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Mars Base

High-School Student Finds Bumpy-Headed Baby Dino | LiveScience - 0 views

www.livescience.com/2-baby-dinosaur-discovery.html

scibyte107 dinosaur

shared by Mars Base on 27 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • A dinosaur skeleton discovered by
  • d high-school student turns out to be the smallest, youngest and most complete duck-billed dinosaur of its kind ever found.
  • This Cretaceous-era herbivore, Parasaurolophus, walked the Earth some 75 million years ago.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • dinosaurs in this genus are best known for their impressive tube-shaped head crests, which may have been used for display or perhaps to amplify the animals' calls
  • specimen
  • was so young that its crest was a mere bump on its head.
  • Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in Claremont, Calif
  • is affiliated with The Webb Schools, a private high-school campus outside of Los Angeles
  • The students at the schools participate in paleontology fieldwork as part of their coursework
  • in 2009
  • a group of students were prospecting for fossils in Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, surveying ground
  • already covered
  • spotted a little sliver of bone sticking out from under a boulder and alerted
  • thought it looked like a piece of dinosaur rib — nice, but not really worth the trouble of excavating.
  • the other side of the boulder
  • what looked like a large cobblestone
  • . A dinosaur skull
  • The team had to line up permits to excavate on the public land
  • returned in 2010 to dig the bones from the ground
  • 800-pound (363 kilograms) armor of rock, the bones had to be airlifted out of the rugged backcountry by helicopter
  • After 1,300 painstaking hours of cleaning, chiseling and picking, technicians revealed the fossil buried in all that stone
  • paleontologists realized they had an amazing example of a baby Parasaurolophus
  • they were able to sample the baby's leg bone. As dinosaur bones grow, they develop ring patterns, much like trees
  • didn't have any rings at all
  • that this animal was under a year old when it died
  • The infant dinosaur was already 6 feet (1.8 meters) long
  • duck-billed dinos hatched at about the same size as a human infant
  • "Joe" was already sprouting a crest bump so young suggests that Parasaurolophus started growing its crest earlier than other duck-billed dinosaurs.
  • "Joe" will go on display at the Alf museum beginning
  • Oct. 22
  • A digital exploration of the skeleton will also be available at dinosaurjoe.com.
  • the student who found the little duck-bill,
  • now in college, studying geology
  • understand how Parasaurolophus evolved that big crest, just by shifting around events in its development
Mars Base

Mars Science Laboratory: NASA Rover Confirms Mars Origin of Some Meteorites - 0 views

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

scibyte106 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 21 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Examination of the Martian atmosphere by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover confirms that some meteorites that have dropped to Earth really are from the Red Planet
  • A key new measurement of the inert gas argon in Mars' atmosphere by Curiosity's laboratory provides the most definitive evidence yet of the origin of Mars meteorites while at the same time providing a way to rule out Martian origin of other meteorites
  • The new measurement is a high-precision count of two forms of argon -- argon-36 and argon-38 -- accomplished by the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument inside the rover.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • These lighter and heavier forms, or isotopes, of argon exist naturally throughout the solar system
  • On Mars the ratio of light to heavy argon is skewed because much of that planet's original atmosphere was lost to space
  • The lighter form of argon was taken away more readily because it rises to the top of the atmosphere more easily and requires less energy to escape
  • That left the Martian atmosphere relatively enriched in the heavier isotope, argon-38
  • past analyses by Earth-bound scientists of gas bubbles trapped inside Martian meteorites had already narrowed the Martian argon ratio to between 3.6 and 4.5
  • Measurements by NASA's Viking landers in the 1970s put the Martian atmospheric ratio in the range of four to seven
  • The new SAM direct measurement on Mars now pins down the correct argon ratio at 4.2
  • The Curiosity measurements do not directly measure the current rate of atmospheric escape
  • NASA's next mission to Mars, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN), is designed to do so
  • That mission is being prepared
  • for a launch-opportunity period that begins on Nov. 18
Mars Base

