Skip to main content

Home/ SciByte/ Group items tagged oxygen

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Mars Base

Nontoxic cancer therapy proves effective against metastatic cancer - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...rapy-effective-metastatic.html

scibyte98 Cancer

shared by Mars Base on 11 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • A combination of nontoxic dietary and hyperbaric oxygen therapies effectively increased survival time in a mouse model of aggressive metastatic cancer
  • a research team from the Hyperbaric Biomedical Research Laboratory at the University of South Florida has found.
  • the research shows the effects of combining two nontoxic adjuvant cancer therapies, the ketogenic diet and hyperbaric oxygen therapy, in a mouse model of late-stage, metastatic cancer
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • demonstrates the potential of these cost-effective, nontoxic therapies to contribute to current cancer treatment regimens
  • Metastasis, the spreading of cancer from the primary tumor to distant spots, is responsible for over 90 percent of cancer-related deaths in humans
  • In the study, mice with advanced metastatic cancer were fed either a standard high carbohydrate diet or carbohydrate-restricted ketogenic diet
  • Mice on both diets also received hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which uses a special chamber to increase the amount of oxygen in the tissues
  • The ketogenic diet forces a physiological shift in substrate utilization from glucose to fatty acids and ketone bodies for energy
  • Normal healthy cells readily adapt to using ketone bodies for fuel, but cancer cells lack this metabolic flexibility, and thus become selectively vulnerable to reduced glucose availability
  • Solid tumors also have areas of low oxygen, which promotes tumor growth and metastatic spread
  • Hyperbaric oxygen therapy involves breathing 100 percent oxygen at elevated barometric pressure, saturating the tumors with oxygen
  • When administered properly, both the ketogenic diet and hyperbaric oxygen therapy are non-toxic and may even protect healthy tissues while simultaneously damaging cancer cells
  • both therapies slowed disease progression independently, animals receiving the combined ketogenic diet and hyperbaric oxygen therapy lived 78 percent longer than mice fed a standard high-carbohydrate diet
Mars Base

Oxygen discovered at Saturn's moon Dione - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...-oxygen-saturn-moon-dione.html

scibyte36 Saturn Dione

shared by Mars Base on 03 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Dione, one of Saturn’s icy moons, has a weak exosphere which includes molecules of oxygen, according to new findings from the Cassini-Huygens mission
  • international mission made the discovery using combined data from one of Cassini’s instruments, called CAPS (Cassini Plasma Spectrometer
  • Dione joins Rhea and the main rings in Saturn's system in having an oxygen rich exosphere
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • It now looks like oxygen production is a universal process wherever an icy moon is bathed in a strong trapped radiation and plasma environment
  • Cassini flew by Dione on 7 April 2010
  • During that flyby
  • molecular oxygen ions near the moon's icy surface
  • used the measurements to estimate the density of the molecular oxygen ions to be in the range of 0.01 to 0.09 ions per cubic centimetre
  • molecular oxygen ions are produced when neutral molecules are ionized; the measurements confirm that a neutral exosphere surrounds Dione.
  • Dione's exosphere is very thin - compared to Earth's atmosphere the density is about a million billionth. The exciting thing is that there is oxygen
Mars Base

Saturn's Icy Moon Dione Has Oxygen Atmosphere | Saturn Pictures | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/n-dione-oxygen-atmosphere.html

scibyte36 Saturn Dione

shared by Mars Base on 03 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • NASA spacecraft circling Saturn has discovered a wispy oxygen atmosphere on the ringed planet's icy moon Dione
  • is 5 trillion times less dense than the air at Earth's surface
  • detected by NASA's Cassini spacecraft
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • equivalent to conditions 300 miles (480 kilometers) above Earth
  • one oxygen ion for every 2,550 cubic feet (90,000 cubic meters
  • still enough to qualify as an atmosphere
  • announced Friday (March 2).
  • Dione, in addition to Saturn's rings and the moon Rhea, is a source of oxygen molecules
  • shows that molecular oxygen is actually common in the Saturn system and reinforces that it can come from a process that doesn't involve life
  • Dione is one of Saturn's smaller moons
  • 698 miles (1,123 km) wide
  • orbits Saturn once every 2.7 days
  • distance of about 234,000 miles (377,400 km)
  • roughly the same as that between Earth and its moon
  • The oxygen on Dione may potentially be created by solar photons or high-energy particles that bombard the Saturn moon's ice-covered surface, kicking up oxygen ions in the process, Tokar explained.  Another idea suggests that geologic processes on Dione could feed the moon's atmosphere, researchers added.
  • atmosphere on Saturn's moon Rhea — one similar to that of Dione — was also detected in 2010
  • Dione was discovered in 1684 by astronomer Giovanni Cassini
  • named after the Greek goddess Dione, who the ancient Greek poet Homer described as the mother of the goddess Aphrodite
  • launched the Cassini mission in 1997 and it has been orbiting Saturn since its arrival at the ringed planet in 2004
  • joint effort by NASA and the space agencies of Europe and Italy, has been extended several times, most recently until 2017
Mars Base

