Moving to Wordpress

I'm going to move my blogging to Wordpress as of today.
I've been with Blogger a long time and it seems to me that it hasn't really done me any wrong, so I really shouldn't walk out. However, people have been telling me just how wonderful it is over at Wordpress so I guess I'm moving over because I've been persuaded by promises of easier blogging. not that there was anything uneasy about this place. I like it here - but it's time to try something new again.

The new blog link is here: http://artneuro.wordpress.com/
So please come and join me there.

I'm going to attempt to bring back the SpaceFreaks side with the Flaming Horses side, so this is going to be a bit bumpy.

Cloning

Bringing Back The Extinct

Earlier back in the decade, the Australian Museum undertook a program to try and clone a Tasmanian Tiger from what remained of specimens in bottles. In 2005, this project as abandoned due to difficulty.

Yet, the notion of cloning the extinct animal lives on. A group of scientists have cloned one gene, and imported it into a mouse.

For the first time, researchers have inserted the genetic material of an extinct animal into a living one. The finding shows how lost information about species from the past can be retrieved, and also provides a glimpse into how long-gone creatures may someday get a second chance at life.

"Now that we've shown you can do this, it opens up the floodgates for all kinds of extinct species," says Andrew Pask, a fellow in zoology at the University of Melbourne in Australia and lead author of a paper published in the online journal PLoS ONE. The gene that the scientists activated in mouse fetuses contained instructions that helped produce cartilage in the rodent's developing skeleton.

The Tasmanian tiger DNA came from specimens that had been preserved in a museum for over a century. The researchers selected a gene called Col2a1 that is possessed by many vertebrates, ranging from mice to people. By attaching a marker to the Tasmanian tiger's version of Col2a1 that glows blue when stained by a chemical, scientists were able to see the where the mouse's body had expressed the gene of the departed beast.

"We saw the genetic information of an extinct animal get read out into a blue pattern," says co-author Richard Behringer, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

The blue tint is colouring from yet another species. The mouse is expressing the Col2a1 gene in its cartilage as you can see. With something like 30,000 genes, a full Tasmanian Tiger is going to be hard to recreate through this kind of gene technology, but it is interesting to see some parts of the Tasmanian Tiger that can be brought back.

PAPA!

Power Amplified Personal Armor

I think that's what it used to b called in the old Sci-Fi books. Turns out the US army is working on one about the time Iron Man is hitting the screens. Of course Iron Man's latest incarnation for the movies is the story of PAPA, but here is somebody working on something less comic book, but power-amplified all the same.

Rex Jameson bikes and swims regularly, and plays tennis and skis when time allows. But the 5-foot-11, 180-pound software engineer is lucky if he presses 200 pounds — that is, until he steps into an "exoskeleton" of aluminum and electronics that multiplies his strength and endurance as many as 20 times.

With the outfit's claw-like metal hand extensions, he gripped a weight set's bar at a recent demonstration and knocked off hundreds of repetitions. Once, he did 500.

"Everyone gets bored much more quickly than I get tired," Jameson said.

Jameson — who works for robotics firm Sarcos Inc. in Salt Lake City, which is under contract with the U.S. Army — is helping assess the 150-pound suit's viability for the soldiers of tomorrow. The suit works by sensing every movement the wearer makes and almost instantly amplifying it.

The Army believes soldiers may someday wear the suits in combat, but it's focusing for now on applications such as loading cargo or repairing heavy equipment. Sarcos is developing the technology under a two-year contract worth up to $10 million, and the Army plans initial field tests next year.

Before the technology can become practical, the developers must overcome cost barriers and extend the suit's battery life. Jameson was tethered to power cords during his demonstration because the current battery lasts just 30 minutes.

But the technology already offers evidence that robotics can amplify human muscle power in reality — not just in the realm of comic books and movies like the recently debuted "Iron Man," about a wealthy weapons designer who builds a high-tech suit to battle bad guys.

"Everybody likes the idea of being a superhero, and this is all about expanding the capabilities of a human," said Stephen Jacobsen, chief designer of the Sarcos suit.

The Army's exoskeleton research dates to 1995, but has yet to yield practical suits. Sarcos' technology sufficiently impressed Raytheon Co., however, that the Waltham, Mass.-based defense contractor bought Sarcos' robotics business last November. Sarcos also has developed robotic dinosaurs for a Universal Studios' "Jurassic Park" theme park ride.

