From DVICE:
The 2012 Ford Mustang Boss 302 promises to be an amazing muscle car bargain, but Ford now says that the car can be made even faster, but only if you fork over some extra cash to buy this special red TracKey.
Read the whole article
Hybrid Batteries for Gadgets Last Twice as Long and Charge in Seconds
From DVICE:
A company called Ioxus has announced the first generation of an ultracapacitor-equipped battery that sounds absolutely game-changing: it's billed as lasting twice as long as your average ultracapacitor, and it charges in mere seconds. There's a catch, though — and
'Biotherapy' Treats With Parasites Instead of Pills
From Discovery News - Top Stories:
Next time you feel sick to your stomach or suffer from severe hay fever, relief may be come from swallowing a worm instead of reaching for the medicine cabinet. Practitioners of "biotherapy" -- or the use of living animals to treat human ailmen
Is This the First Step Toward a Flying Car?
From CNN.com - Technology:
Along with the jetpack, the flying car tops the list of classic science-fiction imaginings that lead legions of fans to ask -- why don't we have this yet? Now researchers, with some cash from the U.S. military, might be taking a step toward making thes
Aerojet Joins the Commercial Spaceflight Federation
Washington, D.C. – The Commercial Spaceflight Federation is pleased to announce that Aerojet has joined the Federation. With over 3,000 employees nationwide including locations in California, Arkansas, Washington State, Virginia, New Mexico, Utah and Tennessee, the company is a leading provider of aerospace propulsion systems.
Julie Van Kleeck, Aerojet’s Vice President for Space Programs, stated, “Aerojet welcomes the opportunity to join the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. Joining CSF will enable Aerojet to work better with industry to serve NASA’s exploration programs and the expanding commercial space market.”
Van Kleeck continued, “Aerojet propulsion systems have flown on every U.S. human spaceflight mission. We are actively engaged in developing propulsion to power the next generation of human spaceflight systems – both launch vehicles and spacecraft. We’re proud of our work on Orion, EELV and a number of new commercial systems such as Taurus II and Sundancer. We are building on Aerojet’s proven capabilities in rocket engine and spacecraft propulsion development, human-rating, propulsion system verification, and operations to power the next generation of U.S. human space flight capabilities.”
Van Kleeck added, “Aerojet believes that affordability and innovation are key to the future of human space flight – and competition is fundamental to both. Aerojet’s membership in CSF will provide new opportunities to support NASA’s efforts to use safe, affordable and innovative commercial systems to transport crew to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) while NASA also continues to reach beyond LEO. We believe that NASA’s plans for new investments in propulsion systems are vital to spurring innovation, driving down cost and fostering both LEO access and human exploration beyond LEO.”
John Schumacher, Aerojet’s Vice President for Washington Operations, added, “Aerojet is at work to field new technologies for both launch and in-space propulsion that foster a new era of affordable, sustainable missions. CSF membership offers unique opportunities to work with other member companies to advance these efforts.”
Mark Sirangelo, Chairman of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, commented, “On behalf of the member companies of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, we are proud to welcome Aerojet. Their expertise in propulsion technology is widely known and it’s a privilege to have them join the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.”
Bretton Alexander, President of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, added, “It is great to see the aerospace industry continue to unite behind a common goal of expanding our nation’s commercial space economy. Creating thousands of new high-tech jobs, enhancing our nation’s access to space, and exciting a new generation of young people to embark on science and technology careers are some of the benefits this growing industry aims to realize. The Federation is pleased to welcome the entire Aerojet team.”
About the Commercial Spaceflight Federation
The mission of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF) is to promote the development of commercial human spaceflight, pursue ever-higher levels of safety, and share best practices and expertise throughout the industry. The Commercial Spaceflight Federation’s member companies, which include commercial spaceflight developers, operators, spaceports, suppliers, and service providers, are creating thousands of high-tech jobs nationwide, working to preserve American leadership in aerospace through technology innovation, and inspiring young people to pursue careers in science and engineering. For more information please visit http://www.commercialspaceflight.org or contact Executive Director John Gedmark at john@commercialspaceflight.org or at 202-349-1121.
About Aerojet
Aerojet, a GenCorp Inc. (NYSE: GY) company, is a major space and defense contractor specializing in missile and space propulsion, and defense and armaments. Since the company was founded in 1942, it has led the way in the development of crucial technology and products that have kept America strong and furthered human exploration of space. For more information on Aerojet, please visit http://www.aerojet.com.
Deficit Commission Errs, “Illustrative Cut” Would Outsource Human Spaceflight to Russia
Washington, D.C. – The Commercial Spaceflight Federation, representing 37 companies employing thousands of Americans nationwide, released a statement opposing in the strongest possible terms the “illustrative cut” to commercial spaceflight put forth today by the co-chairs of the Deficit Commission.
