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Mars Base

Ancient Mars Lake Could Have Supported Life, Curiosity Rover Shows | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/life-lake-curiosity-rover.html

scibyte112 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 10 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • The lake once covered a small portion of the 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater
  • The lake could have potentially supported a class of microbes called chemolithoautotrophs, which obtain energy by breaking down rocks and minerals
  • Here on Earth, chemolithoautotrophs are commonly found in habitats beyond the reach of sunlight, such as caves and hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The shallow ancient lake may have been about 30 miles long by 3 miles wide (50 by 5 kilometers
  • the research team estimates that the lake existed for at least tens of thousands of years — and perhaps much longer, albeit on a possibly on-and-off basis
  • for times when the lake might have been dry, the groundwater's still there
  • The lack of weathering on Gale Crater's rim suggests that the area was cold when the lake existed
  • raising the possibility that a layer of ice covered the lake on a permanent or occasional basis
  • These are entirely viable habitable environments for chemolithoautotrophs
  • Curiosity was not designed to hunt for signs of life on Mars
Mars Base

Curiosity Discovers Ancient Mars Lake Could Support Life - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...t-mars-lake-could-support-life

scibyte112 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 10 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • ASA’s Curiosity rover has discovered evidence that an ancient Martian lake had the right chemical ingredients that could have sustained microbial life
  • these habitable conditions persisted until a more recent epoch than previously thought
  • researchers have developed a novel technique allowing Curiosity to accurately date Martian rocks for the first time ever
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The ancient fresh water lake at the Yellowknife Bay area inside the Gale Crater landing site explored earlier this year
  • existed for periods spanning perhaps millions to tens of millions of years in length
  • before eventually evaporating completely after Mars lost its thick atmosphere.
  • the lake may have existed until as recently as 3.7 Billion years ago, much later than researchers expected
  • which means that life had a longer and better chance
  • before it was transformed into its current cold, arid state.
  • Researchers also announced that they are shifting the missions focus from searching for habitable environments to searching for organic molecules – the building blocks of all life as we know it.
  • the team believes they have found a way to increase the chance of finding organics preserved in the sedimentary rock layers
  • a mission that is now dedicated to the search for that subset of habitable environments which also preserves organic carbon
  • the ancient lake at Yellowknife Bay was likely about 30 miles long and 3 miles wide.
Mars Base

China's Maiden Moon Rover Mission Chang'e 3 Achieves Lunar Orbit - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...oon-rover-achieves-lunar-orbit

scibyte112 ChineseSpaceProgram

shared by Mars Base on 09 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • China’s
  • moon landing probe successfully entered lunar orbit on Friday, Dec. 6
  • China’s ‘Yutu’ lunar lander is riding piggyback atop the four legged landing probe
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Chang’e 3 is due to make a powered descent to the Moon’s surface on Dec. 14, firing the landing thrusters at an altitude of 15 km (9 mi) for a soft landing in a preselected area called the Bay of Rainbows or Sinus Iridum region.
  • The Bay of Rainbows is a lava filled crater located in the upper left portion of the moon as seen from Earth.
Mars Base

Mars Science Laboratory: Laser Instrument on NASA Mars Rover Tops 100,000 Zaps - 0 views

mars.jpl.nasa.gov/...index.cfm

scibyte112 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 06 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Curiosity
  • has passed the milestone of 100,000 shots fired by its laser.
  • The 100,000th shot was one of a series of 300 to investigate 10 locations on a rock called "Ithaca" in late October
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • at a distance of 13 feet, 3 inches (4.04 meters) from the laser and telescope on rover's mast
  • Chemistry and Camera instrument (ChemCam) uses the infrared laser to excite material in a pinhead-size spot on the target into a glowing, ionized gas, called plasma.
  • ChemCam observes that spark with the telescope and analyzes the spectrum of light to identify elements in the target
  • As of the start of December, ChemCam has fired its laser on Mars more than 102,000 times, at more than 420 rock or soil targets
  • The instrument has also returned more than 1,600 images taken by its remote micro-imager camera
  • Each pulse delivers more than a million watts of power for about five one-billionths of a second
  • The technique used by ChemCam, called laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, has been used to assess composition of targets in other extreme environments, such as inside nuclear reactors and on the sea floor
Mars Base