And they still can't catch Osama in Laden.

Platypus Genome

Genetics Of The Weird Is Still Weird

Here is a NYT article on the Platypus genome.

In their investigation of the platypus genetic blueprint, the scientists found that its genome contains about 18,500 genes, similar to other vertebrates and about two-thirds the size of the human genome. The platypus shares 82 percent of its genes with the human, mouse, dog, opossum and chicken. Some repeated elements in the genome, the scientists noted, hold hints as to the chronology of changes in the platypus.

Of particular interest, the researchers reported, the analysis identified families of genes that link the platypus to reptiles (like those for egg-laying, vision and venom production), as well as to mammals (antibacterial proteins and lactation). The platypus lacks nipples; the young nurse through the abdominal skin.

One surprise was finding genes responsible for sensitive odor receptors. As a primarily aquatic animal, the platypus was already known to rely on electrosensory receptors in its bill to detect faint electric fields emitted by underwater prey. So why the considerable ability to sense odors? The scientists speculate that it may involve sexual communication or the use of water-soluble odorants in navigating and hunting underwater.

Richard K. Wilson, director of the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University, said that the comparison of the platypus genes to those of other mammals was the beginning of an examination of how “genes have been conserved throughout evolution.”

The project, involving scientists from eight countries, was primarily financed by the National Human Genome Research Institute in the United States. Its director, Francis S. Collins, said, “As weird as this animal looks, its genome sequence is priceless for understanding how mammalian biological processes evolved.”

It's interesting that they share as much with humans as they do. The venom thing, the egg-laying thing, the duck-billed thing make them so strange, and yet they are close as 82% to placental mammals.

The Big Drought In Pre-History

We Were Down To 2000 once

This an amazing article about what happened to the human population in Pre-history. Homo Sapiens came very close to extinction, 70,000 years ago.
IT WAS a very close call. If a devastating drought that gripped Africa had lasted just a little longer, or been a little worse, we would not be here today.

There would be no humans, no cities, no art and no science. There would be no wars and no human-induced climate change. The world would belong to the animals.

An international genetics project has found that modern humans almost became extinct 70,000 years ago.

The Genographic Project, led by American and Israeli researchers, made the discovery after undertaking the most extensive mitochondrial DNA survey ever undertaken in Africa.

In 1987 a study of mitochondrial DNA, passed down the generations via the maternal line, revealed that every person alive today is descended from one woman who lived in Africa 200,000 years ago.

The latest study shows that after the birth of humanity in eastern Africa, people quickly split into separate communities.

About 150,000 years ago humans, possibly pursuing animal herds, moved to settle throughout Africa. The number of people soared, peaking somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000.

But before the first person could venture out of Africa, the population suddenly crashed to just 2000.

"It could have been even fewer," said Spencer Wells, the Genographic Project director. "We were, in effect, hanging on by our fingertips.

"That's fewer people than there are Sumatra orang-utans today, and they are classified as extremely endangered and will probably go extinct in 20 years."

The crisis was probably caused by climate change. About 130,000 years ago the world started cooling and drying as it neared another ice age.

"There were massive droughts in Africa ... mega-droughts," Dr Wells said. With much of the continent barren and hostile, the tiny human settlements became isolated from each other.

As humanity hovered on the edge of extinction "a shift in culture began. People began making the better hunting tools they needed to survive the drought. Art makes its appearance. There is abstract thought," he said.

Then the drought broke. Isolated communities migrated and merged. With better skills and a friendlier climate, the population boomed again and people finally left Africa, spreading along the Asian coast, towards Australia.

Backed by National Geographic and IBM, the researchers, who have published their findings in The American Journal Of Human Genetics, identified humans' near demise after studying DNA mutation rates.

"By sampling people alive today, estimating how much genetic variation they have ... and knowing the rate at which variation accumulates we can say how long it took to accumulate the observed level of variation, and the size of the starting population," Dr Wells said.

The project aimed to discover what humans were doing before leaving Africa. "Three quarters of our history is virtually unknown," Dr Wells said. The research showed "there was lots going on".

He believes humanity's close shave should send a message to the 6.6 billion people alive today. "We should start to see ourselves as the lucky survivors."

