The Jet Engine VW Beetle

What do you get when you combine a jet engine with a VW Beetle? Well, you get what Mr. Ron Patrick created  -- this awesome baby!

Now aside from this being to coolest Beetle you will ever see in your life, why would you want to put money into something like this if you couldn't even ride it on the street. Hehe, I got some good news for you! It's completely street legal. The only problem is you can't engage the supersonic jet engine on the road. How sad. You're more than welcome to use it's original gasoline engine though!

Mr. Ron Patrick - creator of the jet engine beetle, has his PHD in mechanical engineering from Standford university. That means he knows what the hell he's doing.

Blast off!

How fast does this car go?
The jet engine boasts about 1350 horsepower. However, Ron doesn't really know exactly how fast it can make the car go. This is what he said:

"I don't know how fast the car will go and probably never will. The car was built to thrill me, not kill me. That doesn't stop me from the occasional blast on the highway though."


Ron Patrick used a General Electric Model T58-8F, which is a helicopter turboshaft engine that he modified into a jet engine.

Anyone up for a barbecue?

The most recent funny news about this car (actually several years ago but he doesn't update his site) is that his local DMV made a request to the some federal agency that his Beetle might be a threat to national security. They raise the question of what might happen if the thing gets into the wrong hands. This is how Ron responded:

"If someone with the name "b_laden13" is the highest eBay bidder for my Beetle can I refuse his offer even if he has the prestigious eBay Red Shooting Star feedback rating (the highest)?"

Want More?
Find more photographs and information on this Jet engine powered Bettle at ronpatrickstuff.com

Anyone wanna go for a ride? 

Read More >>

Raw Video Footage of Albert Einstein Arriving in America

Here is a video of the coolest man to ever live, Albert Einstein. The video is very short and has no sounds, but, any video with Albert Einstein in it is a cool video indeed!

Read More >>

Surprise Hidden In Titan's Smog: Cirrus-Like Clouds

Every day is a bad-air day on Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Blanketed by haze far worse than any smog belched out in Los Angeles, Beijing or even Sherlock Holmes's London, the moon looks like a dirty orange ball. Described once as crude oil without the sulfur, the haze is made of tiny droplets of hydrocarbons with other, more noxious chemicals mixed in. Gunk.

Icky as it may sound, Titan is really the rarest of gems: the only moon in our solar system with an atmosphere worthy of a planet. This atmosphere comes complete with lightning, drizzle and occasionally a big, summer-downpour style of cloud made of methane or ethane -- hydrocarbons that are best known for their role in natural gas.

Now, thin, wispy clouds of ice particles, similar to Earth's cirrus clouds, are being reported by Carrie Anderson and Robert Samuelson at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The findings, published February 1 in Icarus, were made using the Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) on NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

Unlike Titan's brownish haze, the ice clouds have the pearly white appearance of freshly fallen snow. Their existence is the latest clue to the workings of Titan's intriguing atmosphere and its one-way "cycle" that delivers hydrocarbons and other organic compounds to the ground as precipitation. Those compounds don't evaporate to replenish the atmosphere, but somehow the supply has not run out (yet?).

"This is the first time we have been able to get details about these clouds," says Samuelson, an emeritus scientist at Goddard and the co-author of the paper. "Previously, we had a lot of information about the gases in Titan's atmosphere but not much about the [high-altitude] clouds."

Puffy methane and ethane clouds had been found before by ground-based observers and in images taken by Cassini's imaging science subsystem and visual and infrared mapping spectrometer. Compared to those clouds, these are much thinner and located higher in the atmosphere. "They are very tenuous and very easy to miss," says Anderson, the paper's lead author. "The only earlier hints that they existed were faint glimpses that NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft caught as it flew by Titan in 1980."

Out on a Limb

Even before Voyager 1 reached Titan, scientists knew the moon was wrapped in a thick atmosphere that probably contained hydrocarbons. Part of that atmosphere, Voyager found, is a haze so smothering that it hides every bit of the moon's surface.

Only a small amount of visible light penetrates this haze, or aerosol, so studies rely on instruments that operate at wavelengths beyond human sight. This is how Voyager learned that Titan's atmosphere is made mostly of nitrogen, as is Earth's. Unlike Earth's atmosphere, though, Titan's has neither oxygen nor water to speak of. Instead, it contains small amounts of organic materials, including members of the hydrocarbon family such as methane, ethane and propane.

Voyager also picked up indications that Titan's stratosphere, the second-lowest layer of its atmosphere, harbored "ices made from some exotic organic compounds," Samuelson says. "At the time, that was about all we could tell."

Fast-forward a quarter-century to mid-2006, past decades of research conducted from telescopes, past Cassini's arrival at Saturn, past the European Space Agency's Huygens probe landing on Titan and taking the first pictures of the surface, past the discovery of the methane and ethane clouds. At this point, Cassini continues to orbit Saturn and visit Titan and other moons periodically.

More than a half-dozen hydrocarbons have been identified in gas form in Titan's atmosphere, but many more probably lurk there. Researchers worldwide are looking for them, including Anderson and Samuelson, who are using the CIRS (pronounced "sears") instrument on Cassini.

Pinpointing the altitudes where such gases turn into ices is painstaking work. The researchers scan up and down the atmosphere, pausing at each altitude to catalog a slew of signals that have to be teased apart later so that the molecules can be identified. "You can learn a lot about a compound, even if you have no idea what it is, by looking at how it is distributed vertically," says Anderson. "Where does it accumulate? Where does it dissipate? How thick is the boundary? Is there layering going on?"

Anderson and Samuelson start a series of observations near Titan's north pole, at roughly the same latitudes Voyager looked at, 62 °N and 70 °N. On Earth, these would fall just inside and outside the ring for the Arctic Circle.

