What do you get when you mix politics and space exploration?
a) an impenetrable mess
b) an interesting clash between technology and people
c) something scarier than sausage making
For those who think politics is messy or scary, I agree. But it makes for good reading. And when you read space politics, you also get nice logo-like images like this one.
I've covered some of the 'people' issues abut space exploration, most recently in . But I'm focused on just getting my lil' old satellite up. What's the picture for getting people, space stations, nuclear reactors, and kitchen sinks into space?
Post-apocalyptic Fundamentalism
Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow is one of many post-apocalyptic novels that envision society returned to a 19th century agrarian state. The rural settings of these novels are commonly used to explore life in a society driven by fear, fear or technology, or change, or those who are different. A society based on fear of technology is what Leigh Brackett explores here.
ESA’s Planck mission is a 'time machine' to study the relic radiation from the Big Bang, and it has delivered its first all-sky image, one of four all-sky scans it will complete by the end of its mission in 2012.
Planck is designed to map tiny irregularities in fossil radiation left over from the very first light in the Universe, emitted shortly after the Big Bang, and has enough sensitivity to reach the experimental limits of what can be observed, allowing researchers to peer into the early Universe and study its constituents, perhaps even the hypothetical dark matter and dark energy that continue to be a debate among the science community worldwide.
Brain stem cells remain dormant until needed to make more neurons but little is known about the molecular guards that keep them quiet - or 'wake' them up.
Scientists from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies say they have identified the signal that prevents stem cells from doing too much proliferating, a move that protects the brain against too much cell division and ensuring a pool of neural stem cells that lasts a lifetime.
Researchers have shown a new ability to control the behaviors of individual electrons within simple atoms and molecules by stripping them away, one by one, and in some cases creating 'hollow atoms'.
The results describe how the Linac Coherent Light Source's intense pulses of X-ray light change the very atoms and molecules they are designed to image. Controlling those changes will be critical to achieving the atomic-scale images of biological molecules and movies of chemical processes that the LCLS is designed to produce.
The cell membrane at first may seem a simple device, but it is in fact a very complex machine. The basic building block is the phospholipid, a set of molecules that have hydrophilic (water loving) heads on one side and a hydrophobic (water hating) tail on the other. Because of this relationship the water loving heads want to be near aqueous environments and the water hating tails like to be near other water hating tails, or fats. Since cells live in aqueous environments, and are filled with aqueous fluids the cell membrane forms two layers with the heads pointing out and the tails pointing towards each other.
MODIS Rapidfire For Citizen Scientists - #4This is part #4 of a brief explanation of the NASA/GSFC MODIS Rapid Response System -
Rapidfire - together with a Howto for citizen scientists. The first part was
MODIS Rapidfire For Citizen Scientists - #1In this part, I describe some of the things to be seen in the MODIS images.
By optimizing magnets, hybrid and electric cars can be made economically competitive, according to a research project currently underway at St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences in Austria.
Their project is seeking to find the ideal composition and structure of high-performance permanent magnets intended for use in cars, a move which can help conserve raw materials and they say the ideal designs can be identified quickly and without major expense, thanks to numerical simulation methods.
If you drink bottled water, soda (or pop, depending on whether you are from Philadelphia or Pittsburgh), or a micro brew-beer in Dallas, Denver or numerous other American cities, you may be carrying an 'iso-signature', a natural chemical imprint related to that geographic location.
Iso-signatures are a chemical in imprint in hair due to beverages may and could be used to track your travels over time, a new study suggests in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
The fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood has been interpreted in myriad ways, particularly as sexual awakening or sexual coming of age (either biologically or socially, depending on which bath-house you pray in). Perhaps if the crimson-caped interloper existed today, she'd wear fire-engine red circle lenses to accent her childlike, doe-eyed innocence.
