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Mars Base

ScienceShot: Why So Many Homeless Planets? - ScienceNOW - 0 views

news.sciencemag.org/...shot-why-so-many-homeless.html

scibyte30 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 20 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • astronomers reported that extrasolar planets may outnumber stars in our galaxy by almost a two-to-one margin
  • that three-quarters of these worlds are likely to be free-floaters, not bound to any star
  • speculated that many of these homeless planets were slung out of their parent solar systems as a result of gravitationally unstable orbits
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  • new computer simulations blame more exotic causes
  • stars literally pushing the planets into interstellar space after the suns reach the end of their normal hydrogen-burning lives and begin expanding into red giants
  • Other scenarios involve gravitational perturbations, either caused by passing stars, a solar system entering and exiting our galaxy's gravitationally dense spiral arms
  • interactions with dense molecular clouds
  • most likely reason
  • extrasolar planets would simply be ejected by the gravitational forces that result when their parent stars get jostled about inside tightly-packed star clusters
Mars Base

Babies Lip-read Before Talking - Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...Babies_lip-read_before_talking

scibyte30 babies

shared by Mars Base on 20 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • infants start babbling at around age 6 months in preparation for talking
  • shift from focusing on adults’ eyes to paying special attention to speakers’ mouths
  • tots become able to blurt out words and simple statements at age 1, they go back to concentrating on adults’ eyes
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • babbling babies match up what adults say with how they say
  • budding talkers can afford to look for communication signals in a speakers’ eyes
  • tested 179 infants from English-speaking families at age 4, 6, 8 or 12 months
  • devices tracked where babies looked when shown videos of women speaking English or a foreign language
  • also report that on average, infants’ pupils increasingly dilated between ages 8 months and 1 year in response to Spanish speakers, a sign of surprise at encountering unfamiliar speech
  • By 2 years of age, children with autism avoid eye contact and focus on speakers’ mouths
  • new findings raise the possibility of identifying kids headed for this developmental disorder even earlier
  • hasn’t yet been demonstrated that children who continue to look at the mouths of native-language speakers after age 1 develop autism or other communication problems more frequently than those who shift to looking at speakers’ eyes
Mars Base

Weird World! 'Oozing' Alien Planet Is a Super-Earth Wonder | Exoplanets & 55 Cancri e |... - 0 views

www.space.com/net-55-cancri-super-earth.html

scibyte30 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 20 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • A new look at an alien planet that orbits extremely close to its parent star suggests that the rocky world might not be a scorching hot wasteland, as was thought
  • The exotic planet 55 Cancri e is a relatively close alien planet, just 40 light-years away from Earth
  • long thought to harbor surface temperatures as high as 4,800 degrees Fahrenheit (about 2,700 degrees Celsius
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • 55 Cancri e could be a wetter and weirder place than   though
  • 55 Cancri e has a mass 7.8 times that of Earth, and a width just over twice that of our planet
  • observations suggest that about a fifth of the planet's mass must be made up of light elements and compounds, including water
  • experiences such extreme temperatures and high pressure, these elements and compounds likely exist in what is known as a "supercritical" fluid state,
  • Supercritical fluids can best be imagined as liquid-like gases in high pressure and temperature conditions
  • water becomes supercritical in some steam turbines
  • supercritical carbon dioxide is used to scrub caffeine from coffee beans
  • supercritical fluids could be seeping out from the planet's rocks. And, while conditions on the strange world are not suitable to host life, 55 Cancri e does give exoplanet hunters an interesting example to study
Mars Base

