Astronomers discover planet made of diamond

August 28, 2011

Astronomers have spotted an exotic planet that seems to be made of diamond racing around a tiny star in our galactic backyard.
The new planet is far denser than any other known so far and consists largely of carbon. Because it is so dense, scientists calculate the carbon must be crystalline, so a large part of this strange world will effectively be diamond.

"The evolutionary history and amazing density of the planet all suggest it is comprised of carbon -- i.e. a massive diamond orbiting a neutron star every two hours in an orbit so tight it would fit inside our own Sun," said Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.

Lying 4,000 light years away, or around an eighth of the way toward the center of the Milky Way from the Earth, the planet is probably the remnant of a once-massive star that has lost its outer layers to the so-called pulsar star it orbits.

Pulsars are tiny, dead neutron stars that are only around 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) in diameter and spin hundreds of times a second, emitting beams of radiation.

In the case of pulsar J1719-1438, the beams regularly sweep the Earth and have been monitored by telescopes in Australia, Britain and Hawaii, allowing astronomers to detect modulations due to the gravitational pull of its unseen companion planet.

The measurements suggest the planet, which orbits its star every two hours and 10 minutes, has slightly more mass than Jupiter but is 20 times as dense, Bailes and colleagues reported in the journal Science on Thursday.

In addition to carbon, the new planet is also likely to contain oxygen, which may be more prevalent at the surface and is probably increasingly rare toward the carbon-rich center.

Its high density suggests the lighter elements of hydrogen and helium, which are the main constituents of gas giants like Jupiter, are not present.

Just what this weird diamond world is actually like close up, however, is a mystery.

"In terms of what it would look like, I don't know I could even speculate," said Ben Stappers of the University of Manchester. "I don't imagine that a picture of a very shiny object is what we're looking at here."

Chicago Public Schools Recess: CEO Jean-Claude Brizard Says It Will Be Mandatory In 2012

August, 2011: The head of the Chicago Public Schools announced on a call-in radio program Monday night that he'd advocate for the return of mandatory recess at elementary schools around the city, marking a victory for parent advocacy groups that have been fighting for it for years.
CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard said on WBEZ that he valued playtime for younger students, and that he would have enforced the mandate for this coming year if he'd been in office longer. Brizard was named to his current post in April of this year, coming over from Rochester Public Schools.
"We came in too late to actually push for a city-wide mandate for this fall," he said, "so we have quite a few more schools pushing recess during the school day for this coming fall. But by next fall, all schools - all elementary schools in the city - will have recess."
As of now, only 42 percent of schools have any recess at all: a mere 15 percent hold it outdoors, while 27 percent have recess in the classroom, according to a recent Chicago Sun-Times story.
Huffington Post Chicago wrote in May that CPS had asked schools to consider re-instating recess individually. Patricia O'Keefe of Raise Your Hand, a pro-recess coalition, was excited at the victory. "We're thrilled that we're going to finally stop depriving children of physical activity and the social time they deserve to be more productive members of society," she told the Chicago Tribune at the time.
And Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis came out in favor of recess as well, calling it a "win-win" in a conversation with the Sun-Times.
With Brizard's blessing, the remaining 58 percent of elementaries without recess should join the fold starting in the 2012-2013 school year. With the CEO and the city's mayor, Rahm Emanuel, still pushing for a longer instructional day, some advocates say that there will be diminishing returns on those academic hours unless the students are given rest and play-time during the day.

'Pink Or Blue' Test Detects Baby's Gender At 7 Weeks

CHICAGO -- Is it a boy or a girl? New research shows that a simple blood test in mothers-to-be can answer that question with surprising accuracy at about seven weeks.
Though not widely offered by U.S. doctors, gender-detecting blood tests have been sold online to consumers for the past few years. Their promises of early and accurate results prompted genetics researchers to take a closer look.
Researchers analyzed 57 published studies of gender testing done in rigorous research or academic settings – though not necessarily the same methods or conditions used by direct-to-consumer firms.
The results suggest blood tests could be a breakthrough for women at risk of having babies with certain diseases. But the study also raises concerns about couples using such tests for gender selection and abortion.

