Steps into Space - Commercialisation, Occupation, Colonization: 05/28/14

Wednesday 28 May 2014

Building with blocks: Architect Anton Garcia-Abril brings his experimental, industrial style to MIT

In a parking lot next to a nondescript building on the northern edge of MIT’s campus, dozens of enormous foam blocks sit in piles. These are not discarded pieces of packaging from some industrial construction, however. They are models of buildings, and the parking lot is the workshop of Anton Garcia-Abril, a professor of architecture at MIT. Along with his partner, Debora Mesa, Garcia-Abril leads a team that often rearranges the blocks into new shapes. Just beyond the fence, traffic roars by on a busy street, trains sometimes roll through on the nearby railroad tracks, and new commercial buildings are being raised a block or two away. Their own building is a former lab for electricity research. It is exactly the kind of setting Garcia-Abril hoped for when he joined MIT’s Department of Architecture last summer. “When we came here and were invited to participate in the research program, we said, ‘We want a yard,’” Garcia-Abril explains. “We want to build, to test, to feel how spaces comfort you, shelter you, and inspire you.” What Garcia-Abril, Mesa, and their team want to test, most of all, are new forms for urban structures, potentially made out of prestressed concrete, that can

The post Building with blocks: Architect Anton Garcia-Abril brings his experimental, industrial style to MIT has been published on Technology Org.

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Out There: Andromeda and the Milky Way: A Merger of Galactic Proportions

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News of two stars in the Andromeda galaxy colliding turned out to be a false alarm, but we’re going to have an encounter ourselves with Andromeda one day.

via New York Times

Water in moon rocks provides clues and questions about lunar history

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A recent review of hundreds of chemical analyses of Moon rocks indicates that the amount of water in the Moon's interior varies regionally -- revealing clues about how water originated and was redistributed in the Moon. These discoveries provide a new tool to unravel the processes involved in the formation of the Moon, how the lunar crust cooled, and its impact history.

via Science Daily

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The clumping behavior of galaxies

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Active, supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxies tend to fall into two categories: those that are hidden by dust, and those that are exposed. Data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, have shown that galaxies with hidden supermassive black holes tend to clump together in space more than the galaxies with exposed, or unobscured, black holes.

via Science Daily

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SpaceX-3 science payloads return to Kennedy

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A trio of science payloads have completed their missions on the International Space Station and returned to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where they'll be turned over to the scientists who designed them.

via Science Daily

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NASA, Khan Academy collaborate to bring STEM opportunities to online learners

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NASA and Khan Academy, a non-profit educational website, has debuted a series of online tutorials designed to increase student interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM. The announcement of the new collaborative effort was made today at the 6th annual White House Science Fair.

via Science Daily

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How did flightless birds travel around the world?

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Despite being flightless, the ostriches of Africa have distant relations in Australia, New Zealand, and South America. All part of a group called the ratites, these birds share some common interests, like laying eggs, running fast, and not flying. But a logical question has bedeviled ornithologists for years: If these birds can't fly, how did they spread across the globe?

The standard explanation is that their common ancestor, also flightless, once roamed all over a southern supercontinent called Gondwana. As the continent split up millions and millions of years ago, populations of this bird were...

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» see original post http://theweek.com/article/index/261957/how-did-flightless-birds-travel-around-the-world
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“Hurricane Daenerys” to ravage NASA in disaster prep exercise next week

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If you’ve worked in IT, you’re almost certainly familiar with your company’s "disaster preparedness plan"—every organization of appreciable size has some kind of formalized set of documents detailing what to do in the event of an emergency. Organizations on the Gulf Coast typically include hurricane scenarios in their disaster preparedness plans, and in this respect, NASA is no different from any other large company. Next week, NASA’s Houston-based Johnson Space Center (JSC) will kick off its annual Hurricane Exercise and run through its site’s disaster plan, but the mock storm the staff will be battling won’t be called "Jerry" or "Bob" or something pedestrian—no, JSC will find itself directly in the path of a far more awesomely named tropical cyclone.

"This year's storm is named 'Hurricane Daenerys,'" said JSC Center Operations Directorate Manager Joel Walker in an e-mail to JSC managers announcing the exercise. "Our exercise will feature a new interactive model which will require quick thinking, priority setting, and mitigation strategies from Senior Staff."

