real-aliens.com » flight

NASA’s History Captured In Awesome Photograph Collection

Tom McFay — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 07:08:00 +0000

As a teaser, we’ve showcased the Gossamer Penguin, an experimental solar-powered aircraft cruising above a dry lakebed at NASA Dryden’s Flight Research Center in July 1979 -one of many strange, woot images of NASA’s early days. The images come from…

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NASA’s History Captured In Awesome Photograph Collection

The Daily Flash -Eco, Space, Tech (9/02)

Tom McFay — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 07:04:00 +0000

New Technique Finds Gaseous Metals in Exoplanet Atmospheres A previously undetected element has been found in the atmospheres of two different extrasolar planets. Using a new technique at a new telescope, two separate groups of exoplanet scientists have discovered potassium…

The Human Species: "Recycling the Big Bang"

Tom McFay — Tue, 04 May 2010 08:30:00 +0000

John C. Mather, a Senior Astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and a Nobel Laureate, explained the creation of the universe and the re-cycling of star matter to create the human species to a packed house at Princeton University’s…

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The Human Species: "Recycling the Big Bang"

NASA’s New Mission: Will It Launch Space-Age "Microsofts & Googles"?

Tom McFay — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 09:00:00 +0000

If the Obama’s new NASA plan survives the congressional wringer of hearings, markups, amendments and votes in anything like its present form, it will mark a radical transformation of the our space program from the emphasis on the development and operations of launch vehicles and spacecraft, focused on traveling to specific destinations to the development of capabilities and technologies needed for future exploration to a variety of destinations, while also supporting the development of a commercial infrastructure to handle more routine operations. In short, the new Obama NASA strategy will do for space what the shift from a DARPA-funded government-centric computer industry of the 70s and early 80’s to an entrepreurial private sector strategy did for the computer industry, spawning the WWW, Apple, Intel, Google, and Microsoft. The shift from government-funded to private launched the US as the world’s innovation leader. In supporting this radical shift, the Augustine committee pointed out that they would require at least $50 billion more over the next 10 years in order for NASA to get back to the moon. And then we would get there about a decade late, and all the money was going into one massive effort. “Events such as the flight of “SpaceShipOne” and current work on commercial human suborbital/orbital flight systems herald a ‘New Space’ era,” said Dr Charles Lurio, publisher of “The Lurio Report” which covers the new private space sector. “Commercial activities could expand to produce economic benefits in rivalry to the IT/web revolution. “The Cold War era ‘moon race’ linked space to a government framework and a public mindset that effectively prohibited developing practical spaceflight abilities for people and cargo. Only comsat – type space businesses could succeed, since radio signals provide their own transportation to and from orbit.” This is exactly why the rise of the US private space sector is so vital and so timely. While critics and status-quo members of congress are lining up to attack the program, US entrepreneurs from Jeff Bezos to Tesla and Space X’s Elon Musk to Microsoft’s Paul Allen, are heading at full steam into our space future. With international partners in abundance including the space programs in Canada, Japan, Europe and India along with other countries, the US space program is preparing for an exciting dynamic future. “The US space program is not atrophying, quite the opposite. The newly proposed NASA budget and program will create the opportunity for the private sector to do for space what it did for computers: massively reduce costs and similarly increase capabilities,” said Dr Charles Lurio, publisher of “The Lurio Report” which covers the new private space sector. The money flows from the vast stimulus effort that the US government has activated over the past few months and is part of the US $6 billion, five-year effort to make sustained commercial spaceflight a reality. “New and small companies will benefit enormously in the process, like Colorado-based Sierra Nevada Corp, which alone was awarded $20 million to continue development of its “Dream Chaser” manned space capsule, and Washington State-based Blue Origin which was awarded almost $4 million for various projects, including research on the use of composite materials in space,” writes Peter J. Brown in Asia Times.” Another small company on the list is Arizona-based Paragon Space Development Corp, which is pursuing various space mission support systems and receiving $1.4 million to do so. “Boeing, a veteran contractor for NASA, received $18 million to create a seven-person space capsule and a joint venture involving Boeing and Lockheed Martin known as the United Launch Alliance will use almost $7 million for systems in support of future Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rocket flights. “It is important to note that two pioneering US private space sector companies, California-based Space Exploration Technologies and Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp, are moving ahead rapidly thanks to the $3.5 billion that they have already been awarded for International Space Station support missions,” Brown added. “Is the private sector likely to have failures? Yes. Will lives be lost? Most regrettably, that may happen at some time or other. But NASA has had tragic losses for decades, without substantially overcoming fundamental safety issues – just as they haven’t reduced cost,” wrote Lurio in his most recent report. “The private sector would pursue multiple paths to orbit in parallel, respond more quickly to fix system flaws, and must strive constantly towards making space flight ever-safer to enable and expand its own new, private markets.” “The proposed R&D work has several sections which themselves appear geared to both benefit from and encourage ‘a thousand flowers blooming’ in the New Space industry,” wrote Lurio, who added, “The fight for changes at NASA has barely begun.” Casey Kazan via Asia Times Image Credit: Thanks to our friends at freakingnews.com