“This proposed cut would have disastrous consequences for NASA and the Nation. Commercial Crew now represents the primary means of transporting U.S. astronauts to orbit following retirement of the Space Shuttle. Commercial Crew will in fact result in substantial cost savings to the U.S. taxpayer. Eliminating Commercial Crew would result in total reliance on Russia to get to the Space Station and result in the loss of thousands of high-tech jobs here in the United States,” stated Bretton Alexander, President of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.
Alexander added, “The bottom line is that elimination of NASA’s Commercial Crew program will cede human spaceflight to Russia. Commercial Crew is the fastest way to reduce the gap following Shuttle retirement, minimizing the time we are dependent on buying seats from the Russians. Some commercial providers have publicly committed to significant cost savings on a per-seat basis as compared to the Russian alternative.
“Moreover, the Deficit Commission also appears to misunderstand the very nature of the Commercial Crew Program. Rather than being ‘a subsidy to the private sector,’ the Commercial Crew program is fulfilling an essential national need by developing the next U.S. spacecraft to take astronauts to the Space Station, while stimulating markets beyond government as well. It is, in fact, a win-win for the American taxpayer.
“Last year, an independent blue-ribbon commission headed by Norm Augustine recommended to President Obama that NASA partner with the private sector on the development of its next manned spacecraft. Since then, groups including 25 former NASA astronauts and 14 Nobel laureates have all endorsed the Commercial Crew Program. The deficit commission couldn’t have gotten this more wrong – this is a program NASA cannot afford to do without,” Alexander concluded.
About the Commercial Spaceflight Federation
The mission of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF) is to promote the development of commercial human spaceflight, pursue ever-higher levels of safety, and share best practices and expertise throughout the industry. The Commercial Spaceflight Federation’s member companies, which include commercial spaceflight developers, operators, spaceports, suppliers, and service providers, are creating thousands of high-tech jobs nationwide, working to preserve American leadership in aerospace through technology innovation, and inspiring young people to pursue careers in science and engineering. For more information please visit http://www.commercialspaceflight.org or contact Executive Director John Gedmark at john@commercialspaceflight.org or at 202-349-1121.
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Commercial Crew Development Round 1 Companies Have Reached Substantial Hardware Milestones In Only 9 Months, New Images & Data Show
Washington, D.C. – Showcasing the potential of commercial crew transportation and commercial fixed-price agreements, five company teams selected by NASA in February 2010 under the $50 million Commercial Crew Development Round One program have built significant working hardware in just nine months, new images and data show.
Please click here to download a high-resolution press release [pdf, 10 MB] for information on the progress of the five teams participating in Commercial Crew Development Round One: Sierra Nevada Corporation, Paragon Space Development Corporation, United Launch Alliance, Blue Origin, and Boeing.
About the Commercial Spaceflight Federation
The mission of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF) is to promote the development of commercial human spaceflight, pursue ever-higher levels of safety, and share best practices and expertise throughout the industry. The Commercial Spaceflight Federation’s member companies, which include commercial spaceflight developers, operators, spaceports, suppliers, and service providers, are creating thousands of high-tech jobs nationwide, working to preserve American leadership in aerospace through technology innovation, and inspiring young people to pursue careers in science and engineering. For more information please visit http://www.commercialspaceflight.org or contact Executive Director John Gedmark at john@commercialspaceflight.org or at 202.349.1121.
Image credit: NASA. Please note this is not a NASA press release.
A blast from the past: Rotary Rocket video
Robin Snelson recently posted on Ustream a video press release from the legendary Rocket Rocket Company, an entrepreneurial RLV developer from the late 1990s:
The 15-minute video from 1998 starts with an animation of the unique flight profile of the company’s Roton SSTO RLV: launch vertically into orbit, deploy its payload, then land vertically using helicopter-like rotors. It then follows with interviews with a number of company officials, many of whom read like a who’s who of NewSpace today: in addition to Rotary founders Gary Hudson and Bevin McKinney, there are cameos by Jeff Greason and Dan DeLong, who went on to found XCOR Aerospace; Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites; and Brian Binnie, a test pilot for Rotary who later flew SpaceShipOne for Scaled.
The video apparently predates the 1999 rollout of the Roton Atmospheric Test Vehicle (ATV) at Mojave Airport. The ATV made a few low-level flight tests using its rotors (powered by tip thrusters), but the company’s financial problems prevented additional test flights as well as the development of additional prototypes. The ATV was destined to go to a helicopter museum near San Diego, but an attempt to airlift the ATV by a Chinook failed. Instead, the ATV is now installed in a small park by the Mojave Air and Space Port headquarters:
SpaceX raises another round
SpaceX has raised another round of financing, to the tune of $50 million, according to an SEC filing by the company on Tuesday. A company spokesman told Business Insider that the additional funding came from existing investors, which would include the Founders Fund and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. However, there appears to be a new (or at least significantly increased) investor in the company: Valor Equity Partners. Valor CEO Antonio Gracias is now listed as a director of SpaceX (he was not listed in SpaceX’s previous SEC filing in March 2009) and SpaceX is now listed in Valor’s online portfolio. (Valor is also an investor in another Elon Musk company, Tesla Motors.)
