The Science Jerks – Episode 5: Urinal Technology, Planetology and Criminology with Bennie Arthur – Video

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The Science Jerks - Episode 5: Urinal Technology, Planetology and Criminology with Bennie Arthur
Comedian Bennie Arthur talks to the jerks about Urinal Video Games, Rogue Planets and Computer Programmer John McAffee on the lam in Belize. Also Jessica Lee...

By: The Science Jerks

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The Science Jerks - Episode 5: Urinal Technology, Planetology and Criminology with Bennie Arthur - Video

NASA Hosts News Conference About 10 Years of Roving on Mars

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NASA's Opportunity rover was built for a three-month mission on Mars, but continues to return valuable scientific data 10 years later. NASA will reflect on the rover's work in a news conference at 11 a.m. PST (2 p.m. EST) Thursday, Jan. 23.

The event will originate from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and be carried live on NASA Television and streamed online.

Participants will be:

-- Michael Meyer, lead scientist, Mars Exploration Program, NASA Headquarters, Washington

-- Ray Arvidson, Mars Exploration Rovers deputy principal investigator, Washington University, St. Louis, Mo.

-- John Callas, Mars Exploration Rovers project manager, JPL

-- Steve Squyres, Mars Exploration Rovers principal investigator, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.

Opportunity, one of NASA's twin Mars Exploration Rovers, reached the Red Planet Jan. 24, 2004 (PST). It landed three weeks after its twin, named Spirit. Both rovers made important discoveries about wet environments that could have supported microbial life on ancient Mars. Spirit stopped communicating with Earth in 2010. Opportunity is continuing to provide scientific results, and currently is investigating the rim of a crater 14 miles (22 kilometers) wide.

Reporters wanting to attend the news conference in person at JPL must arrange access by 4 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 22 by contacting Elena Mejia at elena.mejia@jpl.nasa.gov or 818-354-5467. She can also arrange telephone participation with advance notification. Reporters also may ask questions from other participating NASA centers.

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NASA Hosts News Conference About 10 Years of Roving on Mars

NASA Receives Mars 2020 Rover Instrument Proposals for Evaluation

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NASA has received 58 proposals for science and exploration technology instruments to fly aboard the agency's next Mars rover in 2020, twice the usual number submitted for instrument competitions in the recent past, and an indicator of the extraordinary interest in exploration of the Red Planet.

The agency is beginning a thorough review to determine the best combination of science and exploration technology investigations for the mission and anticipates making final selections in the next five months.

"Proposal writing for science missions is extremely difficult and time consuming. We truly appreciate this overwhelming response by the worldwide science and technical community and are humbled by the support and enthusiasm for this unique mission," said John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science in Washington. "We fully expect to be able to select an instrument suite that will return exciting science and advance space exploration at Mars."

NASA opened competition for Mars 2020 research proposals in September and closed it January 15. Several NASA facilities, academia, industry, research laboratories, and other government agencies submitted proposals. Seventeen proposals came from international partners.

The Mars 2020 mission is designed to accomplish several high-priority planetary science goals and will be an important step toward meeting President Obama's challenge to send humans to Mars in the 2030s. The mission will conduct geological assessments of the rover's landing site, determine the habitability of the environment, search for signs of ancient Martian life, and assess natural resources and hazards for future human explorers.

The science instruments aboard the rover also will enable scientists to identify and select a collection of rock and soil samples that will be stored for potential return to Earth in the future. This will achieve one of the highest-priority objectives recommended by the National Research Council's 2011 Planetary Science Decadal Survey. Analysis of such samples in laboratories here on Earth will help determine whether life existed on Mars and help inform planning for human exploration missions to the planet.

The rover also may help designers of a human expedition understand the hazards posed by Martian dust and demonstrate how to collect carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which could be a valuable resource for producing oxygen and rocket fuel.

