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| December 17, 2013 |
 NASA sees 'some success' with space station fix Washington (AFP) Dec 16, 2013 - NASA engineers are still trying to fix an International Space Station cooling problem and have not yet decided whether spacewalks will be necessary, the US space agency said Monday. The NASA team on the ground is "having some degree of success" at working on a faulty valve that has disrupted the equipment cooling system aboard the orbiting research outpost, said ISS Missions Operations Integ ... more |  |
 Arctic storms that churn seas and melt ice more common than thought Columbus, Ohio (UPI) Dec 16, 2013 - Arctic storms swirling around the top of the world are more common than previously thought with about 1,900 in the first decade of the century, researchers say. As they churn across the top of the globe each year they leave warm water and air in their wakes, melting sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, scientists at Ohio State University reported Wednesday. An analysis of arctic storms f ... more |  |
NASA Finds Reducing Salt Is Bad For Glacial Health Pasadena CA (JPL) Dec 17, 2013 - A new NASA-led study has discovered an intriguing link between sea ice conditions and the melting rate of Totten Glacier, the glacier in East Antarctica that discharges the most ice into the ocean. The discovery, involving cold, extra salty water - brine - that forms within openings in sea ice, adds to our understanding of how ice sheets interact with the ocean, and may improve our ability to fo ... more |  |
 Russia to send woman to space in 2014 Moscow (Voice of Russia) Dec 16, 2013 - Russia will send a female cosmonaut into space for the first time in two decades next year, an official at the space training centre said Wednesday. Yelena Serova, 36 and a professional cosmonaut, "is getting ready for a space flight in the second half of 2014," said Alexei Temerov, an official at Russia's Star City space training centre. Russia will this year celebrate the 50th anniversar ... more |  |
 Astronomers solve temperature mystery of planetary atmospheres Seattle WA (SPX) Dec 16, 2013 - An atmospheric peculiarity the Earth shares with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune is likely common to billions of planets, University of Washington astronomers have found, and knowing that may help in the search for potentially habitable worlds. First, some history: It's known that air grows colder and thinner with altitude, but in 1902 a scientist named Leon Teisserenc de Bort, using i ... more |  |
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 Fast Radio Bursts Might Come From Nearby Stars Cambridge MA (SPX) Dec 16, 2013 - First discovered in 2007, "fast radio bursts" continue to defy explanation. These cosmic chirps last for only a thousandth of a second. The characteristics of the radio pulses suggested that they came from galaxies billions of light-years away. However, new work points to a much closer origin - flaring stars within our own galaxy. "We propose that fast radio bursts aren't as exotic as astr ... more |  |
 Inertial Sensor Head shaken but not disturbed Paris (ESA) Dec 16, 2013 - The Engineering Qualification Model of the Inertial Sensor Head (ISH) for LISA Pathfinder has passed a significant milestone. The integration of all the components of the ISH with perfect alignment, and the successful completion of qualification tests mark the first time that a heavy test mass inertial sensor has been assembled and successfully tested. There are two Inertial Sensor Heads ( ... more |  |
 Clay-Like Minerals Found on Icy Crust of Europa Pasadena CA (JPL) Dec 16, 2013 - A new analysis of data from NASA's Galileo mission has revealed clay-type minerals at the surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa that appear to have been delivered by a spectacular collision with an asteroid or comet. This is the first time such minerals have been detected on Europa's surface. The types of space rocks that deliver such minerals typically also often carry organic materials. " ... more |  |
 Mitsubishi Electric Awarded Contract for GOSAT-2 Satellite System Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Dec 16, 2013 - Mitsubishi Electric Corporation has been selected as the contractor to supply the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) with the Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite-2 (GOSAT-2) satellite system, which is slated to launch in 2017. Mitsubishi Electric expects to be formally authorized to proceed with the development in April, after completing an engineering contract with JAXA to finaliz ... more |  |
 Gaia is positioned for its star-mapping launch on an Arianespace Soyuz Kourou, French Guiana (ESA) Dec 16, 2013 - The payload "stack" is now taking shape for this month's Arianespace launch of Gaia - Europe's billion-star mapper satellite, which is to be lofted by a Soyuz vehicle on December 19 from French Guiana. As the latest milestone in a now well-established processing flow for Arianespace's medium-lift Soyuz, Gaia was positioned atop the launcher's Fregat upper stage during activity in the Space ... more |  |
