Monthly Archives: August 2011

A Greener Way To Get Into Space: The Bloon

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From TreeHugger:

Rockets can be dirty things, spewing perchlorates and other wastes. Even when they burn hydrogen and oxygen, there is a huge carbon footprint to liquifying the stuff. The Virgin Galactic will be running on a pretty clean fuel but isn't perfect. The Bloon may be the clea

In-flight suborbital Internet access? Maybe not.

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One of the nice things about flying on Virgin America (among some other airlines) is having access to the Internet in flight. On one of those long transcontinental flights, it’s great to make the time productive by having access to the web, email, and the like. But what if you’re making a quick trip into space?

Flightglobal.com reports that Virgin Galactic is investigating the possibility of having Internet access on its suborbital flights. The system being considered, according to an unnamed source, would use X-band frequencies to provide connectivity between SpaceShipTwo and the ground. It doesn’t take much to imagine people using the system to post tweets, status updates, and the like from their brief jaunts into space.

There are, though, two problems with this proposal. One is technical. For space communications, X-band frequencies are traditionally reserved for government applications, including military satellite communications and deep space transmissions to spacecraft throughout the solar system. It’s not clear how a commercial venture would be able to use those frequencies. The other is more practical: if you’re spending $200,000 for a relatively short spaceflight, are you really going to be taking the time to post a Facebook update in-flight?

One Virgin official suggested the latter issue made it unlikely the company would develop an in-flight Internet access system. “I like Twitter as much as anyone else, but put the phone down,” advised Will Pomerantz, vice president of special projects, during a Commercial Spaceflight Forum organized by SpaceUp Houston on Thursday night. “Hopefully our passengers are not clamoring to look at their Blackberries and iPhones while in outer space.”

That approach makes some sense. Certainly there will be some data connectivity needs on these flights, both for vehicle telemetry as well as for transmitting data from any experiments carried on the vehicle, but a full-fledged Internet access system, like that on airliners, doesn’t seem necessary.

Space Storm Tracked from Sun to Earth

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For the first time, a spacecraft far from Earth has turned and watched a solar storm engulf our planet. The movie, released today during a NASA press conference, has galvanized solar physicists, who say it could lead to important advances in space weather forecasting.
"The movie sent chills down my spine," says Craig DeForest of the Southwest Researcher Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "It shows a CME swelling into an enormous wall of plasma and then washing over the tiny blue speck of Earth where we live. I felt very small."
CMEs are billion-ton clouds of solar plasma launched by the same explosions that spark solar flares. When they sweep past our planet, they can cause auroras, radiation storms, and in extreme cases power outages. Tracking these clouds and predicting their arrival is an important part of space weather forecasting.
"We have seen CMEs before, but never quite like this," says Lika Guhathakurta, program scientist for the STEREO mission at NASA headquarters. "STEREO-A has given us a new view of solar storms."
STEREO-A is one of two spacecraft launched in 2006 to observe solar activity from widely-spaced locations. At the time of the storm, STEREO-A was more than 65 million miles from Earth, giving it the "big picture" view other spacecraft in Earth orbit lack.
When CMEs first leave the sun, they are bright and easy to see. Visibility is quickly reduced, however, as the clouds expand into the void. By the time a typical CME crosses the orbit of Venus, it is a billion times fainter than the surface of the full Moon, and more than a thousand times fainter than the Milky Way. CMEs that reach Earth are almost as gossamer as vacuum itself and correspondingly transparent.
"Pulling these faint clouds out of the confusion of starlight and interplanetary dust has been an enormous challenge," says DeForest.
Indeed, it took almost three years for his team to learn how to do it. Footage of the storm released today was recorded back in December 2008, and they have been working on it ever since. Now that the technique has been perfected, it can be applied on a regular basis without such a long delay.
Alysha Reinard of NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center explains the benefits for space weather forecasting:
"Until quite recently, spacecraft could see CMEs only when they were still quite close to the sun. By calculating a CME's speed during this brief period, we were able to estimate when it would reach Earth. After the first few hours, however, the CME would leave this field of view and after that we were 'in the dark' about its progress."
"The ability to track a cloud continuously from the Sun to Earth is a big improvement," she continues. "In the past, our very best predictions of CME arrival times had uncertainties of plus or minus 4 hours," she continues. "The kind of movies we've seen today could significantly reduce the error bars."
The movies pinpoint not only the arrival time of the CME, but also its mass. From the brightness of the cloud, researchers can calculate the gas density with impressive precision. Their results for the Dec. 2008 event agreed with actual in situ measurements at the few percent level. When this technique is applied to future storms, forecasters will be able to estimate its impact with greater confidence.
At the press conference, DeForest pointed out some of the movie's highlights: When the CME first left the sun, it was cavernous, with walls of magnetism encircling a cloud of low-density gas. As the CME crossed the Sun-Earth divide, however, its shape changed. The CME "snow-plowed" through the solar wind, scooping up material to form a towering wall of plasma. By the time the CME reached Earth, its forward wall was sagging inward under the weight of accumulated gas.
The kind of magnetic transformations revealed by the movie deeply impressed Guhathakurta: "I have always thought that in heliophysics understanding the magnetic field is equivalent to the 'dark energy' problem of astrophysics. Often, we cannot see the magnetic field, yet it orchestrates almost everything. These images from STEREO give us a real sense of what the underlying magnetic field is doing."
All of the speakers at today's press event stressed that the images go beyond the understanding of a single event. The inner physics of CMEs have been laid bare for the first time -- a development that will profoundly shape theoretical models and computer-generated forecasts of CMEs for many years to come.
"This is what the STEREO mission was launched to do," concludes Guhathakurta, "and it is terrific to see it live up to that promise."