Massive Solar Flares' Effects Arriving On Earth

August 5, 2011: WASHINGTON -- The impact of a series of eruptions on the sun began arriving at Earth on Friday and could affect some communications for a day or so.Operators of electrical grids are working to avoid outages, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says some satellite communications and Global Positioning Systems could face problems.
Three solar flares erupted on the sun starting Tuesday, and the strongest electromagnetic shocks were being felt Friday by the ACE spacecraft, a satellite that measures radiation bursts a few minutes before they strike Earth, said Joseph Kunches, a scientist at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo.
Tom Bogdan, director of the center, said the sun is going from a quiet period into a busier cycle for solar flares and an increase in the number of such blasts is expected over the next three to five years.
Solar flares send out bursts of electromagnetic energy that strike the Earth's magnetic field. The most common impacts for the average person are the glowing auroras around the north and south poles, and the researchers said those could be visible this weekend.
The magnetic blasts, which Bogdan likened to a tsunami in space, can also affect electronic communications and electrical systems. A 1989 solar flare knocked out the electrical systems in Quebec, Canada, but the current solar storm is not expected to be that powerful. On a scale of 1 to 5, he said, it is probably a 2 or 3.
But more significant solar storms are expected in the next few years, he said.
The most powerful known solar storm occurred in 1859, Bogdan said. There were not as many vulnerable electrical items then, but it did knock out telegraph services, even burning down some telegraph stations, he said.
Other serious solar blasts occurred in 1921 and 1940, he noted, and Kunches recalled one on Halloween in 2003.

What is a Google? (Submitted by Pankhuri Panpher)

When you hear the word Google the first image that comes to mind has to be the famous internet search engine but does the word actually mean anything ? Well the answer is a firm yes because it comes from the term “Googol” which represents a number (written as a 1 followed by 100 zeros) so large that it’s actually larger than the total number of atoms in the known universe.
As you might imagine the number is rarely used except maybe in theoretical and computational calculations, however the big question is whether a number bigger than a Googol exists ? Well funnily enough there is and it’s called a googolplex which would be a number 1 followed by, wait for it not one thousand zeros, not even one million zeros but a googol zeroes.
Getting confused ? Well you should be because this number is so large that it’s almost impossible to imagine and also impossible to write because doing so would require more space than the known universe provides. Absolutely mind boggling don’t you think!
Lastly for those of you that are interested in where this term actually came from, well it was popularized in the 1940′s by the american mathematician Edward Kasner who created it as a useful number when comparing unimaginably large numbers with infinity. Oh and the actual term “googol” was coined by his then 9 year old nephew Milton Sirotta, not bad for a 9 year old!

Sugar Doesn't Melt -- It Decomposes, Scientists Demonstrate (Submitted by Josue Fernandez)

Flying in the face of years of scientific belief, University of Illinois researchers have demonstrated that sugar doesn't melt, it decomposes.
"This discovery is important to food scientists and candy lovers because it will give them yummier caramel flavors and more tantalizing textures. It even gives the pharmaceutical industry a way to improve excipients, the proverbial spoonful of sugar that helps your medicine go down," said Shelly J. Schmidt, a University of Illinois professor of food chemistry.
In a presentation to the Institute of Food Technologists about the importance of the new discovery, Schmidt told the food scientists they could use the new findings to manipulate sugars and improve their products' flavor and consistency.
"Certain flavor compounds give you a nice caramel flavor, whereas others give you a burnt or bitter taste. Food scientists will now be able to make more of the desirable flavors because they won't have to heat to a 'melting' temperature but can instead hold sugar over a low temperature for a longer period of time," she said.
Candy makers will be able to use a predictable time-temperature relationship, as the dairy industry does in milk pasteurization, to achieve better results, she said.
Schmidt and graduate student Joo Won Lee didn't intend to turn an established rule of food science on its head. But they began to suspect that something was amiss when they couldn't get a constant melting point for sucrose in the work that they were doing.
"In the literature, the melting point for sucrose varies widely, but scientists have always blamed these differences on impurities and instrumentation differences. However, there are certain things you'd expect to see if those factors were causing the variations, and we weren't seeing them," Schmidt said.
The scientists determined that the melting point of sugar was heating-rate dependent.
"We saw different results depending on how quickly we heated the sucrose. That led us to believe that molecules were beginning to break down as part of a kinetic process," she said.
Schmidt said a true or thermodynamic melting material, which melts at a consistent, repeatable temperature, retains its chemical identity when transitioning from the solid to the liquid state. She and Lee used high-performance liquid chromatography to see if sucrose was sucrose both before and after "melting." It wasn't.
"As soon as we detected melting, decomposition components of sucrose started showing up," she said.
To distinguish "melting" caused by decomposition from thermodynamic melting, the researchers have coined a new name -- "apparent melting." Schmidt and her colleagues have shown that glucose and fructose are also apparent melting materials.
Another of Schmidt's doctoral students is investigating which other food and pharmaceutical materials are apparent melters. She says the list is growing every day.
Having disposed of one food science mystery, Schmidt plans to devote time to others. For instance, staling intrigues her. "We could ship a lot more food around the world if we could stabilize it, keep it from getting stale," she said.
Or there's hydrate formation, which can make drink mixes clumpy if they're open for a while. "We've observed the results -- clumping under conditions of low relative humidity -- but we really don't know why it happens," she noted.
Schmidt said that new instruments are making it possible to probe some of the processes scientists have taken for granted in a way they couldn't do before.

