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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
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
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • 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

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

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
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • 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

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

Mysterious Extragalactic Explosions Baffle Astronomers | Fast Radio Bursts | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/-radio-explosions-mystery.html

scibyte100 RadioSignal

shared by Mars Base on 07 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • known as fast radio bursts (FRBs), above the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy.
  • These bursts gave off more energy in a millisecond than the sun does in 300,000 years
  • The bursts ranged from 5.5 to 10 billion light-years away, meaning it took the light from some of them 10 billion years to reach Earth. (The Big Bang 
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • occurred 13.8 billion years ago
  • These newfound objects allowed the researchers to calculate that an FRB should occur once every 10 seconds
  • whether the new signals came from inside or outside the Milky Way.
  • they studied how the radio waves were affected by the material they pass through — a technique that could allow these new objects to shed light on the components of space.
  • As radio waves travel in space, they are stretched and slowed by the ionized material through which they move
  • Using models, the team concluded that the FRBs traveled billions of light-years — much farther than the edge of Earth's galaxy
  • the source is likely located in another galaxy
  • They are so bright and narrow that we can limit the size of the emission region at the source to just a few hundred kilometers
  • Although the explosions are brief, the astronomers can pinpoint the bursts' locations pretty accurately
  • No corresponding object could be observed in optical, gamma or X-ray wavelengths, so the explosions' origins remain unknown to scientists
  • Possible sources
  • intersecting magnetic fields from two neutron stars, extremely dense city-size bodies packing the mass of the sun.
  • A special kind of supernova orbited by a neutron star could potentially produce radio bursts as the star's magnetic field interacts with the explosion of the supernova
  • such combinations would be rare
  • favorite explanation is a giant burst from a magnetar, a highly magnetized type of neutron star
  • performed approximately a year after the FRBs were first spotted, looked at whether the objects continued to produce emission, but the signals appear to be nonrepeating
  • Efforts are ongoing at the moment to detect FRBs in close to real time, such that they can be followed up quickly
Mars Base

News in Brief: Distant radio-wave pulses spotted | Atom & Cosmos | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...tant_radio-wave_pulses_spotted

scibyte100 RadioSignal

shared by Mars Base on 09 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • four recently detected radio signals disappeared only milliseconds after arriving at Earth
  • only the second detection ever of radio bursts emanating from beyond the Milky Way
  • Picked up by an international team of astronomers at the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • the powerful radio pulses emanate from sources 5 billion to nearly 11 billion light years away
  • these sources remains a mystery
  • but “clearly they’re very energetic events, probably cataclysmic.”
  • One-time radio pulses have been hard to detect
  • today’s telescopes capture radio waves from such a small fraction of the sky
  • the instruments lack the ultrafast time resolution required to pinpoint the short-lived bursts
  • The four new blips may add weight to the only other extragalactic radio burst ever witnessed, reported seven years
  • only had one burst
  • wondered whether it was
  • artifact
Mars Base

Student's flashlight works by body heat, not batteries - 0 views

phys.org/...flashlight-body-batteries.html

scibyte100 StudentDesign

shared by Mars Base on 02 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • her flashlight has got her into the finalist ranks for the Google Science Fair
  • Ann Makosinski from Victoria, British Columbia, has an LED flashlight powered by body heat
  • the Hollow Flashlight, which works according to the thermoelectric effect—creating electric voltage out of temperature difference
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • a Grade 10 student
  • designed a flashlight that provides bright light without batteries or moving parts
  • and only needs a five degree temperature difference to work and produce up to 5.4 mW at 5 foot candles of brightness
  • Using four Peltier tiles and the temperature difference between the palm of the hand and ambient air
  • bought Peltier tiles and tested them to see if they could produce sufficient power to light an LED
  • power was no problem but getting the needed voltage was, as the tiles did not generate enough of the voltage needed
  • some changes to the circuit design
  • used the Internet for information, experimented with different circuits
  • finding an energy-harvesting article
  • that made note of a circuit that could provide enough voltage when used with a recommended transformer
  • The final design included mounting the Peltiers on a hollow aluminum tube which was inserted in a larger PVC pipe with an opening that allowed ambient air to cool the tube
  • The palm wrapped around a cutout in the PVC pipe and warmed the tiles.
  • The result was a bright light at 5 degree Celcius [sic] of Peltier differential
  • Materials for the flashlight project cost her $26
  • The top winner gets a $50,000 scholarship and trip to the Galapagos Islands
  • The prize ceremony takes place in September. Winners will be chosen in different age categories—13-14, 15-16, 17-18.
Mars Base