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/solarstorm-tracking.html

NASA Researchers: DNA Building Blocks Can Be Made in Space

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NASA-funded researchers have evidence that some building blocks of DNA, the molecule that carries the genetic instructions for life, found in meteorites were likely created in space. The research gives support to the theory that a "kit" of ready-made parts created in space and delivered to Earth by meteorite and comet impacts assisted the origin of life.
"People have been discovering components of DNA in meteorites since the 1960's, but researchers were unsure whether they were really created in space or if instead they came from contamination by terrestrial life," said Dr. Michael Callahan of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "For the first time, we have three lines of evidence that together give us confidence these DNA building blocks actually were created in space." Callahan is lead author of a paper on the discovery appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
The discovery adds to a growing body of evidence that the chemistry inside asteroids and comets is capable of making building blocks of essential biological molecules. For example, previously, these scientists at the Goddard Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory have found amino acids in samples of comet Wild 2 from NASA’s Stardust mission, and in various carbon-rich meteorites. Amino acids are used to make proteins, the workhorse molecules of life, used in everything from structures like hair to enzymes, the catalysts that speed up or regulate chemical reactions.
In the new work, the Goddard team ground up samples of twelve carbon-rich meteorites, nine of which were recovered from Antarctica. They extracted each sample with a solution of formic acid and ran them through a liquid chromatograph, an instrument that separates a mixture of compounds. They further analyzed the samples with a mass spectrometer, which helps determine the chemical structure of compounds.
The team found adenine and guanine, which are components of DNA called nucleobases, as well as hypoxanthine and xanthine. DNA resembles a spiral ladder; adenine and guanine connect with two other nucleobases to form the rungs of the ladder. They are part of the code that tells the cellular machinery which proteins to make. Hypoxanthine and xanthine are not found in DNA, but are used in other biological processes.
Also, in two of the meteorites, the team discovered for the first time trace amounts of three molecules related to nucleobases: purine, 2,6-diaminopurine, and 6,8-diaminopurine; the latter two almost never used in biology. These compounds have the same core molecule as nucleobases but with a structure added or removed.
It's these nucleobase-related molecules, called nucleobase analogs, which provide the first piece of evidence that the compounds in the meteorites came from space and not terrestrial contamination. "You would not expect to see these nucleobase analogs if contamination from terrestrial life was the source, because they're not used in biology, aside from one report of 2,6-diaminopurine occurring in a virus (cyanophage S-2L)," said Callahan. "However, if asteroids are behaving like chemical 'factories' cranking out prebiotic material, you would expect them to produce many variants of nucleobases, not just the biological ones, due to the wide variety of ingredients and conditions in each asteroid."
The second piece of evidence involved research to further rule out the possibility of terrestrial contamination as a source of these molecules. The team also analyzed an eight-kilogram (17.64-pound) sample of ice from Antarctica, where most of the meteorites in the study were found, with the same methods used on the meteorites. The amounts of the two nucleobases, plus hypoxanthine and xanthine, found in the ice were much lower -- parts per trillion -- than in the meteorites, where they were generally present at several parts per billion. More significantly, none of the nucleobase analogs were detected in the ice sample. One of the meteorites with nucleobase analog molecules fell in Australia, and the team also analyzed a soil sample collected near the fall site. As with the ice sample, the soil sample had none of the nucleobase analog molecules present in the meteorite.
Thirdly, the team found these nucleobases -- both the biological and non-biological ones -- were produced in a completely non-biological reaction. "In the lab, an identical suite of nucleobases and nucleobase analogs were generated in non-biological chemical reactions containing hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, and water. This provides a plausible mechanism for their synthesis in the asteroid parent bodies, and supports the notion that they are extraterrestrial," says Callahan.
"In fact, there seems to be a 'goldilocks' class of meteorite, the so-called CM2 meteorites, where conditions are just right to make more of these molecules," adds Callahan.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/dna-meteorites.html

