NASA Reconsiders Its Moon Plans

Ares Rocket : courtesy of NASA

From Popscicom:

The Constellation system, which includes the Ares rocket and Orion crew module, could lose favor to a cheaper, more DIY approach to launching orbital craft post-Space Shuttle.

Next year, 33 years after its maiden flight, the space shuttle will retire. What happens after that has become subject to fierce debate within the space agency. The designated successor program, named Constellation, was the darling of previous NASA administrator Michael Griffin, but a new review now has the space agency looking elsewhere for a ride back into the firmament.

The centerpiece of the Constellation program was the Ares rocket. However, that rocket needs billions of dollars more in funding to reach operational status, and has been plagued by numerous engineering problems. Now, some are proposing an alternative rocket system that makes use of already existing shuttle parts.

Read more ....

Late Blight -- Irish Potato Famine Fungus -- Attacks U.S. Northeast Gardens And Farms Hard

Leaf lesions due to late blight.
(Credit: Copyright College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 5, 2009) — Home gardeners beware: This year, late blight -- a destructive infectious disease that caused the Irish potato famine in the 1840s -- is killing tomato and potato plants in gardens and on commercial farms in the eastern United States. In addition, basil downy mildew is affecting plants in the Northeast.

"Late blight has never occurred this early and this widespread in the U.S," said Meg McGrath, associate professor of plant pathology and plant-microbe biology.

One of the most visible early symptoms of the disease is brown spots (lesions) on stems. They begin small and firm, then quickly enlarge, with white fungal growth developing under moist conditions that leads to a soft rot collapsing the stem.

Read more ....

Even Cockroaches Get Fat On Bad Food

Gromphadorhina portentosa--the Madagascar hissing cockroach.
Credit: Natural History Museum, London

From Live Science:

Cockroaches may be tiny enough to slip through the smallest of cracks, but just like humans, these eternal pests can get fat on an unhealthy diet.

As part of a decade's worth of research on cockroaches, Patricia Moore of the University of Exeter studied how female cockroaches change their mating behavior in response to their diet, specifically what they eat when they are young.

"We already knew that what they eat as adults influences reproductive decisions," Moore said. But just how the food they consumed early in life shaped these decisions wasn't known.

Read more ....

Can Aging Be Solved?

Credit: UCSF

From Technology Review:

At the World Congress of Gerontology and Geriatrics later this week in Paris, amid sessions on Alzheimer's disease, elderly care, and osteoporosis is a session provocatively titled "Ageing Is No Longer an Unsolved Biological Problem." It's organized by Leonard Hayflick, a professor of anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco.

In the 1960s, Hayflick discovered that human cells grown in a dish will multiply a finite number of times--a property now known as the Hayflick Limit. These cells later helped ignite the search for the cellular sources of aging, and Hayflick, a former president of the Gerontological Society of America, has since become well known for his skepticism toward claims that human longevity can be significantly lengthened through science.

Read more ....

Web In Trouble? The Hidden Cables Under A Cornish Beach Feeding The World's Internet

Pictured above is the Atlantic's newest and most advanced submarine cable system. It is so powerful that it could carry the entire internet content in both directions

From The Daily Mail:

Hastily snapped on a camera-phone, the picture below shows where the internet feeds into Britain from New York. The super-high-speed cable is now hidden under six feet of Cornish beach - which is just as well, because if it were discovered and damaged, the entire web in Britain could turn to treacle. Warren Pole reports on the fragile network of ocean cabling that keeps the modern world turning, the madcap economics of internet supply - and why it will run out of space by 2014 unless scientists think of something... fast

Read more ....

Revealed: How Pandemic Swine Flu Kills

From The New Scientist:

As the H1N1 swine flu pandemic continues to spread around the world, most cases are still mild. But reports are starting to emerge of people who sicken and die very quickly of what appears to be viral pneumonia. Now two independent groups of scientists have now found out why – and it's all down to where the virus binds within the body.

H1N1 swine flu comes from pigs, so it binds well to cell-surface molecules in the respiratory tracts of other mammals, including humans. But there are slight differences in the way different flu proteins bind to these receptors.

Read more ....

What Did Einstein Know, And When Did He Know It?

Albert Einstein

From Newsweek:

What newly released papers reveal about the physicist.

On July 22 the Einstein Papers Project, located at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, will release the 12th volume of letters written or received by Albert Einstein—791 of them—plus transcripts of several notable lectures and interviews the physicist gave, covering the year 1921. It was a momentous 12 months. You might think there are no new revelations to be made about him, but for Einstein groupies the current volume addresses at least one key question: what did Einstein know about an 1887 experiment that discovered that the speed of light is invariant, regardless of the observer's speed or direction of motion—an idea that forms the core of special relativity and that Einstein did not mention when he laid out the theory of special relativity in a 1905 paper?

