Close-up Look at Black Hole Reveals Feeding Frenzy

Astronomers are getting a close-up look at a cosmic eating machine: a spinning black hole that devours the mass equivalent of two Earths per hour, verging on the limit of its feeding ability.

Supermassive black holes can weigh as much as a billion suns or more and are thought to reside at the centers of most, if not all, large galaxies. Their gravity is so powerful it traps even light, making black holes invisible. Their presence is inferred by watching the motions of stars and gas around them, along with the radiation that's generated in their frenzied vicinities.

The behemoth of interest in the new close-up study, which will be published in the May 28 issue of the journal Nature, lies at the center of a distant active galaxy known as 1H0707-495. Using data from the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton observatory, astronomers analyzed X-rays emitted during the black hole's feeding frenzy.

As matter swirls in toward a black hole, gravity makes it travel at significant fractions of light-speed. That generates X-rays and other radiation that can give astronomers information about the spin of the black hole and its size, among other details.

In this case, the astronomers say they are tracking matter that's within twice the radius of the black hole itself.

Specifically, the XMM-Newton detections suggested the galaxy's core is much richer in iron than the rest of the galaxy. In addition, there was a time lag of 30 seconds between changes in the X-ray light observed directly and those seen in its reflection from the disk. From this delay, the astronomers estimate the black hole weighs about 3 million to 5 million solar masses – modest by supermassive black hole standards.

The team will continue to track the galaxy and map out the accreting process of this supermassive black hole. Far from being a steady process, like muddy water slipping down a plughole, a feeding black hole is a messy eater.

"Accretion is a very messy process because of the magnetic fields that are involved," said study scientist Andrew Fabian of the University of Cambridge.

via Close-up Look at Black Hole Reveals Feeding Frenzy - Yahoo! News.

Pentagon denies report Iraq prison photos show rape

The Pentagon on Thursday denied a British newspaper report that photographs of Iraqi prisoner abuse, whose release U.S. President Barack Obama wants to block, include images of apparent rape and sexual abuse.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the Daily Telegraph newspaper had shown "an inability to get the facts right".

"That news organization has completely mischaracterized the images," Whitman told reporters. "None of the photos in question depict the images that are described in that article."

Thursday's Telegraph quoted retired U.S. Army Major General Antonio Taguba, who conducted a 2004 investigation into abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, as saying the pictures showed "torture, abuse, rape and every indecency."

The newspaper said at least one picture showed an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Others were said to depict sexual assaults with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

In an interview with the New Yorker magazine published in 2007, Taguba was quoted as saying that he saw a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.

Photographs of abuse at the jail outside Baghdad that were published in 2004 damaged the image of the United States as it fought an escalating war against insurgents in Iraq that caused deep resentment throughout the Muslim world.

Whitman said he did not know if the Telegraph had quoted Taguba accurately. But he said he was not aware that any such photographs had been uncovered as part of the investigation into Abu Ghraib or abuses at other prisons.

via Pentagon denies report Iraq prison photos show rape - Yahoo! News.

Would Whitman know about all of the photos uncovered? If so, he is either lying or this is good news.

ROSWELL DEBRIS CONFIRMED AS EXTRATERRESTRIAL: Lab Located, Scientists Named by Anthony Bragalia

Newly discovered documents reveal that in the months immediately following the purported 1947 UFO crash at Roswell, secret government studies began on a material that was previously unknown to science. The "memory metal" that was studied precisely matches some of the debris material reported by several witnesses to the crash. Evidence shows that -under military direction- these unique metal studies were undertaken by a contracted laboratory that possessed advanced technical capabilities that the U.S. government itself did not have at the time. A former high-level scientist employed by the involved laboratory has offered a confession that he was tasked to study the crashed UFO material. Information provided by two U.S. Air Force Generals also offers direct support for this discovery. ...

Battelle scientist Elroy John Center has stated that he analyzed metal from a crashed UFO when he was employed by the Institute. Center was a Senior Research Chemist who worked for Battelle for nearly two decades, from 1939 to 1957. This has been confirmed by both his University of Michigan alumni files and by the location of scientific papers that he authored during his employment while at Battelle.

A graduate Chemical Engineer, Center authored papers that appeared in highly technical journals. His areas of research included the chemical testing of metals; the microdetermination of metals in alloys; and the spectroscopic analysis of unique materials. Center was likely involved in early analysis of the Roswell debris. A groundbreaking metals analysis technique that Center developed has been found cited in studies related to the “polygraphic determination of Titanium” in alloys. Specially-selected Titanium is required to create the Roswell-like "memory metal" Nitinol.

