Watch Students Compete Using Lego Robotics

Posted on by
students from San Cayetano Elementary School race their robot
Students from San Cayetano Elementary School race their robot.

Watch school teams test their software-enabled Lego robots via a live Internet program during the annual Southern California NASA Explorer Schools Robotics Competition.

Students in grades 4 through 12 will command their robots to complete tasks on a simulated Martian terrain.

The competition and related activities will be held at JPL on Tues., Mar. 9, from 12:15 to 3:30 p.m. Pacific time, with the awards ceremony at 3 p.m. Pacific time. The event can be seen live on this page, or at http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl .

All participating teams are part of the NASA Explorer Schools project, a partnership between NASA and about 200 elementary and middle schools nationwide. The project teaches and encourages students to pursue disciplines critical to NASA's future engineering, science and technical missions. JPL and NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif., are the local NASA partners for approximately 25 schools in Southern California.

More information can be found online at http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/fll/default.aspx .

View my blog's last three great articles....

View this site auto transport car shipping car transport

The 2010 FIRST Robotics Competition

Posted on by
FIRST is a spirited competition using sophisticated robotics technologyThe FIRST Robotics Competition is an exciting, nationwide competition that teams professionals and young people to solve an engineering design problem in an intense and competitive way.

For many years, the NASA Robotics Alliance Project has been supporting participation in the FIRST Robotics Competition by providing grants to high school teams as well as sponsoring FIRST regional competitions.

Providing support to competitions like FIRST Robotics is one way the NASA Robotics Alliance Project strives to create a human, technical and programmatic resource of robotics capabilities to aid future robotic space exploration missions.

View my blog's last three great articles....

View this site auto transport car shipping car transport

NASA Weather Pioneer Joanne Simpson Passes

Posted on by
Dr. Joanne SimpsonDr. Joanne Simpson, one of NASA's leading weather scientists of the past 30 years, and a world-renowned atmospheric scientist, died on Thursday, March 4, 2010 at George Washington University Hospital, in Washington.

Until her recent retirement, Simpson was Chief Scientist Emeritus for Meteorology, Earth Sun Exploration Division, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. She worked with a science group on Cloud and Mesoscale modeling and studied hurricanes. She has authored or co-authored over 190 scientific articles.

Dorothy Zukor, Deputy Director of Earth Sciences at Goddard, said "Joanne was a joy to work with. In addition to being excited and enthusiastic about her own research, she was always helping students to become scientists. Many are practicing in the field today because of her guidance and encouragement. She has left a true legacy, not only from her own work but for the future of the field."

Joanne was born in 1923, and was a pioneer by the time she was in her twenties. As a student pilot during World War II, she took a course in meteorology and was fascinated. She earned a B.S. in Meteorology from the University of Chicago, and spent the rest of the war teaching meteorology to Aviation Cadets. In 1949, Simpson became the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in meteorology, focused her research on clouds, and went on to serve on the faculty of the University of Chicago until joining NASA permanently.

Simpson really made her mark in meteorology in the late 1950s, when she and her former professor, Herbert Riehl came up with an explanation of how the atmosphere moved heat and moisture away from the tropics to higher latitudes. That explanation included the "hot tower" hypothesis that later shed light on hurricane behavior.

A "hot tower" is a tropical cumulonimbus cloud that penetrates the tropopause. Basically, the cloud top breaches the top of the troposphere, the lowest layer of the atmosphere and reaches into the stratosphere. These clouds are called "hot" because they rise high due to the large amount of latent heat released as water vapor condenses into liquid.

Simpson developed the first mathematical cloud model using a slide rule to do the calculations because computers weren't available. Her work sparked a brand new field of study in meteorology. In the early 1960s, she developed the first computer cloud model.

Joanne came to NASA Goddard in 1979 as the Chief of NASA’s Laboratory for Atmosphere's Severe Storms Branch. Her arrival at NASA followed an academic career as professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va. sandwiched around a long period as the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Experimental Meteorology Laboratory in Miami, Fla.

During her career at NASA, Joanne's research focused on convective cloud systems and tropical cyclones using numerical cloud models and observations. She made integral contributions to several historic NASA field missions, including the Convection And Moisture EXperiment (CAMEX) missions, the Tropical Ocean Global Atmospheres/Coupled Ocean Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA COARE), the GARP Atlantic Tropical Experiment (GATE), and the Winter Monsoon Experiment (Winter MONEX).

In 1986, NASA asked Joanne to lead the science study for the proposed Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), a satellite to carry both active and passive microwave instruments to accurately measure rainfall across the tropics and subtropics. TRMM is a joint mission between NASA and JAXA, Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency.

Between 1986 and the launch in November 1997, Joanne served first as Study Scientist and then Project Scientist for TRMM, bringing it from concept to reality. TRMM continues to fly today and provide unique surface rainfall and hydrometeor profile data for climate and atmospheric process studies and for real-time operational applications related to convective systems and hurricanes. Joanne often stated that TRMM was the most important accomplishment of her career.

