Thursday, July 16, 2009
Weaving The Way To The Moon
Don Eyles says getting a job on the Apollo mission was probably the greatest stroke of luck in his life (Archive footage: MIT and Nasa)
From The BBC:
As Apollo 11 sped silently on its way to landing the first men on the Moon, its safe arrival depended on the work of a long-haired maths student fresh out of college and a computer knitted together by a team of "little old ladies".
Now, 40 years after Apollo 11 landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon, the work of these unsung heroes who designed and built the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) is back in the spotlight.
"I wasn't so aware of the responsibility at the time - it sort of sunk in later," said Don Eyles, a 23-year-old self-described "beatnik" who had just graduated from Boston University and was set the task of programming the software for the Moon landing.
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Not Only Dogs, But Deer, Monkeys And Birds Bark To Deal With Conflict
Photo: Why do dogs bark so much? A recent paper by UMass Amherst evolutionary biologist Kathryn Lord and colleagues suggests that it has more to do with their evolutionary history as scavengers in dumps than their desire to communicate with humans. (Credit: Raymond Coppinger)From Science Daily:
ScienceDaily (July 15, 2009) — Biologically speaking, many animals besides dogs bark, according to Kathryn Lord at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, but the evolutionary biologist also says domestic dogs vocalize in this way much more than birds, deer, monkeys and other wild animals that use barks. The reason is related to dogs’ 10,000-year history of hanging around human food refuse dumps, she suggests.
In her recent paper in a special issue of the journal, Behavioural Processes, Lord and co-authors from nearby Hampshire College also provide the scientific literature with its first consistent, functional and acoustically precise definition of this common animal sound.
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40 Years After Moon Landing: Why Aren't People Smarter?
Being smart involves being able to understand the relationships between events, finding and questioning hidden assumptions, and so on. The fact is, most students are not taught how to think analytically and critically. Image Credit: stockxpertFrom Live Science:
Editor's Note: Forty years ago this month, humans landed on the moon for the first time. We asked Benjamin Radford why, four decades later, humans have not become any smarter.
A look at old periodicals reveals something very interesting about human nature. Newspapers and magazines from the early 1900s were full of advertisements for instant weight loss gizmos, miracle cures, and all other forms of self-evident quackery. A century later, this stuff is still being advertised — and lots of people are buying.
You would think that by now people would know that you can't lose 10 pounds a week taking a "breakthrough" miracle pill, and you can't earn $50,000 a week working from home in your spare time (at least not legally).
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World's Oldest Tattoos Were Made Of Soot
Photo: Tattoo lines on the right leg of the Tyrolean iceman, Ötzi. (Image:Leopold Dorfer) From New Scientist:
For those inclined to put ink to flesh, modern tattoo parlours offer dizzying arrays of dyes – mercury-containing reds, manganese purples, even pigments that glow in the dark.
Getting inked wasn't always quite so complicated, however. A new analysis concludes that the world's oldest tattoos were etched in soot.
Belonging to Ötzi the 5300 year old Tyrolean iceman, the simple tattoos may have served a medicinal purpose, not a decorative one, says Maria Anna Pabst, a researcher at the Medical University of Graz, Austria, who trained optical and electron microscopes on biopsies of Otzi's preserved flesh.
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What’s In Earth Orbit And How Do We Know?
Tracking all the active satellites and orbital debris around the Earth is a challenging task, even for the US Defense Department. (credit: NASA)From Space Review:
Whenever the topic of space debris and satellites in orbit comes up a lot of numbers tend to get thrown around by a lot of different people, and it can be hard to keep all the figures straight. Compounding this is the superficial knowledge (at best) of the subject by many media commentators and the tradition of secrecy by the US military, the organization that has historically been the main keepers of the data on space debris.
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The Challenge for Green Energy: How To Store Excess Electricity
From Environment 360:
For years, the stumbling block for making renewable energy practical and dependable has been how to store electricity for days when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. But new technologies suggest this goal may finally be within reach.