The team focuses on the observations made when CIRS is positioned to peer into the atmosphere at an angle, grazing the edge of Titan. This path through the atmosphere is longer than the one when the spacecraft looks straight down at the surface. Planetary scientists call this "viewing on the limb," and it raises the odds of encountering enough molecules of interest to yield a strong signal.

It works. When the researchers comb through their data, they succeed in separating the telltale signatures of ice clouds from the aerosol. "These beautiful, beautiful ice clouds are optically thin, and they're diffuse," says Anderson. "But we were able to pick up on them because of the long path lengths of the observations."

In addition to spotting the clouds, the researchers gather enough information to measure the sizes of the ice particles. The results get reported in a January 2010 Icarus paper by Anderson, Samuelson, their Goddard colleague Gordon Bjoraker and Richard Achterberg, a University of Maryland staff member working at Goddard.

"That was convincing evidence," Anderson says. "What Voyager had seen was real."

That Sinking Feeling

Clouds on Titan can't be made from water because of the planet's extreme cold. "If Titan has any water on the surface, it would be solid as a rock," says Goddard's Michael Flasar, the Principal Investigator for CIRS.

Instead, the key player is methane. The action starts high in the atmosphere, where some of the methane gets broken up and reforms into ethane and other hydrocarbons, or combines with nitrogen to make materials called nitriles. Any of these compounds can probably form clouds if enough accumulates in a sufficiently cold area.

The cloud-forming temperatures occur in the "cold, cold depths of Titan's stratosphere," says Anderson. Researchers think that the compounds get moved downward by a constant stream of gas flowing from the pole in the warmer hemisphere to the pole in the colder hemisphere. There, the gas sinks.

This circulation pattern steals so much gas from the warmer hemisphere that researchers can measure the imbalance. The influx of all this gas gives the colder hemisphere more clouds. "At colder temperatures, more gas will condense anyway," Anderson explains, "and on top of that, the atmosphere dumps a whole bunch of extra gas there."

She and Samuelson think this is why the ice clouds were first spotted in the north. When Voyager flew by in November 1980, the north had just crossed from winter into spring. And the north was in mid-winter when the team conducted their early observations. (One Titan year lasts 29-1/2 Earth years, so spring came again to Titan's north in August 2009.)

Still, the team figured, the south shouldn't lack ice clouds; it should just have fewer of them. "For 30 years, Bob [Samuelson] had been saying that these clouds should exist in the southern hemisphere," says Anderson, "so we decided to look."

The team checked Titan's southern hemisphere (at 58 °S latitude) and both sides of the equator (15 °N and 15 °S). Sure enough, they spotted clouds in all three locations. And as predicted, the clouds in the north were more plentiful -- in fact, three times more plentiful -- than those just south of the equator.

"The fact that the clouds are more enhanced at the cold polar region is a promising sign," says Flasar. "It strengthens this idea that the molecules making up these clouds are being carried downward by this global circulation."

Exotic Ices

Part of Titan's allure has long been the organic compounds in the atmosphere, especially because some are thought to be involved in the events that led to life on Earth. One of those is cyanoacetylene, a member of the nitrile family. The compound's distinctive signature made it the first to be picked up in the northern ice clouds by Voyager 1 and by Anderson and Samuelson.

To make a connection between these molecules and life isn't the point for Anderson, though. "I just love ices and aerosols," she says, "and Titan is this great natural laboratory for studying them."

As the researchers continue to identify compounds in Titan's atmosphere, the next likely candidate for an ice is hydrogen cyanide, a nitrile with an earthly reputation as a poison. In the aerosol, the team is investigating an intriguing feature in the data that seems to represent larger hydrocarbons than anybody has identified before, according to Samuelson. Early clues suggest the signature could indicate polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which typically get noticed on Earth as pollutants released by the burning of fossil fuels. In space, PAHs form in the regions where stars are born and die.

Each nugget of information like this is helping scientists piece together the life cycle and ultimate fate of Titan's hydrocarbons, which never reenter the atmosphere via evaporation. "They fall to the surface, and it's a dead end," says Samuelson, "and yet Titan's atmosphere still has methane in it. We are trying to find out why."

The Great Switcheroo

At first, Titan's frozen nitriles seem entirely unrelated to Earth clouds. Even putting aside their exotic ingredients, they form much higher in the atmosphere: at altitudes of about 30 to 60 miles (in the stratosphere) versus no more than 11 miles (in the troposphere) for nearly all Earth clouds.

But Earth does have a few polar stratospheric clouds that appear over Antarctica (and sometimes in the Arctic) during winter. These clouds form in the exceptionally cold air that gets trapped in the center of the polar vortex, a fierce wind that whips around the pole high in the stratosphere. This is the same region where Earth's ozone hole is found.

Titan has its own polar vortex and may even have a counterpart to our ozone hole. The degree of similarity is intriguing, says Flasar, given the different compositions and chemistries of the stratospheric clouds on Earth versus Titan.

"We are starting to find out how similar Titan's clouds are to Earth's," says Samuelson. "How do they compare? How do they not compare?"

The big test of scientists' understanding of Titan's atmosphere will come in 2017, when summer comes to the north and the south plunges into winter. "We expect to find a complete reversal in the circulation of gas then," says Anderson. "The gas should start to flow from the north to the south. And that should mean most of the high-altitude ice clouds will be in the southern hemisphere."

Other major changes are in store for Titan then, Flasar adds, including the disappearance of the fierce winds around the north pole. "The big question is: will the vortex go out with a bang or whimper?" he says. "On Earth, it goes out with a bang. It's very dramatic. But on Titan, maybe the vortex just gradually fizzles out like the smile of the Chesire cat."

