Wednesday 21 January 2015

Hubble eXtreme Deep Field iPad Folio Covers

Here's a great iPad case from Zazzle featuring a Hubble-related design. Maybe you'd like to see your name on it? Click to personalize and see what it's like!


tagged with: hubble extreme deep field, hubble deep field, extreme deep field, hubble, astronomy, cosmology, galaxies, deep space, xdf, outer space

The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) is an image of a small part of space in the center of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field within the constellation Fornax, showing the deepest optical view in space. Released on September 25, 2012, it took 10 years to compile the images and shows galaxies from 13.2 billion years ago. The exposure time was two million seconds, or approximately 23 days. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see. The red galaxies are the remnants of galaxies after major collisions during their elderly years. Many of the smaller galaxies are very young galaxies that eventually became the major galaxies, like the Milky Way and other galaxies in our galactic neighborhood. The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, adds another 5,500 galaxies to Hubble's 2003 and 2004 view into a tiny patch of the farthest universe.

This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 Team.

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Astronomers to map the universe with largest radio telescope ever built

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An international team of scientists have joined forces to lay the foundations for an experiment of truly astronomical proportions: putting together the biggest map of the Universe ever made. The experiment will combine signals from hundreds of radio dishes to make cosmic atlas. The international team of researchers has now set out their plans for the mammoth survey.

via Science Daily

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A repulsive material: domination of electrostatic force

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In a world-first achievement published in Nature, scientists from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science in Japan,

The post A repulsive material: domination of electrostatic force has been published on Technology Org.

 
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Graphene brings quantum effects to electronic circuits

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Scientists have revealed a superfluid phase in ultra-low temperature 2D materials, creating the potential for electronic devices which dissipate very little energy.

via Science Daily

Vintage Astronomy, Celestial Planisphere Map Posters

Here's a great poster featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: antique, constellations, retro, planisphere, americana, vintage illustration, norhtern hemisphere, celestial map, star chart, astronomy

Vintage illustration astronomy and celestial map by Joseph (James) Moxon (1627-1691). Star chart featuring a world planisphere and celestial sphere - both are surrounded by scenes from the Old and New Testaments including vignettes of the Creation, the Garden of Eden, the Deluge, Moses, the Crucifixion and angels observing the Holy City. Created circa 1691 -1699.

Joseph Moxon was a hydrographer to Charles II, was an English printer of mathematical books and maps, a maker of globes and mathematical instruments, and mathematical lexicographer. Joseph Moxin produced the first English language dictionary devoted to mathematics. In November 1678 he became the first tradesman to be elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

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How science can improve interrogation

Science Focus

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The release of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA's detention and interrogation program documents the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) against terrorism suspects detained by the agency.

The report concludes that the CIA program was more widespread and egregious than the American public — and Congressional oversight committees — had been led to believe. Not surprisingly, key findings in the report also call into question the claimed efficacy of EITs in eliciting reliable intelligence information.

As a research psychologist who has spent more than a decade assessing the effectiveness of various interview and interrogation methods, I regard release of the Senate report as a uniquely important event. It should encourage us to critically assess the ethical, legal, and scientific basis upon which the EIT program was based. Just as important, it should prompt us to consider how we devise our future interrogation practices.

An absence of scientific scrutiny

The report offers an opportunity for us to reflect upon the events that led to the use of EITs by the CIA, as well as the debate over their purported effectiveness.

While proponents claim these methods are necessary to compel uncooperative subjects to divulge critical information, critical analysis fails to justify their use.

From my perspective, EITs are ethically indefensible. Their use appears to violate both domestic and international law. Furthermore, no scientific assessment of the techniques can be offered to demonstrate their effectiveness in practice.

The report's first finding agreed — the "CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees." However, the debate between critics and proponents of the program continues, with both sides offering anecdotal evidence to support their claims.

The absence of (and need for) scientific scrutiny on this issue is obvious. Unfortunately, ethical issues once again pervade any such discussion. The ethical conduct of experimental research would preclude any responsible scientist from systematically assessing the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques".

How should one conduct interrogation?

A 2006 Intelligence Science Board concluded that the U.S. government's interrogation practices were largely devoid of any scientific validity.

In fact, existing research into current practices in the U.S. indicates that the use of an accusatorial approach — characterized by accusation, confrontation, and psychological manipulation — can produce false confessions if applied against innocent subjects.

In 2009, the Obama administration created the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG), an inter-agency group comprising personnel from the FBI, CIA, and (Defense Intelligence Agency) DIA. The operational mission of the HIG was to conduct interrogations of high-value terrorism suspects. In addition, the HIG was also tasked with developing a research program to assess the effectiveness of current interrogation practices and to develop novel, science-based methods.

