Astronomical & Earthbound Oddities

5/17/12 - 10:58 pm (Taken with instagram)

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:23:23 -0800

5/17/12 - 10:58 pm (Taken with instagram)

Double Eruption, Coronal Mass Ejection - October 1st

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 15:29:29 -0800

On October 1st around 10:17 UT, widely-spaced sunspots 1302 and 1305 erupted in quick succession, revealing a long-distance entanglement which was not obvious before. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) recorded the double blast:

Since it was launched in 2010, SDO has observed many “entangled eruptions.” Active regions far apart but linked by magnetic fields can explode one after another, with disturbances spreading around the stellar surface domino-style. Yesterday’s eruption appears to be the latest example.

The part of the eruption centered on sunspot 1305 hurled a coronal mass ejection toward Earth. The relatively slow-moving (500 km/s) cloud is expected to reach our planet on Oct. 4th, possibly causing geomagnetic storms when it arrives. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras.

via http://spaceweather.com/

10 Major Health Benefits Of Marijuana

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 02:17:34 -0800

via damnlol.com

New Life-Forms Found at Bottom of Dead Sea

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 17:35:00 -0800

Middle Eastern salt lake a “fantastic hot spot for life,” scientist says.

A diver in the Dead Sea holds a rock sporting a thick microbial mat.

Photograph courtesy Christian Lott, Hydra Institute

Christine Dell’Amore / National Geographic News / Published September 28, 2011

Dozens of giant craters spewing fresh water and brimming with bacteria have been found at the otherwise barren bottom of the Dead Sea, new research shows.

In 2010 the first diving expedition to the springs revealed “a fantastic hot spot for life” in the lake, which lies on the border of Israel and Jordan (see map), said team member Danny Ionescu, a marine microbiologist for the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

The team found several craters—each about 33 feet (10 meters) wide and 43 feet (13 meters) deep—at 100-foot (30-meter) depths on the lake’s bottom. The craters were covered with films and sometimes surprisingly thick mats of new bacterial species, Ionescu said.

These tiny communities live near thin plumes of fresh water that shoot from undersea springs, whose presence has long been suspected based on peculiar ripples on the Dead Sea’s surface.

To reach the springs, divers searched for abrupt drops along the sea floor while contending with very low visibility.

“When you put your head in [a crater] you cannot see anything—you have to have faith and will to explore,” Ionescu said.

But once the water cleared near the base of the crater, seeing the plumes jetting from the earth was “a fascinating feeling,” he said.

(See pictures: “Prehistoric American Skull Found in Sea Cave?”)

Dead Sea Truly Almost Dead

Rivers and streams—most notably the Jordan River—once regularly infused fresh water into the Dead Sea.

The basin has no outlet, so water escapes only by evaporation. As fresh water evaporates, salty minerals dissolved in the water get left behind. Over time, this process made the Dead Sea much saltier than ocean water.

The lake’s saltiness means that larger organisms such as fish and frogs can’t survive in the Dead Sea. But a high concentration of magnesium also makes it surprising to find microbes in the lake.

“There are other hypersaline environments that are full of microbial life,” Ionescu noted. “This, in my opinion, makes our discovery even more surprising.”

In the 1950s countries in the Middle East, including Jordan and Israel, cut off the Jordan River’s supply to the Dead Sea to gain drinking water. The move severely lowered the lake’s water level—a loss that continues by up to a meter (four feet) a year, according to the research team.

Water in the lake, which already sits in the lowest place on Earth, has fallen by more than 80 feet (25 meters) in the past 40 years.

(See “Diverting Red Sea to Save Dead Sea Could Create Environmental Crisis.”)

Few biologists have studied the water body in recent years, except following two major algae bloom events that colored the Dead Sea red in 1980 and 1992.

The surface blooms were caused by organisms different than those recently discovered at depth, Ionescu noted.

In general, the “study really changes how we see the Dead Sea, from a biological perspective,” said Kelly Bidle, an environmental microbiologist at Rider University in New Jersey who studies bacteria that live in salty habitats.

That’s because “seeing this diversity in a place we had never thought was there before” is very exciting, she said.

“Impressive” Craters Unique to Dead Sea

The 2010 expedition mapped an “impressive” network of about 30 craters, a landscape that has no parallel elsewhere on Earth, said team leader Ionescu, whose research is soon being submitted for publication.

Preliminary analyses of samples collected in the craters suggest that the springs’ bacterial communities are very diverse—akin to what you’d find living on rocks in a regular saltwater sea, he added.

The top of the springs’ rocks are covered with green biofilms, which use both sunlight and sulfide—naturally occurring chemicals from the springs—to survive. Exclusively sulfide-eating bacteria coat the bottoms of the rocks in a white biofilm. (See marine-microbe pictures.)

Not only have the organisms evolved in such a harsh environment, Ionescu speculates that the bacteria can somehow cope with sudden fluxes in fresh water and saltwater that naturally occur as water currents shift around the springs.

The existence of such adaptable bacteria is an “intriguing” idea that needs more research, Rider University’s Bidle said.

As of right now, “there is no such documented species that exists that could fit this bill”—all highly salt-adapted bacteria die when placed in fresh water, and vice versa, she noted.

If “your machinery is wired for high salt, it’s very difficult to imagine that you could go from an extreme amount of salt to near-freshwater biology.”

Even so, Bidle doesn’t totally rule out the idea: “When it comes to inhabiting extreme environments, nothing surprises me when it comes to microbial life,” she said.

Dead Sea Diving Not for Everyone

Ionescu and colleagues will visit the underwater craters again in October to study more about the behaviors and life cycles of the newfound bacteria.

It’s no easy task—each diver has to carry 90 pounds (40 kilograms) of weight to lower his or her buoyancy, since the sea’s high salt content tends to make people float.

Divers will also need to wear full face masks to protect their eyes and mouths. That’s because accidentally swallowing Dead Sea salt water would cause the larynx to inflate, resulting in immediate choking and suffocation.

Likewise, the intensely salty water would instantly burn and likely blind the eyes—both reasons why Dead Sea swimmers rarely fully submerge their bodies, Ionescu noted.

