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Mars Base

New US-Russian Crew Docks at Space Station After Super-Fast Flight | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/ule-docking-space-station.html

scibyte88 iss

shared by Mars Base on 29 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Before now, manned trips to the space station have taken at least two days, but with the docking of this ship just six hours after liftoff
Mars Base

Space Station Crew Captures Soyuz Launch, As Seen from Orbit - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...oyuz-launch-as-seen-from-orbit

scibyte88 iss

shared by Mars Base on 29 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The Soyuz TMA-08M spacecraft launched at 2:43 a.m. Friday local time from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan (4:43 p.m. EDT, 20:43 UTC on March 28),
  • crew of Pavel Vinogradov, Aleksandr Misurkin and Chris Cassidy
  • The fast-track launch had the crew arriving in just 5 hours and 45 minutes after launch
Mars Base

Soyuz Makes Record-Breaking 'Fast Track' to Space Station - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...ng-fast-track-to-space-station

scibyte88 iss

shared by Mars Base on 29 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The new abbreviated four-orbit rendezvous with the ISS uses a modified launch and docking profile for the Russian ships
  • It has been tried successfully with three Progress resupply vehicles, but this is the first time it has been used on a human flight.
  • In the past, Soyuz manned capsules and Progress supply ships were launched on trajectories that required about two days, or 34 orbits, to reach the ISS.
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  • The new fast-track trajectory has the rocket launching shortly after the ISS passes overhead
  • Then, additional firings of the vehicle’s thrusters early in its mission expedites the time required for a Russian vehicle to reach the Station
Mars Base

Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...son_Microwave_Anisotropy_Probe

scibyte88 WMAP

shared by Mars Base on 31 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • a spacecraft which measures differences in the temperature of the Big Bang's remnant radiant heat – the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation – across the full sky
  • The WMAP spacecraft was launched on June 30, 2001,
  • The WMAP mission succeeds the COBE space mission and was the second medium-class (MIDEX) spacecraft of the Explorer program.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • WMAP's measurements played the key role in establishing the current Standard Model of Cosmology
  • WMAP data are very well fit by a universe that is dominated by dark energy in the form of a cosmological constant
  • The anisotropies then are used to measure the universe's geometry, content, and evolution; and to test the Big Bang model, and the cosmic inflation theory
  • he map contains 3,145,728 pixels, and uses the HEALPix scheme to pixelize the sphere
  • The telescope's primary reflecting mirrors are a pair
  • that focus the signal onto a pair of
  • secondary reflecting mirrors.
  • shaped for optimal performance: a carbon fibre shell upon a Korex core, thinly-coated with aluminium and silicon oxide.
  • The secondary reflectors transmit the signals to the corrugated feedhorns that sit on a focal plane array box beneath the primary reflectors
  • The receivers are polarization-sensitive differential radiometers measuring the difference between two telescope beams.
  • To avoid collecting Milky Way galaxy foreground signals, the WMAP uses five discrete radio frequency bands
  • The WMAP's trajectory and orbit
  • The WMAP observes in five frequencies, permitting the measurement and subtraction of foreground contamination (from the Milky Way
  • Foreground contamination is removed in several ways
  • First, subtract extant emission maps from the WMAP's measurements; second, use the components' known, spectral values to identify them; third, simultaneously fit the position and spectra data of the foreground emission, using extra data sets
Mars Base

Radiolab Wants Your Help To Track The Once-Every-17-Year Cicada "Swarmageddon" | Popula... - 0 views

www.popsci.com/...ry-17-year-cicada-swarmageddon

scibyte88 Cicada

shared by Mars Base on 02 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Magicicada is a genus of cicada with either a 13- or a 17-year lifespan, depending on species
  • t the Magicicada larvae live underground for nearly their entire lives, feeding on fluids from tree roots in the northeast United States, emerging with only a few weeks life in their lives
  • to molt into adults, mate, lay eggs, and die.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • we're not really sure why they use this life cycle strategy, but one guess is that such a long period between broods could fool predators, who likely won't have been alive (or won't remember) the previous emergence.
  • Brood II, also known as the "East Coast Brood," is a 17-year cicada due for emergence this summer
  • It ranges from the Virginia/North Carolina border up through the northern end of the New York City suburbs
  • Radiolab
  • radio shows/podcasts
  • has come up with a cicada tracker to pinpoint exactly when Brood II will begin "swarmageddon."
  • Radiolab will
  • monitor the soil temperature. When the soil eight inches below the surface reaches a steady temperature of 64 degrees F, the cicadas will begin their transformation
  • You can then report your findings to Radiolab, starting at the latest in mid-April
  • Radiolab's interactive map just when they'll emerge
Mars Base

