The freshly repaired and outfitted Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a new butterfly-shaped galaxy and wisps of stardust containing the elements of life being recycled into new galaxies, Nasa said on Wednesday.
The space agency released the first batch of images from the orbiting Hubble,repaired by shuttle astronauts in May,and said they show the once-doomed telescope has been reinvented yet again.
"The telescope was given an extreme makeover and now is significantly more powerful than ever, well-equipped to last into the next decade," Ed Weiler,associate administrator for Nasa's Science Mission Directorate, said at a news conference.
The newly installed Cosmic Origins Spectrograph got detail data on a galaxy called Markarian 817 being pulled into a supermassive black hole, and an exploded star in the Large Magellanic Cloud that are both spewing matter into space.
"We believe that most of the matter in space is actually wispy filaments between the galaxies," James Green of the University of Colorado told the news conference. Hubble is making these wisps visible for the first time.
The spectral imager detected oxygen,nitrogen and carbon."The elements of life are being produced in stars ... but they are also being distributed through the cosmos," Mr Green said.
Another star has jets, material being blasted out "from what probably is going to be a planetary system by the time this thing settles down", said Bob O'Connell of the University of Virginia.
In May, astronauts fixed two shortedout instruments and installed a new camera and the spectrograph.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Humans can learn to look with their ears, says study
With just a click of the tongue,anyone can learn to "see" with their ears, according to a new study of human echolocation.
Several animals, such as bats,dolphins, whales and some shrews, are known to use echolocation - sound waves bounced off nearby objects - to sense what's around them. Inspired by a blind man who also navigates using sound, a team of Spanish scientists has found evidence that suggests most humans can learn to echolocate. The team also confirmed that the so-called palate click - a sharp click made by depressing the tip of the tongue against the roof of the mouth - is the most effective noise for people to use.
Daniel Kish, executive director of World Access for the Blind in Huntington Beach, California, was born blind. He taught himself to "see" using palate clicks when he was a small child. Kish is able to mountain bike, hike in the wilderness and play ball games without traditional aids.
To better understand Kish's skill, Juan Antonio Martinez and his colleagues at the University of Alcala in Madrid trained 10 sighted students to echolocate.
"It was very difficult to persuade some people to take part in the experiments, because most [of our] colleagues though that our idea was absurd,"Martinez said.
The students were asked to close their eyes and make sounds until they could tell whether any objects were nearby. After just a few days of training,the students had all acquired basic echolocation skills, the scientists report in the March/April 2009 issue of the journal Acta Acustica .The team then recorded the students making three different noises: a "ch"noise made with the tongue, a "ch"made with the lips and the palate click.After studying the shape of the sound wave that each noise produced,Martinez and his colleagues found that the palate click gives the most detailed feedback about a person's surroundings.
For animals that echolocate, the skill is often key to survival, and they have specially adapted organs for the task,Martinez noted. Dolphins, for example,have special structures in their noses that can produce 200 clicks a second.Humans can manage just three or four clicks a second.
"It seems reasonably tough, perhaps tougher for those who can see, because we are very visual animals and don't tend to use that ability at all, so there is a 'visual bias' to overcome," said Peter Scheifele, a bioacoustician at the University of Connecticut who wasn't involved in the study.
The average person can develop good echolocation skills in about a month if he or she trains for one to two hours a day. Blind people are likely to pick up the skill more quickly, Martinez said.
In addition to aiding the blind,echolocation could help rescue teams locate people in foggy conditions or help firefighters quickly find exit points in smoky buildings.
The researchers add that artificial echolocation devices, such as wristbands that beep, can't yet outperform the simple tongue click.
"Such devices are worse than natural echolocation at present," Martinez said,"because they don't reproduce the complete haptic [touch] perception of the echoes".
Several animals, such as bats,dolphins, whales and some shrews, are known to use echolocation - sound waves bounced off nearby objects - to sense what's around them. Inspired by a blind man who also navigates using sound, a team of Spanish scientists has found evidence that suggests most humans can learn to echolocate. The team also confirmed that the so-called palate click - a sharp click made by depressing the tip of the tongue against the roof of the mouth - is the most effective noise for people to use.
Daniel Kish, executive director of World Access for the Blind in Huntington Beach, California, was born blind. He taught himself to "see" using palate clicks when he was a small child. Kish is able to mountain bike, hike in the wilderness and play ball games without traditional aids.