Flybys: commercial space conference, TSC factory groundbreaking, SpaceX rescheduling
Special Aerospace Services, a Colorado aerospace company, announced Monday they would host the first Commercial Human Spaceflight Technical Forum in Boulder this coming January. The one-and-a-half-day conference is designed to give attendees “insight to techniques that will be required to successfully achieve NASA human rating certification and FAA commercial spaceflight licensing”, according to the conference web site. Featured speakers include former shuttle program manager Wayne Hale and former astronaut Jeffrey Ashby.
Groundbreaking is scheduled for Tuesday in Mojave for a new production facility for WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo. The 68,000-square-foot (6,300-square-meter) factory for The Spaceship Company (a joint venture of Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites) is slated for completion in September 2011. The formal name of the facility, according to a Tehachapi News article, is the Final Assembly, Integration and Test Hangar, which, yes, has the acronym FAITH.
SpaceX has rescheduled its next Falcon 9 launch for no earlier than December 7, citing both delays of other launches at Cape Canaveral as well as a desire to run more tests. The launch will be the first of three planned test flights of the Dragon spacecraft under its COTS agreement with NASA. The delay will also give SpaceX additional time to secure a first-ever reentry license for the Dragon from the FAA.
Some people dream their whole lives about flying in space. For Marc and Sharon Hagle, they sort of stumbled across the opportunity, the Orlando Sentinel reports. The two were taking a Zero-G flight along with, as it turned out, a number of Virgin Galactic sales agents, and as the article notes, “It didn’t take much to sell the Hagles on the chance for some real space travel.”
Saturn Then and Now: 30 Years Since Voyager Visit
Ed Stone, project scientist for NASA's Voyager mission, remembers the first time he saw the kinks in one of Saturn's narrowest rings. It was the day the Voyager 1 spacecraft made its closest approach to the giant ringed planet, 30 years ago. Scientists were gathering in front of television monitors and in one another's offices every day during this heady period to pore over the bewildering images and other data streaming down to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Stone drew a crude sketch of this scalloped, multi-stranded ring, known as the F ring, in his notebook, but with no explanation next to it. The innumerable particles comprising the broad rings are in near-circular orbits about Saturn. So, it was a surprise to find that the F ring, discovered just a year before by NASA's Pioneer 11 spacecraft, had clumps and wayward kinks. What could have created such a pattern?
"It was clear Voyager was showing us something different at Saturn," said Stone, now based at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "Over and over, the spacecraft revealed so many unexpected things that it often took days, months and even years to figure them out."
The F ring curiosity was only one of many strange phenomena discovered in the Voyager close encounters with Saturn, which occurred on Nov. 12, 1980, for Voyager 1, and Aug. 25, 1981, for Voyager 2. The Voyager encounters were responsible for finding six small moons and revealing the half-young, half-old terrain of Enceladus that had to point to some kind of geological activity.
Images from the two encounters also exposed individual storms roiling the planet's atmosphere, which did not show up at all in data from Earth-based telescopes. Scientists used Voyager data to resolve a debate about whether Titan had a thick or thin atmosphere, finding that Titan was shrouded in a thick haze of hydrocarbons in a nitrogen-rich atmosphere. The finding led scientists to predict there could be seas of liquid methane and ethane on Titan's surface.
"When I look back, I realize how little we actually knew about the solar system before Voyager," Stone added. "We discovered things we didn't know were there to be discovered, time after time."
In fact, the Voyager encounters sparked so many new questions that another spacecraft, NASA's Cassini, was sent to probe those mysteries. While Voyager 1 got to within about 126,000 kilometers (78,300 miles) above Saturn's cloud tops, and Voyager 2 approached as close as about 100,800 kilometers (62,600 miles), Cassini has dipped to this altitude and somewhat lower in its orbits around Saturn since 2004.
Because of Cassini's extended journey around Saturn, scientists have found explanations for many of the mysteries first seen by Voyager. Cassini has uncovered a mechanism to explain the new terrain on Enceladus – tiger stripe fissures with jets of water vapor and organic particles. It revealed that Titan indeed does have stable lakes of liquid hydrocarbons on its surface and showed just how similar to Earth that moon really is. Data from Cassini have also resolved how two small moons discovered by Voyager – Prometheus and Pandora – tug on the F ring to create its kinked shape and wakes that form snowballs.
"Cassini is indebted to Voyager for its many fascinating discoveries and for paving the way for Cassini," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at JPL, who started her career working on Voyager from 1977 to 1989. "On Cassini, we still compare our data to Voyager's and proudly build on Voyager's heritage."
