Photo via flickr by Madmoiselle Lavender

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Launch Complex 41 on a first-of-a-kind mission to reveal the sun’s inner workings in unprecedented detail.

The most technologically advanced of NASA’s heliophysics spacecraft, SDO will take images of the sun every 0.75 seconds and daily send back about 1.5 terabytes of data to Earth—the equivalent of streaming 380 full-length movies.

The sun’s dynamic processes affect everyone and everything on Earth. SDO will explore activity on the sun that can disable satellites, cause power grid failures, and disrupt GPS communications. SDO also will provide a better understanding of the role the sun plays in Earth’s atmospheric chemistry and climate.

SDO is the crown jewel in a fleet of NASA missions to study our sun. The mission is the cornerstone of a NASA science program called Living With A Star.

“SDO is going to make a huge step forward in our understanding of the sun and its effects on life and society,” said Richard R. Fisher, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

via NASA

Photo via flickr by h.koppdelaney

Neuroscientists have proposed a simple explanation for the pleasure of grasping a new concept: The brain is getting its fix.

The “click” of comprehension triggers a biochemical cascade that rewards the brain with a shot of natural opium-like substances, said Irving Biederman of the University of Southern California. He presents his theory in an invited article in an issue of American Scientist.

“While you’re trying to understand a difficult theorem, it’s not fun,” said Biederman, professor of neuroscience in the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “But once you get it, you just feel fabulous.”

The brain’s craving for a fix motivates humans to maximize the rate at which they absorb knowledge. Biederman hypothesized that knowledge addiction has strong evolutionary value because mate selection correlates closely with perceived intelligence. Only more pressing material needs, such as hunger, can suspend the quest for knowledge, he added.

The same mechanism is involved in the aesthetic experience, Biederman said, providing a neurological explanation for the pleasure we derive from art. “This account may provide a plausible and very simple mechanism for aesthetic and perceptual and cognitive curiosity.”

Biederman’s theory was inspired by a widely ignored 25-year-old finding that mu-opioid receptors—binding sites for natural opiates—increase in density along the ventral visual pathway, a part of the brain involved in image recognition and processing. The receptors are tightly packed in the areas of the pathway linked to comprehension and interpretation of images, but sparse in areas where visual stimuli first hit the cortex.

Biederman’s theory holds that the greater the neural activity in the areas rich in opioid receptors, the greater the pleasure. In a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging trials with human volunteers exposed to a wide variety of images, Biederman’s research group found that strongly preferred images prompted the greatest fMRI activity in more complex areas of the ventral visual pathway.

via ScienceDaily

Photo via flickr by Barack Obama

The mission of the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates (the “CPD”) is to ensure, for the benefit of the American electorate, that general election debates are held every four years between the leading candidates for the offices of President and Vice President of the United States.

The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) was established in 1987 to ensure that debates, as a permanent part of every general election, provide the best possible information to viewers and listeners. Its primary purpose is to sponsor and produce debates for the United States presidential and vice presidential candidates and to undertake research and educational activities relating to the debates. The organization, which is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, 501(c)(3) corporation, sponsored all the presidential debates in 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008.

To meet its ongoing goal of educating voters, the CPD is engaged in various activities beyond producing and sponsoring the presidential debates. Its staff prepares educational materials and conducts research to improve the quality of debates.

Further, the CPD provides technical assistance to emerging democracies and others interested in establishing debate traditions in their countries. In recent years, the staff worked with groups from Brazil, Ecuador, Jamaica, Japan, Mexico, Namibia, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Russia, South Africa, Taiwan and the Ukraine, among others. Finally, the CPD coordinates post-debate symposia and research after many of its presidential forums (1996 Post-Debate Symposium, 1992 Post-Debate Research, 1988 Post-Debate Symposium).

Co-Chariman: Frank J. Fahrenkopf, Jr; Michael D. McCurry; Honorary Co-Chairmen: Jimmy Carter, William Clinton.

