EnlightenedOsote's blog: "Science"

By Lewis Page • Get more from this author Posted in Space, 4th November 2008 00:02 GMT A team of top boffins believe that they have cracked one of the main problems of interplanetary travel - that of surviving deadly solar radiation storms. The physicists say they have come up with an idea for a crafty forcefield which could stand off the protoplasm-punishing particle squalls of deep space. An image of the storm-wracked solar atmosphere There's plenty of weather on the sun. Thus far, only a very few people have ever travelled beyond the protection of the Earth's magnetosphere - the Apollo astronauts who went to the Moon in the 1960s and 70s. All other humans in space - including the crews of the present-day International Space Station - have remained within the protective magnetic field of their home planet. The Apollo missions were reasonably safe because they were brief - only days long. The risk of a major solar radiation storm was minimal. Even so, had there been a serious solar event during an Apollo mission the results might have been disastrous - the more so as there is no lunar atmosphere to protect explorers. A journey to Mars, however, is projected to take 6 months - and then there's the return trip to consider. Even though the astronauts would be protected by the Martian atmosphere (and the planet itself) during their stay, a year in deep space would be very dangerous. Even normal background radiation could be expected to use up much of an astronaut's lifetime exposure limit. A solar storm, more or less bound to occur over such a period, would breach the health guidelines and create an unacceptable risk of cancer. A bad particle squall could cause radiation sickness severe enough to incapacitate or even kill a Mars-ship crew on the spot. But now boffins at the Rutherford Appleton Lab and the Universities of York, Strathclyde and Lisbon have shown that it's possible to generate a "portable magnetosphere" or magnetic forcefield just a few hundred metres across, which would prevent ionised particles reaching a space ship. It had previously been thought that only mighty planetary-scale fields could possibly be effective, but new computer simulations suggest that just a small "hole" in the solar winds could be enough. “These initial experiments have shown promise," said Dr Ruth Bamford of the Rutherford Appleton lab, rather cautiously. "It may be possible to shield astronauts from deadly space weather.” Astronauts in a ship moving through space would find a nifty lightweight forcefield especially useful. Ordinary radiation shielding is extremely heavy, but everything in a spaceship must be as light as possible, every kilo of mass being precious. On the other hand the power required to generate a "magnetic bubble" could be an issue. The new research would seem to have implications for NASA's plans to build a permanent Moon base, too. While lunar explorers would gain a good deal of protection from the Moon itself, blocking out half the sky, the lack of any atmosphere would see an explorer caught outside his thick-walled underground moon bunker by a solar storm during daylight in serious trouble. Moon rovers and inflatable habitats of the future might find magno-forcefield kit very handy. Needless to say, reasonably portable forcefields would also be invaluable for the hover tanks, power-armour suits or interplanetary battlecruisers of tomorrow - ideal for resisting deadly particle-cannon blaster beams, krenon rays* etc. The research is set out in a new paper: The Interactions of a flowing plasma with a dipole magnetic field: measurements and modelling of a diamagnetic cavity relevant to spacecraft protection (R Bamford et al 2008 Plasma Phys. Control. Fusion 50 124025).

I just got the official invite to the launch party for the T-Mobile G1, aka the HTC Dream, aka the Google Phone, the first-ever retail phone running Google's Android platform. As you can see from the invite above, it's going to be a big deal, with T-Mobile and Google execs speaking and a hideous scrum of reviewers jockeying to get their hands on tethered-down units afterwards. In other words, it's going to be great. We'll cover it when it happens, and we'll have a review up as soon as we can an actual review model. We still don't know when it's going on sale or at what price, though. Want to get psyched?

I understand being a Star Wars fan, but this is a little much isn't it?