“It’s a very unique experience,” Ionescu said of diving in the Dead Sea, but “I wouldn’t recommend it for recreational diving.”

via National Geographic News

The Massive Vertical Structures Towering Above Saturn's Rings

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:06:00 -0800

This one is a 10 on the Galaxy wow meter: In images made possible only as Saturn nears equinox, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has uncovered for the first time towering vertical structures in the planet’s otherwise flat rings that are attributable to the gravitational effects of a small nearby moon.

The search for material extending well above and below Saturn’s ring plane has been a major goal of the imaging team during Cassini’s “Equinox Mission,” the two-year period when the sun is seen directly overhead at noon at the planet’s equator. This novel illumination geometry, which occurs every half-Saturn-year, or about 15 Earth years, lowers the sun’s angle to the ring plane and causes out-of-plane structures to cast long shadows across the rings’ broad expanse, making them easy to detect.

Cassini’s cameras spotted not only the predictable shadows of some of Saturn’s moons, but also the shadows of newly revealed vertical structures in the rings themselves. And these observations have lent dramatic support to the analysis that demonstrates how small moons in very narrow gaps can have considerable and complex effects on the edges of their gaps, and that such moons can be smaller than previously believed.

The Daily Galaxy via NASA/Cassini

Cosmic anti-matter enigma eyed in new CERN project

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 23:24:46 -0800

By Robert Evans

GENEVA | Wed Sep 28, 2011 2:16pm EDT

(Reuters) - Unraveling one of the great enigmas of the visible universe, why it is made up largely of matter, will be the target of a ground-breaking research project kicked off on Wednesday at a meeting of leading physicists from eight countries.

More precisely, the program will aim to find why there is so little left of the anti-matter believed to have been present in equal quantities at the “Big Bang” 13.7 billion years ago but which then mysteriously disappeared, or all but.

The CERN particle physics research center said the program would be conducted with a new “Extra Low Energy Antiproton Ring,” dubbed ELENA, which will begin delivering large numbers of tiny anti-proton particles by 2016.

Attending this week’s meeting at CERN, which is leading the project to begin in 2013 with the ring’s installation, are scientists from Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden and the United States.

“This is a big step forward for anti-matter physics,” said Walter Oelert, pioneer expert at CERN — home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) “Big Bang” machine — which said last week researchers had tracked particles traveling faster than light.

Anti-matter was discovered in 1932 after decades of theorizing, and was quickly absorbed into science fiction with its capacity to destroy any ordinary matter it touches.

The matter is converted into instant energy, a fact that has led to speculation that such reactions could fuel ultra-fast spacecraft for inter-stellar travel or be adapted for military use as a trigger for nuclear weapons.

Anti-matter — matter with negative gravity — has already been used in cancer treatments, some developed at CERN, but spokesman James Gillies said ELENA would focus on pure physics.

MUTUAL DESTRUCTION

One of the prime questions facing researchers is why matter and anti-matter did not destroy each other at the time of the Big Bang, making creation of the universe and the emergence of life impossible, and why matter came out on top.

Gillies said ELENA was a low-cost project funded out of the 20-nation centre’s regular budget but would provide researchers with far more anti-protons than had been possible with earlier installations.

Project head Stephan Maury said ELENA, a small declerator ring to be housed alongside its existing but much less efficient anti-proton decelerator (AD), would deliver the anti-particles “at the lowest energies ever reached.”

From the AD, in operation since the early 1990s, the anti-protons must be slowed down by passing them through a series of foil filters, a process that leads to the loss of 99.9 percent before they reach the experiments.

The new ring through which they will travel will slow them down to under one 50th of the energy of the AD, trapping up to 50 percent of the particles or more.

Oelet said this would not only greatly enhance the research potential of current experiments at CERN but would also make it much easier to start a wider range of tests on the make-up and behavior of anti-matter.

(Editing by Louise Ireland)

via Reuters

Space Radiation Expected to Rise for Airline Passengers and Astronauts

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 18:26:00 -0800

by Charles Q. Choi, SPACE.com Contributor

Date: 27 September 2011

SUN Whips Out Massive Flare CREDIT: NASA

Radiation hazards are likely to increase for air travelers and spacefarers in coming years due to changes in solar activity, researchers say.

Cosmic rays from deep space and high-energy particles from the sun can be hazardous to astronauts and also can expose airline crews and passengers to radiation, as well as damage spacecraft, aircraft and satellites. Solar magnetic fields protect Earth by repelling incoming galactic cosmic rays, but the period of high solar magnetic activity known as the grand solar maximum that persisted throughout the Space Age now appears to be coming to an end, and solar particle levels might start rising at the same time.

Cosmic rays constantly bombard the Earth from deep space, but solar activity is dependent on the sun’s regular weather cycle. The sun is currently approaching the peak of its current 11-year cycle, called Solar Cycle 24. That peak will occur in 2013, NASA has said. [Stunning Photos of Solar Flares & Sun Storms]

When powerful sunstorms are aimed directly at Earth, they can pose a serious threat to astronauts in orbiting spacecraft, damage satellites, interfere with communications systems and impact power plants and other infrastructure on the surface. Mild space weather events — such as yesterday’s (Sept. 26) geomagnetic storm, sparked by a weekend solar flare — can also supercharge Earth’s northern lights displays.

To see what future levels of space radiation might be like, researchers analyzed a 9,300-year record of galactic cosmic ray and solar activity in the form of ice extracted from Greenland and Antarctica. [Related: New Forecast: Sun’s ‘Superstorms’ Could Doom Satellites]

Atoms can be transmuted from one element to another by the cosmic rays and solar particles that slam into them, events that scientists can detect in these ice samples. Researchers supplemented these ancient records with present-day data from a global network of neutron monitoring stations.

Based on these past records, the researchers predicted future variations in galactic cosmic ray levels, the near-Earth interplanetary magnetic field, sunspot number and large solar storms. They found the risk of hazardous space weather is likely to rise noticeably over the next century from the level in recent decades.

One should not necessarily put off air travel, said study co-author Michael Lockwood at the University of Reading in England.