To better understand Kish's skill, Juan Antonio Martinez and his colleagues at the University of Alcala in Madrid trained 10 sighted students to echolocate.
"It was very difficult to persuade some people to take part in the experiments, because most [of our] colleagues though that our idea was absurd,"Martinez said.
The students were asked to close their eyes and make sounds until they could tell whether any objects were nearby. After just a few days of training,the students had all acquired basic echolocation skills, the scientists report in the March/April 2009 issue of the journal Acta Acustica .The team then recorded the students making three different noises: a "ch"noise made with the tongue, a "ch"made with the lips and the palate click.After studying the shape of the sound wave that each noise produced,Martinez and his colleagues found that the palate click gives the most detailed feedback about a person's surroundings.
For animals that echolocate, the skill is often key to survival, and they have specially adapted organs for the task,Martinez noted. Dolphins, for example,have special structures in their noses that can produce 200 clicks a second.Humans can manage just three or four clicks a second.
"It seems reasonably tough, perhaps tougher for those who can see, because we are very visual animals and don't tend to use that ability at all, so there is a 'visual bias' to overcome," said Peter Scheifele, a bioacoustician at the University of Connecticut who wasn't involved in the study.
The average person can develop good echolocation skills in about a month if he or she trains for one to two hours a day. Blind people are likely to pick up the skill more quickly, Martinez said.
In addition to aiding the blind,echolocation could help rescue teams locate people in foggy conditions or help firefighters quickly find exit points in smoky buildings.
The researchers add that artificial echolocation devices, such as wristbands that beep, can't yet outperform the simple tongue click.
"Such devices are worse than natural echolocation at present," Martinez said,"because they don't reproduce the complete haptic [touch] perception of the echoes".
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Supercomputers to pursue diseases
For over 10 years, Eric Schadt has been one of a handful of scientists blending mathematics, biology and supercomputers to pursue a new understanding of human biology, one that suggests that the mechanisms of human disease are far more complex than anticipated.
The chief scientific officer for Pacific Biosystems in Menlo Park, California,Schadt,44, is known for finding unorthodox solutions to problems - and for wearing shorts, sandals and rumpled polo shirts, even in business meetings.
When he and other scientists in his field began their work, biologists had long thought that common diseases such as cancer and heart disease could be characterised by identifying a single cause - perhaps an errant gene - and treated with a drug aimed at that gene,or, more likely, the protein the gene produced.
Some of the drugs developed that way, including Herceptin for breast cancer and antiretroviral drugs to treat Aids,were great successes. But that method has faltered. For instance, of drugs that enter human clinical trials,89 percent fail, according to a 2004 study in Nature Reviews ,usually because of unanticipated side effects.
The problem is no surprise to Schadt."It turns out that common diseases involve thousands of genes and proteins interacting on complex pathways," he said.
In 2003, Schadt was first noticed as a co-author of a paper in Nature that articulated the need to move beyond the impact of individual genes on disease and to create computer models of diseases that included the interaction of genes and proteins.
He went on to create some of those models in detail and to report on pilot projects for diabetes and heart disease that analysed in actual patients the complicated series of biochemical interactions that together form a metabolic pathway implicated in a disease. The results of his work offered new possibilities for developing drug treatments and diagnostic tests for predicting risk factors for disease.
Schadt has helped energise the growing field of systems biology, developed and championed by researchers that include Lee Hood, founder and president of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle; George Church, a geneticist at the Harvard Medical School; and Steven Friend, a geneticist who is the director of the non-profit Sage Bionetworks in Seattle and who is also Schadt's longtime colleague and co-author on many important studies.
"He has the ability to take what everyone knows and think about it in novel ways," Hood said."He is exceptional at thinking outside the box."
Schadt is a warm, intense man whose casual wardrobe has become legendary in classrooms and boardrooms. He was raised in the small town of Stevensville,Michigan, in a working class family that he said had little interest in science or in a university education.
After high school, he enlisted in the Air Force and was assigned to an elite rescue unit."I would never have known about biology or mathematics, except for an accident," he said.
While rappelling down a cliff he badly dislocated his shoulder, which forced him to leave his unit. Because his scores in an aptitude and an intelligence test were off the charts, the Air Force sent him to the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. He soon discovered mathematics and later genetics before earning a doctorate in biomathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles.
"My non-conventional background makes me non-conventional," Schadt said."I don't like to be told that I have to do things certain ways."
