NASA Funded Astronomer Wins Nobel Prize

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3 U.S.-born scientists win physics Nobel for revealing universe's expansion is getting faster, Washington Post

"Three U.S.-born scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for overturning a fundamental assumption in their field by showing that the expansion of the universe is constantly accelerating. ... Riess, 41, is an astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland."

Keith's note: Nothing from NASA PAO. NASA funds the Space Telescope Science Institute. All three have used Hubble and other NASA resources.

New Astronauts Sought

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NASA To Seek Applicants For Next Astronaut Candidate Class

"In early November, NASA will seek applicants for its next class of astronaut candidates who will support long-duration missions to the International Space Station and future deep space exploration activities. After applicant interviews and evaluations, NASA expects to announce the final selections in 2013, and training to begin that August."

NRC Report on NASA's Astronaut Corps Released, earlier post

Pilot Paint Program a Success?

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Oregon's PaintCare Pilot program, started in July of 2010, has reported that its first year was a resounding success. The program established 95 collection sites that took in approximately 469,665 gallons of paint: the latex paint is recycled into new paint while the alkyd products are sent for fuel

Is Fracking Worth the Risk?

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Fracking is causing a split in more than just rocks. The controversial technology —which uses a mixture of water, sand, and chemicals to fracture rock and release shale gas — could serve as a major new source of energy. However, environmentalists are concerned about the damage it could d

Digitalization Dilligence

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Software and the hardware it runs on is everywhere in healthcare, from EHRs, to digital thermometers to the latest imaging and stereotactic radiation systems. Are the right controls, protocols, and quality control standards in place to ensure patient safety and critical system availability? Are ther

Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011

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From Wired Top Stories:

Steven Paul Jobs, 56, died earlier today at his home with his family. The co-founder and, until last August, the CEO of Apple, Inc., was the most celebrated person in technology and business on the planet.

Read the whole article

NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers a World Orbiting Two Stars

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The existence of a world with a double sunset, as portrayed in the film Star Wars more than 30 years ago, is now scientific fact. NASA's Kepler mission has made the first unambiguous detection of a circumbinary planet -- a planet orbiting two stars -- 200 light-years from Earth.
Unlike Star Wars’ Tatooine, the planet is cold, gaseous and not thought to harbor life, but its discovery demonstrates the diversity of planets in our galaxy. Previous research has hinted at the existence of circumbinary planets, but clear confirmation proved elusive. Kepler detected such a planet, known as Kepler-16b, by observing transits, where the brightness of a parent star dims from the planet crossing in front of it.
"This discovery confirms a new class of planetary systems that could harbor life," Kepler principal investigator William Borucki said. "Given that most stars in our galaxy are part of a binary system, this means the opportunities for life are much broader than if planets form only around single stars. This milestone discovery confirms a theory that scientists have had for decades but could not prove until now."
A research team led by Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., used data from the Kepler space telescope, which measures dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, to search for transiting planets. Kepler is the first NASA mission capable of finding Earth-size planets in or near the "habitable zone," the region in a planetary system where liquid water can exist on the surface of the orbiting planet.
Scientists detected the new planet in the Kepler-16 system, a pair of orbiting stars that eclipse each other from our vantage point on Earth. When the smaller star partially blocks the larger star, a primary eclipse occurs, and a secondary eclipse occurs when the smaller star is occulted, or completely blocked, by the larger star.
Astronomers further observed that the brightness of the system dipped even when the stars were not eclipsing one another, hinting at a third body. The additional dimming in brightness events, called the tertiary and quaternary eclipses, reappeared at irregular intervals of time, indicating the stars were in different positions in their orbit each time the third body passed. This showed the third body was circling, not just one, but both stars, in a wide circumbinary orbit.
The gravitational tug on the stars, measured by changes in their eclipse times, was a good indicator of the mass of the third body. Only a very slight gravitational pull was detected, one that only could be caused by a small mass. The findings are described in a new study published Friday, Sept. 16, in the journal Science.
"Most of what we know about the sizes of stars comes from such eclipsing binary systems, and most of what we know about the size of planets comes from transits," said Doyle, who also is the lead author and a Kepler participating scientist. "Kepler-16 combines the best of both worlds, with stellar eclipses and planetary transits in one system."
This discovery confirms that Kepler-16b is an inhospitable, cold world about the size of Saturn and thought to be made up of about half rock and half gas. The parent stars are smaller than our sun. One is 69 percent the mass of the sun and the other only 20 percent. Kepler-16b orbits around both stars every 229 days, similar to Venus’ 225-day orbit, but lies outside the system’s habitable zone, where liquid water could exist on the surface, because the stars are cooler than our sun.
"Working in film, we often are tasked with creating something never before seen," said visual effects supervisor John Knoll of Industrial Light & Magic, a division of Lucasfilm Ltd., in San Francisco. "However, more often than not, scientific discoveries prove to be more spectacular than anything we dare imagine. There is no doubt these discoveries influence and inspire storytellers. Their very existence serves as cause to dream bigger and open our minds to new possibilities beyond what we think we 'know.'"