New Horizons Web Site - 0 views

pluto.jhuapl.edu/...piPerspective.php

scibyte30 newhorizons

shared by Mars Base on 21 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • January 19, 2012
  • launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, on January 19, 2006
  • sixth anniversary
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  • nine-year flight from launch to the beginning of Pluto encounter in January 2015 is two-thirds over
  • summer’s wakeup will be a “24 hour” near-encounter rehearsal
  • execute a (nearly) daylong segment of our Pluto encounter sequence on the spacecraft
  • New Horizons will make every maneuver, every scan and every observation that it actually will do around closest approach in 2015
  • ’ll check out every system (and its backup) on New Horizons
  • check out each of the seven scientific instruments
  • collect more science data than we have in any previous wakeup
  • update the software for our primary spacecraft command and control computer
  • removing a bug that occasionally causes it to reset
  • uplink almost two-dozen improvements to our onboard autonomous fault detection and automatic response software
  • Horizons team will use a wide variety of telescopes to intensively probe the space between Pluto and Charon for possible satellites, rings and other kinds of debris structures
  • begin to work through some 260-plus malfunction and contingency scenarios that we’ve identified as possible “gotchas” at Pluto
  • data New Horizons sends back — maps, spectra, plasma data, radio science and more — will provide a detailed view of Pluto and its system of moons
  • knowledge of Pluto will literally expand from a single fact sheet’s worth of information, to textbook-length tomes.
Mars Base

Long-lived NASA Rover Begins Probing Interior of Mars | NASA & Mars Rover Opportunity |... - 0 views

www.space.com/pportunity-winter-science.html

scibyte30 opportunity

shared by Mars Base on 21 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • rover is allowing scientists to begin investigating the mysterious interior of the Red Planet
  • beaming radio signals home to Earth
  • analyzing these signals, researchers hope to get "a handle on the structure of the interior of the planet
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  • distribution of mass, and perhaps how large the core might be
  • the rover won't sleep
  • , it will investigate the rocks at Greeley Haven, take panoramic photos of its surroundings
  • most important — send radio signals back to Earth.
  • mission team will track those signals
  • using Opportunity's motion relative to Earth as a proxy for the rotation of Mars
  • Scientists should thus be able to get very precise measurements of the planet's spin.
  • learning how Mars' spin axis has changed, or precessed, since NASA's Viking mission made similar measurements back in the mid-1970s
  • Knowing the precession rate should allow scientists to get a much better handle on the Red Planet's interior structure
  • keen to study Mars' nutation, which is a smaller-period variation in the planet's rotation. Such information might help reveal whether the Red Planet's core is solid or liquid
  • mission team will be tracking Opportunity's radio signals almost daily. After three to six months, researchers expect to have enough data to start getting an in-depth picture of the Martian interior
Mars Base

Solar Flare May Spark Weekend Northern Lights Show | Solar Flares & Northern Lights | S... - 0 views

www.space.com/kend-northern-lights-show.html

scibyte30 sun solar flare CME

shared by Mars Base on 21 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • A powerful flare erupted from the sun Thursday (Jan. 19
  • solar flare occurred at about 11:30 am EST (1600 GMT
  • coronal mass ejection
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • aimed at Earth
  • sun explosion should reach Earth by Saturday night (Jan. 21), and could amp up northern lights
Mars Base

Scientists turning to crowdsourcing to gather more information about earthquakes - 1 views

www.physorg.com/...crowdsourcing-earthquakes.html

scibyte30 crowdsourcing earthquakes

shared by Mars Base on 21 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • In the past, seismologists have had to rely on information provided by just a few sensors in the vicinity of an earthquake to get information about it
  • afterwards, on anecdotal evidence provided by people that had experienced the quake first hand
  • new sources of data are becoming available that are giving scientists much more information about an earthquake,
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  • example is Twitter. Because it’s a public system, scientists can use filters to pinpoint messages being sent about a specific topic, in this case earthquakes
  • researchers can watch in real time as people send messages about it, outpacing the quake itself
  • new sources of data are becoming available as well as more people become interested in helping scientists gather data
  • Seismic monitors can now be purchased by ordinary citizens, for example, and attached to buildings, private or public where they send data via WiFi to designated research facilities
  • Other new sources of data are becoming available as well as more people become interested in helping scientists gather
  • Smartphone apps are now available as well that can be used to turn a phone into a vibration sensing device during times when the phone is not being carried.
  • earthquake scientists have also begun to set up websites with query forms that people can fill in to add what they know about an earthquake to an existing database
  • seismologists are able to create a far more detailed picture of an earthquake
  • helps in understanding what led to it occurring and the more detailed information scientists receive the more accurate their prediction models should become
  • Citizens have long participated in earthquake science through the reporting, collection, and analysis of individual experiences
  • Today's communications infrastructure has taken citizen engagement to a new level
Mars Base