From 1999 until last month, Schadt worked as the head of genetics and bioin-ABOVE Dr Eric Schadt, chief scientific officer for Pacific Biosystems, in his lab in Menlo Park, California.SCIENCE TIMES formatics for Rosetta Inpharmatics, a company based in Seattle.
Founded in 1996 by Hood, Friend and the biologist and Nobel Laureate Lee Hartwell, Rosetta was bought by the pharmaceutical giant Merck in 2001 for $620 million. At Merck, the Rosetta team was provided with resources beyond those usually available in academia,Schadt said.
Rosetta built one of the fastest supercomputers in the drug industry,running 16 trillion calculations a second.Researchers also developed specialised chips to sequence and analyse tissues from throughout the body.
"Merck dropped a hell of a lot of money into this," Schadt said.
Peter Kim, president of Merck Research Laboratory, said,"The investment has paid off for us."
The company now has in clinical trials eight drugs that emerged out of Rosetta's platform, Kim said, with more than a dozen others in preclinical trials. He declined to provide specifics about the costs of the candidate drugs.
Kim said that Merck was developing some cancer drugs that would be directed at various subpopulations of patients rather than the one-size-fits-all approach that has been a hallmark of modern pharmaceutical companies."We're going to target specific networks and pathways," he said.
Despite Schadt's success, Merck disbanded Rosetta this summer and is closing the Seattle research facility as part of a plan to cut $4.2 billion (143.3 billion baht) and 7,200 jobs. But Merck is donating data, research and hardware from Rosetta to Sage Bionetworks, a non-profit founded this summer by Schadt and Friend, the co-founder of Rosetta, who just stepped down as senior vice-president for cancer research at Merck.The new organisation has received a $5 million (170.6 million baht) anonymous donation as well.
Friend, who is working full-time for Sage, wants to carry on Rosetta's work of modelling highly complex systems by adopting an open-source model such as the one used in software design, where thousands of people from around the world work together in a loose network.
For biology, the idea is to link up scientists and huge databases on everything from genetic pathways to patient records."The complexity of human biology is simply too huge to work out in a single company," Friend said."We need a contributor approach, like Twitter,which sets up a platform and is run by a few people that maybe a billion people contribute to."
Church, the Harvard geneticist, said,"The idea of Sage and open-source is fantastic, but losing Merck's resources may be a net loss to the science, at least in the short term."
When Schadt left Merck last month,he took on two jobs - as the co-director of Sage with Friend, and as the chief technology officer of Pacific Biosystems,a company founded in 2004.
He was attracted to the company's novel use of nanotechnology and lasers to sequence DNA and other molecules."It's like the best microscope in the world for accurate reads of DNA," said Schadt, who will head efforts to analyse data that is expected from Pacific Biosystems next year.
"What Eric is doing has a controversial side," said Dr Eric Topol, a cardiologist and the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in San Diego."First, is it going to really work? Also, we may yet find that some of the single gene markers are actually powerful predictive indicators for disease."
But Schadt said,"It's all about learning to connect the dots - lots and lots of dots."
The chief scientific officer for Pacific Biosystems in Menlo Park, California,Schadt,44, is known for finding unorthodox solutions to problems - and for wearing shorts, sandals and rumpled polo shirts, even in business meetings.
When he and other scientists in his field began their work, biologists had long thought that common diseases such as cancer and heart disease could be characterised by identifying a single cause - perhaps an errant gene - and treated with a drug aimed at that gene,or, more likely, the protein the gene produced.
Some of the drugs developed that way, including Herceptin for breast cancer and antiretroviral drugs to treat Aids,were great successes. But that method has faltered. For instance, of drugs that enter human clinical trials,89 percent fail, according to a 2004 study in Nature Reviews ,usually because of unanticipated side effects.
The problem is no surprise to Schadt."It turns out that common diseases involve thousands of genes and proteins interacting on complex pathways," he said.
In 2003, Schadt was first noticed as a co-author of a paper in Nature that articulated the need to move beyond the impact of individual genes on disease and to create computer models of diseases that included the interaction of genes and proteins.
He went on to create some of those models in detail and to report on pilot projects for diabetes and heart disease that analysed in actual patients the complicated series of biochemical interactions that together form a metabolic pathway implicated in a disease. The results of his work offered new possibilities for developing drug treatments and diagnostic tests for predicting risk factors for disease.