Quick Facts About Humans (Submitted by Marisol Pantigoso)

 

1. If stomachs did not have a lining of mucus, your stomach would digest itself.
2. There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.
3. It takes about 60 seconds for a human blood cell to make a complete circuit of the body.
4. The average person will shed 40 pounds of skin in his/her lifetime.
5. 1/15th of a pint of blood is pumped with every heartbeat.
6. Humans share 98.4% of our DNA with chimps. In comparison, we share 70% of our DNA with a slug.
7. The lightest baby to survive weighed a mere 283 grams.
8. On average, women say 7,000 words per day while men manage just over 2,000 words.
9. The human brain uses 20% of the body’s energy but is only 2% of the body’s weight.
10. On average, humans lose 40-100 strands of hair per day.
11. A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100mph.
12. A cough can reach the speed of 60mph.
13. The average person will drink about 16,000 gallons of water in his/her lifetime.
14. It takes 17 muscles to smile while taking 43 muscles to frown.
15. The human brain is composed of 75% water.
16. Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.
17. More germs are transferred while shaking hands compared to kissing.
18. There are approximately 550 hairs in a person’s eyebrow.
19. The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue.
20. A person produces 10,000 gallons of saliva in an average lifetime.
21. The hardest bone in the human body is the jawbone.
22. The number of eye blinks varies greatly from about 29 blinks each minute if you are talking to someone to only 4 blinks each minute if you are reading.
23. The average human blinks 25 times per minute.
24. A nail takes around 6 months to grow from base to the tip.
25. Each second 10,000,000 cells die and are replaced in your body.
26. Your liver performs over 500 functions in your body.
27. The average person spends 1/3 of their lifetime sleeping.
28. More germs are transferred when shaking hands than kissing.
29. The average person (from western culture) consumes 10 liters of alcohol per year.
30. Roughly 75% of people who play the radio in their car sing along to it.
31. Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.
32. Your right lung takes in more air than your left one does.
33. The human brain is composed of 75% water.
34. 70% of the composition of dust in your home is made up of shed human skin and hair.
35. The tooth is the only part of the human body that can’t repair itself.
36. One human hair can support 3kg.
37. Humans are the only animals that cry tears and blush.
38. It takes the interaction of 72 different muscles to produce human speech.
39. If the normal one hundred thousand hairs on a head were woven into a rope, it could support a weight of more than twelve tons.
40. The fingernail grows about 1.5 inches per year.
41. The total amount of skin covering an adult human weighs 6 lbs.
42. The average person flexes the joints in their fingers 24 million times during a lifetime.
43. Each person inhales about seven quarts of air every minute.
44. On average, we breathe between 12 and 18 times a minute.
45. The average guy will grow about 27 feet of hair out of his face during his lifetime.
46. Approximately 1 out of 25 people suffers from asthma.
47. The average man sweats 2 1/2 quarts every day.
48. One out of every hundred American citizens is color blind.
49. An average person laughs about 15 times a day.
50. A human heart beats 100,000 times a day.

Found on this website: http://www.science-facts.com/amazing-human-facts/

A new way to measure the expansion of the universe (Submitted by Alexa Kopper)

A PhD student from The International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Perth has produced one of the most accurate measurements ever made of how fast the Universe is expanding.