Calm and cool beach waters with San Francisco holidays

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If you are looking for a place where you can get the feel of present comfort in adding up to natural freshness then here is your answer San Francisco. It is a super idea to experience the all in one that is the aquatic activities, calm and novelty, you should spend some time at the beaches of San Francisco staying in a beach rental home. Here are the few places to enjoy your desired feel.

Ocean Beach

Ocean Beach is the foremost pleasant beach in San Francisco. If you are fed up with the hectic city life and desiring for a break to sooth your soul and find a new relation with the nature, you should visit this beach. The best part of this Beach is it is located in the city and there’s no need of a long travel. For adventure seekers, In the San Francisco city Ocean Beach is the best surfing place. This is one of the main surfing spot in the city. The beach features unbelievable combination of surf, sand and sun.

Aquatic Park

Aquatic Park is an urban beach located in the center of city. It is the highlight of the San Francisco tourism because of its nearness to city's major attractions such as Ghirardelli Square and Fisherman's Wharf. Apart from serene atmosphere and spectacular sunsets, the beach is also famous for Ghirardelli Sundae and sourdough bread bowl filled with clam broth.

Baker Beach

Baker Beach has a half mile long stretch of fine powdery sand. The specialty of the beach is you are allowed for a nude beach for this you need to take some time from your San Francisco holidays and visit the northern section of the beach. There are many small activities like swimming, surfing and ocean-side kite flying that you can enjoy in the waters of Baker Beach.

Honeycomb Carbon Crystals Possibly Detected in Space

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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has spotted the signature of flat carbon flakes, called graphene, in space. If confirmed, this would be the first-ever cosmic detection of the material -- which is arranged like chicken wire in flat sheets that are one atom thick.
Graphene was first synthesized in a lab in 2004, and subsequent research on its unique properties garnered the Nobel Prize in 2010. It's as strong as it is thin, and conducts electricity as well as copper. Some think it's the "material of the future," with applications in computers, screens on electrical devices, solar panels and more.
Graphene in space isn't going to result in any super-fast computers, but researchers are interested in learning more about how it is created. Understanding chemical reactions involving carbon in space may hold clues to how our own carbon-based selves and other life on Earth developed.
Spitzer identified signs of the graphene in two small galaxies outside of our own, called the Magellanic Clouds, specifically in the material shed by dying stars, called planetary nebulae. The infrared-sensing telescope also spotted a related molecule, called C70, in the same region – marking the first detection of this chemical outside our galaxy.
C70 and graphene belong to the fullerene family, which includes molecules called "buckyballs," or C60. These carbon spheres contain 60 carbon atoms arranged like a soccer ball, and were named after their resemblance to the architectural domes of Buckminister Fuller. C70 molecules contain 70 carbon atoms and are longer in shape, more like a rugby ball.
Fullerenes have been found in meteorites carrying extraterrestrial gases, and water has been very recently encapsulated in buckyballs by using new laboratory techniques. These findings suggest fullerenes may have helped transport materials from space to Earth long ago, possibly helping to kick-start life.
Spitzer definitively detected both buckyballs and C70 in space for the first time in July 2010 (see http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-243). It later spotted buckyballs -- equivalent in mass to 15 full moons -- in the Small Magellanic Cloud. These latter results demonstrated that, contrary to what was previously believed, fullerenes and other complex molecules could form in hydrogen-rich environments (see http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-351).
According to astronomers, the graphene, buckyballs and C70 might be forming when shock waves generated by dying stars break apart hydrogen-containing carbon grains.
The team that performed the Spitzer research is led by Domingo Aníbal García-Hernández of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain. The results appear in the Astrophyscial Journal Letters. García-Hernández is also the lead author of the study that used Spitzer to detect heaps of buckyballs in the Small Magellanic Cloud.
Read the news release from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson at http://www.noao.edu/news/2011/pr1103.php .
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. For more information about Spitzer, visit http://spitzer.caltech.edu/ and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer .

Unusual Fault Pattern Surfaces in Earthquake Study

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Like scars that remain on the skin long after a wound has healed, earthquake fault lines can be traced on Earth's surface long after their initial rupture. Typically, this line of intersection is more complicated at the surface than at depth. But a new study of the April 4, 2010, El Mayor–Cucapah earthquake in Baja California, Mexico, reveals a reversal of this trend. Superficially, the fault involved in the magnitude 7.2 earthquake appeared to be straight, but at depth, it’s warped and complicated.
The study, which was led by researchers at the California Institute of Technology with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory geophysicist Eric Fielding serving as a coauthor, is available online in the journal Nature Geoscience.
In a standard model, transform plate boundary structures -- where two plates slide past one another -- tend to be vertically oriented, which allows for lateral side-by-side shear fault motion. However, as the study found, the 75 mile (120 kilometer) long El Mayor–Cucapah rupture involved angled, non-vertical faults and the event began on a connecting extension fault between the two segments.
The new analysis indicates the responsible fault is more segmented deep down than its straight surface trace suggests. This means the evolution and extent of this earthquake's rupture could not have been accurately anticipated from the surface geology alone, says the study’s lead author Shengji Wei. Anticipating the characteristics of earthquakes that would likely happen on young fault systems (like the event in the study) is a challenge, since the geologic structures involved in the new fault systems are not clear enough.
Jean-Philippe Avouac, director of Caltech's Tectonics Observatory and principal investigator on the study, says the data can be used to illustrate the process by which the plate boundary -- which separates the Pacific Plate from North America -- evolves and starts connecting the Gulf of California to the Elsinore fault in Southern California.

On the pernicious de-radicalization of the radical future

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Over the past several years a good number of "futurists" and all-out naysayers have systematically worked to undermine and dismiss the potential for radical change to occur in the not-too-distant future. While I've always been more a fan of concepts than time-lines, there is little doubt in my mind that a number of disruptive technologies that have been predicted in the past few decades will eventually come to fruition.

But it's suddenly become very fashionable to poo-poo or sweep-aside the pending impacts of such things as the looming robotics and manufacturing revolutions, the rise of super artificial intelligence, or the migration of humans to a postbiological form. My best guesses as to why include the arrogance of the now (i.e. "we currently live at the most special of times and things will never change too significantly"), distraction (i.e. "there are other more important issues that require our attention"), fear, denial, weak imaginations, and just plain ignorance.

Here's a quick overview of what's coming down the pipe—developments that will forever alter what we currently think of as normalcy and the human condition:

So, just keep on thinking that the future is going to be more of the same.


Slate reviews ‘Planet of the Apes’-style research into brain boosting

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James Hughes, the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, is featured in Slate's article, Think Faster: A review of the Rise of the Planet of the Apes-style research into brain boosting:

In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, James Franco plays a scientist who discovers a genetic engineering treatment, delivered via virus, that prompts the brain to repair itself in the sick and boosts brain power beyond base line in the healthy (at least, in healthy apes). In the real world, though, that sort of therapy is still relegated to mouse experimentation. According to James Hughes, the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, genetic therapy is still a field with more promise than successes. It can be dangerous, as is portrayed in the Apes prequel: In 1999, Jesse Gelsinger, an 18-year-old who suffered from a rare metabolic disorder, died as a result of a gene-therapy trial, and the field is still grappling with that failure.

Brain-computer interfaces, such as implants or "hook-ups," represent an alternative path for neuroenhancement. Linking your brain to a computer chip may conjure up sci-fi nightmares of a USB slot behind your ear, but it's not quite that far-fetched: Technically, the cochlear implants that allow some hearing-impaired or deaf people to hear in a limited fashion are brain-computer interfaces, as Greely points out. But Hughes speculates that brain-computer interfaces for better cognitive skills are probably at least 30 or 40 years out. "Even if we don't have nanobots in your head, we might have simpler ways of, and perhaps noninvasive ways, of hooking the brain up to external media and doing things we can't quite imagine yet," he says.

