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The Search for the Body's Keys to Time

Sunset/Sunrise in Space
© NASA/Ron GaranWhile in space, astronauts may see a sunrise and sunset every 45 minutes. Astronaut Ron Garan took this image of a sunset from the Space Station.

No one really knows the details of how our body clocks work. But when the rhythms get messed up, the results can be horrendous. Accidents, loss of productivity, disease, including serious illnesses like cancer, are known to be caused, in part, by a messed up body clock.

"Biological clocks regulate almost every function in the human body," said military physician Christian Macedonia, who is overseeing a biochronicity program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

The timing and interplay of these clocks drive everything from cell growth to metabolism and from aging to death.

"If scientists can get a better grasp on how time factors into biological functions, the Department of Defense could potentially better preserve the health and readiness of the warfighter," Macedonia wrote in an email to Discovery News.

It's not just the military that would like the keys to the body's timepieces. NASA, for example, has to figure out how to help people living off Earth. That mind-bending view from the International Space Station, which orbits about 240 miles above the planet, comes with a dizzying price: a sunrise and sunset every 45 minutes.

NASA is looking at practical solutions, like installing blue lights aboard the station, a wavelength which studies show increases alertness by suppressing the body's release of melatonin, a natural sleep hormone, and stimulating the retinas to secrete an alertness protein called melanopsin.

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NRL Scientists Identify New Coupling Mode Between Stratosphere and Ionosphere

Upper Wind
© U.S. Naval Research LaboratoryComparison of averaged zonal (E-W) winds in the lower thermosphere for January 2010 from two calculations with the NCAR Thermosphere-Ionosphere model. Panel (a) uses the standard configuration with a bottom boundary that only assumes uniform temperatures. Panel (b) uses a bottom boundary from NOGAPS-ALPHA which includes a realistic temperature distribution at 95 km. Panel (c) is an empirical climatology, the Horizontal Wind Model, developed by NRL/SSD (Drob et al., 2008) which is the standard reference for thermospheric winds.

Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory have identified a new mode of coupling between the stratosphere - which can drive variations at the summer mesopause - and the ionosphere, thereby establishing a new means where changes in the stratosphere can impact space weather. This research appeared in the January 6th, 2012 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

One of the most striking characteristics of the Earth's upper atmosphere is that at the edge of space, 80 to 100 km, at polar latitudes, it is much colder in summer than winter, despite the presence of 24-hour sunlight, explains Dr. David Siskind, who works in NRL's Space Science Division and is the principal investigator for this research.

Scientists have attributed this peculiar temperature reversal to the propagation of small-scale atmospheric gravity waves, which spread up from the lower atmosphere and by momentum deposition, drive the atmosphere away from a simple radiative equilibrium state.

The 80 to 100 km region, which is known as the "mesopause," is so cold that ice clouds can condense in the rarefied air. These polar mesospheric clouds are being studied by a NASA mission called Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere in which NRL is involved.

NRL researchers are using the high-altitude extension of the Navy operational weather forecast model, NOGAPS-ALPHA (Advanced Level Physics High Altitude) to study how lower atmospheric disturbances propagate up to the thermosphere and ionosphere, above 100 km. This investigation is part of a long-term program to explore the coupling between the lower and upper atmosphere. NOGAPS-ALPHA extends up to 100 km, so the NRL team has mated the NOGAPS-ALPHA code with a community thermosphere-ionosphere model developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

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Possible Nova in Ophiuchus

Following the posting on the Central Bureau's Transient Object Confirmation Page about a possible Nova in Oph (TOCP Designation: PNV J17260708-2551454) we performed some follow-up of this object remotely through the 0.10-m f/5 reflector + CCD from MPC code H06 (Mayhill station, NM) of iTelescope network.

On our images taken on 2012, March 27.5 we can confirm the presence of an optical counterpart with unfiltered CCD magnitude 10.9 at coordinates:

R.A. = 17 26 07.02, Decl.= -25 51 42.1 (equinox 2000.0; USNO-B1.0 catalog reference stars).