For the three or four Ars readers who aren't Game of Thrones fans, "Daenerys" is the name of one of the saga's primary characters—the last surviving child of a murdered king, who plans to return to the land her family once ruled and seize the throne by any means necessary. Also, she has a giant army and three enormous fire-breathing dragons. Due to the circumstances of her birth, she is frequently referred to as "Daenerys Stormborn," and she is not, as they say, a person with whom anyone should mess.

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» see original post http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/science/~3/lJVT-pCC5Cs/
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Diamond makes laser beams more brilliant

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For the first time, researchers have shown that diamond can radically improve the quality of high power laser beams, according to new photonics research published overnight in Laser & Photonics Reviews. A team from the Macquarie Photonics Research Centre have demonstrated this improvement by exploiting optical interactions inside a diamond crystal of length several millimetres long. “Lasers come in all sorts of colours and with beam powers that range from the milliwatt level we are familiar with in laser pointers and in DVD players, up to many thousands of watts, enough to burn through steel in a fraction of second,” says lead researcher Dr Aaron McKay. The device used by McKay and colleagues was so highly efficient that the brightness of the output beam was 50% higher than the input beam. However, there is one fundamental property of a laser beam that is critical to applications – its quality, or, in the terminology of physicists, its coherence. High quality lasers are needed to meet growing technological demands in applications as diverse as in materials processing, environmental and remote sensing, and in defence. Beam quality and brightness are fundamental attributes that inherently make lasers so valuable. “Standard methods used to increase

The post Diamond makes laser beams more brilliant has been published on Technology Org.

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Monogram Crab Nebula in Taurus Stickers

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

Monogram Crab Nebula in Taurus Stickers

tagged with: crbneb, astronomy, messier 1, neutron stars, star ejecta, pulsars, supernovae explosions, galaxies, outer space pictures, monogram initials, heavens, european southern observatory, eso, vista, monograms, initialled, monogrammed

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A great outer space picture featuring a three colour composite of the well-known Crab Nebula (also known as Messier 1), as observed with the FORS2 instrument in imaging mode in the morning of November 10, 1999.

It's the remnant of a supernova explosion at a distance of about 6,000 light-years, observed almost 1,000 years ago, in the year 1054. It contains a neutron star near its center that spins 30 times per second around its axis (see below).

In this picture, the green light is predominantly produced by hydrogen emission from material ejected by the star that exploded. The blue light is predominantly emitted by very high-energy ("relativistic") electrons that spiral in a large-scale magnetic field (so-called synchrotron emission). It's believed that these electrons are continuously accelerated and ejected by the rapidly spinning neutron star at the centre of the nebula and which is the remnant core of the exploded star.

This pulsar has been identified with the lower/right of the two close stars near the geometric center of the nebula, immediately left of the small arc-like feature, best seen in ESO Press Photo eso9948.

Technical information: ESO Press Photo eso9948 is based on a composite of three images taken through three different optical filters: B (429 nm; FWHM 88 nm; 5 min; here rendered as blue), R (657 nm; FWHM 150 nm; 1 min; green) and S II (673 nm; FWHM 6 nm; 5 min; red) during periods of 0.65 arcsec (R, S II) and 0.80 (B) seeing, respectively. The field shown measures 6.8 x 6.8 arcminutes and the images were recorded in frames of 2048 x 2048 pixels, each measuring 0.2 arcseconds. North is up; East is left.

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ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA www.eso.org
Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

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Lunar prospecting: Scanning the skies for moons in other solar systems

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The first exoplanet was discovered in 1994. Twenty years later, NASA's exoplanet catalog lists more than 1700 planets confirmed around other stars. Most of these extra-solar-systems have been measured by changes in light spectra, in stellar motion or dust disks around stars. Some exoplanets-more than 40 as of today-have even been directly photographed. One way or the other, we know that exoplanets are out there in abundance, in places we thought they would be and in places we didn't dream a planet could possibly exist. So what comes next?

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The Cone Nebula from Hubble

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Heads or tails: Experimental quantum coin flipping cryptography performs better than classical protocols

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(Phys.org) —Cryptography – the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties, referred to as adversaries – has a long and varied history. In ancient Greece, for example, the Spartan military may have used the so-called scytale transposition cipher to encrypt and decrypt messages. Steganography (hiding the existence of a message) was also first developed at that time as, according to Herodotus, a message tattooed on a slave's shaved head and then hidden under regrown hair – and is still in use in the form of invisible ink, microdots, and digital watermarks. That said, applying complexity cryptography to quantum communication is and will continue to be essential – and while quantum cryptographic primitives are in principle more secure than classical protocols, demonstrating this in a practical system has proven difficult.

