises to equip the Arkyd telescope to look at star systems for exoplanets
  • partnering with exoplanet researchers at MIT [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Arkyd would use two methods to hunt down planets
  • Transiting, or seeing the dip in a star’s brightness when a planet passes in front of it;
  • Gravitational microlensing, or finding planets by measuring how the gravity of the star (and its planets) distorts light from stars and galaxies behind
  • If it can raise $1.3 million, Planetary Resources proposes to build a ground station at an undisclosed “educational partner” that would double the download speed of data from the orbiting observatory
  • Two more stretch goals will be revealed if Arkyd receives 11,000 backers and 15,000 backers
Mars Base

Should This Alien World Even Exist? This Young Disk Could Challenge Planet-Formation Th... - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...enge-planet-formation-theories

scibyte98 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 14 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • gap in the cloud? That could be a planet being born some 176 light-years away from Earth
  • small planet, only 6 to 28 times Earth’s mass.
  • This alien world, if we can confirm it, shouldn’t be there according to conventional planet-forming theory
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  • The gap in the image above — taken by the Hubble Space Telescope — probably arose when a planet under construction swept through the dust and debris in its orbit
  • That’s not much of a surprise (at first blush) given what we think we know about planet formation
  • You start with a cloud of debris and gas swirling around a star, then gradually the bits and pieces start colliding, sticking together and growing bigger into small rocks, bigger ones and eventually, planets or gas giant planet cores
  • this planet is a heck of a long way from its star, TW Hydrae, about twice Pluto’s distance from the sun
  • Given that alien systems’ age, that world shouldn’t have formed so quickly.
  • Astronomers believe that Jupiter took about 10 million years to form at its distance away from the sun
  • This planet near TW Hydrae should take 200 times longer to form because the alien world is moving slower, and has less debris to pick up
  • because TW Hydrae‘s system is believed to be only 8 million years old.
  • TW Hydrae is only 55 percent as massive as our sun
  • astronomers are seriously investigating other theories
  • One alternative brought up in the press release: perhaps part of the disc collapsed due to gravitational instability
  • If that is the case, a planet could come to be in only a few thousand years, instead of several million
  • add to planet formation theories as to how you can actually form a planet very far out
  • If we can actually confirm that there’s a planet there, we can connect its characteristics to measurements of the gap properties
  • direct collapse” theory, though: astronomers believe it takes a bunch of matter that is one to two times more massive than Jupiter before a collapse can occur to form a planet
  • this world is no more than 28 times the mass of Earth, as best as we can figure
  • Jupiter itself is 318 times more massive than Earth
  • There are also intriguing results about the gap
  • dust grains in this system, orbiting nearby the gap, are still smaller than the size of a grain of sand
  • Astronomers plan to use ALMA and the James Webb Space Telescope, which should launch in 2018, to get a better look
Mars Base

Distantly Orbiting Alien World May Challenge Planet-Formation Theories | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/tantly-orbiting-exoplanet.html

scibyte98 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 14 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • red dwarf star TW Hydrae, which lies about 176 light-years from Earth in the constellation Hydra
  • if there is a planet and there is no dust larger than a grain of sand farther out, that would be a huge challenge to traditional planet formation models
Mars Base

Nuclear Fusion Could Power Rocket to Mars | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/uclear-fusion-rocket-mars.html

scibyte90 MarsMission

shared by Mars Base on 11 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Previous estimates have found that a roundtrip manned mission to Mars would require about 500 days of space travel
  • Nuclear fusion occurs when the nuclei of two or more atoms combine, resulting in a release of energy
  • The sun and other stars convert this energy into light, and the same process gives hydrogen bombs their destructive power
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • large metal rings (likely made of lithium
Mars Base

Atlantis Exposed: Space Shuttle Fully Unwrapped for NASA Exhibit | Kennedy Space Center... - 0 views

www.space.com/tlantis-unwrapped-exhibit.html

scibyte92 shuttle

shared by Mars Base on 27 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Space shuttle Atlantis
  • is set to go on public display June 29 at NASA's Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida
  • revealed Friday (April 26) after workers spent two days peeling off its protective shrink-wrap cover of the past five months.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • , workers began carefully cutting back the 16,000 square feet (1,486 square meters) of shrink wrap that protected Atlantis as its $100 million exhibition building was completed around it
  • By the end of the first day, the shuttle's nose, tail, aft engines and left wing were exposed.
  • the workers completed the process, revealing Atlantis' right wing and its 60-foot-long (18 meter) payload bay
  • Opening the payload bay is
  • set to begin in May, will take about two weeks, as the doors are very slowly hoisted open, one by one.
  • Atlantis has been mounted. Thirty feet (9 meters) in the air, the space shuttle has been tilted 43.21 degrees, such that its left wing extends toward the ground.
  • Atlantis will appear to be back in space — an effect that will be enhanced by lighting and a mural-size digital screen that will project the Earth's horizon behind the shuttle
Mars Base