“However, it is good to be aware that one is exposed to more hazardous particles, particularly on trans-polar flights,” Lockwood told SPACE.com. “For really frequent, lifelong fliers, it might become wise to be like workers in the radiation industry and have more-frequent and more in-depth health checks. Also, to reduce exposure for passengers and crew to higher doses during solar events, flights may be diverted to lower latitudes and altitudes, with delay and cost implications — those extra costs will be reflected in ticket prices, of course.”

The scientists detailed their findings online Aug. 19 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

via Space.com

NASA's Falling UARS Satellite Explained - Infographic

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:37:00 -0800

by Karl Tate, SPACE.com Contributor

Date: 23 September 2011

Via SPACE.com

The Sunspots That Kicked Off This Week's Solar Storm May be Just Warming Up

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 17:32:00 -0800

By Clay Dillow Posted 09.27.2011 at 3:55 pm

AR1302 Alan Friedman via Bad Astronomy

That gigantic solar flare that lashed out toward Earth on Saturday is “the geomagnetic storm that just won’t go away,” the NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) in Boulder, Colo., said via its Facebook page today. And that appears to be true. Active Region 1302, pictured above, continues to pummel earth with solar energy and could disrupt satellite communications as it continues turning toward us in the days to come.

AR1302 unleashed a massive coronal mass ejection on Saturday that struck a glancing blow off Earth’s atmosphere yesterday, triggering brilliant auroras across the Northern Hemisphere. So far, the storm hasn’t caused any serious trouble here on the ground. Saturday’s solar explosion didn’t connect with a direct hit, and it is expected to do nothing more than continue to provide electrifying light shows to sky-gazers in Europe and Asia this evening.

But AR1302 is also not slowing down, and as the week wears on it will turn to face Earth more directly. An SWPC bulletin yesterday warned that for the next 3-5 days, we’re squarely in the solar storm’s sights. Another blast like Saturday’s and we may feel it here on Earth in the form of disrupted communications. A larger blast could do even more damage to the power grid and other infrastructure.

Just another thrilling week in the buildup to 2013’s solar maximum. See the sun as NOAA’s GOES-15 sees it today below.

Today’s Solar Activity, Captured by NOAA’s GOES-15: NOAA

via www.popsci.com

Six CMEs in 24 Hours

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 19:16:00 -0800

This movie from the SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) shows the sun’s atmosphere – the corona – from September 17 to September 20. Numerous CMEs blasted off the sun during this period. Credit: ESA/NASA/SOHO
› Play/Download video
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The sun let loose with at least six coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — solar phenomena that can send solar particles into space and affect electronic systems in satellites — from 7 PM ET on September 18, 2011 until 1 PM on September 19. The ejections appear to come from points scattered over the surface of the sun. Two CME’s dissipated quickly, but four continue to spread outward from the sun. NASA models suggest that the leading edge of one CME will pass by Earth at around 5 PM ET on Sep 21, at which point sky watchers should be on the lookout for auroras.

Additional info will be posted if warranted.

What is a coronal mass ejection?

For answers to these and other space weather questions, please visit the Spaceweather Frequently Asked Questionspage.

Karen C. Fox
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

via www.nasa.gov

Do you really have a sexual fetish?

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 15:02:49 -0800

PSYCHOLOGY

Ever since the term “sexual fetish” was first used over a century ago, there’s been a raging scientific debate over what it means. Why does one person get off on shoes, while another gets off on certain large body parts? Are these erotic feelings signs of illness, or simply preferences that are as inexplicable and harmless as liking spaghetti more than sausage?

Though sexual fetishism started out as a fairly neutral term over a century ago in early psychiatry, it’s become one of the most contested ideas in medicine. Here’s why.

The term “sexual fetish” was first used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by psychiatrists like Magnus Hirschfeld to describe — in a neutral fashion — the many ways that people experience sexual desire. Specifically, Hirschfeld and his contemporaries defined fetishism as the act of eroticizing any non-living object or body part. It wasn’t a mental illness, but a description of a mental state. However, in a world where wanting even the most ordinary kinds of sex can be difficult and embarrassing, having a fetish could make people neurotic. As a result, psychiatrists like Richard von Krafft-Ebing, author of the influential 1886 book Psychopathia Sexualis, often associated sexual fetishism with mental illness.

Derangements of the Sexual Instinct

Most of the people writing about sexual fetishes before the 1930s were psychiatrists dealing with people who had come to them because they were uncomfortable with their lust for rubber aprons, bondage, fur, machines, and hundreds of other sexytime items that are listed exhaustively in books like Psychopathia Sexualis, Havelock Ellis’Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Wilhelm Stekel’s The Sexual Aberrations, and many early essays of Sigmund Freud. Each of these researchers took a slightly different view on sexual fetishism, though Freud is perhaps most famous for his idea neuroses arise when people desire any deviation from heterosexual sex where the penis goes into the vagina and stays there for a reasonable amount of time.

Given that many of their patients were no doubt neurotic, many doctors dealing with sexuality at that time were surprisingly supportive of a variety of sexual choices. Havelock Ellis, who wrote about homosexuality extensively, was in an open marriage with a lesbian and championed women’s right to choose their own sexual paths.

Hirschfeld, who deals with fetishes in his book Derangements of the Sexual Instinct, was perhaps the world’s first gay rights advocate. Through his Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, he published a number of essays, and made public health films, about how homosexuality was a legitimate lifestyle and not a sickness. You can see excerpts from one of the movies he made, Different from the Others, here. The film depicts a romance between two men, and was made in 1919.

Even Wilhelm Stekel, credited with inventing the term paraphilia for “extreme” sexual fetishes, also noted in his work that there are many “normal” sexual fetishes — including bondage and domination — that are perfectly healthy and that are shared by many people without any detriment to society or themselves.

Though the Nazis destroyed Hirschfeld’s Sexual Sciences Institute, and burned most of the books and art in its collection, the work he had begun was continued in America by researchers like Alfred Kinsey. A zoologist who studied wasps, he turned to studying human sexuality in the 1940s and published two books — dubbed the “Kinsey reports” — which were summations of thousands of interviews he and his research team conducted with Americans about their sex lives. Though Kinsey never advanced any theories about whether fetishes were normal or not, the fact that he presented the whole range of sexual interests (from Missionary position and homosexuality, to piss fetishes and bestiality) from a detached, non-judgmental perspective was fairly remarkable.