Distant planets' atmospheres revealed | Atom & Cosmos | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...t_planets_atmospheres_revealed

scibyte86 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 15 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Astronomers have gotten the most detailed look yet at the atmosphere of a planet outside the solar system
  • The study is among the first to directly analyze the chemical makeup of an exoplanet
  • In the past, astronomers inferred the existence of exoplanets and their gases by looking for subtle changes in the light streaming from the planet’s star
  • ...42 more annotations...
  • Now, with improved instruments, a team
  • has detected light coming directly from a planet light-years away
  • The data have high enough resolution to reveal not only the presence but the abundance of carbon monoxide and water in the planet’s atmosphere
  • Such information could shed light on how the planet formed
  • studies could also reveal the presence of life on a distant planet, but the planet’s size and orbit have already ruled it out as a habitable world
  • In 2008
  • the first image of a multiplanet system outside the solar system, showing three gas giants orbiting the star HR 8799
  • HR 8799 is about 130 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Pegasus
  • The planets are scorching hot, making them bright enough for astronomers to detect directly
  • In 2010, the researchers imaged a fourth planet around HR 8799
  • In the new study
  • focused on one of these planets, HR 8799c.
  • Five to 10 times as massive as Jupiter, HR 8799c sits about eight times farther away from its star than Jupiter does from the sun
  • Because of that great distance, the astronomers could block the star’s light and record infrared light
  • Because different gases absorb and emit light in distinct ways, the team could identify carbon monoxide and water but found no methane, which scientists had thought might be present.
  • In another new study
  • researchers simultaneously collected infrared light from the atmospheres of all four planets
  • A team led by
  • an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, found hints of ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide and acetylene in the planets’ atmospheres
  • The chemistry of each planet varies
  • different from anything in our own solar system
  • Although the teams looked at different wavelengths of light, which pick up different types of molecules, the two studies appear consistent
  • by peering at just one planet, Konopacky’s team obtained more detailed data that allowed the researchers to get a sense of how much carbon and oxygen is in HR 8799c’s atmosphere
  • Knowing the ratio of carbon to oxygen in the atmosphere may reveal how the planet formed
  • Astronomers have two competing theories of how planets arise from the disk of gas and dust encircling a young star
  • In the gravitational instability model, some of the gas and dust suddenly clumps and collapses, simultaneously creating a planet’s core and atmosphere
  • In this scenario, the chemical composition of a planet should match that of its star
  • In the other model, known as core accretion, planet building is a two-step process
  • First, material from the disk accumulates into a core.
  • Later, the core captures gases swirling in the disk to form an atmosphere.
  • In this case, the carbon-to-oxygen ratio of the planet may differ from the star because the accretion of cores may deplete the disk of certain elements
  • Compared with its star, HR 8799c appears to have slightly more carbon relative to oxygen, suggesting the planet originated via core accretion
  • surmise that when the disk around HR 8799 formed, water froze into particles of ice.
  • The bits of ice collided to form the planet’s core, leaving behind little water vapor, and therefore less oxygen, when the planet accumulated its atmosphere later on
  • Other researchers are not convinced by this conclusion
  • “We don’t really understand planetary formation enough to make a strong case either way,”
  • the data from both new studies may help astronomers refine their simulations of planetary formation
  • astronomers have directly imaged planets around three distant stars
  • researchers are poised to capture light from many more planets
  • Project 1640,
  • is looking for Jupiter-sized planets around some 200 stars
  • “Ultimately, with better instruments, people will be able to use these methods on Earthlike planets.”
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