Pretty interesting. Once upon a time, we were closer to extinction than the Orangutan population today.

Aliens!

Primitive Alien Lives May Exist According to Stephen Hawking

Here's the link.

Given the size of the universe, it is unlikely that Earth is the only planet to develop some sort of life, Hawking told an audience at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He added that humanity must embrace space exploration, if only to ensure its long-term survival.

"While there may be primitive life in our region of the galaxy, there don't seem to be any advanced intelligent beings," said Hawking during a lecture as part of a series commemorating NASA's 50th anniversary this year.

The lack of success by the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project to discover signals from an alien civilization suggests that none exist within several 100 light-years of Earth, Hawking said, though he offered three theories on the dearth of interplanetary communications.

The probability of primitive life developing on a suitable planet may be extremely low, or it may be high, but aliens intelligent enough to beam signals into space may also be smart enough to build civilization-destroying weapons like nuclear bombs, he said. More likely, he added, is that primitive life is likely to develop, but intelligent life as we know it is exceedingly rare.

"We don't appear to have been visited by aliens," Hawking said, adding that he discounts reports of UFOs. "Why would they only appear to cranks and weirdoes?"

I wonder what happens if Stephen Hawking had a UFO encounter. I wonder how his rationality would deal with it. :)

Bio-Crude

CSIRO - Our Tax Payer's Money At Work!
Here's something interesting.

AUSTRALIAN scientists have made a biofuels breakthrough, turning waste products like paper and wood trimmings, crop residue and garden clippings into a stable "bio-crude".

If successfully commercialised, the process could massively reduce the amount of waste going into landfills and help the biofuels industry steer clear of the controversial food versus fuel debate. Most of the world's biofuel is made from food crops such as corn and sugar. Many oppose biofuels because they believe they will lead to higher food prices and hunger among the poor.

The great hope is second-generation technology that enables fuel to be made from waste material like the stalks and leaves of food crops.

Using the process developed by the CSIRO and Monash University, bio-crude could be made on-site at the likes of timber mills then trucked or piped to a refinery to be turned into a petrol substitute.

Steven Loffler from CSIRO Forest Biosciences said the new process had taken 18 months to develop and the key breakthrough was producing a bio-crude that was stable enough to be stored and transported.

Until now, bio-crude made from waste quickly broke down and became useless.

"By making changes to the chemical process, we've been able to create a concentrated bio-crude which is much more stable than that achieved elsewhere in the world," Dr Loffler said.

"This makes it practical and economical to produce bio-crude in local areas for transport to a central refinery, overcoming the high costs and greenhouse gas emissions otherwise involved in transporting bulky green wastes over long distances."

Biofuel production in Australia is still minor. This sort of innovation could turn it all around.

UFOs?!

Chief Cabinet Secretary of Japan Thinks They Exist

The Chief Cabinet Secretary of Japan Nobutaka Machimura was asked what he thought about UFOs. His answer is as follows:

【ＵＦＯ】
　−−先日民主党の参院議員から未確認飛行物体（ＵＦＯ）に関する質問主意書が出され、本日、政府としては存在の確認していないなどとする内容の答弁書が出されたが、この質問の内容や答弁書の内容について長官の考えは 「うーん、まあ、あのー、政府のそれは公式答弁としてはですね、ＵＦＯの存在は確認していない。だから、対策なども特段検討していないという極めて紋切り型の答弁しかないだろうと思いますけれども、あのー、私は個人的には、こういうものは絶対いると思っておりまして。個人的な、個人的な意見でありまして、政府答弁は政府答弁であります。そうじゃないと、いろんなところにあるね、ナスカ（の地上絵）のああいう、説明できないでしょ。と、思っているんですけれどもね。ま、ちょっと、これ以上広げないようにします。どうも。毎回、こういうご質問をお願いいたします」

This is some pretty weird stuff. After being asked what his view on the question submitted to the government in the National Diet about UFOs and his response goes along the lines of:

"Umm, well, uhh, the government's position on this is that we have not verified the existence of UFOs, so we do not have any particular investigation on the matter; and as the government, there really is no other way to answer it but in a curt manner. Well, if you're asking me personally, I think these things have to exist. The government's official answer is the final government answer. Be that as it may, when you think about it, there are so many things you can't explain away like the drawings in Nasca. I won't try and expand on it right now. Thank you. But I hope you ask me these kinds of questions more often."