Giant Chunk of Russian Meteor Recovered - News Watch - 0 views

newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/...nk-of-russian-meteor-recovered

scibyte106 RussianMeteor

shared by Mars Base on 21 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Russian scientists appear to have pulled up a half-ton charred meteorite from the bottom of a murky Siberian lake
  • a piece of the giant space rock that exploded in the skies above the southern Urals in February.
  • Entering the atmosphere at speeds up to 31,000 miles per hour (50,000 kilometers per hour), the Russian meteor, officially named 2011 EO40, exploded about 25 miles (40 kilometers) above the city of Chelyabinsk
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The power of the explosion was estimated to be at least 20 times stronger than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945
  • The resulting air blast damaged buildings and injured some 1,600 people.
  • piece of meteor recovered this week weighs at least 1,257 pounds (570 kilograms).
  • , it is only a fragment of the original impactor that is estimated to have been about 17 meters (54 feet) across, with a mass of about 10,000 metric tons before it shattered
  • locals directed scientists to Lake Chebarkul—45 miles west of the city of Chelyabinsk—to a 25-foot (8-meter) hole punctured in the ice by the meteor
Mars Base

Half-Ton Fragment Of Russian Meteorite Recovered From Lake | Popular Science - 0 views

www.popsci.com/...ssian-meteorite-recovered-lake

scibyte106 RussianMeteor

shared by Mars Base on 20 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The fragment was so large it:
  • 1) broke into three pieces during removal
  • 2) broke the scale scientists used to weigh it, once the scale reached the 570-kilogram mark.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • . It's
  • d off to a local natural history museum, so perhaps it'll go on display soon.
  • The dive seems to be part of an ongoing effort to pull meteorite pieces out of the lake for study
  • Divers previously recovered 12 rocks from the lake, but scientists confirmed only five of those were actually meteorite fragments
Mars Base

First ever evidence of a comet striking Earth - 0 views

phys.org/...3-10-evidence-comet-earth.html

scibyte106 comet

shared by Mars Base on 09 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The comet entered Earth's atmosphere above Egypt about 28 million years ago
  • As it entered the atmosphere, it exploded, heating up the sand beneath it to a temperature of about 2 000 degrees Celsius
  • resulting in the formation of a huge amount of yellow silica glass which lies scattered over a 6 000 square kilometre area in the Sahara
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • specimen of the glass, polished by ancient jewellers, is found in Tutankhamun's brooch with its striking yellow-brown scarab
  • The first ever evidence of a comet entering Earth's atmosphere and exploding, raining down a shock wave of fire which obliterated every life form in its path, has been discovered
  • a mysterious black pebble found years earlier by an Egyptian geologist in the area of the silica glass
  • After conducting highly sophisticated chemical analyses on this pebble
  • conclusion that it represented the very first known hand specimen of a comet nucleus
  • The impact of the explosion also produced microscopic diamonds
  • The team have named the diamond-bearing pebble "Hypatia" in honour of the first well known female mathematician, astronomer and philosopher, Hypatia of Alexandria
  • Comet fragments have not been found on Earth before except as microscopic sized dust particles in the upper atmosphere and some carbon-rich dust in the Antarctic ice.
Mars Base

Mars Rover Curiosity Proves Some Earth Meteorites are Martian | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/iosity-martian-meteorites.html

scibyte106

shared by Mars Base on 20 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • New data collected by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has pinned down the exact ratio of two forms of the inert gas argon in the Martian atmosphere
  • help confirm the origins of some meteorites
  • could also help researchers understand how and when Mars lost most of its atmosphere
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • By understanding exactly how much of the lighter isotope argon-36 is present in the Martian atmosphere and comparing it to the heavier isotope, argon-38, scientists were able to confirm what the composition of a Martian meteorite on Earth should be
  • Curiosity found that the argon ratio for Mars is 4.2. The lighter form of argon has escaped more readily than the heavier isotope
  • Before this new study, scientists had placed the argon ratio somewhere between 3.6 and 4.5 by analyzing gas trapped inside Martian meteors on Earth
  • Argon is the clearest signature of atmospheric loss because it's chemically inert and does not interact
  • Curiosity is unable to directly investigate how much atmosphere Mars is losing, NASA's next Mars mission is designed to do just that
  • The MAVEN spacecraft (the name is short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission) will launch toward the Red Planet in November
Mars Base