Chocolate makes snails smarter - 0 views

phys.org/...-chocolate-snails-smarter.html

scibyte65 chocolate

shared by Mars Base on 27 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • some websites even maintain that dark chocolate can have beneficial effects
  • the science underpinning these claims, and you'll discover just how sparse it is
  • University of Calgary undergraduate
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • became curious about how dietary factors might affect memory
  • Despite his misgivings
  • decided to concentrate on a group of compounds – the flavonoids – found in a wide range of 'superfoods' including chocolate and green tea, focusing on one particular flavonoid, epicatechin (epi).
  • figuring out how a single component of chocolate might improve human memory is almost impossible
  • too many external factors influence memory formation
  • the pond snail Lymnaea stagnalis, to find out whether the dark chocolate flavonoid could improve their memories
  • publish their discovery that epi improves the length and strength of snail memories in The Journal of Experimental Biology
  • molluscs can be trained to remember a simple activity: to keep their breathing tubes (pneumostomes) closed when immersed in deoxygenated water
  • t pond snails usually breathe through their skins, but when oxygen levels fall, they extend the breathing tube above the surface to supplement the oxygen supply
  • e snails can be trained to remember to keep the breathing tube closed in deoxygenated water by gently tapping it when they try to open it,
  • the strength of the memory depends on the training regime.
  • identified an epi concentration – 15 mg m3 pond water – that didn't affect the snails' behaviour
  • to be sure that we're not looking at wired animals
  • ested the molluscs' memories. Explaining that a half-hour training session in deoxygenated water allows the snails to form intermediate-term memories (lasting less than 3 h) but not long-term memories (lasting 24 h or more)
  • when Fruson plunged the molluscs into deoxygenated water to tested their memories a day later, they remembered to keep their breathing tubes closed
  • provided the snails with two training sessions, the animals were able to remember to keep their breathing tubes shut more than 3 days later
  • boosted the molluscs' memories and extended the duration, but how strong were the epi-memories
  • memories can be overwritten by another memory
  • process called extinction
  • the original memory is not forgotten and if the additional memory is stored weakly
  • can be lost and the original memory restored
  • then tried to replace it with a memory where the snails could open their breathing tubes
  • instead of learning the new memory, the epi-trained snails stubbornly kept their breathing tubes shut. The epi-memory was too strong to be extinguished.
  • also found that instead of requiring a sensory organ to consolidate the snails' memories – like their memories of predators triggered by smell – epi directly affects the neurons that store the memory
  • that the cognitive effects of half a bar of dark chocolate could even help your grades: good news for chocoholics the world over.
Mars Base

An artificial blood substitute from Transylvania - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...d-substitute-transylvania.html

scibyte109

shared by Mars Base on 07 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Researchers in
  • Romania, have recently made some significant advances in developing artificial blood substitutes
  • formulation is based not on synthetic hemoglobins, but rather on hemerythrin protein extracted from marine worms
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • the team has been testing their blood substitute in both mice and in cultured cells
  • initial results suggest that many of the adverse effects normally associated with either perfluorocarbon (PFC) or hemoglobin-based oxygen carrier (HBOC) substitutes can be eliminated, or at least minimized
  • Human blood only has a shelf life of a few weeks
  • It also needs to be matched to the recipient's blood type,
  • the risks of disease transmission can be minimized by testing, dangers still present if the donor has been recently infected
  • What makes hemoglobin such a success, is a phenomenon known as cooperative binding
  • as more oxygen binds to hemoglobin in the lungs, it becomes even easier for additional oxygen to bind
  • The problem
  • is that one way or another, the hemoglobin they contain ends up escaping and causing serious damage to organs like the kidneys
  • While their small size allows them to penetrate and oxygenate the nooks and crannies of the body much better than RBCs, that same feature also leads to undesireable extravasation into tissue
  • The goal is not to develop a permanent replacement solution, but rather something that could be used to bridge a critical situation for the few hours or days
  • Researchers have found when these modified hemoglobins do get into tissues, they bind nitric oxide, which appears to have the result that the patient's blood pressure rises precipitously
Mars Base