What do you make of that?
Personally, I'm laughing my head off.

Black Hole Science

Go You Aussie Scientists
This article came in from Pleiades.

The Auger Collaboration - a team of 370 scientists from 17 nations including Australia - reported overnight in the journal Science that they had pinpointed the source of 25 cosmic rays, rare particles that travel across the universe at close to the speed of light.

“They almost certainly come from 'active galactic nuclei' or the centre of very active galaxies, powered by black holes,” said Auger member Roger Clay, a high-energy astrophysicist with the University of Adelaide.

“We're now debating if they're produced near the black hole or by energy coming from the black hole.”

According to his Auger colleague Alan Watson of Britain's University of Leeds, the finding opens a “new window” on the universe and is the start of a new form of astronomy - cosmic-ray astronomy.

Along with Adelaide University colleague Bruce Dawson, Professor Watson and other overseas scientists such as University of Chicago Nobel laureate James Cronin, Professor Clay was a founding member of the collaboration.

They pulled together $US50 million to build the world's largest cosmic-ray observatory.

Named after the French physicist who first observed the cosmic rays, the Pierre Auger Observatory comprises an array of 1500 detectors, spread across 3000 sq km in Argentina.

Although many low-energy cosmic rays, like those from the Sun, hit the observatory, only high-energy cosmic rays are not deflected by magnetic fields on their journey from source to earth.

Having detected these cosmic rays, Auger scientists hope to use them to probe magnetic fields, especially those between galaxies, something now not possible.

“We're desperate to know about magnetic fields because they fill the whole of the universe and they have energy,” said Professor Clay.

Not only do magnetic fields work with gravity to shape galaxies, but they may also be one of the most important forms of energy in the universe.

“We want to know where all the energy of the universe is,” Professor Clay said. “We want to have a list of it all.”

Oi, oi, oi.
We get parochial about these things down here where we don't even have a space policy worth writing about.

New Images Of The Moon

JAXA And NHK

1920 x1080 pixels.
This stuff was shot by a camera developed by NHK, on a Lunar satellite launched by JAXA.
Click to enlarge.

Also, check out this video link here:

Smilodon Biomechanics

Sabre-Tooth Bite Was Weak

This is the article here.

The sabre-toothed cat Smilodon, one of the fiercest predators to roam the Ice Age, had a fairly wimpy bite, Australian researchers said on Monday, but this powerful killing-machine was no pussycat.

Researchers at the University of NSW and the University of Newcastle compared Smilodon's bite strength to another fearsome feline, the modern lion, using a computer model.

"Bite strength has long been a contentious issue in Smilodon," said Stephen Wroe of the University of NSW in Sydney, whose study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Smilodon was one of the most powerfully built feline predators to ever prowl the Earth.

Wroe said early investigators had concluded Smilodon's bite was weak, but later investigators believed it was strong. Wroe and colleagues sought to put the matter to the test.

They used data from CAT scan X-rays of lion and Smilodon skulls to build sophisticated programs that could compare the mechanics of each cat's bite.

What they hoped to gain was a better understanding of how Smilodon killed its prey.

Wroe said lion skulls are built to withstand great forces as they bite animals that "are trying very hard to escape".

When the researchers subjected the digital Smilodon skull to these same forces, it showed much higher stress.

"If Smilodon bit into prey that was struggling wildly - as can a lion - it would have risked serious injury and perhaps even breakage of its own skull and teeth," he said.

So now we know. If a Smilodon attacked us, it would shove us to the ground first, then plunge its long teeth into our soft tissue eliciting massive blood flows.

Super Bug From Space

You'd Think It Was Sci-Fi

Bacteria sent out to outer space come back strong.
Yep. It's like a B- Movie Plot, but here it is.

The germ: Salmonella, best known as a culprit of food poisoning. The trip: Space Shuttle STS-115, September 2006. The reason: Scientists wanted to see how space travel affects germs, so they took some along — carefully wrapped — for the ride. The result: Mice fed the space germs were three times more likely to get sick and died quicker than others fed identical germs that had remained behind on Earth.

"Wherever humans go, microbes go, you can't sterilize humans. Wherever we go, under the oceans or orbiting the earth, the microbes go with us, and it's important that we understand ... how they're going to change," explained Cheryl Nickerson, an associate professor at the Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology at Arizona State University.