Astronomers discover planet that shouldn't be there - 0 views

phys.org/...tronomers-planet-shouldnt.html

scibyte112 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 06 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • An international team of astronomers
  • has discovered the most distantly orbiting planet found to date around a single, sun-like star
  • 11 times Jupiter's mass and orbiting its star at 650 times the average Earth-Sun distance
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • HD 106906 b
  • throws a wrench in planet formation theories
  • no model of either planet or star formation fully explains what we see
  • It is thought that planets close to their stars, like Earth, coalesce from small asteroid-like bodies born in the primordial disk of dust and gas that surrounds a forming star
  • this process acts too slowly to grow giant planets far from their star
  • Another proposed mechanism is that giant planets can form from a fast, direct collapse of disk material
  • primordial disks rarely contain enough mass in their outer reaches to allow a planet like HD 106906 b to form
  • Several alternative hypotheses have been put forward, including formation like a mini binary star system
  • binary star system can be formed when two adjacent clumps of gas collapse more or less independently to form stars, and these stars are close enough to each other to exert a mutual gravitation attraction and bind them together in an orb
  • It is possible that in the case of the HD 106906 system the star and planet collapsed independently from clumps of gas, but for some reason the planet's progenitor clump was starved for material and never grew large enough to ignite and become a star
  • one problem with this scenario is that the mass ratio of the two stars in a binary system is typically no more than 10-to-1.
  • the mass ratio is more than 100-to-1,
  • extreme mass ratio is not predicted from binary star formation theories – just like planet formation theory predicts that we cannot form planets so far from the host star
  • is also of
  • interest because researchers can still detect the remnant "debris disk" of material left over from planet and star formation.
  • potential to help us disentangle the various formation models
  • Future observations of the planet's orbital motion and the primary star's debris disk may help answer that question
  • At only 13 million years old, this young planet still glows from the residual heat of its formation
  • Because at 2,700 Fahrenheit (about 1,500 degrees Celsius) the planet is much cooler than its host star
  • it emits most of its energy as infrared rather than visible light
  • Earth
  • formed 4.5 billion years ago
  • about 350 times older than HD 106906 b.
  • Direct imaging observations require exquisitely sharp images, akin to those delivered by the Hubble Space Telescope
  • To reach this resolution from the ground requires a technology called Adaptive Optics, or AO
  • The team used the new Magellan Adaptive Optics (MagAO) system and Clio2 thermal infrared camera
  • mounted on the 6.5 meter-diameter Magellan telescope in the Atacama Desert in Chile to take the discovery image
  • MagAO was able to utilize its special Adaptive Secondary Mirror
  • 585 actuators, each moving 1,000 times a second, to remove the blurring of the atmosphere
  • optimized for thermal infrared wavelengths, where giant planets are brightest compared to their host stars
  • planets are most easily imaged at these wavelengths
  • The team was able to confirm that the planet is moving together with its host star by examining Hubble Space Telescope data taken eight years prior for another research program
  • This planet discovery is particularly exciting because it is in orbit so far from its parent star. This leads to many
  • questions about its formation history and composition
Mars Base

