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Mars Base

Making cancer less cancerous: Blocking a single gene renders tumors less aggressive - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...rous-blocking-gene-tumors.html

scibyte93 Cancer

shared by Mars Base on 03 May 13 - No Cached
  • Researchers at Johns Hopkins have identified a gene that, when repressed in tumor cells, puts a halt to cell growth and a range of processes needed for tumors to enlarge and spread to distant sites
  • "This master regulator is normally turned off in adult cells, but it is very active during embryonic development and in all highly aggressive tumors studied to date," says Linda Resar, M.D.
  • affiliate in the Institute for Cell Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • work shows for the first time that switching this gene off in aggressive cancer cells dramatically changes their appearance and behavior
  • In the new
  • study, the
  • team applied the same techniques to several strains of human breast cancer cells in the laboratory, including the so-called triple negative cells
  • Triple-negative breast cancer cells tend to behave aggressively and do not respond to many of our most effective breast cancer therapies
  • the cells with suppressed HMGA1 grow very slowly and fail to migrate or invade new territory
  • next implanted tumor cells into mice
  • The tumors with HMGA1 grew and spread to other areas, such as the lungs, while those with blocked HMGA1 did not grow well in the breast tissue or spread to distant sites.
Mars Base

NASA Wants To Send Your Haiku To Mars | Popular Science - 0 views

www.popsci.com/...asa-wants-send-your-haiku-mars

scibyte93 MarsHaiku

shared by Mars Base on 03 May 13 - No Cached
  • Any Earthling can submit a haiku about Mars by July 1—the DVD will include the name of each person who sends a poem, but only the three most popular haikus will eventually orbit the red planet.
  • NASA launches the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft in November, it wants to pack onboard a DVD containing three poetic messages
  • Starting July 15, an online public vote will open to select the three top haikus.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • NASA's MAVEN mission will be the first mission devoted to studying the Martian upper atmosphere
  • gather information that should help scientists figure out what happened to the atmosphere and water that once existed on Mars
Mars Base

IBM researchers make world's smallest movie using atoms (w/ video) - 0 views

phys.org/...orld-smallest-movie-atoms.html

scibyte92 scibyte93

shared by Mars Base on 02 May 13 - No Cached
  • Scientists from IBM
  • unveiled the world's smallest movie, made with one of the tiniest elements in the universe: atoms
  • Named "A Boy and His Atom," the Guinness World Records -verified movie used thousands of precisely placed atoms to create nearly 250 frames of stop-motion action.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • This movie is a fun way to share the atomic-scale world while opening up a dialogue with students and others on the new frontiers of math and science
  • In order to make the movie, the atoms were moved with an IBM-invented scanning tunneling microscope
  • weighs two tons, operates at a temperature of negative 268 degrees Celsius and magnifies the atomic surface over 100 million times
  • IBM Research lab one of the few places in the world where atoms can be moved with such precision.
  • Remotely operated on a standard computer, IBM researchers used the microscope to control a super-sharp needle along a copper surface to "feel" atoms
  • Only 1 nanometer away from the surface, which is a billionth of a meter in distance, the needle can physically attract atoms and molecules on the surface and thus pull them to a precisely specified location on the surface
  • moving atom makes a unique sound that is critical feedback in determining how many positions it's actually moved
  • scientists rendered still images of the individually arranged atoms, resulting in 242 single frames
  • the same team of IBM researchers who made this movie also recently created the world's smallest magnetic bit. They were the first to answer the question of how many atoms it takes to reliably store one bit of magnetic information: 12.
  • it takes roughly 1 million atoms to store a bit of data on a modern computer or electronic device
  • atomic memory could one day store all of the movies ever made in a device the size of a fingernail.
Mars Base

