Monthly Archives: June 2010

Has China Been Formally Invited to Join the ISS Program? (Update)

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Keith's 25 Jun update: According to NASA PAO, NASA issued the following statement this morning: "NASA has confirmed with the director of the Russian Federal Space Agency's human space flight program that Russia has not issued an invitation to China to join the International Space Station program."

More Details on Space Discussions during the International Economical Forum in St. Petersburg, Roscosmos

"International Space Station partners have not received any response from China on a proposal to join the ISS program, Roscosmos Head Anatoly Perminov stated during the International Economical Forum in St. Petersburg. Speaking about Russian role in the program, Perminov reminded that US shuttles are to be retired soon, leaving Soyuz to maintain crew transportation services solely for the ISS, Interfax informs. "This is rather dangerous, any expert recognizes that. There must a backup for the Soyuz. We wish some country would have it, and we contacted China with its human spaceflight program mature enough to maintain crew transportation in the program, asking to join the ISS partnership. However there was no response", Perminov said."

Keith's note: The Roscosmos website is designed a little weird - you can't directly link to some things. To see the original source for this article, go to this page and then go to "all news" and click on "More Details on Space Discussions during the International Economical Forum in St. Petersburg"

Yesterday’s Power Outage at LaRC

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Keith's note: The following was sent to all LaRC employees last night: "Most of NASA Langley lost power at approximately 3 p.m. today when a high voltage cable terminator failed in the Center's Stratton substation. Employees may have heard a loud noise associated with the failure. There were no injuries. The cable terminator is on a electrical feeder cable connected to the 22-kV (22 thousand volt) main power bus. A protective relay tripped the bus off line, and most of the damage was limited to the cable terminator. Power was restored by 3:33 p.m. The Center is open for normal operations."

Shifting The Shuttle

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Shuttle Era Extended to early 2011, Ken Kremer

"The Era of NASA's Space Shuttle Program will be extended by a few more months into early 2011, slightly staving off the retirement that had long been scheduled to occur by the end of 2010. Space Shuttle Program managers have submitted a formal new "change request" to move the launch target dates of the final two shuttle flights, STS 133 and STS 134. These next, and so far last, shuttle flights had been scheduled to lift off on Sept. 16 with Discovery and in late November 2010 with Endeavour and will now be retargeted to late October 2010 and late February 2011 respectively."

NASA Continues To Ignore RockOn! Launch

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Keith's note: It has been 24 hours and virtually nothing has been released by NASA about the RockOn! rocket launch yesterday that carried a number of student experiments. When you go to the Wallops website it now says "A Terrier-Orion Sounding Rocket was successfully launched on 6/24/10. Stay tuned for information on the next launch from Wallops!". There is no (apparent) link to photos, press releases, videos, or any other information associated with the launch.

The last post on the Wallops Twitter (which is going into hibernation again) at 7:25 am EDT yesterday says "We will post a launch pic later this morning. Thanks for that suggestion." The Wallops YouTube page has one video - but it was posted a year ago. The Wallops Facebook page has a video but you have to go through the process of being approved as a Facebook friend before you can see it. Nothing is apparently posted on the Wallops website.

According to project documentation, the following universities had payloads on this mission: Temple University, University of West Virginia, University of Louisiana University of Minnesota, University of Wyoming, University of Puerto Rico, University of Colorado at Boulder, Virginia Tech, University of Northern Colorado, and Colorado State University. Yet there is no evidence that NASA Wallops PAO or the NASA Education Office have lifted a finger to make public notice of this mission.

Given all of the other Summer of Innovation events that NASA is promoting it is rather baffling that NASA's Education office continues to ignore this mission - one where students focused their ideas and imagination on something that actually went into space. I know that they are now aware of this mission. As such this continued omission of mention of the event is no longer an oversight. It is now deliberate.