Since 2010, I have led a group of internationally renowned psychologists from the U.S., UK, Sweden, Australia, Southeast Asia, South Africa, and the Middle East to do just that. For the past four years, we have worked to develop new methods of intelligence interviewing and interrogation. This research is unclassified and is conducted with the oversight of Human Subjects Review Committees that protect the rights and welfare of study participants. Our group has produced more than 60 studies — from experimental research to interviews and surveys of interrogation professionals and systematic analysis of specific criminal and counterterrorist interrogation interviews.

These studies assess the importance of social relationships, active listening, and personal rapport in extracting information. They have developed methods that enhance memory recall and evaluate what kind of questioning can help an interrogator judge whether a suspect is telling the truth or not. They look at the impact of the interrogation context (how should we set up the interrogation room?), and the role of culture and language (including the influence of interpreters).

We are working with U.S. military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies to introduce science-based methods into their formal training programs. The good news is that these methods are now being taught to U.S. government personnel.

Our findings clearly show that interrogation strategies that are based on building rapport and seek to understand a suspect's motivation to cooperate are more effective than accusatory practices that look to raise anxiety levels, fabricate evidence, and minimize a suspect's perception of their own culpability. This conclusion is confirmed by the experiences of many highly skilled interrogators. Further, the "information gathering approach," as it is known, preserves the ethical principles of fairness and justice and is legally permissible.

A complete description of the implications of this research is too detailed to be included here. However, the results of our efforts are available to both the scientific and professional communities. Studies conducted by our researchers are being published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at both academic and professional meetings. A new publication, Interrogation: Expanding the Frontiers of Research and Practice, shares our findings with interrogation professionals, U.S. government trainers, and the public.

Our research program represents only the beginning of what is possible. Medicine and education have turned to researchers for the development of evidence-based approaches. It is time that the practice of interrogation be similarly informed by scientific scrutiny.

The Conversation

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 » see original post http://theweek.com/articles/441551/science-improve-interrogation
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There will never be another space race

Science Focus

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Ellen Stofan, NASA's chief scientist, saw her first rocket launch at age 4. Her father worked at NASA as an engineer, and the thrill of space exploration captured her imagination from an early age. But at a Future Tense film screening of The Dish in Washington D.C. last week, Stofan acknowledged that for many people she meets, what first sparked a space obsession was the Apollo program — President John F. Kennedy's audacious commitment in 1961 to putting Americans on the moon before the end of the decade.

Today, NASA's goal to put astronauts on Mars by the 2030s could be a similarly unifying project. And not only in the United States. A far cry from the fierce Cold War Space Race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, exploration in the 21st century is likely to be a far more globally collaborative project.

Why has the idea of reaching Mars captured the world? A trip to Mars is a priority for many scientific reasons — some believe it's the planet that most resembles our own, and one that could answer the age-old question of whether we're alone in the universe — but there's also been a long popular fascination with the planet, Stofan observed. Ever since Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli first observed the canali on Mars in the 1800s or when H.G. Wells wrote about aliens from Mars in his 1898 science fiction novel, The War of the Worlds, the planet has loomed large in the public's imagination.

And perhaps it's this historic obsession that partly explains the more international effort: the U.S. is hardly the only country dreaming of deep space — and a trip to Mars — these days. India has plans to put astronauts in the sky, Japan just launched a spacecraft to collect asteroid samples, and of course, the European Space Agency had the recent, hugely successful Rosetta mission and Philae lander. It seems that what Apollo did for America's imagination and spirit of invention, foreign space programs can also do domestically. "You see countries like India really investing in their space program because they see it as inspirational and good for their economy," Stofan told the audience.

The truth is, as Stofan put it, "When we go to explore, we do it as a globe." In a conversation outside the event, she recounted the stories of some of the astronauts featured in the 2007 documentary, In the Shadow of the Moon, who travelled the world after they returned from the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 70s. People from all sorts of countries welcomed them, not just as Americans, but as "our astronauts".

"People see space as a place where you go and cooperate," she told me.

This spirit of trans-border ownership and investment seems set to continue. One key part of this is the Global Exploration Roadmap, an effort between space agencies like NASA, France's Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, the Canadian Space Agency, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, among many others, that is intended to aid joint projects from the International Space Station to expeditions to the Moon and near-Earth asteroids — and of course, to reach Mars. On a recent trip to India's space agency, Stofan recounted to me, she met with many Indian engineers who were just as excited as the Americans to get scientists up there, not only to explore, but also to begin nailing down the question of whether there was ever life on the red planet.

It's also clear that the next stage of space exploration will not only be more global, but will equally involve greater private and public partnerships. Companies like Space X and Boeing are increasingly involved in NASA's day to day operations, including a joint project that could carry astronauts into space in 2017. NASA's view is to turn over to the private sector those projects that in a sense have become routine, Stofan suggested, and let NASA focus its resources on getting to Mars.

This environment feels a lot different from the secretive and adversarial Space Race days, when the U.S. and Soviet Union battled to reach the moon first. What's changed? The Cold War is over, of course, but with it, the funding commitment may also be missing this time around. Stofan mentioned, in response to an audience question, that at the time of the Apollo missions, NASA got up to about 4 percent of the federal budget, while now it's only around 0.4 percent. The dollars are still large, of course, but perhaps increased international and private cooperation can be seen as an efficient, clever way to do more with less.