New strategy to treat multiple sclerosis shows promise in mice - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...y-multiple-sclerosis-mice.html

scibyte106 MultipleSclerosis

shared by Mars Base on 12 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Scientists
  • have identified a set of compounds that may be used to treat multiple sclerosis (MS) in a new way
  • existing MS therapies
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • ppress the immune system
  • the compounds boost a population of progenitor cells that can in turn repair MS-damaged nerve fibers
  • cautioned that benztropine is a drug with dose-related adverse side effects, and has yet to be proven effective at a safe dose in human MS patients
  • the newly identified compounds, a Parkinson's disease drug called benztropine, was highly effective in treating a standard model of MS in mice, both alone and in combination with existing MS therapies
  • MS currently affects more than half a million people in North America and Europe, and more than two million worldwide
  • precise triggers are unknown, but certain infections and a lack of vitamin D are thought to be risk factors
  • In MS, immune cells known as T cells infiltrate the upper spinal cord and brain
  • causing inflammation and ultimately the loss of an insulating coating called myelin on some nerve fibers
  • As nerve fibers lose this myelin coating, they lose their ability to transmit signals efficiently, and in time may begin to degenerate
  • resulting symptoms, which commonly occur in a stop-start, "relapsing-remitting" pattern, may include limb weakness, numbness and tingling, fatigue, vision problems, slurred speech, memory difficulties and depression, among other problems
  • Current therapies
  • aim to suppress the immune attack that de-myelinates nerve fibers. But they are only partially effective and are apt to have significant adverse side effects
  • the new study
  • aimed at restoring a population of progenitor cells called oligodendrocytes
  • These cells normally keep the myelin sheaths of nerve fibers in good repair and in principle could fix these coatings after MS damages them
  • oligodendrocyte numbers decline sharply in MS, due to a still-mysterious problem with the stem-like precursor cells that produce them
  • team screened a library of about 100,000 diverse compounds for any that could potently induce OPCs to mature or "differentiate."
  • Several compounds scored well
  • benztropine, had been well characterized and indeed was already FDA-approved for treating Parkinson's disease
  • tests, benztropine showed a powerful ability to prevent autoimmune disease and also was effective in treating it after symptoms had arisen
  • virtually eliminating the disease's ability to relapse
  • benztropine on its own worked about as well as existing treatments, it also showed a remarkable ability to complement these existing treatments
  • two first-line immune-suppressant therapies, interferon-beta and fingolimod
  • Adding even a suboptimal level of benztropine
  • allowed
  • to cut the dose of fingolimod by 90%
  • the same disease-modifying effect as a normal dose
  • that dose-lowering could translate into a big reduction in
  • potentially serious side effects
  • researchers confirmed that benztropine works against disease in this mouse model by boosting the population of mature oligodendrocytes
  • in turn restore the myelin sheaths of damaged nerves
  • even as the immune attack continues
  • benztropine-treated mice showed no change in the usual signs of inflammation, yet their myelin was mostly intact, suggesting that it was probably being repaired as rapidly as it was being destroyed
  • Benztropine is known to have multiple specific effects on brain cells, including the blocking of activity at acetylcholine and histamine receptors and a boosting of activity at dopamine receptors
  • hope to learn more about how
  • its molecular structure might be optimized for this purpose
Mars Base

Virgin Galactic Ticket To Space Promised In New Reality Show Deal - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...mised-in-new-reality-show-deal

scibyte106 VirginGalactic

shared by Mars Base on 06 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • the executive producer behind Survivor is planning to host another reality competition that will land the winner a rocket trip to space
  • don’t know yet what
  • will be needed to score a trip with Virgin Galactic
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • . A press release simply promises a “groundbreaking, elimination competition series where everyday people compete for the ultimate prize”
  • Virgin says its first spaceflight with SpaceShipTwo will be in 2014, and soon after it will open the manifest to the more than 600 folks who have purchased tickets.
  • As for when
  • this is just an agreement so far and nothing firm has been decided
  • in 2000, Burnett announced another deal with NBC to host a space reality show (Destination Mir), with the winner visiting the Russian space station Mir
  • That idea fell apart when the cash-strapped Russian Federal Space Agency elected to deorbit the aging station in 2001
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