Given that so many of the scientists describing sexual fetishes did not consider them to be pathological, how did the term “sexual fetish” come to be so strongly associated with sickness and perversion?

The Paraphilia Controversy

Stekel’s term “paraphilia” is still used in medicine today to diagnose any sexual activity that is “extreme” or deviates from the norm. The controversy here isn’t so much about whether people with fetishes feel bad about themselves — obviously, some people are comfortable with getting off on balloon porn, while other people are weirded out by it and seek help. Instead, the issue is that some fetishes are defined by the medical community as paraphilias, with all the stigmas such a diagnosis entails — including committing people with paraphilias to mental health facilities.

To understand why this is controversial, simply consider the strange history of paraphilias in theDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, a compendium of mental illnesses used by the psychiatric community in the United States to classify people’s mental health. Sometimes, paraphilias are defined based on politics rather than objective research. For example, homosexuality was included in the DSM until 1974, as was “nymphomania,” or female promiscuity, until 1987. Both “diagnoses” were found to be a reflection of cultural biases, and were removed from the DSM after protests from doctors and civil rights groups.

Today, the DSM is undergoing its fifth revision and the controversy over paraphilia definitions rages on. Some doctors are pushing to revive the nymphomania category under the new name“hypersexual disorder.” Others want to continue blurring the line between fetish and paraphilia, by using terms like “fetishistic disorder” or “unspecified paraphilic disorder.” According doctor and sex researcher Charles Moser, who has long argued against the idea of including fetishes and paraphilias in the DSM:

The DSM may be merely pathologizing practices that many psychiatrists find distasteful. However, patients may find their sexual behavior neither distasteful nor a source of distress or dysfunction.

In other words, whether something is a paraphilia may be in the eye of the beholder — and therefore it isn’t a good category to include in a manual that’s used for medical diagnoses.

Psychiatrists like Ray Blanchard, who currently serves as chair of the DSM Paraphilias Sub-Work Group, argue that medical professionals need to retain the idea of paraphilias because there are some “paraphilic disorders that cause real anguish to the individual or predispose the individual to violate the rights of other people or harm them in serious ways.” The question is, what do you mean by “harm”? Does a consensual BDSM relationship count as a paraphilia if somebody gets a bruise?

Sometimes a Fetish is Just a Fetish

Today the scientific community remains divided on the questions of sexual fetishes and paraphilias. Some doctors, like Moser, believe that sexual fetishes are simply personal preferences — perhaps strange, but definitely harmless. Others want to lump a fetish for spanking or threesomes in with crimes like pedophilia or rape. As a result of expert testimony from such doctors, courts have removed children from the custody of parents who have a private interest in everything from bondage to polyamory. Whether your community defines your preferences as a harmless fetish or a harmful paraphilia can still alter the course of your life — and the lives of your family and friends, too.

Still, the early work of Hirschfeld and Kinsey have accomplished one thing, especially in the age of the internet. Sexual fetishes are, as Stekel said almost a century ago, “normal.” Instead of medical tomes with pathologizing titles, today we have self-help books devoted to finding your kink, and reveling in your (safe, consensual) fetishes. You can shop for sex toys at boutiques, and learn about erotic role playing from famous bloggers.

In fact, some of us revel in trying to find (and cultivate) the most obscure possible fetishes just for our own lascivious amusement. For example, I’ve always loved mind control erotica. Why? Who knows, and who really cares? Tried to do it in real life a couple of times (consensually!), but that was a bit of a fail. Luckily, though, there are enough stories about mind control sex on the internet to fill the rest of my life with fetishistic glee. I’m sure you can think of a dozen other weirdly obscure fetishes off the top of your head, too.

What I’m trying to say is that there’s a very important corollary to Internet Rule 34, which states that if you can think of something, somebody has already made porn out of it online. And that corollary is: When you have a sexual fetish, you are never really alone.

via io9.com

7 Incredible NASA Corn Mazes: Cool Crop Circles for Science

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 11:24:00 -0800

by NANCY ATKINSON on SEPTEMBER 13, 2011

An amazing corn maze with a NASA theme, at Cornbelly’s in Lehi, Utah, one of seven around the US in 2011. Image courtesty of The MAiZE Inc.

Imagine looking out your airplane window (or alien spacecraft portal) and seeing a giant Mars Exploration Rover or an astronaut a half-kilometer long etched in …. a corn field? That’s exactly what is happening this fall, as seven farms across the US are participating in a special collaboration with NASA called Space Farm 7 to celebrate the space agency’s achievements and progress in space, as well as providing education and activities about agriculture. The farmers have created some absolutely amazing and intricate crop-circle-like formations that double as corn mazes, giving kids and families the chance to get lost — if you will — in space.

“You don’t always see an astronaut in a corn field,” said Adam Pugh from The Rock Ranchin Georgia, who approached NASA last year with the idea, “and there’s not an obvious connection between corn and NASA. But I thought it would be cool if we could work with NASA and highlight some of the NASA anniversaries going on and use our cornfield as an outdoor classroom to re-enthuse the new generation of youth about space exploration and get them fired up about looking towards the stars.”

Take a look at these awesome corn mazes, all unique and with a special NASA theme.

NASA-themed corn maze at Belvedere Plantation in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Image courtesy The MAiZE Inc.

“I’ve got kids that are nine-, four- and two- years old,” said Pugh, talking with Universe Today from the agri-tourism farm he operates, “and the only thing they know about astronauts is Buzz Lightyear. I felt it would be great if we could teach kids about the real astronauts and the real heroes that have done so much through space exploration to give us things we enjoy today like cell phones, solar panels and all the great things that space exploration has given to us.”