Mars Colony Project Gets 78,000 Applications in 2 Weeks | Mars One | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/s-one-colony-applications.html

scibyte93 MarsOne

shared by Mars Base on 08 May 13 - No Cached
  • About 78,000 people have applied to become Red Planet colonists with the nonprofit organization Mars One since its application process opened on April 22, officials announced today (May 7).
  • 78,000 applications in two weeks
  • goal of half a million applicant
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Mars One estimates that landing four settlers on Mars in 2023 will cost about $6 billion
  • plans to pay most of the bills by staging a global reality-TV event, with cameras documenting all phases of the mission from astronaut selection to the colonists' first years on the Red Planet.
  • The application process extends until Aug. 31. Anyone at least 18 years of age can apply, by submitting to the Mars One website a 1-minute video explaining his or her motivation to become a Red Planet settler. (
  • application fee, which ranges from $5 to $75 depending on the wealth of the applicant's home country. United States citizens pay $38
  • reviewers will pick 50 to 100 candidates from each of the 300 regions around the world that Mars One has identified
  • By 2015, this pool will be whittled down to a total of 28 to 40 candidates, officials said.
  • core group will be split into groups of four, which will train for their one-way Mars mission for about seven years
  • . Finally, an audience vote will pick one of these groups to be humanity's first visitors to the Red Planet.
  • more than 120 countries
  • United States
  • 17,324
  • China (10,241) and the United Kingdom (3,581). Russia, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Argentina and India round out the top 10.
Mars Base

NASA - The Day NASA's Fermi Dodged a 1.5-ton Bullet - 0 views

www.nasa.gov/...bullet-dodge.html

scibyte92 Fermi

shared by Mars Base on 08 May 13 - No Cached
  • the U.S. Space Surveillance Network continued keeping tabs on Cosmos 1805 and every other artificial object larger than 4 inches across in Earth orbit. Of the 17,000 objects currently tracked, only about 7 percent are active satellites.
Mars Base

Reading wordless storybooks to toddlers may expose them to richer language - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...-toddlers-expose-richer_1.html

scibyte93

shared by Mars Base on 30 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Researchers
  • have found that children hear more complex language from parents when they read a storybook with only pictures compared to a picture-vocabulary book
  • often, parents dismiss picture storybooks, especially when they are wordless, as not real reading or just for fun
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • these findings show that reading picture storybooks with kids exposes them to the kind of talk that is really important for children to hear, especially as they transition to school
  • a graduate student, recorded 25 mothers while they read to their toddlers both a wordless picture storybook and a vocabulary book with pictures
  • moms in our study significantly more frequently used forms of complex talk when reading the picture storybook to their child than the picture vocabulary book
  • especially interested in looking at the language mothers use when reading both wordless picture storybooks and picture vocabulary books
  • to see if parents provided extra information to children like relating the events of the story to the child's own experiences or asking their child to make predictions.
  • The results of the study are significant for both parents and educators because vocabulary books are often marketed as being more educationa
  • even short wordless picture books provide children with exposure to the kinds of
  • language that they will encounter at school
  • lay the foundation for later reading developmen
Mars Base

NASA Mulling Missions for Donated Spy Telescopes | National Reconnaissance Office | Spa... - 0 views

www.space.com/llite-telescopes-missions.html

scibyte93

shared by Mars Base on 04 May 13 - No Cached
  • NASA is sorting through a variety of possible uses for a pair of powerful spy satellite telescopes
  • SA asked scientists to suggest missions for the telescopes, which were donated by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and are comparable in size and appearance to the famous Hubble Space Telescope.
  • More than 60 serious proposals came
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • in, the most promising of which were presented in early February
  • The two scopes were originally built to carry out surveillance missions under a multibillion-dollar NRO program called Future Imagery Architecture
  • cost overruns and delays killed the program in 2005, and NASA announced in June 2012 that the NRO had bequeathed the instruments to the space agency
  • the telescopes' 8-foot-wide (2.4 meters) main mirrors are comparable to that of Hubble, the NRO instruments are designed to have a much wider field of view
  • Seven big ideas
  • Mars-orbiting space telescope
  • Exoplanet observatory
  • General-purpose faint object explorer
  • Advanced, Hubble-like visible light/ultraviolet telescope
  • Optical communications node in space (which would aid transmissions to and from deep-space assets)
  • Geospace dynamic observatory (which would study space weather and the sun-Earth system)
  • Research of Earth's upper atmosphere (from a spot aboard the International Space Station)
  • Whatever missions NASA ultimately assigns to the NRO scopes, the instruments are a long way from launch
  • they're far from being fully outfitted spacecraft.
  • no instruments on these two telescopes — just primary and secondary mirrors and the support structures
  • It's going to take a while to develop the instruments and integrate them into the structure
  • there's no guarantee that it will be
  • the funding to bring the scopes up to speed, launch them into space and maintain their operations has not been granted. And
Mars Base