Center's family members confirm that he had an intense interest in UFOs and the extraterrestrial. In May of 1992, noted historical researcher Dr. Irena Scott of Columbus, OH (herself a former Battelle scientist) interviewed a close professional associate of Elroy Center. Elroy had privately related to him in June of 1960 that while he was employed at Battelle he had been involved in a very strange laboratory project. Center said that earlier he had been tasked by his superiors to assist on a highly-classified Battelle study that was contracted by the government. He said that the project involved work on a very unusual material. Center understood that this debris material was retrieved by the US government from the earlier crash of a UFO. Center referred to the item he studied as a "piece." He explained that this "piece" was not something with which anyone was familiar. He also said that the debris had been inscribed with strange symbols that he called "glyphics." Similar markings have of course been reported by some of the witnesses to the Roswell crash debris. Center stopped short of providing any further details. The Battelle scientist passed away in 1991.

via The UFO Iconoclast(s): ROSWELL DEBRIS CONFIRMED AS EXTRATERRESTRIAL: Lab Located, Scientists Named by Anthony Bragalia.

I have some of this material... in wire form. I can't seem to buy a sheet of it from anyone, however.

Scientist Claims UFO Collided with Tunguska Meteorite to Save Earth

Classify this under new of the weird. A Russian scientist claims that aliens downed the Tunguska meteorite 101 years ago to protect our planet from devastation. Yuri Lavbin says he found unusual quartz crystals at the site of the massive Siberian explosion. Ten crystals have holes in them, placed so the stones can be united in a chain, and other have drawings on them. “We don’t have any technologies that can print such kind of drawings on crystals,” said Lavbin. “We also found ferrum silicate that can not be produced anywhere, except in space.”

... The Tunguska Event was a powerful explosion that occurred in an uninhabited and desolate area near the Tunguska River in Russia, on June 30, 1908. Although the cause of the explosion is the subject of debate, it is commonly believed to have been caused by the explosion of a large meteoroid or comet fragment, occurring the in Earth’s atmosphere about 5–10 kilometers (3–6 miles) high. The blast flattened an estimated 60 million trees over 2,150 square kilometers, but no crater or “smoking gun” meteorite has ever been found. Different studies have yielded varying estimates of the object’s size, but there is general agreement that it was a few tens of meters across.

A couple of expeditions have gone to the remote site of the crash. Lavbin says that one expedition located the unusual crystals.

While I’m not a chemist, I couldn’t find any information on “ferrum silicate.” Seemingly, it doesn’t exist.

One small, nondescript photo accompanied Lavbin’s claims, published by the Macedonian International News Agency.

This isn’t the first time a UFO has been claimed to associated with the Tunguska event. Another report from 2004 said a scientific expedition to the site found blocks of an extraterrestrial technical device, and one 50-kilogram piece of the stone was brought to the city of Krasnoyarsk to be studied and analyzed. No subsequent reports or analysis could be located during an internet search.

Other claims of exploding alien spaceships or alien weapons detonating to “save the Earth from an imminent threat” appear to originate from a science fiction story “A Visitor From Outer Space” written by Soviet engineer Alexander Kazantsev in 1946, in which a nuclear-powered Martian spaceship, seeking fresh water from a lake blew up in mid-air. This story was was said to be inspired by Kazantsev’s visit to Hiroshima in late 1945.

via Scientist Claims UFO Collided with Tunguska Meteorite to Save Earth | Universe Today.

Meditation on Demand: Scientific American

In the fall of 2005, the Dalai Lama gave the inaugural Dialogues between Neuroscience and Society lecture at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, DC. There were over 30,000 neuroscientists registered for the meeting, and it seemed as if most of them attended the talk. The Dalai Lama’s address was designed to highlight the areas of convergence between neuroscience and Buddhist thought about the mind, and to many in the audience he clearly achieved his objective. There was some controversy over his being invited to deliver this lecture insofar as he is both a head of state and a religious leader, and for that reason he largely stuck to his prepared text. But he strayed from the text at least once, reminding the audience that not only was he a Buddhist monk but also an enthusiastic proponent of modern technology.

Elaborating, he shared a confidence with the audience, telling the audience of scientists that meditating was hard work for him (even though he meditates for 4 hours every morning), and that if neuroscientists were able to find a way to put electrodes in his brain and provide him with the same outcome as he gets from meditating, he would be an enthusiastic volunteer. It turns out that a recent set of experiments, from researchers at MIT and Stanford, moves us a step closer to making his wish a reality.

...

The Dalai Lama’s interest in neuroscience has been reciprocated by at least some members of the neuroscience community. Reasoning that studying the brains of people who meditate might lead to novel insights about the human brain, investigations of long-term meditators has been fertile ground for scientific investigation, with some of the more rigorous work emerging from Richard Davidson’s laboratory at the University of Wisconsin. From the perspective of neuroscience, meditation can be characterized as a series of mental exercises by which one strengthens one’s control over the workings of their own brain. The simplest of these meditation practices is ‘focused attention’ where one concentrates on a single object, for example one’s breath. When expert meditators practiced focused attention meditation, demonstrable changes were seen using fMRI in the networks of the brain that are known to modulate attention.