But Voyager left a few mysteries that Cassini has not yet solved. For instance, scientists first spotted a hexagonal weather pattern when they stitched together Voyager images of Saturn's north pole. Cassini has obtained higher-resolution pictures of the hexagon – which tells scientists it's a remarkably stable wave in one of the jet streams that remains 30 years later – but scientists are still not sure what forces maintain the hexagon.
Even more perplexing are the somewhat wedge-shaped, transient clouds of tiny particles that Voyager discovered orbiting in Saturn's B ring. Scientists dubbed them "spokes" because they looked like bicycle spokes. Cassini scientists have been searching for them since the spacecraft first arrived. As Saturn approached equinox, and the sun's light hit the rings edge-on, the spokes did reappear in the outer part of Saturn's B ring. But Cassini scientists are still testing their theories of what might be causing these odd features.
"The fact that we still have mysteries today goes to show how much we still have to learn about our solar system," said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager's project manager, based at JPL. "Today, the Voyager spacecraft continue as pioneers traveling toward the edge of our solar system. We can't wait for the Voyager spacecraft to enter interstellar space – true outer space – and make more unexpected discoveries."
Voyager 1, which was launched on Sept. 5, 1977, is currently about 17 billion kilometers (11 billion miles) away from the sun. It is the most distant spacecraft. Voyager 2, which was launched on Aug. 20, 1977, is currently about 14 billion kilometers (9 billion miles) away from the sun.
The Voyagers were built by JPL, which continues to operate both spacecraft. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages Cassini for NASA. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL.
For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/voyager20101111.html
Cassini’s CIRS Reveals Saturn Is on a Cosmic Dimmer Switch
Like a cosmic light bulb on a dimmer switch, Saturn emitted gradually less energy each year from 2005 to 2009, according to observations by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. But unlike an ordinary bulb, Saturn's southern hemisphere consistently emitted more energy than its northern one. On top of that, energy levels changed with the seasons and differed from the last time a spacecraft visited in the early 1980s. These never-before-seen trends came from an analysis of comprehensive data from the Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS), an instrument built by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., as well as a comparison with earlier data from NASA's Voyager spacecraft. When combined with information about the energy coming to Saturn from the sun, the results could help scientists understand the nature of Saturn's internal heat source.
The findings were reported November 9 in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets by Liming Li of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. (now at the University of Houston), and colleagues from several institutions, including Goddard and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena Calif., which manages the Cassini mission. "The Cassini CIRS data are very valuable because they give us a nearly complete picture of Saturn," says Li. "This is the only single data set that provides so much information about this planet, and it's the first time that anybody has been able to study the power emitted by one of the giant planets in such detail."
The planets in our solar system lose energy in the form of heat radiation in wavelengths that are invisible to the human eye. The CIRS instrument picks up wavelengths in the thermal infrared region, which is beyond red light, where the wavelengths correspond to heat emission.
"In planetary science, we tend to think of planets as losing power evenly in all directions and at a steady rate," says Li. "Now we know Saturn is not doing that." (Power is the amount of energy emitted per unit of time.)
Instead, Saturn's flow of outgoing energy was lopsided, with its southern hemisphere giving off about one-sixth more energy than the northern one, Li explains. This effect matched Saturn's seasons: during those five Earth years, it was summer in the southern hemisphere and winter in the northern one. (A season on Saturn lasts about seven Earth years.) Like Earth, Saturn has these seasons because the planet is tilted on its axis, so one hemisphere receives more energy from the sun and experiences summer while the other receives less energy and is shrouded in winter. Saturn’s equinox, when the sun was directly over the equator, occurred in August 2009.
In the study, Saturn's seasons looked Earth-like in another way: in each hemisphere, its effective temperature, which characterizes its thermal emission to space, started to warm up or cool down as a change of season approached. Because Saturn's weather is variable and the atmosphere tends to retain heat (called heat inertia), the temperature changes in complicated ways throughout the atmosphere. "The effective temperature provides us a simple way to track the response of Saturn's atmosphere, as a system, to the seasonal changes," says Li. Cassini's observations in the northern hemisphere revealed that the effective temperature gradually dropped from 2005 to 2008 and then started to warm up again by 2009. In Saturn's southern hemisphere, the effective temperature cooled from 2005 to 2009, as the equinox started to approach.
The emitted energy for each hemisphere rose and fell along with the effective temperature. Even so, during this five-year period, the planet as a whole seemed to be slowly cooling down and emitting less energy.
To find out if similar changes were happening one Saturn year ago, the researchers looked at data collected by Voyager in 1980 and 1981. Like Cassini CIRS, Voyager recorded fluctuations in the energy emitted by the planet and in the effective temperature. But Voyager did not see the imbalance between the southern and northern hemispheres; instead, the two regions were much more consistent with each other.
Why wouldn't Voyager have seen the same summer-versus-winter difference between the two hemispheres? The amount of energy coming from the sun (called solar radiance), which drives weather and atmospheric temperatures, could have fluctuated from one Saturn year to the next. The patterns in Saturn's cloud cover and haze could have, too.