T. K. Mattingly Oral History - 0 views

www.jsc.nasa.gov/...MattinglyTK_11-6-01.htm

scibyte91 Apollo13

shared by Mars Base on 18 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • The Race to the Moon book’s description is probably a little better
  • The way back, the spacecraft started drifting off its trajectory, and now they had to make their midcourse corrections to get back
  • turns out that, too, we had practiced in some simulation somewhere. It’s not very accurate, but it doesn’t have to be
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • It was hard to get people to recognize that we do that, but you don’t need to be the nearest five degrees
  • didn’t solve any problems in the simulator
  • actually ran those procedures, verified them, made some red lines, I think, brought them back over
  • They had to take their flight plan and turn it over and tear out pages and write on the back of it. The only thing they had were pencils and ball pens
  • actually had extra electrical power in the lunar module batteries
  • Somebody came in and found a way to do a jumper cord and take battery power out of the lunar module and top off the command module and to use that power to help get the command module stuff started so we didn’t use all the power from the batteries. So we ended up with a good margin on the batteries
  • Because all our procedures were based on two practical rules. One of them is, structural things don’t break. Actually, that drove everything. Fluid lines and structural—you know, joints can leak, shorts can happen to wires, but physical structure doesn’t break
  • if you admitted to that, then the number of things that you could have to prepare for is infinite.
  • had done a lot of testing of this, a lot of margin of safety in the hardware, so we never looked at those kinds of implications
  • Got in the car to drive back up. This is two days, I think, two days before launch, I think. I’m driving up the road, turned the radio on, and they interrupt the news announcement that this afternoon NASA has announced that they have changed and substituted Jack Swigert for me.
  • Gene says, “Sy, didn’t Jim say that he looked out the window and there’s stuff out in the sky and he heard something?” He says, “Does that sound like instrumentation to you?”
  • thanks to the kind of simulation training program we had, maybe the things weren’t exactly the same or in an exactly the same order, but everything we ended up doing had been done somewhere.
  • somewhere in an earlier sim, there had been an occasion to do what they call LM lifeboat, which meant you had to get the crew out of the command module and into the lunar module, and they stayed there
  • when you get out in space, that all those black spots in between the stars are filled with stars, and those constellations are nowhere near as obvious as they were
  • The guys in the lunar module electrical system had calculated how much time we had, and the two numbers didn’t match. So bringing on this platform is probably the biggest energy user in the spacecraft. Didn’t want to do it
  • They had a capability to maneuver, and they knew where they were, and now they could figure out what to do
  • a big debate about what to do next, as I recall, the books and the movies and all don’t really capture.
  • That debate of what to do next was also rather charged because there was one group of people that said, “You know, this has really been a bad day. We don’t know the condition of any piece of hardware we’ve got. We don’t want to do anything. Don’t touch anything. Let’s just figure this out.”
  • There’s others that said, “There’s only this much electricity and water in the lunar module. We need to turn around and come home as fast as possible.
  • Somewhere in there—I don’t remember all the details—we found out that a family that had gone to a picnic with Charlie and his family over the weekend, one of their kids had the measles, and Charlie was considered exposed
  • One of the many lessons out of all this is starting on day one it was from the very first moment, assume you’re going to succeed and don’t do anything that gets in the way.
  • you had to write down all the numbers in the command module, put them on a list, and then do some math, and then punch the numbers into the lunar module computer
  • you could get a very good alignment so that now you could go in with the lunar module and make a little tweak to tighten up the alignment
  • to get back before the batteries run out
  • while
  • debating what to do with this inertial unit in the command module we had to bring up from scratch, these units are very, very delicate
  • they were allowed to run at a temperature of like 70 plus or minus one. They were tested to see that they would work at plus or minus 10.
  • had one that we don’t know what its temperature is, but we know it’s below freezing
  • didn’t do any testing at those kind of temperatures
  • semi-apocryphal story is that one of the employees at the company
  • had a snowstorm
  • last winter
  • had an IMU in the back of the station wagon
  • took it inside
  • hooked it up and ran it, and they didn’t have any trouble
  • they had had a problem down on the spacecraft, some kind of a problem with detanking the oxygen from the service module
  • took all night and a good bit of the next day
  • to review
  • they’d seen a problem like this before, and even though the regular drain system wasn’t working, they could boil the oxygen out
  • the oxygen tank that we discussed prior to launch was, in fact, the culprit in the explosion. It was damaged in the process that we used in ways that we didn’t anticipate
Mars Base

Acidic Europa may eat away at chances for life - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...cidic-europa-chances-life.html

scibyte36 Jupiter Europa

shared by Mars Base on 03 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Europa's interior. The moon is thought to have a metallic core surrounded by a rocky interior, and then a global ocean on top of that surrounded by a shell of water ice
  • ocean underneath the icy shell of Jupiter's moon Europa could be too acid to support life
  • Europa, which is roughly the size of Earth's moon, could possess an ocean about 100 miles deep
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Recent findings even suggest its ocean could be loaded with oxygen, enough to support millions of tons worth of marine life like the kinds that exist on Earth
  • However, chemicals found on the surface of Europa might jeopardize any chances of life evolving there
  • compounds in question are oxidants, which are capable of receiving electrons from other compounds
  • usually rare in the solar system because of the abundance of chemicals known as reductants such as hydrogen and carbon
  • oxidants from Europa's surface might react with sulfides and other compounds in this moon's ocean before life could nab it
  • generating sulfuric and other acids
  • . If this has occurred for just about half of Europa's lifetime, not only would such a process rob the ocean of life-supporting oxidants
  • could become relatively corrosive, with a pH of about 2.6, "about the same as your average soft drink
  • ecosystem would need to evolve quickly to meet this crisis, with oxygen metabolisms and acid tolerance developing in only about 50 million years to handle the acidification
  • analogous to microbes found in acid mine drainage on Earth
  • bright red Río Tinto river in Spain
  • dominant microbes found there are acid-loving "acidophiles" that depend on iron and sulfide as sources of metabolic energy.
  • microbes there have figured out ways of fighting their acidic environment
  • If life did that on Europa, Ganymede, and maybe even Mars, that might have been quite advantageous
  • Others have questioned whether or not rock in Europa's seabed might actually neutralize the effects of this acidity
  • not think this is likely
  • one of the interesting possibilities is that they might have use blue phosphates as their bone material instead to evolve large organisms
Mars Base

