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NASA to Reveal Hubble Discovery of Milky Way’s Violent Fate
Figure: Galactic Cannibalism of two galaxies that wandered too close to each other’s orbit.
NASA will reveal new discoveries about the violent fate of our Milky Way galaxy on Thursday (May 31), the space agency has announced.
NASA will hold a press conference at 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT) Thursday at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Scientists will discuss new Hubble Space Telescope findings about the inevitable crash of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, which will occur billions of years from now.
“Because of uncertainties in Andromeda’s motion, it has not been possible to determine whether the Milky Way will have a head-on collision or glancing blow with the neighboring galaxy billions of years in the future,” NASA officials said in a media alert Friday (May 25). “Hubble’s precise observations will settle this question.”
The largest stars die in explosions more powerful than anyone thought possible—some triggered in part by the production of antimatter
Groundwater Depletion in Semiarid Regions of Texas and California Threatens US Food Security
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SpaceX successfully launched its commercial rocket today marking the first time a private company has sent a spacecraft to the space station. The Falcon 9 rocket along with the Dragon capsule is loaded with the hopes and dreams of hundreds of students from around the USA.
The Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP), launched June 2010 by the National Center for Earth and Space ScienceEducation (NCESSE) in partnership with NanoRacks, LLC, is an important U.S. national Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education initiative that gives students across a community the ability to design and propose real experiments to fly in low Earth orbit, first aboard the final flights of the Space Shuttle, and then on the International Space Station (ISS)—America’s newest National Laboratory.
The SpaceX Falcon/Dragon ship launch successfully marks a new era in commercial space transportation. It will deliver cargo, for now, and astronauts later, saving money for NASA and the government.
The Fabric of Space-time
Image: What happens to light as it passes through a point of space-time in where mass has been applied, as well as why objects in space orbit the way they do (planets, galaxies, clusters, etc.)
Also known as the Space-time Continuum, I’ve always been fascinated about the very space that holds the planet we live on, stars we see at night, solar system we observe, and supernovas we stargaze on telescopes. In astronomy you hear the term space-time get used a lot and I thought I’d highlight key features that describe what this fabric is. I find it odd that not that many people stop to think what holds us up, how are we suspended in space-time? Well, technically we’re not suspended. We’re constantly moving, constantly orbiting. And it’s not just Earth and the solar system joining in on this cosmic dance, you can include star clusters, galaxies, super clusters and even Blackholes, just about everything in our Universe. Keep in mind that even as you read this post, our solar system is orbiting the Milky Way galaxy, traveling at roughly 220 kilometers a second!
What is Space-time?
Einstein visualized gravity as a manifestation of the curvature of space-time - the three space dimensions and a fourth time dimension. Most of us cannot visualize a curvature of four dimensional space-time, so visualize a curved two dimensional rubber sheet. Placing a mass on the rubber sheet curves it downward like space-time curves in the presence of a mass. On such a rubber sheet a small mass can circle around the curvature produced by a large mass, just as planets orbit the Sun. Or a mass can roll straight downward just as an object falls to the Earth. Space-time being the very “material” these events and masses take place on.
Einstein explained gravity as a result of the curvature of space-time near the presence of a mass. The differences between general relativity and Newton’s law of gravity only become noticeable when the gravitational force is very strong.
Einstein’s general theory of relativity is one of the crowning intellectual achievements of the 20th century and led to such predictions as black holes, gravitational lenses, and the expanding universe. So far it has passed every experimental test with flying colors.
Info via Suite101
One plant yields 3 clues to biofuel crops
The analysis of gene activity by researchers at Iowa State University and determination of protein structures by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences independently identified three related proteins that appear to be involved in fatty-acid metabolism. The researchers used thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) as the model plant.
The research groups then joined forces to test this hypothesis, demonstrating a role of these proteins in regulating the amounts and types of fatty acids accumulated in plants.
The researchers also showed that the action of the proteins is very sensitive to temperature and that this feature may play an important role in how plants mitigate temperature stress using fatty acids.
The discovery is published online in the journal Nature.
“This work has major implications for modulating the fatty-acid profiles in plants, which is terribly important, not only to sustainable food production and nutrition but now also to biorenewable chemicals and fuels,” says corresponding author Joseph Noel, a professor and director of the Jack H. Skirball Center for Chemical Biology and Proteomics at the Salk Institute and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
In this photo: The blue areas in this thale cress plant indicate where the fatty-acid-binding protein one gene is expressed and also correspond to regions where high fatty acids would be synthesized by the plant. (Credit: Eve Syrkin Wurtele and Micheline Ngaki)
Read more here.
In the earliest days of computing, the game of chess represented a challenge to the science and research community who sought to explore the calculating capabilities of these machines. Chess, while a very structured and focused game, requires a certain level of intelligence that some humans never master.
IBM took on this challenge and Friday May 11, 2012 marks the 15 year anniversary of Deep Blue, IBM’s chess-playing computer, and its victory to become a world chess champion.
Deep Blue was a highly powerful computer that was programmed to solve the complex, strategic game of chess. But IBM’s goal behind Deep Blue was a much grander challenge - it enabled researchers to discover and understand the limits of massively parallel processing and high performance computing.
Deep Blue’s legacy can be found in the way computer systems are used to automate and help humans with their decision making in tackling tough problems. If Deep Blue could explore up to 200 million possible chess positions per second, then couldn’t this deep computing capability be used to help society handle the kinds of complex calculations required in areas such as drug development, financial risk assessment, and extensive data mining? Deep Blue proved that industry could tackle these issues with smart algorithms and sufficient computational power.
Ultimately, the creation of Deep Blue helped pave the way for new kinds of advanced computers and breakthroughs such as IBM Blue Gene and IBM Watson. IBM Blue Gene, when it was introduced in 2004, demonstrated the next grand challenge in computing and was both the most powerful supercomputer and the most efficient, but it was built to help biologists observe the invisible processes of protein folding and gene development. Deep Blue was also one of the earliest experiments in supercomputing that propelled IBM to become a market leader in this space to this day.
15 years on the world has seen epic growth in the volume and variety of data that is being generated by the planet, so much so that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. Continuing along the trajectory of using science and technology to tackle challenges such as making sense of the trillions of bytes of data in our world and mining it for information and knowledge, IBM developed IBM Watson. IBM Watson can hold the equivalent of about one million books worth of information. Yet its significance was not solely the amount of information it could process, but a new generation of technology that uses algorithms to find answers in unstructured data more effectively than standard search technology, while also understanding natural language. The promise of IBM Watson is being explored by industry today - as an online tool to assist medical professionals in formulating diagnoses and simplifying the banking experience by analyzing customer needs in the context of vast amounts of ever-changing financial, economic, product and client data.
Deep Blue can be thought of as the earliest pioneer in a new era of computing, laying the groundwork for a generation of computers and software that do more than compute – they will be able to sense, learn and predict – what can be termed as the cognitive era of computing. These smart machines and systems will be better equipped to handle the vast amounts of data now pervading our society and make sense of it to solve the latest challenges in our world, whether its predicting outages across the grid, to exploring the origins of the universe etc.