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Student research leads to method for developing clean hydrogen fuel

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Recycling waste materials into new products is a common method for sustaining a green environment, but it isn’t only limited to reusing old cans, plastics, and paper. In chemistry, scientists use discarded materials to create renewable sources of energy. Sean Taylor is one of two Rutgers-Camden students to find a new family of functional materials for the production of clean hydrogen fuel through photocatalysis. A pair of Rutgers University–Camden students has found a new family of functional materials for the production of clean hydrogen fuel through photocatalysis, a process that uses sunlight or ultraviolet light to drive chemical reactions. “We’re taking something that is discarded as waste and turning it into something useful,” says Sean Taylor, a senior chemistry major at Rutgers–Camden and Sterling High School graduate from Stratford. For this research project, Taylor and fellow senior chemistry major Mihir Mehta reuse glycerol, a sustainable compound discarded as waste when vegetable oils are used to create biofuel. The two students mix the glycerol with water and a specially prepared titanium dioxide photocatalyst. The hydrogen resulting from the mixture is an ideal fuel to meet the need for sustainable and renewable sources of energy. “It becomes an alternative energy source,”

The post Student research leads to method for developing clean hydrogen fuel has been published on Technology Org.

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Sunsets on Titan reveal the complexity of hazy exoplanets

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Scientists working with data from NASA's Cassini mission have developed a new way to understand the atmospheres of exoplanets by using Saturn's smog-enshrouded moon Titan as a stand-in. The new technique shows the dramatic influence that hazy skies could have on our ability to learn about these alien worlds orbiting distant stars.

via Science Daily

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A habitable environment on Martian volcano?

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The Martian volcano Arsia Mons may have been home to one of the most recent habitable environments yet found on the Red Planet, geologists say. The research shows that volcanic eruptions beneath a glacial ice sheet would have created substantial amounts of liquid water on Mars's surface around 210 million years ago. Where there was water, there is the possibility of past life.

via Science Daily

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NASA-funded rocket to study birthplace of stars

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In deep space, floating between the stars, lies an abundance of atoms -- carbon, oxygen, hydrogen -- that over millions of years will grow into new stars and new planets. NASA successfully launched the Colorado High-resolution Echelle Stellar Spectrograph, or CHESS, payload aboard a Black Brant IX suborbital sounding rocket on May 24, 2014, for a 15-minute flight to observe this star nursery more comprehensively and in better detail than has been done by a single instrument ever before.

via Science Daily

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Initialled Dumbbell Nebula Constellation Vulpecula Stickers

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

Initialled Dumbbell Nebula Constellation Vulpecula Stickers

tagged with: awesome astronomy images, inspirational, dmbblneb, vulpecula constellation, intense ultraviolet radiation, european southern observatory, messier 27 ngc 6853, heavens, monograms, initialled, eso, vista, initials, monogrammed, monogram

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A great photo from deep space featuring the Dumbbell Nebula - also known as Messier 27 or NGC 6853. It's a typical planetary nebula and is located in the constellation Vulpecula (The Fox).

The distance is rather uncertain, but is believed to be around 1,200 light-years. It was first described by the French astronomer and comet hunter Charles Messier who found it in 1764 and included it as no. 27 in his famous list of extended sky objects.

Despite its class, the Dumbbell Nebula has nothing to do with planets. It consists of very rarefied gas that has been ejected from the hot central star (well visible on this photo), now in one of the last evolutionary stages. The gas atoms in the nebula are excited (heated) by the intense ultraviolet radiation from this star and emit strongly at specific wavelengths.

This image is the beautiful by-product of a technical test of some FORS1 narrow-band optical interference filters. They only allow light in a small wavelength range to pass and are used to isolate emissions from particular atoms and ions.

In this three-colour composite, a short exposure was first made through a wide-band filter registering blue light from the nebula. It was then combined with exposures through two interference filters in the light of double-ionized oxygen atoms and atomic hydrogen. They were colour-coded as “blue”, “green” and “red”, respectively, and then combined to produce this picture that shows the structure of the nebula in “approximately true” colours.

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Image code: dmbblneb

ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA www.eso.org
Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

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