A Peek Inside the Manta Ray Womb - ScienceNOW - 0 views

news.sciencemag.org/...inside-the-manta-ray-womb.html

scibyte50 MantaRay ultrasound

shared by Mars Base on 06 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • In November 2008, a female manta ray got stuck in a fishing net off the coast of Okinawa, Japan
  • fishermen called up the local aquarium, where scientists were studying how the creatures reproduce
  • The ray was pregnant
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • manta rays give birth to live young, but they don't have an umbilical cord or a placenta to deliver oxygen
  • researchers have figured out how manta ray embryos get oxygen without a mammal's life-support equipment
  • uterus is closed off from the outside seawater, so the embryo has to be getting oxygen somehow, but nobody knew how
  • checked to see if she was pregnant using an ultrasound machine that had been modified to keep water away from the electronics
Mars Base

2013 in science - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...2013_in_science

scibyte114 2013YearInReview

shared by Mars Base on 23 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Morocco in 2011, and report that it is a new type of Mars rock with an unusually high water content.[8][9][10] American researchers state that a gene associated with active personality traits is also linked to
  • Astronomers affiliated with the Kepler space observatory announce the discovery of KOI-172.02, an Earth-like exoplanet candidate which orbits a star similar to the Sun in the habitable zone
  • 13 January – Massachusetts doctors invent a pill-sized medical scanner that can be safely swallowed by patients, allowing the esophagus to be more easily scanned for disease
  • ...101 more annotations...
  • 17 January – NASA announces that the Kepler space observatory has developed a reaction wheel issue
  • 2 January A study by Caltech astronomers reports that the Milky Way Galaxy contains at least one planet per sta
  • 3 January
  • 8 January
  • 20 January – Scientists prove that quadruple-helix DNA is present in human cells
  • 25 January
  • An international team of scientists develops a functional light-based "tractor beam", which allows individual cells to be selected and moved at will. The invention could have broad applications in medicine and microbiology
  • 30 January – South Korea conducts its first successful orbital launch
  • 6 February
  • Astronomers report that 6% of all dwarf stars – the most common stars in the known universe – may host Earthlike planets
  • Scientists discover live bacteria in the subglacial Antarctic Lake Whillans
  • American scientists finish drilling down to the subglacial Lake Whillans, which is buried around 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) under the Antarctic ice
  • 10 February NASA's Curiosity Mars rover uses its onboard drill to obtain the first deep rock sample ever retrieved from the surface of another plane
  • 15 February A 10-ton meteoroid impacts in Chelyabinsk, Russia, producing a powerful shockwave and injuring over 1,000 people
  • 28 February
  • Astronomers make the first direct observation of a protoplanet forming in a disk of gas and dust around a distant sta
  • A third radiation belt is discovered around the Eart
  • 1 March – Boston Dynamics demonstrates an updated version of its BigDog military robot
  • 3 March – American scientists report that they have cured HIV in an infant by giving the child a course of antiretroviral drugs very early in its life. The previously HIV-positive child has reportedly exhibited no HIV symptoms since its treatment, despite having no further medication for a year
  • researchers replace 75 percent of an injured patient's skull with a precision 3D-printed polymer replacement implant. In future, damaged bones may routinely be replaced with custom-manufactured implants
  • 7 March
  • A study concludes that heart disease was common among ancient mummies
  • 11 March
  • 12 March NASA's Curiosity rover finds evidence that conditions on Mars were once suitable for microbial life after analyzing the first drilled sample of Martian rock, "John Klein" rock at Yellowknife Bay in Gale Crater. The rover detected water, carbon dioxide, oxygen, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, chloromethane and dichloromethane. Related tests found results consistent with the presence of smectite clay minerals
  • 14 March CERN scientists confirm, with a very high degree of certainty, that a new particle identified by the Large Hadron Collider in July 2012 is the long-sought Higgs boson
  • 18 March
  • NASA reports evidence from the Curiosity rover on Mars of mineral hydration, likely hydrated calcium sulfate, in several rock samples, including the broken fragments of "Tintina" rock and "Sutton Inlier" rock as well as in the veins and nodules in other rocks like "Knorr" rock and "Wernicke" rock.[177] Analysis using the rover's DAN instrument provided evidence of subsurface water, amounting to as much as 4% water content, down to a depth of 60 cm
  • 27 March – A potential new weight loss method is discovered, after a 20% weight reduction was achieved in mice simply by having their gut microbes altered.
  • NASA scientists report that hints of dark matter may have been detected by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station
  • 3 April
  • 15 April A functional lab-grown kidney is successfully transplanted into a live rat in Massachusetts General Hospital
  • 18 April – NASA announces the discovery of three new Earthlike exoplanets – Kepler-62e, Kepler-62f, and Kepler-69c – in the habitable zones of their respective host stars, Kepler-62 and Kepler-69. The new exoplanets, which are considered prime candidates for possessing liquid water and thus potentially life, were identified using the Kepler spacecraft
  • 21 April The Antares rocket, a commercial launch vehicle developed by Orbital Sciences Corporation, successfully conducts its maiden flight
  • After years of unpowered glide tests, Scaled Composites' SpaceShipTwo hybrid spaceplane successfully conducts its first rocket-powered fligh
  • 29 April
  • 1 May IBM scientists release A Boy and His Atom, the smallest stop-motion animation ever created, made by manipulating individual carbon monoxide molecules with a scanning tunnelling microscope
  • A new study finds that children whose parents suck on their pacifiers have fewer allergies later in life