“Why are we ignoring things we know? We know that the sun doesn’t always shine and that the wind doesn’t always blow.” So wrote former U.S. Energy Secretary James Schlesinger and Robert L. Hirsch last spring in the Washington Post, suggesting that because these key renewables produce power only intermittently, “solar and wind will probably only provide a modest percentage of future U.S. power.”
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Memory Test And PET Scans Detect Early Signs Of Alzheimer's
PET scans can detect the decline in glucose metabolism associated with decreased cognitive function, particularly in the temporal and parietal lobes located on the sides and the back of the brain, the regions associated with memory formation and language. UC Berkeley researchers are finding that brain imaging shows promise as a method of detecting early signs of Alzheimer's disease. On the left is a PET scan showing normal levels of glucose metabolism, indicated in yellow and red. The levels of glucose metabolism in the brain are decreased in patients with mild cognitive impairment (middle) and with Alzheimer's disease (right). (Credit: Cindee Madison and Susan Landau, UC Berkeley)From Science Daily:
ScienceDaily (July 15, 2009) — A large study of patients with mild cognitive impairment revealed that results from cognitive tests and brain scans can work as an early warning system for the subsequent development of Alzheimer's disease.
The research found that among 85 participants in the study with mild cognitive impairment, those with low scores on a memory recall test and low glucose metabolism in particular brain regions, as detected through positron emission tomography (PET), had a 15-fold greater risk of developing Alzheimer's disease within two years, compared with the others in the study.
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Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Apollo 11 Mission Gear Up For Auction
Sample Return Bag: Lunar rocks were placed in an aluminum box for return to Earth; this Beta cloth cover went over the box, to contain the dust and any stowaways. courtesy Bonhams From PopSci.com:
Always dreamed of using Neil Armstrong's moon rock collection bag as an overnight duffle? Now's your chance
To commemorate the 40th anniversary of man's landing on the moon, you can buy yourself a little piece of space history. On July 16, the auction house Bonhams is conducting an auction of lunar memorabilia. The sale includes a number of items that the Apollo 11 mission crew carried onto the moon's surface on the history-making trip. Lunar dust still covers some of the lots.
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President Obama's Science Czar, John Holdren: Is He An Advocate For Forced Sterializations And Abortions?
President Obama's Science Czar, John HoldrenObama's Science Czar: Traditional Family Is Obsolete, Punish Large Families -- The Washington Examiner
President Obama's Science Czar, John Holdren, took a controversial and amoral approach to the science of population by recommending mass compulsory sterilization and even forced abortion (and/or forced marriages) under certain circumstances. His 1977 tome, Ecoscience, which he co-authored with Paul and Anne Ehrlich, also displays a revealing disregard for the institution of the traditional human family.
Holdren and the Ehrlichs write:
Radical changes in family structure and relationships are inevitable, whether population control is instituted or not. Inaction, attended by a steady deterioration in living conditions for the poor majority, will bring changes everywhere that no one could consider beneficial. Thus, it is beside the point to object to population-control measures simply on the grounds that they might change the social structure or family relationships.
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My Comment: This man is President Obama's point man on science??!!??!!. Was he ever vetted .... and if he was, does President Obama also believe in these opinions?
Read the article as well as the comments section in this Washington Examiner article .... there is enough information there to make you wonder on what is happening with this administrations science policies.
On Sixth Try, Endeavour Lifts Off -- News Updates And Roundup July 15, 2009
The space shuttle Endeavour launched from the Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesOn Sixth Try, Endeavour Lifts Off -- New York Times
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — For the space shuttle Endeavour, the sixth time proved to be the charm.
After hydrogen leaks, schedule conflicts, lightning strikes and a couple of rain delays, the Endeavour, on the sixth launch attempt, finally lifted to orbit Monday at 6:03 p.m. into the humid Florida sky.
That was one short of NASA’s record for the number of delays. Two previous missions, in 1986 and 1995, were delayed six times before launching on the seventh attempt.
