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Smartphone apps may be the key to getting people out of their cars and onto mass transit. An interesting study of commuters in Boston and San Francisco found people are more willing to ride the bus or train when they have tools to manage their commutes effectiv
From PhysOrg.com - latest science and technology news stories:
Now Polish scientists say they have discovered a new method to produce entire layers of graphene, a move that should help to propel it out of the lab and into everyday life. Just one atom thick, the novel form of carbon is
On Monday, Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin signed into law a bill establishing tax credits on salaries of engineers hired by aerospace companies in the state. The legislation is designed to encourage aerospace companies in the state to hire employees (especially those educated in the state) by creating or moving jobs there.
Buried near the end of the article, though, is some news about the Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority, the state agency that runs the Oklahoma Spaceport, a former Air Force base in Burns Flat. Fallin is seeking to effectively eliminate OSIDA as an independent agency by cutting its roughly half-million-dollar budget and folding it into another state agency, such as the Department of Commerce or the Oklahoma Aeronautics Commission. “I’m actually working with our legislators and Department of Commerce on further continuing to market that facility,” she told the AP, “but yet also trying to figure out how we can have shared resources as it relates to the aerospace industry and especially (the Space Industry Development Authority).”
The spaceport was to be the home base for Rocketplane and its XP suborbital vehicle, but the company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation last year, effectively leaving the spaceport without a customer. (Armadillo Aerospace has used the site for some low-altitude test flights in the past, but is flying their higher altitude space missions from Spaceport America in New Mexico.) Ironically, the tax credits Rocketplane received for moving to Oklahoma several years ago (what the company often called “winning the O Prize”) became one of the reasons legislators cited when they created a moratorium on tax credits last year that was partially lifted by the new law.
Astronomers say they have never seen anything this bright, long-lasting and variable before. Usually, gamma-ray bursts mark the destruction of a massive star, but flaring emission from these events never lasts more than a few hours.
Although research is ongoing, astronomers say that the unusual blast likely arose when a star wandered too close to its galaxy's central black hole. Intense tidal forces tore the star apart, and the infalling gas continues to stream toward the hole. According to this model, the spinning black hole formed an outflowing jet along its rotational axis. A powerful blast of X- and gamma rays is seen if this jet is pointed in our direction.
On March 28, Swift's Burst Alert Telescope discovered the source in the constellation Draco when it erupted with the first in a series of powerful X-ray blasts. The satellite determined a position for the explosion, now cataloged as gamma-ray burst (GRB) 110328A, and informed astronomers worldwide.
As dozens of telescopes turned to study the spot, astronomers quickly noticed that a small, distant galaxy appeared very near the Swift position. A deep image taken by Hubble on April 4 pinpoints the source of the explosion at the center of this galaxy, which lies 3.8 billion light-years away.
That same day, astronomers used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to make a four-hour-long exposure of the puzzling source. The image, which locates the object 10 times more precisely than Swift can, shows that it lies at the center of the galaxy Hubble imaged.
"We know of objects in our own galaxy that can produce repeated bursts, but they are thousands to millions of times less powerful than the bursts we are seeing now. This is truly extraordinary," said Andrew Fruchter at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
"We have been eagerly awaiting the Hubble observation," said Neil Gehrels, the lead scientist for Swift at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "The fact that the explosion occurred in the center of a galaxy tells us it is most likely associated with a massive black hole. This solves a key question about the mysterious event."
Most galaxies, including our own, contain central black holes with millions of times the sun's mass; those in the largest galaxies can be a thousand times larger. The disrupted star probably succumbed to a black hole less massive than the Milky Way's, which has a mass four million times that of our sun
Astronomers previously have detected stars disrupted by supermassive black holes, but none have shown the X-ray brightness and variability seen in GRB 110328A. The source has repeatedly flared. Since April 3, for example, it has brightened by more than five times.
Scientists think that the X-rays may be coming from matter moving near the speed of light in a particle jet that forms as the star's gas falls toward the black hole.
