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Mars Base

'Bionic man' goes on show at British musuem - 0 views

phys.org/...-02-bionic-british-musuem.html

scibyte81 BionicMan

shared by Mars Base on 06 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Rex, which is short for "Robotic Exoskeleton", the six foot six inch (two metre) humanoid with its uncannily life-like face was assembled by leading roboticists for a television programme
  • The creation includes key advances in prosthetic technology, as well as an artificial pancreas, kidney, spleen and trachea and a functional blood circulatory system
  • the museum in London
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • museum exhibit
  • will explore changing perceptions of human identity against the background of rapid progress in bionics
  • Rex is not strictly bionic as he does not include living tissue
Mars Base

Mars Science Laboratory: NASA Curiosity Rover Collects First Martian Bedrock Sample - 0 views

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

scibyte81 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 11 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Rock powder generated during drilling travels up flutes on the bit
  • The bit assembly has chambers to hold the powder until it can be transferred to the sample-handling mechanisms of the rover's Collection and Handling for In-Situ Martian Rock Analysis (CHIMRA) device
  • Before the rock powder is analyzed, some will be used to scour traces of material that may have been deposited onto the hardware while the rover was still on Earth, despite thorough cleaning before launch
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • take the powder we acquired and swish it around to scrub the internal surfaces of the drill bit assembly
  • use the arm to transfer the powder out of the drill into the scoop, which will be our first chance to see the acquired sample
  • To get to the point of making this hole in a rock on Mars, we made eight drills and bored more than 1,200 holes in 20 types of rock on Earth
  • Inside the sample-handling device, the powder will be vibrated once or twice over a sieve that screens out any particles larger than six-thousandths of an inch (150 microns) across
  • portions of the sieved sample will fall through ports on the rover deck into the Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument and the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument
  • "John Klein" in memory of a Mars Science Laboratory deputy project manager who died in 2011
  • The fresh hole, about 0.63 inch (1.6 centimeters) wide and 2.5 inches (6.4 centimeters) deep in a patch of fine-grained sedimentary bedrock, can be seen in images and other data Curiosity beamed to Earth Saturday.
Mars Base

Mars Science Laboratory: Preparatory Drill Test Performed on Mars - 0 views

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

scibyte81 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 11 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Curiosity used both percussion and rotation to bore about 0.8 inch (2 centimeters) into a rock on Mars and generate cuttings for evaluation in advance of the rover's first sample-collection drilling.
  • this "mini drill" test in preparation for full drilling was confirmed in data
  • The test was performed on a patch of flat, vein-bearing rock called "John Klein."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Pre-drilling observations of this rock yielded indications of one or more episodes of wet environmental conditions
Mars Base

Research group suggests Chicxulub crater may have been caused by binary asteroids - 0 views

phys.org/...b-crater-binary-asteroids.html

scibyte81 Chicxulub

shared by Mars Base on 05 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • A team of researchers from the U.K. and Australia has published a pape
  • suggesting that the crater Chicxulub, off the coast of Mexico, may have come about due to the impact of binary asteroids
  • The crater is thought by many scientists to be evidence of an asteroid strike that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • space scientists estimate that as many as 15 percent of those observable are binaries
  • This observation has caused scientists problems
  • due to the
  • evidence of binaries striking the Earth – as few as 2 to 4 percent
  • the team
  • suggests that many of the craters evident on the surface of the Earth, and believed to have been caused by a single asteroid, may in fact have been caused by binaries
  • a binary could cause just one crater if the two asteroids were close enough together when they struck.
  • suggest such craters would likely have a peanut shape, or have one side distorted
  • came to these conclusions after building computer simulations that showed asteroids hitting the earth
  • Some of the craters that resulted were oblong, or irregularly shaped, which they say, means the same could be true of real craters here on Earth
  • that the crater has some asymmetries that could be explained by a binary strike
  • If that were the case, they further suggest it likely that the combined size of the asteroid would have been roughly the same as the calculated size of a single entity
  • a combined diameter of 7 to 10 k
  • The crater left behind has a diameter of approximately 180 km, which means, the researchers say, that twin asteroids could have been as far apart as 80 km and still produced a single crater.
  • scientists will have to take a new look at other existing craters to try to determine if they too are possibly the result of binary strikes and if so, recalculate their number
Mars Base