"It's reasonable to think that the changes in Saturn's emitted power are related to cloud cover," says Amy Simon-Miller, who heads the Planetary Systems Laboratory at Goddard and is a co-author on the paper. "As the amount of cloud cover changes, the amount of radiation escaping into space also changes. This might vary during a single season and from one Saturn year to another. But to fully understand what is happening on Saturn, we will need the other half of the picture: the amount of power being absorbed by the planet."
Li is finishing an analysis of the solar energy that came to Saturn, based on data sets collected by two other Cassini instruments, the imaging science subsystem and the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer. He agrees that this information is crucial because Saturn, like its fellow giant planets Jupiter and Neptune, is thought to have its own source of internal energy. (The fourth giant planet, Uranus, does not seem to have an internal source.) By studying the changes in Saturn's outgoing energy along with the changes in incoming solar energy, scientists can learn about the nature of the planet's internal energy source and whether it, too, changes over time.
"The differences between Saturn's northern and southern hemisphere and that fact that Voyager did not see the same asymmetry raise a very important question: does Saturn's internal heat vary with time?" says Li. "The answer will significantly deepen our understanding of the weather, internal structure and evolution of Saturn and the other giant planets."
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The composite infrared spectrometer team is based at NASA Goddard, where the instrument was built.
For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/whycassini/dimmer-switch.html
NASA’s Fermi Telescope Finds Giant Structure in our Galaxy
NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has unveiled a previously unseen structure centered in the Milky Way. The feature spans 50,000 light-years and may be the remnant of an eruption from a supersized black hole at the center of our galaxy.
"What we see are two gamma-ray-emitting bubbles that extend 25,000 light-years north and south of the galactic center," said Doug Finkbeiner, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who first recognized the feature. "We don't fully understand their nature or origin."
The structure spans more than half of the visible sky, from the constellation Virgo to the constellation Grus, and it may be millions of years old. A paper about the findings has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.
Finkbeiner and his team discovered the bubbles by processing publicly available data from Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT). The LAT is the most sensitive and highest-resolution gamma-ray detector ever launched. Gamma rays are the highest-energy form of light.
Other astronomers studying gamma rays hadn't detected the bubbles partly because of a fog of gamma rays that appears throughout the sky. The fog happens when particles moving near the speed of light interact with light and interstellar gas in the Milky Way. The LAT team constantly refines models to uncover new gamma-ray sources obscured by this so-called diffuse emission. By using various estimates of the fog, Finkbeiner and his colleagues were able to isolate it from the LAT data and unveil the giant bubbles.
Scientists now are conducting more analyses to better understand how the never-before-seen structure was formed. The bubble emissions are much more energetic than the gamma-ray fog seen elsewhere in the Milky Way. The bubbles also appear to have well-defined edges. The structure's shape and emissions suggest it was formed as a result of a large and relatively rapid energy release - the source of which remains a mystery.
One possibility includes a particle jet from the supermassive black hole at the galactic center. In many other galaxies, astronomers see fast particle jets powered by matter falling toward a central black hole. While there is no evidence the Milky Way's black hole has such a jet today, it may have in the past. The bubbles also may have formed as a result of gas outflows from a burst of star formation, perhaps the one that produced many massive star clusters in the Milky Way's center several million years ago.
"In other galaxies, we see that starbursts can drive enormous gas outflows," said David Spergel, a scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey. "Whatever the energy source behind these huge bubbles may be, it is connected to many deep questions in astrophysics."
Hints of the bubbles appear in earlier spacecraft data. X-ray observations from the German-led Roentgen Satellite suggested subtle evidence for bubble edges close to the galactic center, or in the same orientation as the Milky Way. NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe detected an excess of radio signals at the position of the gamma-ray bubbles.
The Fermi LAT team also revealed Tuesday the instrument's best picture of the gamma-ray sky, the result of two years of data collection.
"Fermi scans the entire sky every three hours, and as the mission continues and our exposure deepens, we see the extreme universe in progressively greater detail," said Julie McEnery, Fermi project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
NASA's Fermi is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership, developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.
"Since its launch in June 2008, Fermi repeatedly has proven itself to be a frontier facility, giving us new insights ranging from the nature of space-time to the first observations of a gamma-ray nova," said Jon Morse, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “These latest discoveries continue to demonstrate Fermi's outstanding performance.”
For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/news/new-structure.html
NASA Extends TIMED Mission for Fourth Time
Nine years after beginning its unprecedented look at the gateway between Earth's environment and space, not to mention collecting more data on the upper atmosphere than any other satellite, NASA’s Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics (TIMED) mission has been extended again.
Before the launch of TIMED, the mesosphere and lower thermosphere/ionosphere -- which help protect us from harmful solar radiation -- had been one of the least explored and understood regions of our environment.
