SciByte

also has additional color calibration tools for the rover’s Mastcam

; in addition to the words “Mars 2012″ and “To Mars, To Explore” around its top bezel,

along its edge

Along with line drawings and the word for “Mars” in sixteen languages, Curiosity’s sundial bears the following inscription

“For millennia, Mars has stimulated our imaginations. First, we saw Mars as a wandering star, a bringer of war from the abode of the gods. In recent centuries, the planet’s changing appearance in telescopes caused us to think that Mars had a climate like the Earth’s. Our first space age views revealed only a cratered, Moon-like world, but later missions showed that Mars once had abundant liquid water. Through it all, we have wondered: Has there been life on Mars? To those taking the next steps to find out, we wish a safe journey and the joy of discovery.”

lowest frequency in sound

crucial for speech and music perception, allowing recognition of sounds in complex and noisy auditory environments.

musical training as children makes better listeners later in life

the study suggests that short-term music lessons may enhance lifelong listening and learning

For the study, young adults with varying amounts of past musical training were tested by measuring electrical signals from the auditory brainstem in response to eight complex sounds ranging in pitch

Forty-five adults were grouped into three

matched groups based on histories of musical instruction

One group had no musical instruction

another had 1 to 5 years

the other had to 6 to 11 years

Both musically trained groups began instrumental practice around age 9

musical training during childhood led to more robust neural processing of sounds later in life

Prior research on highly trained musicians and early bilinguals revealed that enhanced brainstem responses to sound are associated with heightened auditory perception, executive function and auditory communication skills.

we infer that a few years of music lessons also confer advantages in how one perceives and attends to sounds in everyday communication situations, such as noisy restaurants

Dinosaur tracks are far more common

Stanford may have discovered a footprint of an adult ankylosaur in an unexpected place.

the print sits on the property of a NASA‘s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland

Stanford stumbled across the lone track earlier this summer and recently led NASA scientists out to the site to show them the fossil depression

the track has started to erode, and may have been damaged by a lawnmower, the roughly 112-million-year-old track still shows four toe imprints

member of the heavily-armored ankylosaur subgroup that lacked tail clubs but often sported prominent spikes along their sides

Officials

are already moving to protect the fossil, and they plan to bring in paleontologists to look for other dinosaur tracks

it seems that there is more than just a lone track at the spaceflight facility. When Stanford took the NASA scientists out to the site, he and other researchers found several more possible dinosaur tracks. The high-tech NASA facility may have been founded on a Cretaceous dinosaur stomping ground.

The second track is a smaller version of the first.

, the smaller print was discovered within the first, evidence that they were made around the same time and leading researchers to suggest it may have been a mother-and-child pair.

"He was the best, and I will miss him terribly," Apollo 11 command module pilot Michael Collins

Soon after returning from the moon, Armstrong announced he would not fly in space again.

He resigned from NASA

later in 1971

"He didn't give interviews, but he wasn't a strange person or hard to talk to," said Ron Huston, a colleague at the University of Cincinnati. "He just didn't like being a novelty.

Armstrong was born Aug. 5, 1930, on a farm in Ohio

He was licensed to fly at 16, before he got his driver's license

enrolled in Purdue University to study aeronautical engineering but was called to duty with the U.S. Navy in 1949 and flew 78 combat missions in Korea

He became a test pilot with what evolved into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, flying more than 200 kinds of aircraft from gliders to jets.

accepted into NASA's second astronaut class in 1962

backup commander for the historic Apollo 8 mission at Christmastime in 1968

In Wapakoneta, media and souvenir frenzy was swirling around the home of Armstrong's parents

People were pulling grass out of their front yard."

Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins were given ticker tape parades in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles and later made a 22-nation world tour. A homecoming in Wapakoneta drew 50,000 people to the city of 9,000.

In 1970, Armstrong was appointed deputy associate administrator for aeronautics at NASA but left the following year to teach aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati.

remained there until 1979 and during that time bought a farm, where he raised cattle and corn. He stayed out of public view, accepting few requests for interviews or speeches.

"I can honestly say—and it's a big surprise to me—that I have never had a dream about being on the moon," he said

His family's statement

"Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.