Board of Directors:  Howard Buffett; John C. Danforth; Antonia Hernandez; Caroline Kennedy; Newton N. Minow; Dorthothy Ridings; Alan K. Simpson; H, Patirck Swygert.

Executive Director: Janet H. Brown.

The World Factbook is a free online publication provided by The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), an independent US Government agency responsible for providing national security intelligence to senior US policymakers. The World Factbook offers information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 266 world entities.

Plus, its Reference area includes: maps of the major world regions, as well as Flags of the World, a Physical Map of the World, a Political Map of the World, and Standard Time Zones of the World Map.

The World Factbook is in the public domain. Accordingly, it may be copied freely without permission of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The official seal of the CIA, however, may NOT be copied. Misuse of the official seal could result in civil and criminal penalties.

Photo via flickr by all-i-oli

If researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai are right, we may all someday possess Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak. The theorists believe that silver-plated nanoparticles suspended in water and aligned in a magnetic field could allow for creating a metamaterial—the “active ingredient” in an invisibility device.

The fluid proposed by Ji-Ping Huang and colleagues of Fudan University contains magnetite balls 10 nanometres in diameter, coated with a 5-nanometre-thick layer of silver, possibly with polymer chains attached to keep them from clumping.

In the absence of a magnetic field, such nanoparticles would simply float around in the water, but if a field were introduced, the particles would self-assemble into chains whose lengths depend on the strength of the field, and which can also attract one another to form thicker columns.

The chains and columns would lie along the direction of the magnetic field. If they were oriented vertically in a pool of water, light striking the surface would refract negatively—bent in a way that no natural material can manage.

This property could be exploited for invisibility devices, directing light around an object so that it appears as if nothing is there, or be put to use in lenses that could capture finer details than any optical microscope.

This isn’t the first attempt at building an invisibility device. David Smith and his team at Duke University in September 2006 had built a device that could hide an object from view, but only from the “eyes” of a microwave detector—and then only at a very specific microwave frequency.

via KurzweilAI and New Scientist

Photo via flickr by Matheus Sanchez

The White House has decided to begin funding private companies to carry NASA astronauts into space, but the proposal faces major political and budget hurdles, according to people familiar with the matter.

The controversial proposal, expected to be included in the Obama administration’s next budget, would open a new chapter in the U.S. space program. The goal is to set up a multiyear, multi-billion-dollar initiative allowing private firms, including some start-ups, to compete to build and operate spacecraft capable of ferrying U.S. astronauts into orbit—and eventually deeper into the solar system.

Congress is likely to challenge the concept’s safety and may balk at shifting dollars from existing National Aeronautics and Space Administration programs already hurting for funding to the new initiative. Press officials for NASA and the White House have declined to comment. Industry and government officials have talked about the direction of the next NASA budget, but declined to be identified.

The idea of outsourcing a portion of NASA’s manned space program to the private sector gained momentum after recommendations from a presidential panel appointed last year. The panel, chaired by former Lockheed Martin Corp. Chairman Norman Augustine, argued that allowing companies to build and launch their own rockets and spacecraft to carry American astronauts into orbit would save money and also free up NASA to focus on more ambitious, longer-term goals.

Space Exploration Technologies Corp., founded by Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk, is one of the start-up commercial ventures likely to gain from the proposed policy shift. But other large incumbent NASA contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing Co. also are likely to compete for some of the anticipated government seed money earmarked for new commercial ventures.
via Wall Street Journal

Following is an Open Letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden from Robert Bigelow written on October 14, 2009 advocating the importance of “commercial space.”

An Open Letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden From Robert Bigelow

Robert T. Bigelow
Wednesday, October 14, 2009

On behalf of myself and all of us at Bigelow Aerospace let me first congratulate you on becoming NASA administrator. I’m sure the joy you must feel in being entrusted with leading such an extraordinary organization is only rivaled by the difficulty of the decisions you are now facing.

