Splash! NASA moon crash struck lots of water

Suddenly, the moon looks exciting again. It has lots of water, scientists said Friday — a thrilling discovery that sent a ripple of hope for a future astronaut outpost in a place that has always seemed barren and inhospitable.

Experts have long suspected there was water on the moon. Confirmation came from data churned up by two NASA spacecraft that intentionally slammed into a lunar crater last month.

“Indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn't find just a little bit. We found a significant amount,” said Anthony Colaprete, lead scientist for the mission, holding up a white water bucket for emphasis.

The lunar crash kicked up at least 25 gallons and that’s only what scientists could see from the plumes of the impact, Colaprete said.

Some space policy experts say that makes the moon attractive for exploration again. Having an abundance of water would make it easier to set up a base camp for astronauts, supplying drinking water and a key ingredient for rocket fuel.

“Having definitive evidence that there is substantial water is a significant step forward in making the moon an interesting place to go,” said George Washington University space policy scholar John Logsdon.

Even so, members of the blue-ribbon panel reviewing NASA’s future plans said it doesn’t change their conclusion that the program needs more money to get beyond near-Earth orbit. The panel wants NASA to look at other potential destinations like asteroids and Mars.

“This new and terrific result reassures us about lunar resources, but … the challenges currently facing the human spaceflight program remain,” Chris Chyba, a Princeton astrophysicist who is on the panel, said in an e-mail.

President George W. Bush had proposed a more than $100 billion plan to return astronauts to the moon, then go on to Mars; a test flight of an early version of a new rocket was a success last month. President Barack Obama appointed the special panel to look at the entire moon exploration program. The decision is now up to the White House, and NASA’s lunar plans are somewhat on hold until then.

via The Associated Press: Splash! NASA moon crash struck lots of water.

The water is inside the rock, not in pools or lakes like this:

 

Scientists inch closer to ‘Three parent babies’

Scientists have inched closer to producing a controversial “three parent baby” after they successfully fertilised an egg with two biological mothers, a development likely to provoke an ethical storm over hybrid or genetically modified children.

The research led by Atsushi Tanaka of St Mother Hospital in Kitakyushu, Japan, has shown that eggs donated by young females could be used to repair the damaged eggs of older women, increasing the chances of successful fertilisation.

Though they are yet to use the eggs to produce babies, they injected them with sperm to produce an early stage embryo in the laboratory.

Tanaka team removed the nuclei from 31 eggs collected from women undergoing IVF and injected them into enucleated eggs donated by women aged under 35. Of these, 25 eggs looked viable.

When injected with sperm, 7 eggs or 28 per cent formed early-stage embryos called blastocyts, compared with just 3 per cent of the unrepaired eggs, the New Scientist reported today.

The research is likely to provoke an ethical outrage as critics believe it could lead to hybrid or genetically modified children.

“If we could transfer these constructed new embryos, I believe the success rate would be high,” Tanaka, the lead researcher was quoted as saying by the New Scientist.

via Scientists inch closer to ‘Three parent babies’.

And the ugliest people are…

Britons are among the ugliest people in the world, according to a dating website that says it only allows “beautiful people” to join.

Fewer than one in eight British men and just three in 20 women who have applied to BeautifulPeople.com have been accepted, an emailed statement from the website showed.

Existing members of the “elite dating site” rate how attractive potential members are over a 48 hour period, after applicants upload a recent photo and personal profile.

Swedish men have proved the most successful, with 65 percent being accepted, while Norwegian women are considered the most beautiful with 76 percent accepted, the website said.

The way that BeautifulPeople.com accepts new members is simple. A potential member applies with a photo and a brief profile. Over 48 hours, existing members of the opposite sex vote whether or not to admit them, the site said.

Options are: “Yes definitely,” “Hmm yes, O.K,” “Hmm no, not really” and “No definitely not.”

The site was founded in 2002 in Denmark and went live across the globe last month. Since then, the site has rejected nearly 1.8 million people from 190 countries, admitting just 360,000 new members.