Schadt has helped energise the growing field of systems biology, developed and championed by researchers that include Lee Hood, founder and president of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle; George Church, a geneticist at the Harvard Medical School; and Steven Friend, a geneticist who is the director of the non-profit Sage Bionetworks in Seattle and who is also Schadt's longtime colleague and co-author on many important studies.
"He has the ability to take what everyone knows and think about it in novel ways," Hood said."He is exceptional at thinking outside the box."
Schadt is a warm, intense man whose casual wardrobe has become legendary in classrooms and boardrooms. He was raised in the small town of Stevensville,Michigan, in a working class family that he said had little interest in science or in a university education.
After high school, he enlisted in the Air Force and was assigned to an elite rescue unit."I would never have known about biology or mathematics, except for an accident," he said.
While rappelling down a cliff he badly dislocated his shoulder, which forced him to leave his unit. Because his scores in an aptitude and an intelligence test were off the charts, the Air Force sent him to the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. He soon discovered mathematics and later genetics before earning a doctorate in biomathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles.
"My non-conventional background makes me non-conventional," Schadt said."I don't like to be told that I have to do things certain ways."
From 1999 until last month, Schadt worked as the head of genetics and bioin-ABOVE Dr Eric Schadt, chief scientific officer for Pacific Biosystems, in his lab in Menlo Park, California.SCIENCE TIMES formatics for Rosetta Inpharmatics, a company based in Seattle.
Founded in 1996 by Hood, Friend and the biologist and Nobel Laureate Lee Hartwell, Rosetta was bought by the pharmaceutical giant Merck in 2001 for $620 million. At Merck, the Rosetta team was provided with resources beyond those usually available in academia,Schadt said.
Rosetta built one of the fastest supercomputers in the drug industry,running 16 trillion calculations a second.Researchers also developed specialised chips to sequence and analyse tissues from throughout the body.
"Merck dropped a hell of a lot of money into this," Schadt said.
Peter Kim, president of Merck Research Laboratory, said,"The investment has paid off for us."
The company now has in clinical trials eight drugs that emerged out of Rosetta's platform, Kim said, with more than a dozen others in preclinical trials. He declined to provide specifics about the costs of the candidate drugs.
Kim said that Merck was developing some cancer drugs that would be directed at various subpopulations of patients rather than the one-size-fits-all approach that has been a hallmark of modern pharmaceutical companies."We're going to target specific networks and pathways," he said.
Despite Schadt's success, Merck disbanded Rosetta this summer and is closing the Seattle research facility as part of a plan to cut $4.2 billion (143.3 billion baht) and 7,200 jobs. But Merck is donating data, research and hardware from Rosetta to Sage Bionetworks, a non-profit founded this summer by Schadt and Friend, the co-founder of Rosetta, who just stepped down as senior vice-president for cancer research at Merck.The new organisation has received a $5 million (170.6 million baht) anonymous donation as well.
Friend, who is working full-time for Sage, wants to carry on Rosetta's work of modelling highly complex systems by adopting an open-source model such as the one used in software design, where thousands of people from around the world work together in a loose network.
For biology, the idea is to link up scientists and huge databases on everything from genetic pathways to patient records."The complexity of human biology is simply too huge to work out in a single company," Friend said."We need a contributor approach, like Twitter,which sets up a platform and is run by a few people that maybe a billion people contribute to."
Church, the Harvard geneticist, said,"The idea of Sage and open-source is fantastic, but losing Merck's resources may be a net loss to the science, at least in the short term."
When Schadt left Merck last month,he took on two jobs - as the co-director of Sage with Friend, and as the chief technology officer of Pacific Biosystems,a company founded in 2004.
He was attracted to the company's novel use of nanotechnology and lasers to sequence DNA and other molecules."It's like the best microscope in the world for accurate reads of DNA," said Schadt, who will head efforts to analyse data that is expected from Pacific Biosystems next year.
"What Eric is doing has a controversial side," said Dr Eric Topol, a cardiologist and the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in San Diego."First, is it going to really work? Also, we may yet find that some of the single gene markers are actually powerful predictive indicators for disease."
But Schadt said,"It's all about learning to connect the dots - lots and lots of dots."
Sunday, September 6, 2009
CROWDS SWAMP GERMANY'S BIGGEST ELECTRONICS TRADE FAIR
Dominated by flat-panel televisions in every variation, the IFA consumer electronics trade fair began on Friday in Berlin, offering hundreds of thousands of European fans a look at the world's newest audio and video gadgets.