"The best explanation at the moment is that we happen to be looking down the barrel of this jet," said Andrew Levan at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, who led the Chandra observations. "When we look straight down these jets, a brightness boost lets us view details we might otherwise miss."
This brightness increase, which is called relativistic beaming, occurs when matter moving close to the speed of light is viewed nearly head on.
Astronomers plan additional Hubble observations to see if the galaxy's core changes brightness.
NASA Goddard manages Swift, and Hubble, and NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages Chandra. The Hubble Space Telescope was built and is operated in partnership with the European Space Agency. Science operations for all three missions include contributions from many national and international partners.
For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/star-disintegration.html
Astronomers have discovered that two symmetrical jets shooting away from opposite sides of a blossoming star are experiencing a time delay: knots of gas and dust from one jet blast off four-and-a-half years later than identical knots from the other jet.
The finding, which required the infrared vision of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, is helping astronomers understand how jets are produced around forming stars, including those resembling our sun when it was young.
"More studies are needed to determine if other jets have time delays," said Alberto Noriega-Crespo of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who is a co-author of the new study to be published in the April 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. "Now we know that in at least one case, there appears to be a delay, which tells us that some sort of communication may be going on between the jets that takes time to occur."
Jets are an active phase in a young star's life. A star begins as a collapsing, roundish cloud of gas and dust. By ejecting supersonic jets of gas, the cloud slows down its spinning. As material falls onto the growing star, it develops a surrounding disk of swirling material and twin jets that shoot off from above and below the disk, like a spinning top.
Once the star ignites and shines with starlight, the jets will die off and the disk will thin out. Ultimately, planets may clump together out of material left in the spinning disk.
The discovery of the time delay, in the jets called Herbig-Haro 34, has also led the astronomers to narrow in on the size of the zone from which the jets originate. The new Spitzer observations limit this zone to a circle around the young star with a radius of 3 astronomical units. An astronomical unit is the distance between our sun and Earth. This is about 10 times smaller than previous estimates.
"Where we stand today on Earth was perhaps once a very violent place where high-velocity gas and dust were ejected from the disk circling around our very young sun," said Alex Raga of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the first author of the paper. "If so, the formation of planets like Earth depends on how and when this phenomenon ended. Essentially, every star like our own sun has gone through a similar cloud-disk-jets formation process."
One of the jets in Herbig-Haro 34 had been studied extensively for years, but the other remained hidden behind a dark cloud. Spitzer's sensitive infrared vision was able to pierce this cloud, revealing the obscured jet in greater detail than ever before. Spitzer images show that the newfound jet is perfectly symmetrical to its twin, with identical knots of ejected material.
This symmetry turned out to be key to the discovery of the jets' time delay. By measuring the exact distances from the knots to the star, the astronomy team was able to figure out that, for every knot of material punched out by one jet, a similar knot is shot out in the opposite direction 4.5 years later. This calculation also depended on the speed of the jets, which was known from previous studies by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Other symmetrical jets similar to Herbig-Haro 34 have been observed closely before, but it is not clear if they are also experiencing time delays.
The astronomers say that some kind of communication is going on between the Herbig-Haro 34 jets, likely carried by sound waves. Knowing the length of the time delay and the speed of sound allowed them to calculate the maximum size of the jet-making zone.
The astronomy team is currently analyzing other jets imaged by Spitzer, looking for more evidence of time delays.
The Spitzer observations were made before it used up its liquid coolant in May 2009 and began its warm mission.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.
For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/news/spitzer20110316.html
For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1912.html
With more than a few stamps on its passport, NASA's Aquarius instrument on the Argentinian Satélite de Aplicaciones Científicas (SAC)-D spacecraft will soon embark on its space mission to "taste" Earth's salty ocean.
After a journey of development and assembly through NASA facilities, a technology center in Bariloche, Argentina, and testing chambers in Brazil, the Aquarius instrument, set to measure the ocean's surface salinity, recently made the trip from São José dos Campos, Brazil, to California's Vandenberg Air Force Base for final integration and testing before its scheduled launch on June 9.