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NASA’s New Mission: Will It Launch Space-Age "Microsofts & Googles"?

Solar Dynamics Observatory: Will It Be Able to Predict Massive Solar Tsunamis?

Tom McFay — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 08:48:00 +0000

The Atlas V roared to life last Thursday morning to send the Solar Dynamics Observatory into space on its mission to evaluate the complex mechanisms of the sun. This past November, NASA’s orbiting STEREO satellites confirmed the existence of solar mega-tsunamis when they captured height data after a sunspot erupted. The scale of this tsunami literally dwarfs the Earth’s diameter — it was 62,000 miles high and raced across the surface at 560,000 mph! STEREO A and B orbit 90 degrees apart and luckily, one was overhead while the other saw the eruption on the limb. This gave NASA scientists enough data to confirm the tsunami wasn’t a shadow, solving a modern solar mystery The new SDO spacecraft is in a circularized geosynchronous orbit at about 22,300 miles. From that altitude, the spacecraft will relay the readings instantly to a ground station in New Mexico. The research is expected to reveal the sun’s inner workings by constantly taking high resolution images, collecting readings from inside the sun and measuring its magnetic field activity. This data is expected to give researchers the insight they need to eventually predict solar storms and other activity on the sun that can affect spacecraft in orbit, astronauts on the International Space Station and electronic and other systems on Earth. Solar flares rise and fall on an 11-year cycle, and last year marked what scientists thought was the solar minimum. Through the beginning of 2009, the sun stayed unusually quiet, but all that changed, when a major sunspot appeared on the backside of the sun, where it was captured by NASA’s STEREO instrument. Just as earthquakes can set off huge tsunami waves on the surface of our oceans, a coronal mass ejection or flare can cause a tsunami on the Sun’s surface—and it did on May 19, 2007. The waves generated by the explosions can travel at over a million kilometers per hour. The event was captured by NASA’s twin Stereo spacecraft and was observed by a team at Trinity College, Dublin. The event lasted for about 35 minutes and ultimately covered almost the full disk of the Sun. The energy released in these explosions is phenomenal, about two billion times the annual world energy consumption in just a fraction of a second. A previous observation of a solar tsunami was recorded by the SOHO spacecraft almost a decade ago but these images were misleading to scientists. Theorists were unable to match the anticipated behaviors of the tsunami to the observation because theory suggested that the solar tsunamis would travel much faster than observed. According to their calculations, tsunamis on the Sun should have had phenomenal speed due to the influence of the Sun’s magnetic field on the solar material—making the waves magneto-acoustical in nature. With the improved capabilities of the Stereo’s Extreme Ultraviolent Imager (EUVI) instruments they in fact measured speeds in agreement with the theory. In addition, by monitoring the Sun at four wavelengths which penetrate different layers of the Sun’s atmosphere, astronomers could see how the wave moved vertically as well as horizontally. “We were able to show for the first time that this wave actually propagates almost all the way from the surface of the Sun to high up in the Sun’s atmosphere,” said Dr. Gallagher. The researchers even saw the pressure wave reflect and refract off different regions of the Sun’s atmosphere exactly as Earth’s tsunami’s do as they crash against land. a rogue flare, a solar tsunami of 100 times a normal flare would release the energy equivalent of billions of hydrogen bombs and spew into space hundred of billions of tons of murderous gamma rays that could overwhelm the natural defenses of the Earth’s magnetosphere and atmosphere and zap all living creatures in its path. And mostly the most fascinating fact about this gruesome scenario is that it would leave no, zero, trace in history. The solar cycle, or the solar magnetic activity cycle, is the dynamical engine and energy source behind all solar phenomena driving