A second set of experiments studied long-term meditators practicing ‘open monitoring meditation’, a more advanced meditation practice which in many ways is a form of metacognition: the objective is not to focus one’s attention but rather to use one’s brain to monitor the universe of mental experience without directing attention to any one task. The unexpected result of this experiment was that the EEG of long-term meditators exhibited much more gamma-synchrony than that of naive meditators. Moreover, normally human brains produce only short bursts of gamma-synchrony. What was most remarkable about this study was that long-term meditators were able to produce sustained gamma-activity in a manner that had never previously been observed in any other human. As such, sustained gamma activity has emerged as a proxy for at least some aspects of the meditative state.
Gamma Waves
But what causes gamma rhythm? And are there any potential benefits of sustained gamma-activity? The strongest hypothesis for the cellular mechanisms underlying generation of the gamma rhythm is that it is due to the activation of fast-spiking interneurons in the cerebral cortex.  ...

via Meditation on Demand: Scientific American.

Did President Kennedy meet extraterrestrials?

Image: President Kennedy arrives at Homestead AFB, Florida, 1962.

According to claims in a rare video, George Adamski met with President Kennedy at the White House in late 1961 and passed on a letter to him from human looking extraterrestrials. In addition to giving advice on the Cuban missile crisis, the alleged letter also contained an invitation for Kennedy to meet with the extraterrestrials. If Kennedy did attend such a meeting, it may explain why he was certain about human looking extraterrestrial life; made undisclosed trips to Air Force bases to deal with the UFO issue; and why he instructed NASA to cooperate with the USSR on joint space and lunar missions, and to release classified UFO files.

Lou Zinstag, Carl Jung’s niece describes what she was told by Adamski concerning Kennedy’s alleged meeting with extraterrestrials:

I still remember his [Adamski’s] White House story. He told me that he had been entrusted with a written invitation for President Kennedy to visit one of the space people’s huge mother ships at a secret airbase in Desert Hot Springs, California, for few days. In order to keep this visit absolutely secret, Adamski was to take the invitation directly to the White House through a side door. Still glowing with excitement and smiling happily, he explained how the row of cars in which his taxi was traveling had to stop because of a red light just in front of this particular door where a man he knew - a spaceman, he said - was standing ready to let him in. Adamski later learned that Kennedy had spent several hours at the airbase after having canceled an important trip to New York, and that he had a long talk with the ships crew, but that he had not been invited for a flight."

The quality of witness testimonies, photos and film evidence presented in the rare video (see part one of this investigative series), all lead to the conclusion that George Adamski was largely telling the truth about his flying saucer sightings and contacts with human looking extraterrestrials. There is however no direct physical evidence that Kennedy met with the extraterrestrials Adamski was in contact with. There is, however, circumstantial evidence that such a meeting did happen, and it influenced Kennedy’s policies on space cooperation and UFOs.

via Honolulu Exopolitics Examiner: Did President Kennedy meet extraterrestrials?.

Neuroscience Sheds New Light on Creativity

Close your eyes and visualize the sun setting over a beach.

How detailed was your image? Did you envision a bland orb sinking below calm waters, or did you call up an image filled with activity -- palm trees swaying gently, waves lapping at your feet, perhaps a loved one holding your hand?

Now imagine you're standing on the surface of Pluto. What would a sunset look like from there? Notice how hard you had to work to imagine this

scene. Did you picture a featureless ball of ice with the sun a speck of light barely brighter than a star along the horizon? Did you envision frozen lakes of exotic chemicals or icy fjords glimmering in the starlight?

What you conjured illuminates how our brains work, why it can be so hard to come up with new ideas -- and how you can rewire your mind to open up the holy grail of creativity. Recent advances in neuroscience, driven by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that lets scientists watch brain activity as never before, have changed what we know about key attributes of creativity. These advances, for example, have swept away the idea that there is a pleasure center in the brain that somehow acts as an accelerator to the engine of human behavior. Rather, chemicals such as dopamine shuttle between neurons in ways that look remarkably like the calculations modern robots perform.

Creativity and imagination begin with perception. Neuroscientists have come to realize that how you perceive something isn't simply a product of what your eyes and ears transmit to your brain. It's a product of your brain itself. And iconoclasts, a class of people I define as those who do something that others say can't be done -- think Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, or Florence Nightingale -- see things differently. Literally. Some iconoclasts are born that way, but we all can learn how to see things not for what they are, but for what they might be.

Perception and imagination are linked because the brain uses the same neural circuits for both functions. Imagination is like running perception in reverse. The reason it's so difficult to imagine truly novel ideas has to do with how the brain interprets signals from your eyes. The images that strike your retina do not, by themselves, tell you with certainty what you are seeing. Visual perception is largely a result of statistical expectations, the brain's way of explaining ambiguous visual signals in the most likely way. And the likelihood of these explanations is a direct result of past experience.