Aquarius will map the concentration of dissolved salt at the ocean's surface, information that scientists will use to study the ocean's role in the global water cycle and how this is linked to ocean currents and climate. Sea surface temperature has been monitored by satellites for decades, but it is both temperature and salinity that determine the density of the surface waters of the ocean. Aquarius will provide fundamentally new ocean surface salinity data to give scientists a better understanding of the density-driven circulation; how it is tied to changes in rainfall and evaporation, or the melting and freezing of ice; and its effect on climate variability.
"The ocean is essentially Earth's thermostat. It stores most of the heat, and what we need to understand is how do changes in salinity affect the 3-D circulation of the ocean," said Gene Feldman, Aquarius Ground System and Mission Operations Manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
The development of the Aquarius mission began more than 10 years ago as a joint effort between Goddard and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. In 2008, Goddard engineers completed the Aquarius microwave radiometer instrument, which is the key component for measuring salinity from space.
"The radiometer is the most accurate and stable radiometer built for sensing of Earth from space. It's a one-of-a-kind instrument," said Shannon Rodriguez-Sanabria, a microwave communications specialist at Goddard.
JPL built Aquarius' scatterometer instrument, a microwave radar sensor that scans the ocean's surface to measure the effect wind speed has on the radiometer measurements. The radiometer and scatterometer instruments, along with an 8.25-by-10-foot elliptical antenna reflector and many other systems, have been integrated together at JPL to form the complete Aquarius instrument. A number of other instruments aboard the SAC-D spacecraft are contributions from Argentina, France, Canada and Italy.
In June 2009, Aquarius was flown via a U.S. Air Force cargo jet to San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina, a destination known for its natural scenery of blue lakes and verdant mountains, to be integrated with Argentina's SAC-D spacecraft. A year later, the fully assembled spacecraft and all the instruments now referred to as the "Aquarius/SAC-D Observatory" were shipped to Brazil. There, engineers began a nine-month campaign of alignment, electro-magnetic, vibration, and thermal vacuum testing to ensure it will survive the rigors of launch and orbiting in space.
JPL will manage the Aquarius mission through Aquarius' commissioning phase, scheduled to last 45 days after launch. Goddard will then manage the Aquarius instrument operations during the mission. Argentina's Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE) will operate the spacecraft and download all of the data collected by Aquarius several times per day. Goddard is responsible for producing the Aquarius science data products. JPL will manage the data archive and distribution to scientists worldwide.
Aquarius will collect data continuously as it flies in a near-polar orbit and circles Earth 14 to 15 times each day. The field of view of the instrument is 390 kilometers (242 miles) wide, and will provide a global map every seven days. The data will be compiled to generate more accurate monthly averages during the mission, which is designed to last a minimum of three years.
For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/aquarius20110406.html
The PS-PVD rig at NASA's Glenn Research Center uses new technology to create super thin ceramic coatings, which are being developed to protect high efficiency engines. The coatings created in the PS-PVD rig are thinner and more complex than those previously available.
The PS-PVD rig uses a system of vacuum pumps and a blower to remove air from the chamber, reducing the pressure inside to fraction of normal atmospheric pressure. The plasma flame is extremely hot and reaches 10,000 degrees Celsius. Ceramic powder is introduced from the torch into the plasma flame. The plasma vaporizes the ceramic powder, which then condenses 5 feet away from the torch onto the component to form the ceramic coating.
Plasma--not a gas, liquid or solid--is the fourth state of matter and often behaves like a gas, except that it conducts electricity and is affected by magnetic fields. On an astronomical scale, plasma is common. The sun is composed of plasma, fire is plasma, fluorescent and neon lights contain plasma. NASA’s PS-PVD rig is one of only two such facilities in the country and one of four in the world.
For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1909.html
The Cult of Kurzweil: Will Robots Save Our Souls? Religion Dispatches ... with his reading machines and the next moment we hear Kurzweil promising that he will resurrect his father from the dead—or watch him swallow hundreds of vitamin supplements out of a hope that these will keep him alive until he can upload his mind ... |
We are perpetually consumed by this “double life” scenario between what we project our society to be, and the society we actually live in. Impregnation of fantasy expectations portrayed in movies and other art forms into reality is a much favored venture of the human species. Laws of acceleration and trends of minimalism have increased the inclining curve of technological progress and physio-dimensional proportions. Energy, computing power, and genetics have all been favored playing fields.
