Splashdown! The Ship That Picked Up the Apollo 11 Astronauts

From Wired Science:

ALAMEDA — The USS Hornet was on hand 40 years ago to pick up the Apollo 11 astronauts after their Columbia Command Module splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969.

Today, the aircraft carrier is preserved as a museum in Alameda, California. Its main deck is littered with historic warplanes and space artifacts including an Apollo command module and Mobile Quarantine Facility from subsequent missions, pictured below. The first footsteps the Apollo 11 crew took on Earth after walking on the moon are traced on the deck.

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Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man

This personal robot plugs itself in when it needs a charge. Servant now, master later?
Ken Conley/Willow Garage

From The New York Times:

A robot that can open doors and find electrical outlets to recharge itself. Computer viruses that no one can stop. Predator drones, which, though still controlled remotely by humans, come close to a machine that can kill autonomously.

Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.

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What And When Is Death?

From The New Atlantis:

All living things die. This is not new and it has nothing to do with technology. What is new in our technological age, however, is an uncertainty about when death has come for some human beings. These human beings, as an unintended consequence of efforts to prevent death, are left suspended at its threshold. Observing them in this state of suspension, we, the living, have a very hard time knowing what to think: Is the living being still among us? Is there still a present for this person or has the long reign of the past tense begun: Is he or was he? The phenomenon is popularly known as “brain death,” but the name is misleading. Death accepts no modifiers. There is only one death. Has it occurred or not? Alive or dead?

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Bluefin Tuna Species Racing Toward Extinction

Bluefin Tuna

From Future Pundit:

A Wired article reports on efforts of scientists to breed and raise tuna in captivity in order to save wild tuna from extinction. While the scientific results in Australia and elsewhere look promising the news about tuna in the wild looks pretty grim.

News of breeding success comes with the three bluefin species — Northern, Southern and Pacific — speeding towards extinction, the victim of something close to a marine version of the 19th century buffalo slaughter. In the last 30 years, bluefin populations around the world have collapsed. Fishing fleets with spotter planes have chased ever-smaller, ever-younger fish, catching them at sea and hauling them to shoreline pens to be fattened and killed before they’re even old enough to reproduce.

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New Flu Treatment Outsmarts Mutations

Candy Coated: A new treatment targets “lollipop” molecules on the flu’s surface. Russell Kightley/Photo Researchers

From Popsci.com:

A new drug could foil any outbreak.

Before swine flu swept through the U.S., the virus had bounced around South America undetected for years. The H1N1 strain caught scientists by surprise, and without a vaccine. But a few weeks before the first North American case popped up, researchers successfully tested a therapy that could knock out almost any flu, and possibly any virus.

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Beyond The Moon: A Chat With Buzz Aldrin

Preparing for an Apollo 11 Countdown Test: NASA

From Popsci.com:

The 79-year-old astronaut says: Enough about the moon; let's go to Mars.

It's been 40 years since Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin landed the Apollo 11 lunar module in the Sea of Tranquility. Aldrin, now 79 years old, recalls that fateful day with clarity. Alarms were sounding inside the space capsule during their speedy descent, and even down to the last seconds, the astronauts were uncertain whether they would need to abort the landing. Millions of Earthlings watched on television as the Eagle touched down.

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My Comment: Still a dreamer at 79 .... and he is right.

For 13 Astronauts, A Day Off In Space

International Space Station

From Yahoo News/Space.com:

The 13 people living on the International Space Station took some hard-earned time off Saturday, a welcome relief after a hectic week of orbital construction.

It's a rare rest day for the station's six-man crew and seven visiting astronauts from the space shuttle Endeavour, who have plowed through a week packed with four spacewalks and robotic arm work to upgrade the orbiting laboratory with new batteries, spare parts and - their crown jewel - a brand new Japanese porch, complete with experiments.

"On a very long mission like this, it's really important that they get some time to recuperate and recover and really just enjoy being on orbit as the first 13-person crew," space station flight director Holly Ridings told reporters late Friday.

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Building NASA's Future

Photo: Steel pieces that make up most of Ares I-X are clustered in High Bay 4 of the assembly building. The five cylinders represent the interstage and upper stage of Ares I; the final piece is the dart-shaped mock-up of the crew capsule. Credit: John Loomis

From Technology Review:

The U.S. space agency readies the first test flight of the vehicle destined for the moon.

One of the largest structures in the world, the vehicle assembly building at Kenned­y Space Center in Florida is the last stop for the space shuttle before it is rolled out to the launch pad. But with the shuttles scheduled to retire in 2010, the massive building has already become home to NASA's next launch vehicle.

