Webb Telescope NIRSpec Instrument Arrives at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center – Video

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Webb Telescope NIRSpec Instrument Arrives at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
JWST Telescope NIRSpec instrument arrives at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. NIRSpec is provided by the European Space Agency and built by EADS/Astrium. Th...

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Webb Telescope NIRSpec Instrument Arrives at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center - Video

NASA's Hubble spies asteroid spouting six comet-like tails

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Is it a lawn sprinkler in space?

An asteroid with six comet-like tails of dust radiating from it -- like a rotating lawn sprinkler -- was spotted for the first time by NASA's Hubble Space telescope.

"We were literally dumbfounded when we saw it," lead investigator David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles said today in a press release.

Astronomers were puzzled over the tiny points of lightbeaming from asteroid P/2013 P5 found in August. However, it wasn't until September 10 when Hubble was used to take a more detailed image of the flying object that the multiple tails were discovered.

When Hubble spotted the asteroid again on September 23,

"Even more amazing, its tail structures change dramatically in just 13 days as it belches out dust," Jewitt said. "That also caught us by surprise. It's hard to believe were looking at an asteroid."

Astronomers believe the asteroid's rotation rate increased to the point where its surface starting flying apart causing the tails of dust to blast off into space.

The mysterious asteroid will continue to be observed by Jewitt and his team of astronomers in hopes of measuring the asteroid's true spin rate

"In astronomy, where you find one, you eventually find a whole bunch more," Jewitt said. "This is just an amazing object to us, and almost certainly the first of many more to come."

Jewitt said P/2013 P5 is probably a fragment of a larger asteroid that broke apart in a collision approximately 200 million-years ago.

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NASA's Hubble spies asteroid spouting six comet-like tails

NASA, International Researchers Obtain Crucial Data From Meteoroid Impact

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A team of NASA and international scientists for the first time have gathered a detailed understanding of the effects on Earth from a small asteroid impact. The unprecedented data obtained as the result of the airburst of a meteoroid over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk on Feb. 15, has revolutionized scientists' understanding of this natural phenomenon.

The Chelyabinsk incident was well observed by citizen cameras and other assets. This factor provided a unique opportunity for researchers to calibrate the event, with implications for the study of near-Earth objects (NEOs) and the development of hazard mitigation strategies for planetary defense. Scientists from nine countries now have established a new benchmark for future asteroid impact modeling. "Our goal was to understand all circumstances that resulted in the shock wave," said meteor expert Peter Jenniskens, co-lead author of a report published in the journal Science.

Jenniskens, a meteor astronomer at NASA's Ames Research Center and the SETI Institute, participated in a field study led by Olga Popova of the Institute for Dynamics of Geospheres of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow in the weeks following the event. "It was important that we followed up with the many citizens who had firsthand accounts of the event and recorded incredible video while the experience was still fresh in their minds," said Popova.

By calibrating the video images from the position of the stars in the night sky, Jenniskens and Popova calculated the impact speed of the meteor at 42,500 mph. As the meteor penetrated through the atmosphere, it fragmented into pieces, peaking at 19 miles above the surface. At that point the superheated meteor appeared brighter than the sun, even for people 62 miles away.

Because of the extreme heat, many pieces of the meteor vaporized before reaching Earth. Scientists believe that between 9,000 to 13,000 pounds of meteorites fell to the ground. This amount included one fragment weighing approximately 1,400 pounds. This fragment was recovered from Lake Chebarkul on Oct. 16 by professional divers guided by Ural Federal University researchers in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

NASA researchers participating in the 59 member consortium study suspect the abundance of shock fractures in the rock contributed its breakup in the upper atmosphere. Meteorites made available by Chelyabinsk State University researchers were analyzed to learn about the origin of the shock veins and their physical properties. Shock veins are caused by asteroid collisions. When asteroid collide with each other, heat generated by the impact causes iron and nickel components of the objects to melt. These melts cool into thin masses, forming metal veins shock veins in the objects.

"One of these meteorites broke along one of these shock veins when we pressed on it during our analysis," said Derek Sears, a meteoriticist at Ames.

Mike Zolensky, a cosmochemist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, may have found why these shock veins (or shock fractures), were so frail. They contained layers of small iron grains just inside the vein, which had precipitated out of the glassy material when it cooled. "There are cases where impact melt increases a meteorite's mechanical strength, but Chelyabinsk was weakened by it," said Zolensky.