space weather. “This recent sunspot activity is like the first robin of spring,” said solar physicist Douglas Biesecker of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. “In this case, it’s an early omen of solar storms that will gradually increase over the next few years.” As for “real life consequences,” a high period of solar activity – expected during the solar cycles peak in 2011/12 – plays havoc with much of the electrical equipment here on Earth. GPS signals, power grids, cell phones, civilian and airline communications, military communications and a whole lot more are just waiting to fritz out due to increased solar activity. An example of such an outage came in 1989, in Canada’s province of Quebec, when thanks to a major solar storm, the entire provinces power-grid was knocked offline. “Our growing dependence on highly sophisticated, space-based technologies means we are far more vulnerable to space weather today than in the past,” said Vice Admiral Conrad C. Lautenbacher, Jr., undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator. “NOAA’s space weather monitoring and forecasts are critical for the nation’s ability to function smoothly during solar disturbances.” The only reason that Earth experiences these issues though is due to the increased activity, during what is called a Solar Maximum. The rest of the time, our planet’s magnetic field protects us from the odd solar burp. On January 20th, 2005… a giant sunspot named “NOAA 720″ exploded. The blast sparked an X-class solar flare, the most powerful kind, and hurled a billion-ton cloud of electrified gas (a “coronal mass ejection”) into space. Solar protons accelerated to nearly light speed by the explosion reached the Earth-Moon system minutes after the flare–the beginning of a days-long “proton storm.” “The Moon is totally exposed to solar flares,” explains solar physicist David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center. “It has no atmosphere or magnetic field to deflect radiation.” Protons rushing at the Moon simply hit the ground–or whoever might be walking around outside. “An astronaut caught outside when the storm hit would’ve gotten sick,” says Francis Cucinotta, NASA’s radiation health officer at the Johnson Space Center. At first, he’d feel fine, but a few days later symptoms of radiation sickness would appear: vomiting, fatigue, low blood counts. These symptoms might persist for days. On Earth, no one suffered because the planet’s thick atmosphere and magnetic field protects us from protons and other forms of solar radiation. In fact, the storm was good. When the plodding coronal mass ejection arrived 36 hours later and hit Earth’s magnetic field, sky watchers in Europe saw the brightest and most stunning auroras in years. But a rogue solar flare tsunami might be a different story: Since we’ve only been tracking solar flares since the beginning of the Space Age, we have no real idea of how massive solar flares can become. A solar flare occurs when magnetic energy that has built up in the solar atmosphere is suddenly released. Radiation is emitted across virtually the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves at the long wavelength end, through optical emission to x-rays and gamma rays at the short wavelength end. The amount of energy released from a single flare is the equivalent of millions of 100-megaton hydrogen bombs exploding simultaneously! With a natural cycle averaging out at approximately 11 years, the sun is typically a storm of flares and sun-spots the size of planets, causing electromagnetic havoc and radiation problems within its sphere of influence. That influence can reach all the way to earth, and will often trouble astronauts who have to deal with the heightened levels of radiation as they patrol the skies. Posted by Casey Kazan with Dr. Chandra Walker Source Links: http://www.physics.tcd.ie/Astrophysics/tsunami/ http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/stereoimages/195SolarTsunami.shtml http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7326097.stm http://nam2008.qub.ac.uk/press/2008-15- http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sdo/main/index.html

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Solar Dynamics Observatory: Will It Be Able to Predict Massive Solar Tsunamis?