Chancellor ANgela Merkel ceremonially opened IFA at a Thursday evening reception at the city fairgrounds, where an industry leader told her the booming sector was all but recession-proof.
"Our sector is defying the crisis," said Rainer Kecker, head of the GFU German consumer electronics trade association that runs the event.
A total of 1,164 manufacturers from 60 nations are axhibiting at the event, which runs until September 9.
Many products are being promoted with claims of green technology inside through reduced use of heavy metals and other pollutants.
Cutting power use by plasma and liquid-crystal-display (LCD) television sets is a key aim of the industry.
LCD sets with light-emitting diode (LED) backlights are centrepieces at this year's show.
Backlights shine through the screens to create an image.
Makers say thatg converting backlights to LED light sources, instead of using fluorescent tubes, reduces electricity use by up to 40 per cent.
Merkel said many products introduced at IFA quickly become big sellers but she chided German broadcasters for their long delay in introducing high-definition television, which is only now starting in Germany.
"It was first demonstrated at IFA 24 years ago, she said.
Two big Japanese-based electronics groups, Sony and Panasonic, have said this week they are on the verge of launching home televisions that play three-dimensional (3D) recordings and broadcasts.
The illusion requires viewers to wear special spectacles.
But the two company's systems are currently incompatible, raising fears of a new format war in the industry.
Crowds of consumer-electronics fans swarmeld trough the fairground on Friday.
Europe's biggest annual gadgets event features 1,164 brands from 60 nations.
Temporary cinemas demonstrated big-screen 3D movies, whihc manufacturers Sony and Panasonic hope to introduce on home television screens next year.
However some executives grumbled that too much talk of the future was distracting the public from the new products that are actually on display, including high-definition televisions and DVD players.
Unlike trade-only events such as the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, IFA encourages crowd attendance, with masses of leaflets and plenty of products to try out, mostly held by steel cables to deter thieves.
"Would you like me to demonstrate our new television?" says one smiling hostess to anyone who will listen.
"Have you heard about our new coffee maker?" warbles another.
At IFA, nobody goes home without having accepted several free cups of hot coffee from the hostesses.
Celebrity chefs from German television food shows were manning many of the home-appliance booths, demonstrating labour-saving kitchen gear and handing out titbits.
Chancellor ANgela Merkel ceremonially opened IFA at a Thursday evening reception at the city fairgrounds, where an industry leader told her the booming sector was all but recession-proof.
"Our sector is defying the crisis," said Rainer Kecker, head of the GFU German consumer electronics trade association that runs the event.
A total of 1,164 manufacturers from 60 nations are axhibiting at the event, which runs until September 9.
Many products are being promoted with claims of green technology inside through reduced use of heavy metals and other pollutants.
Cutting power use by plasma and liquid-crystal-display (LCD) television sets is a key aim of the industry.
LCD sets with light-emitting diode (LED) backlights are centrepieces at this year's show.
Backlights shine through the screens to create an image.
Makers say thatg converting backlights to LED light sources, instead of using fluorescent tubes, reduces electricity use by up to 40 per cent.
Merkel said many products introduced at IFA quickly become big sellers but she chided German broadcasters for their long delay in introducing high-definition television, which is only now starting in Germany.
"It was first demonstrated at IFA 24 years ago, she said.
Two big Japanese-based electronics groups, Sony and Panasonic, have said this week they are on the verge of launching home televisions that play three-dimensional (3D) recordings and broadcasts.
The illusion requires viewers to wear special spectacles.
But the two company's systems are currently incompatible, raising fears of a new format war in the industry.
Crowds of consumer-electronics fans swarmeld trough the fairground on Friday.
Europe's biggest annual gadgets event features 1,164 brands from 60 nations.
Temporary cinemas demonstrated big-screen 3D movies, whihc manufacturers Sony and Panasonic hope to introduce on home television screens next year.
However some executives grumbled that too much talk of the future was distracting the public from the new products that are actually on display, including high-definition televisions and DVD players.
Unlike trade-only events such as the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, IFA encourages crowd attendance, with masses of leaflets and plenty of products to try out, mostly held by steel cables to deter thieves.
"Would you like me to demonstrate our new television?" says one smiling hostess to anyone who will listen.
"Have you heard about our new coffee maker?" warbles another.
At IFA, nobody goes home without having accepted several free cups of hot coffee from the hostesses.