  • NASA reports that a reaction wheel on the Kepler space observatory may be malfunctioning and may result in the premature termination of the observatory's search for Earth-like
  • 15 May
  • 16 May Water dating back 2.6 billion years, by far the oldest ever found, is discovered in a Canadian mine
  • 27 May Four-hundred-year-old bryophyte specimens left behind by retreating glaciers in Canada are brought back to life in the laboratory
  • 29 May
  • Russian scientists announce the discovery of mammoth blood and well-preserved muscle tissue from an adult female specimen in Siberia
  • A new treatment to "reset" the immune system of multiple sclerosis patients is reported to reduce their reactivity to myelin by 50 to 75 percent
  • 4 June
  • During the Shenzhou 10 mission, Chinese astronauts deliver the country's first public video broadcast from the orbiting Tiangong-1 space laboratory
  • 20 June
  • China's Shenzhou 10 manned spacecraft returns safely to Earth, having conducted China's longest manned space mission to date
  • 26 June
  • 20 June
  • 20 June
  • 6 July
  • Scientists report that a wide variety of microbial life exists in the subglacial Antarctic Lake Vostok, which has been buried in ice for around 15 million years. Samples of the lake's water obtained by drilling were found to contain traces of DNA from over 3,000 tiny organisms
  • 15 July
  • ASA engineers successfully test a rocket engine with a fully 3D-printed injector
  • 19 July
  • NASA scientists publish the results of a new analysis of the atmosphere of Mars, reporting a lack of methane around the landing site of the Curiosity rover
  • Earth is photographed from the outer solar system. NASA's Cassini spacecraft releases images of the Earth and Moon taken from the orbit of Saturn
  • 29 July – Astronomers discover the first exoplanet orbiting a brown dwarf, 6,000 light years from Earth
  • exoplanet
  • 7 January
  • Astronomers
  • report that "at least 17 billion" Earth-sized exoplanets are estimated to reside in the Milky Way Galaxy
  • 20 February
  • NASA reports the discovery of Kepler-37b, the smallest exoplanet yet known, around the size of Earth's Moon
  • 10 June
  • Scientists report that the earlier claims of an Earth-like exoplanet orbiting Alpha Centauri B, a star close to our Solar System, may not be supported by astronomical evidence
  • 25 June – In an unprecedented discovery, astronomers detect three potentially Earthlike exoplanets orbiting a single star in the Gliese 667
  • 11 July For the first time, astronomers determine the true colour of a distant exoplanet. HD 189733 b, a searing-hot gas giant, is said to be a vivid blue colour, most likely due to clouds of silica in its atmosphere
  • NASA announces that the failing Kepler space observatory may never fully recover. New missions are being considered
  • 15 August
  • Phase I clinical trials of SAV001 – the first and only preventative HIV vaccine – have been successfully completed with no adverse effects in all patients. Antibody production was greatly boosted after vaccination
  • 3 September
  • 12 September NASA announces that Voyager I has officially left the Solar System, having travelled since 1977
  • NASA scientists report the Mars Curiosity rover detected "abundant, easily accessible" water (1.5 to 3 weight percent) in soil samples
  • 26 September
  • In addition, the rover found two principal soil types: a fine-grained mafic type and a locally derived, coarse-grained felsic type
  • mafic
  • as associated with hydration of the amorphous phases of the soi
  • perchlorates, the presence of which may make detection of life-related organic molecules difficult, were found at the Curiosity rover landing site
  • earlier at the more polar site of the Phoenix lander) suggesting a "global distribution of these salts
  • Astronomers have created the first cloud map of an exoplanet, Kepler-7b
  • 30 September
  • 8 October The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to François Englert and Peter Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider"
  • 16 October Russian authorities raise a large fragment, 654 kg (1,440 lb) total weight, of the Chelyabinsk meteor, a Near-Earth asteroid that entered Earth's atmosphere over Russia on 15 February 2013, from the bottom of Chebarkul lake.
  • Researchers have shown that a fundamental reason for sleep is to clean the brain of toxins. This is achieved by brain cells shrinking to create gaps between neurons, allowing fluid to wash through
  • 17 October
  • 22 October – Astronomers have discovered the 1,000th known exoplanet
  • 4 November - Astronomers report, based on Kepler space mission data, that there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of sun-like stars and red dwarf stars within the Milky Way Galaxy
  • 11 billion of these estimated planets may be orbiting sun-like stars
  • 5 November – India launches its first Mars probe, Mangalyaan
  • The IceCube Neutrino Observatory has made the first discovery of very high energy neutrinos on Earth which had originated from beyond our Solar System
  • 21 November
  • 1 December – China launches the Chang'e 3 lunar rover mission, with a planned landing on December 16
  • 3 December – The Hubble Space Telescope has found evidence of water in the atmospheres of five distant exoplanets: HD 209458b, XO-1b, WASP-12b, WASP-17b and WASP-19b
  • 9 December NASA scientists report that the planet Mars had a large freshwater lake (which could have been a hospitable environment for microbial life) based on evidence from the Curiosity rover studying Aeolis Palus near Mount Sharp in Gale Crater
  • 12 December NASA announces, based on studies with the Hubble Space Telescope, that water vapor plumes were detected on Europa, moon of Jupiter
  • 14 December – The unmanned Chinese lunar rover Chang'e 3 lands on the Moon, making China the third country to achieve a soft landing there
  • 18 December
  • nomers have spotted what appears to be the first known "exomoon", located 1,800 light years away
  • 20 December – NASA reports that the Curiosity rover has successfully upgraded, for the third time since landing, its software programs and is now operating with version 11. The new software is expected to provide the rover with better robotic arm and autonomous driving abilities. Due to wheel wear, a need to drive more carefully, over the rough terrain the rover is currently traveling on its way to Mount Sharp, was also reported
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.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • 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
Mars Base