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Astronomers discover first noble gas molecules in space London, UK (SPX) Dec 16, 2013 - Noble gas molecules have been detected in space for the first time in the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant, by astronomers at UCL. Led by Professor Mike Barlow (UCL Department of Physics and Astronomy) the team used ESA's Herschel Space Observatory to observe the Crab Nebula in far infrared light. Their measurements of regions of cold gas and dust led them to the serendipitous discovery of ... more |  |
 Recipe for a Universe Vienna, Austria (SPX) Dec 16, 2013 - When soup is heated, it starts to boil. When time and space are heated, an expanding universe can emerge, without requiring anything like a "Big Bang". This phase transition between a boring empty space and an expanding universe containing mass has now been mathematically described by a research team at the Vienna University of Technology, together with colleagues from Harvard, the MIT and Edinb ... more |  |
 Orbital samples with sight-saving potential Houston TX (SPX) Dec 16, 2013 - Those who travel to space are rewarded with a beautiful sight - planet Earth. But the effects of space travel on the human sense of sight aren't so beautiful. More than 30 percent of astronauts who returned from two-week space shuttle missions and 60 percent who spent six months aboard the International Space Station were diagnosed with eye problems. Two recent investigations examined mech ... more |  |
Programming smart molecules Cambridge, MA (SPX) Dec 17, 2013 - Computer scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have joined forces to put powerful probabilistic reasoning algorithms in the hands of bioengineers. In a new paper presented at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference on December 7, Ryan P. Adams and Nils Napp ... more |  |
 Bio-inspired method to grow high-quality graphene for high-end electronic devices Singapore (SPX) Dec 17, 2013 - A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS), led by Professor Loh Kian Ping, who heads the Department of Chemistry at the NUS Faculty of Science, has successfully developed an innovative one-step method to grow and transfer high-quality graphene on silicon and other stiff substrates, opening up opportunities for graphene to be used in high-value applications that are cu ... more |  |
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 Rising mountains dried out Central Asia Stanford CA (SPX) Dec 17, 2013 - A record of ancient rainfall teased from long-buried sediments in Mongolia is challenging the popular idea that the arid conditions prevalent in Central Asia today were caused by the ancient uplift of the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. Instead, Stanford scientists say the formation of two lesser mountain ranges, the Hangay and the Altai, may have been the dominant drivers of climate in ... more |  |
East Antarctica is sliding sideways San Francisco CA (SPX) Dec 17, 2013 - It's official: East Antarctica is pushing West Antarctica around. Now that West Antarctica is losing weight--that is, billions of tons of ice per year--its softer mantle rock is being nudged westward by the harder mantle beneath East Antarctica. The discovery comes from researchers led by The Ohio State University, who have recorded GPS measurements that show West Antarctic bedrock is bein ... more |  |
 Raytheon BBN Technologies and GrammaTech collaborate to help U.S. government prevent malware in IT devices Boston MA (SPX) Dec 17, 2013 - Raytheon BBN Technologies and GrammaTech, Inc. are collaborating on a $4.8 million contract award under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's VET program. Raytheon BBN Technologies is a wholly owned subsidiary of Raytheon. The VET (Vetting Commodity IT Software and Firmware) program seeks to help U.S. government agencies address the threat of malicious code and hidden "backdoor" ... more |  |
 China's Jade Rabbit lunar rover sends first photos from moon Beijing (AFP) Dec 16, 2013 - China's Jade Rabbit rover vehicle sent back photos from the moon Sunday after the first lunar soft landing in nearly four decades marked a huge advance in the country's ambitious space programme. The Yutu, or Jade Rabbit, was deployed at 4:35 am (2035 GMT Saturday), several hours after the Chang'e-3 probe landed on the moon, said the official news agency Xinhua. The rover and lander beg ... more |  |
 Think you know what alien life may look like? Be careful! Washington DC (UPI) Dec 16, 2013 - The search for planets outside our solar system has been much in the news for the past couple of years, with most of the attention, and questions, focused on "habitable" planets - do they exist, and if so are at least some in fact harboring life? And the biggest question of all: What might that life look like? While scientists might argue over what would make a distant exoplanet ... more |  |
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