Entire books have been written about learning, but the important elements for creative thinkers can be boiled down to this: Experience modifies the connections between neurons so that they become more efficient at processing information. Neuroscientists have observed that while an entire network of neurons might process a stimulus initially, by about the sixth presentation, the heavy lifting is performed by only a subset of neurons. Because fewer neurons are being used, the network becomes more efficient in carrying out its function.

The brain is fundamentally a lazy piece of meat. It doesn't want to waste energy. That's why there is a striking lack of imagination in most people's visualization of a beach sunset.

via Neuroscience Sheds New Light on Creativity - Rewiring the Creative Mind | Fast Company.

Space rock yields carbon bounty

Formic acid, a molecule implicated in the origins of life, has been found at record levels on a meteorite that fell into a Canadian lake in 2000. Cold temperatures on Tagish Lake prevented the volatile chemical from dissipating quickly.

An analysis showed four times more formic acid in the fragments than has been recorded on previous meteorites. The researchers told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union that the formic acid was extraterrestrial.

Formic acid is one of a group of compounds dubbed "organics", because they are rich in carbon.

"We are lucky that the meteorite was untouched by humans hands, avoiding contamination by organic compounds that we have on our fingers," said Dr Christopher Herd, the curator of the University of Alberta's meteorite collection.

Samples of the meteorite totalling 850 grams were collected from Tagish Lake in Canada, purchased in 2006 by a consortium including the Royal Ontario Museum and recently subjected to chemical analysis.

The scientists found levels of formic acid four times higher than had previously been recorded on a meteorite. Studies have until recently focused on the Murchison meteorite that landed in a town of that name in Australia in 1969.

"The interesting thing is that we do see this variability between meteorites, seeming to have increased enrichments of one particular compound over another," said Mark Sephton, a meteorite and geochemistry professor at Imperial College London.

"This has for a while been overlooked as we concentrated predominantly on the Murchison meteorite, but now we've got another fresh sample and we can start to analyse a different portion of the asteroid belt and therefore a different portion of the Solar System."

...

The Murchison meteorite contains many types of amino acids

The particular types, or isotopes, of hydrogen that are found in the formic acid show that it most likely formed in the cold regions of space before our Solar System existed.

On Earth, formic acid is commonly found in the stings of insects such as ants, but Professor Sephton it is likely to have been an important "ingredient in the kitchen" on Earth before life began.

via BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Space rock yields carbon bounty.

NKorea threatens to attack US, SKorean warships

North Korea threatened military action Wednesday against U.S. and South Korean warships plying the waters near the Koreas' disputed maritime border, raising the specter of a naval clash just days after the regime's underground nuclear test.

In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned that Pyongyang faced unspecified consequences because of its "provocative and belligerent" acts.

Pyongyang, reacting angrily to Seoul's decision to join an international program to intercept ships suspected of aiding nuclear proliferation, called South Korea's decision tantamount to a declaration of war.

"Now that the South Korean puppets were so ridiculous as to join in the said racket and dare declare a war against compatriots," North Korea is "compelled to take a decisive measure," the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea said in a statement carried by state media.

The North Korean army called it a violation of the armistice the two Koreas signed in 1953 to end their three-year war, and said it would no longer honor the treaty.

South Korea's military said Wednesday it was prepared to "respond sternly" to any North Korean provocation.

Clinton said "there are consequences to such actions," referring to discussions in the United Nations meant to punish North Korea for its nuclear and missile tests.

She also underscored the firmness of the U.S. treaty commitment to defend South Korea and Japan, U.S. allies in easy reach of North Korean missiles.

North Korea's latest belligerence comes as the U.N. Security Council debates how to punish the regime for testing a nuclear bomb Monday in what President Barack Obama called a "blatant violation" of international law.

via NKorea threatens to attack US, SKorean warships - Yahoo! News.

Police find feral girl in Siberia

Russian police have taken into care a 5-year-old girl who has been shut up in a flat in the company of cats and dogs for her entire life, police said on Wednesday.

The girl, who lived in the Eastern Siberian city of Chita, could not speak Russian and acted like an dog when police took her into care.

"For five years, the girl was 'brought up' by several dogs and cats and had never been outside," a police statement said.

"The unwashed girl was dressed in filthy clothes, had the clear attributes of an animal and jumped at people," it said.

The flat had no heat, water or sewage system.

A police spokeswoman said the girl, known as Natasha, is being monitored by psychologists in an orphanage. Her mother was being questioned but her father has not been found yet.

She appears to be about 2-years-old, though her real age is five, refuses to eat with a spoon and has taken on many of the gestures of the animals with which she lived, police said.

"When carers leave the room, the girl jumps at the door and barks," the police said.