Source: Reprinted news release via NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Read More >>

NASA Finds Earth-size Planet Candidates in the Habitable Zone

Is our Milky Way galaxy home to other planets the size of Earth? Are Earth-sized planets common or rare? NASA scientists seeking answers to those questions recently revealed their discovery.

"We went from zero to 68 Earth-sized planet candidates and zero to 54 candidates in the habitable zone - a region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Some candidates could even have moons with liquid water," said William Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., and the Kepler Mission’s science principal investigator. "Five of the planetary candidates are both near Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of their parent stars."

Planet candidates require follow-up observations to verify they are actual planets.

"We have found over twelve hundred candidate planets - that’s more than all the people have found so far in history," said Borucki. "Now, these are candidates, but most of them, I’m convinced, will be confirmed as planets in the coming months and years."

The findings increase the number of planet candidates identified by Kepler to-date to 1,235. Of these, 68 are approximately Earth-size; 288 are super-Earth-size; 662 are Neptune-size; 165 are the size of Jupiter and 19 are larger than Jupiter. Of the 54 new planet candidates found in the habitable zone, five are near Earth-sized. The remaining 49 habitable zone candidates range from super-Earth size -- up to twice the size of Earth -- to larger than Jupiter. The findings are based on the results of observations conducted May 12 to Sept. 17, 2009 of more than 156,000 stars in Kepler’s field of view, which covers approximately 1/400 of the sky.

"The fact that we’ve found so many planet candidates in such a tiny fraction of the sky suggests there are countless planets orbiting stars like our sun in our galaxy," said Borucki. "Kepler can find only a small fraction of the planets around the stars it looks at because the orbits aren’t aligned properly. If you account for those two factors, our results indicate there must be millions of planets orbiting the stars that surround our sun."

“We’re about half-way through Kepler’s scheduled mission," said Roger Hunter, the Kepler project manager. "Today’s announcement is very exciting and portends many discoveries to come. It’s looking like the galaxy may be littered with many planets.”

Among the stars with planetary candidates, 170 show evidence of multiple planetary candidates, including one, Kepler-11, that scientists have been able to confirm that has no fewer than six planets.

"Another exciting discovery has been the tremendous variations in the structure of the confirmed planets – some have the density of Styrofoam and others are denser than iron. The Earth's density is in between."

"The historic milestones Kepler makes with each new discovery will determine the course of every exoplanet mission to follow," said Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Kepler, a space telescope, looks for planet signatures by measuring tiny decreases in the brightness of stars caused by planets crossing in front of them - this is known as a transit.

Since transits of planets in the habitable zone of sun-like stars occur about once a year and require three transits for verification, it is expected to take three years to locate and verify Earth-size planets orbiting sun-like stars.

The Kepler science team uses ground-based telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope to perform follow-up observations on planetary candidates and other objects of interest found with the spacecraft. The star field that Kepler observes in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra can only be seen from ground-based observatories in spring through early fall. The data from these other observations helps determine which of the candidates can be validated as planets.

"The first four months of data have given us an enormous amount of interesting information for the science community to explore and to find the planets among the candidates that we have found," said Borucki. "Keep in mind, in the future, we’ll have even more data for small planets in and near the habitable zone for everyone to look at."

Kepler will continue conducting science operations until at least November 2012, searching for planets as small as Earth, including those that orbit stars in a warm habitable zone where liquid water could exist on the surface of the planet. Since transits of planets in the habitable zone of solar-like stars occur about once a year and require three transits for verification, it is expected to take three years to locate and verify Earth-size planets orbiting sun-like stars.

Borucki predicted that the search using the Kepler spacecraft’s continuous and long-duration capability will significantly enhance scientists’ ability to determine the distributions of planet size and orbital period in the future.

"In the coming years, Kepler’s capabilities will allow us to find Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of other stars," Borucki said. "Future missions will be developed to study the composition of planetary atmospheres to determine if they are compatible with the presence of life. The design for these missions depends of Kepler finding whether Earth-size planets in the habitable zone are common or rare."

The Kepler Mission team has discovered a total of 15 exoplanets, including the smallest known exoplanet, Kepler-10b.

"Kepler is providing data 100 times better than anyone has ever done before," said Borucki. "It’s exploring a new part of phase space, a new part of the universe that could not be explored without this kind of precision, so it’s producing absolutely beautiful data. We’re seeing the variability of stars like no one has ever seen before. We’re finding planets smaller than anyone has ever seen before, because the data quality is extremely good."

"In one generation we have gone from extraterrestrial planets being a mainstay of science fiction, to the present, where Kepler has helped turn science fiction into today's reality," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "These discoveries underscore the importance of NASA's science missions, which consistently increase understanding of our place in the cosmos."

Source: Reprinted news release via NASA

Read More >>

Proposed Mission to Jupiter System Achieves Milestone

Credit: NASA

With input from scientists around the world, American and European scientists working on the potential next new mission to the Jupiter system have articulated their joint vision for the Europa Jupiter System Mission. The mission is a proposed partnership between NASA and the European Space Agency. The scientists on the joint NASA-ESA definition team agreed that the overarching science theme for the Europa Jupiter System Mission will be "the emergence of habitable worlds around gas giants."

The proposed Europa Jupiter System Mission would provide orbiters around two of Jupiter's moons: a NASA orbiter around Europa called the Jupiter Europa Orbiter, and an ESA orbiter around Ganymede called the Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter.

"We've reached hands across the Atlantic to define a mission to Jupiter's water worlds," said Bob Pappalardo, the pre-project scientist for the proposed Jupiter Europa Orbiter, who is based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "The Europa Jupiter System Mission will create a leap in scientific knowledge about the moons of Jupiter and their potential to harbor life."