“I would say Britain is stumbling because they don't spend as much time polishing up their appearance and they are letting themselves down on physical fitness,” Beautiful People managing director Greg Hodge said. “Next to Brazilian and Scandinavian beauties, British people just aren't as toned or glamorous.”

via And the ugliest people are… | Oddly Enough | Reuters.

I signed up and I’m now a member of BeautifulPeople.com.  Surprising. I never thought of myself as one of the most beautiful people in the world.  Unfortunately, when I logged in today, I got this message:

Dear member,

BeautifulPeople.com has launched globally.
The launch is being extensively covered by the global media.

The huge media coverage is currently generating so much traffic on our servers that we have had to limit some users from using the site.
We are sorry for the inconvenience.

We’re excited to welcome you, so please check back later.

Thanks
The BeautifulPeople Team

Bad Decisions May Be Contagious

Money Pit. Throwing good money after bad in decisions like real estate investments could be contagious.Like the flu, a person’s emotional state can be contagious. Watch someone cry, and you’ll likely feel sad; think about the elderly, and you’ll tend to walk slower. Now a study suggests that we can also catch someone else’s irrational thought processes.

Anyone who’s lost money on a fixer-upper may have succumbed to a classic economic fallacy known as “sunk costs.” You make a bad investment in a home that’s never going to sell for more than you put in to it, yet you want to justify your investment by continuing to throw money into renovations. One way to avoid this hole is to get advice from someone who has no self-interest in the project. But is the outsider still somehow susceptible to your mindset?

To find out, social psychologist Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and colleagues asked college students to take over decision-making for a person they had never met–and who they didn’t know was fictitious. The volunteers were split into two groups: one that felt some connection with the decision-maker and another that didn’t.

In one experiment, the volunteers watched the following scenario play out via text on a computer screen: the fictitious decision-maker tried to outbid another person for a prize of 356 points, which equaled $4.45 in real money. The decision-maker started out with 360 points, and every time the other bidder upped the ante by 40 points, the decision-maker followed suit. Volunteers were told that once the decision-maker bid over 356 points, he or she would begin to lose some of the $12 payment for participating in the study.

When the fictitious decision-maker neared this threshold, the volunteers were asked to take over bidding. Objectively, the volunteers should have realized that–like the person who makes a bad investment in a fixer-upper–the decision-maker would keep throwing good money after bad. But the volunteers who felt an identification with the fictitious player (i.e., those told by the researchers that they shared the same month of birth or year in school) made almost 60% more bids and were more likely to lose money than those who didn’t feel a connection. The team reports the findings of this experiment–and three similar experiments–in this month’s issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

via Bad Decisions May Be Contagious — Torrice 2009 (1110): 2 — ScienceNOW.

Are Earth’s Oceans Made Of Extraterrestrial Material?

Contrary to preconceived notions, the atmosphere and the oceans were perhaps not formed from vapors emitted during intense volcanism at the dawning of our planet. Francis Albarède of the Laboratoire des Sciences de la Terre (CNRS / ENS Lyon / Université Claude Bernard) suggests that water was not part of the Earth's initial inventory but stems from the turbulence caused in the outer Solar System by giant planets. Ice-covered asteroids thus reached the Earth around one hundred million years after the birth of the planets.The Earth's water could therefore be extraterrestrial, have arrived late in its accretion history, and its presence could have facilitated plate tectonics even before life appeared. The conclusions of the study carried out by Albarède feature in an article published on the 29 October 2009 in the journal Nature.

Space agencies have got the message: wherever there is life there has to be water. Around 4.5 billion years ago, the Earth was bequeathed with sufficient water for oceans to form and for life to find favorable niches in the seas and on the continents resulting from plate tectonics. In comparison, the Moon and Mercury are dry, mortally cold deserts, Mars dried up very quickly and the surface of Venus is a burning inferno.

