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August Will Be a Blue Moon Month

Joe Rao
SPACE.com
Mon, 30 Jul 2012 20:07 UTC
Full Moon
© Alamelu Sundaramoorthy
This image of the full moon was taken by Alamelu Sundaramoorthy from Portland, Ore. on July 3, 2012.
The month of August brings us not one, but two full moons. The first will kick off the month on Wednesday (Aug.1), and will be followed by a second on Aug. 31.

Some almanacs and calendars assert that when two full moons occur within a calendar month, the second full moon is called a "blue moon."

The full moon that night will likely look no different than any other full moon. But the moon can change color in certain conditions.

After forest fires or volcanic eruptions, the moon can appear to take on a bluish or even lavender hue. Soot and ash particles, deposited high in the Earth's atmosphere, can sometimes make the moon appear bluish.

Smoke from widespread forest fire activity in western Canada created a blue moon across eastern North America in late September 1950. In the aftermath of the massive eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in June 1991 there were reports of blue moons (and even blue suns) worldwide.
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Propaganda

Science or Hype? Two climate papers get hyped first, reviewed later

Brad Plumer
The Washington Post Blog
Mon, 30 Jul 2012 19:36 UTC
In September 2011, researchers at the CERN institute in Geneva convened a press conference to make a jaw-dropping announcement. The scientists had been firing a beam of neutrinos 450 miles from Switzerland to Italy, and, after taking tens of thousands of measurements, they'd discovered that some of the neutrinos appeared to be moving faster than the speed of light. If true, the results would've shattered some of the most cherished beliefs of physicists.

What was almost as surprising, however, is that the scientists had not yet published their findings in an established scientific journal at the time of the announcement. The results had not been picked over by expert reviewers who could try to poke holes and question the conclusions. Instead, the CERN researchers were placing their paper on arXiv, submitting it to an "open-source review" in which anyone from around the world could scrutinize the experiment and try to verify the results.

Six months later, the findings of the so-called OPERA experiment were disproved. Four other experiments had found that neutrinos travel at the speed of light after all. Einstein's theory of special relativity was saved. Yet the CERN researchers also set an odd precedent, in which scientific results are announced to the world and hyped before they've gone through traditional peer review. To some scientists, this was a controversial practice. And now the practice seems to be creeping to other areas, including the always-charged field of climate science.
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Bulb

Brains Are Different in People With Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory


Science Daily
Mon, 30 Jul 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© James Steidl / Fotolia
UC Irvine scientists have discovered intriguing differences in the brains and mental processes of an extraordinary group of people who can effortlessly recall every moment of their lives since about age 10.

UC Irvine scientists have discovered intriguing differences in the brains and mental processes of an extraordinary group of people who can effortlessly recall every moment of their lives since about age 10.

The phenomenon of highly superior autobiographical memory -- first documented in 2006 by UCI neurobiologist James McGaugh and colleagues in a woman identified as "AJ" -- has been profiled on CBS's "60 Minutes" and in hundreds of other media outlets. But a new paper in the peer-reviewed journal Neurobiology of Learning & Memory's July issue offers the first scientific findings about nearly a dozen people with this uncanny ability.

All had variations in nine structures of their brains compared to those of control subjects, including more robust white matter linking the middle and front parts. Most of the differences were in areas known to be linked to autobiographical memory, "so we're getting a descriptive, coherent story of what's going on," said lead author Aurora LePort, a doctoral candidate at UCI's Center for the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory.
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Magnify

Sex with early mystery species of humans seen in DNA, researcher says

Brian Vastag
The Washington Post
Thu, 26 Jul 2012 16:40 UTC
dna
© unbekannt
There's only one way the foreign DNA could have made it into modern human populations. "We're talking about sex," said Joshua Akey of the University of Washington, whose lab identified the foreign DNA in three groups of modern Africans.

The human family tree just got another - mysterious - branch, an African "sister species" to the heavy-browed Neanderthals that once roamed Europe.

While no fossilized bones have been found from these enigmatic people, they did leave a calling card in present-day Africans: snippets of foreign DNA.
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Saturn

NASA Develops New Space Suit for Advanced Space Missions

Tiffany Kaiser
DailyTech
Sun, 29 Jul 2012 15:00 UTC
Image
© Popular Mechanics
Z-1 Prototype
The new space suit is called the "Z-1 Prototype Spacesuit and Portable Life Support System (PLSS) 2.0"

NASA has decided to perform a complete makeover on its traditional U.S. space suit in preparation of new space ventures that lie ahead.

NASA's current space suits were designed in 1992. They were made for crews aboard the space shuttle fleet and those spending time at the International Space Station (ISS). But with the space shuttle fleet's recent retirement and the country's latest goals to go to Mars, an asteroid, and beyond, NASA has recognized that it may be time to create more robust and technologically-equipped suits for astronauts.

The new space suit is called the "Z-1 Prototype Spacesuit and Portable Life Support System (PLSS) 2.0." It is a rear-entry space suit that can do pretty much anything the actual spaceship does, from supplying oxygen, removing carbon dioxide, and protecting the astronaut from extreme heat/cold.
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Meteor

Tagish Lake Meteorites Reveals Secrets Of The Early Solar System

Lee Rannals
Red Orbit
Thu, 26 Jul 2012 12:01 UTC
Image
© NASA/Hrybyk-Keith, Mary P.
Artist's concept of excess left-hand aspartic acid created in asteroids and delivered to Earth via meteorite impacts. The line at the bottom is a chromatogram showing that left-hand aspartic acid (tall peak in the center, with diagram of left-hand aspartic acid molecule on top) was four times more abundant in the meteorite sample than right-hand aspartic acid (smaller peak to the left, with right-handed aspartic acid molecule on top.
New clues have been unveiled that shed light on why living things use only molecules with specific orientations.