The new reports integrate goals that were being separately developed by NASA and ESA working groups into one unified strategy.

The ESA report is being presented to the European public and science community this week, and the NASA report was published online in December. The NASA report is available at http://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag .

The proposed mission singles out the icy moons Europa and Ganymede as special worlds that can lead to a broader understanding of the Jovian system and of the possibility of life in our solar system and beyond. They are natural laboratories for analyzing the nature, evolution and potential habitability of icy worlds, because they are believed to present two different kinds of sub-surface oceans.

The Jupiter Europa Orbiter would characterize the relatively thin ice shell above Europa's ocean, the extent of that ocean, the materials composing its internal layers, and the way surface features such as ridges and "freckles" formed. It will also identify candidate sites for potential future landers. Instruments that might be on board could include a laser altimeter, an ice-penetrating radar, spectrometers that can obtain data in visible, infrared and ultraviolet radiation, and cameras with narrow- and wide-angle capabilities. The actual instruments to fly would be selected through a NASA competitive call for proposals.

Ganymede is thought to have a thicker ice shell, with its interior ocean sandwiched between ice above and below. ESA's Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter would investigate this different kind of internal structure. The Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter would also study the intrinsic magnetic field that makes Ganymede unique among all the solar system's known moons. This orbiter, whose instruments would also be chosen through a competitive process, could include a laser altimeter, spectrometers and cameras, plus additional fields-and-particles instruments

The two orbiters would also study other large Jovian moons, Io and Callisto, with an eye towards exploring the Jupiter system as an archetype for other gas giant planets.

NASA and ESA officials gave the Europa Jupiter System Mission proposal priority status for continued study in 2009, agreeing that it was the most technically feasible of the outer solar system flagship missions under consideration.

Over the next few months, NASA officials will be analyzing the joint strategy and awaiting the outcome of the next Planetary Science Decadal Survey by the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academies. That survey will serve as a roadmap for new NASA planetary missions for the decade beginning 2013.

For more information about the Europa Jupiter System Mission, go to http://opfm.jpl.nasa.gov/europajupitersystemmissionejsm/ .

JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Source: NASA

Read More >>

Six Small Planets Orbiting A Sun-Like Star Amaze Astronomers

A remarkable planetary system discovered by NASA's Kepler mission has six planets around a Sun-like star, including five small planets in tightly packed orbits. Astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and their coauthors analyzed the orbital dynamics of the system, determined the sizes and masses of the planets, and figured out their likely compositions--all based on Kepler's measurements of the changing brightness of the host star (called Kepler-11) as the planets passed in front of it.

"Not only is this an amazing planetary system, it also validates a powerful new method to measure the masses of planets," said Daniel Fabrycky, a Hubble postdoctoral fellow at UC Santa Cruz, who led the orbital dynamics analysis. Fabrycky and Jack Lissauer, a scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, are the lead authors of a paper on Kepler-11 published in the February 3 issue of Nature.

The five inner planets in the Kepler-11 system range in size from 2.3 to 13.5 times the mass of the Earth. Their orbital periods are all less than 50 days, so they orbit within a region that would fit inside the orbit of Mercury in our solar system. The sixth planet is larger and farther out, with an orbital period of 118 days and an undetermined mass.

"Of the six planets, the most massive are potentially like Neptune and Uranus, but the three lowest mass planets are unlike anything we have in our solar system," said Jonathan Fortney, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC, who led the work on understanding the structure and composition of the planets, along with UCSC graduate students Eric Lopez and Neil Miller.

The Kepler space telescope detects planets that "transit" or pass in front of their host star, causing periodic dips in the brightness of the star as measured by the telescope's sensitive photometer. The amount of the brightness reduction tells scientists how big the planet is in terms of its radius. The time between transits tells them its orbital period. To determine the planets' masses, Fabrycky analyzed slight variations in the orbital periods caused by gravitational interactions among the planets.

"The timing of the transits is not perfectly periodic, and that is the signature of the planets gravitationally interacting," he said. "By developing a model of the orbital dynamics, we worked out the masses of the planets and verified that the system can be stable on long time scales of millions of years."

Previously, detections of transiting planets have been followed up with observations from powerful ground-based telescopes to confirm the planet and determine its mass using Doppler spectroscopy, which measures the "wobble" in the motion of the star caused by the gravitational tug of the planet. With Kepler-11, however, the planets are too small and the star (2,000 light-years away) is too faint for Doppler spectroscopy to work. This is likely to be the case with many of the planets detected by the Kepler mission, the main goal of which is to find small, Earth-size planets in the habitable zones of their stars.

"We will need to use orbital dynamics a lot with the Kepler mission to measure the masses of planets, so we expect to be doing a lot of those analyses," Fabrycky said.

More than 100 transiting planets have been observed by Kepler and other telescopes, but the vast majority of them are Jupiter-like gas giants, and almost all of them are in single-planet systems. The Kepler-11 system is remarkable in terms of the number of planets, their small sizes, and their closely packed orbits. Before this, astronomers had determined both size and mass for only three exoplanets smaller than Neptune. Now, a single planetary system has added five more. The sixth planet in Kepler-11 is separated enough from the others that the orbital perturbation method can't be used to determine its mass, Fabrycky said.

As is the case in our solar system, all of the Kepler-11 planets orbit in more or less the same plane. This finding reinforces the idea that planets form in flattened disks of gas and dust spinning around a star, and the disk pattern is conserved after the planets have formed, Fabrycky said. "The coplanar orbits in our solar system inspired this theory in the first place, and now we have another good example. But that and the Sun-like star are the only parts of Kepler-11 that are like the solar system," he said.

The densities of the planets (derived from mass and radius) provide clues to their compositions. All six planets have densities lower than Earth's. "It looks like the inner two could be mostly water, with possibly a thin skin of hydrogen-helium gas on top, like mini-Neptunes," Fortney said. "The ones farther out have densities less than water, which seems to indicate significant hydrogen-helium atmospheres."

That's surprising, because a small, hot planet should have a hard time holding onto a lightweight atmosphere. "These planets are pretty hot because of their close orbits, and the hotter it is the more gravity you need to keep the atmosphere," Fortney said. "My students and I are still working on this, but our thoughts are that all these planets probably started with more massive hydrogen-helium atmospheres, and we see the remnants of those atmospheres on the ones farther out. The ones closer in have probably lost most of it."

One reason a six-planet system is so exciting is that it allows scientists to make these kinds of comparisons among planets within the same system. "That's really powerful, because we can work out what's happened to this system as a whole," Fortney said. "Comparative planetary science is how we've come to understand our solar system, so this is much better than just finding more solitary hot Jupiters around other stars."

For example, the presence of small planets with hydrogen-helium atmospheres suggests that this system formed relatively quickly, he said. Studies indicate that stellar disks lose their hydrogen and helium gas within about 5 million years. "So it tells us how quickly planets can form," Fortney said.

The inner planets are so close together that it seems unlikely they formed where they are now, he added. "At least some must have formed farther out and migrated inward. If a planet is embedded in a disk of gas, the drag on it leads to the planet spiralling inward over time. So formation and migration had to happen early on."

Source: Reprinted news release via University of California - Santa Cruz

Read More >>

The Brain Knows What The Nose Smells, But How? Stanford Researchers Trace The Answer

Mice know fear. And they know to fear the scent of a predator. But how do their brains quickly figure out with a sniff that a cat is nearby?

It's a complex process that starts with the scent being picked up by specific receptors in their noses. But until now it wasn't clear exactly how these scent signals proceeded from nose to noggin for neural processing.

In a study to be published in Nature (available online now to subscribers), Stanford researchers describe a new technique that makes it possible to map long-distance nerve connections in the brain. The scientists used the technique to map for the first time the path that the scent signals take from the olfactory bulb, the part of the brain that first receives signals from odor receptors in the nose, to higher centers of the mouse brain where the processing is done.

"No one could trace signals across neural connections to a specific type of neuron at a specific location before," said biology Professor Liqun Luo. This is Luo's first study of the mouse olfactory system, but his lab has spent 10 years studying olfactory pathways in the fruit fly. Because mouse brains are so much larger and more complex that those of flies, Luo and postdoctoral researcher Kazunari Miyamichi had to develop an entirely new experimental technique.

These techniques can be used to do more than just study how mice smell. "The tools we've developed can be applied to trace neural connections of any part of the nervous system," Luo said. The tools could be used to understand how mouse brains process information from their other senses, or how the brain controls movement. The tools could also be adapted for use in rats and other mammalian species, he said.

To trace the neural pathways, the researchers injected mouse brains with two viruses, one after the other.

The researchers first injected a low-grade virus into the higher centers of a mouse brain, where it infected nearby neurons.

This first virus left the neurons susceptible to infection by the second virus, which was injected two weeks later. The second virus – fluorescent red in color – was designed by collaborator Edward Callaway at the Salk Institute.

Genes introduced by the first virus allowed the next virus to infect its way from the higher brain to the olfactory bulb, going in the opposite direction of scent signals. By following the backward progress of the second virus, the scientists could identify the neurons in the olfactory bulb where the virus ended up, thanks to the red fluorescence.

The scientists then sliced each mouse brain into about 60 thin sections, and took photos of all of them through a microscope. They used a sophisticated algorithm to combine the images from 35 mice into a 3-D model of the olfactory bulb designed by graduate students Fernando Amat and Farshid Moussavi in Professor Mark Horowitz's electric engineering group. This allowed them to look for patterns between where the virus started in the higher brain centers and where in the olfactory bulb it finished its journey.

They found that most of the nerve pathways heading to the higher processing centers that direct the mice's innate like or dislike of certain odors, and trigger a response to them, originated from one region – the top part of the olfactory bulb. This could explain how the mouse brain directs the animal's innate fear response to cat or fox urine.

This is in contrast to the neurons heading to the brain areas which process learned responses to odor. The neurons associated with learned responses are scattered all over the olfactory bulb, and their relative lack of organization could reflect their flexibility in allowing the mice to learn to avoid or be attracted to new smells.

The group also found that each neuron in the brain's higher centers receives signals from at least four neurons in the olfactory bulb, each of which receives input from a large number of like odor receptors. This progressive funneling and processing helps explain how the brain integrates the information from many different odors, Luo said.

In addition, he said, "There might be similar organizational principles in flies and mice, despite the evolutionary distance between them."

Luo said he will use the techniques in this study to take a more detailed look at other parts of the mouse olfactory bulb and brain, with the eventual goal of understanding how the brain processes specific odors. He said he was also working to improve the technique to track neurons across longer distances, allowing him to look in more detail at other pathways in the mouse nervous system.

Source: Reprinted news release via Stanford University

Read More >>

First Stars In Universe Were Not Alone

The first stars in the universe were not as solitary as previously thought. In fact, they could have formed alongside numerous companions when the gas disks that surrounded them broke up during formation, giving birth to sibling stars in the fragments. These are the findings of studies performed with the aid of computer simulations by researchers at Heidelberg University's Centre for Astronomy together with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching and the University of Texas at Austin (USA). The group's findings, published in Science Express, cast an entirely new light on the formation of the first stars after the Big Bang.

Stars evolve from cosmic gas clouds in a fierce and complex battle between gravity and internal gas pressure. The density of the gas increases due to its own gravitational pull. This causes the gas to heat up, as a consequence the pressure rises, and the compression process comes to a halt. If the gas manages to get rid of the thermal energy, compression can continue and a new star is born. This cooling process works especially well if the gas contains chemical elements like carbon or oxygen. Stars forming in this way are normally low in mass, like our Sun. But in the early universe these elements had yet to emerge, so the primordial cosmic gas could not cool down very well. Accordingly, most theoretical models predict the masses of primordial stars to be about a hundred times greater than that of the Sun.

Heidelberg astrophysicist Dr. Paul Clark and his colleagues investigated these processes with the help of very high resolution computer simulations. Their findings indicate that this simple picture needs to be revised and that the early universe was not only populated by huge, solitary stars. The reason is the underlying physics of the so called accretion disks accompanying the birth of the very first stars. The gas from which a new star forms rotates, and so the gas is unable to fall directly onto the star, but first builds up a disk-like structure. Only as a result of internal friction can the gas continue to flow onto the star. If more mass falls onto this disk than it can transport inwards, it becomes unstable and breaks into several fragments. So instead of forming just one star at the centre, a group of several stars is formed. The distances between some of the stars can be as small as that between the Earth and the Sun.

According to Dr. Clark, this realisation opens up exciting new avenues for detecting the first stars in the universe. In the final stages of their lives, binaries or multiple stellar systems can produce intense bursts of X-rays or gamma rays. Future space missions are being planned specifically to investigate such bursts from the early universe. It is also conceivable that some of the first stars may have been catapulted out of their birth group through collisions with their neighbours before they were able to accumulate a great deal of mass. Unlike short-lived high-mass stars, low-mass stars may survive for billions of years. "Intriguingly," says Dr. Clark, "some low-mass primordial stars may even have survived to the present day, allowing us to probe the earliest stages of star and galaxy formation right in our own cosmic backyard."

Together with Dr. Simon Glover and Dr. Rowan Smith, Dr. Paul Clark is a member of the star-formation research group headed by Prof. Dr. Ralf Klessen at Heidelberg University's Centre for Astronomy. Also involved in the research were Dr. Thomas Greif of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (Garching) and Prof. Dr. Volker Bromm of the University of Texas. This research was funded by the Baden-Württemberg Foundation as part of the International Top-Level Research II programme. Additional support came from the FRONTIER innovation fund of Heidelberg University as well as the German Research Foundation, the US National Science Foundation, and NASA.


Source: Reprinted news release via University of Heidelberg

Read More >>

China Builds 15 Story Hotel In 6 Days [Video]

Here is a video of a hotel being built in just 6 days! The Chinese really have construction down to a science!

If you think this video is cool, check these out:
The Big Bang In A Light Bulb
How To Make A Star Trek Style Door
The Coolest Homemade Lightsaber
Cereal Boxes That Light Up




Via Singularityhub

Read More >>

Runaway Star Plows Through Space

The blue star near the center of this image is Zeta Ophiuchi. When seen in visible light it appears as a relatively dim red star surrounded by other dim stars and no dust. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

A massive star flung away from its former companion is plowing through space dust. The result is a brilliant bow shock, seen here as a yellow arc in a new image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.

The star, named Zeta Ophiuchi, is huge, with a mass of about 20 times that of our sun. In this image, in which infrared light has been translated into visible colors we see with our eyes, the star appears as the blue dot inside the bow shock.

Zeta Ophiuchi once orbited around an even heftier star. But when that star exploded in a supernova, Zeta Ophiuchi shot away like a bullet. It's traveling at a whopping 54,000 miles per hour (or 24 kilometers per second), and heading toward the upper left area of the picture.

As the star tears through space, its powerful winds push gas and dust out of its way and into what is called a bow shock. The material in the bow shock is so compressed that it glows with infrared light that WISE can see. The effect is similar to what happens when a boat speeds through water, pushing a wave in front of it.

This bow shock is completely hidden in visible light. Infrared images like this one from WISE are therefore important for shedding new light on the region.

JPL manages and operates WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The principal investigator, Edward Wright, is at UCLA. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory, Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise, http://wise.astro.ucla.edu and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise .

Read More >>

Green Super Rice Is Coming

Rice bred to perform well in the toughest conditions where the poorest farmers grow rice is a step away from reaching farmers thanks to a major project led by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). Green Super Rice is actually a mix of more than 250 different potential rice varieties and hybrids variously adapted to difficult growing conditions such as drought and low inputs, including no pesticide and less fertilizer, and with rapid establishment rates to out-compete weeds, thus reducing the need for herbicides. More types of Green Super Rice that combine many of these traits are in the pipeline.

As reported in the latest issue of Rice Today, Green Super Rice is already in the hands of national agricultural agencies in key rice-growing countries for testing and development.

Green Super Rice is an example of what is needed as part of a "Greener Revolution," which is called for by rice scientists around the world and is one of the driving concepts behind the Global Rice Science Partnership (GRiSP) – a plan to improve international partnerships in rice research, its delivery, and impact that would also ensure that rice is grown in an environmentally sustainable way.

With the theme Rice for Future Generations, the 3rd International Rice Congress held in November last year was the perfect venue for the launch of GRiSP. Incredible sharing of rice research and ideas occurred, which Rice Today features in a suite of stories outlining some of the highlights and activities of the event that was attended by more than 1,900 people.

Our Grain of Truth article links Latin America in with GRiSP, highlighting the benefits of sharing expertise and experiences, while in Africa we learn about how improving the quality of rice is critical to reducing the continent's rice imports.

