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Mars Base

Knee Ligament Described in 19th Century Rediscovered: Scientific American Gallery - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/gallery_directory.cfm

scibyte110

shared by Mars Base on 16 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • ACL tear takes about eight to 12 months to heal, and they’ve always been difficult to treat
  • Until recently, doctors were at a loss as to why patients kept complaining about instability in their knees after recovering from successful ACL-repair surgeries
  • knees would consistently fail the so-called pivot-shift test, used by physicians to evaluate sprains in the anterior and lateral parts of the knee
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Flemish researchers has finally uncovered the problem: a previously unknown ligament in the knee
  • scientists were prompted to find the ligament after reading an article published in 1879
  • The French surgeon described a “pearly, fibrous band” and hypothesized it was an additional ligament located on the anterior part of the human knee
  • Over a century later knee surgeons and an anatomist
  • set out to determine whether the flexible connective tissue
  • exists
  • After investigating 41 unpaired knees from human cadavers the doctors found that all but one knee displayed the described ligament, now named the anterolateral ligament (ALL).
  • The discovery
  • has given basic anatomy a fresh jolt
  • hopes the study will encourage students to look to anatomy as an exciting science, where new features of the human body may be discovered
  • Other researchers, such as orthopedic surgeon
  • are currently trying to find a technique to repair that ligament
  • In the meantime they hope clinicians will take the ALL into consideration when making a diagnosis or planning reconstructive surgery.
Mars Base

The World's Oldest Animal Is Even Older Than We Thought | Popular Science - 0 views

www.popsci.com/...t-animal-even-older-we-thought

scibyte110

shared by Mars Base on 16 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Ming, a mollusk of the species Arctica islandica. In 2006, researchers
  • examined its interior growth rings--patterns on the inside of its shell--to determine its age
  • at an impressive 405 years old
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • now researchers are reporting it's more than an entire century older than that: a healthy 507 years
  • originally, researchers counted the rings on its shell, which usually provides an accurate count, since the clams produce another ring each summer
  • the rings were so compressed there was apparently a miscount
  • . A new count of rings on the exterior, confirmed by carbon dating, gave the new age
  • Ming's slow metabolism is what allows it to survive for so long
  • Ming died
  • back in 2006
  • it's not unlikely that an even older one has been found and not properly researched
Mars Base

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

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

scibyte110 Farming

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

New research reveals Ming the Mollusk actually 100 years older than thought - 0 views

phys.org/...-ming-mollusk-years-older.html

scibyte110

shared by Mars Base on 17 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • it was born in 1499
  • the clam was born just a few years after Columbus discovered America
  • through the Reformation
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • the establishment of the Romanov dynasty in Russia, the building of the Taj Majal in India, two world wars
Mars Base

Mars Science Laboratory: Curiosity Out of Safe Mode - 0 views

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

scibyte110

shared by Mars Base on 17 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • received confirmation from Mars
  • Nov. 10) that the Curiosity rover has successfully transitioned back into nominal surface operations mode
  • had been in safe mode since Nov. 7,
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • when an unexpected software reboot (also known as a warm reset) occurred during a communications
  • After analyzing the data returned by the spacecraft on
  • Nov. 7
  • Curiosity operations team was able to determine the root cause. An error in existing onboard software resulted in an error in a catalog file
  • This caused an unexpected reset when the catalog was processed by a new version of flight software which had been installed on Thursday
  • The team was able to replicate the problem on ground testbeds the following day
  • Commands recovering the spacecraft were uplinked to the spacecraft early Sunday
Mars Base

A New Perspective on Murray Ridge - 0 views

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

scibyte110 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 17 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Mars Base on 17 Nov 13
     
    A New Perspective on Murray Ridge
Mars Base

Why Teenagers Are So Impulsive | Science/AAAS | News - 0 views

news.sciencemag.org/...why-teenagers-are-so-impulsive

scibyte110

shared by Mars Base on 16 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • When teenagers successfully resist an urge in a common test of impulsivity, they show increased activation in a brain region associated with restraint
  • suggesting that their brains have to work harder to avoid acting on the impulse
  • Why do teens—especially adolescent males—commit crimes more frequently than adults
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • One explanation may be that as a group, teenagers react more impulsively to threatening situations than do children or adults
  • likely because their brains have to work harder to rein in their behavior
  • teenagers have a reputation for courting danger that is often attributed to immaturity or poor decision-making
  • If immaturity or lack of judgment were the only problem, however, one would expect that children, whose brains are at an even earlier stage of development
  • younger children tend to be more cautious than teenagers, suggesting that there is something unique about adolescent brain development that lures them to danger
  • It's hard to generalize about teenage impulsivity
  • some adolescents clearly have more self-control than many adults
  • a growing body of evidence suggests that, in general, teens specifically struggle to keep their cool in social situations
  • many crimes committed during adolescence involve emotionally fraught social situations
  • to test whether teens perform badly on a common impulsivity task when faced with social cues of threat
  • recruited 83 people, ranging in age from 6 to 29, to perform a simple "Go/No-Go" task
  • they watched a series of faces making neutral or threatening facial expressions flicker past on a computer screen
  • Each time the participants saw a neutral face, they were instructed to hit a button
  • They were also told to hold back from pressing the button when they saw a threatening face
  • As the participants performed the task, the researchers monitored their brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging.
  • teenagers made about 15% more errors than adults and children when attempting to stop themselves from pressing the button when they saw the threatening facial expression
  • Males performed worse than females, suggesting a sex difference that fits with the disproportionate number of crimes that male teens commit,
  • adolescents who did manage to restrain themselves showed significantly higher activity in a brain region called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which is involved in top-down control of behavior
  • think of it as the break
  • the teenage brain might need to work a little harder to hold that response back
Mars Base