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Massive Impact On Jupiter Recorded -- News Updates July 25, 2009

Closeup view of the new dark spot on Jupiter taken with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 on July 23, 2009. (IBTimes / NASA, ESA, H. Hammel (Space Sc)

Jupiter: Our Cosmic Protector? -- The New York Times

Jupiter took a bullet for us last weekend.

An object, probably a comet that nobody saw coming, plowed into the giant planet’s colorful cloud tops sometime Sunday, splashing up debris and leaving a black eye the size of the Pacific Ocean. This was the second time in 15 years that this had happened. The whole world was watching when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 fell apart and its pieces crashed into Jupiter in 1994, leaving Earth-size marks that persisted up to a year.

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More News On Jupiter's Collision

Hubble Snaps Sharpest Image Yet of Jupiter Impact -- Wired Science
Hubble image shows debris from Jupiter collision -- AP
See Jupiter's Great Black Spot -- MSNBC
Hubble restarted, captures images of Jupiter 'scar' -- International Herald Tribune
Hubble pictures Jupiter's 'scar' -- BBC
The Bruise Heard Round the World -- New York Times
Jupiter collision packed a huge wallop -- Christian Science Monitor

Europe's Mars Rover Slips To 2018

From The BBC:

Europe's flagship robotic rover mission to Mars now looks certain to leave Earth in 2018, two years later than recently proposed, the BBC understands.

The ExoMars vehicle is intended to search the Red Planet for signs of past or present life.

The delay is the third for the mission originally planned to launch in 2011.

While the switch will disappoint many people, officials say the change will open up a greatly expanded programme of exploration at the Red Planet.

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Strong Evidence That Cloud Changes May Exacerbate Global Warming

This image shows unique cloud patterns over the Pacific Ocean of the coast of Baja California, an area of great interest to Amy Clement and Robert Burgman of the University of Miami and Joel Norris of Scripps Oceanography, as they study the role of low-level clouds in climate change. (Credit: NASA)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 24, 2009) — The role of clouds in climate change has been a major question for decades. As the earth warms under increasing greenhouse gases, it is not known whether clouds will dissipate, letting in more of the sun's heat energy and making the earth warm even faster, or whether cloud cover will increase, blocking the Sun's rays and actually slowing down global warming.

In a study published in the July 24 issue of Science, researchers Amy Clement and Robert Burgman from the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and Joel Norris from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego begin to unravel this mystery. Using observational data collected over the last 50 years and complex climate models, the team has established that low-level stratiform clouds appear to dissipate as the ocean warms, indicating that changes in these clouds may enhance the warming of the planet.

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Permafrost Could Be Climate's Ticking Time Bomb

Gregory Lehn , a Ph. D. student in the department of Earth and planetary sciences at Northwestern University on the left, and Matt Khosh, Ph.D. student in the department of marine sciences at the University of Texas, Austin on the right, talk with Jim McClelland, professor in the department of marine sciences at the University of Texas, Austin, a co-principal investigator on the project, in the center. Credit: Andrew D. Jacobson, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Northwestern University

From Live Science:

The terrain of the North Slope of Alaska is not steep, but Andrew Jacobson still has difficulty as he hikes along the spongy tundra, which is riddled with rocks and masks multitudes of mosquitoes.

Jacobson, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Northwestern University, extracts soil and water samples in search of clues to one of global warming's biggest ticking time bombs: the melting of permafrost.

Permafrost, or frozen ground, covers approximately 20 to 25 percent of the land-surface area in the northern hemisphere, and is estimated to contain up to 1,600 gigatons of carbon, primarily in the form of organic matter. (One gigaton is equivalent to one billion tons.)

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Monolayer Nanotechnology Will Enable Silicon to Maintain Conductance for Smaller Devices And Sustain Moore's Law Progress

From The Next Big Future:

Scientists at Rice University and North Carolina State University have found a method of attaching molecules to semiconducting silicon that may help manufacturers reach beyond the current limits of Moore's Law as they make microprocessors both smaller and more powerful.

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Traffic Hydrocarbons Linked To Lower IQs In Kids

From Science News:

Prenatal exposures to common air pollutants correlate with drop in intelligence scores.

Here’s a dirty little secret about polluted urban air: It can shave almost 5 points off of a young child’s IQ, a new report suggests.

That’s no small loss, says Kimberly Gray, whose federal agency cofinanced the study, to appear in the August Pediatrics.