So, what does the future hold? NASA is extremely focused on how to get to Mars and back again safely, Stofan told the audience, but the fun role of science fiction, she suggested, is to start envisioning what the steps after that might be. For example, what it might be like to live on Mars? After all, science often gets its inspiration from the creative world. Just look at how similar mobile phones are to the communicators from Star Trek, she pointed out, or the fact that MIT students made a real life version of the robotic sphere that Luke Skywalker trains with in Star Wars. "Stories are a great counterpoint to science."

What would Stofan like to see on the big screen next? "The Martian. I think it's being made into a movie in already. And I wish someone would redo The Dune."

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 » see original post http://theweek.com/articles/441556/there-never-another-space-race
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In theory, the Milky Way could be a 'galactic transport system'

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Based on the latest evidence and theories our galaxy could be a huge wormhole and, if that were true, it could be "stable and navigable." Astrophysicists combined the equations of general relativity with an extremely detailed map of the distribution of dark matter in the Milky Way when proposing this possibility.

via Science Daily

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North American and Pelican Nebulae Square Sticker

Here's a great sheet of stickers featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: envelope sealers, nanpn, pelican nebula, north american nebula, emission nebulae, billowing interstellar gas clouds, awesome astronomy images, dust clouds, hydrogen clouds, stellar winds, star forming activity, star nursery, star nurseries

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A gorgeous picture from outer space featuring the North American and Pelican emission nebulae in the constellation of Cygnus, The Swan. The red, green and yellow areas all highlight the cloud of interstellar ionised hydrogen.
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image code: nanpn

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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The Complex Ion Tail of Comet Lovejoy

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Zazzle Space Gifts for young and old

Researchers generate tiny images that contain over 300 colors

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A scheme for greatly increasing the number of colors that can be produced by arrays of tiny aluminum nanodisks has been demonstrated by A*STAR scientists.



Zazzle Space market place

Exploding Universe Abstract Wall Decal

Here's a great wall decal featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: nebula, black, space, hole, blue, green, astronomy, clouds, purple, red, gaseous, window, light, white

Exploding universe Abstract Wall Decal

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Hubble eXtreme Deep Field Cover For The iPad Mini

Here's a great iPad case from Zazzle featuring a Hubble-related design. Maybe you'd like to see your name on it? Click to personalize and see what it's like!


tagged with: hubble extreme deep field, hubble deep field, extreme deep field, hubble, astronomy, cosmology, galaxies, deep space, xdf, outer space

The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) is an image of a small part of space in the center of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field within the constellation Fornax, showing the deepest optical view in space. Released on September 25, 2012, it took 10 years to compile the images and shows galaxies from 13.2 billion years ago. The exposure time was two million seconds, or approximately 23 days. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see. The red galaxies are the remnants of galaxies after major collisions during their elderly years. Many of the smaller galaxies are very young galaxies that eventually became the major galaxies, like the Milky Way and other galaxies in our galactic neighborhood. The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, adds another 5,500 galaxies to Hubble's 2003 and 2004 view into a tiny patch of the farthest universe.

This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 Team.

»visit the EnhancedImages store for more designs and products like this
The Zazzle Promise: We promise 100% satisfaction. If you don't absolutely love it, we'll take it back!

Microscopy Reveals how Atom-High Steps Impede Oxidation of Metal Surfaces

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Rust never sleeps. Whether a reference to the 1979 Neil Young album or a product designed to protect

The post Microscopy Reveals how Atom-High Steps Impede Oxidation of Metal Surfaces has been published on Technology Org.

 
#materials 
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Capturing mercury from air in gold shops

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In any given year, workers in artisanal and small-scale gold mining shops in remote locales like Brazil and

The post Capturing mercury from air in gold shops has been published on Technology Org.

 
#materials 
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SpaceX Lands $1 Billion From Google and Fidelity

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Google and Fidelity have invested in the rocketry company founded by Elon Musk, in part to further Google’s goal of extending the Internet’s reach through satellites.















via New York Times

Pillars of Dust, Orion Nebula Rectangular Stickers

Here's a great sheet of stickers featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: awesome hubble images, cygsb, new star s106ir, constellation cygnus, the swan, glowing hydrogen, interstellar gas clouds, star nurseries, star birth, envelope sealers, star forming activity

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A gorgeous deep space photogrpah featuring dark pillars of dust doing their best to resist erosion by the intense ultraviolet radiation from the most massive of Orion's stars.

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image code: podoneb

Image credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team

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Star Cloud Wall Decal

Here's a great wall decal featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: star cloud, stars, space, astronomy, clouds, outer space, nebulae, astronauts, science, scientist, exploration, hubble, space pictures, space photographs, outer space pictures

A picture of a star cloud in a star forming region of space.

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