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Mars Base

News in Brief: World's largest volcano lurks beneath Pacific Ocean | Earth | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...no_lurks_beneath_Pacific_Ocean

scibyte101 volcano

shared by Mars Base on 07 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • The most massive volcano in the world, with a footprint the size of New Mexico, crouches in the dark depths of the western Pacific Ocean
  • hollowed peak lying beneath 2 kilometers of water
  • a basaltic mound, may rival the largest known volcano in the solar system: Mars’ Olympus Mons
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • A team led by oceanographer
  • bounced sound waves off the deep-sea mountain to measure its size
  • Tamu Massif forms a broad, rounded dome rising 4 kilometers from the seafloor and stretching 450 by 650 kilometers across
  • Core samples that the researchers extracted from the volcano’s slopes showed that, during its prime 145 million years ago, the ancient mound spewed lava sheets 23 meters thick.
Mars Base

Could People Hibernate? Lemurs Give Clues - News Watch - 0 views

newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/...le-hibernate-lemurs-give-clues

scibyte101 hibernate

shared by Mars Base on 05 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Fat-tailed dwarf lemurs are the only primates that can hibernate
  • lemurs are unique in that they can go the entire hibernation period—up to eight months—without fully sleeping
  • hibernation doesn’t necessarily mean sleep
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  • hibernation simply refers to the seasonal bodily changes that occur in some animals—slower heart rates, decreased oxygen intake, and a reduced ability to regulate body temperature
  • during hibernation, a lemur’s breathing can slow to one inhalation every 20 minutes, and its heart rate drops from a normal 200 beats per minute to just 4 beats per minute
  • lemurs can hibernate, surviving three-quarters of a year without deep sleep,
  • The longest a human has ever been recorded going without sleep is allegedly 18 days, 21 hours, and 40 minutes
  • severely sleep-deprived humans have a tendency to fall asleep for seconds at a time, it’s hard to prove such claims without brain monitoring
  • rapid eye movement (REM) sleep—which is when we dream
  • non-REM sleep. Non-REM sleep is vital. When you fall into bed after pulling an all-nighter
  • deep, non-REM sleep that you want
  • when lemurs hibernate, scientists speculate that they experience only REM sleep. Though no one can prove whether lemurs actually dream
  • primates exhibit all the telltale signs of a full night’s REM sleep such as increased brain activity, rapid eye movements, and muscle paralysis
  • A 1989 study by sleep scientist
  • demonstrated the lethal consequences of sleep deprivation
  • When the researcher kept ten rats awake, depriving them of non-REM sleep, they developed skin lesions, lost weight, and experienced an erosion of their gastrointestinal tracts.
  • After 32 days, all of the rats were dead
  • If you completely deprive animals of [non-REM] sleep, then they die
  • yet the lemurs that hibernate appear to be able to go for months without sleep…and they’re not dying
  • Lemurs in captivity often don’t hibernate
  • Some of [the lemurs hibernated] 40 feet off the ground in the middle of the forest in coastal Madagascar
  • team visited the primates in their natural habitat—Madagascar
  • By placing the lemurs in special nesting boxes and attaching EEGs to their tiny foreheads while they hibernated, Krystal was able to record their vital signs
  • found that when it was warm outside, close to 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius), the primates would only hibernate in REM sleep.
Mars Base

Computer Game-Playing Shown to Improve Multitasking Skills: Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

scibyte101

shared by Mars Base on 05 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • a study published this week in Nature
  • convincingly shows that if a game is tailored to a precise cognitive deficit, in this case multitasking in older people, it can indeed be effective
  • the study found that a game called NeuroRacer can help older people to improve their capacity to multitask
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • the effect seems to carry over to tasks in everyday life and is still there after six months
  • The study also shows how patterns of brain activity change as those cognitive skills improve
  • NeuroRacer is a three-dimensional video game in which players steer a car along a winding, hilly road with their left thumb, while keeping an eye out for signs that randomly pop up
  • If the sign is a particular shape and colour, players have to shoot it down using a finger on their right hand
  • draws on a mix of cognitive skills just as real life does — such as attention focusing, task switching and working memory
  • first recruited around 30 participants for each of six decades of life, from the 20s to the 70s
  • confirmed that multitasking skills as measured by the game deteriorated linearly with age
  • then recruited 46 participants aged 60–85
  • put them through a 4-week training period with a version of NeuroRacer that increased in difficulty as the player improved
  • After training, subjects had improved so much that they achieved higher scores than untrained 20-year-olds
  • the skill remained six months later without practice
  • scientists also conducted a battery of cognitive tests on the participants before and after training
  • Certain cognitive abilities that were not specifically targeted by the game improved and remained improved
  • working memory and sustained attention
Mars Base

Rats induced into hibernation-like state | Life | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...ed_into_hibernation-like_state