"NASA robotic missions are pioneering a path for human exploration of Mars in the 2030s," said William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations in Washington. "The Mars 2020 rover mission presents new opportunities to learn how future human explorers could use natural resources available on the surface of the Red Planet. An ability to live off the land could reduce costs and engineering challenges posed by Mars exploration."

The instruments developed from the selected proposals will be placed on a rover similar to Curiosity that has been exploring Mars since 2012. Using a proven landing system and rover chassis design to deliver these new experiments to Mars will ensure mission costs and risks are minimized as much as possible while still delivering a highly capable rover.

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NASA Receives Mars 2020 Rover Instrument Proposals for Evaluation

NASA’s Mars 2020 Rover instrument proposals

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NASA has received 58 proposals for science and exploration technology instruments to fly aboard the agency's next Mars rover in 2020, twice the usual number submitted for instrument competitions in the recent past, and an indicator of the extraordinary interest in exploration of the Red Planet.

The agency is beginning a thorough review to determine the best combination of science and exploration technology investigations for the mission and anticipates making final selections in the next five months.

"Proposal writing for science missions is extremely difficult and time consuming. We truly appreciate this overwhelming response by the worldwide science and technical community and are humbled by the support and enthusiasm for this unique mission," said John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science in Washington. "We fully expect to be able to select an instrument suite that will return exciting science and advance space exploration at Mars."

NASA opened competition for Mars 2020 research proposals in September and closed it January 15. Several NASA facilities, academia, industry, research laboratories and other government agencies submitted proposals. Seventeen proposals came from international partners.

The Mars 2020 mission is designed to accomplish several high-priority planetary science goals and will be an important step toward meeting President Obama's challenge to send humans to Mars in the 2030s. The mission will conduct geological assessments of the rover's landing site, determine the habitability of the environment, search for signs of ancient Martian life, and assess natural resources and hazards for future human explorers.

The science instruments aboard the rover also will enable scientists to identify and select a collection of rock and soil samples that will be stored for potential return to Earth in the future. This will achieve one of the highest-priority objectives recommended by the National Research Council's 2011 Planetary Science Decadal Survey. Analysis of such samples in laboratories here on Earth will help determine whether life existed on Mars and help inform planning for human exploration missions to the planet.

The rover also may help designers of a human expedition understand the hazards posed by Martian dust and demonstrate how to collect carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which could be a valuable resource for producing oxygen and rocket fuel.

"NASA robotic missions are pioneering a path for human exploration of Mars in the 2030s," said William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations in Washington. "The Mars 2020 rover mission presents new opportunities to learn how future human explorers could use natural resources available on the surface of the Red Planet. An ability to live off the land could reduce costs and engineering challenges posed by Mars exploration."

The instruments developed from the selected proposals will be placed on a rover similar to Curiosity, which has been exploring Mars since 2012. Using a proven landing system and rover chassis design to deliver these new experiments to Mars will ensure mission costs and risks are minimized as much as possible while still delivering a highly capable rover.

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NASA's Mars 2020 Rover instrument proposals

nasa-rover-rock-reuters-220114.JPG

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January 22, 2014

A NASA combination handout photograph shows the surface of Mars in front of the Mars rover on December 26, 2013 (left) and on January 8, 2014. - Reuters pic, January 22, 2014.Scientists are stumped as to how a rock mysteriously appeared in images taken two weeks apart by NASA's Mars rover Opportunity.

The rover, which landed in an area known as Meridiani Planum a decade ago, is exploring the rim of a crater for signs of past water.

Another rover, Curiosity, touched down on the opposite side of the planet in 2012 for a more ambitious mission to look for past habitable environments.

For the moment, however, scientists are pondering a more immediate question. On January 8, while preparing to use its robotic arm for science investigation, Opportunity sent back a picture of its work area.

Oddly, it showed a bright white rock, about the size of a doughnut, where only barren bedrock had appeared in a picture taken two weeks earlier. Scientists suspect the rock was flipped over by one of the rover's wheels.