We appreciated the fact that you and Deputy Administrator Lori Garver took the time to meet with commercial space executives and, as we expressed during that meeting, Bigelow Aerospace remains a strong supporter of commercial crew transportation. However, in that discussion last month, and in subsequent public appearances, you have consistently voiced a concern and a question. Specifically, you have often commented on the importance of commercial space transportation providers proving themselves via cargo delivery, and have asked the question what is the definition of “commercial space.” I hope we can help you to address both of these issues, and I will begin with cargo delivery.

Your request that commercial providers should prove themselves via cargo delivery is easily answered since it has already occurred. As a matter of fact, mere hours after the commercial space meeting you convened in delivering a communications satellite. Many of the misconceptions surrounding “commercial” space transportation spring from the fact that the Atlas 5 and Delta 4 are being left out of the discussion. As you’re probably aware, Bigelow Aerospace has invested a great deal of time and money examining the viability of the Atlas 5 as a commercial crew carrier, and these analyses have made us a strong supporter of the system. The reason we are so enthusiastic about the Atlas 5 is largely because it addresses the very concern that you’re voicing, the Atlas 5 rocket has time and time again proven itself capable of reliably launching high-value cargo. As a matter of fact, the Atlas 5 is unquestionably one of the most reliable and safest space launch systems in operation today. The Atlas family has had many dozens of consecutive successful launches, an unparalleled track record, making it the perfect choice for human-rating, since, ultimately, a great deal of “human-rating” is providing proven flight heritage.

This is not to say that we don’t have great hope for and belief in Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and the Falcon 9. We believe that SpaceX has the potential to revolutionize the launch market. However, when the commercial crew transportation debate is artificially limited to only the two current participants of NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, and the Atlas 5 is ignored, as it was during the congressional hearing in the House several weeks ago, this leads to a flawed discussion and problematic conclusions. We don’t know if the House authorizers avoided talking about the Atlas due to bias, ignorance or a combination of both, but we have faith that you and President Barack Obama’s White House are not suffering from a similarly limited vision.

Therefore, to answer your concern, a commercial crew rocket has not only proven itself capable of delivering cargo worth billions of dollars, but, in the form of the Atlas, has been doing so for decades.

Next, you ask a much more difficult question, what is “commercial space.” There can be many responses to this query, and, as you have pointed out, if you line up three entrepreneurs they will likely give you a half dozen answers. However, we believe there are several general principles that separate “commercial space” from traditional programs. First, “commercial” initiatives are allowed to fail. Per the COTS structure, if a commercial project’s budget skyrockets, or if key technical milestones are abrogated, the initiative is shut down (this is why Kistler’s removal from the COTS program was actually a triumph in good government contracting). Also integral to this concept is the requirement of firm, fixed pricing. Again, the COTS program serves as an excellent example of this strategy, since it utilizes a firm, fixed amount of government funding tied to achieving specific milestones. In the end, “commercial” space is less about who is doing the work than the means of procurement. When NASA needs to send some international space station hardware or documents quickly overseas, it doesn’t build a boat, you use Federal Express or some other commercial carrier. NASA simply buys a service, at a fixed price, and steps away. By funding a commercial crew program that follows this COTS model, you can make the commercial purchase of space transportation a reality, freeing NASA forever from the shackles of low Earth orbit (LEO).

Additionally, it’s just as important to ask what commercial space isn’t, because there are many misconceptions there as well. Commercial does not inherently equal small or unproven, as demonstrated consistently by the Atlas and Delta rockets. Moreover, we recently teamed with Boeing, and together submitted a proposal for the Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program. Some have tried to marginalize commercial crew as a risky strategy due to the lack of performance and experience of the companies involved. Boeing submitting a CCDev proposal and its desire to become a leader in the commercial space field flies in the face of such criticism. Arguably, no one has more experience in human spaceflight than Boeing, and to ignore their powerful entrance into the commercial crew transportation arena is to do a great disservice to the field itself and the current debate.