Feral children, the stuff of folklore all over the world, usually exhibit the behaviour of the animals with whom they have had closest contact, a condition known as the Mowgli Syndrome after the fictional child from Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book" who was raised by wolves in the jungle.

Such children have usually built strong ties with the animals with whom they lived and find the transition to normal human contact extremely traumatic.

via Police find feral girl in Siberia - Yahoo! News.

Priest fired for beating drug addicts

The Serbian Orthodox Church has dismissed a priest running a treatment centre for drug addicts after videos showed patients being kicked and punched.

Bishop Artemije, in charge of the Rasko-Prizrenska diocese, said he ordered an inquiry into the activities of priest Branislav Peranovic at the Crna Reka centre, about 300 kilometres (187 miles) southwest of the capital Belgrade.

"We will shut down the facility if the reports about beatings and violence persist," Artemije said in a statement.

The bishop said he decided against closing it "after numerous pleadings by the patients and their parents."

"We are also asking state authorities to investigate the matter and punish those responsible," the statement said.

Last week, the Holy Synod, the church's top body, asked Artemije to shut down the centre that houses about 200 patients near the southwestern city of Novi Pazar.

Two separate videos made public by Belgrade's Vreme weekly and B92 TV showed one of the centre's employees and Peranovic repeatedly beating patients with a shovel, and kicking and hitting them inside a room decorated with icons.

The government's human rights watchdog Sasa Jankovic has filed criminal charges against the centre and Peranovic.

This week Serbian health authorities said the Crna Reka centre was not registered to undertake drug rehabilitation.

Peranovic told B92 TV the beatings were a "hard and unwanted, but necessary part of treatment."

He said that on admission, patients and their parents had to sign a written consent approving the use of violence "for therapeutic purposes."

via Priest fired for beating drug addicts - Yahoo! News.

Cancer errases man's fingerprints, causes airport security event

A Singapore cancer patient was held for four hours by immigration officials in the United States when they could not detect his fingerprints -- which had apparently disappeared because of a drug he was taking.

The incident, highlighted in the Annals of Oncology, was reported by the patient's doctor, Tan Eng Huat, who advised cancer patients taking this drug to carry a doctor's letter when travelling to the United States.

The drug, capecitabine, is commonly used to treat cancers in the head and neck, breast, stomach and colorectum.

One side-effect is chronic inflammation of the palms or soles of the feet and the skin can peel, bleed and develop ulcers or blisters -- or what is known as hand-foot syndrome.

"This can give rise to eradication of fingerprints with time," explained Tan, senior consultant in the medical oncology department at Singapore's National Cancer Centre.

The patient, a 62-year-old man, had head and neck cancer that had spread but responded well to chemotherapy. To prevent the cancer from recurring, he was put on capecitabine.

"In December 2008, after more than three years of capecitabine, he went to the United States to visit his relatives," Tan wrote.

"He was detained at the airport customs for four hours because the immigration officers could not detect his fingerprints. He was allowed to enter after the custom officers were satisfied that he was not a security threat."

Tan said the loss of fingerprints is not described in the packaging of the drug, although chronic inflammation of the palms and soles of feet is included.

"The topmost layer ... is the layer that accounts for the fingerprint, that (losing that top layer) is all it takes (to lose a fingerprint)," Tan told Reuters.

"Theoretically, if you stop the drug, it will grow back but details are scanty.

via Cancer patient held at U.S. airport for missing fingerprint - Yahoo! News.

Let's get real about alternative energy

This is an important perspective on alternative energy from David MacKay, a professor of physics at the University of Cambridge:

We need to introduce simple arithmetic into our discussions of energy.

We need to understand how much energy our chosen lifestyles consume, we need to decide where we want that energy to come from, and we need to get on with building energy systems of sufficient size to match our desired consumption.  ...

Let's express energy consumption and energy production using simple personal units, namely kilowatt-hours. One kilowatt-hour (kWh) is the energy used by leaving a 40-watt bulb on for 24 hours. The chemical energy in the food we eat to stay alive amounts to about 3 kWh per day. Taking one hot bath uses about 5 kWh of heat. Driving an average European car 100 kilometers (roughly 62 miles) uses 80 kWh of fuel. With a few of these numbers in mind, we can start to evaluate some of the recommendations that people make about energy. ...

In total, the European lifestyle uses 125 kWh per day per person for transport, heating, manufacturing, and electricity. That's equivalent to every person having 125 light bulbs switched on all the time. The average American uses 250 kWh per day: 250 light bulbs.

And most of this energy today comes from fossil fuels. What are our post-fossil-fuel options?

Among the energy-saving options, two promising technology switches are the electrification of transportation (electric vehicles can be about four times as energy-efficient as standard fossil-fuel vehicles) and the use of electric-powered heat pumps to deliver winter heating and hot water (heat pumps can be four times as energy-efficient as standard heaters).