The technologies or their advancement is in itself not to be blamed since their evolution is a natural inevitability of human civilization. In fact, all of the previously mentioned technologies hold great promise in improving the human condition.
Answers and newer knowledge on genomics and proteomics would increase our knowledge about our origins, strengths, and susceptibilities. We will have improved specific medications for serious ailments. Synthetic biology would bring down delivery timelines for precision drug design and delivery systems at the nano-scale. Sentience generation in other species would enable their utilitarian exploitation. Research into mice longevity would indeed eventually contribute to human longevity. However, I think that too much hype is being placed in the wrong direction.
Why are we fascinated by these technological fantasies?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License
April 7, 1883 (Cortona) – February 26, 1966 (Paris)
BOOK PRESENTATION:
Matteo D’Ambrosio will present his work
Roman Jakobson e il Futurismo italiano (Liguori editore)
Thursday, April 7th, 2011
6pm
Associazione Culturale “Maksim Gor’kij” (già Italia-URSS)
Via Nardones 17, Napoli
Introduction by Luigi Marino (Associazione Culturale “Maksim Gor’kij”), with Prof. ssa Michaela Böhmig (Università degli Studi di Napoli “l’Orientale”); Prof. Alexandre Urussov (Università degli Studi di Napoli “l’Orientale”)
In collaboraion with:
Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici
Comitato di Napoli della Società Dante Alighieri
Liguori editore
When you think power generation in the early 1900s, coal and steam generally come to mind. But in Alexis Madrigal's upcoming book, Powering The Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology, he shows that people were trying to find environmentally friendly alternatives via ocean waves in the nascent days of household electricity. More »
The SlobStopper is a real product—MADE IN THE USA—forged from two layers of polyurethane laminate. What does it do? Why, it stops your slob! It ensures that toddlers, with their undeveloped motor skills and precarious feeding angles, don't corner the market on bib-wearing! It makes pretty girls look at you when you wear it because you're a guy who knows he's going to dribble his Slurpee all down his frontside yet is frugal enough to minimize dry cleaning charges! It is horrible, it is wonderful, it is America. And it puts your Snuggie to shame. [SlobStopper via Geekologie] More »
How do you improve on the month's best diapered baby twins jibber jabber video? Make that same video... with overweight men. Specifically, Commish Michael Chiklis and funnyman Patton Oswalt, who gibberish with the best of 'em. More »
There are a ton of solar backpacks on the market and they're not very attractive, so it's nice that a mainstream designer label like fashion juggernaut Ralph Lauren has come out with a stylish version of their own. More »
So the graphic realism isn't quite Black Ops, but this military sim will actually influence real-world naval operations in the future. More »
You will never find me watching a silent movie, nosiree, I'm a talkie man. But Silent Film Director, a $1 iOS app, has shown me that a scratchy old sped-up silent movie is pretty fun when you're the star! (That's me, doing my best silent movie-era acting, up above). The app lets you choose what style of old school movie you want to make ('20s silent movie, '60s home video or '70s home video, or a few others), slap on some stock piano music or a tune from your library, and set how fast you want your action comically sped up. And if you really want to get into it (I won't judge!), you can buy the pro pack for $1 as an in-app purchase, allowing you to add title cards and transitions. Fun! Until the Great Depression hits. [iTunes] More »
Complaints arose today that the mobile broadband on Verizon iPads wasn't working. Apple confirmed that rumor, stating "a small number of iPad 2 customers have experienced connectivity issues with the Verizon 3G network" and that they're "investigating it." [AllThingsD] More »
Paris! The City of Light, the City of Love, the city of...expensive airfare. But with this new app from Fotopedia, you won't have to spend a cent to immerse yourself in Parisian culture. More »