"The middle part of the atmosphere was the part we kind of ignored," says John Sigwarth, the deputy project scientist for TIMED at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. "It's too high for balloons and too low for spacecraft. So the understanding of this middle atmosphere and its impact on the upper atmosphere has been tremendously increased due to TIMED."
The mission will now continue to study the influences of the sun and humans on our upper atmosphere. TIMED began its extended mission on Oct. 1, 2010, and will collect data through 2014. This is its fourth extension since the original 2-year mission began in January 2002. TIMED will focus this time on a problem that has long puzzled scientists: differentiating between human-induced and naturally occurring changes in this atmospheric region. This extension also allows TIMED to continue collecting data for longer than a full 11-year solar cycle.
"The sun is a variable star with an 11 year cycle," says Sigwarth. "So, if things change in the mesosphere, you don't know if it's because the sun changed or because human activity has caused the change. By getting back to the same point in the cycle, we can compare what it was like then, and what it's like now, and see if there's a long term trend of changes that's not solar related."
The key instrument performing this work is known as SABER (or Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry), built by Hampton University in Hampton, Va. SABER can remotely sense composition and temperature in the mesosphere.
In addition to checking for effects from humans, TIMED scientists would like to understand how cooling temperatures in the middle atmosphere are causing the thermosphere to become less dense and its composition to change. With fewer particles in the thermosphere, there’s less drag on satellites in space, which affects how long spacecraft and space debris stay in orbit – information that must be integrated into calculations for orbit models.
Composition changes in the thermosphere can also alter ionospheric structures that affect radio wave propagation and communications. To help with this is an instrument called SEE (or the Solar EUV Experiment) built at the University of Colo., which looks at the sun's x-rays and extreme ultraviolet rays to see how they impact our atmosphere.
TIMED will also collaborate with NASA’s newest eye on the Sun, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, which provides continuing solar radiation measurements and new views of how solar activity is created.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. manages the TIMED mission for the agency's Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The spacecraft was built by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.
For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/sunearthsystem/main/timed-extended.html
Sunspot 1121 Unleashes X-ray Flare
Active sunspot 1121 has unleashed one of the brightest x-ray solar flares in years, an M5.4-class eruption at 15:36 UT on Nov. 6th.
Radiation from the flare created a wave of ionization in Earth's upper atmosphere that altered the propagation of low-frequency radio waves. There was, however, no bright CME (plasma cloud) hurled in our direction, so the event is unlikely to produce auroras in the nights ahead.
This is the third M-flare in as many days from this increasingly active sunspot. So far none of the eruptions has been squarely Earth-directed, but this could change in the days ahead as the sun's rotation turns the active region toward our planet.
For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/sunearthsystem/main/News110610-Mflare.html
Susan Jacoby on the ‘myth of separate magisteria’ [science & religion]
Susan Jacoby, author of "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism," has penned a piece for Big Questions Online in which she asks the question: Can—and should—science and religion avoid each other's turf.
Taking the late Stephen Jay Gould's to task on his description of the two disciplines as "non-overlapping magisteria," Jacoby wonders why so many intellectuals now pay obeisance to the "historically absurd idea of separate domains for science and religion."
...scientists use embryonic stem cells in research aimed at developing treatments for currently incurable scourges of the body. Some church leaders, primarily Roman Catholics and conservative American Protestants, are doing everything they can to impede the research because their faith tells them that a six-day-old embryo is the equivalent of a person — and that destroying the cells for scientific purposes is murder.
The biomedical researcher who wants to continue working with embryonic stem cells is making a moral as well as a scientific judgment, and the cleric is making a judgment that constrains science. The domains have overlapped since science first began making discoveries that could promote, or, for that matter, threaten human welfare. When Dr. Edward Jenner developed an early form of vaccination against smallpox in 1796, many orthodox Christians — the most notable of whom was Yale’s president, the Rev. Timothy Dwight — considered vaccination an intrusion on God’s plan, which supposedly required the ancient killer disease.
Citing Sam Harris's recent book, "The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values," she lauds the recent insights brought forth by the neurosciences, and suggests that we should reject both religious notions of revealed truth and the secular veneration of moral relativism. Instead, argues Jacoby, we should look to science which has a crucial role to play in assessing moral values according to their observable earthly consequences:
Numerous social science studies have shown, for example, that countries where women are forbidden to educate themselves, earn a living, or control their sexual lives are the poorest societies on earth by any objective measure of well-being — from health to poverty rates. How, then, can it be morally sound — regardless of whether people believe they are doing the will of God — to subjugate women?
In this instance, the cop-out for the separate magisteria establishment is that religions restricting the freedom of women must be “false.” Those who uphold the notion of separate domains want domain over values for their religion — not all religion.
Neuroscience raises a red flag because it attempts to explain human behavior by studying the physical brain rather than by evoking the existence of a independent, non-physical soul. The idea that humans may not possess free will in the religious or secular senses — at least not to the degree we would like — is as threatening to our sense of human specialness today as Darwin’s theory of evolution was in his time.