The farms that are part of Space Farm 7 create corn mazes every year, as part of their harvest-time autumn festivities, Pugh said, and this year seven farms have a space-themed maze. “Most of the places started as pumpkin patches or small farms and have all gotten into agri-tourism, an increasingly popular idea which uses an agricultural setting as a place for education or tourism. It’s all part of a growing trend of people buying local for their produce, meats and dairy products.”

Corn maze at Dell’Osso Farms in Lathrop, California. Image courtesty of The MAiZE Inc.

Pugh said farmers have noticed a disconnect between today’s youth and agriculture. “We have kids coming on our field trips who have no idea where milk or eggs come from – they just think they come from the store,” he said. “But real effort and skill goes into creating the food that we all enjoy. Our purpose is to not only entertain these folks and get them to spend quality time together and exercise but also educate them and help them realize where their food comes from.”

The SpaceFarm 7 celebration is very timely as this year NASA celebrates the 50th anniversary of the first American in space, the 30th anniversary of the first Space Shuttle mission and the 20th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s deployment in space. NASA has ten regional research centers located in the United States, and the individual Space Farms have each been paired up with their nearest space center in order to highlight that region’s contribution to NASA.

NASA-themed corn maze at Dewberry Farm in Brookshire, Texas. Image courtesty of The MAiZE Inc

Layla Dowdy from NASA’s Public Affairs Office said NASA is supporting this awesome outreach project with exhibits, and speakers, as well as an online national contest where winners earn a visit to Kennedy Space Center and the chance to dine with an astronaut. To enter, visit www.spacefarm7.com and vote on your favorite of the seven maze designs. A winner will be randomly selected at the end of October.

The celebrations at each of the farms will include a visiting astronaut or other NASA officials, as well as activities such as hobby-rocket launches, hands-on space education activities, and demonstrations from local astronomy clubs, in addition to the regular activities the agri-tourism farms have.

“We’re providing all sorts of neat opportunities for families to experience space exploration, in ways which are normally not accessible unless you travel to Houston or Kennedy Space Center,” Pugh said. “We’re bringing the education materials to people all over the US, and our shared objective with NASA is to reach 1 million kids.”

“We just want to encourage families to get outdoors and enjoy quality time together,” Pugh added. “Our whole purpose is to be good stewards of the land and share that with folks.”

Activities at The Rock Ranch include zip lines, paddle boats, pony rides and other fun outdoor activities where people can “enjoy nature and farmland,” Pugh said.

Corn maze at Liberty Ridge Farm in Schaghticoke, New York. Image courtesty of The MAiZE Inc

The mazes typically average 8 acres in size, said Kamille Combs from The MAiZE Inc, a company that helps farmers design and create their corn mazes.

Combs provided the opening dates for the 7 mazes across the US:

The Rock Ranch; The Rock, GA; Sept. 24
Cornbelly’s Corn Maze & Pumpkin Fest; Lehi, UT; Sept. 30
Dewberry Farm; Brookshire, TX; Sept. 24
Liberty Ridge Farm; Schaghticoke, NY; Sept. 17
Belvedere Plantation; Fredericksburg, VA; Oct. 1
Vala’s Pumpkin Patch; Gretna, NE; Sept. 17
Dell’ Osso Farms; Lathrop, CA; Oct. 1

Look for more information on the Space Farm 7 website and get out and enjoy the mazes if one is near you.

Corn maze at The Rock Ranch; The Rock, Georgia. Image courtesty of The MAiZE Inc

Corn maze at Vala’s Pumpkin Patch in Gretna, Nebraska. Image courtesty of The MAiZE Inc

via www.universetoday.com

Are We Entering the 7th Stage of Evolution on Earth?

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 01:11:36 -0800

Milan Ćirković of the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade, and one of the world’s leading authorities on astrobiology and the evolution of galaxies and baryonic dark matter, has outlined along with philosopher Robert Bradbury the six great mega-trajectories of the biological evolution on Earth:

1. From the origin of life to the ”Last Common Ancestor”
2. Prokaryote diversification
3. Unicellular eukaryote diversification
4. Multicellularity
5. Invasion of the land
6. Appearance of intelligence and technology.

The authors suggest a “postbiological” seventh mega-trajectory triggered by the emergence of artificial intelligence” at least equivalent to the biologically-evolved one. (Bradbury is the inventor of the matrioshka brain — a hypothetical megastructure, based on the Dyson sphere, of immense computational capacity).

In a fascinating discovery that counters a common theory that human evolution has slowed to a crawl or even stopped in modern humans, a recent study examining data from an international genomics project describes the past 40,000 years as a time of supercharged evolutionary change, driven by exponential population growth and cultural shifts.

The findings may lead to a very broad rethinking of human evolution, especially in the view that modern culture has essentially relaxed the need for physical genetic changes in humans to improve survival.

A team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks estimates that positive selection just in the past 5,000 years alone — dating back to the Stone Age — has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period of human evolution. Many of the new genetic adjustments are occurring around changes in the human diet brought on by the advent of agriculture, and resistance to epidemic diseases that became major killers after the growth of human civilizations.

“In evolutionary terms, cultures that grow slowly are at a disadvantage, but the massive growth of human populations has led to far more genetic mutations,” says Hawks. “And every mutation that is advantageous to people has a chance of being selected and driven toward fixation. What we are catching is an exceptional time.”

While the correlation between population size and natural selection is nothing new — it was a core premise of Charles Darwin, Hawks says — the ability to bring quantifiable evidence to the table is a new and exciting outgrowth of the Human Genome Project.

In the hunt for recent genetic variation in the genome map the project has cataloged the individual differences in DNA called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). The project has mapped roughly 4 million of the estimated 10 million SNPs in the human genome. Hawks’ research focuses on a phenomenon called linkage disequilibrium (LD). These are places on the genome where genetic variations are occurring more often than can be accounted for by chance, usually because these changes are affording some kind of selection advantage.

The researchers identify recent genetic change by finding long blocks of DNA base pairs that are connected. Because human DNA is constantly being reshuffled through recombination, a long, uninterrupted segment of LD is usually evidence of positive selection. Linkage disequilibrium decays quickly as recombination occurs across many generations, so finding these uninterrupted segments is strong evidence of recent adaptation, Hawks says.