How One Faulty Nitrogen-Purge Valve Forced SpaceX to Abort | Autopia | Wired.com - 0 views

www.wired.com/...cex-nitrogen-purge-valve-abort

scibyte47 SpaceX PrivateSpaceTravel iss

shared by Mars Base on 22 May 12 - No Cached
  • SpaceX engineers were able to trace the high-pressure problem to a valve that controls the flow of nitrogen used to purge the engine before ignition
  • check valve that allows the nitrogen purge prior to ignition in the Merlin engine was stuck open just before launch
  • stuck valve allowed “liquid oxygen to flow from the main injector [for the rocket engine itself] into the gas generator injector
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • stuck valve meant the liquid oxygen flowed into the gas generator injector, which led to the high pressure in engine five’s combustion chamber. The high pressure caused the flight computer to shutdown the engines, aborting the launch
  • the Falcon 9 may have been okay even if it had launched with the high pressure
Mars Base

April 11 - Today in Science History - Scientists born on April 11th, died, and events - 0 views

todayinsci.com/4_11.htm

scibyte125 LookingBackApr

shared by Mars Base on 08 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Apollo 13 launch
  • 1970, Apollo 13, the third manned lunar landing mission, began with the successful launch of the spacecraft Odyssey from Cape Canaveral with crew James Lovell, Fred Haise, and John Swigert. Two days later, on 13 Apr disaster struck 200,000 miles from earth. A liquid oxygen tank exploded, disabling the normal supply of oxygen, electricity, light, and water. Swigert reported: “Houston, we've had a problem.” The lunar landing was aborted. After circling the moon, the crippled spacecraft began a long, cold journey back to earth with enormous logistical problems in providing enough energy to the damaged fuel cells to allow a safe return. On 17 Apr, with the world anxiously watching, tragedy turned to triumph as the Apollo 13 astronauts touched down safely in the Pacific Ocean
Mars Base

May 6 - Today in Science History - Scientists born on May 6th, died, and events - 0 views

todayinsci.com/5_06.htm

scibyte128 LookingBackMay

shared by Mars Base on 27 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Open-heart surgery
  • In 1953, a heart-lung machine designed by Dr. John Heysham Gibbon was used to successfully complete the first open-heart surgery, on patient Cecelia Bavolek, demonstrating that an artificial device can temporarily mimic the functions of the heart. Improved versions allow surgeons today to perform bypass surgery and heart transplants. He built the first experimental heart-lung machine or pump oxygenator in 1937 that used two roller pumps and able to replace the heart and lung action of a cat for 25 minutes. By the late 1940s, with financial and technical support from IBM President Thomas J. Watson, Gibbon produced an improved device which cascading the blood down a thin sheet of film for oxygenation to prevent damage blood corpuscles
Mars Base

May 2 - Today in Science History - Scientists born on May 2nd, died, and events - 0 views

todayinsci.com/5_02.htm

scibyte128 LookingBackMay

shared by Mars Base on 27 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Electrolysis of water
  • In 1800, English chemist William Nicholson was the first to produce a chemical reaction by electricity. He had been working with Anthony Carlisle, a London surgeon, experimenting with Allesandro Volta's voltaic pile. The new effect was discovered when wires from the poles of the battery being used came into contact with water and bubbles of gas were released as current flowed through the water. Closer examination of the electrolysis showed oxygen was released at the (positive) anode, and hydrogen appeared at the cathode. Electricity had separated the molecules of water. Further, the effect of the amount of hydrogen and oxygen set free by the current was proportional to the amount of current used
  • Gulf Stream
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In 1775, Benjamin Franklin completed the first scientific study of the Gulf Stream. His observations began in 1769 when as deputy postmaster of the British Colonies he found ships took two weeks longer to bring mail from England than was required in the opposite direction. Thus, Franklin became the first to chart the Gulf Stream
Mars Base