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/multimedia/images/Kepler-16_transit-art.html

Houston Home Insulations- A Solution to Beat the Houston Heat

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The sun shining bright at the beaches can be enjoyed having a glass of lemonade, relaxing ourselves in the sun tanning our skin. The same relentless heat cannot be enjoyed when you are at home as it’s going to cause you a lot of frustration as you just feel so tiring and the heat only adds to your frustration. You will prefer to set the air conditioner to the lowest temperature possible in order to escape the heat, but once you step out of the room you feel your home is like a furnace.
One useful solution i.e. possible is to plant a lot of trees, but that’s not going to happen as whether we plant trees or not, we are cutting them to build our homes. So instead of thinking in the way of nature we have to think in the way of manmade technology. The technical solution to protect our homes from heat can be insulation.
Houston is one of the cities in the United States where one must brave the heat during summers; it can get as hot as 84.5 °F. So in order to make one’s home cozy one needs to consider insulation as an option and at a place like Houston it’s absolutely necessary.
If you are living at Houston and would like to do home insulation, you must consider the options of home insulation available. Attic insulation is considered a basic and effective type of insulation which can make your home feel comfortable and also save energy. Radiant barrier foil can be considered as an option too as it effectively blocks the sunlight away from the attic and an effective way of reducing the energy bills. Spray foam insulation is one method that is been getting popular in recent times.
Based on the design and construction of your home, you need to decide upon an insulation method. Before that you need to follow some basic guidelines like using a thermal detector to find the leaky spots. You might think that having a lot of leaky spots will be of help as a lot of air escapes and you can feel cool but the fact is if you are using your air conditioner to beat the Houston heat, you will never get your home cooled with so many leaky spots. In addition to this, you will find that your energy bill too increases.
Also there are other little details like checking the spots where your piping line enters, internet cable, other connections and also the switch boards. These places would constitute a considerable number of heat losses and having foam insulation done on these places will be a good option. Think about having window curtains which you just close at night to stop the cold air and open in the morning to get the warm breeze.
Insulation is only a part of making the home a cozy place, it is an effective way to beat the heat, but after insulation think of changing the setup of your house to make it feel more cool and comfortable.

Expedition 28 Crew Lands Safely

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Expedition 28 Commander Andrey Borisenko and Flight Engineers Alexander Samokutyaev and Ron Garan landed their Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft in Kazakhstan a few seconds before midnight EDT Friday, with an official landing time of 11:59:39 p.m. Thursday. Russian recovery teams were on hand to help the crew exit the Soyuz vehicle and adjust to gravity after 164 days in space.
The trio launched aboard the Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in April and spent 162 days living and working aboard the International Space Station.
Samokutyaev was at the controls of the spacecraft as it undocked at 8:38 p.m. Thursday from the Poisk docking port on the station's Zvezda service module.
The undocking marked the end of Expedition 28 and the start of Expedition 29 under the command of NASA astronaut Mike Fossum, who is scheduled to remain on the station with Flight Engineers Sergei Volkov and Satoshi Furukawa until November. Borisenko ceremonially handed command of the station over to Fossum on Wednesday. Fossum, Volkov and Furukawa arrived at the station aboard the Soyuz TMA-02M spacecraft in June.
NASA and its international partners have agreed to a tentative launch schedule with crew flights to the International Space Station resuming on Nov. 14. The Space Station Control Board, with representation from all partner agencies, set the schedule after hearing the Russian Federal Space Agency’s findings on the Aug. 24 loss of the Progress 44 cargo craft. The dates may be adjusted to reflect minor changes in vehicle processing timelines.
According to the current plan, the Soyuz 28 spacecraft, carrying NASA's Dan Burbank and Russia's Anatoly Ivanishin and Anton Shkaplerov, will launch Nov. 14 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and arrive at the station on Nov. 16.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition28/exp28_lands.html