It also may have been deposited after a meteorite landed nearby.

Either way, the rock, dubbed "Pinnacle Island" is providing an unexpected science bonus.

"Much of the rock is bright-toned, nearly white," NASA said in a statement yesterday. "A portion is deep red in colour. Pinnacle Island may have been flipped upside-down when a wheel dislodged it, providing an unusual circumstance for examining the underside of a Martian rock." - Reuters, January 22, 2014.

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Centre for Nanoscale BioPhotonics studies cellular-level processes

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The Centre of Excellence in Nanoscale BioPhotonics (CNBP), a newly established collaborative research program based at the University of Adelaide, will begin its work in earnest later this month with a kick-off meeting in the Australian city.

Announced in December 2013 as one of a dozen new centers backed by the Australian Research Council (ARC) and supported by AUS$23 million from the government agency, CNBP aims to develop novel biophotonics techniques suitable for the study of living cells within biological systems.

"The challenge we want to focus on is understanding the biology of single cells and cellular processes, without the need to take the cells out of the body and rely on traditional microscopy," commented Tanya Monro, director of the university's Institute for Photonics & Advanced Sensing and now director of CNBP.

The center has defined three initial target challenges, formulated so as to tackle some currently challenging questions in cell biology. They include exploring approaches to sensing in and around developing embryos; probing immune signals linked to touch and pain in the central nervous system, in order to investigate the origins of sensation; and exploring the role of the endothelium within blood vessels and the damaging effects of plaque.

These challenges have in turn led to the four themes which currently form the center's research agenda: creating novel light sources for interrogating biomolecules; creating smart surfaces for photonic structures and nanoparticles; creating nanophotonic architectures customized to enhance light-matter interactions at the nanoscale for biological measurement; and identifying specific molecular changes for measurement using advanced molecular sensors.

The themes give an indication of the combination of techniques and novel thinking that the center hopes to foster, an aspect reflected in the Centre's name.

"'Nanoscale' represents the fact that the technology suite we will be developing brings together nanofabrication and nanophotonics, building on the convergence of nanotechnology and photonics," noted Monro. "A lot of current biophotonics technologies are concerned only with imaging modalities, but these nanoscale techniques can go further than that."

A number of recent developments in the field of nanoscale probes give an indication of how these complementary technologies might be fruitfully exploited in areas of interest to CNBP.

One example is the use of carefully manufactured nanocrystals, referred to as upconversion nanoparticles, that can be excited by infra-red irradiation and then emit in a very localized fashion in the visible range.

A recent paper, co-authored by research groups now connected with CNBP, showed how the entry of a single such particle into an advanced nanostructured optical fiber could be detected at the other end of the fiber, potentially allowing nanoscale measurements to be made at a distance. This could in turn provide a means of making some of these measurements within living organisms.

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Centre for Nanoscale BioPhotonics studies cellular-level processes

New Jets for Composite Nano-Materials to be Presented at NanoTech Tokyo

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(PRWEB) January 22, 2014

4SPIN device is to roll out new jets for the production of composite nanomaterials and core-shell nanofibres in Tokyo. These jets can be used to prepare nanomaterial samples composed of nanofibres of several different substances, or even to create nanofibres using different materials for the interior and the case of the fibre.

Composite materials have a great future in areas such as filtration and internal medicine. Consider, for example, new wound dressings made of composite nanofibres. The bandages carrier fibres are insoluble and their nanostructure ensures that no infectious bacteria penetrate the wound. The second type of nanofibre is gradually dissolved and releases wound-healing substances into the wound, says Ji ebek, a scientist from the nanofibre production device development laboratory, as he explains the benefits of composite fibres.

In addition to three new types of jets for the preparation of composite nanofibres, we will also be introducing a new linear mutli needle-less jet with high spinnability and very high productivity in Tokyo. This new needleless electrospinning emitter is capable of scaling up nanofibrous material production.