In our mapping section, we see how much yield and yield stability have improved since the 1960s – and also notice how much room for improvement remains.

IRRI's rodent experts, headed by Dr. Grant Singleton, take us on a journey to the northern Philippines to discover both "good" and "bad" rat species. And, we see how they are working with a local community to adopt practices to help reduce rat damage in rice crops – in 2010, rats destroyed between 30% and 50% of the rice crop there.

India is our country profile this issue and we take a look at some rice awareness-raising activities in Singapore. Meanwhile, IRRI's senior economist Dr. Samarendu Mohanty observes the recent fluctuations of rice prices and suggests that freeing up the market and creating a strategic rice reserve would help keep rice prices stable in the long term.

Finally, it is a pleasant surprise to see that nine World Food Prize laureates have had a connection with IRRI – a reminder that rice science is having an impact where it really matters.

Source: Reprinted news release via International Rice Research Institute

Read More >>

Taiwan Develops Face-Recognising Vending Machine

A face-recognising vending machine developed in Taiwan is able to offer hair-growing tonic to balding men and razors to people with beards, one of the inventors said Friday.

The vending machine, from Taipei-based Innovative DigiTech-Enabled Applications and Services Institute, is equipped with a camera that reads the faces of shoppers and then suggests products according to their gender and age.

Read more --Taiwan develops face-recognising vending machine

Read More >>

Japanese Carmakers In Push For Hydrogen Vehicles

Japan's top three automakers Toyota, Honda and Nissan have united with Japanese energy firms in a push to commercialise greener hydrogen fuel cell cars and build a network of fuelling stations.

Along with 10 Japanese energy groups including natural gas refiners and distributors, the companies are aiming to build 100 filling stations by 2015 in Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Fukuoka, the companies said in a statement Thursday.

Read more -- Japanese carmakers in push for hydrogen vehicles

Read More >>

The Two-faced Whirlpool Galaxy

These images by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope show off two dramatically different face-on views of the spiral galaxy M51, dubbed the Whirlpool Galaxy.

The image at left, taken in visible light, highlights the attributes of a typical spiral galaxy, including graceful, curving arms, pink star-forming regions, and brilliant blue strands of star clusters.

In the image at right, most of the starlight has been removed, revealing the Whirlpool's skeletal dust structure, as seen in near-infrared light. This new image is the sharpest view of the dense dust in M51. The narrow lanes of dust revealed by Hubble reflect the galaxy's moniker, the Whirlpool Galaxy, as if they were swirling toward the galaxy's core.

To map the galaxy's dust structure, researchers collected the galaxy's starlight by combining images taken in visible and near-infrared light. The visible-light image captured only some of the light; the rest was obscured by dust. The near-infrared view, however, revealed more starlight because near-infrared light penetrates dust. The researchers then subtracted the total amount of starlight from both images to see the galaxy's dust structure.

The red color in the near-infrared image traces the dust, which is punctuated by hundreds of tiny clumps of stars, each about 65 light-years wide. These stars have never been seen before. The star clusters cannot be seen in visible light because dense dust enshrouds them. The image reveals details as small as 35 light-years across.

Astronomers expected to see large dust clouds, ranging from about 100 light-years to more than 300 light-years wide. Instead, most of the dust is tied up in smooth and diffuse dust lanes. An encounter with another galaxy may have prevented giant clouds from forming.

Probing a galaxy's dust structure serves as an important diagnostic tool for astronomers, providing invaluable information on how the gas and dust collapse to form stars. Although Hubble is providing incisive views of the internal structure of galaxies such as M51, the planned James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is expected to produce even crisper images.

Researchers constructed the image by combining visible-light exposures from Jan. 18 to 22, 2005, with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), and near-infrared light pictures taken in December 2005 with the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS).

Credit for the NICMOS image: NASA, ESA, M. Regan and B. Whitmore (STScI), and R. Chandar (University of Toledo)

Credit for the ACS image: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Image files and more information about M51 are available on:


http://hubblesite.org/news/2011/03
http://www.nasa.gov/hubble
Source - http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/two-faced.html

Read More >>

The Big Bang Inside An Exploding Camera Flash Bulb [Video]

Here is a video of a camera flash bulb exploding in slow motion at 1052 frames per second. I kinda think it resembles what I would imagine the Big Bang looked like. What do you think it looks like?


slow burn from frazerchurchill on Vimeo.

Via Gizmodo

Read More >>

Make Your Own Star Trek Style Door [Video]

If you're a Star Trek fan, you are gonna love this Star Trek style door this guy 'Marc' made for his house. He spent about $500 bucks and many man hours to complete it, but the finished product is awesome! The doors even are code activated!

Here is a video of him with the Star Trek doors. He also goes a little bit into how he made them. If you want to know more about Marc and see his other creations visit his blog at uiproductions.blogspot.com


Via Singularityhub

Read More >>

What Is Life? New Answers To An Age-Old Question In Astrobiology

© Mary Ann Liebert Inc. publishers

Biologists have been unable to agree on a definition of the complex phenomenon known as "life." In a special collection of essays in Astrobiology, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., leaders in the fields of philosophy, science, and molecular evolution present a variety of perspectives on defining life. Tables of content and a free sample issue are available online.

Why is a definition of life so important yet so elusive? As David Deamer, Guest Editor and Research Professor of Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz, writes in his Introduction, a definition is needed to help determine what is and is not life as scientists begin to develop artificial life forms in the laboratory and, in the future, dispatch exploratory rovers that investigate what appear to be life forms on other planets.