Herschel Mission Finds Galactic Growth Slow and Steady

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The Herschel infrared space observatory has discovered that galaxies do not always need to collide with each other to drive vigorous star birth. The finding overturns a long-held assumption and paints a more stately picture of how galaxies evolve.
Herschel is a European Space Agency mission with important contributions from NASA and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
"Galaxy mergers play an important role in producing the most powerful starbursts today," said Lee Armus, a co-author of the new study from NASA's Herschel Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "But in the early universe, when most galaxies contained a lot more gas, mergers were not the only way, or even the most common way, to make lots of stars at a rapid rate."
The new results are based on Herschel's observations of two patches of sky, each about one-third the size of the full moon.
It's like looking through a keyhole across the universe. Herschel has seen more than a thousand galaxies at a variety of distances from Earth, spanning 80 percent of the age of the cosmos.
These observations are unique because Herschel can obtain data at a wide range of infrared light and reveal a more complete picture of star birth than ever seen before.
The results appear in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Read more at http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Herschel/SEM2Y40UDSG_0.html .
Herschel is a European Space Agency cornerstone mission, with science instruments provided by consortia of European institutes and with important participation by NASA. NASA's Herschel Project Office is based at JPL. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for two of Herschel's three science instruments. The NASA Herschel Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech, supports the United States astronomical community. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/herschel/news/herschel20110913.html

Why Occupy Wall Street ain’t no Arab Spring…and other musings

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Like many people these days I've been thinking about the Occupy Wall Street movement. My mind's been spinning as I try to figure out what it's all about and what the movement might actually be capable of achieving. My thinking in these early days is equal parts hopefulness to outright cynicism. As I mentioned in a tweet earlier today, corporatism survived 60 years of communist onslaught; it should have no problem weathering this storm.

Or perhaps I'm overstating the whole thing. Maybe it's just about applying fixes to a system that's gone a bit haywire. And if that's the case, then great. I wish the protesters the best of luck.

But part of my concern is that, aside from some mild reforms that may come out of all this, the overriding and highly globalized capitalist system isn't going anywhere anytime soon. It's pretty entrenched and not easily rocked. The 99% are going to have to get comfortable with being a part of the disenfranchised majority for some time to come. This isn't like the situation in the Middle East; there's not going to be an Arab Spring on this side of the ocean any time soon.

Indeed, while there's no question that Occupy Wall Street was inspired by the Arab Spring, there's significant discrepancy in the underlying causes of these two social movements.

The situation in the West stands in stark contrast to recent events in the Middle East in which a number of countries were simply working to overthrow authoritarian regimes and get to democracy in the first place. The Middle East is currently struggling through puberty. It's a part of the world that's still coming to grips with modernity and socio-economic globalization. Religious fundamentalism threatens at every corner while Western influences complicate things by working to further their own interests in a region rich with oil.

And that's another aspect that differs from Occupy Wall Street. New York City protesters are railing against the very forces who helped the Arab Spring along. The success of the Arab Spring was and continues to be driven by the support of NATO and other Western benefactors. The West is diligently working to secure the region and prevent the onset of fundamentalist regimes—and to ensure easy access to oil. All the while claiming that it's working to instil democracy. It's no co-incidence that NATO suddenly cared about the situation in Libya while other oil-poor regions of Africa and the Middle East continued to burn. The whole charade is unabashedly obvious.