Armstrong was tempted by the idea of trying to set down just shy of those boulders, which he knew would be of great interest to scientists on Earth. But they were going too fast; there were just too many rocks. Armstrong took over from the computer, steering Eagle over the giant crater and the boulder field, and flew onward, hunting for safer ground

it was crucial to land without any sideways motion, lest they risk tipping over at touchdown

The blast of the descent rocket was kicking up moon dust

Armstrong fixed his gaze on rocks sticking up through the blowing dust; using them as reference points

guided Eagle slowly downward, about as fast as an elevator

only the second person in his family to attend college

college tuition was paid for under the Holloway Plan — successful applicants committed to two years of study, followed by three years of service in the United States Navy, then completion of the final two years of the degree

Armstrong held honorary doctorates from a number of universities.[11]

On January 27, 1967, the date of the Apollo 1 fire, Armstrong was in Washington, D.C., with Gordon Cooper, Dick Gordon, Jim Lovell and Scott Carpenter for the signing of the United Nations Outer Space Treaty.

returned to the Georgetown Inn, where they each found messages to phone the Manned Spacecraft Center

they learned of the deaths of Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee

sugar molecules, known as glycolaldehyde, have previously been detected in interstellar space

according to the researchers, this is the first time they have been spotted so close to a sun-like star

the molecules are about the same distance away from the star as the planet Uranus is from our sun.

glycolaldehyde, which is a simple form of sugar, not much different to the sugar we put in coffee

found the sugar molecules using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope in Chile

primary star is about the same mass as the Sun, and its companion is an M-dwarf star one-third its size

inner planet is three times the size of Earth and orbits the binary star every 49.5 days

outer planet is 4.6 times the size of Earth with an orbit of 303.2 days.

outer planet is the first planet found to orbit a binary star within the "habitable zone,"

the planet's size (about the same as Uranus) means that it is an icy giant, and not an abode for life

"The challenging thing is that this is a very faint star," Endl said, "about 6,000 times dimmer than can be seen with the naked eye."

The secondary star is too faint to measure

taking spectra of the system

These values, along with the Kepler eclipse and transit timings, were plugged into a model that calculated the relative sizes of all the bodies involved

cured the coated snippets under ultraviolet light

unconfirmed hint of an additional world lurks in the blinking starlight produced when the planetary companions pass between the two stars and Earth

additional blink has been seen clearly just once

inner planet, Kepler-47b, is three times wider than Earth

The two stars orbit one another in roughly 7.5 days

The study has followed a group of 1,037 children

from birth to age 38

At age 38, all of the study participants were given a battery of psychological tests to assess memory, processing speed, reasoning and visual processing

Friends and relatives routinely interviewed as part of the study were more likely to report that the persistent cannabis users had attention and memory problems such as losing focus and forgetting to do tasks.

often become fouled after a few hours. Also, water

can sit on top of such filters, making it harder for oil to get through.

dip the screen in a blend containing two compounds: POSS (fluorodecyl polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane) and PEGDA (polyethylene glycol diacrylate

minute or so under ultraviolet light cures the membrane, and it’s hardened and ready to use.

once every six minutes, the stars now eclipse six seconds sooner

equates to a predicted orbital period reduction of about 0.25 milliseconds each year

Although this isn’t “direct” observation of gravitational waves, it is evidence inferred by their predicted effects… akin to watching a floating lantern in a dark pond at night moving up and down and deducing that there are waves present

Based on these measurements, by April 2013 the stars will be eclipsing each other 20 seconds sooner than first observed.

We expected that there should be this large population of hidden quasars in the universe, but WISE can now identify them across the sky

be used to explore how images were "built" by the brain and eye.

Feedback from the device will be fed into a "vision processor" allowing doctors to determine exactly what Ashworth sees when her retina is subjected to various levels of stimulation

team is working towards a "wide-view" 98-electrode device that will provide users with the ability to perceive large objects such as buildings and cars, and a "high-acuity" 1,024-electrode device

high-acuity device are expected to be able to recognise faces and read large print

Every time there was stimulation there was a different shape that appeared

switched on the device in their laboratory last month after Ashworth had fully recovered from surgery