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

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

scibyte110 dinosaur

shared by Mars Base on 14 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • A small roadside quarry west of Denver
  • , has revealed a new treasure: the snout of the long-necked dinosaur Apatosaurus ajax
  • The specimen, nicknamed Kevin, is the first Apatosaurus ajax muzzle ever found
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • the discovery is likely to help paleontologists understand how A. ajax is related to other Apatosaurus
  • volunteers have been painstakingly carving Kevin's bones out of sandstone for two years
  • Apatosaurus is perhaps most notorious for its complicated naming history
  • Another paleontologist, Elmer Riggs, killed the Brontosaurus genus in 1903 after noting that the skeletons didn't vary enough to justify two genuses
  • A. ajax was as long as three school busses and weighed as much as eight Asian elephants
  • Apatosaurus had lightweight vertebrae that would have allowed it to move its head rapidly: Imagine a neck the length of a school bus, flitting up and down and side to side like an ostrich neck
Mars Base

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

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

scibyte110 dinosaur

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

MAVEN thunders to Space on Journey to Study Red Planet's Watery History and Potential f... - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...history-and-potential-for-life

scibyte110 MAVEN

shared by Mars Base on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) space probe thundered to space
  • Nov. 18
  • from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 41 at 1:28 p.m. EST atop a powerful Atlas V rocket
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • It will take the spacecraft 10 months to reach the Red Planet, with arrival scheduled for Sept. 22, 2014
  • MAVEN’s purpose is to accomplish world class science after arriving at Mars and completing a check-out period before it can finally begin collecting science data
  • MAVEN will answer key questions about the evolution of Mars, its geology and the potential for the evolution of life
  • Mars was once wet billions of years ago,
  • Now it’s a cold arid world, not
  • hospitable to life
  • want to determine what were the drivers of that change
  • What is the history of Martian habitability, climate change and the potential for life
  • MAVEN will study Mars upper atmosphere to explore how the Red Planet may have lost its atmosphere over billions of years
  • It will measure current rates of atmospheric loss to determine how and when Mars lost its atmosphere and water
  • The MAVEN probe carries nine sensors in three instrument suites
  • The Particles and Fields Package,
  • contains six instruments to characterize the solar wind and the ionosphere of Mars.
  • The Remote Sensing Package,
  • will determine global characteristics of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere.
  • The Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer,
  • will measure the composition of Mars’ upper atmosphere.
  • Over the course of its one-Earth-year primary mission, MAVEN will observe all of Mars’ latitudes at altitudes ranging from 93 miles to more than 3,800 miles.
  • MAVEN will execute five deep dip maneuvers during the first year, descending to an altitude of 78 miles. This marks the lower boundary of the planet’s upper atmosphere.
Mars Base

Magma Boils Beneath Antarctic Ice | Science/AAAS | News - 0 views

news.sciencemag.org/...ma-boils-beneath-antarctic-ice

scibyte110

shared by Mars Base on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Marie Byrd Land is a desolate region of Antarctica buried deep beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet
  • Historic eruptions have punctured the ice sheet, creating a chain of volcanoes amid the ice
  • researchers have shown that molten rock still stirs deep underground
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Only the largest eruptions could melt all the ice above them and poke through to the surface, but even smaller eruptions could potentially cause global sea level to rise, although no one knows how big the rise might be
  • The crust is thinned by the West Antarctic Rift System, a series of giant rift valleys beneath the ice sheet
  • erupted lava from underground magma chambers has burst through the ice repeatedly over geological history as the plates moved over the top
  • No one knew whether magma was still stirring
  • until seismic monitoring stations were installed on the ice between 2007 and 2010.
  • Researchers built the stations to study the shifting crustal blocks of the West Antarctic Rift System
  • But seismologist
  • found another use
  • They noticed a series of small earthquakes, mainly occurring during two “seismic swarms” in January and February 2010 and March 2011
  • These earthquakes were unusual: The ground was shaking much more slowly during the quakes than one would expect from the plates grinding against each other
  • looked at two different types of waves that come in—the P wave, which is the primary wave, and the S wave, which is the secondary wave
  • calculations revealed that the waves had come from 25 to 40 kilometers below Earth's surface and were centered around a point
  • approximately the point the volcanic activity should have reached if it had continued the linear trend of volcanoes to the south
  • The exact cause of these deep quakes is not understood, but they are thought to result from the movement of magma deep below active or soon-to-be active volcanoes
  • They found that the area showed a slightly higher magnetic field than the surrounding area and that there was a bump in the crust—common signals of magmatic activity
  • Radar mapping also indicated a layer of volcanic ash embedded in the ice
  • probably
  • from an eruption of Mount Waesche about 8000 years ago—very recent geological history
  • There is no evidence of an actual eruption since then, but, because magma is still moving deep under the Earth, an eruption could occur at any time
  • The current center of volcanic activity is covered by at least 1 kilometer of ice, and it would take an exceptionally large eruption to melt all this
  • But an eruption could make its presence felt in subtler ways. As fresh snow adds to their own mass, ice sheets flow downward into the sea
  • melting the base of the ice sheet, an eruption could speed up this flow, potentially raising the level of the ocean. No one knows how significant such a rise might be
  • Any effect on the ice sheet above, and thus any effect on the oceans, would probably be quite small
  • a proper study is needed to find out how significant volcanic activity could be to future sea levels
Mars Base

Mars Rover Curiosity Sidelined by Electrical Glitch | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/riosity-electrical-glitch.html

scibyte110 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 23 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • (Nov. 17), the mission team noticed a change in the voltage difference between the body of the Curiosity rover and its electricity-distributing power bus
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