Read more ....

Climate Change And The Mystery Of The Shrinking Sheep

Milder winters are causing Scotland's wild breed of Soay sheep to get smaller, despite the evolutionary benefits of possessing a large body. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 4, 2009) — Milder winters are causing Scotland's wild breed of Soay sheep to get smaller, despite the evolutionary benefits of possessing a large body, according to new research.

The new study provides evidence for climate change as the cause of the mysterious decrease in the size of wild sheep on the Scottish island of Hirta, first reported by scientists in 2007. The researchers believe that, due to climate change, survival conditions on Hirta are becoming less challenging, which means slower-growing, smaller sheep are more likely to survive the winters than they once were. This, together with newly-discovered so-called 'young mum effect' whereby young ewes produce smaller offspring, explains why the average size of sheep on the island is decreasing.

Read more ....

The Strange Ingredients In Fireworks

Copper produces blue sparks. Barium, also used in rat poison and glassmaking, makes green. A mix of strontium salts, lithium salts and other stuff makes red. Aluminum and titanium put the white stars in an aerial flag. Image credit: stockxpert

From Live Science:

Fireworks for the 4th of July are all about light, color and sound. But inside, there are some bizarre ingredients, from aluminum to Vaseline and even the stuff of rat poison.

An ancient mix of black powder, essentially gunpowder little changed from its invention in China a millennia ago, gets each rocket in the air by creating pressure in gas trapped in a tube, or mortar.

Two fuses are lit at once: one to ignite the black powder, and another that burns slower, creating a well-timed explosion high in the sky.

Read more ....

Marie Curie Voted Greatest Female Scientist

Marie Curie has been voted the greatest woman scientist of all time. Photo: PA

From The Telegraph:

Marie Curie, the Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist has been voted the greatest woman scientist of all time.

The Polish-born researcher, who discovered radiation therapy could treat cancer, won just over a quarter of the poll (25.1 per cent) - almost twice as much as her nearest rival Rosalind Franklin (14.2 per cent), the English biophysicist who helped discover the structure of DNA.

Only two modern role models made the top ten - astrophysicist Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell came fourth (4.7 per cent) and Dr Jane Goodall, the world famous primatologist, was tenth (2.7 per cent).

Read more ....

Hunting For Life In Alien Worlds

An artist's impression of the exoplanet HD 189733b transiting its sun. Astronomers have detected both water vapour and methane in its atmosphere. Image: ESA - C.Carreau.

From Plus Magazine:

Two of the most fundamental questions asked by people, and as yet still unanswered by science, are how life emerged on the Earth, and whether we are alone in the cosmos: does life exist in extraterrestrial locations as well? These deeply important questions form the core of a new kind of science, one that recently has been rapidly gathering momentum. Astrobiology is supported by a flood of new information from studies on the origins of terrestrial life, and our deep-space probes and telescopes exploring the Universe around us. The science incorporates everything from understanding the survival of life in the most extreme environments on Earth and looking for the earliest evidence of cells in the ancient rocks of our planet, to exploring the alien worlds of our solar system to determine if they have ever provided an environment suitable for life of their own.

Read more ....

Vegetarian Diet 'Weakens Bones'

A vegetarian salad. Australian researchers have said that people who live on vegetarian diets have slightly weaker bones than their meat-eating counterparts. (AFP/File/Jay Directo)

From Yahoo News/AFP:

SYDNEY (AFP) – People who live on vegetarian diets have slightly weaker bones than their meat-eating counterparts, Australian researchers said Thursday.

A joint Australian-Vietnamese study of links between the bones and diet of more than 2,700 people found that vegetarians had bones five percent less dense than meat-eaters, said lead researcher Tuan Nguyen.

The issue was most pronounced in vegans, who excluded all animal products from their diet and whose bones were six percent weaker, Nguyen said.

Read more ....

Don't Look Down: Terrifying View From Glass Box Balcony Jutting Out From Skyscraper's 103rd Floor

Long way up: Even the floor of the platforms are glass - few
were brave enough to look straight down

From The Daily Mail:

If you're scared of heights, it may be time to look away now.

Not content with having the tallest building in America, the owners of Sears Tower in Chicago have installed four glass box viewing platforms which stick out of the building 103 floors up.

The balconies are suspended 1,353 feet in the air and jut out four feet from the building's Skydeck.

Read more ....

My Comment: This is so cool.

New Form Of El Nino May Increase Atlantic Storms

From Yahoo News/AP:

WASHINGTON – El Nino may have a split personality.

The warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean has long been known to affect weather around the world, but researchers now say it may come in two forms with different impacts.

The traditional El Nino tends to reduce the number of Atlantic hurricanes. But a form Georgia Tech scientists call El Nino Modoki can lead to more hurricanes than usual in the Atlantic Ocean. Modoki, from Japanese, refers to something that is "similar but different."