Scientists Identify Cause of Japan's Devastating 2011 Tsunami - 0 views

www.scienceworldreport.com/...s-devastating-2011-tsunami.htm

scibyte112 earthquakes

shared by Mars Base on 06 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • In March 2011, a devastating tsunami struck Japan's Tohoku region
  • Now, researchers have uncovered the cause of this tsunami, shedding light on what displaced the seafloor off the northeastern coast of Japan
  • Learning more about the 2011 tsunami and its causes is an important step for monitoring future events.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • could help researchers provide earlier warnings
  • During their study
  • scientists underwent a 50-day expedition on the Japanese drilling vessel Chikyu
  • They then drilled three holes in the Japan Trench area in order to study the rupture zone of the 2011 earthquake
  • a fault in the ocean floor where two of Earth's major tectonic plates meet deep beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean.
  • The conventional view among geologists
  • has been that deep beneath the seafloor, where rocks are strong, movements of the plates can generate a lot of elastic rebound
  • Closer to the surface of the seafloor, where rocks are softer and less compressed, this rebound effect was thought to taper off
  • In fact
  • the largest displacement of plates before the 2011 tsunami occurred in 1960 off the coast of Chile
  • That's when a powerful earthquake displaced seafloor plates by an average of 20 meters
  • The Tohoku earthquake, in contrast, displaced its own plates by 30 to 50 meters.
  • So what caused this unexpectedly violent slip
  • the fault itself is very thin--less than five meters thick in the area sampled.
  • makes it the thinnest plate boundary on Earth.
  • In addition, clay deposits that fill the narrow fault are made of extremely fine sediment, which makes it extremely slippery
  • these findings don't just show researchers a bit more about the past; they also have implications for the future
  • Other subduction zones in the northwest Pacific where this type of clay is present--from Russia's Kamchatka peninsula to the Aleutian Islands--may also be capable of generating similar, huge earthquakes
Mars Base

Sea Coral in Bone Grafting? How the Material is Made Compatible with Natural Bone - 0 views

www.scienceworldreport.com/...al-made-compatible-natural.htm

scibyte112 Biometerial

shared by Mars Base on 01 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • sea coral
  • scientists have now discovered a way to refine
  • properties that may make it more compatible with natural bone.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • When biomaterials do not biodegrade
  • may continuously cause problems
  • In extreme conditions, it is possible that the different mechanical properties of the artificial bone graft may cause a re-fracture or become a source for bacterium growth in infection
  • In order to get around this issue
  • researchers decided to study the calcium carbonate found in the exoskeleton of sea coral and convert it into coralline hydroxyapatite (CHA)
  • then refined the material to produce coralline hydroxyapatite/calcium carbonate (CHACC)
  • This CHACC composition contained 15 percent of CHA in a thin layer around the calcium carbonate and had a strong, porous structure that has made CHA commercially successful, but contained significantly improved biodegrading properties to support natural bone healing.
  • not to say that the material is ready to be used across the globe
  • There is a ways to go before the material can match the benefits of an autograft
  • and can be used by the several million people worldwide that undergo bone grafting procedures each year
  • the development of the CHACC material could provide an important step toward creating a biodegradable material that could help patients in the future
Mars Base

Scientists Color Silk By Feeding Silkworms Fabric Dyes | Popular Science - 0 views

www.popsci.com/...-feeding-silkworms-fabric-dyes

scibyte112

shared by Mars Base on 05 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • team fed ordinary silkworms mulberry leaves that had been sprayed with fabric dyes. Out of seven tested dyes, only one worked, producing a thread that reminded me of pink-dyed hair.
  • the worms themselves take on some color before they weave their silk cocoons. Their colorful diets did not affect their growth
  • coloring fabric normally uses enormous amounts of fresh water
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The water gets contaminated with dangerous chemicals in the process, requiring costly treatment before factories can dump it back into waterways—or wreaking havoc when factory owners dodge cleanup rules
  • Scientists are just starting to study this idea, however, it remains to be seen if it's commercially viable
  • In this experiment, the Indian team tested seven azo dyes, which are cheap and popular in the industry
  • The scientists found different dyes moved through silkworms' bodies differently. Some never made it into the worms' silk at all
  • Others colored the worms and their cocoons, but the color molecules settled mostly in the sticky protein the worms add to their cocoons
  • That sticky stuff gets washed away before the silk is turned into fabric
  • Only one dye, named "direct acid fast red," showed up in the final, washed silk threads. By the time it made it there, it was a pleasant, light pink.
Mars Base