NASA Mulling Missions for Donated Spy Telescopes | National Reconnaissance Office | Spa... - 0 views

www.space.com/llite-telescopes-missions.html

scibyte93

shared by Mars Base on 04 May 13 - No Cached
  • NASA is sorting through a variety of possible uses for a pair of powerful spy satellite telescopes
  • SA asked scientists to suggest missions for the telescopes, which were donated by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and are comparable in size and appearance to the famous Hubble Space Telescope.
  • More than 60 serious proposals came
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • in, the most promising of which were presented in early February
  • The two scopes were originally built to carry out surveillance missions under a multibillion-dollar NRO program called Future Imagery Architecture
  • cost overruns and delays killed the program in 2005, and NASA announced in June 2012 that the NRO had bequeathed the instruments to the space agency
  • the telescopes' 8-foot-wide (2.4 meters) main mirrors are comparable to that of Hubble, the NRO instruments are designed to have a much wider field of view
  • Seven big ideas
  • Mars-orbiting space telescope
  • Exoplanet observatory
  • General-purpose faint object explorer
  • Advanced, Hubble-like visible light/ultraviolet telescope
  • Optical communications node in space (which would aid transmissions to and from deep-space assets)
  • Geospace dynamic observatory (which would study space weather and the sun-Earth system)
  • Research of Earth's upper atmosphere (from a spot aboard the International Space Station)
  • Whatever missions NASA ultimately assigns to the NRO scopes, the instruments are a long way from launch
  • they're far from being fully outfitted spacecraft.
  • no instruments on these two telescopes — just primary and secondary mirrors and the support structures
  • It's going to take a while to develop the instruments and integrate them into the structure
  • there's no guarantee that it will be
  • the funding to bring the scopes up to speed, launch them into space and maintain their operations has not been granted. And
Mars Base

Chipmaker Races to Save Stephen Hawking's Speech as His Condition Deteriorates: Sc... - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

scibyte80 StephenHawking

shared by Mars Base on 01 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has long relied on technology to help him connect with the outside world despite the degenerative motor neuron disease he has battled for the past 50 years
  • a highly respected computer scientist indicated at last week’s International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that he and his team may be close to a breakthrough that could boost the rate at which the physicist communicates, which has fallen to a mere one word per minute in recent years.
  • For the past decade Hawking has used a voluntary twitch of his cheek muscle to compose words and sentences one letter at a time that are expressed through a speech-generation device connected to his computer.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Each tweak stops a cursor that continuously scans text on a screen facing the scientist.
  • Intel chief technology officer
  • noted that Hawking can actually make a number of other facial expressions as well that might also be used to speed up the rate at which the physicist conveys his thoughts
  • Even providing Hawking with two inputs would give him the ability to communicate using Morse code
  • Intel has since the late 1990s supplied Hawking with technology to help the scientist express himself
  • The latest chapter in their work together began in late 2011 when Hawking reached out to
  • inform
  • the Intel co-founder and father of Moore’s law that the physicist’s ability to compose text was slowing and inquiring whether Intel could help.
  • met with Hawking early last year around the time of the latter’s 70th birthday celebration in Cambridge, where the Intel CTO was one of the speakers
  • After meeting with Hawking
  • he wondered whether his company’s processor technology could restore the scientist’s ability to communicate at five words per minute, or even increase that rate to 10
  • Intel is now working on a system that can use Hawking’s cheek twitch as well as mouth and eyebrow movements to provide signals to his computer
  • built a new, character-driven interface in modern terms that includes a better word predictor
  • company is also exploring the use of facial-recognition software to create a new user interface for Hawking that would be quicker than selecting individual letters or words
  • A black box beneath his wheelchair contains an audio amplifier, voltage regulators and a USB hardware key that receives the input from an infrared sensor on Hawking’s eyeglasses, which detects changes in light as he twitches his cheek
  • current setup includes a tablet PC with a forward-facing Webcam that he can use to place Skype calls
  • A hardware voice synthesizer sits in another black box on the back of the chair and receives commands from the computer via a USB-based serial port
  • Intel’s work with Hawking is part of the company’s broader research into smart gadgets as well as assistive technologies for the elderly
  • The key to advancing smart devices—which have been at a plateau over the past five or six years—is context awareness
  • Devices will really get to know us the way a friend would, understanding how our facial expressions reflect our mood
  • Intel’s plan for identifying personal context requires a combination of hardware sensors—camera, accelerometer, microphone, thermometer and others
  • with software that can check one’s personal calendar, social networks and Internet browsing habits, to name a few.
  • use this [information] to reason your current context and what's important at any given time [and deliver] pervasive assistance
  • One approach to “pervasive assistance” is the Magic Carpet, a rug that Intel and GE developed with embedded sensors and accelerometers that can record a person’s normal routine and even their gait, sounding an alert when deviations are detected.
  • Such assistance will anticipate our needs, letting us know when we are supposed to be at an appointment and even reminding us to carry enough cash when running certain errands
Mars Base