Among all the energy-supply technologies, the three with the biggest potential today are solar power, wind power and nuclear power.

As a thought-experiment, let's imagine that technology switches and lifestyle changes manage to halve American energy consumption to 125 kWh per day per person. How big would the solar, wind and nuclear facilities need to be to supply this halved consumption? For simplicity, let's imagine getting one-third of the energy supply from each.

To supply 42 kWh per day per person from solar power requires roughly 80 square meters per person of solar panels.

To deliver 42 kWh per day per person from wind for everyone in the United States would require wind farms with a total area roughly equal to the area of California, a 200-fold increase in United States wind power.

To get 42 kWh per day per person from nuclear power would require 525 one-gigawatt nuclear power stations, a roughly five-fold increase over today's levels.

I hope these numbers convey the scale of action required to put in place a sustainable energy solution.

via Commentary: Let's get real about alternative energy - CNN.com.

Romania Targets Moon with Balloon-Launched Ball

Nearly 40 years after Americans first set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969 with NASA's historic Apollo 11 flight, a host of private rocketeers are hoping to follow to win a $30 million prize. Here, SPACE.com looks at ARCA, one of 17 teams competing in the Google Lunar X Prize:

Former X Prize contenders such as the Romanian team ARCA could have called it a day when Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X Prize on Oct. 4, 2004. Instead, ARCA hopes to build on its previous effort to reach the moon and win the Google Lunar X Prize and even more prize money.

"We have the experience now, we have the know-how, we have a list of companies that can help us, we have connections," said Bogdan Sburlea, ARCA (Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association) project manager. "We already have some technology from the previous competition."

That tested technology includes a balloon that can carry ARCA's European Lunar Explorer (ELE) space probe into the upper atmosphere, eliminating the need for a traditional launch pad and allowing ARCA to launch close to the equator from a sea platform. The "0" pressure balloon design is similar to a giant black hot-air balloon that uses solar energy to heat the air inside, instead of the burner that normal hot-air balloons use.

Once the balloon soars above 11 miles (18 km), the three-stage rocket slung below will fire and boost itself into low Earth orbit. ELE will then travel to the moon and deploy its Lunar Lander, which resembles a knobby rubber ball that uses its own rocket engine to ensure a soft landing.

The Google Lunar X Prize requires teams to land a robot on the moon, move at least 1,640 feet (500 meters) and beam high definition views back to Earth. ARCA's round lander would skim the lunar surface using its rocket engine.

Unlike some teams with plans for lunar rovers or crawlers, ARCA sprang for the easiest lunar lander they could design. The team's focus is on getting to the moon, as opposed to what happens once they get there.

"Our design for the lander is extremely simple, it's a sphere," Sburlea said. "It's too complicated, too expensive to build a robot."

via Romania Targets Moon with Balloon-Launched Ball - Yahoo! News.

Opposites attract in human search for mate

When it comes to choosing a mate, opposites really do attract, according to a Brazilian study that found people are subconsciously more likely to choose a partner whose genetic make-up is different to their own.

They found evidence that married couples are more likely to have genetic differences in a DNA region governing the immune system than were randomly matched pairs.

This was likely to be an evolutionary strategy to ensure healthy reproduction because genetic variability is an advantage for offspring, Maria da Graca Bicalho and her colleagues at the University of Parana in Brazil reported.

"Although it may be tempting to think that humans choose their partners because of their similarities, our research has shown clearly that it is differences that make for successful reproduction, and that the subconscious drive to have healthy children is important when choosing a mate," Bicalho said in a statement.

Scientists said it was not clear what signals attract the body to people who are genetically dissimilar to themselves, but suggested body odor or even face structure could play a role.

Many researchers have found evidence than animals are attracted to members of the opposite sex with differences in major histocompatibility complex or MHC, an immune system factor that also plays a role in having healthy offspring.

Bicalho, who will present her findings at a conference of the European Society of Human Genetics in Vienna on Monday, said the team compared genetic data from 90 married couples with data from 152 randomly generated control couples.

They found the real couples had significantly more dissimilarities in MHC.

"Parents with dissimilar (genetic regions) could provide their offspring with a better chance to ward infections off because their immune system genes are more diverse," they wrote in a summary prepared for the meeting.

via Opposites attract in human search for mate - Yahoo! News.

'Slumdog' filmmakers meet poor kid stars in Mumbai

The makers of "Slumdog Millionaire" met the film's two impoverished child stars on Wednesday and reassured them they will soon have new homes. But the father of one of the children stormed out, saying the filmmakers have not done enough to help.

Rubina Ali, 9, and Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, 10, both lost their homes this month after city authorities demolished parts of their slum in Mumbai. Rubina has been staying with relatives and Azhar has been living in a makeshift shanty of tarps and blankets with his parents.