Another new emitter is our coaxial single jet, capable of producing hollow fibres and even processing core materials that will not form fibres via electrospinning on their own, said Dr. Victor Stickel, the Managing Director of Insight InterAsia the 4SPIN distributor on Asian markets as he shed light on the new developments.

The Nanotech International Nanotechnology Exhibition & Conference is the worlds largest nanotechnology fair and an essential event for state-of-the-art manufacturing. The exhibition will be held on 29 31 January 2014 from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. daily.

Background The 4SPIN laboratory apparatus excels with its ability to spin even difficult-to-process solutions, create nanomaterials from natural polymers and produce materials in which the nanofibre orientation is flawlessly unidirectional. The apparatus also excels in its safety features and centralised control of nanofibre production processes. These advantages have predestined the device to be a key instrument in the development of new hi-tech materials. http://www.4spin.info

Contipro is an innovation-oriented manufacturer of active ingredients for the pharmaceutical and cosmetic industry. Its core product is sodium hyaluronate. Nearly a hundred researchers work at its R&D laboratories, focusing on the main research areas of nanotechnology, wound healing, tissue engineering, drug delivery and anti-aging. http://www.contipro.com

Insight interAsia is the leading technical sales, marketing, and business development company helping technology companies to sell their products and services throughout Asia and North America. Insight interAsia sells the products of its European and American principals in the technology areas of semiconductors, MEMS, nanotech, sensors, PV, cleantech, biopharma, energy, and the automotive industry. The company has technical sales and service staff throughout Asia and the US markets. insightinterasia.com

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New Jets for Composite Nano-Materials to be Presented at NanoTech Tokyo

Team 10 saves war medals from auction

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SAN DIEGO - An Imperial Beach family called Team 10 desperate to get their late father's war medals from a storage unit and the Troubleshooter got results in a few hours.

Thomas Moore thought his father-in-law's war medals and other important family items would be auctioned off on Thursday from the storage unit they were renting.

"I've never felt so helpless in my life," said Moore. "I feel empty."

Moore's father-in-law, Bill Wright, was everything to the family.

"He was like my father," said Moore. "I was adopted so I don't have any blood relatives."

Wright was also a proud veteran and endured an explosion in the Korean War, where he was awarded a Purple Heart.

"He was a POW and he was shot," said Moore.

When Wright became sick in April, the entire family moved to an RV to take care of him and they had to put a lot of things at A1 Storage in Chula Vista. Moore said they could no longer pay for the unit when Wright passed away in July.

"I asked, how long do we have to not pay before you sell our stuff and they said 96 days," said Moore.

Moore said the next day day 11 they put a lock on the unit. It was filled with appliances and furniture but all he wanted was a box of personal items and Wright's medals. Moore said the late payments and fees have now gone up to nearly $1,000, which they cannot afford.

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Team 10 saves war medals from auction

Mind uploading in fiction – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Main article: Mind uploading

Mind uploading, mind transfer or whole brain emulation is a use of a computer as an emulated human brain, and the view of thoughts and memories as software information states. The term mind transfer also refers to a hypothetical transfer of a mind from one biological brain to another. It is a common theme in science fiction.

One of the earliest examples can be found in Frederik Pohl's story "The Tunnel Under the World" from 1955. In this story, the protagonist Guy Burckhardt continually wakes up on the same date from a dream of dying in an explosion. Burckhardt is already familiar with the idea of putting human minds in robotic bodies, since this is what is done with the robot workers at the nearby Contro Chemical factory. As someone has once explained it to him, "each machine was controlled by a sort of computer which reproduced, in its electronic snarl, the actual memory and mind of a human being ... It was only a matter, he said, of transferring a man's habit patterns from brain cells to vacuum-tube cells." Later in the story, Pohl gives some additional description of the procedure: "Take a master petroleum chemist, infinitely skilled in the separation of crude oil into its fractions. Strap him down, probe into his brain with searching electronic needles. The machine scans the patterns of the mind, translates what it sees into charts and sine waves. Impress these same waves on a robot computer and you have your chemist. Or a thousand copies of your chemist, if you wish, with all of his knowledge and skill, and no human limitations at all." After some investigation, Burckhardt learns that his entire town had been killed in a chemical explosion, and the brains of the dead townspeople had been scanned and placed into miniature robotic bodies in a miniature replica of the town (as a character explains to him, 'It's as easy to transfer a pattern from a dead brain as a living one'), so that a businessman named Mr. Dorchin could charge companies to use the townspeople as test subjects for new products and advertisements.