- Yet Another Stealth Launch at Wallops (Update), earlier post
- Wallops Flight Facility, NASA's hidden launch shop, CNet

Oceans on Venus Might Have Been Habitable

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From SPACE.com:

Venus, currently one of the most inhospitable places in the solar system, may once have had an ample supply of water - possibly even oceans - and been a potentially habitable place when it was young, a new study suggests. The finding comes from the European Space

Extracted Teeth Could Stock Stem Cell Banks

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From Discovery News - Top Stories:

Scientists have found a new and relatively accessible supply line for stem cells that can grow into any type of cell in the human body -- extracted teeth. Like cells from embryos, the soft living tissue from inside teeth can be induced to becom

Pushing Safer Alternatives

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From Chemical & Engineering News: Latest News:

California regulators are taking action to step up pressure on manufacturers to replace toxic chemicals in consumer products with safer alternatives. The state regulation proposed on June 23 would require manufacturers to assess whe

Plastic Bags Into Power?

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From Discovery News - Top Stories:

Rather than languishing in landfills or littering roadsides, plastic bags could make their way into useful products like toner, lubricants, or rechargeable cell phone or laptop batteries, if new research becomes commercialized. Plastic recyclin

Crazy Video: Super-Hydrophobic Substances

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From mental_floss Blog:

Today's weird science: Dr. Neil Shirtcliffe shows off substances that repel water in very surprising ways. It's a little hard to describe — basically, imagine a coating that prevents water from adhering to something. And I mean water will not stick

Living, Breathing Lung Tissue Created in the Lab

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From TG Daily:

A Yale University team has successfully implanted laboratory-made lung tissue into rats - which were then able to use it to breathe. The Yale researchers took adult rat lungs and removed their existing cellular innards, while keeping the external cell structure an

Space Tourists: a second look

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Space Tourists poster

Earlier this week I got to see the film Space Tourists during a screening as part of the AFI Silverdocs film festival in Silver Spring, Maryland. This film has been out for some time but has been limited to the film festival circuit; it first appeared in the US at Sundance earlier this year and Ryan Kobrick wrote a good review of the film for The Space Review.

My own impressions of the film are mixed. Part of the film is about the spaceflight experience, in particular the flight of Anousheh Ansari, but as much or more is about life in Kazkhastan, with imagery of abandoned apartment blocks and crumbling infrastructure. The film follows a group of scavengers who travel out to where the first stages of the Soyuz rocket that launched Ansari fall back to Earth; they cut up the metal and sell it for scrap. At times the film juxtaposes the two: we see the metal collectors immediately pull out of the rocket stage a small tank that looks like a cooking pot so they can use it exactly for that—a pot to cook their meals in over an open fire. We then see Ansari and her crewmates on the ISS prepare their own prepackaged meals on the station.

Another portion of the film steps away from the ISS and Kazakhstan to look at the effort by one Romanian group, ARCA, led by Dumitru Popescu, to develop their own vehicles. ARCA competed in the Ansari X PRIZE and is a team in the Google Lunar X PRIZE; the film shows their efforts to loft a subscale rocket on a solar-heated balloon. It’s an odd choice for a film supposedly about space tourism: this particular ARCA effort isn’t directly about space tourism, while a number of other ventures are focused on space tourism and arguably making faster progress than ARCA.

The film is neither blatantly pro- or anti-tourism. In a brief Q&A session after the screening, director Christian Frei said he was drawn to the topic after reading a short newspaper article about Daisuke Enomoto, who had planned to fly to the ISS on a Soyuz flight. Enomoto was rejected for health reasons and Ansari, who had been training as his backup, took his place. Ansari provided him with the footage she shot while on the station for his documentary without any conditions, he said. That was a relief to hm, he said, since dealing with “billionaires”, as he put it, “was a challenge”. (Ansari is not quite a billionaire.)

One comment by Frei struck me late in the Q&A session. Asked about the inclusion of ARCA in the film, he said that he wanted to feature someone in the film who wants to go to space “with his own tools” instead of simply buying a ticket. “I love this guy and his dream of going and flying to the Moon as a Romanian,” he said. “This is the most expensive thing that you can imagine. And of course he won’t get there, but, you know, theoretically it would work.” In some sense he’s right: it is unlikely that the small, undercapitalized ARCA team will be able to land a spacecraft on the Moon as required for the GLXP; after all, the team was never able to develop a suborbital rocket for the original X PRIZE competition. But, unlike Frei, I’d be cautious about completely writing off ARCA or anyone else striving to turn a dream into reality.