Employing this test, the researchers found evidence of recent selection on approximately 1,800 genes, or 7 percent of all human genes.

This finding runs counter to conventional wisdom in many ways, Hawks says. For example, there’s a strong record of skeletal changes that clearly show people became physically smaller, and their brains and teeth are also smaller. This is generally seen as a sign of relaxed selection — that size and strength are no longer key to survival.

But other pathways for evolution have opened, Hawks says, and genetic changes are now being driven by major changes in human culture. One good example is lactase, the gene that helps people digest milk. This gene normally declines and stops activity about the time one becomes a teenager, Hawks says. But northern Europeans developed a variation of the gene that allowed them to drink milk their whole lives — a relatively new adaptation that is directly tied to the advance of domestic farming and use of milk as an agricultural product.

The biggest new pathway for selection relates to disease resistance, Hawks says. As people starting living in much larger groups and settling in one place roughly 10,000 years ago, epidemic diseases such as malaria, smallpox and cholera began to dramatically shift mortality patterns in people. Malaria is one of the clearest examples, Hawks says, given that there are now more than two dozen identified genetic adaptations that relate to malaria resistance, including an entirely new blood type known as the Duffy blood type.

Another recently discovered gene, CCR5, originated about 4,000 years ago and now exists in about 10 percent of the European population. It was discovered recently because it makes people resistant to HIV/AIDS. But its original value might have come from obstructing the pathway for smallpox.

“There are many things under selection that are making it harder for pathogens to kill us,” Hawks says.

Population growth is making all of this change occur much faster, Hawks says, giving a tribute to Charles Darwin. When Darwin wrote in “Origin of the Species” about challenges in animal breeding, he always emphasized that herd size “is of the highest importance for success” because large populations have more genetic variation, Hawks says.

The parallel to humans is obvious: The human population has grown from a few million people 10,000 years ago to about 200 million people at A.D. 0, to 600 million people in the year 1700, to more than 6.5 billion today. Prior to these times, the population was so small for so long that positive selection occurred at a glacial pace, Hawks says.

“What’s really amazing about humans,” Hawks continued, “that is not true with most other species, is that for a long time we were just a little ape species in one corner of Africa, and weren’t genetically sampling anything like the potential we have now.”

The recent changes are especially striking.

“Five thousand years is such a small sliver of time — it’s 100 to 200 generations ago. That’s how long it’s been since some of these genes originated, and today they are in 30 or 40 percent of people because they’ve had such an advantage. It’s like ‘invasion of the body snatchers.’

The Daily Galaxy via University of Massachusetts Amherst and centauri-dreams.org

Everyone has a 9/11 story. This one is mine.

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 12:02:00 -0800

A morning like any other..

I stumble down the stairs and make my coffee. I settle in to my office chair, jump in a local chatroom to say goodmorning to my friends. When I log on, the chat room in uncharacteristically empty. One of the few online saw me come on and without even saying hello, asked if I had turned on a TV yet. I hadn’t, so I did.

There was no way I could have been prepared for what I saw. Moments after I tuned in and started digesting what was being reported, the 2nd plane hit. I immediately woke up my roommates and we watched events unfold for awhile. I had to go to work that day, so I showered in something of a daze. Got in my car and tuned in public radio for the ride to work. In transit, the first tower collapsed. Looking around me in traffic, I could see everyone else getting the same news. Faces of wonder, sadness, disbelief in every vehicle.. my own tears pushing at the back of my eyes.

I get to work and it’s unusually quiet for a normally fast paced environment. Radios are giving minute-by-minute reports of the chaos in New York. Shortly thereafter, the 2nd tower collapsed. Reports of the FAA grounding all air traffic comes in.

..and then it hits me.

My parents are on a trip in Europe, due to leave that day for home. My brother and sister in law are in Las Vegas on vacation. And two of my best friends are off camping in the wilds of Utah, oblivious to everything. I couldn’t concentrate on my work. I could barely think. Two days went by before I heard from my brother. He had spoken to my folks, who we’re stuck, at that time indefinitely, in London. But they were all safe. It was almost a week before I heard from my friends on the camping trip.

Facing so many unknowns and fears essentially on my own was something I took away from that day. Is my family dead? WIll I hear from my friends again? Am I or my other friends and family in imminent danger? Splitting my thoughts on 24 hour coverage of this mess and not knowing the fate of the people I care for, by the end of that day I was wreck. The country I’ve always known as unshakable, shook. But no matter how awful I felt, I had to keep reminding myself that people were suffering.

We were all hurting. We were all experiencing fears.

The world wept for us.. and for a time, we were united.

The rest you know as history, colored by your own experiences.

The Evolution of 'Star Trek'

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 01:29:14 -0800

Source: SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration

Breathtaking time-lapse video shows two years of nature in...

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 18:43:30 -0800

Breathtaking time-lapse video shows two years of nature in constant flux

Prepare to be blown away by the constantly shifting glory of nature. Photographer Henry Jun Wah Lee with Evosia Studios has collected two years worth of gorgeous moments in one four-minute time lapse video that takes our breath away.

Writes Lee:

In 2009, I set out to film nature to share with urban dwellers who, like me, have never ventured outside the routines and comforts of cities.

It’s now been two years, many amazing trips, and countless incredible experiences. This film is a compilation of the many highlights captured during this time.

Here’s the complete list of natural scenes included in this video:

Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest
Mono Lake
Joshua Tree National Park
Alabama Hills
Lunar Eclipse of December 2010
Monument Valley
Salton Sea
Tuscon, Arizona
Jeju Island, South Korea
Yosemite National Park
Petrified Forest National Park
Death Valley National Park
Horseshoe Bend

via io9.com

Scientists unveil a newly-discovered, ancient human ancestor

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 14:22:00 -0800

HUMAN EVOLUTION

This skull belonged to Australopithecus sediba, a new hominin species recently discovered in South Africa. The two million year old fossils are some of the most complete ever discovered, and they could rewrite our evolutionary family tree.