Something close to the notion of mind uploading is very briefly mentioned in Isaac Asimov's 1956 short story The Last Question: "One by one Man fused with AC, each physical body losing its mental identity in a manner that was somehow not a loss but a gain." A more detailed exploration of the idea (and one in which individual identity is preserved, unlike in Asimov's story) can be found in ArthurC. Clarke's novel The City and the Stars, also from 1956 (this novel was a revised and expanded version of Clarke's earlier story Against the Fall of Night, but the earlier version did not contain the elements relating to mind uploading). The story is set in a city named Diaspar one billion years in the future, where the minds of inhabitants are stored as patterns of information in the city's Central Computer in between a series of 1000-year lives in cloned bodies. Various commentators identify this story as one of the first (if not the first) to deal with mind uploading, human-machine synthesis, and computerized immortality.[1][2][3][4]

Another of the "firsts" is the novel Detta r verkligheten (This is reality), 1968, by the renowned philosopher and logician Bertil Mrtensson, a novel in which he describes people living in an uploaded state as a means to control overpopulation. The uploaded people believe that they are "alive", but in reality they are playing elaborate and advanced fantasy games. In a twist at the end, the author changes everything into one of the best "multiverse" ideas of science fiction.

In Robert Silverberg's To Live Again (1969), an entire worldwide economy is built up around the buying and selling of "souls" (personas that have been tape-recorded at six-month intervals), allowing well-heeled consumers the opportunity to spend tens of millions of dollars on a medical treatment that uploads the most recent recordings of archived personalities into the minds of the buyers. Federal law prevents people from buying a "personality recording" unless the possessor first had died; similarly, two or more buyers were not allowed to own a "share" of the persona. In this novel, the personality recording always went to the highest bidder. However, when one attempted to buy (and therefore possess) too many personalities, there was the risk that one of the personas would wrest control of the body from the possessor.

In the 1982 novel Software, part of the Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker, one of the main characters, Cobb Anderson, has his mind downloaded and his body replaced with an extremely human-like android body. The robots who persuade Anderson into doing this sell the process to him as a way to become immortal.

In William Gibson's award-winning Neuromancer (1984), which popularized the concept of "cyberspace", a hacking tool used by the main character is an artificial infomorph of a notorious cyber-criminal, Dixie Flatline. The infomorph only assists in exchange for the promise that he be deleted after the mission is complete.

The fiction of Greg Egan has explored many of the philosophical, ethical, legal, and identity aspects of mind transfer, as well as the financial and computing aspects (i.e. hardware, software, processing power) of maintaining "copies." In Egan's Permutation City (1994), Diaspora (1997) and Zendegi (2010), "copies" are made by computer simulation of scanned brain physiology. See also Egan's "jewelhead" stories, where the mind is transferred from the organic brain to a small, immortal backup computer at the base of the skull, the organic brain then being surgically removed.

The movie The Matrix is commonly mistaken for a mind uploading movie, but is only about virtual reality and simulated reality, since the main character Neo's physical brain still is required to reside his mind. The mind (the information content of the brain) is not copied into an emulated brain in a computer. Neo's physical brain is connected into the Matrix via a brain-machine interface. Only the rest of the physical body is simulated. Neo is disconnected from and reconnected to this dreamworld.

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Mind uploading in fiction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia