Damn you, hawk, and your terrifying dinosaur hands! What did that poor water balloon ever do to you?!
[Via HuffPo]
It looks like it's finally going to happen, an actual mission to Jupiter's icy moon Europa — one of the the solar system's best candidates for hosting alien life.
Yesterday, NASA announced an injection of $17.5 billion from the federal government (down by $1.2 billion from its 2010 peak). Of this, $15 million will be allocated for "pre-formulation" work on a mission to Europa, with plans to make detailed observations from orbit and possibly sample its interior oceans with a robotic probe. Mission details are sparse, but if all goes well, it could be launched by 2025 and arriving in the early 2030s.
This is super-exciting. Recent evidence points to a reasonable chance of habitability. Its massive subsurface ocean contains almost twice as much water as found on Earth. The water is kept in liquid state owing to the gravitational forces exerted by Jupiter and the moon's turbulent global ocean currents. Excitingly, a probe may not have to dig very deep to conduct its search for life; the moon's massive plumes are ejecting water directly onto the surface.
According to NASA, the high radiation environment around Jupiter and extreme distance from Earth are the primary challenges (it took NASA's Galileo six years to get to Jupiter from the sun). The space agency will now be looking at competing ideas for the proposed Europa mission. NASA is still not sure how big the mission should be, or how much it will cost.
Image: NASA/JPL.
Recently a group of doctors and midwives published a paper about birth outcomes for home births, which seemed to indicate home birth is as safe as hospital birth. A skeptic blog got a statistics professor to analyze the paper, and came up with very different results. Check them both out!
Midwives Alliance of North America, or MANA, has recently released data on over 16,000 home birth outcomes. A group of doctors and midwives analyzed the data and concluded, in a paper published in the Journal of Midwifery and Women's Health, that "Low-risk women in this sample experienced high rates of normal physiologic birth and very low rates of operative birth and interventions, with no concomitant increase in adverse events." This conclusion has come under fire by some, including Dr. Amy Tuteur, a doctor, a blogger, and a skeptic about the safety of home birth.
Tuteur has been criticized in the past for the fact that she analyzes papers on hospital and home birth safety, but has not published an academic paper or had specialized training in statistical analysis. After this home birth paper came out, Tuteur asked Dr. Aviva Romm, a doctor and home birth advocate, to agree to an analysis of the paper by an independent statistician. Romm subsequently withdrew from the agreement, citing an insulting blog entry written by Tuteur.
Dr. Brooke Orosz, a statistics professor with several published mathematics papers and a YoutYube series about statistics, volunteered to analyze the paper. Orosz took a look at the MANA data, compared it to data from the CDC and WHO, and came to a very different conclusion, stating:
So, for a comparable group of infants born in the hospital, with congenital abnormalities excluded, the combined neonatal and intrapartum death rate is at most 0.7 per thousand. The combined neonatal and intrapartum death rate for the MANA STATS group, with congenital abnormalities excluded, was 2.06 per thousand, which is significantly higher. (p<.0001, highly statistically significant.)
In other words, the expected number of deaths from causes other than congenital anomalies was at most 12, and the actual number of deaths was 35 (44 with anomalies included). It is clear that home birth substantially increases the risk of neonatal death and of intrapartum death.
The paper goes on to analyze the difference between rates of mortality in subgroups of babies, morbidity in babies, and maternal mortality, and finishes:
The mothers in the MANA STATS cohort experienced fewer childbirth interventions than comparable-risk women giving birth in the hospital.
However, the rate of intrapartum stillbirth or neonatal death was considerably higher, and the difference was particularly alarming among high-risk subgroups such as breech and VBAC. The incidence of low APGAR was significantly higher and may have been much higher. The risk of postpartum hemorrhage was substantially higher.
This is an apparent contradiction of the conclusion published in the Journal of Midwifery: "no concomitant increase in adverse events." That leaves the ultimate conclusion up to the reader of both analyses. Check out both theJournal of Midwifery & Woman's Health paper, and Doctor Orosz analysis, published on The Skeptical OB, and decide. It's worth looking through the comments of Orosz's analysis, as Orosz responds to questions and talks about how her analysis of the paper affected her opinion on home birth.
Top Image: SCA Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget.
An overwhelming majority of doctors and nurses think they don't know enough about old people's sex habits. In a recent survey, just 3% of U.S. nurses and primary care physicians felt they had adequate knowledge of older adult sexuality. (In case you had any doubts: yes, they're having sex. And not always safely.)
H/t Zhana Vrangalova.
That's more like it. "Inmates" was really four minisodes detailing the post-prison escape stories of Beth and Daryl, Tyreese and the Carol Corps, Maggie and Sasha and Bob, and finally Glenn, respectively. And they were all far more engaging than last week's last season premiere.
But we'll get to that in a second. First, the recap:
We begin with Daryl and Beth; specifically we begin with Beth and Daryl running for their lives, inexorably, as the show played an excerpt from Beth's first diary entry upon moving into the prison. It's a little cheesy, but it contrasts Beth's former, almost reluctant glimmer of hope to their current insecurity exceedingly well. Daryl, meanwhile, is defeated. Now, defeated for Daryl is still a default fight for survival, but Beth has to talk him into even looking for tracks in case someone else escape. They do find some tracks, but only come across a fresh zombie kill, and Beth breaks down. But the most heartbreaking part of the segment? When it's revealed that the two are starting their fires by using Beth's diary pages. There's no mistaking what the characters have lost.
Meanwhile, Tyresse is in full babysitter mode, including both the Carol Corps girl and — wait for it — Judith. She's alive! But holy shit. You don't know what tense zombie entertainment is until you watch this segment where one guy is trying to protect two little girls and a baby from an unknowable amount of zombies. Tyreese is surprisingly parental, but every time Judith cries it's nerve-wracking, because the baby could bring death on their heads at any moment.
Of course, Lizzie, the more psychotic member of the Carol Corps, sees a pretty simple solution to this problem. When Tyreese hears a woman's scream in the distance and leaves the girls together (see Assorted Musings below for more), Judith starts crying and Lizzie just puts her hand over Judith's mouth and nose — she's not upset at Judith, and she doesn't even pay attention to the zombies approaching them (Mika, meanwhile, is freaking out). Lizzie's just having a great time smothering this baby. Tyreese hears Mika shoot at one of the zombies, but can't get away from the zombies he's found, along with some strangers, all of whom get eaten. As soon as he gets a chance, he starts running back to them, panicked, and finds — Carol.
Carol saved them! It's definitely a Carol ex Machina, but she explains that she had returned to the prison (I assume she decided Rick could go fuck himself) just to see it get destroyed, saw Tyreese and the girls run off, tried to chase them but lost them for a bit, and found them in just the nick of time, so I'll allow it. Tyreese, who still doesn't know that Carol set his gal pal on fire, is overjoyed to see her. One of the dying strangers manages to tell this semi-happy family about a community that's safe, they just have to follow the train tracks. Soon enough, they see a sign for a place called — not at all ominously — Terminus.
Okay, Maggie, Sasha and Bob time. Maggie is distraught about Glenn, Sasha is pragmatic, and Bob seemingly accepts that he could die at literally any minute and makes some peace with that. Sasha wants to set up camp, but Maggie just runs off to find the school bus she left Glenn in, forcing Sasha and Bob to follow her as opposed to splitting up. Maggie finds the bus quickly enough, stopped in the middle of a road… and full of zombies. Maggie's ready to jump on in, but Sasha and Bob point out that's stupid. Maggie knows this, but has to see if Glenn is one of them anyways, so Bob convinces her to let them open the back door and let the zombies out one at a time.
This is obviously still a dumb plan, and eventually the zombies overpower Sasha and Bob and flood out all at once, but they manage to dispatch them without too much fuss. Which is when Maggie jumps on the bus to see if Glenn — or what's left of him — is isnide. Sure enough, there's one zombie trapped under another body; Maggie pulls it off, and the zombie leaps at her, but we don't see its face, but he kind of has Glenn's hair and is wearing the same dark sort of shirt as Glenn last had on, and Maggie starts balling immediately after she knifes the zombie in the face, but then she starts laughing. Cut to commercial. And the first shot back is Glenn waking up at the prison.
Let me tell you how good this was. I was genuinely worried here that Glenn was dead. I thought it was entirely plausible that Walking Dead would kill Glenn off-screen, turn him into a Walker, and force Maggie to stab him in the head as an almost involuntary reaction to him lunging at her. That sounded just brutal and awful enough to be right up Walking Dead's alley. Now, I knew the show wouldn't kill Glenn without clearly showing he was dead, and once it cut to commercial without revealing the face of the zombie, I knew Glenn was safe. But for that insanely long take of Maggie where she's crying after the stabbing, I expected to the camera to cut to zombie-Glenn with a knife in his head at any second. Hell, even when she was laughing I thought there was a chance Maggie was just laughing hysterically at the unbelievable wretchedness of what she'd just done.
Anyways, Glenn. If you'll recall, e was barely recovered from being deathly ill when Maggie got him on the bus and ran off to find Beth. Well, clearly Glenn followed and managed to get himself to a safe place before passing out, although there are dozens of zombies who know where he is and want a bite. He returned to the prison where they all lived, first looking for Maggie, and then looking for supplies so he can set out to find Maggie. In what is possibly the smartest decision made by anyone on The Walking Dead, Glenn gets out his riot gear and puts it on.
On his way out, he spies The Governor's New Wife's Sister — who is named Tara, as I have finally looked ut up since she's clearly sticking around for a while — in a small fenced enclosure, surrounded by zombies. Glenn tries to get her to leave, but she feels responsible for following the Governor and causing all this mess and death. She even mentions "Brian" killing the old man, and that's how Glenn finds out Herschel is dead. But Glenn won't abandon Tara, mostly because he needs her if he wants any chance of finding Maggie. So he rigs a Molotov cocktail to distract the zombies, and runs off with Tara. They get to the road, where Glenn fights off several before collapsing, forcing Tara to wake up out of her stupor and beat some heads in. Which is what she's doing when a truck approaches… and a man named Abraham steps out. Comic readers will know him well.
"Inmates" was a much better episode than "After" for a variety of reasons: 1) There were four stories instead of two. None of them needed to be padded out like Carl and Michonne's were, and I think more happened in these anyways. 2) The zombie scares were actually kind of tense. We knew there was no way Carl was going to die alone during his stupid snit, so those zombie attacks were wasting time. But a few of this episode's action scenes were tense for a few different reasons — like I had no fucking clue how the Carol Corps were going to survive an attack while they were on their own. And when Maggie was playing Die Hard on the school bus I wasn't worried she was going to die, but I was worried about what she was going to find. So well done there. 3) Almost no one did anything stupid. Carl did several stupid things last week, and frankly, these characters have enough problems without their lack of common sense getting in the way. But in "Inmates," Maggie entering the school bus was a dumb decision, but one she emotionally needed to make. Tyreese leaving the girls alone wasn't great, but it was a calculated risk — no present threat in addition to the chance of saving a fellow survivor. He didn't make the call easily.
And now there's this exciting new goal, Terminus, for everyone to get to, implying how everyone will meet back up. There are new characters who are likely going to stick around for awhile and shake things up. Carol's back and hanging with Tyreese, and conflict is a-brewing! Lizzie's last name is Borden, apparently! And no one needlessly risked his or her life in order to eat a million pounds of canned pudding! Good stuff all around!
Assorted Musings:
The girl who plays Beth is not the world's best on-screen crier.
Lizzie also apparently stabs a variety of bunny rabbits to death while at camp one night — clearly not for eating, just for the killing. This does indicate that she's the one who killed the animals at the prison and then left them by the fence, as the most prevalent fan theories proposed. I had resisted this idea, because I assumed the perpetrator was trying to lure zombies to the prison fence. But tonight it dawned on me that Lizzie wasn't doing that, she was just trying to hide the evidence of her serial critter killer career, and thought the zombies would take care of it.
That bunny stuff was set up really well, by the way. Daryl and Beth pass by a log that the bunnies are sitting cozily in. Then there's a brief shot of the same log, with the bunnies still inside, which Lizzie is sitting next to. Lizzie notices something in the log area. Lizzie takes out her knife and starts make bored, dispassionate stabbing motions at this area, while no one is the wiser. It's chilling.
I call them bunnies and not rabbits because they were bunnies, goddammit. They were all so placid and adorable they might as well have been wearing little bow ties.
Seriously, I don't think Tyreese leaving the girls is as insane as it sounds; there are no apparent walkers in the vicinity, but there obviously are by the survivor. Tyreese places them back-to-back and arms them, and tells them if any walkers come to run toward him. Most importantly, the scream could be a prison survivor or just someone to help him protect two kids and a baby, which is worth the seemingly small chance the girls would be in danger (you know, if he thought the world was governed by logic instead of sadistic screenwriters). Again, a calculated risk.
Glenn's pretty badass in the episode. But more importantly, there's some fine acting from Steven Yuen. The range of emotions he goes through in the prison, from comprehension to loss to determination is great. And the way he reacts when he asks Tara if the old man was named Herschel — he sounds like a little boy, which is powerful because Herschel was obviously such a father figure to him.
SPOILER ABOUT ABRAHAM: I'm used to seeing all military personnel in zombie films be evil murderer-rapists, so I assumed that when Abraham showed up in camo we were meeting the next big bad. But about 30 seconds of Googling revealed that's not the case, which is a nice subversion of the trope. Unless the show is fucking with us, which is always a possibility.
BABY JUDITH DEATH WATCH: The other thing that stressed me out about this episode is because I honestly thought the show might have Lizzie kill Judith right there, and let me tell you why: The comic is definitely awful enough to kill a baby. The show has not done anything to make me think that it wouldn't kill a baby, other than not killing the baby… yet. I really thought the baby was dead when we saw the car seat full of blood, so I still kind of think that Judith could go at any time. Baby Judith is a huge narrative anchor that drags down the characters and the narrative while they must deal with her, which is partially why she's gone in the comic — this cannot be lost on the TV writers. About the only thing Baby Judith has going in her favor is that killing a baby would be about the most horrible thing a TV drama could depict, and AMC might not want to potentially alienate a large portion of TWD's already large audience. But the show already killed a 10-year-old girl named Sophia, so forgive me if I don't think Judith is out of the woods yet.
LOOK AT THE STARE LIZZIE IS GIVING BABY JUDITH IN THE PICTURE ABOVE AAAAAAAAA
Women put a lot of thought into their underwear choices, and have a few basic metrics they use to pick their skivvies. That's according to Christiana Tsaousi, who has studied underwear consumption extensively as a lecturer in consumerism at the University of Leicester.
Tsaousi just published a paper on women's underwear choices in the Journal of Consumer Culture, for which she interviewed women from a variety of backgrounds about their drawers. (She also wrote her dissertation on underwear consumption, and it's pretty damn interesting.) Tsaousi's subjects all thought quite a bit about which underwear made them feel comfortable in different situations, and told Tsaousi about it.
According to a release from the University of Leicester:
She found that some groups such as the young rugby girls favoured "cute" underwear while for others such as academics something that supports their professional dress was the main priority.
"The paper indicates that women's choices in underwear are determined by factors such as our ways of thinking, up-bringing, taste and status in society," Dr Tsaousi said. "The paper also suggests that women make similar judgements about their underwear as they would their outerwear."
A big influence on women's tastes in underwear came not from fashion mags and sexy lingerie ads, but from their mothers. After all, mothers are the first people to buy girls underwear and bras, and those choices often stick with women for a lifetime. (This, I would note, does not explain my Superman and Batman underwear.)
Tsaousi also had some words of wisdom for people who think it's awesome to buy their girlfriends sexy gotch for Valentine's Day:
When partners are looking to buy underwear as Valentine's gifts for their wives or girlfriends, they should choose underwear which will fit their partners well and will make them feel comfortable – rather than the stereotypical tiny, uncomfortable types. This will ultimately lead to them feeling nice about themselves.
To return to my earlier point, Superman underwear is a good idea. Everybody feels nicer in it.
Fantastic news, everyone: NASA's Curiosity mega rover has successfully crossed over the perilous Dingo Gap sand dune — opening the gateway to the science rich targets in the "Moonlight Valley" and Martian mountain beyond.
"I'm over the moon that I'm over the dune! I successfully crossed the 'Dingo Gap' sand dune on Mars," Curiosity tweeted overnight Thursday.
"Moonlight Valley" is the name of the breathtaking new locale beyond Dingo, Curiosity Principal Investigator John Grotzinger, of Caltech, told Universe Today. Curiosity drove westward over the 1-meter (3-foot) tall Dingo Gap dune in stellar style on Thursday, February 6th, on Sol 535.
Curiosity scans Moonlight Valley beyond Dingo Gap Dune. Curiosity's view to "Moonlight Valley" beyond after crossing over 'Dingo Gap' sand dune. This photomosaic was taken after Curiosity drove over the 1 meter tall Dingo Gap sand dune and shows dramatic scenery in the valley beyond, back dropped by eroded rim of Gale Crater. Assembled from navigation camera (navcam) raw images from Sol 535 (Feb. 6, 2104) Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ken Kremer- kenkremer.com/Marco Di Lorenzo.
Dramatic before and after photos reveal that the rover passed over the Red Planet dune without difficulty. They also show some interesting veins and mineral fractures are visible in the vicinity just ahead.
"Moonlight Valley has got lots of veins cutting through it," Grotzinger told me. "We're seeing recessive bedrock."
The Martian dune lies between two low scarps sitting at the north and south ends.
"The rover successfully traversed the dune in Dingo Gap," wrote science team member Ken Herkenhoff in an update. "The data look good."
Curiosity Crosses 'Dingo Gap' sand dune – Looking forward and back on Sol 535. Hazcam camera images. Credit: NASA.
Since arriving at the picturesque "Dingo Gap" sand dune about a week ago, Curiosity's handlers had pondered whether to breach the dune as an alternate pathway into the smoother terrain of the valley beyond as a work around to avoid fields of rough rocks that have been ripping holes into the robots six aluminum wheels in recent months.
"We're guessing it will be softer on the wheels," Grotzinger informed me.
Before giving the go ahead to move forward, engineers took a few days to carefully assess the dune's integrity and physical characteristics with the rovers science instruments and cameras to insure there wasn't the potential to get irretrievably stuck in a deep sand trap.
The team even commanded Curiosity to carry out a toe dip by gently rolling the 20 inch (50 cm) diameter wheels back and forth over the crest on Tuesday, February 4th, to insure it was safe to mount.
They won't take any chances with safety, recalling that rover Spirit's demise occurred when she because mired in a hidden sand trap in 2010 from which there was ultimately no escape. She froze to death during the bitter Martin winter – more than six years into her 90-day mission.
Opportunity also got wedged at the seemingly endless dune field at "Purgatory Dune" that nearly doomed her early in the now decade long trek. Engineers spent weeks on the extrication effort.
Curiosity does a "toe dip" wheel motion test at Dingo Gap sand dune on Sol 534, Feb 5, 2014 before crossing dune on Sol 535. Hazcam image linearized and colorized. Credit: NASA/JPL/Marco Di Lorenzo/Ken Kremer- kenkremer.com.
Since last summer, Curiosity has been traveling on a southwestward route to the breathtaking foothills of Mount Sharp, her ultimate science destination.
The westward route though Dingo will soon lead Curiosity to a spot dubbed "KMS-9" where the team hopes to conduct the first rock drilling operations since departing the Yellowknife Bay quadrant in July 2013, into areas of intriguing bedrock.
"At KMS-9, we see three terrain types exposed and a relatively dust-free surface," said science team collaborator Katie Stack of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.
The missions science focus has shifted to "search for that subset of habitable environments which also preserves organic carbon," says Curiosity Principal Investigator John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. But first, with the dune now safely in the rear view mirror, the team plans a busy weekend of research activities. A big science program using the X-Ray spectrometer and high resolution MAHLI camera on the robotic arm is already planned for this weekend.
"The arm will be deployed to investigate some interesting veins or minerals filling fractures in front of the rover," says Herkenhoff. "ChemCam will search for frost early on the morning of Sol 538 (Saturday), then analyze targets Collett and Mussell along the vein/fracture fill later in the day."
Thereafter Curiosity will continue on its journey across the floor of Gale Crater, taking images and atmospheric measurements along the way to the sedimentary layers at the base of Mount Sharp.
Curiosity has already accomplished her primary goal of discovering a habitable zone on Mars that could support Martian microbes if they ever existed.
To date Curiosity's odometer stands at nearly five kilometers and she has taken over 118,000 images. The robot has about another five km to go to reach Mount Sharp.
Meanwhile, NASA's sister Opportunity rover is exploring clay mineral outcrops by the summit of Solander Point on the opposite side of Mars at the start of her second Decade investigating the Red Planet's mysteries.
This article originally appeared at Universe Today and is republished here with permission.
The X-Files' creator Chris Carter returns to TV for The After, a mysterious TV series about eight strangers, brought together to face an even more mysterious apocalypse. Here's the first clip from the series, and, as you might have gathered by this point, it's kind of mysterious.
The After will be part of Amazon's second pilot season, which means people will have to vote to determine whether it'll get picked up for a full series. So if you ant to know what the hell happened or why the hell that one helicopter flew directly into the other one (sentient killer technology? suicidal pilot? clumsiness?), well, that's on you whenever Amazon decides to release it (we'll let you know).
[Via Entertainment Weekly]
When Neil deGrasse Tyson was applying to colleges, Carl Sagan went out of his way to make the budding astrophysicist feel especially at home at Cornell University, where he taught. Tyson would ultimately attend Harvard, but not before writing this letter to Sagan explaining his decision.
Tyson remembers his first meeting with Sagan fondly. If you've never seen it, his recounting of the interaction is definitely worth a watch. The thought of two giants in the world of science communication interacting with one another, one firmly established, the other just starting out, the two separated by a generation but bound by their love for the Universe, is enough to warm even the iciest of hearts. When the rebooted Cosmos television series – the original-run of which now being over 30 years old – premieres this March, it will be Tyson who preserves Sagan's legacy as the show's host. One is hard pressed to imagine a more fitting successor.
This letter hails from The Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive, which was recently acquired by the Library of Congress. The LoC has begun cataloging the collection and posting digitized versions of its contents to the library's website. Check it out here.
[The Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive via kottke]
Lego is releasing a new line of Star Wars sets called Microfighters, where characters get awesome mini-versions of ships like the Millennium Falcon and Star Destroyers to jet around in. The reason you care besides the fact that Star Wars Legos are great, is because this new commercial for them rules.
Seriously, Disney. When you re-release the movies, if you just want to splice this in over The Phantom Menace's podracing sequence, that'd be fine with us.
When NASA concluded that a "doughnut-sized" object that appeared mysteriously before its Opportunity rover on Mars was actually an errant rock, it left some people dissatisfied: A lawsuit brought against the Agency alleges NASA not only failed to adequately investigate the object, but that it is biological in nature.
The suit has been filed by one Rhawn Joseph, an author of fringe papers and trade books on subjects ranging from alien life to the terrorist attacks of September 11th. (The entry for Joseph on Rational Wiki describes his ideas re: life's origins as "eccentric.") Popular Science gives a tidy summary of the suit's allegations:
The lawsuit, filed yesterday in a California court, is aimed at NASA and its Administrator, Charles Bolden, requesting that the agency "perform a public, scientific, and statutory duty which is to closely photograph and thoroughly scientifically examine and investigate a putative biological organism." Joseph is disputing the rock theory, since, "when examined by Petitioner the same structure in miniature was clearly visible upon magnification and appears to have just germinated from spores." (Joseph is the Petitioner.) The "rock," according to the lawsuit, was there the whole time, it just grew until it became visible. "The refusal to take close up photos from various angles, the refusal to take microscopicimages of the specimen, the refusal to release high resolution photos, is inexplicable, recklessly negligent, and bizarre," according to the suit.
A moment, now, to remind readers of the two leading explanations for how the rock wound up where it did. 1) The rover either bumped into the object, knocking it over as it maneuvered, or 2) (the less likely explanation, according to Mars Exploration Rover lead scientist Steve Squyres) the rock was ejected during a nearby impact event and landed in front of the rover. Another moment to remind readers that Mars is a dynamic planet that is windy, seasonal, and susceptible to collision with meteorites. It's also got a bunch of robots roving around on its surface – digging, drilling, laser-ing, and, yes, knocking over rocks.
[Via PopSci]
Just halfway through its three-month lunar mission, China's Jade Rabbit has experienced a "mechanical control abnormality." Experts now fear the lunar rover may be permanently lost.
According to the Chinese State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence, the problem was the result of a "complicated surface environment."
Lutz Richter, a planetary rover specialist with Kayser-Threde, a German aerospace company that works with NASA and the European Space Agency, says the Chinese are likely preparing for the loss of their rover.
"This is speculation, but I think there's a problem with the electrical motors that close the solar panels," he's quoted in the South China Morning Post.
Which is really bad news. If the solar panels can't close, some of Jade Rabbit's internal electrical components would freeze during the lunar night and become irrevocably damaged. The problem started just as the rover was entering into its second dormancy period of the mission — the start of the lunar night, which lasts about two weeks. During the day, the temperature on the lunar surface reach 100 degrees Celsius, but at night it plunges to -180C.
Jade Rabbit woke up from its extended night-time slumber two weeks ago without incident.
Richter speculates that it might be dust blocking the mechanism, saying that extreme temperatures could also damage its hinges and motors.
The breakdown has generated considerable interest amongst the Chinese. As the BBC reports:
"People not only hailed the authority's openness to the accident, but also expressed concern," it said.
On Sina Weibo, China's largest microblog provider, users began tagging their posts with the hash tag "#hang in there Jade Rabbit".
Users also circulated comic strips depicting a rabbit on the Moon, and rabbit-themed pictures, while expressing their support for the rover.
User Jessica_S_AC_USK wrote: "I want to cry. Go Jade Rabbit, even if we fail this time, we still have next time - our Chinese Jade Rabbit's goal is the sea of stars! We will not give up easily."
Referring to a Chinese folktale about a rabbit on the Moon, another microblog user wrote: "Whatever happens, we must thank Jade Rabbit. When our generation tells stories to our children, we can confidently say: 'There really is a Jade Rabbit on the moon!'"
[ scmp | image: xinhua]
An international team of researchers has found that the cause of schizophrenia is even more complex than already believed, with rare gene mutations contributing to the disorder. In two studies published in the journal Nature, they show that schizophrenia arises from the combined effects of many genes.
Photo Credit: Alaina Abplanalp Photography.
Blood DNA taken from 6,948 people in Bulgaria and Sweden was catalogued. This included patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, their parents and healthy controls. Scientists were able to pinpoint the sites of gene mutations and identify patterns that reveal clues about the biology underlying schizophrenia. Rather than finding only a few "faulty" genes, the two studies determine that the genetic basis of schizophrenia is tremendously complex. The data confirms that it is a very large number of rare genetic mutations that contribute to risk of developing the disorder.
Schizophrenia is a chronic, often debilitating mental illness that affects 1% of people at some time in their lives. Symptoms include persistent hallucinations, delusions and paranoia. The exact cause of the disorder remains unknown, but is considered to result from a complex interplay of a person's genes and their environment.
Many studies have shown that schizophrenia runs in families and so genes are undoubtedly a factor. A tenth of people with schizophrenia have a parent with the condition. But, despite its high heritability, a large number of individuals with schizophrenia do not have a family history of the disease. The search for a "schizophrenia gene", though popular, has not proved fruitful. This research sheds light on how genetics plays a role in cases which have not been inherited.
These two new studies are the result of the largest genetic study of its kind with scientists hailing from nine different institutions including Cardiff University and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The clinical and genetic information gathered on more than 3,000 affected individuals has produced the world's largest database on schizophrenia.
Technological improvements enabled researchers to sequence and examine the components of genes and they detected changes at the scale of single nucleotides. Despite the large sample size, no individual gene could be conclusively identified as the culprit for causing schizophrenia.
But a new window was found into the disorder in the study led by Cardiff University's MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics. They examined the role of new mutations – those that are found in affected individuals, but not their parents. These mutations account for roughly 5% of schizophrenia cases.
Michael O'Donovan who co-led this research said, "looking for individual changes to the chemical composition of genes, we found what we predicted. Even small new mutations were not randomly occurring, but were concentrated in a relatively small number of genes that are crucial to the way nerve cells communicate across synapses."
Their research showed that mutations found in affected individuals, but not their parents, disrupt specific sets of proteins. It focused on analyzing the protein-coding regions of people's DNA and identified how these mutations play a role in triggering the disorder. They preferentially disrupt specific sets of proteins which have related functions in the brain.
Other layers of data are now needed to build a fuller picture that will enable researchers to start thinking of new ways to treat patients. Elizabeth Tunbridge, research fellow in Psychiatry at Oxford University, said that developing treatment is still a long way off. But the research is "reassuringly consistent with existing research [into schizophrenia]."
This research also shows that the new mutations cluster in the same way in those who have inherited the disease. This confirms that schizophrenia is inherently the same however it develops.
This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.
Further proving that if there's a product people have heard of Hollywood can make a movie out of it, Fox has announced they're putting a Magic: The Gathering movie into development, with the hope of turning it into a Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings-type fantasy franchise.
This sort of ignores the fact that Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings were based on books with actual plots to them, meaning there were narratives that could be recreated on screen, while Magic: The Gathering is a card game, but whatever. According to The Hollywood Reporter:
The studio has enlisted Simon Kinberg, the Fox-based writer-producer who is also helping shepherd the X-Men and Fantastic Four universes at the studio, to produce the adaptation. Kinberg will also act as the franchise's engineer — or supreme sorcerer, if you will — overseeing the development of the movie series in concert with Hasbro execs.
I won't, Hollywood Reporter. Now, if you said Kinberg was going to tap this franchise for all its mana, I might have been with you. I definitely would have approved if you said Kinberg was planning on heading straight to his local collectibles store to buy as many packing of Magic cards as it took before a plot occurred to him.
Forget the shadowy glimpse of the big G from the teaser trailer, forget the artist's rendering on this model package. Here's an actual action figure of the new Godzilla design, shown in good lighting, that reveals the King of the Monsters in full, clear detail from the top of his head to his massive toes.
We knew about his thick neck already, and the arms are a bit tinier than I was expecting, but I have no problems here. As long as Godzilla is 1) shooting energy beams from his mouth and 2) not burrowing through Manhattan or giving birth to Jurassic Park rip-offs, I'm down.
Godzilla opens on May 16th.
[Via Comic Book Movie]
How people develop long-lasting taste aversions has intrigued scientists for decades. Surprisingly, research now shows this phenomenon doesn't occur in the brain area involved in taste perception, as previously believed — this discovery could not only help us better understand our taste system, but also why people eat the foods they do.
In recent years, scientists have used a variety of techniques to reveal the roles that different brain regions play in managing our senses. But the taste cortex, or gustatory cortex, of the brain has remained a bit of a mystery, said Alan Spector, a neuroscientist who studies the gustatory system at Florida State University. "Though, there have been some theories about what it's involved in," he told io9. In particular, research has suggested the gustatory cortex, which is known to mediate our taste perception, also plays a strong role in conditioned taste aversion.
This ubiquitous phenomenon occurs when people (or animals) eat or drink something new, and get sick shortly after (within 12 hours). From then on, they will have a powerful, long-lasting aversion to the food item, a reaction that is a kind of natural survival mechanism. And unlike other forms of conditioning, taste aversion doesn't require repeated trials — you only need to get sick from something just once in order to become averse to it. This can also happen with food you're familiar with, but the aversion won't last as long, Spector said.
A number of studies in the past have shown that damaging an animal's gustatory cortex causes it to lose its learned taste aversion. This suggests that the taste cortex encodes conditioned taste aversion. Recently, Spector and his colleague Koji Hashimoto decided to use this "lesion approach" to see if the gustatory cortex also encodes other functions of taste, such as taste sensitivity and taste discrimination. They began by trying to reproduce those past studies on taste aversion — they couldn't. In their experiments, they found that even extensive damage to rats' taste cortexes didn't mess with their conditioned taste aversion.
The researchers thought that maybe they did something differently. "We thought that maybe our lesions were in a slightly different place or not as big," Spector said. So Spector and his colleagues — Lindsey Schiera and Koji Hashimoto, especially — redid the experiments with a more comprehensive approach.
The researchers began by inducing a conditioned taste aversion in rats. They first placed the rodents on a "restricted water access schedule," where they only gave the rats water at certain times of the day. The rodents functioned just fine on the schedule, but they were thirsty when drinking-time came around.
Next, the team replaced the water with a sodium chloride (salt) solution. After the rats drank the solution, the team injected them with a bit of lithium chloride, which causes nausea for an hour or so. They pulled this trick again a few days later — and force fed the rats that already developed an aversion to the solution after getting sick the first time — to solidify the conditioning. They then left out two bottles of liquid — one contained normal water and the other contained the salt solution — for over a month, and found that the rats only drank the pure water, showing that the conditioning lasts for a long time.
The researchers made all kinds of different surgical lesions across the rats' gustatory cortexes and adjacent areas, and then tested their taste aversion. When they looked at the group of rats with the most extensive gustatory cortex damage, they found that these rats were still averse to the salt solution.
They then conducted another set of experiments where they tested if the rats could form a conditioned taste aversion to delicious sucrose after they developed lesions. Again, as a group, the rats with the most extensive damage showed no taste aversion impairments — that is, the rats were still able to develop a taste aversion to sucrose despite having damaged gustatory cortexes.
"Basically, we weren't finding many effects," Spector said. "We were perplexed."
When the team took a closer look at individual rats, however, they saw that some of them did indeed show a disruption in their conditioned taste aversion. Using a high-resolution lesion mapping program they developed, they were able to overlay the lesions of the unimpaired rats with the impaired rats, which allowed them to find lesion "hot spots" associated with taste aversion disruption.
To their surprise, the lesions of the impaired rats were outside of the gustatory cortex, as it's conventionally defined by electrophysiological recordings (a technique in which scientists measure the activity of neurons), Spector said.
Deficits in taste aversion were instead associated with the most posterior end of the gustatory complex, as well as an adjacent brain area called the visceral cortex, which processes information from the organ systems, including the gut. The researchers took a look at some of those previous studies on taste aversion impairments, and found that while those studies showed lesions in the main gustatory cortex, they also showed lesions in the visceral cortex. "Most people very naturally contributed [the effect] to the gustatory cortex," Spector said.
The results suggest that the gustatory system works with the visceral sensory system when it comes to learned taste aversion, as well as eating, drinking and satiation, Spector said. "All of these things involve a symphony between the signals coming from the mouth and the signals coming from the gut and other organ systems that help guide ingestive behavior," he explained, adding that further work on the interplay between these systems could elucidate why people eat what they do, and even why some people overeat.