The impact that created the shock veins may have occurred as long ago as 4.4 billion years. This would have been 115 million years after the formation of the solar system, according to the research team, who found the meteorites had experienced a significant impact event at that time. "Events that long ago affected how the Chelyabinsk meteoroid broke up in the atmosphere, influencing the damaging shockwave," said Jenniskens.

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NASA, International Researchers Obtain Crucial Data From Meteoroid Impact

NASA keeps an eye on ferocious Super Typhoon Haiyan from space

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11 hours ago

NASA Goddard MODIS Rapid Response Team

This visible image of Super Typhoon Haiyan approaching the Philippines was taken from the MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite on Wednesday at 11:25 p.m. EDT.

A NASA satellite has been keeping an eye on Super Typhoon Haiyan as the monster storm pounds the Philippines with torrential rain and the most powerful winds seen in a generation.

The space agency's Aqua satellite passed over Super Typhoon Haiyan as the cyclone neared the Philippines recently. Aqua's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instrument, or MODIS, snapped a photo of Haiyan at 12:25 p.m. local Philippine time on Thursday (11:25 p.m. EDT on Wednesday).

The image shows the broad bands of thunderstorms surrounding Haiyan's eye, as well as the weather systems lashing the Philippines in the early morning hours of Thursday (EDT time), NASA officials said. [8 Terrible Typhoons]

Meanwhile, another Aqua instrument the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) gathered infrared data on the typhoon, measuring temperatures at Haiyan's cloud tops and at the surface of the sea.

"The infrared data revealed a sharply defined eye with multiple concentric rings of thunderstorms and a deep convective eyewall," NASA spokesman Rob Gutro of the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., wrote in a description of the Aqua observations.

"The infrared data showed cloud top temperatures as cold as 210 degrees kelvin/-81.67F/-63.15C/ in the thick band of thunderstorms around the center," Gutro added. "Those cold temperatures indicate very high, powerful thunderstorms with very heavy rain potential."

NASA / JPL, Ed Olsen

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NASA keeps an eye on ferocious Super Typhoon Haiyan from space

NASA tracks ferocious Super Typhoon Haiyan

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11 hours ago

NASA Goddard MODIS Rapid Response Team

This visible image of Super Typhoon Haiyan approaching the Philippines was taken from the MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite on Wednesday at 11:25 p.m. EDT.

A NASA satellite has been keeping an eye on Super Typhoon Haiyan as the monster storm pounds the Philippines with torrential rain and the most powerful winds seen in a generation.

The space agency's Aqua satellite passed over Super Typhoon Haiyan as the cyclone neared the Philippines recently. Aqua's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instrument, or MODIS, snapped a photo of Haiyan at 12:25 p.m. local Philippine time on Thursday (11:25 p.m. EDT on Wednesday).

The image shows the broad bands of thunderstorms surrounding Haiyan's eye, as well as the weather systems lashing the Philippines in the early morning hours of Thursday (EDT time), NASA officials said. [8 Terrible Typhoons]

Meanwhile, another Aqua instrument the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) gathered infrared data on the typhoon, measuring temperatures at Haiyan's cloud tops and at the surface of the sea.

"The infrared data revealed a sharply defined eye with multiple concentric rings of thunderstorms and a deep convective eyewall," NASA spokesman Rob Gutro of the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., wrote in a description of the Aqua observations.

"The infrared data showed cloud top temperatures as cold as 210 degrees kelvin/-81.67F/-63.15C/ in the thick band of thunderstorms around the center," Gutro added. "Those cold temperatures indicate very high, powerful thunderstorms with very heavy rain potential."

NASA / JPL, Ed Olsen

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NASA tracks ferocious Super Typhoon Haiyan

Nanotechnology Offers Potential to Predict Football Concussions

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American football is a collision sport. And one consequence of repeated collisions between players is concussions. Science is starting to draw a link between these so-called mild brain injuries and the long-term effects they have on the playersnamely the onset of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative condition believed to be caused by head trauma and linked to depression and dementia. Recently, the issue has come to a head with the deaths of several former star players and the broadcast of the Frontline report League of Denial, which chronicles scientists' long struggle to convince NFL officials to recognize a link between concussions and CTE.

While the NFL has tried to institute rules aimed at limiting the number of concussions that players suffer, the new regulations dont seem to have stemmed the tide of brain injuries. Each week, a slew of player concussions are reported.

Another avenue being pursued in the hopes of limiting player concussions is the engineering of better helmets to improve head protection. An IEEE Spectrum article published last year, Ratings for Football Helmets Help Improve Player SafetyBut Not Before Another Tragedy, reported on efforts to measure the effectiveness of different football helmets in reducing head trauma and categorize them based on their efficacy.

Now researchers at Brigham Young University have taken this measurement of helmet impact one step further with immediate, real-time measurements of each hit that a player endures. From those measurements, which are communicated immediately to a hand-held device, coaches know whether a collision is capable of inducing a concussion, even if the player denies any problem. A description of the technology is provided in the video below.

A coach will know within seconds exactly how hard their player just got hit, said Jake Merrell, a student at BYU who developed the technology, in a press release. Even if a player pops up and acts fine, the folks on the sidelines will have data showing that maybe he isnt OK.

The heart of the technology is smart foam enabled by nanoparticles, which Merrell has dubbed ExoNanoFoam. The nano-enabled foam behaves as a piezoelectric in which pressure on the material produces an electrical voltage. A microcontroller sensor in the helmet reads the electrical voltage produced by the foam, and sends a signal to a handheld tablet equipped with a program that interprets it and delivers real-time information on the seriousness of the hit sustained by the player.

Since the foam is actually in contact with the player's head, it provides a more accurate measurement of the forces upon the players head than the accelerometers that have been used previously to measure these impacts. The drawback with accelerometers is that they measure only of the acceleration or deceleration of the players helmet.

Merrell intends to submit his prototype to the upcoming Head Health Challenge, which aims to develop new technologies for measuring impacts in real-time in order to improve player safety.

Photo: Brigham Young University

IEEE Spectrums nanotechnology blog, featuring news and analysis about the development, applications, and future of science and technology at the nanoscale.

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Nanotechnology Offers Potential to Predict Football Concussions

Science Behind the Medicine and Medical Advances: What’s New in Transplantation? – Video

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Science Behind the Medicine and Medical Advances: What #39;s New in Transplantation?
We will explore the discoveries of Vanderbilt #39;s biomedical and engineering labs. Some of these discoveries we may see in our doctors #39; offices very soon. Expe...

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Science Behind the Medicine and Medical Advances: What's New in Transplantation? - Video

Officials ink deal to create medical school in Las Vegas

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By Paul Takahashi (contact)

Thursday, Nov. 7, 2013 | 7:35 p.m.

Nevadas university leaders have signed a partnership agreement to begin establishing a new M.D.-granting medical school in Southern Nevada.

The agreement, or memorandum of understanding, outlines a vision for UNLV and the University of Nevada School of Medicine at UNR to work together to create a four-year medical school at UNLV that would mint medical doctors.

The UNLV medical school would open under the University of Nevada medical schools accreditation, but will eventually become its own independently operated, separately accredited and financially-sustainable medical school.

Nevada System of Higher Education Chancellor Dan Klaich, UNR President Marc Johnson, University of Nevada School of Medicine Dean Tom Schwenk and UNLV President Neal Smatresk signed the agreement on Wednesday. Nevada regents are expected to vote on the agreement at their December board meeting.

"Increasing the medical education and health care options for Nevadans has always been a top priority for the Nevada System of Higher Education," Klaich said in a statement. "I'm proud of the collaboration between our two universities and their efforts to bring these long-discussed plans from the drawing board to reality."

Earlier this year, Nevadas higher education leaders led by Regent Mark Doubrava directed UNLV and UNR to begin developing plans for a UNLV medical school while continuing to develop the medical school at UNR. UNLVs faculty senate and graduate student government also supported plans for an on-campus medical school.

Currently, UNR operates the University of Nevada School of Medicine; students complete their core classes in Reno and can complete their clinical training in Reno and at University Medical Center in Las Vegas.

Proponents of a UNLV medical school have long argued that the current model for medical education in Nevada has not served Southern Nevada, by solving its shortage of physicians. Las Vegas is the largest metropolitan area in the United States without an allopathic medical school.

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Officials ink deal to create medical school in Las Vegas