The Coolest Stars Come Out of the Dark

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Artist's concept of the brown dwarfs WISE is expected to find
This artist's concept shows simulated data predicting the hundreds of failed stars, or brown dwarfs, that NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is expected to add to the population of known stars in our solar neighborhood. › Full image and caption

Astronomers have uncovered what appear to be 14 of the coldest stars known in our universe. These failed stars, called brown dwarfs, are so cold and faint that they'd be impossible to see with current visible-light telescopes. Spitzer's infrared vision was able to pick out their feeble glow, much as a firefighter uses infrared goggles to find hot spots buried underneath a dark forest floor.

The brown dwarfs join only a handful of similar objects previously discovered. The new objects are between the temperatures of about 450 Kelvin to 600 Kelvin (350 to 620 degrees Fahrenheit). As far as stars go, this is bitter cold -- as cold, in some cases, as planets around other stars.

These cool orbs have remained elusive for years, but will soon start coming out of the dark in droves. NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission, which is up scanning the entire sky now in infrared wavelengths, is expected to find hundreds of objects of a similarly chilly disposition, if not even colder. WISE is searching a volume of space 40 times larger than that sampled in the recent Spitzer study, which concentrated on a region in the constellation Boötes. The Spitzer mission is designed to look at targeted patches of sky in detail, while WISE is combing the whole sky.

"WISE is looking everywhere, so the coolest brown dwarfs are going to pop up all around us," said Peter Eisenhardt, the WISE project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and lead author of a recent paper in the Astronomical Journal on the Spitzer discoveries. "We might even find a cool brown dwarf that is closer to us than Proxima Centauri, the closest known star."

Brown dwarfs form like stars out of collapsing balls of gas and dust, but they are puny in comparison, never collecting enough mass to ignite nuclear fusion and shine with starlight. The smallest known brown dwarfs are about 5 to 10 times the mass of our planet Jupiter -- that's as massive as some known gas-giant planets around other stars. Brown dwarfs start out with a bit of internal heat left over from their formation, but with age, they cool down. The first confirmed brown dwarf was announced in 1995.

"Brown dwarfs are like planets in some ways, but they are in isolation," said astronomer Daniel Stern, co-author of the Spitzer paper at JPL. "This makes them exciting for astronomers -- they are the perfect laboratories to study bodies with planetary masses."

Most of the new brown dwarfs found by Spitzer are thought to belong to the coolest known class of brown dwarfs, called T dwarfs, which are defined as being less than about 1,500 Kelvin (2,240 degrees Fahrenheit). One of the objects appears to be so cold that it may even be a long-sought Y dwarf -- a proposed class of even colder stars. The T and Y classes are part of a larger system categorizing all stars; for example, the hottest, most massive stars are O stars; our sun is a G star.

"Models indicate there may be an entirely new class of stars out there, the Y dwarfs, that we haven't found yet," said co-author Davy Kirkpatrick, a co-author of the study and a member of the WISE science team at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. "If these elusive objects do exist, WISE will find them." Kirkpatrick is a world expert in brown dwarfs -- he came up with L, T and Y classifications for the cooler stars.

Kirkpatrick says that it's possible that WISE could find an icy, Neptune-sized or bigger object in the far reaches of our solar system -- thousands of times farther from the sun than Earth. There is some speculation amongst scientists that such a cool body, if it exists, could be a brown dwarf companion to our sun. This hypothetical object has been nicknamed "Nemesis."

"We are now calling the hypothetical brown dwarf Tyche instead, after the benevolent counterpart to Nemesis," said Kirkpatrick. "Although there is only limited evidence to suggest a large body in a wide, stable orbit around the sun, WISE should be able to find it, or rule it out altogether."

The 14 objects found by Spitzer are hundreds of light-years away -- too far away and faint for ground-based telescopes to see and confirm with a method called spectroscopy. But their presence implies that there are a hundred or more within only 25 light-years of our sun. Because WISE is looking everywhere, it will find these missing orbs, which will be close enough to confirm with spectroscopy. It's possible that WISE will even find more brown dwarfs within 25-light years of the sun than the number of stars known to exist in this space.