Celebrity chefs from German television food shows were manning many of the home-appliance booths, demonstrating labour-saving kitchen gear and handing out titbits.
Friday, September 4, 2009
Nasa tracks large debris close to ISS
Nasa yesterday tracked a large piece of space debris set to pass close to the International Space Station (ISS) as astronauts prepared for the second of three spacewalks.
Astronauts Danny Olivas and Christer Fuglesang planned to camp out in the Quest airlock in order to acclimatize their bodies for their outing in space more than 12 hours later.
Mission Control was keeping a close watch on the remains of the three-yearold Ariane 5, a European space rocket,that was moving in an oval-shaped orbit.
The piece, around 19sq m in size,was expected to pass almost 3km from the ISS today.
Nasa Flight Director Office chief John McCullough said it did not appear that the ISS would have to move to avoid the space junk.
A final decision was to be made during the last hour of yesterday's spacewalk,but Mission Control was developing a contingency plan to potentially "reboost"the station-shuttle complex that currently holds 13 astronauts. The linked spacecraft are currently orbiting 354km above the Earth.
During their spacewalk, Mr Olivas and Sweden's Mr Fuglesang were to install a new liquid ammonia tank used to keep the ISS cool.
On Wednesday, Mr Olivas and fellow astronaut Nicole Stott performed the first spacewalk of the space shuttle Discovery 's nine-day mission at the ISS,removing an old tank from the outpost's truss. The tank will return to Earth with Discovery .The duo also fetched US and European experiment equipment from the orbiting station's Columbus laboratory that will be brought back to scientists on Earth.
Discovery 's mission is the fourth of five planned for the shuttle programme this year. The last is scheduled for November.
The two crews continued unloading equipment from the Leonardo MultiPurpose Logistics Module, a huge pressurised chamber carrying 7.5 tonnes of supplies, including new station crew quarters, a freezer, two research racks and a treadmill named after popular US talkshow comedian Stephen Colbert.
The freezer will store samples of blood,urine and other materials that will eventually be brought back to Earth for study on the effects of zero-gravity.
Discovery , which blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Friday is due to return to Earth on Sept 10.
The mission is the 128th for the space shuttle programme, and the 30th mission to the ISS.
Once the Discovery mission is complete, just six more shuttle flights remain before Nasa's three shuttles are retired in September next year.
Astronauts Danny Olivas and Christer Fuglesang planned to camp out in the Quest airlock in order to acclimatize their bodies for their outing in space more than 12 hours later.
Mission Control was keeping a close watch on the remains of the three-yearold Ariane 5, a European space rocket,that was moving in an oval-shaped orbit.
The piece, around 19sq m in size,was expected to pass almost 3km from the ISS today.
Nasa Flight Director Office chief John McCullough said it did not appear that the ISS would have to move to avoid the space junk.
A final decision was to be made during the last hour of yesterday's spacewalk,but Mission Control was developing a contingency plan to potentially "reboost"the station-shuttle complex that currently holds 13 astronauts. The linked spacecraft are currently orbiting 354km above the Earth.
During their spacewalk, Mr Olivas and Sweden's Mr Fuglesang were to install a new liquid ammonia tank used to keep the ISS cool.
On Wednesday, Mr Olivas and fellow astronaut Nicole Stott performed the first spacewalk of the space shuttle Discovery 's nine-day mission at the ISS,removing an old tank from the outpost's truss. The tank will return to Earth with Discovery .The duo also fetched US and European experiment equipment from the orbiting station's Columbus laboratory that will be brought back to scientists on Earth.
Discovery 's mission is the fourth of five planned for the shuttle programme this year. The last is scheduled for November.
The two crews continued unloading equipment from the Leonardo MultiPurpose Logistics Module, a huge pressurised chamber carrying 7.5 tonnes of supplies, including new station crew quarters, a freezer, two research racks and a treadmill named after popular US talkshow comedian Stephen Colbert.
The freezer will store samples of blood,urine and other materials that will eventually be brought back to Earth for study on the effects of zero-gravity.
Discovery , which blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Friday is due to return to Earth on Sept 10.
The mission is the 128th for the space shuttle programme, and the 30th mission to the ISS.
Once the Discovery mission is complete, just six more shuttle flights remain before Nasa's three shuttles are retired in September next year.
Andromeda galaxy is a "cosmic cannibal"
Earth's nearest major galactic neighbour is a cosmic cannibal.And it is heading this way.
