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Russia wants to build manned base on moon - Technology & science - Space - Space.com - ... - 0 views

www.msnbc.msn.com/...technology_and_science-space russia base moon
shared by Chris Fisher on 22 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Russia is talking to NASA and the European Space Agency about building manned research colonies on the moon, according to Russian news reports.
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Frontiers | Do Dolphins Rehearse Show-Stimuli When at Rest? Delayed Matching of Auditor... - 0 views

www.frontiersin.org/...full scibyte30 dolphins
shared by Mars Base on 21 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • recordings made before the whale sounds started being broadcast revealed that they had never emitted such sounds before
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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.
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Sun shoots a fastball at Earth, but minimal impact expected on satellites, power grid -... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gIQA5KiBEQ_story.html sun power grid
shared by Chris Fisher on 21 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • A huge sunspot unleashed a blob of charged plasma Thursday that space weather watchers predict will blast past the Earth on Sunday.
  • But, he added, “We’re not looking at an extreme event here.”
  • “At first glance, it was, ‘Oh my God, it’s at the center of the [sun’s] disk, it ought to go right to the Earth,’ ” Kunches said. But upon further review and “head-scratching” Thursday, NOAA’s space weather team calculated that most of the plasma blob should pass harmlessly over the top of our planet.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “It’s more of a glancing blow,” Pulkkinen said.
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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
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • 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
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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,
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • 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
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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
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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
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • 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
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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
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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
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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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NASA Spacecraft in Home Stretch of Journey to Pluto | NASA & New Horizons Mission | Plu... - 0 views

www.space.com/raft-horizons-anniversary.html scibyte30 newhorizons pluto
shared by Mars Base on 20 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • the mission will give scientists their first good look at any dwarf planet — a class of bodies suspected to be far more numerous in our solar system than terrestrial and giant planets combined.
  • New Horizons has put about 2.14 billion miles (3.45 billion km) on its odometer,
  • another 1 billion miles (1.6 billion km) left to go before the close encounter.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • NASA has billed New Horizons as the fastest spacecraft ever launched from Earth
  • But the Tombaughs' two children, Annette and Alden, should get to see what New Horizons discovers. They'll be the mission team's guests of honor when the probe makes its closest approach to Pluto in July 2015
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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
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • 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.
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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
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