The research also has clinical applications. For example, cancer patients receiving chemotherapy sometimes develop eating disorders, which may in part be due to the therapy inducing taste aversions. "Learning more about this would help guide the type of therapeutic regimes that physicians suggest," Spector said.
For now, Spector is planning on returning to his original research goal: Using the lesion approach to understand the role the taste cortex plays in taste sensitivity and taste discrimination. "We really don't know a lot about what the gustatory complex does," he said. "What has initially been attributed to gustatory complex probably involves other areas of the brain."
Check out the full study over in the journal PNAS.
Top image via Levranii/Shutterstock.
The entire idea of traveling into space to other worlds can be given a specific date: January 7, 1610.
It was on that evening Galileo Galilei first observed the satellites of Jupiter and realized that the planets were worlds just like our own. Until then, the heavens were thought to be no great distance from the earth, and the sun and the moon were thought to be the only material bodies with which we shared the universe. Even at that, the nature of the moon, for example, was an object of much debate: was it in fact a body like the earth? or was it something more ethereal? The stars, while some were brighter than others, were nevertheless thought to be at more or less all the same distance from the earth, though just what that distance might be was a matter for discussion.
The planets were merely a special class of bright stars that wandered among the other "fixed" stars; the word "planet" itself simply means nothing more than "wanderer." Otherwise there was nothing particularly unusual about them. It was unthinkable to the ancients that those twinkling lights might be places that could be traveled to and only the moon served as a destination in a rare handful of fantasies. And even it was not regarded as something altogether physical, but rather a kind of ethereal Never-Never Land.
Galileo's revelation changed all of that forever. The moon was a world as imperfect as our own, with mountains, valleys, plains and hundreds of odd, circular ring mountains and craters. The planets were obviously worlds like the moon and the earth. And if they were indeed worlds like our own, did not that imply other similarities? Would they not have landscapes and living inhabitants? Surely there would be animal life and perhaps civilizations? Would there be great cities and mighty kingdoms up there in the heavens? And if there were, might there not also be great treasures? These questions were far from rhetorical. When human beings looked skyward they no longer saw abstract points of light. They saw the infinite possibilities of new worlds.
At the time of Galileo's discovery of new worlds in the sky, there were new worlds being discovered right here on earth. Scarcely more than a century earlier the continents of North and South America had been discovered quite by accident, lying unsuspected and unknown on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean. By the early 1600s, hundreds of ships and thousands of explorers, colonists, soldiers, priests and adventurers had made the journey to these amazingly fertile, rich and strange new lands. Now they learned that an Italian scientist had found that the sky was full of new worlds, too. How frustrating it must have been! The new worlds of the Americas, which could not even be seen and which existed for the vast majority of Europeans only in the form of traveler's tales and evocative if imaginative charts, nevertheless could be visited by anyone possessing the funds or courage. But now here were whole new earths—Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the moon—which could be seen by anyone and even mapped; whole new planets with unimaginable continents and riches . . . yet there was no way to touch them! They were like a banana dangling just beyond the reach of a monkey.
It is little wonder that Galileo's discoveries could not be suppressed. Their publication was quickly followed by a flood of space travel stories: Somnium, The Man in the Moone, Voyage to the Moon, A Voyage to the World of Cartesius, Iter Lunaire, John Daniel, Micromegas, A Voyage to the Moon and countless others. There were poems, songs, stage plays and sermons, all inspired by the possibility of traveling to the new worlds in the sky. Bishop Wilkins had no personal doubts that these voyages would eventually be made. He wrote in his Discovery of a New World (1638), "You will say there can be no sailing thither [to the moon] . . . We have not now any Drake, or Columbus, to undertake this voyage, or any Daedalus to invent a conveyance through the air. I answer, though we have not, yet why may not succeeding times raise up some spirits as eminent for new attempts, and strange inventions, as any that were before them? . . . I do seriously, and upon good grounds affirm it possible to make a flying-chariot . . ."
A great many writers did their best to imagine what such a flying chariot might be like, but they were handicapped by the limitations of the technologies available at the time. The writers of space travel stories before the end of the 1700s were merely groping in the dark: there simply was no method by which a human being could leave the surface of the earth. In all the history of mankind no one had ever left the earth any farther than they could jump.
(I should mention here the Austrian scientist, Conrad Haas. His Kunstbuch [1529-1556] preceded Galileo by more than half a century. The book is devoted entirely to the science of rocketry and contains the first descriptions of the use of multi-stage rockets, bell-shaped nozzles, delta fins and liquid fuel. One of the illustrations in the book depicts a large rocket topped by a "flying house," which Haas clearly meant to carry a passenger. There is no indication, alas, that Haas intended his rocket for spaceflight.)
The invention of the lighter-than-air manned balloon in 1783 was a major revolution, and revelation, in mankind's perception of the exploration of the universe because it was not accomplished by imaginary means but by the use of a man-made machine, a device of science. This is the altered perception that is most important to realize: that by means of a man-made instrumentality, employing well-understood physical principles, it was possible to leave the earth. Therefore the problem of traveling to the other worlds that shared the universe with the earth ought also be surmountable by means of science and mechanics. That is, even if the wiser heads were aware that it was unlikely that anyone would ever travel to the moon in a balloon—hot air, hydrogen or otherwise—they were also cognizant that the idea of traveling there somehow was no longer a matter relegated to pure fantasy.
Yet, if traveling into space was simply a matter of applying the right technology, what might that technology be? Balloons? Anti-gravity? Giant cannons? These and other ideas were all suggested. But it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that anyone with an engineering or scientific background seriously proposed the use of rockets to propel a spacecraft. But what about the science fiction writers? Everyone knows they're always ahead of the game. Did anyone writing a science fiction story come up with the idea of using a rocket-powered spaceship before engineers and scientists did?