Without question, AdBusters—the Canadian activist group that kick-started Occupy Wall Street—took inspiration from the events in the Middle East, particularly the Tahir Square protests in Cairo. In copycat manner, AdBusters organized a peaceful occupation of Wall Street to protest the current U.S. political leadership and its failure to prevent or address the global financial crisis. The movement's auspices have expanded significantly from that starting point and now includes such things as taxing the rich, raising taxes on corporations, ending corporate welfare and personhood status, support for trade unionism, and protecting Medicare and Social Security. Occupy Wall Street, because of its decentralized nature, has become a Rorschach test for lefties who are busily projecting their own hopes and demands onto the movement.

At the most basic level, Occupy Wall Street is a reaction to a whole host of socio-economic problems and the glaringly obvious corruption and indifference of both Wall Street traders and the politicians who back them. At a more conceptual level, however, Occupy Wall Street is a necessary manifestation that has been brought about by two fundamental short-comings of the political system in the United States.

First, the U.S. has no bona fide left wing political presence. It's a country in which the word socialism is routinely spat out as a pejorative. Contrast that with the political situation in Canada in which the country's official opposition, the New Democratic Party, is overtly socialist. And that's not to mention the political climate in Europe and elsewhere in which left wing parties carry much more clout in the political spectrum. Now, I'm not suggesting that left wing parties are the answer to America's woes; but what I am suggesting is that Americans have no political outlet to express their left-of-center demands and desires. As a result, lefties (and even some libertarians and anarchists) have had no choice but to rally around this protest movement in a sheer act of catharsis.

Second, and very much related to the first, the United States is a two party corporatocracy in which the Democrats and Republicans merely trade-off every four years or so. Democracy in the truest sense only exists in the U.S. at a very micro or local scale, while the overarching political structure (or superstructure to borrow a Marxist term), essentially works to serve and further corporate interests. The alienating effect of this two-party teeter-totter has reached a kind of boiling point, particularly now as America is mired in a seemingly endless recession and as Americans have been inspired by social protest movements overseas.

At the same time, Occupy Wall Street can also been as a mirror of the Tea Party Movement—another political spasm that's emerged on account of the rigid two party system. The left and right are clearly polarizing in the United States. The only question is whether or not they can pull the Democrats and Republicans along with them. It doesn't appear that this will be the case.

It's difficult to predict what consequences, if any, these two movements will have on the political makeup of the U.S. and whether or not they'll be able to see their demands come to fruition.

Definitely interesting times.


Singularity Summit 2011: New York (October 15-16)

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The Singularity Summit 2011 will be held in New York from October 15-16 at the historic 92nd Street Y:

Speakers include futurist Ray Kurzweil, visionary scientist Stephen Wolfram, IBM manager Dan Cerutti, longevity expert Sonia Arrison, author David Brin, neuroscientist Christof Koch, PayPal founder Peter Thiel, MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark, AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, MIT polymath Alexander Wissner-Gross, DARPA challenge winner Riley Crane, Skype founder Jaan Tallinn, Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings, economist Tyler Cowen, television personalities Jason Silva and Casey Pieretti, and robotics professors James McLurnkin and Robin Murphy.

In his influential 1993 article The Coming Technological Singularity, Vernor Vinge discussed the possibility that future technology could feed on itself, causing an "exponential runaway" in technological progress: "Developments that before were thought might only happen in 'a million years' (if ever) will likely happen in the next century." In his 2005 book, The Singularity is Near, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil used current exponential trends in technology to predict the arrival of this Singularity in the next few decades. The Singularity Summit was founded as an academic forum for discussing the "big picture" questions in industry, economics, and ethics raised by the prospect of such a profound event.

Be sure to register for the event.


Quantified self + Paleo

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Quantified self guru Seth Roberts recently attended the Ancestral Health Symposium. His take-away: The QS and Paleo health communities need each other. He basically argues that Paleo is not persuasive enough and that it desperately requires more data and experimentation to prove efficacy. At the same time, however, Roberts is excited by the prospect and makes the claim that Paleo "could change the world." He says,

The Paleo people are really pretty brainy. I mean, they don't particularly talk that way or show it off, but from a lot of the talks that I heard, I understood that there was a lot of smart thinking going on, and a lot of scholarship, and a lot of critical thinking where they don't just accept something because somebody says it.

Check out Roberts's talk at the Quantified Self Silicon Valley meetup at Stanford’s Calming Technologies lab.


Seth Roberts: QS + Paleo.