Research analyzing meteorite fragments that fell on a frozen lake in Canada is providing strong evidence that liquid water inside an asteroid leads to a preference of left-handed over right-handed forms of common protein amino acids in meteorites.

"Our analysis of the amino acids in meteorite fragments from Tagish Lake gave us one possible explanation for why all known life uses only left-handed versions of amino acids to build proteins," Dr. Daniel Glavin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and lead author of a paper being published in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science, said in a press release.

A meteorite landed on Earth back in January 2000, and because many people witnessed the event, pieces were able to be collected and preserved in their frozen state for research.

"The Tagish Lake meteorite continues to reveal more secrets about the early Solar System the more we investigate it," Dr. Christopher Herd, a co-author on the paper, said. "This latest study gives us a glimpse into the role that water percolating through asteroids must have played in making the left-handed amino acids that are so characteristic of all life on Earth."
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Satellite

Russian cargo spacecraft docks with space station on 2nd try


Space.com
Sun, 29 Jul 2012 14:15 UTC
Safe docking followed a failed first attempt on July 23, which was aborted after a technical glitch
Image
© NASA TV
An unmanned Russian Progress 47 cargo ship is being used to test an upgraded automated docking system for the International Space Station.

An unmanned Russian cargo ship parked itself at the International Space Station tonight (July 28), in a second attempt to test an updated space docking system, NASA says.

The robotic Russian Progress 47 spacecraft re-docked to the space station to test the new Kurs-NA docking system. The cargo ship safely approached the station and automatically attached itself to the Pirs docking compartment on the Russian segment of the massive orbiting laboratory at 9:01 p.m. ET (0101 GMT July 29). Russia intends to use the Kurs-NA docking system on future unmanned Progress spacecraft and manned Soyuz vehicles.

The Progress' safe docking followed a failed first attempt four days ago, on July 23, which was aborted after a technical glitch prevented the spacecraft from reaching the orbiting outpost. After that attempt, the Progress 47's onboard computers kept the craft a safe distance away from the station while Russian engineers analyzed the failure.
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Sun

Tidy close-match star system holds planetary pinball clue


New Scientist
Sat, 28 Jul 2012 06:21 UTC
Mirror solar system
© Cristina Sanchis Ojeda
Nicely arranged
We are not alone - in one sense at least. A trio of planets orbiting a sun-like star has the most similar layout to our solar system yet seen.

The discovery supports the idea that planets emerge from relatively flat discs of material encircling stars and, at first, orbit neatly in the same plane, just as our eight planets circle the sun. This long-held notion has recently been called into question by a haul of planetary systems with wildly skewed orbits.

Most of these chaotic systems contain hot Jupiters, massive gas giants that circle their stars in a tight embrace. These behemoths frequently have dramatically tilted and sometimes even backward orbits. The big question is whether hot Jupiters form from slanted discs of material or if the planets scatter into odd positions when a tidy system is somehow disrupted by gravitational interactions among its multiple worlds.

Using data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, a team led by Roberto Sanchis Ojeda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology examined a star system called Kepler 30 and measured how well the planets' orbits line up with the star's rotational plane, something known as obliquity.
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Magic Wand

Birds smarter than seven year old kids


Phenomenica
Fri, 27 Jul 2012 15:46 UTC
Image
© Unknown
No matter how bright you think your child is, until the age of seven, children are no brainier than the birds.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge during simple experiments found out that birds did just as well as children up until the age of seven, The Daily Mail reported.

By pitting birds against boys and girls using tests inspired by the Aesop's fable in which a thirsty crow is able to drink from a pitcher after using pebbles to raise the water level to within its reach.

In two of the three tests the birds, Eurasian jays, did just as well as the seven-year-old children.

After this, the human mind proved superior to the bird brain.

The experiments built on earlier work in which jays quickly learned that adding stones to a cylinder half-filled with water would bring a tasty treat floating on the surface within reach of their beaks.
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Meteor

New Comet: P/2012 O3 (McNAUGHT)

Giovanni Sostero, Nick Howes & Ernesto Guido
Remanzacco Observatory
Fri, 27 Jul 2012 02:29 UTC
Cbet nr. 3193, issued on 2012, July 26, announces the discovery of a new comet (discovery magnitude 18.0) by R. H. McNaught on CCD images obtained with the 0.5-m Uppsala Schmidt telescope at Siding Spring on July 23.7. The new comet has been designated P/2012 O3 (McNAUGHT).

We performed some follow-up measurements of this object, while it was still on the neocp. Stacking of 14 R-filtered exposures, 60-sec each, obtained remotely, from the Haleakala-Faulkes Telescope North on 2012, Jul. 24.47, through a 2.0-m f/10.0 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD under good seeing conditions, shows that this object is a comet: sharp central condensation, surrounded by a faint coma nearly 5" in diameter, elongated toward PA 25 deg.

Our confirmation image
P/2012 O3
© Remanzacco Observatory
M.P.E.C. 2012-O36 assigns the following preliminary elliptical orbital elements to comet P/2012 O3: 2012 Aug. 15.60; e= 0.65; Peri. = 343.30; q = 1.59 AU; Incl.= 16.46.
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