According to books, the ocean and the atmosphere were formed from volcanic gases and the Earth’s interior is the source of volatile elements. However, the rocks of the Earth’s mantle are deficient in water (geochemists estimate its concentration at two hundredth percent). The same is true on Earth’s sister planets, Venus and Mars. The main reason proposed by Albarède is that, during the formation of the Solar System, the temperature never dropped sufficiently between the Sun and the orbit of Jupiter for volatile elements to be able to condense with planetary material. The arrival of water on Earth therefore corresponds to a late episode of planetary accretion.

It is widely accepted that terrestrial planets are formed over several million years by the agglomeration of asteroids (of kilometric size) then protoplanets (of the size of Mars). The arrival of the last of these large objects corresponds to the lunar impact, 30 million years after the formation of the Solar System. Initially, this hurly-burly took place between planetary objects located within the snow line, in other words between the Sun and the asteroid belt. This space, swept by the electromagnetic winds of the young Sun, was then too hot for water and volatile elements to condense within it.

The major delivery of volatile elements on our planet could have corresponded to a phenomenon that occurred some tens of millions of years after the lunar impact: this was the big clean up of the outer Solar System initiated by the giant planets. Due to their very strong gravity, they sent the final ice-rich planetary rubble in all directions, including in our own direction. Penetrating into the mantle through the surface, the water could then have softened the Earth and reduced the strain at which materials shatter. Plate tectonics then began and with it the emergence of continents, conditions probably necessary for the appearance of life. Mars dried out before water managed to penetrate in depth and, as regards Venus, the conditions that reigned before the violent remodeling of its surface, 800 million years ago, by intense volcanism are still not known.

At a time when the habitability of extraterrestrial planets is beginning to be explored seriously, understanding what made earth the only place that harbors life is a key question.

via Are Earth’s Oceans Made Of Extraterrestrial Material?.

Meet Bismuth

Bismuth is a brittle metal with a white, silver-pink hue, often occurring in its native form with an iridescent oxide tarnish showing many refractive colors from yellow to blue. The spiral stair stepped structure of a bismuth crystal is the result of a higher growth rate around the outside edges than on the inside edges. The variations in the thickness of the oxide layer that forms on the surface of the crystal causes different wavelengths of light to interfere upon reflection, thus displaying a rainbow of colors. When combusted with oxygen, bismuth burns with a blue flame and its oxide forms yellow fumes.[1] Its toxicity is much lower than that of its neighbors in the periodic table such as lead, tin, tellurium, antimony, and polonium.

Although ununpentium is theoretically more diamagnetic, no other metal is verified to be more naturally diamagnetic than bismuth.[1] (Superdiamagnetism is a different physical phenomenon.) Of any metal, it has the second lowest thermal conductivity (after mercury) and the highest Hall coefficient. It has a high electrical resistance.[1] When deposited in sufficiently thin layers on a substrate, bismuth is a semiconductor, rather than a poor metal.[2]

Elemental bismuth is one of very few substances of which the liquid phase is denser than its solid phase (water being the best-known example). Bismuth expands 3.32% on solidification; therefore, it was long an important component of low-melting typesetting alloys, which needed to expand to fill printing molds.[1]

Though virtually unseen in nature, high-purity bismuth can form distinctive hopper crystals. These colorful laboratory creations are typically sold to collectors. Bismuth is relatively nontoxic and has a low melting point just above 271 °C, so crystals may be grown using a household stove, although the resulting crystals will tend to be lower quality than lab-grown crystals. …
While bismuth was traditionally regarded as the element with the heaviest stable isotope, bismuth-209, it had long been suspected to be unstable on theoretical grounds. This was finally demonstrated in 2003 when researchers at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay, France, measured the alpha emission half-life of 209Bi to be 1.9 × 1019 years,[3] over a billion times longer than the current estimated age of the universe. Owing to its extraordinarily long half-life, for all presently-known medical and industrial applications bismuth can be treated as if it is stable and non-radioactive. The radioactivity is of academic interest, however, because bismuth is one of few elements whose radioactivity was suspected, and indeed theoretically predicted, before being detected in the laboratory.

via Bismuth – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Dreams may have an important physiological function

Dreams have long been assumed to have psychological functions such as consolidating emotional memories and processing experiences or problems, but according to a Harvard psychiatrist and sleep researcher the real function may actually be physiological.