First Evidence of Life in Antarctic Subglacial Lake : The Crux - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...e-in-antarctic-subglacial-lake

scibyte80 AntarcticLake

shared by Mars Base on 01 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • The search continues for life in subglacial Lake Whillans, 2,600 feet below the surface of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet—but a thrilling preliminary result has detected signs of life
  • At 6:20am on January 28, four people in sterile white Tyvek suits tended to a winch winding cable onto the drill platform
  • One person knocked frost off the cable as it emerged from the ice borehole a few feet below
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • a gray plastic vessel, as long as a baseball bat, filled with water from Lake Whillans, half a mile below.
  • The bottle was hurried into a 40-foot cargo container outfitted as a laboratory on skis
  • Some of the lake water was squirted into bottles of media in order to grow whatever microbes might inhabit the lake
  • cultures could require weeks to produce results
  • When lake water was viewed under a microscope, cells were seen: their tiny bodies glowed green in response to DNA-sensitive dye. It was the first evidence of life in an Antarctic subglacial lake.
  • (A Russian team has reported that two types of bacteria were found in water from subglacial Lake Vostok, but DNA sequences matched those of bacteria that are known to live inside kerosene—causing the scientists to conclude that those bacteria came from kerosene drilling fluid used to bore the hole, and not from Lake Vostok itself
  • In order to conclusively demonstrate that Lake Whillans harbors life, the researchers will need to complete more time-consuming experiments showing that the cells actually grow
  • dead cells can sometimes show up under a microscope with DNA-sensitive
  • weeks or months will pass before it is known whether these cells represent known types of microbes, or something never seen before
  • t a couple of things seem likely. Most of those microbes probably subsist by chewing on rocks. And despite being sealed beneath 2,600 feet of ice, they probably have a steady supply of oxygen.
  • oxygen comes from water melting off the base of the ice sheet—maybe a few penny thicknesses of ice per year
  • When you melt ice, you’re liberating the air bubbles [trapped in that ice
  • That’s 20 percent oxygen
  • , lake bacteria could live on commonly occurring pyrite minerals that contain iron and sulfur
  • would obtain energy by using oxygen to essentially “burn” that iron and sulfur (analogous to the way that animals use oxygen to slowly burn sugars and fats).
  • The half mile of glacial ice sitting atop Lake Whillans is quite pure—derived from snow that fell onto Antarctica thousands of years ago.
  • contains only one-hundredth the level of dissolved minerals that are seen in a clear mountain creek, or in tap water from a typical city
  • a sensor lowered down the borehole this week showed that dissolved minerals were far more abundant in the lake itself
  • The fact that we see high concentrations is suggestive that there’s some interesting water-rock-microbe interaction that’s going on
  • Microbes, in other words, might well be munching on minerals under the ice sheet
  • will take months or years to unravel this picture
  • will perform experiments to see whether microbes taken from the lake metabolize iron, sulfur, or other components of minerals
  • will analyze the DNA of those microbes to see whether they’re related to rock-chewing bacteria that are already known to science.
  • Antarctica isn’t the only place in the solar system where water sits concealed in the dark beneath thick ice. Europa and Enceladus (moons of Jupiter and Saturn, respectively) are also thought to harbor oceans of liquid water. What is learned at Lake Whillans could shed light on how best to look for life in these other places
Mars Base

