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Sea turtles 'lost years' mystery starts to unravel - 0 views

phys.org/...urtles-lost-years-mystery.html scibyte123
shared by Mars Base on 05 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Small satellite-tracking devices attached to sea turtles swimming off Florida's coast have delivered first-of-its-kind data that could help unlock they mystery of what endangered turtles do during the "lost years."
  • "lost years" refers to the time after turtles hatch and head to sea where they remain for many years before returning to near-shore waters as large juveniles
  • The time period is often referred to as the "lost years" because not much has been known about where the young turtles go and how they interact with their oceanic environment
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • "Before this study, most of the scientific information about the early life history of sea turtles was inferred through genetics studies, opportunistic sightings offshore, or laboratory-based studies
  • With real observations of turtles in their natural environment, we are able to examine and reevaluate existing hypotheses about the turtles' early life history
  • A team of scientists
  • tracked 17 loggerhead turtles for 27 to 220 days in the open ocean using small, solar-powered satellite tags
  • The goal was to better understand the turtles' movements, habitat preferences, and what role temperature may play in early sea turtle life history
  • While the turtles remain in oceanic waters (traveling between 124 miles to 2,672 miles) off the continental shelf and the loggerhead turtles sought the surface of the water as predicted
  • the study found that the turtles do not necessarily remain within the currents associated with the North Atlantic subtropical gyre
  • . It was historically thought that loggerhead turtles hatching from Florida's east coast complete a long, developmental migration in a large circle around the Atlantic entrained in these currents
  • the team's data suggest that turtles may drop out of these currents into the middle of the Atlantic or the Sargasso Sea.
  • The team also found that while the turtles mostly stayed at the sea surface, where they were exposed to the sun's energ
  • the turtles' shells registered more heat than anticipated (as recorded by sensors in the satellite tags
  • a new hypothesis about why the turtles seek refuge in Sargassum. It is a type of seaweed found on the surface of the water in the deep ocean long associated with young sea turtles.
  • propose that young turtles remain at the sea surface to gain a thermal benefit
  • "This makes sense because the turtles are cold blooded animals. By remaining at the sea surface,
  • by associating with Sargassum habitat, turtles gain a thermal refuge of sorts that may help enhance growth and feeding rates, among other physiological benefits.
  • More research will be needed, but it's a start at cracking the "lost years" myster
  • findings are important because the loggerhead turtles along with other sea turtles are threatened or endangered species
  • Florida beaches are important to their survival because they provide important nesting grounds in North America
  • More than 80% of Atlantic loggerheads nest along Florida's coast
  • There are other important nesting grounds and nursing areas for sea turtles in the western hemisphere found from as far north as Virginia to South America and the Caribbean.
  • "There's a whole lot that happens during the Atlantic crossing that we knew nothing abou
  • r work helps to redefine Atlantic loggerhead nursery grounds and early loggerhead habitat use
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China's Yutu Moon Rover Unable to Properly Maneuver Solar Panels - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...properly-maneuver-solar-panels scibyte122 scibyte123 ChineseSpaceProgram-Yutu
shared by Mars Base on 04 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The serious technical malfunction
  • of China’s Yutu moon rover
  • has been identified as an inability to properly maneuver the life giving solar panels
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • “Yutu suffered a control circuit malfunction in its driving unit,” according to a newly published report on March 1 by the state owned Xinhua news agency.
  • prevented Yutu from entering the second dormancy as planned
  • A functioning control circuit is required to lower the rovers mast
  • They must be folded down into a warmed electronics box to shield them from the damaging effects of the Moon’s nightfall when temperatures plunge dramatically to below minus 180 Celsius, or minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit.
  • The panel driving unit also helps maneuver the panels into position to efficiently point to the sun to maximize the electrical output
  • Chinese space engineers engaged in troubleshooting to try and identify and rectify the technical problems in a race against time to find a solution before the start of Lunar Night 3.
  • The 140 kilogram rover was unable to move during Lunar Day 3 due to the mechanical glitches.
  • “Yutu only carried out fixed point observations during its third lunar day
  • it did complete some limited scientific observations. And fortunately the ground penetrating radar, panoramic and infrared imaging equipment all functioned normally.
  • Yutu and the companion Chang’e-3 lander have again gone into sleep mode during Lunar Night 3 on Feb. 22 and Feb 23 respectively, local Beijing time.
  • the issue with the control circuit malfunction in its driving unit remains unresolved and a still threatens the outlook for Yutu’s future exploration.
  • Yutu is now nearing its planned 3 month long life expectancy
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Curiosity Rover pauses mid-drive and captures Spectacular Martian Mountain Snapshot - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...ular-martian-mountain-snapshot scibyte122 Curiosity
shared by Mars Base on 02 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The six wheeled rover paused during the planned Feb. 19 drive of 328 feet (100 meters) to capture the imagery.
  • on Feb. 20 (Sol 549), she also completed her second 100 meter drive in reverse.
  • occasionally commanding Curiosity to drive backwards in a newly tested bid to minimize serious damage to the six 20 inch diameter wheels
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Curiosity is well on the way to her next near term goal, which is a science waypoint, named Kimberly (formerly called KMS-9), which lies about half a mile ahead.
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Mars Science Laboratory: NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover Views Striated Ground - 0 views