"We've been trying for a long time to move them into legal accommodation," director Danny Boyle told reporters at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences on the outskirts of Mumbai, where he and producer Christian Colson met the children and their families.

Relations between the filmmakers and the children's families have grown tense since the phenomenal success of the film, which grossed more than $326 million.

The filmmakers set up a trust aimed at ensuring the children get proper homes, a decent education, a monthly stipend and a nest egg when they finish high school. They have pledged to spend up to $100,000 to buy the two families new apartments and have donated $747,500 to a charity to help slum children across Mumbai.

Colson has described the trust as substantial, but will not tell anyone how much it contains — not even the children's parents — for fear of making the youngsters vulnerable to exploitation.

Nirja Mattoo, who helps oversee the children's trust, said a new home has been found for Azhar's family near to his school and neighborhood. "We are finalizing the deal. Next week it should be done," she said.

The hunt for Rubina's house continues, she added.

But Rafiq Qureshi, Rubina's father, said Boyle has not done enough.

"It's no big deal for them, this kind of money. It's been five or six months we've been living in such difficulty. They should help us," he said in an interview after he cut the meeting short in anger.

"After the Oscars they forgot about us," he added. "For two months we didn't get any money."

Mattoo declined to comment on Qureshi's behavior.

via 'Slumdog' filmmakers meet poor kid stars in Mumbai - Yahoo! News.

Ex-schools trustee gets probation in ketchup theft

A former school board trustee from Southern California has been sentenced to two years of informal probation for stealing a bottle of ketchup from a college dining area.

Orange County Superior Court Judge Jacki Brown on Tuesday also ordered Steve Rocco to pay about $200 in fines and stay 100 yards away from the college.

Rocco was convicted by a jury last month of misdemeanor petty theft for stealing a 14-ounce bottle of ketchup from a Chapman University dining area.

The eccentric former Orange Unified School District trustee known for espousing conspiracy theories claims authorities planted the ketchup near his bicycle to make it look like a theft when he was recycling the bottle.

He says he will appeal.

via Ex-schools trustee gets probation in ketchup theft - Yahoo! News.

Inserted gene passed along to monkey offspring

Scientists have shown that transgenic monkeys can pass a newly acquired gene along to their offspring, a "milestone" for creating animals with versions of human diseases for medical research.

While researchers have long created transgenic mice and other animals by giving them extra genetic material, monkeys offer a promising avenue for medical studies because of their similarity to humans.

Researchers have added genes to rhesus macaques before, but the new work with marmosets is the first to document that monkeys can pass an inserted gene along to future generations. That's important because it opens the door to creating colonies of such "transgenic" monkeys by breeding, which would be far simpler than the cumbersome process of making each animal from scratch by inserting genes into embryos.

The work is reported in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature by scientists at the Central Institute for Experimental Animals in Kawasaki, Japan, and elsewhere in that country.

The researchers plan to use transgenic marmosets to study such conditions as Parkinson's disease and Lou Gehrig's disease, or ALS, a statement from the institute said.

Anthony Chan of the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta said the result boosts his confidence that his transgenic macaques will also pass along their added genes to offspring, once they become old enough to reproduce.

For the study, the researchers used a gene that makes tissues glow under ultraviolet light, as an easy way to see where the gene is present. They put the gene in a virus that would insert it into the DNA of cells, and then injected the virus into marmoset embryos. From these embryos, five healthy marmosets were born. All showed evidence of having inherited the gene.

Later, one of those animals fathered a male by test-tube fertilization. The gene was shown to be active in the offspring's skin.

via Inserted gene passed along to monkey offspring - Yahoo! News.

Space storm caught slamming into Earth's atmosphere

A space storm has been observed exploding from a central point in Earth's upper atmosphere for the first time. The result could one day lead to better predictions of the storms, which can harm satellites and power grids on the ground.

The energy that powers space storms comes from clouds of plasma hurled at Earth by the sun. These clouds stretch our planet's magnetic field like a rubber band, storing energy in a long magnetic tail behind our planet.

The energy released when the field snaps back into place creates the ethereal glow of auroras (see a gallery of the light shows). It also floods the space around our planet with radiation that can incapacitate satellites and sicken astronauts, and can trigger electric currents on Earth capable of knocking out power gridsMovie Camera.

Now, scientists have obtained the clearest view yet of the energy that was released in the magnetic tail arriving and initiating a disturbance in Earth's upper atmosphere, or ionosphere.

via Space storm caught slamming into Earth's atmosphere - space - 26 May 2009 - New Scientist.

How I avoided two painful and expensive dental procedures

When it comes to your health, don't trust just one expert's view. Consult several. Keep looking until you find the best option.

I was told about a year ago that I needed a deep cleaning which would involve two dental visits and 11 shots to get me numb each time. I broke a tooth below the gum line and on the part that came out, I could see tartar (aka calculus), hard rough spots of different colored "stuff" clinging to my broken tooth.