SETI Invites Citizens of the World Join in the Search for ET

Tom McFay — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 08:45:00 +0000

SETI has just invited the citizens of the world to join the search for extraterrestrial life. All you need to do is log on to the new SETIQuest.org site. SETIQuest is the result of astronomer Jill Tarter’s TED Prize wish. Tarter wished that they would “empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company”. With SETIQuest, the TED Conference and Tarter are making that happen. The website will make vast amounts of SETI data available to the public, making the SETI Institute’s signal-detection algorithm an open source code, inviting brilliant coders and amateur techies to tweak it and take it to new levels of discovery: “Today we do a very good job at finding very narrowband signals buried deep in noise – a good guess for what a deliberately transmitted signal might look like. But we have only limited sensitivity to signals that are more complex. With available cloud storage and processing resources, we can provide digital signal processing experts and students with a lot of raw data from the ATA and invite them to develop new algorithms that can find other types of signals that we are now missing. We’ll take the best of those algorithms and work with the designer and the OS developers to make them run in real-time so that we can add them to our observational quiver. “And finally for everyone else that doesn’t happen to have coding or algorithmic skills, we’d like to involve you by using your eyes to find anomalous patterns in data coming from the ATA. These patterns aren’t ones we can define right now, or develop algorithms to detect, but your eyes and your brain can find them anyway. True, most of these anomalies will turn out to be interference generated by terrestrial technologies, but we want you to become part of a global community that can rapidly sort through all the possibilities and perhaps turn up that needle we’ve all been seeking.” So, non-coding “Citizen scientists” can visually search the data for anything that looks like something other than white noise. Should you spot something anomalous, you can alert the global community. If enough citizen scientists agree that something looks like a real ET signal, their collective concern will direct SETI’s telescopes to zoom in on the signal source. This time, the “WOW!” might just be the real thing. Casey Kazan via SETI.org

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SETI Invites Citizens of the World Join in the Search for ET

The Daily Flash -Eco, Space, Tech (2/10)