Florian Beutler, a PhD candidate with ICRAR at the University of Western Australia, has calculated how fast the Universe is growing by measuring the Hubble constant.

"The Hubble constant is a key number in astronomy because it's used to calculate the size and age of the Universe," said Mr Beutler.

As the Universe swells, it carries other galaxies away from ours. The Hubble constant links how fast galaxies are moving with how far they are from us.

By analysing light coming from a distant galaxy, the speed and direction of that galaxy can be easily measured. Determining the galaxy's distance from Earth is much more difficult. Until now, this has been done by observing the brightness of individual objects within the galaxy and using what we know about the object to calculate how far away the galaxy must be.

This approach to measuring a galaxy's distance from Earth is based on some well-established assumptions but is prone to systematic errors, leading Mr Beutler to tackle the problem using a completely different method.

Published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Mr Beutler's work draws on data from a survey of more than 125,000 galaxies carried out with the UK Schmidt Telescope in eastern Australia. Called the 6dF Galaxy Survey, this is the biggest survey to date of relatively nearby galaxies, covering almost half the sky.

Galaxies are not spread evenly through space, but are clustered. Using a measurement of the clustering of the galaxies surveyed, plus other information derived from observations of the early Universe, Mr Beutler has measured the Hubble constant with an uncertainly of less than 5%.*

"This way of determining the Hubble constant is as direct and precise as other methods, and provides an independent verification of them," says Professor Matthew Colless, Director of the Australian Astronomical Observatory and one of Mr Beutler's co-authors. "The new measurement agrees well with previous ones, and provides a strong check on previous work."

The measurement can be refined even further by using data from larger galaxy surveys.

"Big surveys, like the one used for this work, generate numerous scientific outcomes for astronomers internationally," says Professor Lister Staveley-Smith, ICRAR's Deputy Director of Science.

Fact or Fiction?: Cells Phones can Cause Brain Cancer (Submitted by Rino Kim)

This summer, Ronald Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, sent a memo to staffers warning them to limit their cell phone use and to use hands-free sets in the wake of "growing evidence that we should reduce exposure" to cell phone radiation. Among the possible consequences: an increased risk of brain cancer.

Five months later, a top official at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) told a congressional panel that published scientific data indicates cell phones are safe.

So what's the deal? Do cell phones cause cancer—or not?

It depends on whom you ask: Herberman, Robert Hoover, director of NCI's Epidemiology and Biostatistics Program, and other health officials recently clashed during a hearing before the House Subcommittee on Domestic Policy held to determine whether mobile phones are safe.

"Long term and frequent use of cell phones which receive and emit radio frequency may be associated with an increased risk of brain tumors," Herberman told lawmakers. "I find the old adage 'better to be safe than sorry' to be very apt to this situation."

Hoover, on the other hand, insisted that the pervasive technology was safe, testifying that "its effect on the body appears to be insufficient to cause genetic damage."

The debate became so heated at one point that Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D–Ohio), who called the hearing, snapped at Hoover for interrupting David Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany, State University of New York, as he argued there was enough evidence to warrant more scrutiny and a government warning of potential damage.

Cell phones use non-ionizing radiation, which differs from the ionizing radiation of x-rays and radioactive material in that it does not have enough energy to knock around—or ionize—electrons or particles in atoms. Cell phone radiation falls into the same band of nonionizing radio frequency as microwaves used to heat or cook food. But Jorn Olsen, chair of epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Public Health says that unlike microwaves, cell phones do not release enough radiation or energy to damage DNA or genetic material, which can lead to cancer.

Recent research suggests, however, that although short-term exposure is harmless, long-term cell phone use may be a different story. Three studies since 1999 indicate that people who have used cell phones for more than a decade may have as much as three times greater risk of developing brain tumors on the side of the head against which they most often hold their phone—an argument for, at the least, shifting ears regularly or, even better, using an earpiece or the speakerphone feature while chatting.

"For people who've used their cell phones for more than 10 years and who use their phone on the same side as the tumor, it appears there's an association," Lawrie Challis, emeritus physics professor at the University of Nottingham in England and former chairman of the U.K.'s Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research program, told ScientificAmerican.com during a recent interview.