Lawrence Hansen: Animal researchers and animal rights advocates guilty of groupthink
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| Thomas Peter, Retuers |
There's an interesting and thought-provoking article by Lawrence A. Hansen over at The Chronicle: Animal Research: Groupthink in Both Camps. Hansen, who is an animal researcher himself, makes the case that both animal researchers and defenders of animals are guilty of groupthink, a mode of thought that people engage in when they are profoundly involved in a cohesive in-group. This typically happens when members of a group strive for unanimity and override their motivations to realistically appraise alternative courses of action:
We faculty members with deep concerns for animal welfare are often viewed by our groupthink scientific colleagues as untrustworthy or even treasonous agents provocateurs, since we are inclined to raise both ethical and scientific objections to invasive and lethal animal experimentation, especially when it involves primates and companion animals—that is, dogs and cats.
Meanwhile, our animal-rights associates suspect us of insufficient ardor for animal welfare, since we acknowledge that not all research involving animals is torture, and many of us do not object when transgenic mice are painlessly euthanized after being well cared for during their short lives.
Groupthink among animal advocates, unless it leads to violence, is harmless enough, but it's self-defeating when the goal is to rally public opposition to vivisection (a term that encompasses both the dissection of living animals for teaching, and performing invasive, intentionally mutilating or maiming surgeries on living animals as a way to do research). A huge reservoir of empathy for our fellow primates and for companion animals goes untapped when PETA demonstrators protest biomedical research on mice or trivia like presidential fly swatting. It may well be that a Gandhi-like respect for all animal life represents the ultimate in human ethical evolution, but until that "consummation devoutly to be wished" is realized, apes and monkeys and dogs and cats are being confined, vivisected, and killed while animal advocates are ignored as a lunatic fringe.
But when it comes to animal vivisection in particular, Hansen paints a particularly grim picture of what goes on behind the scenes and the attitudes that perpetuate unethical research practices:
One especially disturbing example of primate vivisection repeatedly approved by many university animal-care-and-use committees is a decades-long series of highly invasive experiments performed on rhesus monkeys to learn more about the neuronal circuitry of visual tracking in the brain. The luckless monkeys undergo multiple surgeries to have coils implanted in both eyes; holes drilled in their skulls to allow researchers to selectively destroy some parts of their brains and put recording electrodes in others; and head-immobilization surgeries in which screws, bolts, and plates are directly attached to their skulls. The monkeys are anesthetized during these surgeries. After a recovery period, they are intentionally dehydrated to produce a water-deprivation "work ethic" so that they will visually track moving objects for the reward of a sip of water.
First impressions are usually correct in questions of cruelty to animals, and most of us cannot bear to even look at pictures of these monkeys, with their electrode-implanted brains and bolted heads, being put through their paces in a desperate attempt to get a life-sustaining sip of water. Such treatment is justified in the corresponding grant application by invoking the possibility that the resulting data may allow us to find the cause and cure for human diseases such as Alzheimer's.
But those of us who have spent decades in research on Alzheimer's disease recognize that such a justification is an ethical bait and switch, since the neural pathway being investigated in these experiments is not even involved in Alzheimer's disease. These experiments in the basic neuroscience of visual tracking are so thoroughly unrelated to the neuropathology of Alzheimer's disease that in more than 28 years of research in the neuroscience of the disease, I have never come across a single reference to them in any scientific literature on neurodegenerative disease.
Since most invasive monkey research is not directly linked to alleviating human suffering, argues Hansen, what is the real motivation of scientists doing such things to our cousin primates? "The investigators are not sadists, although they may seem to be from the monkey's point of view," he writes, "Researchers simply see themselves as doing neuroscience, reasoning that if you want to learn about how brains are wired, the easiest and most direct way is to selectively damage a living brain and see what happens."
Hansen's analysis is both fair and tempered; he concludes on a rather encouraging and enlightened note:
All these efforts reflect a growing awareness that neuroscientists wedded to primate vivisection as a way to conduct research are simply too biased by their own training, research agendas, and career considerations to objectively perform the kind of ethical cost-benefit analysis required before permitting primate vivisection. The trend toward outside supervision of animal vivisection parallels the point made by Georges Clemenceau, a French statesman and physician, who said, "War is too important to be left to the generals." Ethically aware citizens are increasingly concluding that primate vivisection is too important to be left to the researchers who dominate their university animal-care-and-use committees.
Clegg’s ‘Armageddon science’
Physicist Brian Clegg, author of "Armageddon Science: The Science of Mass Destruction", was recently interviewed by Salon. Among the various threats to humanity discussed—a list that includes nuclear weapons, global warming, particle accelerators, nanobots, and apparently autistics—Clegg also discusses the possibility of a technological singularity. But like so many other so-called experts, he gets this one completely wrong. Fair warning, as this next quote is full of fail:
The Singularity came from the ideas of science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge. It's like the Borg in "Star Trek": something that is a combination of living creature and machine. Followers of the Singularity believe the machine will become more and more intelligent, and that this new creature will be the next step. Homo sapiens will either be subjugated or wiped out.