Newsflash: Lightning May Cause Headaches - News Watch - 0 views

newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/...-lightning-may-cause-headaches

scibyte82 lightning

shared by Mars Base on 13 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • The study found a shocking 31 percent increase of the risk of headache and a 28 percent increased risk of migraine for chronic headache sufferers on days that lightning struck within 25 miles (40 kilometers) of their homes
  • Furthermore, new-onset headaches and migraines increased by 24 percent and 23 percent, respectively
  • new study is the first to show a correlation between lightning and associated weather phenomena and the squalls in our heads
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • results “suggest that lightning has its own unique effect on headache
  • how exactly lightning might trigger headaches
  • there are a number of possible explanations
  • Electromagnetic waves emitted from lightning could trigger headaches
  • lightning produces increases in air pollutants like ozone, and can cause release of fungal spores that might lead to migraine
  • while the study sheds light on the apparent link between lightning and headaches, “the exact mechanisms through which lightning and/or its associated meteorologic factors trigger headache are unknown
Mars Base

Meteor strike in Russia hurts almost 1,000 (w/ Video) - 0 views

phys.org/...ower-panic-central-russia.html

scibyte82 RussianMeteor

shared by Mars Base on 16 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • The fall of such a large meteor estimated as weighing dozens of tonnes was extremely rare
  • 950 people were injured, with two-thirds of the injuries light wounds from glass shards and other materials blown out by the shockwave
  • the ministry saying almost 300 buildings were damaged including schools, hospitals, a zinc factory and even an ice hockey stadium
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • At 9:20 am (0320 GMT), an object was observed above Chelyabinsk which flew by at great speed and left a trail behind. Within two minutes there were two bangs," regional emergencies official Yuri Burenko
  • office of the local governor said that a meteorite had fallen into a lake outside the town of Chebarkul in the Chelyabinsk region and television images pointed to a six-metre (20-foot) hole in the frozen lake's ice
  • it has yet to be finally confirmed if meteorite fragments made contact with the Earth and there were no reports that any locals had been hurt directly by a falling piece of meteorite
  • the shock wave blew out windows amid temperatures as low as minus 18 degrees Celsius (zero degrees Fahrenheit
  • Russian Academy of Sciences
  • estimated the body to be several metres long and weighing several dozen tonnes
  • The meteor explosion appears to be one of the most stunning cosmic events above Russia since the 1908 Tunguska Event
  • With the meteor quickly a leading trend on Twitter
  • locals posted amateur footage on YouTube showing men swearing in surprise and fright, and others grinding their cars to a halt
  • virtually impossible" to spot objects such as the meteor that struck Russia, which he called a "tiny asteroid", ahead of time against a daytime sky
  • The Chelyabinsk region is Russia's industrial heartland
  • huge facilities that include a nuclear power plant and the massive Mayak atomic waste storage and treatment centre
  • radiation levels in the region also did not change and that 20,000 rescue workers had been dispatched to help the injured and locate those requiring help
Mars Base

End of the World: 10 Disasters That Could End It All At Any Given Second - Best of the ... - 0 views

botw.org/endworld.html

scibyte75 End-of-the-World

shared by Mars Base on 13 Dec 12 - Cached
  • Gamma-Ray Burst
  • Gamma-ray bursts are extremely powerful, estimated to have 10 quadrillion times more energy than our sun
  • They are created by the collision of two collapsed stars
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • it is almost impossible to visualize collapsed stars making it even more difficult to predict the location of a gamma-ray burst
  • A burst 1,000 light years from the earth (further away than most of our stars) would create an explosion as bright as our sun and bring a hasty destruction to earth
  • atmosphere and the ozone would provide protection at first it would soon be cooked away by the radiation. UV rays would kill the photosynthetic plankton in the ocean, which provide most of the earth's oxygen
  • At least one burst can be seen each day when watching our sky with gamma-ray vision; it can't be too long before there is one closer to home
  • earth's atmosphere and magnetic field protect us from the consequences of these potentially lethal flares
  • The sun emits solar flares, also known as coronal mass ejections, towards earth frequently
  • These flares are large magnetic outbursts which contain high-speed subatomic particles
  • evidence has been found that sun-like stars far from our solar system can briefly increase in brightness by 20 times
  • hypothesized that these increases are caused by super-flares, which are millions of times more powerful than the common solar flare
  • If our sun were to emit one of these super-flares it would literally fry the earth
  • if our sun's activity were to decrease by a mere 1% (which has been known to happen to many sun-like stars) we would be flung back into another ice age
  • Solar Activity (Super-Flares and Decreased Activity)
  • Particle Accelerators
  • When electric fields are used to accelerate protons they could collide at speed fast enough to create black holes or bits of altered matter
  • These small black holes would slowly engulf our planet
  • pieces of altered matter, called strangeletes, would destroy any ordinary matter they came in contact with, eventually annihilating the entire planet
  • most scientists assure that none of the particle accelerators being used at the present are strong enough to bring about these events
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