Our confirmation image:

Nova in Ophiuchus
© Remanzacco Observatory
You can see an animation showing a comparison between our confirmation image and the archive POSS2/UKSTU plate (R Filter - 1997).

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The Four Ages of the Universe -- What's Next?

Universe
© NASA

The Greek poet Hesiod described the Five Ages of Man in mythology.

They progress from the Golden Age, when people lived among the gods, through the warlike Bronze Age and on to the Heroic Age. His narrative ends with the Iron Age, a period of toil and misery for mankind.

Science has now replaced these mythologies. We are at the point where we look at the entire universe as a grand series of game-changing leaps toward our emergence as an intelligent species. It is an epic story more compelling than anything from creation mythology.

In a recent paper, Marcelo Gleiser of Dartmouth College describes the universe's first three ages as the physical age, chemical age, and biological age. He says that we are now entering the cognitive age, the emergence of intelligence life on Earth and presumably across the universe.

This leaves us with an enticing question: what will be the fifth age of the universe? Will this be a period of decline toward the burnout of the last star, as our extrapolations from current astrophysics predict? Or could it be something more existential and unpredictable given the potential influence of "thinking matter" on the arrow of time? Are we entering a cosmological Age of Aquarius?

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Microsoft Intercepting and Censoring Chats in Windows Live Messenger

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© TorrentFreak.com
Update (below): Microsoft says it has "long" been censoring users

Tech giant Microsoft is actively intercepting and censoring conversations in its Windows Live Messenger program, utilizing a block list to prevent users from trading links to a popular peer-to-peer media sharing website known as The Pirate Bay.

While it's not surprising that a corporate block list would include The Pirate Bay, one of the Internet's most notorious havens for media sharing in violation of copyright laws around the world, at least one branch of the website devoted to legal peer-to-peer sharing is also being blocked.

In a trial-run Monday morning, Raw Story discovered that Microsoft is also blocking "The Promo Bay," where artists submit their materials to be discovered by a mass audience.

Artists the world over use The Promo Bay to help develop a global fanbase, utilizing the very technologies that have caused such consternation among the entertainment industry's largest players.

Microsoft, it would seem, does not like that.

Laptop

Hacker 'command' servers seized in US: Microsoft

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© AFPMicrosoft on Monday said that cyber crime "command" servers in two US states were seized in an ongoing campaign to sever online crooks from infected computers used as virtual henchmen.
Microsoft on Monday said that cyber crime "command" servers in two US states were seized in an ongoing campaign to sever online crooks from infected computers used as virtual henchmen.

A team headed by the software colossus capitalized on laws crafted to fight organized crime groups to obtain court orders to seize servers in Pennsylvania and Illinois being used to control computers corrupted by malicious code.

Viruses slipped into people's machines stole online banking account and password information and relayed it to crooks who have looted more than $100 million in the past five years, according to court documents.

The "worldwide, illegal" computer networks were an amalgam of more than 13 million infected machines referred to as "Zeus botnets" due to the type of malicious code involved.

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NASA Hopes to Launch 5-Rocket Mission to Light US East Coast Sky Tuesday

NASA will try again early Tuesday (March 27) in an effort to launch five suborbital sounding rockets on a mission to study high-level jet stream winds by creating artificial glowing clouds near the edge of space. After several delays, the rockets are scheduled to blast off from launch pads in Virginia between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. EDT (0600 and 0900 GMT).

If all goes well, each of the five unmanned rockets will release a chemical tracer into the jet stream winds more than 60 miles up that should create brilliant milky white trails in the nighttime sky to enable scientists and people on the United States East Coast to actually "see" these high-altitude winds at the edge of space, NASA officials have said. The glowing clouds created in the experiment may also be visible to skywatchers along the U.S. East Coast, local weather permitting.
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© NASA/Wallops This map of the United States' mid-Atlantic region shows the flight profile of NASA's five ATREX rockets, as well as the projected area where they may be visible after launch on March 14, 2012. The rockets' chemical tracers, meanwhile, should be visible from South Carolina through much of New England.