mars.jpl.nasa.gov/...index.cfm scibyte122 Curiosity
shared by Mars Base on 02 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has reached an area where orbital images had piqued researchers' interest in patches of ground with striations all oriented in a similar direction.
  • The foreground rocks are in an outcrop called "Junda," which the rover passed during a drive of 328 feet (100 meters) on Feb. 19.
  • A location still ahead, called "Kimberley," where researchers plan to suspend driving for a period of science investigations, also features ground with striations.
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Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers : Nature News & Comment - 0 views

www.nature.com/...n-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763 scibyte122
shared by Mars Base on 28 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.
  • Over the past two years
  • catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer
  • more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE),
  • One of the named authors replied t
  • said that he first learned of the article when conference organizers notified his university in December 2013;
  • he does not know why he was a listed co-author on the paper.
  • Among the works
  • a paper published as a proceeding from the 2013 International Conference on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering, held in Chengdu, China.
  • The authors of the paper, entitled ‘TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce’,
  • in the abstract that they “concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact”.
  • a way to automatically detect manuscripts composed by a piece of software called SCIgen, which randomly combines strings of words to produce fake computer-science papers
  • SCIgen was invented in 2005 by researchers
  • to prove that conferences would accept meaningless papers — and, as they put it, “to maximize amusement”
  • A related program generates random physics manuscript titles on the satirical website arXiv vs. snarXiv.
  • SCIgen is free to download and use, and it is unclear how many people have done so, or for what purposes
  • SCIgen’s output has occasionally popped up at conferences, when researchers have submitted nonsense papers and then revealed the trick.
  • Most of the conferences took place in China, and most of the fake papers have authors with Chinese affiliations.
  • The papers are quite easy to spot,” says Labbé, who has built a website where users can test whether papers have been created using SCIgen.
  • involves searching for characteristic vocabulary generated by SCIgen
  • In April 2010, he used SCIgen to generate 102 fake papers by a fictional author called Ike Antkare
  • showed how easy it was to add these fake papers to the Google Scholar database
  • There is a long history of journalists and researchers getting spoof papers accepted in conferences or by journals to reveal weaknesses in academic quality controls
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March 5 - Today in Science History - Scientists born on March 5th, died, and events - 0 views

www.todayinsci.com/...3_05.htm scibyte122 LookingBackMar
shared by Mars Base on 01 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Oldest eclipse record
  • In 1223 BC, the oldest recorded eclipse occurred, according to one plausible interpretation of a date inscribed on a clay tablet retrieved from the ancient city of Ugarit, Syria (as it is now). This date is favoured by recent authors on the subject, although alternatively 3 May 1375 BC has also been proposed as plausible. Certainly by the 8th century BC, the Babylonians were keeping a systematic record of solar eclipses, and possibly by this time they may have been able to apply numerological rules to make fairly accurate predictions of the occurrence of solar eclipses.
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March 6 - Today in Science History - Scientists born on March 6th, died, and events - 0 views