Joanne recently inquired about TRMM and was very enthusiastic about TRMM's potential overlap with Goddard's Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission, to be launched in 2013. Dr. Robert Adler, now a Senior Research Scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park, was formerly Joanne’s Deputy on TRMM and also TRMM Project Scientist later in the mission, says "Joanne was the heart and soul of TRMM during the pre-launch phase, sharpening the scientific focus of the mission, resolving critical choices related to instruments, orbit, etc. and fighting (and winning) the budget and political battles to get us to launch and beyond. TRMM would not exist if it hadn’t been for Joanne."

Joanne had a career filled with awards and recognition of her research. She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, awarded the Carl-Gustaf Rossby Award (the highest honor bestowed by the American Meteorological Society), presented with a Guggenheim Fellowship, served as President of the American Meteorological Society and received numerous NASA and Goddard awards. In 2002, she was awarded the prestigious International Meteorological Organization Prize. She was the first woman to receive the award.

Joanne's contributions will forever live on in NASA hurricane research and are a tremendous part of meteorological history.

View my blog's last three great articles....

View this site auto transport car shipping car transport

Alternative Energy Crops in Space

Posted on by
Fruits of J. curcas. Fruits are produced terminally in the branches, and each fruit contains three seedsWhat if space held the key to producing alternative energy crops on Earth? That's what researchers are hoping to find in a new experiment on the International Space Station.

The experiment, National Lab Pathfinder-Cells 3, is aimed at learning whether microgravity can help jatropha curcas plant cells grow faster to produce biofuel, or renewable fuel derived from biological matter. Jatropha is known to produce high quality oil that can be converted into an alternative energy fuel, or biofuel.

By studying the effects of microgravity on jatropha cells, researchers hope to accelerate the cultivation of the plant for commercial use by improving characteristics such as cell structure, growth and development. This is the first study to assess the effects of microgravity on cells of a biofuel plant.

Fluid Processing Apparatus (FPA) containing cell suspensions of J. curcas"As the search for alternate energy sources has become a top priority, the results from this study could add value for commercialization of a new product,” said Wagner Vendrame, principal investigator for the experiment at the University of Florida in Homestead. "Our goal is to verify if microgravity will induce any significant changes in the cells that could affect plant growth and development back on Earth."

Launched on space shuttle Endeavour’s STS-130 mission in February, cell cultures of jatropha were sent to the space station in special flasks containing nutrients and vitamins. The cells will be exposed to microgravity until they return to Earth aboard space shuttle Discovery's STS-131 mission targeted for April.

Seeds of J. curcas. Seeds are pressed for oil extraction, which can be utilized as biofuelFor comparison studies of how fast the cultures grow, a replicated set of samples are being maintained at the University of Florida's Tropical Research and Education Center in Homestead.

"Watching the space shuttle go up carrying a little piece of my work is an indescribable experience," said Vendrame. "Knowing that my experiment could contribute to creating a sustainable means for biofuel production on Earth, and therefore making this a better world adds special value to the work."

View my blog's last three great articles....

View this site auto transport car shipping car transport

Winds of Change

Posted on by

This is a composite image of NGC 1068, one of the nearest and brightest galaxies containing a rapidly growing supermassive black hole. The X-ray images and spectra obtained using Chandra's High Energy Transmission Grating Spectrometer show that a strong wind is being driven away from the center of NGC 1068 at a rate of about a million miles per hour. This wind is likely generated as surrounding gas is accelerated and heated as it swirls toward the black hole. A portion of the gas is pulled into the black hole, but some of it is blown away. High energy X-rays produced by the gas near the black hole heat the ouflowing gas, causing it to glow at lower X-ray energies.

X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory are shown in red, optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope in green and radio data from the Very Large Array in blue. The spiral structure of NGC 1068 is shown by the X-ray and optical data, and a jet powered by the central supermassive black hole is shown by the radio data.

This Chandra study is much deeper than previous X-ray observations. Using this data, researchers believe that each year several times the mass of our sun is being deposited out to large distances, about 3,000 light years from the black hole. The wind likely carries enough energy to heat the surrounding gas and suppress extra star formation.

These results help explain how a supermassive black hole can alter the evolution of its host galaxy. It has long been suspected that material blown away from a black hole can affect its environment, but a key question has been whether such "black hole blowback" typically delivers enough power to have a significant impact.

NGC 1068 is located about 50 million light years from Earth and contains a supermassive black hole about twice as massive as the one in the middle of the Milky Way Galaxy.

View my blog's last three great articles....

View this site auto transport car shipping car transport

Georgia Rep. Paul Broun, Obama a Marxist for sure

Posted on by

Congressman Paul Broun appeared on the Pete Domininick XM/Sirius radio show last week, and made the following comments:

INTERVIEWER: The President and the Democrats are gonna pass a bill that's gonna kill jobs, and increase premiums, and wreck health care in the country...

BROUN: Absolutely.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think President Obama is a Socialist?

BROUN: I know he is. In fact, if you look at his own writings, he said when he was in college he leaned to Marxist tendencies, and Marxist professors. He joined Marxist clubs. You look at who he's put in his administration. There are avowed Socialists.