Frankly, I think the time scales are unrealistic. There is no doubt that technology is going to be used to enhance human beings. We've been doing this for a long time. You could say that the dog enhanced human ability; we created dogs from the wolf and used them for our benefit. In the modern sense, we use technology inside our bodies. But technology always jumps in a different direction than you might expect. The people who talk about the Singularity look at computer technology and medical technology that puts stuff in our bodies and assume the technology will continue to progress in the exact same direction. I think we're much more likely to end up with technology that interacts with us rather than becoming a part of us.
The Singularity is a rather crude idea, and the 2040 prediction is ridiculous, especially if you look at how little cybertechnology has actually developed. Ray Kurzeil has this idea of wanting to live forever, and hoped to keep himself going until the technology developed, so the Singularity is a kind of wish fulfillment. Most of the scientific community, frankly, views him as an eccentric. He gives himself blood transfusions and eats vast numbers of supplements every day, and these are things that actually have very little scientific basis for prolonging life. The Singularity is popular because everyone wants to live forever. It's a very appealing idea.
Once again the cult of Ray Kurzweil is invoked, and as is frustratingly typical of these outside commentaries, transhumanism is conflated with the singularity (not to mention the use of ad hominen to dismiss Ray's predictions). Nowhere in this analysis does Clegg discuss the potential for a runaway superintelligence or an "intelligence explosion" outside of human enhancement. So needless to say, his assessment of the singularity risk is grossly understated.
NYT: Glimpsing a scientific future as fields heat up
We are in the midst of the biotechnology revolution and Gina Kolata of the New York Times knows it:
“I’ve learned over the years that the best predictor for what will be new and exciting is, ‘Expect the unexpected,’ ” said Dr. Joseph L. Goldstein, a Nobel laureate who is professor and chairman of the department of medical genetics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
Dr. David Baltimore of CalTech, another Nobel laureate, said, “If you could predict it, it wouldn’t be a breakthrough.”
But even if it’s impossible to predict a particular major discovery, one can sometimes sense when a particular area of science is taking off, says Dr. Richard Klausner, a former head of the National Cancer Institute who is now a managing partner in the Column Group, a venture capital firm. “It gets on a Moore’s Law curve,” he said, referring to an observation in computer science that the speed of computing keeps increasing exponentially.
When that happens, Dr. Klausner said, “barriers and unknowns seem to be falling,” and it is pretty much predictable that even more exciting discoveries will be made.
Biocentric theory: Does quantum physics imply immortality?
Cool book by Robert Lanza and Rob Berman: Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe. Those unfamiliar with Lanza's particular take on biocentric theory should read this, but he essentially suggests that the Universe is a consequence and construct of conscious observers and not the other way around; it's the quantum realm and the subjective perception of time that "creates" a comprehensible Universe to dwell in. Consequently, argues Lanza, there may be a link to cosmological immortality.
Robert Lanza writes in the Huffington Post:
Critics claim that this behavior is limited to the quantum world. But this "two-world" view (that is, the view that there is one set of laws for quantum objects and another for the rest of the universe, including us) has no basis in reason and is being challenged in labs around the world. Last year, researchers published a study in Nature suggesting that quantum behavior extends into the everyday realm. Pairs of ions were coaxed to entangle, and then their properties remained bound together when separated by large distances ("spooky action at a distance," as Einstein put it) as if there were no time or space. And in 2005, KHCO3 crystals exhibited entanglement ridges half an inch high, demonstrating that quantum behavior could nudge into the ordinary world of human-scale objects.
In the Oct. 2010 issue of Discover, theoretical physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow state, "There is no way to remove the observer -- us -- from our perceptions of the world ... In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities."
That night, while lying awake at my neighbor's house, I had found the answer -- that the missing piece is with us. As I see it, immortality doesn't mean perpetual (linear) existence in time but resides outside of time altogether. Life is a journey that transcends our classical way of thinking. Experiment after experiment continues to suggest that we create time, not the other way around. Without consciousness, space and time are nothing. At death, there's a break in the continuity of space and time; you can take any time -- past or future -- as your new frame of reference and estimate all potentialities relative to it. In the end, even Einstein acknowledged that "the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Life is just one fragment of time, one brushstroke in a picture larger than ourselves, eternal even when we die. This is the indispensable prelude to immortality.
Probably more metaphysics than physics at this point, but interesting food for thought. I've always been fascinated by theories and philosophical systems that start from the presence of the observer—perspectives like Buddhism and even fine tuning arguments. Indeed, as Buddhism suggests, the most important phenomenon in the Universe is subjective awareness: if nothing is observed there is nothing.
Flame away, commenters, flame away.