Worldwide, one in 29,000 men and one in 38,000 women on average develop brain tumors each year, with people in industrial nations twice as likely as those in developing countries to be diagnosed with one, according to the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France. If cell phone use does, in fact, triple the odds of getting cancer, these stats would suggest that over 60 years a man's risk of developing a brain tumor from cell phone use increases from 0.206 percent to 0.621 percent, and a woman's from 0.156 percent to 0.468 percent.

IARC in 2000 launched a study called Interphone, funded by the European Union, the International Union against Cancer and other national and local funding bodies. Interphone compared surveyed cell phone use in 6,420 people with brain tumors to that of 7,658 healthy people in 13 developed countries—Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the U.K.—to try to determine whether people with brain tumors had used their cell phones more than healthy people, an association that might suggest that cell phones caused the tumors.

The results are expected by the end of this year. "The interpretation of the results is not simple because of a number of potential biases which can affect the results," says project leader Elisabeth Cardis, a professor at the Center for Research in Environmental Epidemiology at the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park. "These analyses are complex and have, unfortunately, taken much time." Among factors that might skew the results: failure of participants—especially those with tumors—to accurately recall exactly how long and often they talk on their cell phones.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the average time between first exposure to a cancer-causing agent and clinical recognition of the disease is 15 to 20 years or longer—and cell phone use in the U.S. has only been popular for about a decade. (In 1996 there were 34 million U.S. cell phone users compared with more than 200 million today, according to CTIA–The Wireless Association, a Washington, D.C.–based cell phone industry group.)

Carpenter told the congressional panel that most of the studies that have shown an increased risk are from Scandinavia, where cell phones have been popular since the early 1990s. Herberman added that most of the research showing cell phones are safe is based on surveys of consumers who have used them for less than 10 years.

Despite a dearth of human studies, more than 400 experiments have been done since the early 1970s to determine how cell phone radiation affects animals, cells and DNA. They, too, have produced conflicting results. Some suggest that cell phone radiation damages DNA and/or nerve cells, others do not. At the hearing, Carpenter suggested that cell phones may increase the brain's production of reactive forms of oxygen called free radicals, which can interact with and damage DNA.

Contradictory findings could be a sign of poor study quality, according to NCI expert Hoover. But Jerry Phillips, a biochemist who performed cell phone research at U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs's Pettis VA Medical Center in Loma Linda, Calif., in the 1990s, believes that conflicting results are to be expected given the nature of the radiation being scrutinized.

Phillips says, for instance, that sometimes the body will respond to radiation by initiating a series of intrinsic repair mechanisms designed to fix the harmful effects. In other words, the effects from radiation exposure may be different in different people. And these varied responses may help explain the contradictory results, says Phillips, who is now director of the Science/Health Science Learning Center at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence out there claiming a link between cell phone use and cancer: Keith Black, chairman of neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, says that the brain cancer (malignant glioma) that killed O. J. Simpson's attorney, Johnnie Cochran, was the result of frequent cell phone use, based on the fact that the tumor developed on the side of the head against which he held his phone. And in May, a week after Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy was diagnosed with a glioma, The EMR Policy Institute, a Marshfield, Vt.–based nonprofit organization that supports research on the effects of electromagnetic radiation, released a statement linking his tumor to heavy cell phone use. But the NCI maintains that there is no definitive evidence that cell phones increase cancer risk.

In other words, the verdict is still out. "We can't rule out the possibility of risk," Nottingham's Challis says. "There hadn't been as much work in this area as is now demanded."

Computer Scientists Turn Cell Phones into Health Care Resource (Submitted by Jose Pablo Garcia)