The mission, scheduled to last 16 days, includes five spacewalks dedicated to the construction of the International Space Station. It is the only second time a shuttle mission has been planned for that long.
Read more ....
More News on Today's Space Shuttle Launch
Space shuttle blasts off after month's delay -- AP
Space shuttle Endeavour blasts off after several postponements -- CNN
Sixth time lucky; space shuttle Endeavour blasts off -- Times Online
Endeavour launches on sixth attempt -- BBC
Debris Strikes Endeavour During Liftoff -- New York Times
FACTBOX-The crew of the U.S. space shuttle Endeavour -- Reuters
FACTBOX: Highlights of space shuttle Endeavour's mission -- Reuters
Tracking The Evolution Of A Pandemic
Photo: Birth of a bug: New research on the emergence of the 1918 influenza virus suggests that it may have evolved in a manner similar to that of the current H1N1 strain (shown here). Credit: Center for Disease Control and Prevention From The Technology Review:
Understanding how viruses evolve could help predict the next outbreak.
A close examination of the genetic evolution of the three major influenza epidemics of the 20th century concludes that all of the viruses involved evolved slowly, through interspecies genetic exchange, and that genes from the catastrophic 1918 pandemic may have been circulating as many as seven years earlier. If true, this means that widespread genetic surveillance methods should have ample time to detect the next pandemic strain, and possibly even vaccinate against it before it gets out of control.
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DNA Is Dynamic And Has High Energy; Not Stiff Or Static As First Envisioned
New research shows that DNA is not a stiff or static as once thought.(Credit: iStockphoto/Andrew Wood)
From Science Daily:
ScienceDaily (July 14, 2009) — The interaction represented produced the famous explanation of the structure of DNA, but the model pictured is a stiff snapshot of idealized DNA. As researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Houston note in a report that appears online in the journal Nucleic Acids Research, DNA is not a stiff or static. It is dynamic with high energy. It exists naturally in a slightly underwound state and its status changes in waves generated by normal cell functions such as DNA replication, transcription, repair and recombination.
DNA is also accompanied by a cloud of counterions (charged particles that neutralize the genetic material's very negative charge) and, of course, the protein macromolecules that affect DNA activity.
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40 Years After Moon Landing: Why Can't We Cure Cancer?
Neil Armstrong took this picture of Buzz Aldrin, showing a reflection in Aldrin's visor of Armstrong and the Lunar Module during the Apollo 11 mission, which landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969. This is one of the few photographs showing Armstrong (who carried the camera most of the time) on the moon. Credit: NASAFrom Live Science:
Richard Nixon had every reason to be optimistic when, during his 1971 State of the Union address, he called for a concerted effort to find a cure for cancer. After all, it took only three years for the Manhattan Project to produce the world's first atomic bomb. Nixon's own presidency witnessed the 1969 moon landing, a goal set forth by John F. Kennedy in 1961.
It seemed that given enough resources there was no job that Americans couldn't tackle quickly.
But with $200 billion spent and tens of millions of cancer deaths accumulated since 1971, most would say we are losing the war on cancer. Cancer is the top killer worldwide, responsible for 7.4 million or 13 percent of all deaths annually. In America cancer will soon overtake heart disease as the top killer, claiming more than half million lives annually.
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Moon Landing Anniversary: 10 Reasons The Apollo Landings Were 'Faked'
Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong on July 20, 1969 Photo: AP From The Telegraph:
Below is a list of ten of the most popular reasons given by conspiracy theorists who believe the Apollo Moon landings that began 40 years ago were faked.
1) When the astronauts are putting up the American flag it waves. There is no wind on the Moon.
2) No stars are visible in the pictures taken by the Apollo astronauts from the surface of the Moon.
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Gravity Wells Could Provide 'Parking Lots' For Spaceships
From McClatchy News:WASHINGTON — Nature has provided five huge rest stops far out in space for the convenience of spacecraft traveling from Earth.
Some NASA folks call them "parking lots" in space.