Astronomers have long suspected that Andromeda is a space predator, consuming dwarf galaxies that wander too close. Now, cosmic detectives are doing a massive search of the neighbourhood and have found proof of Andromeda's sordid past: They have spotted leftovers in Andromeda's wake.
Early results of a massive telescope scan of Andromeda and its surroundings found about a half-dozen remnants of Andromeda's galactic appetite. Stars and dwarf galaxies that got too close to Andromeda were ripped from their usual surroundings.
"What we're seeing right now are the signs of cannibalism," said the study's lead author Alan McConnachie of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia."We're finding things that have been destroyed ... partly digested remains."
Andromeda and the Milky Way, Earth's galaxy, are the two big dogs of this galactic neighbourhood. Andromeda is about 2.5 million light years away. A light year is about 9.4 trillion kilometres.
Astronomers have known for decades that galaxies consume each other, some-times violently, sometimes just creating new mega-galaxies. But this study is different because "of the scale of the cannibalism, and we've found evidence directly in front of our eyes", said coauthor Mike Irwin, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge in England.
And just because Andromeda consumes a galaxy, it does not make the victim disappear, he said.
The cannibalistic behaviour often just strips stars from where they had been,rearranging the night sky. Most of a galaxy is empty space, so there is little if any crashing of stars and planets going on, Mr Irwin said
Astronomers have long suspected that Andromeda is a space predator, consuming dwarf galaxies that wander too close. Now, cosmic detectives are doing a massive search of the neighbourhood and have found proof of Andromeda's sordid past: They have spotted leftovers in Andromeda's wake.
Early results of a massive telescope scan of Andromeda and its surroundings found about a half-dozen remnants of Andromeda's galactic appetite. Stars and dwarf galaxies that got too close to Andromeda were ripped from their usual surroundings.
"What we're seeing right now are the signs of cannibalism," said the study's lead author Alan McConnachie of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia."We're finding things that have been destroyed ... partly digested remains."
Andromeda and the Milky Way, Earth's galaxy, are the two big dogs of this galactic neighbourhood. Andromeda is about 2.5 million light years away. A light year is about 9.4 trillion kilometres.
Astronomers have known for decades that galaxies consume each other, some-times violently, sometimes just creating new mega-galaxies. But this study is different because "of the scale of the cannibalism, and we've found evidence directly in front of our eyes", said coauthor Mike Irwin, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge in England.
And just because Andromeda consumes a galaxy, it does not make the victim disappear, he said.
The cannibalistic behaviour often just strips stars from where they had been,rearranging the night sky. Most of a galaxy is empty space, so there is little if any crashing of stars and planets going on, Mr Irwin said
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Researchers train minds to move matter
Learning to move a computer cursor or robotic arm with nothing but thoughts can be no different from learning how to play tennis or ride a bicycle,according to a new study of how brains and machines interact.
The research, which was conducted in monkeys but is expected to apply to humans, involves a fundamental redesign of brain-machine experiments.
In previous studies, the computer interfaces that translate thoughts into movements are given a new set of instructions each day - akin to waking up each morning with a new arm that you have to figure out how to use all over again.
In the new experiments, monkeys learned how to move a computer cursor with their thoughts using just one set of instructions and an unusually small number of brain cells that deliver instructions for performing movements the same way each day.
"This is the first demonstration that the brain can form a motor memory to control a disembodied device in a way that mirrors how it controls its own body,"said Jose M. Carmena, an assistant professor of computer and cognitive science at the University of California,Berkeley, who led the research.
The experiments were described yesterday in the journal PloS Biology .The results are very "dramatic and surprising", said Eberhard E. Fetz, an expert in brain-machine-interface technology at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the research."It goes to show the brain is smarter than we thought."
In this experiment, as in previous ones, electrodes are implanted directly into the brain to record activity from a population of 75 to 100 cells that help guide movement. As animals move a hand or arm, the activity pattern of those cells is recorded.
Later the limb is immobilised, and researchers can predict what the animal wants to do with it by looking at the cells' activity; that pattern is then sent to a socalled decoder - a computer algorithm that transforms the brain signals into commands that a machine can carry out.
But because of the variability caused by motions of the electrodes and changes in brain cells, researchers have assumed that a new population of cells would be in control of the movements each day. They recalibrated the decoder each day, and the subject had to relearn the task - move a cursor, reach with a robot arm every time.