Nickerson added, in a telephone interview, that learning more about changes in germs has the potential to lead to novel new countermeasures for infectious disease.

She reports the results of the salmonella study in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers placed identical strains of salmonella in containers and sent one into space aboard the shuttle, while the second was kept on Earth, under similar temperature conditions to the one in space.

After the shuttle returned, mice were given varying oral doses of the salmonella and then were watched.

After 25 days, 40 percent of the mice given the Earth-bound salmonella were still alive, compared with just 10 percent of those dosed with the germs from space. And the researchers found it took about one-third as much of the space germs to kill half the mice, compared with the germs that had been on Earth.

The researchers found 167 genes had changed in the salmonella that went to space.

Why?

"That's the 64 million dollar question," Nickerson said. "We do not know with 100 percent certainty what the mechanism is of space flight that's inducing these changes."

However, they think it's a force called fluid shear.

"Being cultured in microgravity means the force of the liquid passing over the cells is low." The cells "are responding not to microgravity, but indirectly to microgravity in the low fluid shear effects."

"There are areas in the body which are low shear, such as the gastrointestinal tract, where, obviously, salmonella finds itself," she went on. "So, it's clear this is an environment not just relevant to space flight, but to conditions here on Earth, including in the infected host."

She said it is an example of a response to a changed environment.

"These bugs can sense where they are by changes in their environment. The minute they sense a different environment, they change their genetic machinery so they can survive," she said.

Worse the devil you know if it goes and come back from Space, then.

North West Passage Opens Up

A Strange Moment In History

The search for the North West Passage claimed many an explorer. Now, thanks to global warming, it's going to be relatively easy to navigate.

The European Space Agency said nearly 200 satellite photos this month taken together showed an ice-free passage along northern Canada, Alaska and Greenland, and ice retreating to its lowest level since such images were first taken in 1978.

The waters are exposing unexplored resources, and vessels could trim thousands of miles from Europe to Asia by bypassing the Panama Canal. The seasonal ebb and flow of ice levels has already opened up a slim summer window for ships.

Leif Toudal Pedersen, of the Danish National Space Center, said that Arctic ice has shrunk to some 1 million square miles. The previous low was 1.5 million square miles, in 2005.

"The strong reduction in just one year certainly raises flags that the ice (in summer) may disappear much sooner than expected," Pedersen said in an ESA statement posted on its Web site Friday.

Pedersen said the extreme retreat this year suggested the passage could fully open sooner than expected — but ESA did not say when that might be. Efforts to contact ESA officials in Paris and Noordwik, the Netherlands, were unsuccessful Saturday.

A U.N. panel on climate change has predicted that polar regions could be virtually free of ice by the summer of 2070 because of rising temperatures and sea ice decline, ESA noted.

Russia, Norway, Denmark, Canada and the United States are among countries in a race to secure rights to the Arctic that heated up last month when Russia sent two small submarines to plant its national flag under the North Pole. A U.S. study has suggested as much as 25 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and gas could be hidden in the area.

Environmentalists fear increased maritime traffic and efforts to tap natural resources in the area could one day lead to oil spills and harm regional wildlife.

Until now, the passage has been expected to remain closed even during reduced ice cover by multiyear ice pack — sea ice that remains through one or more summers, ESA said.

Researcher Claes Ragner of Norway's Fridtjof Nansen Institute, which works on Arctic environmental and political issues, said for now, the new opening has only symbolic meaning for the future of sea transport.

"Routes between Scandinavia and Japan could be almost halved, and a stable and reliable route would mean a lot to certain regions," he said by phone. But even if the passage is opening up and polar ice continues to melt, it will take years for such routes to be regular, he said.

"It won't be ice-free all year around and it won't be a stable route all year," Ragner said. "The greatest wish for sea transportation is streamlined and stable routes."

"Shorter transport routes means less pollution if you can ship products from A to B on the shortest route," he said, "but the fact that the polar ice is melting away is not good for the world in that we're losing the Arctic and the animal life there."

The opening observed this week was not the most direct waterway, ESA said. That would be through northern Canada along the coast of Siberia, which remains partially blocked.

