© NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/DLR
A flash of sunlight reflected off a lake on Saturn’s moon Titan
A flash of sunlight reflected off a lake on Saturn’s moon Titan
Science & Technology
2009 is ending with a flurry of sunspots. Indeed, if sunspot 1039 holds together just one more day (prediction: it will), the month of December will accumulate a total of 22 spotted days and the final tally for the year will look like this:
The dark line is a linear least-squares fit to the data. If the trend continues exactly as shown (prediction: it won't), sunspots will become a non-stop daily occurance no later than February 2011. Blank suns would cease and solar minimum would be over.
© NOAA
On Dec. 31st, the Blue Moon will dip into Earth's shadow for a partial lunar eclipse. The event is visible from Europe, Africa and Asia: map. At maximum eclipse, around 19:24 Universal Time, approximately 8% of the Moon will be darkly shadowed. Click here to launch an animated preview.
Blue Moons are rare (once every ~2.5 years). Blue Moons on New Year's Eve are rarer still (once every ~19 years). How rare is a lunar eclipse of a Blue Moon on New Year's Eve?
© Larry Koehn
© Stefano De Rosa
The full moon of Dec. 2, 2009, over Turan, Italy. Photographer Stefano De Rosa notes that the blue colors are cast by Christmas lights surrounding the pictured church.
The full moon of Dec. 2, 2009, over Turan, Italy. Photographer Stefano De Rosa notes that the blue colors are cast by Christmas lights surrounding the pictured church.
Don't expect the Moon to actually turn blue, though. "The 'Blue Moon' is a creature of folklore," he explains. "It's the second full Moon in a calendar month."
Most months have only one full Moon. The 29.5-day cadence of the lunar cycle matches up almost perfectly with the 28- to 31-day length of calendar months. Indeed, the word "month" comes from "Moon." Occasionally, however, the one-to-one correspondence breaks down when two full Moons squeeze into a single month. Dec. 2009 is such a month. The first full Moon appeared on Dec. 2nd; the second, a "Blue Moon," will come on Dec. 31st.
This definition of Blue Moon is relatively new. If you told a person in Shakespeare's day that something happens "once in a Blue Moon" they would attach no astronomical meaning to the statement. Blue moon simply meant rare or absurd, like making a date for the Twelfth of Never. "But meaning is a slippery substance," says Hiscock. "The phrase 'Blue Moon' has been around for more than 400 years, and during that time its meaning has shifted."
Russia is considering sending a spacecraft to a large asteroid to knock it off its path and prevent its collision with Earth - a collision NASA considers highly unlikely - the head of the country's space agency said Wednesday.
Anatoly Perminov said the space agency will hold a meeting soon to assess a mission to Apophis, telling Golos Rossii radio that it would invite NASA, the European Space Agency, the Chinese space agency and others to join the project once it is finalized.
When the 270-meter (885-foot) asteroid was first discovered in 2004, astronomers estimated the chances of it smashing into Earth in its first flyby in 2029 were as high as 1-in-37, but have since lowered their estimate.
Anatoly Perminov said the space agency will hold a meeting soon to assess a mission to Apophis, telling Golos Rossii radio that it would invite NASA, the European Space Agency, the Chinese space agency and others to join the project once it is finalized.
When the 270-meter (885-foot) asteroid was first discovered in 2004, astronomers estimated the chances of it smashing into Earth in its first flyby in 2029 were as high as 1-in-37, but have since lowered their estimate.
© Newscom
Wisconsin farmer Jim Lange loads a hopper of genetically modified corn. The blue color is insecticide covering kernels.
Wisconsin farmer Jim Lange loads a hopper of genetically modified corn. The blue color is insecticide covering kernels.
A report released by the Organic Center found that the amount of herbicides used on genetically engineered crops has increased in the past 10 years, not decreased as might be expected. Since many genetically engineered crops were modified so that farmers could spray Roundup, or Glyphosate, to kill the weeds in their fields but not the crops themselves, the expectation was that less herbicide would be required. But the new report found that this is not what happened.
The authors of the report, entitled "Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use," used US Department of Agriculture data to look at America's three largest genetically engineered crops - soybeans, corn, and cotton. They found that the amount of herbicides used on them has increased from 1996 to 2008 by approximately 7 or 8 percent, with a particularly sharp increase from 2005 on.
In August 1960, two mongrel dogs named Belka (Little Squirrel) and Strelka (Little Arrow) became the first living creatures to perform a space flight and return safely to Earth.
Spinal cord disorders like spina bifida arise during early development when future spinal cord cells growing in a flat layer fail to roll up into a tube. In the Dec. 6 issue of Nature Cell Biology, researchers from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine team with colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley to report a never-before known link between protein transport and mouse spinal cord development, a discovery that opens new doors for research on all spinal defects.
"What I love about this discovery is the total surprise -- we never before would have linked defects in the protein-secretion machinery and neural tube closure," says David Ginty, Ph.D., professor of neuroscience and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
The team originally set out to find new genes that instruct proper wiring of the hundred billion neurons in the nervous system. To do that, they randomly generated mutations in mouse genes, bred the mice and examined offspring for defects in nervous system development. One of the thousands of mouse embryos examined by graduate student Janna Merte had a spinal cord that had failed to close into a tube. Whereas conditions like spina bifida arise from failure of the tail end of the spinal cord to close, these new mice had a more severe condition, where the entire length of the spinal tube had failed to close.
"What I love about this discovery is the total surprise -- we never before would have linked defects in the protein-secretion machinery and neural tube closure," says David Ginty, Ph.D., professor of neuroscience and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
The team originally set out to find new genes that instruct proper wiring of the hundred billion neurons in the nervous system. To do that, they randomly generated mutations in mouse genes, bred the mice and examined offspring for defects in nervous system development. One of the thousands of mouse embryos examined by graduate student Janna Merte had a spinal cord that had failed to close into a tube. Whereas conditions like spina bifida arise from failure of the tail end of the spinal cord to close, these new mice had a more severe condition, where the entire length of the spinal tube had failed to close.
© Tracy Tran, David Ginty and Alex Kolodkin
A pyramidal neuron in the mouse cerebral cortex is labeled using the Golgi technique.
A pyramidal neuron in the mouse cerebral cortex is labeled using the Golgi technique.
Details of the observation in lab mice, published Dec. 24 in Nature, reveal that semaphorin, a protein found in the developing nervous system that guides filament-like processes, called axons, from nerve cells to their appropriate targets during embryonic life, apparently assumes an entirely different role later on, once axons reach their targets. In postnatal development and adulthood, semaphorins appear to be regulating the creation of synapses -- those connections that chemically link nerve cells.
"With this discovery we're able to understand how semaphorins regulate the number of synapses and their distribution in the part of the brain involved in conscious thought," says David Ginty, Ph.D., a professor in the neuroscience department at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. "It's a major step forward, we believe, in our understanding of the assembly of neural circuits that underlie behavior."
Comment: What is wrong with this picture? We are being told that the chance of Apophis hitting Earth is 1-in-250,000 - yet the Russians are considering spending the money to send it off course. That means one of two things: either the odds are much higher than we are told, or there is something else of concern out there and Apophis is just the cover story.