Both large, experienced companies like Boeing, and new entrepreneurial firms like Bigelow Aerospace and SpaceX, believe in the value of commercial crew. The Atlas 5 has already proven itself more than capable of delivering high-value cargo, and, if a commercial crew program is initiated, the Atlas will readily prove itself capable of delivering crew to LEO. Herein lies the answer to your human spaceflight dilemma. A commercial crew program can easily return Americans to space in a mere four years for the amount of funding recommended by the Augustine Committee.

America has already abdicated its leadership in commercial space launch, with nearly all such activities being conducted by Russian, European, Indian or Chinese entities. Our commercial satellite manufacturing base has also steadily been slipping away, and the decisions you make in the near future will determine if commercial crew transportation becomes yet another domestic industry whose jobs and capabilities are permanently shipped overseas.

As you are well aware, future U.S. access to space will soon be entirely dependent on Russia. The Russians are excellent capitalists, and you should expect prices to rise above the already stunning $51 million per seat that NASA is currently paying during every subsequent Soyuz contract negotiation. A robust commercial crew program represents this nation’s only hope of reversing this deplorable situation and reviving America’s human spaceflight capabilities. If you choose this path, it will free NASA both in terms of substance and financing to look beyond LEO, leaving the agency to again become a trailblazer to the stars.

Robert T. Bigelow is the founder of Bigelow Aerospace.

Photo via flickr by jurvetson

Humans are terrible swimmers, converting roughly 3 percent of their kicks, strokes and general underwater exertions into forward motion. We can boost our efficiency to 10 percent by adding fins, but dolphins, by comparison, can turn 80 percent of their energy into thrust. Not to be outdone, the Pentagon’s research wing, DARPA, is developing a contraption called PowerSwim that lets Navy SEALs and other combat divers swim faster, and with less effort.

When used properly, the device allows swimmers to cover a given distance up to 150 percent faster than with fins, while using the same amount of energy. Much of that boost in metabolic efficiency is due to the muscle groups used.

As DARPA program manager Barbara McQuiston explained, the swimmer is essentially relaxing into a slightly bent position, instead of forcing or pushing the foils through the water. This takes the emphasis off the small muscle groups used to kick, and allows larger muscle groups, such as the glutes and quads, to take over.

The goal isn’t to increase the total distance that personnel can cover, but to get them there more quickly, and with more energy.

via Popular Mechanics

Photo via flickr by Mat_the_W

Humans use their whole bodies, not just their ears, to understand speech, according to University of British Columbia linguistics research.

It is well known that humans naturally process facial expression along with what is being heard to fully understand what is being communicated. The UBC study is the first to show we also naturally process tactile information to perceive sounds of speech.

Prof. Bryan Gick of UBC’s Dept. of Linguistics, along with PhD student Donald Derrick, found that air puffs directed at skin can bias perception of spoken syllables. “This study suggests we are much better at using tactile information than was previously thought,” says Gick, also a member of Haskins Laboratories, an affiliate of Yale University.

The study, published in Nature, offers findings that may be applied to telecommunications, speech science and hearing aid technology.

English speakers use aspiration—the tiny bursts of breath accompanying speech sounds—to distinguish sounds such as “pa” and “ta” from unaspirated sounds such as “ba” and “da.” Study participants heard eight repetitions of these four syllables while inaudible air puffs—simulating aspiration—were directed at the back of the hand or the neck.

When the subjects—66 men and women—were asked to distinguish the syllables, it was found that syllables heard simultaneously with air puffs were more likely to be perceived as aspirated, causing the subjects to mishear “ba” as the aspirated “pa” and “da” as the aspirated “ta.” The brain associated the air puffs felt on skin with aspirated syllables, interfering with perception of what was actually heard.

“Our study shows we can do the same with our skin, “hearing” a puff of air, regardless of whether it got to our brains through our ears or our skin,” says Gick.

Future research may include studies of how audio, visual and tactile information interact to form the basis of a new multi-sensory speech perception paradigm.

via Science Daily

Vator TV reports that Vint Cerf appeared at the Churchill Club in Menlo Park, CA and offered three thoughts on the future of mobile.

Following are Vint’s predictions, paraphrased by technology trends and news editor, Matt Bowen.