Normally, baseline environmental exposures to a pollutant yield at most a subtle change — one that is hard to detect and with impacts that are hard to gauge, says Gray, of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, N.C. But the new study shows that children heavily exposed in the womb to common combustion pollutants known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons had, by kindergarten age, an IQ some 4.5 points lower than that of kids with minimal fetal exposures.

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Apollo 11 Experiment Still Going After 40 Years

Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment

From Yahoo News/Space:

The Apollo 11 astronauts returned from the moon 40 years ago today, but they left behind more than footprints. An experiment they placed on the moon's surface is still running to this day.

The Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment is the only moon investigation to continuously operate since the Apollo 11 mission. The experiment studies the Earth-Moon system and beams the data to labs around the world, including NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.

"Yes, we are still going," said James Williams, a JPL scientist involved with the experiment, in an e-mail interview.

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Is the Sun Missing Its Spots?

SUN GAZING These photos show sunspots near solar maximum on July 19, 2000, and near solar minimum on March 18, 2009. Some global warming skeptics speculate that the Sun may be on the verge of an extended slumber. NASA

From The New York Times:

The Sun is still blank (mostly).

Ever since Samuel Heinrich Schwabe, a German astronomer, first noted in 1843 that sunspots burgeon and wane over a roughly 11-year cycle, scientists have carefully watched the Sun’s activity. In the latest lull, the Sun should have reached its calmest, least pockmarked state last fall.

Indeed, last year marked the blankest year of the Sun in the last half-century — 266 days with not a single sunspot visible from Earth. Then, in the first four months of 2009, the Sun became even more blank, the pace of sunspots slowing more.

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Alien-Wasp Swarms Devouring Birds, Bugs in Hawaii

Invasive western yellowjacket wasps in Hawaii (above, a wasp eats an unidentified insect near another wasp) are munching their way through an "astonishing diversity" of creatures, from caterpillars to ring-necked pheasants, a July 2009 study says. The voracious wasps, which have exploded in their new habitat, can wipe out whole swaths of prey insects surrounding their nests. Photograph courtesy Erin Wilson

From National Geographic:

Attacking from nests as big as pickup-truck beds, invasive western yellowjacket wasps in Hawaii are munching their way through an "astonishing diversity" of creatures, from caterpillars to pheasants, a new study says.

Adult yellowjackets consume only nectar. But they kill or scavenge prey to deliver needed protein to their growing broods.

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Nasa Finds Monster Black Hole Sucking Up Gas, Dust And Stars At Centre Of Galaxy

The galaxy NGC-1097 with a monstrous black hole surrounded by a ring of stars at its centre
Photo: REUTERS / NASA

From The Telegraph:

Nasa has found a monster black hole 100 million times the mass of the Sun feeding off gas, dust and stars at the centre of a galaxy 50 million light-years away.

The star-ringed black hole forms the eye of a galaxy called NGC-1097 which was photographed by the US space agency's Spitzer Space Telescope in California.

A black hole is a region of space in which the gravitational pull is so powerful that nothing, including whole planets, can escape being sucked in if they come within its reach.

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Sensational Collection Of Satellite Images Captures Earth's Natural Wonders From Space

This image shows how dust from the Sahara desert blew all the way over the British Isles

From The Daily Mail:

For decades, man has gazed up at the stars and marvelled at the wonders of the universe.

But, as this amazing selection of images shows, there are many mind-blowing sights to behold from the other direction.

Pictures taken by astronauts and Nasa satellites give a fascinating bird's-eye view of Earth's natural wonders - including hurricanes, volcanoes and other powerful weather formations - from space.

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What NASA's Return To The Moon May Look Like

To explore the lunar surface, NASA envisions a pressurised rover that will act as a mobile habitat, allowing astronauts to explore the lunar surface for weeks at a time without returning to their base. If supply depots are scattered along the way, these rovers could potentially have a range of hundreds of kilometres. (Image: Regan Geeseman)

From New Scientist:

The Apollo era may have ended as funding fizzled, and the programme's astronauts may be bigger fans of Mars, but the hope of returning to the moon never really went away.

Twenty years ago, on the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, then-President George H. W. Bush proposed that the US build a base on the moon and send an expedition to Mars. The call fell flat with Congress, which never provided the funding to back up the plan.

But a decade and a half later, his son, President George W. Bush, articulated a similar vision with a clear deadline – an aim to return humans to the moon by 2020, as a stepping-stone on the way to Mars.

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