Dominick then pressed Rep. Broun on Obama's citizenship, asking "you can't say that he's an American citizen." Broun responded, "I don't know."

Broun is a medical doctor. He is considered a libertarian-conservative, and has received consistently high ratings from the RLC Liberty Index. He was supported by Libertarian Republicans in his past elections.

He is not yet a co-sponsor of the House bill by Florida Rep. Bill Posey HR 1073 to require proof of citizenship for eligibility of future presidential contenders. The bill currently has 12 co-sponsors, all Republicans.

Here the entire 2 minute interview here.

Va. health bill could foil Obama proposal – Boston Globe

Posted on by

Boston Globe
Va. health bill could foil Obama proposal
Boston Globe
In Arizona, for example, voters will have a chance to approve a constitutional amendment this fall that would “preserve the freedom of all residents of the ...
INSIGHTS INTO THE WORLD / Tradition important in US health care reformistockAnalyst.com (press release)
Our Opinion: It's time for a vote on health-care reformThe State Journal-Register

all 1,642 news articles »

Olas Altas Beach, in the Heart of Mazatlan’s Old Town

Posted on by

The prettiest beaches in Mazatlan, Mexico, the ones with broad bands of silken white sand, are located in the northern part of the city, in La Zona Dorada – the Golden Zone, and even further north in the new hotel zone. Although attractive, these northern beaches lack character because of their location: step off the beach and into the tourist area and you could be on any beach in any part of the world. High rise condos stand side-to-side with franchise hotels, storefronts are filled with cheap trinkets and T-shirts, and the restaurants are ubiquitous franchises that cater to American palettes.

Olas Altas, a pretty little crescent beach in Old Town, Mazatlan

On the other side of town, across the broad boulevard from Mazatlan’s charming Old Town, lies a smaller crescent of beach known as Olas Altas. At the south end of the half-moon bay, waves roll in on the  point and set up nice waves for surfers and body boarders. The rest of the beach is sheltered and enjoys calm water that is perfect for families. The sand here is soft and glows pink in the sunrise and sunset, perfectly framing the sunset over the bay. Best of all, this beach’s proximity to Mazatlan’s city center makes it a perfect choice for a visit that combines sunbathing with dozens of other activities, from investigating hundreds of historic buildings painted in riotous colors to browsing through the Art Museum or Archeological Museum.

Walking the Malecon along Olas Altas Beach

And not to worry about the quality or price of the food. Restaurants such as La Cueva de Leon, directly across the street from Olas Altas Beach, feature authentic, delicious Mexican food for incredibly low prices (in the case of La Cueva, nothing is priced higher than $50 pesos, which is slightly less than $4 U.S.).

Photo Credit: Barbara Weibel

Article by Barbara Weibel of Hole In The Donut Travels

Birding with St. Pete Audubon–Shorebirds at Fort Desoto Park

Posted on by

Shortly after 8 a.m. this morning I found myself standing out on the rather chilly mud flats at Fort Desoto County Park with members of the St. Petersburg Audubon Society, hoping to learn about shorebirds. For a novice, shorebirds are incredibly challenging to identify. But with the assistance of experienced birders I found myself quickly [...]

New Zealand South Island

Posted on by

Hey all I'm really sorry but this is a long update hope it doesn't bore you too much I am still loving New Zealand and want to stay here even more now Itrsquos the only place in the world Irsquove been so far that I think Irsquod like to live in more than England. Day 8 Wellington to NelsonWe had to get up REALLY early to be picked up at 7am for the 8.45am ferry to Picton on the Sout

2.5 Weeks Out

Posted on by

Instead of preparing for the big adventure I'm milling over words at coffee. I'm reading a book that represents all I love in words. It's called The Infirmary by Edward Micus. He was one of my Creative Writer teachers at Minnesota StateMankato. His words are magical to me so sincere evoking honest emotions and not overly dramatic. The life experience in his writing is something to be ad

Tips to Experienced RvR Chosens in Warhammer

Posted on by

Well hello there This is mmofisher your old friend. Welcome to our site Now here is a Warhammer guide which selected from the other website. I will post this guide as two articles. If you are interested in this guide just keep paying attention to our website.If you really want to be a tank unfortunately to get everything that you would want would require renown rank 100 or something ridiculou

First day

Posted on by

First day of work Woke up a little after 6 which was only annoying because I kept waking up throughout the night. Probably too excitednervous. Haha. Anyway got up had breakfast with Ingrid and then we headed over to the headquarters at 7. Basically just had orientation today which was actually nice. Although I loved Nevada I was kinda jealous of the fact that I never got an orientation whil

Rainy and cold… I thought I was down south

Posted on by

Day 2 was quite as wonderful as day one After a night of crazy rain and wind the morning began and continued cloudy and cold. In the morning Ingrid and I went by ourselves back to the blind we had gone to yesterday in order to see what birds were there and to write down what we saw. This time we took our gum boots because of the rain. Good thing The path which had been quite muddy yesterda