"WISE is going to transform our view of the solar neighborhood," said Eisenhardt. We'll be studying these new neighbors in minute detail -- they may contain the nearest planetary system to our own."

Other authors of the Spitzer paper are Roger Griffith and Amy Mainzer of JPL; Ned Wright, A.M. Ghez and Quinn Konopacky of UCLA; Matthew Ashby and Mark Brodwin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge; Mass., Michael Brown of Monash University, Australia; R.S. Bussmann of the University of Arizona, Tucson; Arjun Dey of National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Tucson, Ariz.; Eilat Glikman of Caltech; Anthony Gonzalez and David Vollbach of the University of Florida, Gainesville; and Shelley Wright of the University of California, Berkeley.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

JPL manages the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The principal investigator, Edward Wright, is at UCLA. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory, Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about Spitzer, visit http://spitzer.caltech.edu/ and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer. More information about WISE is online at http://wise.astro.ucla.edu and http://www.nasa.gov/wise.

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New Clues Suggest Wet Era on Early Mars Was Global

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Lyot Crater on Mars
Lyot Crater, pictured here, is one of at least nine craters in the northern lowlands of Mars with exposures of hydrated minerals detected from orbit, according to a June 25, 2010, report. › Full image and caption
Minerals in northern Mars craters seen by two orbiters suggest that a phase in Mars' early history with conditions favorable to life occurred globally, not just in the south.

Southern and northern Mars differ in many ways, so the extent to which they shared ancient environments has been open to question.

In recent years, the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter and NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have found clay minerals that are signatures of a wet environment at thousands of sites in the southern highlands of Mars, where rocks on or near the surface are about four billion years old. Until this week, no sites with those minerals had been reported in the northern lowlands, where younger volcanic activity has buried the older surface more deeply.

French and American researchers report in the journal Science this week that some large craters penetrating younger, overlying rocks in the northern lowlands expose similar mineral clues to ancient wet conditions.

"We can now say that the planet was altered on a global scale by liquid water about four billion years ago," said John Carter of the University of Paris, the report's lead author.

Other types of evidence about liquid water in later epochs on Mars tend to point to shorter durations of wet conditions or water that was more acidic or salty.

The researchers used the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), an instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, to check 91 craters in the northern lowlands. In at least nine, they found clays and clay-like minerals called phyllosilicates, or other hydrated silicates that form in wet environments on the surface or underground.

Earlier observations with the OMEGA spectrometer on Mars Express had tentatively detected phyllosilicates in a few craters of the northern plains, but the deposits are small, and CRISM can make focused observations on smaller areas than OMEGA.

"We needed the better spatial resolution to confirm the identifications," Carter said. "The two instruments have different strengths, so there is a great advantage to using both."

CRISM Principal Investigator Scott Murchie of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md., a co-author of the new report, said that the findings aid interpretation of when the wet environments on ancient Mars existed relative to some other important steps in the planet's early history.

The prevailing theory for how the northern part of the planet came to have a much lower elevation than the southern highlands is that a giant object slammed obliquely into northern Mars, turning nearly half of the planet's surface into the solar system's largest impact crater. The new findings suggest that the formation of water-related minerals, and thus at least part of the wet period that may have been most favorable to life, occurred between that early giant impact and the later time when younger sediments formed an overlying mantle.

"That large impact would have eliminated any evidence for the surface environment in the north that preceded the impact," Murchie said. "It must have happened well before the end of the wet period."

The report's other two authors are Francois Poulet and OMEGA Principal Investigator Jean-Pierre Bibring, both of the University of Paris.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA. Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory provided and operates CRISM, one of six instruments on that orbiter.

For more information about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, visit http://www.nasa.gov/mro.

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BP is burning rare sea turtles alive, blocking efforts to save them

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By now, almost everyone is aware of the out-of-control oil spill down in the Gulf of Mexico that seems to be getting exponentially worse with each passing day. But what people may not know is that BP's efforts to control the oil by burning it are actually burning alive a certain rare and endangered species of sea turtle.