Well, of course! This feat is usually credited to Cyrano de Bergerac. In his satirical fantasy, Histoire Comique: Contenant les Etats et Empire de la Lune (1657, but written 10 years earlier), de Bergerac described the flight of a manned rocket. His hero had already tried several methods of flying to the moon, all unsuccessful. One of them employed a kind of box with wings powered by giant springs. This is launched from a cliff and immediately crashes. While de Bergerac is consoling himself in a local bar, some jokers fasten skyrockets to the box. On his next attempt, the rockets are lit and he is launched into the sky. "The rockets at length ceased through the exhaustion of material and, while I was thinking that I should leave my head on the summit of a mountain, I felt (without my having stirred) my elevation continue; and my machine, taking leave of me, fell towards the Earth."
Cyrano thus became perhaps the first human second stage in astronautical history. By virtue of some beef marrow he had rubbed over his body earlier (to relieve his bruises), Cyrano found himself continuing on to the moon (it being a popular superstition at that time that the moon attracted the marrow of animals).
Although de Bergerac is often credited with the first suggestion for the use of rockets in space travel, he truly only gets half points for doing this since he only includes them in his list of possible means of locomotion because he believes they sounded just as silly as all the other methods he described. One must remember that de Bergerac was trying to come up with the most unlikely-sounding methods of launching himself into space—that rockets were one of his choices was only a serendipitous accident.
On the other hand, Jules Verne took rockets seriously, using them in his classic 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon and its 1870 sequel, Around the Moon. Although he employed an enormous cannon to launch his projectile (a decision he has been much derided for by those with 20/20 hindsight; however, he actually chose a cannon for very good reasons...while at the same time being perfectly aware of why such a cannon wouldn't work for launching people; but that's a subject for a different article), he supplied it with rockets for steering. What makes this a real plus for Verne is that he was the first person ever to suggest that rockets would work just as well in a vacuum as in air. Even the New York Times was ignorant of that fact, when it took Robert Goddard to task for writing about moon rockets:
That Professor Goddard with his 'chair' in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action and reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react—to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
A number of sci fi historians have pointed out that Verne was beat by a nose with the publication of Achille Eyraud's Voyage to Venus, which was published in the same year as Verne's novel but a few months earlier. In his story, Eyraud correctly explains that the reaction effect that propels his spacecraft is the same as that produced by the recoil of a gun and that it flies in exactly the same way that a skyrocket does, although it is clear that Eyraud does not quite understand the principles involved. His rocket is propelled by ejecting a stream of pressurized water from a nozzle at the rear. This is all well and good. But when one of his characters mentions that this would require a prodigious amount of water Eyraud goes badly astray. He has his inventor explain that the water is not lost "because the expulsion was intercepted and deviated at a certain distance by a small paddle wheel, which made the water fall into a basin from which it was forced again by the pump." Since the ejected water is recovered in a container towed behind the spacecraft this would, of course, negate any reactive effect: the spaceship would simply stand still.
It would appear, finally, that the honor of describing the first unambiguous rocket-propelled spaceship goes to American author, Elbert Perce. In his obscure 1857 novel Gulliver Joi, he describes a journey to a hitherto-unknown planet, "Kailoo". The spacecraft is a hollow cylinder made of a very light substance that is nevertheless as hard as iron. It is only just large enough to contain its single passenger. The rear of the cylinder is sharply pointed. The cylinder is placed in a frame to which are attached powerful steel springs. Released by a trigger, these would give the projectile its initial velocity. In the pointed end of the spacecraft is placed a strong, square steel box. This contains a newly invented powder. From one end of the box extends a small, very strong tube. When the box is heated by the "malleable flame," a kind of perpetually burning globular mass resembling molten iron, the powder inside ignites. "As long as a steady heat can be obtained enough to keep it in fusion, so long a steady blast of exceedingly powerful flame will issue from the tube of the steel box, which tube . . .extends through the aperture at the pointed end of the cylinder." The exhaust can be controlled by a stop-cock.
The spaceship is controlled by a kind of magnetic compass that automatically keeps it pointed toward the planet Kailoo. The passenger is also equipped with a powerful telescope. The "cabin" is just large enough to allow its passenger to lie down within it. It is cushioned with a lining of fur with the controls conveniently within reach.
At the time for takeoff the inventor inserts the malleable flame and "instantly a stream of fire issued from it, striking the rock with great violence . . . The old man then pulled the small trigger that confined the steel springs, and propelled by their force, and that of the flame, I shot up into the air, the long broad flame of fire streaming behind me like the blaze of a comet."
Once the rocketeer found himself approaching Kailoo he "shut off the supply of flame that propelled" him and descended to the surface.
And if all that isn't a perfect description of a rocketship, I don't know what is.
The NOAA has released a satellite photo of the massive storm that's currently wreaking havoc across the U.S. northeast. It's a bad one folks, with snow accumulation reaching one to two feet in some areas and temperatures dropping as low as -13F (-25C).
Some 2,300 flights have already been cancelled, with hundreds more likely to come. New York's JFK airport is closed for snow removal and all public schools are closed. Both New York and New Jersey are currently in a state of emergency.
From the NOAA:
Two low pressure systems will converge over the Mid-Atlantic Region Thursday resulting in heavy snowfall potential and dangerously cold temperatures from the Midwest through the central Appalachians and into New England into Friday. Heaviest amounts of snow, upwards of 10-12 inches, are expected for coastal southern New England, and along the Great Lakes. Some areas of coastal Massachusetts could see 12-15 inches of snowfall. In addition to heavy snowfall, north to northeast winds gusting to 35 to 50 mph could cause blizzard conditions for eastern Long Island and coastal Massachusetts. Wind chill temperatures well below 0 F are forecast for much of the Central and Eastern U.S. on Friday. Wind chills below -30 F are expected for portions of northern New England. This image from the GOES-13 satellite on January 2, 2014 (17:45 UTC) shows the two weather systems (moist air from the Gulf of Mexico and cold air from Canada) moving across the U.S.
The latest radar from Intellicast:
More at the National Weather Service.