1. Your mobile will become your remote.
You can easily predict that more and more appliances of all kinds—refrigerators, office equipment, etc, will be part of the Internet. That’s significant to mobile because once you connect all these things, the mobile is the remote controller for all these things, or it becomes the way to reach an intermediary that makes those decisions for you. You get rid of all the remote controls, and you might get some help from a third party.

2. There will be Internet capability in autos, and mobile will help us get there.
A car that doesn’t yet have Internet capability, when you get into our car with your mobile, you become the router. Have you ever been in a traffic jam and you didn’t know where it ends, but you know that everyone whizzing by on the other side knows? That information should be coming to you, and it will.

3. Interplanetary-grade connectivity
The current android operating system has a lot of experiments. For NASA, I’m trying to see if we can put the interplanetary protocols on top of Android Operating System, not because I want you to be able to call Mars, but because they’re more robust than what we currently have. What I’m anticipating is that if this works in the civilian mobile environment, we might see that suite of protocols in addition to the other ones we’re currently using today. And if that’s true, then you’d be able to have interactions that ordinarily wouldn’t work very well because communication breaks if connectivity breaks, but the DTN protocols are more robust in that regard.

Also, you may wonder, why are we creating an interplanetary network? Some people think, “Oh, you’re building this interplanetary network in hopes that somebody may come.” That’s not what we’re planning. All of our interplanetary work involves point-to-point radio links to communicate the spacecraft back to earth. There’s something called the deep space network which the jet propulsion laboratory runs which has three big 70-meter antennas that are stationed about 120 degrees apart on the earth, Madrid, Spain, Canberra, Australia and Goldstone, California so no matter how the earth rotates, those big antennas can see out into the solar system. But most of the applications have been point-to-point radio links. Well, that’s a very plain kind of network. Maybe like a radio relay, and that’s about it. If we had richer protocols for these systems, we could build much more complex missions that involved multiple spacecraft, maybe multiple orbiters.

My colleagues are designing these protocols to be used by all of the space-faring nations. The interplanetary network is an open source, open system; anyone can use it. And if they start to using these protocols as standards, then anyone’s spacecraft will be able to communicate with anyone else’s spacecraft. When you complete the primary mission, the spacecraft often survive well beyond that, so they can be re-purposed as part of a communication system. What I’m anticipating is that as we launch new missions, the previous missions’ assets will become part of an interplanetary backbone. I’m guessing that over the coarse of the next several decades we will actually grow an interplanetary system. That’ll be wonderful and useful overtime for both human and robotic exploration.

In a conversation with Sputnik Observatory, Vint shares his view of the future of mobile communications due to the advancement of the interplanetary internet.

SPTNK transcript

Photo via flickr by Desirée Delgado

We assume that we see things as they really are. But according to a new report in Psychological Science, if we really want something, that desire may influence how we view our surroundings.

Psychological scientists Emily Balcetis from New York University and David Dunning from Cornell University conducted a set of studies to see how our desires affect perception. In the first experiment, participants had to estimate how far a water bottle was from where they were sitting. Half of the volunteers were allowed to drink water before the experiment, while the others ate salty pretzels, thus becoming very thirsty. The results showed that the thirsty volunteers estimated the water as being closer to them than volunteers who drank water earlier.

Our desire for certain objects may also result in behavioral changes. In a separate experiment, volunteers tossed a beanbag towards a gift card (worth either $25 or $0) on the floor, winning the card if the beanbag landed on it. Interestingly, the volunteers threw the beanbag much farther if the gift card was worth $0 than if it was worth $25—that is, they underthrew the beanbag when attempting to win a $25 gift card, because they viewed that gift card as being closer to them.

These findings indicate that when we want something, we actually view it as being physically close to us. The authors suggest that “these biases arise in order to encourage perceivers to engage in behaviors leading to the acquisition of the object.” In other words, when we see a goal as being close to us (literally within our reach), it motivates us to keep on going to successfully attain it.

via ScienceDaily