Well, yeah. Aspirational targets for carbon emissions are nice, but I doubt the government would let me fill an Aspirational Tax Return, so I don't know why we have to be subjected to that kind of bullshit.

More Astronaughty

NASA In Yet More PR Trouble

I know it's been a little while since I posted but hey, life is busy. Anyway, here's today's headline:

America's space agency was shaken Thursday by two startling and unrelated reports: One involved claims that astronauts were drunk before flying. The other was news from NASA itself that a worker had sabotaged a computer set for delivery to the international space station.

It was just another jolt for an operation that has had a rocky year from the start, beginning with the arrest of an astronaut accused of attacking a rival in a love triangle.

"It's going to shake up the world, I'll tell you that," retired NASA executive Seymour Himmel said of the latest news. "There will be congressional hearings that you will not be able to avoid."

News of the two latest bombshells broke within just a few hours of each other Thursday afternoon.

Aviation Week & Space Technology reported on its Web site that a special panel studying astronaut health found that on two occasions, astronauts were allowed to fly after flight surgeons and other astronauts warned they were so drunk they posed a safety risk.

The independent panel also found "heavy use of alcohol" before launch — within the standard 12-hour "bottle-to-throttle" rule, the magazine reported.

A NASA official confirmed the report contains such details, but said they were from anonymous interviews and not substantiated. The official asked that his name not be used because NASA will discuss the health report on Friday.

The Aviation Week story did not say how long ago the alleged incidents took place, nor did it say whether it involved pilots or other crew members.

At a news conference to discuss the upcoming space shuttle launch set for Aug. 7, NASA's space operations chief was asked repeatedly about the drunken astronaut report.

The manager, Bill Gerstenmaier, would only say that he had never seen an intoxicated astronaut before flight or been involved in any disciplinary action related to that.

But Gerstenmaier had more news. He revealed that an employee for a NASA subcontractor had cut the wires in a computer that was about to be loaded into the shuttle Endeavour for launch.

The subcontractor, which he wouldn't name, contacted NASA 1 1/2 weeks ago, as soon as it learned that another computer had been damaged deliberately, Gerstenmaier said. Had the contractor not discovered the problem, NASA would have uncovered it by testing the computer before launch, Gerstenmaier said. Safety was not an issue, he added.

He refused to speculate on the worker's motive. He also wouldn't say where the sabotage occurred. He said it did not happen in Florida and had nothing to do with an ongoing strike at the Kennedy Space Center by a machinists' union.

NASA hopes to fix the computer in time for launch next month. It's intended to be installed inside the space station to collect data from strain gauges on a major outside beam.

Former shuttle commander Eileen Collins was as stunned as anyone to learn of the astronaut alcohol claims in the upcoming health report.

"I'm anxious to hear more details because this is very out of character from anything I have ever experienced," she said.

Collins worries this will hurt the image of the astronauts, at least in the short term. "I hope people can really look at the good things astronauts do," she said.

Astronaut Jeffrey Williams, who spent six months on the space station last year, said he's never seen or heard of anything like this. As for the effect this may have on astronaut morale, especially so close to a shuttle flight, he said, "We're trained to deal with things so we deal with them without much emotion."

Himmel, who retired in 1981 as associate director for what is now Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, wasn't surprised to learn the information was anonymous.

Oh how these stories keep coming out. So much for 'The Right Stuff' myth.

One Last Shot

Mars Rover Opportunity


I know it's been a while.
Here's the latest on the Opportunity craft on Mars.

Opportunity, one of NASA's two robot rovers that have been exploring Mars for more than three years, is about to be driven inside a gaping hole, blasted out millions of years ago by a meteorite.

The ragged Victoria Crater, named after the ship Magellan took on his circumnavigation of the world, is 730 metres wide and 70 metres deep and surrounded on almost all sides by sheer cliffs.

Scientists believe rocks exposed at the bottom of the crater could reveal clues to what lies below the surface of the red planet, and possibly even find evidence of underground water.

NASA officials admit that even if the US$400 million rover can safely negotiate its way into the crater without toppling over, there is no guarantee it will be able to drive out again.

Only designed to last 90 days on the Martian surface, the six-wheeled Opportunity is showing signs of wear. Its sister rover, Spirit, on the opposite side of the
planet, has already lost the use of one wheel, which it now has to drag along.