Fear of Komodo dragon bacteria wrapped in myth - 0 views

phys.org/...modo-dragon-bacteria-myth.html

scibyte100

shared by Mars Base on 01 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • It has long been believed that Komodo dragon bites were fatal because of toxic bacteria in the reptiles' mouths
  • But ground-breaking research
  • has found that the mouths of Komodo dragons are surprisingly ordinary and the levels and types of bacteria do not differ from any other carnivore
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Unlike people have been led to believe, they do not have chunks of rotting flesh from their meals on their teeth, cultivating bacteria
  • the poor hygiene of water buffalo is responsible for perceptions about deadly toxic bacteria in the dragons
  • They now populate the islands of Indonesia where they prey on the introduced water buffalo, and on pigs and deer
Mars Base

Researchers discover link between fear, sound perception - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...2013-06-link-perception.html

scibyte100

shared by Mars Base on 01 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • our emotions can actually affect how we hear and process sound
  • When certain types of sounds become associated in our brains with strong emotions, hearing similar sounds can evoke those same feelings
  • a phenomenon commonly seen in combat veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • a pair of researchers
  • has discovered how fear can actually increase or decrease the ability to discriminate among sounds depending on context
  • study
  • emotional conditioning in mice to investigate how hearing acuity (the ability to distinguish between tones of different frequencies) can change following a traumatic event, known as emotional learning
  • In these experiments
  • animals learn to distinguish between potentially dangerous and safe sounds—called "emotional discrimination learning."
  • This type of conditioning tends to result in relatively poor learning, but
  • designed a series of learning tasks intended to create progressively greater emotional discrimination in the mice, varying the difficulty of the
  • The researchers found that, as expected, fine emotional learning tasks produced greater learning specificity than tests in which the tones were farther apart in frequency
  • animals presented with sounds that were very far apart generalize the fear that they developed to the danger tone over a whole range of frequencies
  • animals presented with the two sounds that were very similar exhibited specialization of their emotional response
  • pitch discrimination abilities were measured in the animals, the mice with more specific responses displayed much finer auditory acuity than the mice who were frightened by a broader range of frequencies
  • Another interesting finding of this study is that the effects of emotional learning on hearing perception were mediated by a specific brain region, the auditory cortex
  • The auditory cortex has been known as an important area responsible for auditory plasticity
  • Surprisingly
  • found that the auditory cortex did not play a role in emotional learning
  • the specificity of emotional learning is controlled by the amygdala and sub-cortical auditory areas
  • hypothesis is that the amygdala and cortex are modifying subcortical auditory processing areas. The sensory cortex is responsible for the changes in frequency discrimination, but it's not necessary for developing specialized or generalized emotional responses
Mars Base

Space Shuttle Atlantis Exhibit 'Incredible,' 'Breathtaking' | NASA Shuttle Program | Sp... - 0 views

www.space.com/exhibit-visitors-reaction.html

scibyte100 shuttle

shared by Mars Base on 01 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • The retired orbiter is displayed at an angle, with its cargo bay doors open and robotic arm outstretched
  • The public got its first official look at the display
  • June 29
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • when the Space Shuttle Atlantis exhibition opened
  • at NASA's Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex
  • Atlantis dominates the center of a multistory building that allows views of the orbiter from many angles.
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