As fossil finds go, the Australopithecus sediba find is a downright bonanza. Paleontologists first discovered the hominin at the Malapa site in 2008, and they’ve since found over 220 bones representing at least half a dozen individuals of all ages. Professor Lee Berger of Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand explains the find:

“The fossils demonstrate a surprisingly advanced but small brain, a very evolved hand with a long thumb like a humans, a very modern pelvis, but a foot and ankle shape never seen in any hominin species that combines features of both apes and humans in one anatomical package. The many very advanced features found in the brain and body, and the earlier date make it possibly the best candidate ancestor for our genus, the genus Homo, more so than previous discoveries such as Homo habilis.”

Even better, these might just be the most accurately dated bones in the entire hominin fossil record. Analysis of the surrounding rocks indicate that they date back to a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field, which we know occurred between precisely 1.977 and 1.98 million years ago. That means we can date these fossils to within just 3,000 years, which is practically unheard of for such an ancient find.

At just under two million years old, these specimens predate the emergence of Homo erectus by about 200,000 years, and it’s also about 100,000 years older than the oldest known Homo habilis fossil. It’s harder to establish concrete dates for when Homo habilis evolved versus Australopithecus sediba - both could have evolved anywhere between about 2.5 and 2 million years ago, and that’s a pretty massive span of time.

But it does appear that Australopithecus sediba played a pivotal role in the emergence of the later Homo genus. That would indicate that it either predates Homo habilis or that habilisdoesn’t actually belong in that genus after all, which some paleontologists such as Richard Leakey have long argued.

Before we continue, it might be good to quickly explain the differences between the Australopithecus and Homo genera. Basically, Australopithecus was significantly closer to the other apes than was Homo - it was much smaller, much less intelligent, was not strictly bipedal, and spent a lot of time in the trees.

Professor Berger also tackles this topic in explaining why sediba was categorized as part of Australopithecus:

The fossils have an overall body plan that is like that of other Australopiths – they have small brains, relatively small bodies and long and seemingly powerful arms. They do, however, have some features in the skull, hand and pelvis that are found in later definitive members of the genus Homo but not in other Australopiths. However, given the small brains and Australopith-like upper limbs, and features of the foot and ankle, the team has felt that keeping this species in the genus Australopithecus was the conservative thing to do. Nevertheless, sediba is turning out to be one of the most intriguing hominins yet discovered, and it certainly shows a mosaic of features shared by both earlier and later hominins.

Full size

A key reason for sediba’s suddenly privileged position is its hands. Although they were probably primarily used for moving swiftly through the trees - a distinctly non-Homobehavior - the hands also appear capable of the precision grip, which means they were capable of making tools. We know that these particular fossils postdate the first recorded evidence of tools.

The sediba hands are the most complete in the fossil record until the time of the Neanderthals, more than a million years later, which allows for remarkably fine-grained analysis. It appears thatAustralopithecus sediba actually had a hand better adapted for tool-making than did Homo habilis, including the original 1.75 million year old find that defined Homo habilis - literally “handy man” - in the first place.

This doesn’t mean that Homo habilis wasn’t actually making tools - that 1.75 million year old hand was found near stone tools, which is partially why the species became so intrinsically associated with tool-making. But Australopithecus sediba does appear to represent a much stronger transitional stage between the tree-dwelling earlier Australopithecus species - including the famous Australopithecus afarensis specimen Lucy, who dates back 3 million years - and later tool-makers like Homo erectus.

So then, let’s say we remove Homo habilis from our direct ancestry - perhaps re-categorizing it as Australopithecus habilis, but that’s another argument for another decade - and slot in Australopithecus sediba as the direct ancestor of Homo erectus. What else can this new find tell us? One of the most intriguing finds has to do with brains and bipedalism.

Full size

The key here is the pelvis, which expanded in the Homo genus. There are two possible explanations for this - we need wider pelvises for stability while walking upright, or females need larger pelvises in order to give birth to children with larger brains and, thus, larger skulls. As Duke researcher Steven Churchill explains, Australopithecus sediba sheds some light on which of these was the real driving force of pelvic expansion:

“It’s clear there could be two things driving the evolution of the pelvis in our Homolineage. One is bipedal locomotion. Between six and two million years ago, we begin to see a lot of it. The other thing is our big brains. Our brains have to pass through the pelvis, so accommodations must be made. What’s cool about sediba is their pelvises are already different from other australopiths, and yet they’re still small-brained… It’s hard to imagine that there’s no change in locomotion behind all this.”

The small brains are themselves an intriguing point. While the brains do not fossilize, they do leave clear marks on the inside of the skull. From those indentations, the researchers can deduce a surprising amount about the brain. There’s evidence that the front of the brain was already starting to reorganize itself into something like the modern human frontal lobe, which is one of the keys to our current intelligence.

We wouldn’t have expected to find a frontal lobe like that in such an ancient species, and it suggests the hominin brain didn’t enlarge gradually from Australopithecus to Homo. Instead, this suggests that the later Australopiths began reorganizing their brains into something more akin to later Homo brains, and only then did the brains begin to radically increase in volume.

There’s a lot more still to come about this new find, and there’s high hope that the Malapa site will reveal still more ancient hominin specimens. Until then, let’s just welcome the newest member of our extended evolutionary family. We may have just discovered the evolutionary equivalent of our great-great-grandparent, and that’s pretty damn awesome.

via io9.com

HOW TO MAKE LOVE LIKE A CAVEMAN

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 11:24:34 -0800

Daniel Honan on September 3, 2011

If asked to imagine what prehistoric human sex was like, according to psychologist Christopher Ryan, most of us would conjure “the hackneyed image of the caveman, dragging a dazed woman by her hair with one hand, a club in the other…” Ryan says this image is mistaken in every detail. A much more likely picture of how it went down in prehistoric times was this: a caveman would quietly sit in the corner and watch another caveman have sex with a woman, patiently waiting his turn.

Apparently, prehistoric women were extraordinarily promiscuous, and like our primate ancestors, women are hard-wired to behave like chimps in the bedroom. In his book, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origin of Modern Sexuality, Ryan offers a biological explanation for why we find monogamy so difficult today. A male is interested in sex with one woman up until the point of orgasm, at which point he will immediately lose interest, fall asleep, or perhaps wonder off to find more action.