"While we take seriously the uncertainty about whether Opportunity will climb back out, the potential value of investigations that appear possible inside the crater convinced me to authorise the team to move forward into Victoria Crater," Alan Stern, NASA's science chief and a member of the rover mission team, said.

"It is a calculated risk worth taking.We don't want this to be a one-way trip ... but if Opportunity becomes trapped there, it will be worth the knowledge gained."
Scientists plan to drive Opportunity into the crater at a spot they have dubbed Duck Bay, which has relatively gently slopes of 15 to 20 degrees and a surface covered in rock that should help the wheels grip the slippery slopes.

Well, we can only hope it works and survives to get out again.

TileFile

A Bit OF Fun
I have been playing around with this site a bit. I think it's quite innovative and different to the chaos of MySpace or the narrow focuses of specialist sites. It's still new, but it looks like it could be real fun.

Dark Matter

Strongest Evidence Yet


Long disputed, the evidence for Dark Matter has been gatherin steadily.

"This is the strongest evidence yet for the existence of dark matter," astronomer Myungkook James Jee of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore told reporters.

Astronomers believe dark matter - as opposed to ordinary matter making up the stars, planets and the like - comprises about 85 per cent of the universe's material, but evidence of it has been difficult to come by.

Dark matter cannot be directly seen. It does not shine or reflect light, but astronomers infer its existence in galaxy clusters by observing how its gravity
bends the light given off by even more faraway galaxies. They do not know what
it is made of, but think it could be a kind of particle.

Astronomer Richard Massey of the California Institute of Technology, not involved in the research, said the findings are facing scepticism within the astronomical community.

"It's really exciting if it's right. But to be sort of convinced of the ring, astronomers would really want to see some independent observations verifying it," Massey said.

Here's the article.

Space As A Lifestyle Choice...

Don't Wanna Go Home


Here's an interesting article on what Cosmonauts say about working in Space.

The best, the most beautiful part, is after the start when you look at Earth
straight away," Cosmonaut Vladimir Dezhurov said.
"Earth is like a big, blue balloon and this beautiful balloon is flying, all around it is solid blackness."

Dezhurov has lived in Star City – a formerly top-secret training base for cosmonauts near Moscow – for 21 years and has done two four-month stints aboard the International Space Station, 350 km above Earth. He can think of no other profession he'd like better, despite the fact that after the launch, and that glimpse of his home planet, "it's all work, work, work up there, night and day".

But his main gripe is not the long hours, or missing his family and friends. "The hardest thing is coming back to Earth," he said. The problem is not so much the mundanity of earthly existence – bills to pay, food to buy, chores to complete.

"The muscle fabric degrades very much. It's hard to walk. You have to learn how to walk again, like a small child."

Astronauts train daily aboard the orbiting space station to prevent the atrophy of their legs and feet which are under-used in weightlessness. It takes several weeks under medical supervision to recover from a long stay in space.

The things we learn, every day. :)

More on Schirra

Pretty Cool
If you thought the Right Stuff was a bit too macho, you should check this out here from Time Magazine:

Wally Schirra once told Chris Kraft to go to hell. Remember the astronaut, who died this week at 84, for a lot of things, but put that particular bit of courage near the top of your list. Nobody, up until that moment, had ever told Kraft to go to hell, and the fact is, Schirra didn't tell him directly either. What he did do was tell Deke Slayton, the head of the astronaut corps, and he knew Slayton would tell Kraft, the director of all of the manned missions. Even when you're calling down your imprecation from the safe remove of the Apollo 7 command module high in Earth orbit, that took brass.

Apollo 7 was Schirra's third and last mission. Having joined the space agency as one of the original seven astronauts in 1959, the former Korean war combat pilot became the fifth American in space, orbiting the Earth in his tiny Mercury spacecraft in 1962. In 1965, he returned to space aboard Gemini 6 with co-pilot Tom Stafford, rendezvousing with Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, already waiting in orbit in Gemini 7. After those two trips, there wasn't much that rattled Schirra, but agreeing to fly Apollo 7 at all still took some spine.