Mark Bedau, Reed College (Portland, OR) and the University of Southern Denmark (Odense), relies on the Program-Metabolism-Container (PMC) model to define minimal chemical life. He supports his belief that this integrated triad of chemical systems is all that is needed for a living organism to maintain its existence, grow, reproduce, and evolve, in the essay entitled, "An Aristotelian Account of Minimal Chemical Life."

Antonio Lazcano, National Autonomous University of Mexico, and colleagues present an historical perspective of the many definitions of life put forth over the years and why they have been unsatisfactory, in the essay, "The Definition of Life: A Brief History of an Elusive Scientific Endeavor."

Steven Benner, Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution and The Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology (Gainesville, FL), explores the various definitions of life popular in the astrobiology community and how each is connected to a "theory of life." In the essay "Defining Life," Benner describes how chemical structures capable of Darwinian evolution might be useful as universal biosignatures.

Finally, an essay adapted from the writings of deceased Ukranian scientist Sergey Tsokolov asserts that feedback loops should be an essential component of any definition of life. Life could not exist in the absence of negative feedback, concludes Tsokolov in the essay "A Theory of Circular Organization and Negative Feedback: Defining Life in a Cybernetic Context."

David Deamer commented, "These essays represent a remarkable effort on the part of the authors. We asked them to address a question that has challenged some of the great minds in biology, including Schrödinger himself, who initiated the discussion in 1944 with his book entitled "What Is Life?" Our authors rose to the challenge, and their ideas and perspectives are genuinely new. It was a pleasure to work with them and help them wrestle with this difficult and complex problem." Deamer is the new Senior Editor in charge of essays on timely topics for Astrobiology.

Source: Reprinted news release via Mary Ann Liebert, Inc

Read More >>

The Best Way To Measure Dark Energy Just Got Better

Dark energy is a mysterious force that pervades all space, acting as a "push" to accelerate the Universe's expansion. Despite being 70 percent of the Universe, dark energy was only discovered in 1998 by two teams observing Type Ia supernovae. A Type 1a supernova is a cataclysmic explosion of a white dwarf star.

These supernovae are currently the best way to measure dark energy because they are visible across intergalactic space. Also, they can function as "standard candles" in distant galaxies since the intrinsic brightness is known. Just as drivers estimate the distance to oncoming cars at night from the brightness of their headlights, measuring the apparent brightness of a supernova yields its distance (fainter is farther). Measuring distances tracks the effect of dark energy on the expansion of the Universe.

The best way of measuring dark energy just got better, thanks to a new study of Type Ia supernovae led by Ryan Foley of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He has found a way to correct for small variations in the appearance of these supernovae, so that they become even better standard candles. The key is to sort the supernovae based on their color.

"Dark energy is the biggest mystery in physics and astronomy today. Now, we have a better way to tackle it," said Foley, who is a Clay Fellow at the Center. He presented his findings in a press conference at the 217th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

The new tool also will help astronomers to firm up the cosmic distance scale by providing more accurate distances to faraway galaxies.

Type Ia supernovae are used as standard candles, meaning they have a known intrinsic brightness. However, they're not all equally bright. Astronomers have to correct for certain variations. In particular, there is a known correlation between how quickly the supernova brightens and dims (its light curve) and the intrinsic peak brightness.

Even when astronomers correct for this effect, their measurements still show some scatter, which leads to inaccuracies when calculating distances and therefore the effects of dark energy. Studies looking for ways to make more accurate corrections have had limited success until now.

"We've been looking for this sort of 'second-order effect' for nearly two decades," said Foley.

Foley discovered that after correcting for how quickly Type Ia supernovae faded, they show a distinct relationship between the speed of their ejected material and their color: the faster ones are slightly redder and the slower ones are bluer.

Previously, astronomers assumed that redder explosions only appeared that way because of intervening dust, which would also dim the explosion and make it appear farther than it was. Trying to correct for this, they would incorrectly calculate that the explosion was closer than it appeared. Foley's work shows that some of the color difference is intrinsic to the supernova itself.

The new study succeeded for two reasons. First, it used a large sample of more than 100 supernovae. More importantly, it went back to "first principles" and reexamined the assumption that Type Ia supernovae are one average color.

The discovery provides a better physical understanding of Type Ia supernovae and their intrinsic differences. It also will allow cosmologists to improve their data analysis and make better measurements of dark energy - an important step on the road to learning what this mysterious force truly is, and what it means for the future of the cosmos.

Source: Reprinted news release via Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Read More >>

Stanford researcher uses living cells to create 'biotic' video games (w/ Video)

(PhysOrg.com) -- The digital revolution has triggered a wild proliferation of video games, but what of the revolution in biotechnology? Does it have the potential to spawn its own brood of games? Stanford physicist Ingmar Riedel-Kruse has begun developing "biotic games" involving paramecia and other living organisms. He hopes the games lead to advances in education and crowd-sourcing of laboratory research while helping to raise the level of public discourse on bio-related issues.

Read more -- Stanford researcher uses living cells to create 'biotic' video games (w/ Video)

Read More >>

Announcement: Web-Streamed Event Will Cover Mars Science Findings

The National Air and Space Museum in Washington will present a discussion of Mars science Thursday, Jan. 13, from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. EST (7:30 to 9:30 a.m. PST) in a program to be televised and streamed online.

Mars experts from NASA, the European Space Agency and elsewhere will discuss the past and future of our understanding of the Red Planet. They will take questions from the audience. Viewers will learn the significance of water on Mars and see photographs from spacecraft at Mars.

For more information, see http://www.nasm.si.edu/events/eventDetail.cfm?eventID=2641&hp=hi . To watch the event live on the NASA Television website, go to www.nasa.gov/ntv . To view an archived video after the event, go to http://www.youtube.com/NASAtelevision.

Read More >>