The traditional El Nino involves a periodic warming of the water in the eastern part of the tropical Pacific. Indeed, it was first noticed by Peruvian fishermen, who named it after the baby Jesus because it tended to first appear around Christmastime.

Read more ...

Computer Reveals Stone Tablet 'Handwriting' In A Flash

Archaeologists have discovered more than 50,000 stone inscriptions from ancient Athens and Attica so far. However, attributing the pieces to particular cutters so they can be dated has proven tricky. Traditionally, epigraphers must hunt for giveaways to a cutter's individual style - a tiny stroke at the top of a letter, for instance (Image: Michail Panagopolous et al.)

From New Scientist:

You might call it "CSI Ancient Greece". A computer technique can tell the difference between ancient inscriptions created by different artisans, a feat that ordinarily consumes years of human scholarship.

"This is the first time anything like this had been done on a computer," says Stephen Tracy, a Greek scholar and epigrapher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who challenged a team of computer scientists to attribute 24 ancient Greek inscriptions to their rightful maker. "They knew nothing about inscriptions," he says.

Tracy has spent his career making such attributions, which help scholars attach firmer dates to the tens of thousands of ancient Athenian and Attican stone inscriptions that have been found.

Read more ....

Sea Ice At Lowest Level In 800 Years Near Greenland

There has never been so little sea ice in the area between Svalbard and Greenland in the last 800 years. (Credit: NASA/GSFC)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 2, 2009) — New research, which reconstructs the extent of ice in the sea between Greenland and Svalbard from the 13th century to the present indicates that there has never been so little sea ice as there is now. The research results from the Niels Bohr Institute, among others, are published in the scientific journal, Climate Dynamics.

There are of course neither satellite images nor instrumental records of the climate all the way back to the 13th century, but nature has its own 'archive' of the climate in both ice cores and the annual growth rings of trees and we humans have made records of a great many things over the years - such as observations in the log books of ships and in harbour records. Piece all of the information together and you get a picture of how much sea ice there has been throughout time.

Read more ....

How Earth Got Its Oxygen

Cyanobacteria scum is now considered a nuisance, but these microbes oxygenated our planet over 2 billion years ago. Credit: Washington State Dept. of Health

From Live Science:

The first half of Earth's history was devoid of oxygen, but it was far from lifeless. There is ongoing debate over who the main biological players were in this pre-oxygen world, but researchers are digging up clues in some of the oldest sedimentary rocks on the planet.

Most scientists believe the amount of atmospheric oxygen was insignificant up until about 2.4 billion years ago when the Great Oxidation Event (GOE) occurred. This seemingly sudden jump in oxygen levels was almost certainly due to cyanobacteria – photosynthesizing microbes that exhale oxygen.

Read more ....

Fit Body, Fit Mind? Your Workout Makes You Smarter

Photo: Noah Clayton Getty Images

From Scientific America:

How can you stay sharp into old age? It is not just a matter of winning the genetic lottery. What you do can make a difference

As everybody knows, if you do not work out, your muscles get flaccid. What most people don’t realize, however, is that your brain also stays in better shape when you exercise. And not just challenging your noggin by, for example, learning a new language, doing difficult crosswords or taking on other intellectually stimulating tasks. As researchers are finding, physical exercise is critical to vigorous mental health, too.

Read more ....

The Truth About Water on Mars: 5 New Findings

Lesson 4: The Lack of Perchlorate Streaks Contradicts

Evidence of Liquid Water Deposits Underground

From Popular Mechanics:

In its few months of roaming the polar area on Mars last year, the Phoenix Lander found water ice beneath the red planet's surface and snow in the atmosphere. But for those hoping that life once existed on Mars—or still might—liquid water would be the crown jewel. While Phoenix died this past November as the winter brought on shorter and colder days, project leader Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, along with a number of colleagues from NASA's Jet Propulsion lab and universities all over the world, have spent the intervening months confirming those early finds and poring over the lander's massive amounts of data. Most of the attention is focused on whether Phoenix's data conclusively shows evidence that liquid water once flowed across Mars. There is a lot of complex analysis, but, in short, signs point to yes. Here are five lessons taken from today's analysis, which was published today in four separate studies in the journal Science.

Read more ....

International Space Station To Get A Big, Beautiful Window

International Space Station Cupola Window: NASA

From Popsci.com:

We've seen private tourists and urine-recycling water filters make their way onto the International Space Station, but breathtaking views have never been the station's strongest selling point. Because of external hazards such as solar radiation and orbiting space debris, the biggest window is only 20 inches. Until now, that is.

The Tranquility node of the ISS is slated for a new 31-inch window, dubbed the Cupola, that will provide views of space never before seen from inside the station. NASA says astronauts will be able to gaze at Earth and the stars. [NASA via Boing Boing]

Read more ....