According to Dr J. Allan Hobson, the major function of the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep associated with dreams is physiological rather than psychological. During REM sleep the brain is activated and “warming its circuits” and is anticipating the sights, sounds and emotions of the waking state.

Dr Hobson said the idea explains a lot, and likened it to jogging. The body does not remember every step of a jog, but it knows it has exercised, and in the same way we do not remember many of our dreams, but our minds have been tuned for conscious awareness.

Hobson said dreams represent a parallel consciousness state that is running continuously, but which is normally suppressed while the person is awake. Dr Mark Mahowald, a neurologist from Hennepin County Medical Center, in Minneapolis, said most people studying dreams have started out with fixed ideas about the psychological functions of dreaming, and try to make dreaming fit these ideas, but the new study makes no such assumptions.

In evolutionary terms REM sleep seems to be relatively recent, and has been identified in humans, other warm-blooded animals, and birds. Earlier studies have suggested it appears early in life, in the third trimester in humans, and research has produced evidence the brain of the fetus may in a sense be “seeing” images long before its eyes are opened, so the REM state appears to help the brain build neural connections, especially in the visual areas.

This does not mean dreams have no psychological meaning, since they do at times reflect current problems, anxieties and hopes, but people can read almost anything into dreams. A recent study of more than one thousand people at Carnegie Mellon University in Harvard, showed that there were strong biases in how people interpreted dreams. So, for example, subjects attached more significance to negative dreams about people they disliked and to positive dreams about people they liked.

Research on lucid dreams has suggested that only 20 percent of dreams are about people or places we know, and most images are unique to a single dream. Lucid dreaming is the ability to watch a dream as an observer without waking up, and Dr Hobson finds support in lucid dreaming for his argument for dreams as a kind of physiological brain exercise. A study co-authored by Hobson and published in the September issue of the journal Sleep reported that elements of both REM and waking were apparent in lucid dreaming, especially in the frontal areas that are quiet during normal dreams. According to Hobson, this suggests there are two systems, which can be running at the same time.

The potential applications of the research may be a deeper understanding of conditions such as schizophrenia, which is categorized by imaginings that may be related to abnormal activation of a dreaming state.

via Dreams may have an important physiological function.

What the LHC is really looking for

AS DAMP squibs go, it was quite a spectacular one. Amid great pomp and ceremony – not to mention dark offstage rumblings that the end of the world was nigh – the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s mightiest particle smasher, fired up in September last year. Nine days later a short circuit and a catastrophic leak of liquid helium ignominiously shut the machine down.

Now for take two. Any day now, if all goes to plan, proton beams will start racing all the way round the ring deep beneath CERN, the LHC’s home on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland.

Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg is worried. It's not that he thinks the LHC will create a black hole that will engulf the planet, or even that the restart will end in a technical debacle like last year’s. No: he’s actually worried that the LHC will find what some call the “God particle”, the popular and embarrassingly grandiose moniker for the hitherto undetected Higgs boson.

“I’m terrified,” he says. “Discovering just the Higgs would really be a crisis.”

Why so? Evidence for the Higgs would be the capstone of an edifice that particle physicists have been building for half a century – the phenomenally successful theory known simply as the standard model. It describes all known particles, as well as three of the four forces that act on them: electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces.

It is also manifestly incomplete. We know from what the theory doesn’t explain that it must be just part of something much bigger. So if the LHC finds the Higgs and nothing but the Higgs, the standard model will be sewn up. But then particle physics will be at a dead end, with no clues where to turn next.

Hence Weinberg’s fears. However, if the theorists are right, before it ever finds the Higgs, the LHC will see the first outline of something far bigger: the grand, overarching theory known as supersymmetry. SUSY, as it is endearingly called, is a daring theory that doubles the number of particles needed to explain the world. And it could be just what particle physicists need to set them on the path to fresh enlightenment.

via In SUSY we trust: What the LHC is really looking for – physics-math – 11 November 2009 – New Scientist.