Do Dolphins Speak Whale in Their Sleep? - ScienceNOW - 2 views

news.sciencemag.org/...hins-speak-whale-in-their.html

scibyte30 dolphins sleep

shared by Mars Base on 21 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Researchers discovered the dolphins' midnight melodies by accident
  • Every day, as music and sounds of the sea play in the background, they show off their swimming, jumping, and ball-catching skills for an adoring audience and squawk and whistle just like dolphins should
  • But at night, they make strange noises that researchers believe are imitations of humpback whale songs included in the performance soundtrack
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Ethologist
  • and her colleagues had hung underwater microphones in the tank because little is known about what dolphins sound like at night
  • One night, they suddenly heard 25 new sounds (see below) that the dolphins had never made before
  • dolphins are known for mimicry
  • researchers examined their complex daytime environment to determine
  • zeroed in on the new soundtrack that Planète Sauvage was playing during performances
  • included music, sea gulls' calls, the dolphins' own whistles, and humpback whale calls
  • researchers used a computer program to compare auditory recordings of the whale
  • showed that the two sounds were very similar
  • the dolphins had been captive their entire lives, they couldn't have picked them up from real whales
  • the team asked 20 human volunteers to listen to humpback whale sounds and wild dolphin sounds
  • researchers played the nighttime vocalizations and asked the volunteers whether the sounds came from a whale or a dolphin
  • About 76% of the time, the volunteers classified the imitations as sounds from real whales
  • Because the dolphins didn't make these noises during the show, the finding suggests that they waited to practice the sounds hours later.
  • the shows prime the animals to learn and remember information
  • find out whether the dolphins are asleep and dreaming when they mimic
  • dreams help dolphins etch new information into their memories, just like in humans
  • capture electroencephalogram recordings of the dolphins' brains at night
  • a biologist at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom who studies animal vocalization, says that the idea that dolphins might delay their rehearsals for hours is intriguin
  • isn't convinced from the small number of recordings that the researchers obtained that the dolphins were imitating whales
  • dolphins make so many different sounds that it's difficult to pin down one as an imitation of a particular source
  • songbirds rehearse their imitations of other noises at night, so he thinks it's not unlikely that dolphins might do the same.
Mars Base

Seaweed Study Fuels Bioenergy Enthusiasm - Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...udy_fuels_bioenergy_enthusiasm

scibyte30 BioEnergy

shared by Mars Base on 21 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Seaweed has long made biofuel prospectors drool
  • hadn’t figured out how to efficiently chew through the stuff
  • Researchers have engineered a bacterium that can break down and digest seaweed’s gummy cell walls to yield ethanol and other useful compounds
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Unlike corn and many other biofuel feedstocks, seaweed doesn’t need arable land, fertilizer or freshwater
  • If seaweed can be efficiently munched into ethanol, it broadens the biofuel horizon
  • the team took the workhorse bacterium E. coli and within it, patched together the genes and other parts needed for superior seaweed-to-fuel conversion
  • The system yields 80 percent of the theoretical maximum amount of ethanol for a given amount of biomass,
  • scientists noted, and with further tweaking will probably be even more efficient
  • initial breakdown products can easily be harvested for creating useful compounds such as precursors to nylon or plastics
Mars Base

Delay for space station's 1st private cargo run (Update) - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...tation-1st-private-hookup.html

scibyte30 SpaceStation SpaceX

shared by Mars Base on 21 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • SpaceX planned to launch its unmanned supply ship from Cape Canaveral on Feb. 7
  • company said more testing was needed with the spacecraft, named Dragon
  • confirmed the launch would not occur until late March.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • as much as he'd like to take part in the historic event, it's important that SpaceX fly when it's ready. Burbank will return to Earth in mid-March.
  • Just over a year ago
  • Space Ex
  • launched a test version of the capsule
  • NASA is counting on companies like SpaceX to keep the station stocked, now that the shuttles are retired.
  • Russian, European and Japanese space agencies - all government entities - are picking up the slack as best they can, sending up regular shipments to the orbiting outpost
  • It may take a little more time, but when it happens, it's going to be amazing
  • first Dragon capsule to visit the space station will carry several hundred pounds of astronaut provisions - nothing crucial, in case of a failure
  • Astronauts aboard the space station will use a huge robot arm to grab and berth the Dragon
  • it will be able to return scientific samples to Earth, Burbank noted. None of the other countries' supply ships can do that; they burn up on re-entry.
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