Smartpen takes handwritten notes into mobile, cloud era - 0 views

phys.org/...dwritten-mobile-cloud-era.html

scibyte81 Smartpen

shared by Mars Base on 08 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • When used on special paper, the pens record your every scribble with a built-in camera
  • they can also record audio at the same time and sync that audio with what you write
  • recently updated its lineup of pens for the cloud-based, mobile computing era
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Sky, the new smartpens sync with Evernote, the popular Internet-based notetaking and storage service, rather than with the user's computer. And they typically connect to Evernote directly through their built-in Wi-Fi radios
  • near a hotspot, their Sky pens will begin syncing their notes as soon as they stop recording them.
  • the new pens is that they - and the notes they record - are no longer tethered to an individual computer
  • Sky pen owners can send up to 500 megabytes of data for free from their smartpens. That's about 70 hours worth of recordings or 10,000 pages of notes
  • The two companies have built into Evernote a Livescribe player that allows users to see and hear their notes at the same time
  • Evernote arranges the notes by page in their notebook, but when you click or tap on the page, the Livescribe player will collect and display all the pages of notes from that particular recording.
  • the service scans them for recognizable characters and words so users can search them
  • has several shortcomings
  • the pen is married to Evernote. You can't choose to sync your notes with any other service
  • Another limitation of the Sky pen is that it can be slow to transfer recordings
  • All Livescribe pens allow users to replay audio recordings by simply tapping their pen on their written notes
  • you have to use them with company approved paper
  • does allow users to print out paper with the patterns on it, but if you want to use a notebook, you have to choose one approved by the company
Mars Base

Bright Comet May Be Visible to Naked Eye in March | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/-pan-starrs-visible-march.html

scibyte83 PANSTARRS

shared by Mars Base on 08 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • A comet that shines as brightly as the stars of the Big Dipper could be heading our way in March
  • the Comet Pan-STARRS is expected to whiz by about 100 million miles from Earth, skimming the orbit of Mercury, early next month.
  • could fail to put on a dazzling show if it falls apart under the intense heat and gravitational pull of its plunge toward the sun
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • if it survives, Comet Pan-STARRS might send an amazing stream of gas and dust into the night sky
  • Pan-STARRS should be very active, producing a lot of dust and therefore a nice dust tail
  • it could still be difficult to see
  • From our point of view on Earth, the comet will be very close to the sun
  • it is only observable in twilight when the sky is not fully dark
  • comes from the Oort Cloud,
  • discovered in June 2011 by the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System, or Pan-STARRS telescope, in Hawaii
  • nearest approach to Earth on March 5, when it will come be about 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) away
  • the best time to look for it might be at sunset March 12 and 13, when the comet will appear not far from the crescent moon
  • The comet's tail will probably require binoculars or a small telescope
Mars Base

Green tea and red wine extracts interrupt Alzheimer's disease pathway in cells - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...en-tea-red-wine-alzheimer.html

scibyte81 Alzheimer

shared by Mars Base on 06 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Natural chemicals found in green tea and red wine may disrupt a key step of the Alzheimer's disease pathway
  • Alzheimer's disease is characterised by a distinct build-up of amyloid protein in the brain
  • clumps together to form toxic, sticky balls of varying shapes
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • These amyloid balls latch on to the surface of nerve cells in the brain by attaching to proteins on the cell surface called prions
  • investigate whether the precise shape of the amyloid balls is essential for them to attach to the prion receptors
  • if so, we wanted to see if we could prevent the amyloid balls binding to prion by altering their shape, as this would stop the cells from dying
  • The team formed amyloid balls in a test tube and added them to human and animal brain cells
  • When we added the extracts from red wine and green tea, which recent research has shown to re-shape amyloid proteins, the amyloid balls no longer harmed the nerve cells
  • this was because their shape was distorted, so they could no longer bind to prion and disrupt cell function
  • showed, for the first time, that when amyloid balls stick to prion, it triggers the production of even more amyloid
  • the team's next steps are to understand exactly how the amyloid-prion interaction kills off neurons
  • that this will increase our understanding of Alzheimer's disease even further, with the potential to reveal yet more drug targets,
  • While these early-stage results should not be a signal for people to stock up on green tea and red wine, they could provide an important new lead in the search for new and effective treatments
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