Tom McFay — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 08:04:00 +0000

If Google Wave Is The Future, Google Buzz Is The Present Google has a problem. Despite having their hands in just about everything online, they’ve never been able to tackle what is a key part of the fabric of the web: social. Yes, they have Orkut and OpenSocial, but no one actually uses them. Okay, some people use them, but not in the meaningful social ways that people use Facebook or even Twitter. Today, Google may have just solved their social problem. Google Buzz is easily the company’s boldest attempt yet to build a social network. Imagine taking elements of Twitter, Yammer, Foursquare, Yelp, and other social services, and shoving them together into one package. Now imagine covering that package in a layer that looks a lot like FriendFeed. Now imagine shoving that package inside of Gmail. That’s Buzz. If Google Wave is the future, Google Buzz is the present. Did Giant Meteorites Slam Earth Around A.D. 500? Pieces of a giant asteroid or comet that broke apart over Earth may have crashed off Australia about 1,500 years ago, says a scientist who has found evidence of the possible impact craters. Satellite measurements of the Gulf of Carpentaria (see map) revealed tiny changes in sea level that are signs of impact craters on the seabed below, according to new research by marine geophysicist Dallas Abbott. Based on the satellite data, one crater should be about 11 miles (18 kilometers) wide, while the other should be 7.4 miles (12 kilometers) wide. For years Abbott, of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, has argued that V-shaped sand dunes along the gulf coast are evidence of a tsunami triggered by an impact. “These dunes are like arrows that point toward their source,” Abbott said. In this case, the dunes converge on a single point in the gulf—the same spot where Abbott found the two sea-surface depressions. Google developing a translator for smartphone Google is developing a translator for its Android smartphones that aims to almost instantly translate from one spoken language to another during phone calls. Head of translation services at Google, Franz Och, said he believed almost instant speech-to-speech translation should be possible if the accuracy of voice recognition and machine translation can be improved. He said Google is working on this, and he expected the technology to “work reasonably well” in a few years. Google’s system would analyze speech in the same way as a human interpreter, listening to a package of speech to gather the full meaning before it attempts to translate. It will improve in accuracy the more it is used. What Apple and Amazon Job Ads Reveal About the iPad-Kindle Battle Ahead Both Amazon and Apple have new advertisements for job openings at their companies that, if you read into the details just a little, give away many a detail on the upcoming Kindle versus iPad conflict. It’s going to be very interesting. First up, and most surprising if you’re an e-ink fanatic, is that one of Amazon’s new jobs is for a “hardware display manager.” That title isn’t particularly revealing, but get this: The specific expertise Amazon’s looking for–at a senior level–is in “the LCD business” where you must know the “key players in the market.” There are also two different advertisements for experts in wireless technology. At Last, a Flight Check-In System That Doesn’t Suck ITA, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, company that is set to introduce a new system that could revolutionize the business of flying you from point A to point B and make life easier not just for you but also for ticket agents and airline execs. This summer, after five years of development and testing, Air Canada is set to implement the first phase of the program, tentatively dubbed the Passenger Services System (PSS). Founded by MIT alums in the mid-1990s, the firm had its first hit in 2001, when it became the search backbone for Orbitz. Its software now powers two-thirds of all online flight sales in the United States and provides pricing info for leading travel sites including Kayak and Hotwire. “ITA uses really smart tech and algorithms to bring back fast and accurate data,” says Krista Pappas, head of business development for travel at Microsoft’s Bing, another data partner. “It has a unique ability to put together results in a fast, efficient, and accurate way.”

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The Daily Flash -Eco, Space, Tech (2/10)