Study gives new meaning to 'let your fingers do the walking' - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...2013-12-fingers.html

scibyte112

shared by Mars Base on 05 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • conclusion of a study conducted by a team of cognitive psychologists
  • When you are typing away at your computer, you don't know what your fingers are really doing
  • It found that skilled typists can't identify the positions of many of the keys on the QWERTY keyboard and that novice typists don't appear to learn key locations in the first place
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • we're capable of doing extremely complicated things without knowing explicitly what we are doing
  • The researchers recruited 100 university students and members from the surrounding community to participate in an experiment
  • The participants completed a short typing test
  • Then, they were shown a blank QWERTY keyboard and given 80 seconds to write the letters in the correct location
  • On average, they typed 72 words per minute, moving their fingers to the correct keys six times per second with 94 percent accuracy
  • By contrast, they could accurately place an average of only 15 letters on a blank keyboard.
  • The fact that the typists did so poorly at identifying the position of specific keys didn't come as a surprise
  • For more than a century, scientists have recognized the existence of automatism: the ability to perform actions without conscious thought or intention
  • Automatic behaviors of this type are surprisingly common, ranging from tying shoelaces to making coffee to factory assembly-line work to riding a bicycle and driving a car
  • What did come as a surprise, however, was evidence that conflicts with the basic theory of automatic learning which holds that it starts out as a conscious process and gradually becomes unconscious with repetition
  • According to the widely held theory, when you perform a new task or the first time, you are conscious of each action and store the details in working memory
  • Then, as you repeat the task, it becomes increasingly automatic
  • This allows you to think about other things while you performing the task but your conscious recollection of the details gradually fades away
  • researchers were surprised when they found evidence that the typists never appear to memorize the key positions, not even when they are first learning to type.
  • Evidence for this conclusion came from another experiment included in the study
  • The researchers recruited 24 typists who were skilled on the QWERTY keyboard and had them learn to type on a Dvorak keyboard, which places keys in different locations.
  • After the participants developed a reasonable proficiency with the alternative keyboard, they were asked to identify the placement of the keys on a blank Dvorak keyboard
  • On average, they could locate only 17 letters correctly, comparable to participants' performance with the QWERTY keyboard.
  • According to the researchers, the lack of explicit knowledge of the keyboard may be due to the fact that computers and keyboards have become so ubiquitous that students learn how to use them in an informal, trial-and-error fashion when they are very young
Mars Base

SpaceX Launches Falcon 9 Rocket On High-Stakes Commercial Satellite Mission | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/mark-commercial-satellite.html

scibyte111 SpaceX

shared by Mars Base on 04 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • The liftoff at 5:41 p.m. EST (2241 GMT) marked SpaceX's first entry into the large commercial satellite market and its first launch into a geostationary transfer orbit needed for such a mission.
Mars Base

SpaceX Successfully Completes First Mission to Geostationary Transfer Orbit | SpaceX - 0 views

www.spacex.com/...n-geostationary-transfer-orbit

scibyte111 SpaceX

shared by Mars Base on 04 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • December 03, 2013
  • SpaceX
  • completed its first geostationary transfer mission, delivering the SES-8 satellite to its targeted 295 x 80,000 km orbit
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • launch pad and the first commercial flight from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in over five years
  • SpaceX has nearly 50 launches on manifest, of which over 60% are for commercial customers
  • This launch also marks the second of three certification flights needed to certify the Falcon 9 to fly missions for the U.S. Air Force under the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program
  • When Falcon 9 is certified, SpaceX will be eligible to compete for all National Security Space (NSS) missions
Mars Base

Dinosaur Bone Damaged in WWII Revealed with 3D Printing | LiveScience - 0 views

www.livescience.com/-dinosaur-bone-3d-printed.html

scibyte111 dinosaur

shared by Mars Base on 02 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • belongs to the Museum of National History in Berlin
  • During World War II, a bomb fell on the museum's east wing, collapsing the basement where dinosaur fossils were stored
  • Making matters worse, bones from two separate expeditions had been housed in the same area
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • One expedition, in Tanzania, ran from 1909 to 1913 and brought back 235 tons of fossils, labeled with letters based on their locations.
  • The other fossils came from a 1909 discovery in Halberstadt, Germany. Those bones also used a letter-based label system
  • individual animals
  • By comparing the scans to sketches of the long-ago digs, the researchers determined that the vertebra came from the Halberstadt dig in Germany
  • The scans showed a fractured bone. Some of the cracks were no doubt from fossilization
  • But one crunched-up corner was likely the result of the bombing
  • To recreate the bone as it was before the bombing, the researchers took data from the CT scan and built a blueprint to 3D print the fossil
  • When the process was done
  • The researchers were even able to print the bone chip from the bombing damage, which fit into the rest of the vertebra like a puzzle piece.
  • Mars Base on 02 Dec 13
     