Twinkle, twinkle little star: New app measures sky brightness - 0 views

phys.org/...e-star-app-sky-brightness.html

scibyte93 LightPollution

shared by Mars Base on 04 May 13 - No Cached
  • Researchers from the German "Loss of the Night" project have developed an app for Android smart phones, which counts the number of visible stars in the sky
  • The data from the app will be used by scientists to understand light pollution on a world wide scale.
  • The smartphone app will evaluate sky brightness, also known as skyglow, on a worldwide scale
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • This data can be used to map the distribution and changes in sky brightness, and will eventually allow scientists to investigate correlations with health, biodiversity, energy waste and other factors
  • The app works by interactively asking users to say whether individual stars are visible. By determining what the faintest visible star is, the researchers learn how many stars are visible at that location, and by extension how bright the sky is
  • With this app, people from around the world can collect data on skyglow without needing expensive equipment
  • some of the testers found that without intending too they learned the names of several stars and constellations
  • is based on the widely used Google Sky Map application
  • development of the app was sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education,
  • satellites that observe Earth at night measure the light that is radiating into the sky, not the brightness that is experienced by people and other organisms on the ground
Mars Base

Scientists study rare dinosaur skin fossil to determine skin colour for first time - 0 views

phys.org/...rare-dinosaur-skin-fossil.html

shared by Mars Base on 04 May 13 - No Cached
  • this is only the third three-dimensional dinosaur skin specimen ever found worldwide
  • One of the only well preserved dinosaur skin samples ever found is being tested at the Canadian Light Source (CLS) synchrotron to determine skin colour and to explain why the fossilized specimen remained intact after 70-million years.
  • the hadrosaur, a duck-billed dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous period (100-65 million years ago), was found close to a river bed near Grande Prairie, Alberta.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • One question is whether the hadrosaur skin was green or grey, like most dinosaurs are portrayed, or was it a completely different colour
  • the CLS to look at unique structures called melanosomes, cellular organelles the contain pigments that control the color of an animal's skin.
  • "If we are able to observe the melanosomes and their shape, it will be the first time pigments have been identified in the skin of a dinosaur
  • There has been research that proved the colour of some dinosaur feathers, but never skin
  • Using light at the CLS mid-infrared (Mid-IR) beamline, Barbi and CLS scientists are also looking for traces of organic and inorganic elements that could help determine the hadrosaur's diet and why the skin sample was preserved almost intact
  • the sample is placed in the path of the infrared beam and light reflects off of it.
  • , chemical bonds of certain compounds will create different vibrations
  • For example, proteins, sugars and fats still found in the skin will create unique vibrational frequencies that scientists can measure
Mars Base

Mars Rover Opportunity Back in Action After Glitch | Mars Solar Conjunction | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/-rover-exits-standby-mode.html

scibyte92 opportunity

shared by Mars Base on 02 May 13 - No Cached
  • Mars rover Opportunity has overcome a glitch that put the robot into standby mode late last month
  • ortunity apparently put itself into standby automode — in which it maintains power balance but waits for instructions from the ground — on April 22, after sensing a problem during a routine camera check, mission officials said.
  • rover's handlers didn't notice the problem until April 27, when Opportunity got back in touch after a nearly three-week communications moratorium
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Opportunity's controllers prepared a new set of commands on April 29 designed to get things back to normal, and the fix has apparently worked
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