scibyte101 hibernate

shared by Mars Base on 05 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Rats spent hours in a state of chilly suspended animation after researchers injected a compound into the animals in a cold room
  • animals’ heart rates slowed, brain activity became sluggish and body temperature plummeted.
  • Lowering the body temperature of a nonhibernating mammal is really hard
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  • As temperatures inside the body fall, several failsafe systems spring into action
  • Blood vessels near the skin squeeze tight to hold warmth in, the body starts to shiver and brown fat, a tissue that’s especially plentiful in newborns, starts to produce heat
  • colleagues bypassed the rats’ defenses against the cold with a compound that’s similar to adenosine, a molecule in the body that signals sleepiness
  • After about an hour in a room chilled to 15° Celsius, the rats grew lethargic
  • brain waves slowed, their blood pressure dropped and their heart grew sluggish, occasionally skipping beats
  • The rats’ core temperature dropped from about 38°  to about 30° C, or 80° Fahrenheit
  • measured even lower temperatures in further experiments — rats’ core body temperature reached 15° C or about 57° F.
  • The rats weren’t in a coma, nor were they asleep or truly hibernating
  • Hibernating animals’ metabolisms plummet and their temperatures sink much lower
  • an Arctic ground squirrel, for instance, cools to about —3° C when it hibernates
  • It’s a new state
  • don’t really know what it is
  • In the experiment, loud noises and tail pinches failed to arouse the rats.
  • They didn’t eat or drink. Occasionally, one would slither into a corner, but for the most part, the animals stayed still for up to 6 hours
  • In unpublished experiments, Tupone has kept the animals in the unresponsive state for 24 hours, he says.
  • Warming the room coaxed the rats out of their torpor
  • The recovery process takes about 12 hours, during which the animals ate and drank voraciously
  • After recovering, the animals were alert, moved around their cages normally and slept when tired
  • When people have heart attacks or strokes, clinicians can use ice packs or frigid water to chill people and prevent further tissue damage
  • those methods of cooling take time and can have dangerous side effects
Mars Base

Planetary Resources Raises $1.5M for Crowdfunded Space Telescope | Space Telescopes | S... - 0 views

www.space.com/owdfunded-space-telescope.html

CrowdFunded Arkyd scibyte101

shared by Mars Base on 07 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Planetary Resources raised more than $1.5 million in 33 days to launch a small space telescope into low Earth orbit in 2015
  • Planetary Resources, Bellevue, Wash., began a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign May 29 seeking to raise at least $1 million by June 30
  • The company hit that goal June 19, then raked in another $505,366 in the final 10 days of the campaign, including $100,000 on June 30 from Virgin Group Chairman Richard Branson.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • 17,614 people donated money for the crowdsourced Arkyd-100
  • 14,919 space selfies, according data from Kickstarter
  • Kicktraq.com, shows that Planetary Resources raised an average of $45,614 a day, with the 17,614 donors contributing an average of $85 each
Mars Base

Wow! Curiosity Rover Captures 2 Mars Moons Together In Stunning NASA Video | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/osity-martian-moons-video.html

Curiosity scibyte101

shared by Mars Base on 07 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Earth's moon
  • A spectacular new video from NASA's Mars rover Curiosity shows the Red Planet's two tiny moons eclipsing each other
  • Curiosity snapped 41 images of the Mars moons in the night sky on Aug. 1, with rover scientists then stitching them together to make the final 30-second video
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • the first time a view of the two Martian satellites — called Phobos and Deimos — eclipsing each other has been captured from the vantage point of the planet's surface
  • researchers are studying the images to refine their knowledge of the orbits of Phobos and Deimos
  • ultimate goal is to improve orbit knowledge enough that we can improve the measurement of the tides Phobos raises on the Martian solid surface
  • Phobos' orbit is taking it closer to the surface of Mars very slowly
  • Deimos may gradually be getting farther and farther away from the planet
  • Phobos is just 14 miles (22 kilometers) wide on average, while Deimos is even smaller
  • But Curiosity was able to spot both of them because they orbit
  • 3,700 miles (6,000 km) in Phobos' case and 12,470 miles (20,070 km) for Deimos
  • Earth's moon
  • a diameter of about 2,160 miles (3,475 km)
  • farther away — its average distance is 239,000 miles (384,600 km)
  • Phobos appears half as big in the sky to Curiosity as Earth's moon does to human skywatchers
  • Earth's moon
Mars Base

Hobbled Kepler Space Telescope Now On The Hunt For A New Mission - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...-on-the-hunt-for-a-new-mission

Kepler scibyte101

shared by Mars Base on 07 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • NASA cannot recover the two failed reaction wheels that stopped Kepler from doing its primary science mission
  • the spacecraft, which is already working years past when its prime mission ceased in 2010, is still in great shape otherwise
  • could be anything from searching for asteroids to a technique called microlensing, which could show Jupiter-sized planets around other stars with the spacecraft’s more limited pointed ability
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • NASA is now considering other science missions
  • the health of the spacecraft, but it is so far listed as good (except for the two damaged reaction wheels).
  • There are limiting factors
  • radiation can degrade components over time, and a stray micrometeorid could (as a small chance) cause damage on the spacecraft
  • a state where the spacecraft uses as little fuel as possible
  • point rest state right now
  • will extend the fuel “budget” for years
  • unable to say just how many years yet
  • Another concern is NASA’s limited budget
  • Kepler has, so far, detected more than 2,700 candidate exoplanets orbiting distant stars, including many Earth-size planets that are within their star’s habitable zone, where water could exist in liquid form
  • NASA made several attempts to resurrect the wheels
  • follow-up spacecraft planned: the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which is expected to start around 2017 or 2018. It will look for alien planets in the brightest and closest stars in the entire sky, in locations that are (in relative terms) close to Earth.
Mars Base

Curiosity Rover Snaps Best Mars Solar Eclipse Photos Ever | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/se-curiosity-rover-photos.html

G+ Curiosity scibyte101

shared by Mars Base on 07 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Phobos does not completely cover the sun as seen from the Red Planet's surface, so the Aug. 17 event was an annular or "ring of fire" eclipse
  • Phobos is just 14 miles (22 kilometers) wide on average
  • Phobos appears
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • relatively big
  • because the moon orbits so close to Mars
  • just 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers
  • Phobos takes eight hours to complete one lap around Mars
  • Observations of Phobos and Deimos by Curiosity and
  • Opportunity should help researchers refine their knowledge of the two moons' orbits
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