Meanwhile, I got sick for about a month and I had swollen glands in my neck. From these symptoms, I believed I had an infection due to build up below the gum line. This is very common in adults after a certain age.

On a whim, I googled the phrase "dissolve tartar". To my pleasant surprise, I found a solution to avoid a deep cleaning: Periogen! No tartar = no gum disease = no need for a deep cleaning.

Today, after a month of Periogen use and a few weeks of CoQ10 use, I finally had my exam--along with an ordinary dental cleaning.

RESULTS: I was told by the hygienist today that my gums look very healthy. He only found one small spot with any plaque, and said that I am very far from needing the "root scaling and planing" procedure, also known as a deep cleaning. My pocket depths were all 2's and 3's with two 4 millimeter readings back near where I had my wisdom teeth out.

Note: To avoid bias, I did not tell him that another dentist had recommended a deep cleaning until after I had the results.

Either Periogen did remove the tartar as it claims and did fix my gums (the CoQ10 I've been taking for a few weeks may have helped too)  or I previously had a dentist who was recommending a procedure I did not need. (This is the same dentist who told me I had worn down a tooth by flossing too much. I still do not think ordinary floss can damage a tooth with normal flossing, even if you saw back and forth for a minute a day... which I didn't anyway...)

Back to my main point: Hats off to Perigen!! Healthy Gums!! No shots required!!! Not only did I have a good dental check up, but I believe that by removing the breeding grounds for gum disease bacteria, I am also improving my overall general health.

Here is how Periogen dissolves tarter:

Periogen® works by exploiting a weakness discovered by The Periogen Company in the fundamental structure of oral tartar.  Their patent pending composition and process is exclusive and cannot be found in any other gum disease treatment in the world.  All other treatments only address infections below the gum line.  Periogen® however, addresses infection and also dissolves layer after layer of disease-laden tartar with each application.

The number of Periogen® applications necessary to remove all tartar depends directly on the thickness of deposits.  Once tartar is completely removed from teeth below the gum line, natural processes restore gum-tooth connections and close periodontal pockets.  This simple and painless process facilitates complete periodontal recovery without the need for painful, expensive, and often ineffective tartar removal dental office procedures.

Tartar, above and below the gum line, is comprised primarily of calcium phosphate salts, saliva, debris and other minerals.  Visually, the structure of tartar is that of millions of fossilized bacteria bound together in tens of thousands of layers.  Up until now, tartar has been universally understood to be inert - so hard that only mechanical scraping with steel dental instruments could remove it.  Living within this porous material are fresh bacteria that ferment infection after infection.  This tartar-bacteria connection is the true nature of periodontal disease.

Periogen® does not dissolve the hardened tartar directly, but acts to dissolve the binding agents – the “cement” which holds fossilized bacteria and debris together.  Microscopic study of Periogen® in action shows that thousands of individual fossilized bacteria disconnect and float free from cemented-together tartar “communities” with each application.  Each application is as effective as the last, until tartar is dissolved into its most fundamental microscopic components.

All the while during this innovative, alternative treatment, new bacteria simply have no place to live – so infections disperse and do not return - completely naturally - without the use of powerful anti-bacterial agents.  In fact, Periogen® users can expect relief from the pain, bleeding and soreness of periodontal disease within the first few days of use.

Once periodontal pockets close to within 3 millimeters or so in depth, normal brushing and irrigating (or flossing) can maintain your newly restored dental health.  As an option, patients may continue to irrigate with Periogen® over the long-term to prevent tartar from accumulating above and below the gum line.  It has been reported that during such maintenance periods including Periogen,® routine dental visits are tartar-free and “most enjoyable.”

http://www.globaltonic.com/pages/how-periogen-works.html

One more tip: Avoid Crown Lengthening with Laser Dentistry

I also recently avoided another recommended painful and disfiguring surgical procedure known as a crown lengthening by finding a laser dentist who could cut away the gums enough to work around the one tooth. I believe this is known as laser de-epithelialization. This was just one visit to the laser dentist and did not involve lowering my gums, exposing roots of other teeth, or filing down my jaw bone.

It was slightly gross to have my gums burned away around the tooth, and it was sensitive for a week or more, but SO much better than the alternative which I learned about in detail by consulting a periodontist.

I understand the Periodontist's explanation that a smooth surface is required for good attachment and to avoid future decay, but if the laser works, you save a huge amount of pain, money and future discomfort from exposure of the roots of your nearby teeth!

The good thing about the laser is that it encourages regrowth of Keratinized Gingiva the tough gum tissue that attaches to your teeth and protects the roots.

If the crown lengthening is done with laser therapy instead of the traditional surgical intervention, the healing will tend to be quicker and the procedure will have less swelling and discomfort as a rule. Not all lasers are appropriate for this procedure. - tgs