So any blockbuster neuroenhancer is still in the lab, or just a twinkle in a scientist's eye, at the moment. But those in the field are already preparing for the ethical and societal ramifications. Some, like Greely, urge the public—and physicians—not to be too squeamish about giving healthy brains a little boost. "In a world in which human work spans and life spans are increasing, cognitive enhancement tools—including the pharmacological—will be increasingly useful for improve quality of life and extended work productivity, as well as to stave off normal pathological age-related cognitive declines," he and colleagues argued in a 2008 Nature commentary.


Wired’s unethical experiments: The Ape Man

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Wired recently published an article titled, "Seven Creepy Experiments That Could Teach Us So Much (If They Weren’t So Wrong)." Among their picks is the creation of an "ape man" that would come about through cross-breeding a human with a chimpanzee:

The premise:
The great biologist Stephen Jay Gould called it “the most potentially interesting and ethically unacceptable experiment I can imagine.” The idea? Mating a human with a chimp. His interest in this monstrosity grew out of his work with snails, closely related species of which can display wide variation in shell architecture. Gould attributed this diversity to a few master genes, which turn on and off the shared genes responsible for constructing the shells. Perhaps, he speculated, the large visible differences between humans and apes were also a factor of developmental timing. He pointed out that adult humans have physical traits, such as larger craniums and wide-set eyes, that resemble infant chimpanzees, a phenomenon known as neoteny—the retention of juvenile traits in adults. Gould theorized that over the course of evolution, a tendency toward neoteny might have helped give rise to human beings. By watching the development of a half-human, half-chimp, researchers could explore this theory in a firsthand (and truly creepy) way.

How it works:
It would probably be frighteningly easy: The same techniques used for in vitro fertilization would likely yield a viable hybrid human-chimp embryo. (Researchers have already spanned a comparable genetic gap in breeding a rhesus monkey with a baboon.) Chimps have 24 pairs of chromosomes, and humans 23, but this is not an absolute barrier to breeding. The offspring would likely have an odd number of chromosomes, though, which might make them unable to reproduce themselves. As for the gestation and birth, it could be done the natural way. Chimpanzees are born slightly smaller than humans, on average—around 4 pounds—and so comparative anatomy would argue for growing the embryo in a human uterus.

The payoff:
Gould’s idea about neoteny remains controversial, to say the least. “It got a lot of scrutiny and has been disproved in many ways,” says Daniel Lieberman, a Harvard professor of human evolutionary biology. But Alexander Harcourt, professor emeritus of anthropology at UC Davis, regards neoteny as “still a viable concept.” This forbidden experiment would help to resolve that debate and, in a broader sense, illuminate how two species with such similar genomes could be so different. Its outcome would take biologists deep into the origin of the species we care about most: ourselves. Let’s just hope we can find a less disturbing route to get there.


Chimerical performance art

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Performance artist Marion Laval-Jeantet has injected herself with horse blood plasma as part of an artistic project called "May the Horse Live in Me" that seeks to explore trans-species relationships. She prepared her body to accept the horse blood plasma by getting injected with different horse immunoglobulins over the course of several months:

These foreign animal antibodies were injected in progressively larger amounts to allow her to build up tolerance in a process that she referred to as “mithridatisation,” after the Persian king of Pontus, Mithridates VI, who supposedly built up an immunity to poison by regularly consuming small doses of it.

Earlier this year, after months of preparation, she was injected with horse blood plasma, which contained the full spectrum of immunoglobulins without provoking an allergic reaction.

As part of the performance piece she also wore a set of stilts with hooves on the end to feel at one with the horse. She walked around with the donor horse in a “communication ritual” before having her hybrid blood extracted and freeze-dried.

She explained to Centre Press that the whole process made her feel “hyperpowerful, hypersensitive and hypernervous.” She added: “I had a feeling of being superhuman. I was not normal in my body. I had all of the emotions of a herbivore. I couldn’t sleep and I felt a little bit like a horse.”

Art Orienté Objet has a long history of working in the bioart space, having created other pieces including Skin Culture, which uses bioengineered skin as a canvas for animal-shaped tattoos.

Check out the video:

Via.