New software technology allows cell phone and PDA users to download their medical records, making them quickly accessible in case of emergency. The new software, to be available in a year, can even display animated 3D scans. Computer scientists say the technology will also enable students to do research using their portable devices.
SAN DIEGO--Imagine if your medical records were lost or misplaced. It can cause more than aggravation; it could impact the care you receive. Now, imagine being able to download your own health records -- even X-rays and diagnostic scans -- right into your cell phone or PDA.
The same technology that brings games to life in your cell phone can also help you and your doctor keep track of your health. Gregory Quinn, a computer scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, says, "We can do quite amazing things in terms of presenting information."
Many of the newer cells phones and PDAs have a graphics chip like the one in your PC. The chip can turn your phone into a virtual medical library, complete with stunning 3D computer graphics and medical scans.
Quinn is developing a program that will allow doctors to view a patient's medical history on mobile devices.
Cardiologist Michael Wright believes mobile medical records will not only help doctors, it will simplify things for patients. Dr. Wright, who is medical director at the LifeScore Clinic in San Diego says: "Right now your medical records are scattered here and there. You don't really have easy access to them."
With Quinn's program, medical notes and patient tests can be downloaded onto a cell phone in just minutes. "Let's say, for example, I had done a scan here and had picked up a narrowed blood vessel coming down the surface of the heart. That would be visible on this 3D model," Dr. Wright says.
All the data on a phone is stored in the memory expansion slot. In these medical phones, however, Instead of music and digital pictures, it could hold a virtual scan of the body and much more. "It really does provide a, an on going, growing medical record that they can always have with them," Dr. Wright tells DBIS.
The 3D mobile medical data program should be available within a year. Quinn's program isn't limited to medical information. He says students will be able to retrieve science and other information on their cell phones during class.

BACKGROUND: Half a billion cell phones are sold each year, and within two years most of these will be inter-connected devices and contain built-in 2D/3D graphics accelerators. Scientists may be able to use these devices to disseminate visual information and scientific data, such as real-time molecular and medical data. For developing countries in particular, the cell phone will become their first and/or primary computing device. It's high-end data visualization for the masses.
MAKING PHONES SMARTER: So-called "smartphones" relate to a single device that can take care of all your handheld computing and communications needs in a single small package, integrating digital photography, cellular communication, calendars and address books, GPS navigation, email, and even play music or games. The biggest advantage is that smartphones allow users to install, configure and run their favorite applications, creating individual, tailor-made service. In contrast, most standard cell-phone software offers only limited configurations for personalizing the device.
ABOUT GRAPHICS ACCELERATORS: A graphics accelerator is a type of video adapter that contains its own microprocessor, enabling higher performance. It has its own memory for storing graphical representations. Among other advantages, graphics accelerators free up the computer's central processing unit. The CPU can do other tasks while the graphics accelerator is processing the graphics. When computation tasks are divided in this way, it is known as "load balancing." Today, graphics accelerators are not just an enhancement, but a necessity, and are bundled automatically into mid-range and high-range computers.
GOING DIGITAL: Digital cell phones use the same radio technology as analog phones, but unlike analog signals, digital signals can be compressed and manipulated to fit more calls onto a given bandwidth. It's also why more cable companies are switching to digital to gain more channels. Using digital cell phones, three to ten digital calls can occupy the same space as a single analog call.

NASA's Dawn's Spacecraft Views Dark Side of Vesta (Submitted by Alonso Zevallos)

Dawn took this image over Vesta's northern hemisphere after the spacecraft completed its first passage over the dark side of the giant asteroid. It is northern hemisphere winter on Vesta now, so its north pole is in deep shadow.

The Dawn science team is working to determine the significance of the distinct features in this image, which include large grooves or ridges extending for great distances around Vesta.

This image was taken by Dawn's framing camera on July 23, from a distance of 3,200 miles (5,200 kilometers).

The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, for NASA. The University of California, Los Angeles, is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. The Dawn framing cameras have been developed and built under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, with significant contributions by DLR German Aerospace Center, Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering, Braunschweig. The Framing Camera project is funded by the Max Planck Society, DLR, and NASA/JPL.

Aerosol affects climate more than satellite estimates predict (Submitted by Alex Borbon)

ScienceDaily (Aug. 1, 2011) — Aerosol particles, including soot and sulfur dioxide from burning fossil fuels, essentially mask the effects of greenhouse gases and are at the heart of the biggest uncertainty in climate change prediction. New research from the University of Michigan shows that satellite-based projections of aerosols' effect on Earth's climate significantly underestimate their impacts.