For several weeks now, rescue crews have been feverishly trying to save Kemp's Ridleys sea turtles, as well as four other endangered varieties, from being caught in the oil corral areas that are being intentionally burned by BP, but according to Mike Ellis, one of the boat captains involved in the project, BP has now blocked all such rescue efforts from taking place.

"They ran us out of there and then they shut us down, they would not let us get back in there," he explained in an interview with Catherine Craig, a conservation biologist.

According to Dr. Brian Stacy, a veterinarian with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, there are five different endangered sea turtles living in the Gulf that are all at risk, but the type being found "dead or covered in oil" the most is the Kemp's Ridleys variety, which is the rarest species of them all. Read more...
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Pathology Informatics 2010 – Sept 19-22, Boston, MA – Mark your Calendars

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It goes without saying that this is THE pathology informatics meeting of the year and brings together two historically strong meetings - APIII and Lab InfoTech Summit (AIMCL prior to that). 

Outstanding faculty at a great venue.  Travel awards and CME availalble.

Whether you are a rookie or a seasoned veteran between the 3 tracks (see below) listed below from the conference website, this meeting will offer something to everyone. 

Another added deliverable of combining forces to have this meeting is the breadth and depth of exhibitors who will attend outnumbering either meeting on its own.

Pathology Informatics 2010

Click here to download conference brochure (PDF)

Pathology Informatics 2010 (PI-2010) is the product of more than 40 cumulative years of experience in providing continuing medical education in the area of pathology informatics. Its predecessor conferences were: (1) AIMCL, held in Ann Arbor from 1983 to 2003; (2) APIII held in Pittsburgh from 1996 to 2009; and (3) Lab InfoTech Summit from 2004 to 2009. A decision was made last year to merge these events into a single mega-event, bringing together their directors and staffs under the sponsorship of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh, and the Association for Pathology Informatics, API.

Pathology Informatics, a subdiscipline of pathology and clinical laboratory medicine, is growing rapidly. In recognition of this fact, we offer registrants to PI-2010 three workshops on the first day of and three tracks on the subsequent two and one-half days. The three tracks are the following: (1) Applied Informatics; (2) Advanced and Experimental Informatics; and (3) Pathology Imaging Informatics. These three tracks are punctuated by plenary lectures to the whole group by noted pathologists and scientists. The first of these tracks closely approximates the previous Lab InfoTech Summit held in Las Vegas and the latter two track closely to previous APIII offerings.

We view the role of the exhibitors at PI-2010 as essential to the learning mission because they serve as partners in the deployment of new information management systems. Because the training of pathology residents and fellows in pathology informatics is essential to our mission, we have also taken special efforts to award travel grants to them in programs across the country and encourage pathology program directors to view the PI-2010 experience as an “away rotation” for such trainees. Special discounts on the registration fees are offered to them as well as to API and HIMA members.

Who Should Attend?

Pathology Informatics 2010 is an annual educational conference designed for world-wide collaboration, technology and learning together to come together in one meeting place.

PI2010 offers direct interaction with physicians, researchers, residents and graduate students, Industry-related developers, engineers, imaging informatics professionals, vendor representatives and many others interested in how informatics and imaging are transforming pathology, oncology and radiology. Prior knowledge of informatics is not required and courses are offered for individuals new to this field.

Conference Highlights

  • Three pre-conference workshops and three tracks to choose from over the course of the four conference days.

  • An eminent faculty consisting of most of the national experts in the field of pathology informatics in the country and from abroad.

  • Dawn-to-dusk programming over the course of four days including a gala welcoming reception on the first night of the conference and formal lecture-demonstrations by a selection of exhibitors.

  • Elegant conference space and room accommodations at the Westin Copley Place, one of the finest hotels in Boston.

Overall Conference Objectives

  • Present practical and emerging solutions for automated information and image management in pathology and the clinical laboratories.

  • Describe how workflow in the clinical laboratories and pathology can be supported and enhanced by new software and hardware solutions.

  • Understand the various software and hardware products available in the clinical laboratory and pathology market by interacting with a large number of exhibitors.

  • Present new research in pathology informatics on the basis of submitted competitive scientific abstracts.

  • Provide a forum for basic pathology informatics instruction for house officers and fellows in pathology training programs.