In other words, human males are in important ways sexually incompatible with human females, who are capable of multiple orgasms. So what is the evolutionary advantage of this? Take monogamy out of the equation, and the evolutionary logic becomes more evident. A woman can have multiple sexual partners. This may increase her chances of reproducing, and she needs to try it a lot to be successful. Compared to other animals, humans have an incredibly low rate of conception, based on the number of sexual acts we partake in. And so it is well that sex is so much fun for humans, because if that were not the case, we wouldn’t have made it this far.

So just what does it mean to make love like a caveman? It means have a lot of sex, partaking in, as Ryan describes it, the “seven million years of primate promiscuity” that our ancestors so heartily embraced as a species. That’s a lot of sex.

Watch Christopher Ryan explain the evolution of human sexuality here:

What’s the Significance?

According to Ryan, if we took an honest look at our dysfunctional sexual lives today, this is what we would find: we are all victims of a well-intentioned inquisition. American society has responded to this crisis by inventing a ‘marital-industrial complex’ of couples therapy, “pharmaceutical hard-ons,” sex advice columnists, and “creepy father-daughter purity cults.” Viagra breaks sales records every year. Pornography worldwide is a $100 billion business. Ryan says we spend all of this money to compensate for a fundamental disconnect we have with our nature.

For instance, why is monogamy so difficult? According to Ryan, we are biologically programmed against it. It was not until the advent of agriculture that man developed a notion of private property, and had reason to feel jealous of a promiscuous mate. Culture invented monogamy, and with it marriage, cheating, and a sense of shame that surrounds our sexual selves. Ryan is anything but a home-wrecker. His book offers no prescriptions for curing our disconnect with nature. What he does recommend, however, is that we lose this sense of shame we have when we feel or act certain ways that contradict our culture, but which are in perfect harmony with our sexual nature.

via bigthink.com

'Stem Cell Zoo' May Aid Endangered Species

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 03:04:00 -0800

Jennifer Welsh, LiveScience Staff Writer
Date: 04 September 2011 Time: 02:09 PM ET

Scripps Research scientists produce first stem cells from endangered species. Cells could make it possible to improve reproduction and genetic diversity for some species, possibly saving them from extinction, or to bolster the health of endangered animals in captivity.
CREDIT: San Diego Zoo

Stem cells are quickly becoming an important tool for human medical treatments, and researchers are betting they will also be a useful tool for zoo animals. They are working to create stem cell lines from zoo animals, for use in treating animal diabetes and other ailments as well as helping the animals reproduce.

The scientists have already created a “frozen zoo,” which contains different types of cells from every animal there, and now they are putting together a “stem cell zoo.”

“There are only two animals in it,” study researcher Inbar Friedrich Ben-Nun, of The Scripps Research Institute, said in a statement, “but we have the start of a new zoo, the stem cell zoo.”

Stem cells are prized, because they can be turned into any type of cell in the body, a characteristic called pluripotency. The cells can even be turned into sperm or egg cells, and used in assisted reproduction to make more individuals of the species.

“The most important thing is to provide these stem cells as a resource for other people taking some of the next steps,” said Jeanne Loring, also of The Scripps Research Institute.

Endangered stem cells

The researchers started with two species: the drill primate, a highly endangered primate genetically close to humans, and the northern white rhinoceros, which is genetically far from humans and also incredibly endangered.

To create the stem cells, the researchers used the same genes that are used to turn human cells pluripotent; they inserted those genes into the animals’ skin cells. They had originally tried to use genes from the animals themselves and their close relatives, but after more than a year of trying they were having little success.

The new technique isn’t very efficient yet, transforming just a few cells into stem cells at a time, but that’s enough, the researchers said.

Stem cell therapies

Both animals, the researchers said, were chosen because they could benefit from stem cells now. For instance, the drill primate suffers from diabetes when in captivity, and stem cell-based treatments for diabetes being researched in humans suggest the same may work in these primates.

The rhinoceros was chosen because it is one of the most highly endangered species on the planet, with only seven animals, all in captivity, in existence (two of which are in the San Diego Zoo Safari Park). They haven’t reproduced in several years, and because the population is so small there is a lack of genetic diversity, which could affect their survival.

If the researchers can use the stem cells to make sperm and eggs from skin cells of deceased animals in the frozen zoo, they could reintroduce some genetic diversity into the population, while also increasing its size.

“The best way to manage extinctions is to preserve species and their habitats,” study researcher Oliver Ryder, of the San Diego Zoo, said in a statement. “But that’s not working all the time.”

The rhinos are a perfect example, he said, because there are so few. “Stem cell technology provides some level of hope that they won’t have to become extinct even though they’ve been completely eliminated from their habitats.”

The study was published today (Sept. 4) in the journal Nature Methods.

via http://www.livescience.com

A rainbow cloud shimmers over Ethiopia

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 11:43:00 -0800

New Scientist. Image: Esther Havens.

Here’s a rare look at a rainbow over the skies of Ethiopia. Find out how this cloud — known as as “pileus cloud” — brightens the atmosphere.

Pileus clouds are formed over the towers of cumulus clouds. The cumulus clouds puff up through convection, or the upwards motion of moist air in one section. The moisture in the air condenses and forms the towers of the cloud. Above the cumulus clouds in the troposphere, ice crystals are compressed by the wall of upward-moving air. They form the little cumulus “caps” that are pileus clouds.

These clouds only form when the convective current is strong enough and the upper atmosphere has enough water in it to form the crystals. Even then, what most people see are puffs of white cloud over the top of the cumulus clouds, not dazzling rainbows.

As with any rainbow effect, the light has to be precisely placed. Light has to hit the cloud and diffract through the prism of the drops. But when light hits the cloud from behind, it usually hits the eye of the beholder head-on as well. This means that any rainbow effect is drowned in a flood of white light. Iridescent clouds are only visible when something blocks out the light from the sun while still showing the light through the clouds. In this case, the dark cumulus cloud blocks out the sunlight, while the pileus cloud shimmers.

via io9.com