The findings will be published online the week of Aug. 1 in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Aerosols are at the core of "cloud drops" -- water particles suspended in air that coalesce to form precipitation. Increasing the number of aerosol particles causes an increase in the number of cloud drops, which results in brighter clouds that reflect more light and have a greater cooling effect on the planet.
As to the extent of their cooling effect, scientists offer different scenarios that would raise the global average surface temperature during the next century between under 2 to over 3 degrees Celsius. That may not sound like a broad range, but it straddles the 2-degree tipping point beyond which scientists say the planet can expect more catastrophic climate change effects.
The satellite data that these findings poke holes in has been used to argue that all these models overestimate how hot the planet will get.
"The satellite estimates are way too small," said Joyce Penner, the Ralph J. Cicerone Distinguished University Professor of Atmospheric Science. "There are things about the global model that should fit the satellite data but don't, so I won't argue that the models necessarily are correct. But we've explained why satellite estimates and the models are so different."
Penner and her colleagues found faults in the techniques that satellite estimates use to find the difference between cloud drop concentrations today and before the Industrial Revolution.
"We found that using satellite data to try to infer how much radiation is reflected today compared to the amount reflected in the pollution-free pre-industrial atmosphere is very inaccurate," Penner said. "If one uses the relationship between aerosol optical depth -- essentially a measure of the thickness of the aerosols -- and droplet number from satellites, then one can get the wrong answer by a factor of three to six."
These findings are a step toward generating better models, and Penner said that will be the next phase of this research.
"If the large uncertainty in this forcing remains, then we will never reduce the range of projected changes in climate below the current range," she said. "Our findings have shown that we need to be smarter. We simply cannot rely on data from satellites to tell us the effects of aerosols. I think we need to devise a strategy to use the models in conjunction with the satellite data to get the best answers."
The research is funded by NASA.

Human Magnetism (Submitted by Alex Schmack)

In the X-Men comic books, Magneto fights by controlling magnetic fields; now a new study suggests that perhaps non-villains can sense magnetic fields too. Fruit flies can use a protein abundant in people’s retinas to sense magnetic fields, scientists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester report June 21 in Nature Communications. Researchers swapped a human light-sensing molecule called cryptochrome with the flies’ own magnetic field-sensing protein. The human protein allowed the flies to distinguish between high and normal magnetic fields. The results revive a controversial debate over whether humans can detect magnetic fields, the authors write. —Laura Sanders

Russia Backtracks on Plan to Sink Space Station (Submitted by Tuti Kopper)

Despite earlier comments indicating the station would be sunk by 2020, a spokesperson says they hope to extend the station's life.

A watery fate may have to wait.

Russia's space agency backpedaled Thursday from an international outcry over comments by deputy head Vitaly Davydov, who said Russia planned to sink the International Space Station into the Pacific Ocean in 2020.

"The partners have agreed to continue the ISS operation until 2020. The partners will also approve an extended period of the ISS," agency press secretary Anna Vedishcheva told Russian news agency Interfax-AVN on Thursday.

At a 2010 meeting of the international science agencies that run the ship, most agreed that an "extended period" of operation was a common goal. But Vedischeva continued to stress the spacebase's ultimate fate: a watery grave at the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

WIDE ANGLE: The Shuttle's Final Countdown

"The only way to dispose of the station is to sink it," Vedishcheva said, a necessary evil required "to avoid the appearance of a large amount of space debris in orbit."

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She described media reports on the Russian space agency's comments as "distorted."
After sinking hundreds of millions into construction of the space station -- billions if you include the cost of the space shuttle flights that carried the ISS modules into orbit -- knowledgeable government sources and NASA spokesmen were aghast Wednesday at Davydov's unilateral declaration of the station's fate.
"This isn't the first time I've seen Russia come out with a statement that seems to be coming out of their own stovepipes," one knowledgeable congressional representative told FoxNews.com Wednesday. "I would give it no credence at all."

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"NASA would have advised us ahead of time if there were any agreement along those lines," he said.
Indeed, NASA claimed they were in talks to extend the station's services: "The partnership is currently working to certify on-orbit elements through 2028," NASA spokesman Joshua Buck told FoxNews.com.
Russian officials now claim the focus was always on the method of disposal and not about setting concrete deadlines.
The space station represents a massive, worldwide accomplishment, spanning an area the size of a football field. It has been continuously occupied for nearly 11 years, and has travelled more than 1.5 billion miles -- the equivalent of eight round trips to the Sun -- over the course of over 57,000 orbits around the Earth, NASA notes.