Cholesterol-lowering eye drops could treat macular degeneration - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...s-atherosclerosis-macular.html

scibyte89

shared by Mars Base on 03 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • A new study raises the intriguing possibility that drugs prescribed to lower cholesterol may be effective against macular degeneration, a blinding eye disease.
  • Researchers
  • have found that age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss in Americans over 50, shares a common link with atherosclerosis
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  • Both problems have the same underlying defect: the inability to remove a buildup of fat and cholesterol
  • researchers shed new light on how deposits of cholesterol contribute to macular degeneration and atherosclerosis and even blood vessel growth in some types of cancer
  • Patients who have atherosclerosis often are prescribed medications to lower cholesterol and keep arteries clear
  • This study suggests that some of those same drugs could be evaluated in patients with macular degeneration
  • we need to investigate whether vision loss caused by macular degeneration could be prevented with cholesterol-lowering eye drops or other medications that might prevent the buildup of lipids beneath the retina
  • The new research centers on macrophages, key immune cells that remove cholesterol and fats from tissues
  • In macular degeneration, the excessive buildup of cholesterol begins to occur as we age, and our macrophages begin to malfunction
  • In the "dry" form of age-related macular degeneration, doctors examining the eye can see lipid deposits beneath the retina
  • As those deposits become larger and more numerous, they slowly begin to destroy the central part of the eye, interfering with the vision needed to read a book or drive a car
  • As aging macrophages clear fewer fat deposits beneath the retina, the macrophage cells themselves can become bloated with cholesterol, creating an inflammatory process that leads to the formation of new blood vessels that can cause further damage
  • Those vessels characterize the later "wet" form of the disease
  • that inflammation creates a toxic mix of things that leads to new blood vessel growth
  • Most of the vision loss
  • is the result of bleeding and scar-tissue formation related to abnormal vessel growth
  • the scientists identified a protein that macrophages need to clear fats and cholesterol
  • As mice and humans age, they make less of the protein, and macrophages become less effective at engulfing and removing fat and cholesterol
  • team found that macrophages, from old mice and in patients with macular degeneration, have inadequate levels of the protein, called ABCA1, which transports cholesterol out of cells
  • As a result, the old macrophages accumulated high levels of cholesterol and couldn't inhibit the growth of the damaging blood vessels
  • when the researchers treated the macrophages with a substance that helped restore levels of ABCA1, the cells could remove cholesterol more effectively, and the development of new blood vessels was slowed
  • able to deliver the drug, called an LXR agonist, in eye drops
  • found that we could reverse the macular degeneration in the eye of an old mouse
  • could focus therapy only on the eyes, and we likely could limit the side effects of drugs taken orally
  • since macrophages are important in atherosclerosis and in the formation of new blood vessels around certain types of cancerous tumors, the same pathway also might provide a target for more effective therapies for those diseases
  • can reverse the disease cascade in mice by improving macrophage function, either with eye drops or with systemic treatments,
  • Some of the therapies already being used to treat atherosclerosis target this same pathway, so we may be able to modify drugs that already are available and use them to deliver treatment to the eye
Mars Base

Astronomers Watch as a Black Hole Eats a Rogue Planet - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...black-hole-eats-a-rogue-planet

scibyte89 BlackHole

shared by Mars Base on 03 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Astronomers using the Integral space observatory were able to watch as the planet was eaten by a black hole that had been inactive for decades
  • The observation was
  • from a galaxy that has been quiet for at least 20–30 years
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  • the event is a preview of a similar feeding event that is expected to take place with the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy
  • galaxy NGC 4845, 47 million light-years away
  • Astronomers were using Integral to study a different galaxy when they noticed a bright X-ray flare coming from another location in the same wide field-of-view
  • the origin was confirmed as NGC 4845, a galaxy never before detected at high energies
  • the emission was traced from its maximum in January 2011, when the galaxy brightened by a factor of a thousand, and then as it subsided over the course of the year
  • By analyzing the characteristics of the flare, the astronomers could determine that the emission came from a halo of material around the galaxy’s central black hole as it tore apart and fed on an object of 14–30 Jupiter masses, and so the astronomers say the object was either a super-Jupiter or a brown dwarf
  • This object appears to have been ‘wandering,’ which would fit the description of recent studies
  • The black hole in the center of NGC 4845 is estimated to have a mass of around 300,000 times that of our own Sun
  • This is the first time where we have seen the disruption of a substellar object by a black hole
  • estimate that only its external layers were eaten by the black hole, amounting to about 10% of the object’s total mass, and that a denser core has been left orbiting the black hole
  • The flaring event in NGC 4845 might be similar to what is expected to happen with the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy
  • these events will tell astronomers more about what happens to the demise of different types of objects as they encounter black holes of varying sizes
  • Estimates are that events like these may be detectable every few years in galaxies around us
  • the emission brightened and decayed shows there was a delay of 2–3 months between the object being disrupted and the heating of the debris in the vicinity of the black hole.
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