On January 27, 1967, just 21 months before Schirra's mission took off, the Apollo command module had killed three of his colleagues, when a spark ignited its pure oxygen atmosphere, immolating Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee during a lockdown rehearsal on the pad. Everyone at NASA already knew that the so-far unflown Apollo was a lemon. Not long before the three men died, they sat for a photo session with a model of the command module resting on a table in front of them it. In one of the outtakes never released to the press, they dropped the grins, bowed their heads and brought their hands together prayerfully. They inscribed the picture to Harrison Storms, the head of North American Aviation, the spacecraft's lead contractor: "Stormy," the inscription read, "this time we are not calling Houston!"

After the fire, it was left to Schirra, the commander of the three-man back-up crew that included space rookies Walt Cunningham and Donn Eisele, to help oversee the gutting and redesign of the ship. Schirra was a bear about the job, stalking the factory floor, poking his nose into whatever the engineers were doing and making it clear when he did not like what he saw. If he wasn't satisfied with the answers he got, he'd go up to the executive suites and buttonhole Storms himself. "You guys want to fix this ship or not?" he'd challenge. "If so let me see you down on the factory floor with the rest of us."

After all this, it was no surprise that when the spacecraft finally took off for its 11-day trip, Schirra would be just as much of a pit bull about how the ship would be flown. NASA scientists had stuffed the flight plan with experiments and astronomical observations, but Schirra didn't want any part of them. This was an engineering mission, as the test pilots liked to call it, meaning that it was a shakedown flight for the ship itself, not a working trip for the men in lab coats.
Whenever an experiment crowded an engineering exercise, he'd jettison the experiment. When a prime-time broadcast was scheduled for shortly before the crew was to execute a tricky rendezvous, he scrubbed the TV show. "No TV until after the rendezvous," he pronounced. The ground objected but Schirra held firm. "TV will be delayed without any further discussion."

Things got more contentious still when all three men developed head colds, something that can be uncomfortable enough on Earth and is exponentially worse in the unfamiliar pressure of a sealed spacecraft. Reporters noticed the sparring between mission control and the ship and began writing about the "snappishness" of the astronauts. The Russian press weighed in too, pointing out the crew's "increased irritation due to the monotony of the spaceflight and the imperfect design of the systems for controlling the vital functions of the spacemen."
Finally, Kraft broke all protocol and proposed to speak to Schirra directly. Slayton offered to do it himself, figuring that as one astronaut to another he could communicate more candidly. Slayton did just that and later reported back to Kraft.
"I told him that the whole world was following this flight and that he and his crew were not coming across well," Slayton said. "I told him he was trained to do a job and that he'd better get busy doing it."
"And?" Kraft asked.
"And he told me to go to hell."

As Slayton must have known, however, doing his job was precisely what Schirra was engaged in for the entire 11 days aloft. Astronauts were pilots first and showmen second. And while the silver flight suits and the smiling press events and the ticker-tape parades belied that, they were hired for their unique understanding of the machines they flew and their hardheaded ability to coax the most from them. That was Schirra's gift. And if flipping off his boss was necessary to get his work done, well, he was happy to do that too. Kraft, 83, wound up respecting Schirra for that act of defiance. Schirra was happy to get that nod. But the fact was, the pilot in him really didn't need it.

An interestng read and a peep in to the world of '60s-'70s NASA.

The Passing Of Wally Schirra

All Hail The Mercury Seven


Wally Schirra, he of the Mercury Seven with 'the Right Stuff' passed away.

Schirra was one of the seven young men selected in 1959 to lead the Cold War
space race against the Soviet Union. Only John Glenn and Scott Carpenter remain
from the project. He was born in March 1923 into an aviation family, Schirra
was one of the seven Mercury astronauts named by NASA in April 1959. He then
piloted the Sigma 7 Mercury flight in late 1962, which orbited Earth six
times.

That flight lasted 9 hours, 15 minutes and attained a speed of 28,091km/h at an altitude of 280 km. It travelled almost 230,400 km before re-entry.
Schirra was the command pilot on the historic 1965 Gemini 6 flight. The highlight was a successful rendezvous of Gemini 6 with the already orbiting Gemini 7 spacecraft. This was the first rendezvous of two manned manoeuvrable spacecraft and established another space first for the United States.

In 1968 he was the command pilot on Apollo VII. Schirra had logged a total of 295 hours and 15 minutes in space. He was the only astronaut to have flown Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions.

In 1969 Schirra retired from the US Navy and NASA. According to his family, Schirra died of natural causes.

Farewell, and godspeed, Wally.