Hulk Smash! Collision That Formed Our Moon Shows Up In Lunar Rocks, Study Says - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...s-up-in-lunar-rocks-study-says

scibyte134 LunarFormation

shared by Mars Base on 07 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • theory
  • Billions of years ago
  • , a Mars-sized body (sometimes called “Theia”) smashed into our young planet
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Earth fortunately survived
  • and the fragments from the crash gradually coalesced into the Moon that we see today
  • scientists believe they have found traces of Theia in lunar rocks pulled from the Apollo missions
  • The isotopes or types of oxygen revealed in the new research appear to be different between the Earth and the Moon
  • implies that a body of different composition caused the changes
  • Before, the “resolution” of these microscopes couldn’t find any significant differences
  • the new data reveals the moon rocks have 12 parts per million more oxygen-17 than the Earth rocks
  • “The differences are small and difficult to detect, but they are there,” stated lead researcher Daniel Herwartz
  • means two things
  • first
  • can now be reasonably sure that the giant collision took place
  • Second
  • it gives us an idea of the geochemistry of Theia
  • The work was published in Science and will also be presented at the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in California on June 11.
Mars Base

Could Pulses in Earth's Magnetic Field Forecast Earthquakes? | Science/AAAS | News - 0 views

news.sciencemag.org/...tic-field-forecast-earthquakes

scibyte134 earthquakes

shared by Mars Base on 07 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • In the days leading up to some recent moderate-sized earthquakes, instruments nearby have picked up brief low-frequency pulses in Earth’s magnetic field
  • A few scientists have proposed that such pulses, which seemed to become stronger and more frequent just before the earthquakes occurred, could serve as an early warning sign for impending seismic activity
  • Now, a team has come up with a model for how these magnetic pulses might be generated, though some critics say they may have a humanmade origin.
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • Brief fluctuations in Earth’s magnetic field have been detected before many earthquakes in the past 50 years
  • Friedemann Freund, a crystallographer at San Jose State University
  • in the weeks before a magnitude-5.4 quake struck about 15 kilometers northeast of San Jose in October 2007, an instrument near the epicenter sensed a number of unusual magnetic pulses
  • Those blips became more frequent as the day of the earthquake approached, Freund says
  • recently, prior to several medium- to moderate-sized quakes in Peru, two sensitive magnetometers recorded the same sort of pulses
  • how such pulses could be generated
  • suggest that these blips stem from microscopic changes in crystals in rocks under seismic stress deep within Earth
  • In many types of rocks, particularly volcanic rocks that have substantial amounts of water locked inside them, crystals are chock-full of oxygen-oxygen bonds called peroxy bonds
  • (These bonds formed long ago, after chemical changes split some of the water molecules, freeing the hydrogen atoms to bond together and then diffuse out of the rocks as gas.)
  • When those rocks are squeezed, say, by the sides of a fault zone scraping past one another, some of the peroxy bonds break
  • Those broken bonds release negatively charged electrons, which remain trapped in place, and create positively charged “holes” in the crystal
  • his team propose that the same process might be happening within Earth’s crust
  • As stress on large volumes of rock builds in advance of an impending quake, many, many of these electrical holes are created inside them
  • the mass migration of such holes that creates the large electrical currents responsible for generating the low-frequency magnetic pulses that make their way to detectors on Earth’s surface
  • they say
  • some critics of his model have proposed
  • lightning
  • as an alternative explanation
  • he notes, with data from the two sensors in Peru he and his colleagues were able to pinpoint the strongest of those pulses as originating within a few kilometers of the epicenters of subsequent quakes
  • For now, Freund admits, the team’s model is preliminary: The paper has been submitted to a journal and is now being reviewed by other scientists.
  • two instruments aren’t sufficient to pinpoint the location of an event; to truly “triangulate” an event you need at least three sensors
  • “I’m concerned that the pulses are not originating deep within the Earth.”
  • “This paper only makes sense if the observations [of magnetic pulses] are good,”
  • John Ebel, a seismologist at Boston College, who wasn’t involved in the research
  • the blips may have some inexplicable humanmade origin
  • Decades ago
  • his Boston-based magnetometers started picking up a series of odd pulses every morning.
  • Eventually
  • identified
  • It was the engineers cranking up Boston’s trolley cars at a rail yard a few kilometers away from the instruments
  • Even if the magnetic pulses originate within Earth along seismic zones under stress, Freund says, the blips don’t always foretell a quake
  • It’s more likely to be the pattern of pulses—and, in particular, changes in their size and frequency—that Freund and his colleagues say might offer scientists a crystal ball for impending temblors
1 - 20 of 46 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page