They're unusual locations where gravity loses its pull and a spaceship can loiter, rather like a marble at the bottom of a cup, without using a lot of fuel. Three of them are 930,000 miles outside Earth's orbit. One is between the Earth and the sun, and another is hidden on the far side of the sun.
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400-Billion-Euro Plan To Pump African Solar Power To Europe
A man pictured next to solar panels whose energy helps pump water into a water tower in a village in Niger, 2004. Twelve European companies launched a 400-billion-euro (560-billion-dollar) initiative on Monday to plant huge solar farms in Africa and the Middle East to produce energy for Europe. (AFP/File/Issouf Sanogo)From Yahoo News/AFP:
MUNICH, Germany (AFP) – Twelve European companies launched a 400-billion-euro (560-billion-dollar) initiative Monday to plant huge solar farms in Africa and the Middle East to produce energy for Europe.
The consortium says the massive proposal could provide up to 15 percent of Europe's electricity needs by 2050.
Engineering giants ABB and Siemens, energy groups E.ON and RWE and financial institutions Deutsche Bank and Munich Re are among the companies which signed a protocol in Munich.
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NASA Aiming For Wednesday Shuttle Launch, Try 6
Space shuttle Endeavour stands on launch pad 39A moments after the launch was scrubbed due to weather conditions at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla, Monday, July 13, 2009. (AP Photo/John Raoux)From Yahoo News/AP:
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – NASA is hoping the weather finally cooperates for its sixth launch attempt for space shuttle Endeavour.
Endeavour is poised to take off for the international space station early Wednesday evening, along with seven astronauts. Forecasters put the odds of good weather at 60 percent.
Thunderstorms have delayed the mission three times and hydrogen gas leaks have caused two delays. Endeavour holds the final piece of Japan's space lab, which should have flown last month.
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Tuesday, July 14, 2009
The Spacemen Who Spent Three Months On A Mission To Mars... Without Leaving Moscow
Still smiling: The six volunteers stayed in good spirits during their three-month mission, despite living in quarters just 12ft acrossFrom The Daily Mail:
A crew of six men saw the Sun for the first time in three months today after they were released from a cramped spacecraft simulator.
The volunteers were taking part in a simulated mission to Mars, which was designed to study the psychological and medical aspects of long-duration spaceflight.
They entered voluntary confinement at the end of March when there was still snow on the ground in Moscow.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1199429/The-spacemen-spent-months-mission-Mars--leaving-Moscow.html#ixzz0LHlGzfR7&D
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Longest Insect Migration Revealed
From The BBC:Every year, millions of dragonflies fly thousands of kilometres across the sea from southern India to Africa.
So says a biologist in the Maldives, who claims to have discovered the longest migration of any insect.
If confirmed, the mass exodus would be the first known insect migration across open ocean water.
It would also dwarf the famous trip taken each year by Monarch butterflies, which fly just half the distance across the Americas.
Biologist Charles Anderson has published details of the mass migration in the Journal of Tropical Ecology.
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H1N1 (Swine Flu) News Updates -- July 14, 2009
New Flu "Unstoppable", WHO Says, Calls For Vaccine -- Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Saying the new H1N1 virus is "unstoppable", the World Health Organization gave drug makers a full go-ahead to manufacture vaccines against the pandemic influenza strain on Monday and said healthcare workers should be the first to get one.
Every country will need to vaccinate citizens against the swine flu virus and must choose who else would get priority after nurses, doctors and technicians, said Dr. Marie-Paule Kieny, WHO director of the Initiative for Vaccine Research.
Read more ....
More News On H1N1
New flu resembles feared 1918 virus: study -- Reuters
U.K. Aims for Broad Vaccination Program -- Wall Street Journal
WHO warns of vaccine shortfall for coming flu season -- Globe And Mail
Swine flu: health experts 'surprised' by spread of virus in the UK -- The Guardian
NHS helplines swamped as swine flu panic rises after death of six-year-old girl -- Daily Mail
67 Air Force cadets stricken with swine flu -- Denver Post/AP
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