Supernova-Black Hole Duo Found in Distant Spiral Galaxy

Tom McFay — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:00:00 +0000

Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have detected a stellar-mass black hole much farther away than any other previously known in a spiral galaxy called NGC 300, six million light-years from Earth. With a mass above fifteen times that of the Sun and joined with a star that will soon become a supernova, then a black hole itself. This is also the second most massive stellar-mass black hole ever found. “This is the most distant stellar-mass black hole ever weighed, and it’s the first one we’ve seen outside our own galactic neighborhood, the Local Group,” says Paul Crowther, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Sheffield and lead author of the paper reporting the study. The black hole’s odd partner is a Wolf-Rayet star, which also has a mass of about twenty times as much as the Sun. Wolf-Rayet stars begin life as cosmic titans, but they live fast and die hard, exploding as supernova and blasting vast amounts of heavy elements into space for use in later generations of stars and planets before their cores implode to form black holes. Many astronomers believe that one of the most plausible reasons we have yet to detect intelligent life in the universe is due to the deadly effects of local supernova explosions that wipe out all life in a given region of a galaxy. While there is, on average, only one supernova per galaxy per century, there is something on the order of 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe. Taking 10 billion years for the age of the Universe (it’s actually 13.7 billion, but stars didn’t form for the first few hundred million), Dr. Richard Mushotzky of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, derived a figure of 1 billion supernovae per year, or 30 supernovae per second in the observable Universe! Certain rare stars -real killers -type 11 stars, are core-collapse hypernova that generate deadly gamma ray bursts (GRBs). These long burst objects release 1000 times the non-neutrino energy release of an ordinary “core-collapse” supernova. The stellar-mass black holes found in the Milky Way weigh up to ten times the mass of the Sun but, outside our own galaxy, they may just be “minor-league players,” since astronomers have found another black hole with a mass over fifteen times the mass of the Sun. In 2007, an X-ray instrument aboard NASA’s Swift observatory scrutinised the surroundings of the brightest X-ray source in NGC 300 discovered earlier with the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory. “We recorded periodic, extremely intense X-ray emission, a clue that a black hole might be lurking in the area,” explains team member Stefania Carpano from ESA. Thanks to new observations performed with the FORS2 instrument mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers have confirmed their earlier hunch. The new data show that the black hole and the Wolf-Rayet star dance around each other, with a period of about 32 hours. The astronomers found that the black hole is stripping matter away from the star as they orbit. It will take a few billion years, however, until the actual merger. “This is indeed a very ‘intimate’ couple,” notes collaborator Robin Barnard. “How such a tightly bound system has been formed is still a mystery.” Only one other system of this type has previously been seen, but other systems comprising a black hole and a companion star are not unknown to astronomers. Based on these systems, the astronomers see a connection between black hole mass and galactic chemistry. “We have noticed that the most massive black holes tend to be found in smaller galaxies that contain less ‘heavy’ chemical elements,” says Crowther. “Bigger galaxies that are richer in heavy elements, such as the Milky Way, only succeed in producing black holes with smaller masses.” Astronomers believe that a higher concentration of heavy chemical elements influences how a massive star evolves, increasing how much matter it sheds, resulting in a smaller black hole when the remnant finally collapses. In less than a million years, it will be the Wolf-Rayet star’s turn to go supernova and become a black hole. “If the system survives this second explosion, the two black holes will merge, emitting copious amounts of energy in the form of gravitational waves as they combine,” concludes Crowther. “Our study does however show that such systems might exist, and those that have already evolved into a binary black hole might be detected by probes of gravitational waves, such as LIGO or Virgo.” Casey Kazan via ESO Image Credit: Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

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Supernova-Black Hole Duo Found in Distant Spiral Galaxy

The Day Earth Survived Its Greatest Stellar Attack -Ever (A Weekend Classic)