Carmena wondered what would happen if he kept the decoder constant as it measured the activity of just a few neurons observed to fire reliably with a given task. Could an initially random group of 10 to 15 neurons,with practise, be coaxed into forming a stable motor memory? Could the brain, not the decoder, do the learning?
Carmena's team trained two monkeys to use a joystick to move a computer cursor to blue targets on a circle and extracted a decoder for the movements. The animals then practised moving the cursor with their thoughts for 19 days.
In the beginning, the cursor trajectories were hit or miss. But over time the pattern of cell firing stabilised,and the monkeys developed a stable mental model for cursor control.
This is exactly how you learn to ride a bicycle or play tennis, Carmena said. At first your movements are uncoordinated. But with time, a motor memory is engraved in your brain.
Carmena then decided to test the memory in his monkeys. He changed the decoder. Instead of moving the cursor to blue targets, for example, the colour changed to yellow.
Within a couple of days, the monkeys learned the new task using the same small group of cells, he said.Moreover, they could switch back and forth between the tasks with ease. They had two mental maps that did not interfere with one another.
This is similar to learning to play tennis on a clay court and switching to a grass court or like switching between a mountain bike and a motorbike, he said.The brain can acquire multiple skills using the same set of neurons to carry out different movements.
If brain machine interfaces can be made safe enough for use in humans - a feat that is by no means guaranteed - paralysed people may one day operate prosthetic limbs as naturally as they use their own limbs, Carmena said.
The research, which was conducted in monkeys but is expected to apply to humans, involves a fundamental redesign of brain-machine experiments.
In previous studies, the computer interfaces that translate thoughts into movements are given a new set of instructions each day - akin to waking up each morning with a new arm that you have to figure out how to use all over again.
In the new experiments, monkeys learned how to move a computer cursor with their thoughts using just one set of instructions and an unusually small number of brain cells that deliver instructions for performing movements the same way each day.
"This is the first demonstration that the brain can form a motor memory to control a disembodied device in a way that mirrors how it controls its own body,"said Jose M. Carmena, an assistant professor of computer and cognitive science at the University of California,Berkeley, who led the research.
The experiments were described yesterday in the journal PloS Biology .The results are very "dramatic and surprising", said Eberhard E. Fetz, an expert in brain-machine-interface technology at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the research."It goes to show the brain is smarter than we thought."
In this experiment, as in previous ones, electrodes are implanted directly into the brain to record activity from a population of 75 to 100 cells that help guide movement. As animals move a hand or arm, the activity pattern of those cells is recorded.
Later the limb is immobilised, and researchers can predict what the animal wants to do with it by looking at the cells' activity; that pattern is then sent to a socalled decoder - a computer algorithm that transforms the brain signals into commands that a machine can carry out.
But because of the variability caused by motions of the electrodes and changes in brain cells, researchers have assumed that a new population of cells would be in control of the movements each day. They recalibrated the decoder each day, and the subject had to relearn the task - move a cursor, reach with a robot arm every time.
Carmena wondered what would happen if he kept the decoder constant as it measured the activity of just a few neurons observed to fire reliably with a given task. Could an initially random group of 10 to 15 neurons,with practise, be coaxed into forming a stable motor memory? Could the brain, not the decoder, do the learning?
Carmena's team trained two monkeys to use a joystick to move a computer cursor to blue targets on a circle and extracted a decoder for the movements. The animals then practised moving the cursor with their thoughts for 19 days.
In the beginning, the cursor trajectories were hit or miss. But over time the pattern of cell firing stabilised,and the monkeys developed a stable mental model for cursor control.
This is exactly how you learn to ride a bicycle or play tennis, Carmena said. At first your movements are uncoordinated. But with time, a motor memory is engraved in your brain.
Carmena then decided to test the memory in his monkeys. He changed the decoder. Instead of moving the cursor to blue targets, for example, the colour changed to yellow.
Within a couple of days, the monkeys learned the new task using the same small group of cells, he said.Moreover, they could switch back and forth between the tasks with ease. They had two mental maps that did not interfere with one another.
This is similar to learning to play tennis on a clay court and switching to a grass court or like switching between a mountain bike and a motorbike, he said.The brain can acquire multiple skills using the same set of neurons to carry out different movements.
If brain machine interfaces can be made safe enough for use in humans - a feat that is by no means guaranteed - paralysed people may one day operate prosthetic limbs as naturally as they use their own limbs, Carmena said.
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