www.todayinsci.com/...3_06.htm
shared by Mars Base on 01 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Silly Putty
  • In 1950, Silly Putty was introduced as a toy by Peter Hodgson, a marketing consultant, who packaged one-ounce portions of the rubber-like material in plastic eggs. It could be stretched, rolled into a bouncing ball, or used to transfer colored ink from newsprint. The original discovery was made in 1943 by James Wright who combined silicone oil and boric acid at the laboratories of General Electric. He was researching methods of making synthetic rubber, but at the time no significant application existed for the material. However, it was passed around as a curiosity. Hodgson saw a sample and realized its potential simply for entertainment and coined its name for marketing it as a toy. Its popularity made him a millionaire
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March 10 - Today in Science History - Scientists born on March 10th, died, and events - 0 views

www.todayinsci.com/...3_10.htm
shared by Mars Base on 01 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Syzygy
  •   In 1982, a syzygy occurred when all nine planets aligned on the same side of the Sun. The planets are spread out over 98 degrees on this date. The four major planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, span an arc of some 73 degrees.
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NASA Nearly Doubles Discovery of Known Planets Without Active Kepler Space Telescope - 0 views

www.scienceworldreport.com/...ithout-active-kepler-space.htm scibyte122 Kepler
shared by Mars Base on 27 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The Kepler Space Telescope has been inactive since May of 2013, but the probe's data has led astronomer's to discover 715 new planets
  • The 715 new planets are said to be distributed among 305 different star systems, and the number of Earth-sized planets increased by 400%
  • four of the newly discovered planets are about 2.5 times wider than Earth
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • he number of known planets beyond our solar system has increased to almost 1,700
  • Kepler 174d, Kepler 296f, Kepler 298d, and Kepler 309c are also said to be located in a habitable zone where water may exist in liquid form
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Doctor uses printed 3D heart to assist in infant heart surgery - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...r-3d-heart-infant-surgery.html scibyte122 MedicalTreatment
shared by Mars Base on 27 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • 14 month old infant
  • had been born with four congenital heart defects—doctors had known since before he was born that his heart had problems
  • Fixing them all would prove to be a challenge. When it came time to plan the surgery
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • surgeons and found each of them had different ideas on the best way to fix the hear
  • The ideal approach would involve the least amount of cutting and suturing—but that can be hard to plan using only conventional scanning techniques
  • Researchers
  • worked with radiologists
  • to create a means for converting data from a CT scan of
  • s heart to data that could be used with a 3D printer.
  • The two seemed a perfect match as CT scanning uses the same basic idea as 3D printing
  • it takes pictures of slices and puts them together on a computer screen to form a whole, and 3D printing is achieved by laying down one layer or "slice" of material at a time.
  • The 3D printing
  • to print the heart (in three pieces) at twice its normal size
  • also used a flexible type of plastic known as "Ninja Flex" instead of AB
  • allowed the surgeon to bend the finished heart in ways that resembled a real human heart.
  • Printing the heart took approximately 20 hours at a cost of roughly $600
  • it allowed for a single surgery
  • and greatly reduced cutting and suturing, which ultimately led to a much quicker recovery
  • heart surgery on such a young patient is not unheard of, of course, what's new is that Austin was able to map out his surgical approach using a nearly exact model of the patients heart—it had been printed on a 3D printer.
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Could the Video-Game Tetris Curb Cravings for Food, Cigarettes and Alcohol? - 0 views

www.scienceworldreport.com/...ood-cigarettes-and-alcohol.htm scibyte122
shared by Mars Base on 25 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • A recent study suggests that Tetris could actually help dieters reduce cravings
  • examine how the game can affect people's carvings
  • researchers created two study groups: One that played Tetris for three minutes while the other group was told that the game was loading but they never received the chance to play
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • participants were then asked to rate their cravings for cigarettes, food and alcohol based on the vividness, intrusiveness and strength of those cravings.
  • Tetris group showed a 24 percent reduction in cravings following their activity with the game
  • the other group who did not get to play Tetris did not experience any craving reductions.
  • "Ultimately, we are constantly looking for ways to stimulate cravings for healthy activities - such as exercise - but this a neutral activity that we have shown can have a positive impact."
  • "Feeling in control is an important part of staying motivated, and playing Tetris can potentially help the individual to stay in control when cravings strike
  • It is something a person can quickly access, for the most part whether they are at work or at home, and replaces the feeling of stress caused by the craving itself,"
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