Tom McFay — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 13:14:14 +0000

It came suddenly from the distant reaches of the Constellation Sagittarius, some 50,000 light years away. For a brief instant, a couple of tenths of a second, on December 27, 2004 an invisible burst of energy the equivalent of half a million years of sunlight shone on Earth. Many orbiting satellites electronics were zapped and the Earth’s upper atmosphere was amazingly ionized from a massive hit of gamma ray energy. The source of the invisible attack was a rare magnetar SGR 1806-20 on the other side of the Milky Way. These soft gamma ray repeaters, SGRs, occur when twisted magnetic fields attempt to re-align themselves and crack the magetar’s crust releasing the awesome burst or pulse of energy with a death-zone of a few light years. Magnetars have magnetic fields 1000 times those of ordinary pulsars -so powerful as to be lethal at a distance of 1000 kilometers. Atronomers have catalogued well over 1000 pulsars, and estimate the number of quiet netron stars to be vastly more at some 100 million given the 10-billion-year life of the Milky Way’s disk. The odds are that one is nearby, gliding sliently past Earth, of no danger. The tonest fraction of neutron stars have morphed into magnetars, be;ived to be the offspring of the most maasive stars, hypergiants that don’t have enough mass to evolve into black holes. Fortunately for Earth, the nearest GRB candidate seems to be thousands of light-years away. Maybe… Data from satellites and observatories around the globe showed a jet from a powerful stellar explosion witnessed on March 19, 2008 aimed almost directly at Earth. NASA’s Swift satellite detected the explosion – formally named GRB 080319B – at 2:13 a.m. EDT that morning and pinpointed its position in the constellation Bootes. The gamma-ray burst became bright enough for human eyes to see. Observations of the event are giving astronomers the most detailed portrait of a burst ever recorded. “Swift was designed to find unusual bursts,” said Swift principal investigator Neil Gehrels at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “We really hit the jackpot with this one.” In a paper that appeared in Nature, Judith Racusin of Penn State University and a team of 92 coauthors reported on observations across the spectrum that began 30 minutes before the explosion and followed its afterglow for months. The team concludes the burst’s extraordinary brightness arose from a jet that shot material directly toward Earth at 99.99995 percent the speed of light. At the same moment Swift saw the burst, the Russian KONUS instrument on NASA’s Wind satellite also sensed the gamma rays and provided a wide view of their spectral structure. A robotic wide-field optical camera called “Pi of the Sky” in Chile simultaneously captured the burst’s first visible light. Within the next 15 seconds, the burst brightened enough to be visible in a dark sky to human eyes. It briefly crested at a magnitude of 5.3 on the astronomical brightness scale. Incredibly, the dying star was 7.5 billion light-years away. Telescopes around the world already were studying the afterglow of another burst when GRB 080319B exploded just 10 degrees away. TORTORA, a robotic wide-field optical camera operated in Chile with Russian-Italian collaboration, also caught the early light. TORTORA’s rapid imaging provided the most detailed look yet at visible light associated with a burst’s initial gamma-ray blast. Immediately after the blast, Swift’s UltraViolet and Optical Telescope and X-Ray Telescope indicated they were effectively blinded. Racusin initially thought something was wrong. Within minutes, however, as reports from other observers arrived, it was clear this was a special event. Gamma-ray bursts are the universe’s most luminous explosions. Most occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As a star’s core collapses, it creates a black hole or neutron star that, through processes not fully understood, drive powerful gas jets outward. These jets punch through the collapsing star. As the jets shoot into space, they strike gas previously shed by the star and heat it. That generates bright afterglows. The team believes the jet directed toward Earth contained an ultra-fast component just 0.4 of a degree across. This core resided within a slightly less energetic jet about 20 times wider. “It’s this wide jet that Swift usually sees from other bursts,” Racusin explained. “Maybe every gamma-ray burst contains a narrow jet, too, but astronomers miss them because we don’t see them head-on.” Such an alignment occurs by chance only about once a decade, so a GRB 080319B was a rare catch. Source: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Casey Kazan

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The Day Earth Survived Its Greatest Stellar Attack -Ever (A Weekend Classic)

A Cure for the Common Cold? Geneticists Close to Cracking Code

Tom McFay — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 08:10:00 +0000

“We still can’t cure the common cold”, the rallying cry of anyone trying to belittle progress. You’ll notice that these people don’t live in caves, walk to work, die of smallpox or eat anything they caught themselves, but it makes them feel better to complain. And it makes us feel better to know they may soon be wrong, as a team of genetics researchers target the entire common cold genome. One reason it’s so hard to cure the common cold isn’t the scientist’s fault – it’s the non-scientists who insist on calling it “common”. There is no single virus causing the sickness, rather a family of thousands of mutating rhinoviruses evolved from at least fifteen separate ancestor strains. The little buggers can mutate hundreds of times to avoid detection by the immune system, are known to skip steps that other infections need, and can even recombine whole sections of genome when more than one cold strain infects the same unlucky person. Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are taking a bigger-picture approach to the problem – instead of targeting tiny parts of some strains, which the cold can just evolve out of, they’re mapping a huge number of entire genomes. They’ve already added ninety new genome sequences to the recorded data, as well as brand new insights about the rhinovirus mutation system. The plan is that this data should highlight hot-spots of mutation and, more importantly, vital RNA sections which resist such changes and can then be targeted with a mix of anti-viral drugs. So the next time you’re struck low with sniffles, keep warm with this thought: millions of dollars in genomics technology is targeting your passengers for destruction. Posted by Luke McKinney. Cracking the Code of the Common Cold

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A Cure for the Common Cold? Geneticists Close to Cracking Code