    Dinosaur Bone Damaged in WWII Revealed with 3D Printing
Mars Base

Memories 'geotagged' with spatial information - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...131128141405.htm

scibyte111 memories

shared by Mars Base on 01 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Using a video game in which people navigate through a virtual town delivering objects to specific locations, a team of neuroscientists
  • has discovered how brain cells that encode spatial information form "geotags" for specific memories and are activated immediately before those memories are recalled.
  • work shows how spatial information is incorporated into memories and why remembering an experience can quickly bring to mind other events that happened in the same place
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • findings provide the first direct neural evidence for the idea that the human memory system tags memories with information about where and when they were formed
  • this study involved playing a simple video game on a bedside computer
  • The game in this experiment involved making deliveries to stores in a virtual city
  • The participants were first given a period where they were allowed to freely explore the city and learn the stores' locations
  • When the game began, participants were only instructed where their next stop was, without being told what they were delivering
  • After they reached their destination, the game would reveal the item that had been delivered, and then give the participant their next stop
  • After 13 deliveries, the screen went blank and participants were asked to remember and name as many of the items they had delivered in the order they came to mind
  • This allowed the researchers to correlate the neural activation associated with the formation of spatial memories (the locations of the stores) and the recall of episodic memories: (the list of items that had been delivered).
  • "Having these patients play our games allows us to record every action they take in the game and to measure the responses of neurons both during spatial navigation and then later during verbal recall."
  • By asking participants to recall the items they delivered instead of the stores they visited, the researchers could test whether their spatial memory systems were being activated
  • map-like nature of the neurons associated with spatial memory made this comparison possible
  • During navigation, neurons in the hippocampus and neighboring regions can often represent the patient's virtual location within the town
  • Using the brain recordings generated while the participants navigated the city, the researchers were able to develop a neural map that corresponded to the city's layout
  • As participants passed by a particular store, the researchers correlated their spatial memory of that location with the pattern of place cell activation recorded
  • With maps of place cell activations in hand, the researchers were able to cross- reference each participant's spatial memories as they accessed their episodic memories of the delivered items
  • given just the place cell activations of a participant
  • could predict, with better than chance accuracy, the item he or she was recalling
  • cannot distinguish whether these spatial memories are actually helping the participants access their episodic memories
  • seeing that this place cell activation plays a role in the memory retrieval processes
  • Earlier neuroscience research
  • had suggested the hippocampus has two distinct roles
  • tracking location information for spatial memory, and
  • recording events for episodic memory
  • This experiment provides further evidence that these roles are intertwined
Mars Base

ScienceShot: Printing a Dinosaur | Science/AAAS | News - 0 views

news.sciencemag.org/...scienceshot-printing-dinosaur

scibyte111 dinosaur

shared by Mars Base on 02 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • The target fossil for the new study was a specimen that had been dug up from a German clay pit in the early 1900s
  • The object, still encased in much of the rock that had entombed it, had been slathered in concrete and then transported back to a museum in Berlin
  • struck by a bomb during World War II, sending the specimen and hundreds of others into a jumbled heap of rubble
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Most of the fossils that weren’t blasted to dust had had their labels burned, so no one could identify what the remaining concrete jackets held or where they had been dug up
  • A CT scan of one such lump
  • revealed that it held a vertebra
  • from a Plateosaurus
  • the researchers report
  • That, in turn, allowed the researchers to determine where the fossil had originally been unearthed, among other details
  • Scientists have long used CT scans to peek inside fossil-bearing rocks, but the increasing use of 3D printers now enables them to make endless numbers of exact copies of those relics
  • The technique might even help museum folk speed up their analyses: By knowing what’s inside a lump of rock, researchers can determine which fossils are worth extracting, and which ones can wait
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