But while the latest weather forecasts appear to be favorable with clear weather forecast along the Atlantic Seaboard, another meteorological condition - gusty winds - could ground the rockets for yet another night. The mission, which is called the Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment, or ATREX for short, has been on hold since the night of the first launch attempt on March 15.

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Findings Cast Doubt on Moon Origins

Moons Origin
© Cosmic Collisions Space Show/Rose Center for Earth and Space/AMNHSpectacular. New research sheds light on how the moon formed.

The moon, that giant lump of rock that has fascinated poets and scientists alike, may be about to get even more interesting. A new analysis of isotopes found in lunar minerals challenges the prevailing view of how Earth's nearest neighbor formed.

Most scientists believe Earth collided with a hypothetical, Mars-sized planet called Theia early in its existence, and the resulting smash-up produced a disc of magma orbiting our planet that later coalesced to form the moon. This is called the giant impact hypothesis. Computer models indicate that, for the collision to remain consistent with the laws of physics, at least 40% of the magma would have had to come from Theia.

One way to test the hypothesis is to look at the isotopes of particular elements in rocks returned from the moon. Atoms of most elements can occur in slightly different forms, called isotopes, with slightly different masses. Oxygen, for example, has three isotopes: 16O, 17O and 18O, indicating differences in the number of neutrons each nucleus contains. Compare any two samples of oxygen found on Earth and you'll find the proportions of 16O, 17O and 18O isotopes are almost identical in the two samples. The proportions found in samples from meteorites and other planets like Mars, however, are usually different. So if you find that a sample has the same oxygen isotope composition as one from Earth, then it's very likely the sample came from our world.

Previous research has established that the oxygen isotope composition of lunar samples is indistinguishable from that of Earth. Since 40% of the moon is supposed to have come from Theia (which presumably would have had a different isotope composition), this might spell trouble for the giant impact hypothesis. But it's possible that Earth may have exchanged oxygen gas with the magma disk that later formed the Moon shortly after the collision, explaining why the results are the same.

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Largest molecules yet behave like waves in quantum double-slit experiment

Double-Slit Experiment
© Creative Commons, JordgetteA famous 1800s physics experiment, the double-slit experiment, revealed that light behaves like both particles and waves.
One of the most famous experiments in quantum physics, which first showed how particles can bizarrely behave like waves, has now been carried out on the largest molecules ever.

Researchers have sent molecules containing either 58 or 114 atoms through the so-called "double-slit experiment," showing that they cause an interference pattern that can only be explained if the particles act like waves of water, rather than tiny marbles.

Researchers said it wasn't a foregone conclusion that such large particles would act this way.

"In a way it's a little bit surprising, because these are highly complex and also flexible molecules; they change their shape while they're flying through the apparatus," said Markus Arndt of the University of Vienna in Austria, a co-leader of the project. "If you talk to the community, maybe 50 percent would say this is normal because it's quantum physics, and the other 50 percent would really scratch their heads because it's quantum physics."

Indeed, the double-slit experiment, one of the foundations of quantum physics, was voted the "most beautiful experiment" ever in a 2002 poll of Physics World readers.

Meteor

'It's Completely Unexpected': Mystery of Strange Cloud Formations Over Martian Landscape

An amateur astronomer has managed to capture recent images of Mars which appear to show cloud like formations on Mars.

Wayne Jaeschke, from West Chester, Pennsylvania, noticed the formations which can be seen rising up from the edge of the Martian disk after he took the pictures on March 20.

Some observers have suggested the so-called clouds are at least 150 miles away from the surface while others have suggested it could be debris which was disturbed after the Red Planet was hit by a meteor.
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Amateur astrophotographer Wayne Jaeschke captured this picture of the Red Planet from his private observatory in West Chester, Pennsylvania. A 200 per cent enlargement of the formation can be seen at the top of the picture