Content provided by Reuters Thursday, September 18, 2008 NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Dysfunction in a portion of the brain may explain some of the symptoms of fibromyalgia syndrome, researchers suggest in a paper published in the Journal of Rheumatology. Dr. Yasser Emad, of Cairo University, Egypt, and colleagues used proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy to examine the function of the hippocampus in 15 patients with fibromyalgia syndrome and in10 healthy women who were the same age as the other patients. The hippocampus is located deep in the front portion of the brain involved in regulating emotions and memory. Functionally, the hippocampus is part of the olfactory cortex, which is important to the sense of smell. The name is from the Greek hippos (horse) = kampos (a sea monster), based on its shape, which resembles a seahorse. Using spectroscopy, the researchers calculated levels of hippocampus levels of the brain chemicals N-acetyl aspartate (NAA), choline, creatine, along with their ratios, and compared the findings between the two groups. All study participants also underwent assessments of sleep patterns, cognitive function, and symptoms of depression. The number of tender points on the body was assessed in all patients and a visual analog scale was used to measure pain. Patient age averaged 35.7 years, and their average disease duration was 18.1 months. All of the patients had cognitive functional impairments on the Mini-Mental State Examination, eight (35.5 percent) were depressed according to the Hamilton Depression Scale, and nine (60 percent) had sleep disturbances. None of the control subjects had any problems in these areas. "NAA levels of the right and left hippocampi were lower in the patients compared to controls," Emad's team explains. "Another statistically significant difference was observed in choline levels in the right hippocampus, which were higher in the patient group." The fibromyalgia patients also had significantly lower NAA to choline and NAA to creatine ratios compared with the control subjects. There were no differences between the groups in other metabolites measured or in the choline to creatine ratio. In the patient group, language scores were significantly correlated with choline and creatine levels, but there was no significant correlation between the levels of the metabolites or their ratios and the number of tender points. "The hippocampus was dysfunctional in patients with fibromyalgia, as shown by lower NAA levels," the investigators conclude. Because the hippocampus has a critical role in maintaining cognitive functions, sleep regulation, and pain perception, the researchers suggest that metabolic dysfunction of hippocampus may be implicated in the symptoms of this puzzling syndrome. SOURCE: Journal of Rheumatology, July, 2008.

Cannabis plant extracts can effectively fight drug-resistant bacteria. Scientists Say Substances Derived From Cannabis Could Outdo Conventional Antibiotics In Killing Some Bacteria By NORA SCHULTZ Sept. 12, 2008 Substances harvested from cannabis plants could soon outshine conventional antibiotics in the escalating battle against drug-resistant bacteria. The compounds, called cannabinoids, appear to be unaffected by the mechanism that superbugs like MRSA use to evade existing antibiotics. Scientists from Italy and the United Kingdom, who published their research in the Journal of Natural Products last month, say that cannabis-based creams could also be developed to treat persistent skin infections. Marijuana (AP Photo) Cannabis has long been known to have antibacterial properties and was studied in the 1950s as a treatment for tuberculosis and other diseases. But research into using cannabis as an antibiotic has been limited by poor knowledge of the plant's active ingredients and by the controversy surrounding its use as a recreational drug. Now Giovanni Appendino of the Piemonte Orientale University, in Italy, and Simon Gibbons of the School of Pharmacy at the University of London, U.K., have revisited the antibiotic power of marijuana by systematically testing different cannabinoids' ability to kill MRSA. Related Drugs With Bad Reps Have Good Side Med Marijuana Profits Illegal in CA? Medical Pot User Denied Organ Transplant MRSA, short for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is a bacterium that can cause difficult-to-treat infections since it does not respond to many antibiotics. Many healthy people carry S. aureus on their skin, but problems arise when multi-drug-resistant strains infect people with weak immune systems through an open wound. In the worst cases, the bug spreads throughout the body, causing a life-threatening infection. To make matters worse, resistance to antibiotics is rapidly increasing, and some strains are now even immune to vancomycin, a powerful antibiotic that is normally used only as a last resort when other drugs fail. But when Appendino, Gibbons, and their colleagues applied extracts from five major cannabinoids to bacterial cultures of six strains of MRSA, they discovered that the cannabinoids were as effective at killing the bugs as vancomycin and other antibiotics. "The cannabinoids even showed exceptional activity against the MRSA strain that makes extra amounts of the proteins that give the bugs resistance against many antibiotics," says Gibbons. These proteins, he explains, allow the bacteria to "hoover up unwanted things from inside the cell and spit them out again."

http://www.wikisky.org/

Stephen Hawking's explosive new theory By Roger Highfield, Science Editor Last Updated: 12:01am BST 26/06/2008 Prof Stephen Hawking has come up with a new idea to explain why the Big Bang of creation led to the vast cosmos that we can see today. Big bang expansion The new theory believes original estimates of Big Bang expansion are wrong Astronomers can deduce that the early universe expanded at a mind-boggling rate because regions separated by vast distances have similar background temperatures. They have proposed a process of rapid expansion of neighbouring regions, with similar cosmic properties, to explain this growth spurt which they call inflation. But that left a deeper mystery: why did inflation occur in the first place? Now New Scientist reports that an answer has been proposed by Prof Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University, working with Prof Thomas Hertog of the Astroparticle and Cosmology Laboratory in Paris. advertisement Prof Hawking is best known for his attempts to combine theories of the very small, quantum theory, and that of gravity and the very big, general relativity, into a new theory, called quantum gravity. Quantum mechanics is awash with strange ideas and can shed new light on inflation, which came in the wake of when the universe itself was around the size of an atom. By quantum lore, when a particle of light travels from A to B, it does not take one path but explores every one simultaneously, with the more direct routes being used more heavily. This is called a sum over histories and Prof Hawking and Prof Hertog propose the same thing for the cosmos. In this theory, the early universe can be described by a mathematical object called a wave function and, in a similar way to the light particle, the team proposed two years ago that this means that there was no unique origin to the cosmos: instead the wave function of the universe embraced a multitude of means to develop. This is very counter intuitive: they argued the universe began in just about every way imaginable (and perhaps even some that are not). Out of this profusion of beginnings, like a blend of a God’s eye view of every conceivable kind of creation, the vast majority of the baby universes withered away to leave the mature cosmos that we can see today. But, like any new idea, there were problems. The professors found that they could not explain the rapid expansion - inflation - of the universe, evidence of which is left behind all around us in what is called the cosmic microwave background, in effect the echo of the big bang, a relic of creation that can be measured with experiments on balloons and on space probes. Now, in a paper in Physical Review Letters with Prof James Hartle of the University of California, Santa Barbara, they realised that their earlier estimates of inflation were wrong because they had not fully thought through the connection between, on the one hand, their theoretical predictions and, on the other, our observations of the echo. At first, they found that the most probable history of the cosmos had only undergone "a little bit of inflation at the beginning, contradicting the observations," said Prof Hertog. Now, after a correction to take account of how the data we have on inflation is based on only a view of a limited volume of the universe, they find that the wave function does indeed predict a long period of inflation. # Hawking warns Government over 'disastrous' science funding cuts # Stephen Hawking seeks 'Einsteins of Africa' # Hawking: Man must leave planet Earth "This proposal, with volume weighting, can explain why the universe inflated," Prof Hawking tells New Scientist. By taking into account that we have a parochial view of the cosmos, the team has come up with a radical new take on cosmology. Most models of the universe are bottom-up, that is, you start from well-defined initial conditions of the Big Bang and work forward. However, Prof Hertog and Prof Hawking say that we do not and cannot know the initial conditions present at the beginning of the universe. Instead, we only know the final state - the one we are in now. Their idea is therefore to start with the conditions we observe today - like the fact that at large scales one does not need to adopt quantum lore to explain how the universe (it behaves classically, as scientists say) - and work backwards in time to determine what the initial conditions might have looked like. In this way, they argue the universe did not have just one unique beginning and history but a multitude of different ones and that it has experienced them all. The new theory is also attractive because it fits in with string theory - the most popular candidate for a "theory of everything." String theory allows the existence of an" unimaginable multitude of different types of universes in addition to our own," but it does not provide a selection criterion among these and hence no explanation for why our universe is, the way it is", says Prof Hertog. "For this, one needs a theory of the wave function of the universe." And now the world of cosmology has one. The next step is to find specific predictions that can be put to the test, to validate this new view of how the cosmos came into being.

What is Hanny's Voorwerp? Credit: Galaxy Zoo Project, ING Explanation: What is that green thing? A volunteer sky enthusiast surfing through online Galaxy Zoo images has discovered something really strange. The mystery object is unusually green, not of any clear galaxy type, and situated below relatively normal looking spiral galaxy IC 2497. Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel, discovered the strange green "voorwerp" (Dutch for "object") last year. The Galaxy Zoo project encourages sky enthusiasts to browse through SDSS images and classify galaxy types. Now known popularly as Hanny's Voorwerp, subsequent observations have shown that the mysterious green blob has the same distance as neighboring galaxy IC 2497. Research is ongoing, but one leading hypothesis holds that Hanny's Voorwerp is a small galaxy that acts like a large reflection nebula, showing the reflected light of a bright quasar event that was visible in the center of IC 2497 about 100,000 years ago. Pictured above, Hanny's Voorwerp was imaged recently by the 2.5-meter Isaac Newton Telescope in the Canary Islands by Matt Jarvis, Kevin Schawinski, and William Keel.