Trivia

The trick to curing hiccups is to get the nerves that regulate breathing synchronized. 1. Hold your breath as long as you can, then exhale very gradually. 2. Deep slow breathing. 3. Nonstop, slow sipping of a glass of warm water. 4. Taking a teaspoon of granulated sugar.

The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.

If you toss a penny 10,000 times, it will not be heads 5,000 times, but more like 4,950. The heads picture weighs more, so it ends upon the bottom.

The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified.

Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them used to burn their houses down – hence the expression “to get fired.”

New ESO Image of a Dark Molecular Cloud

This newly released image from the 2.2-meter MPG/ESO telescope shows the dark molecular cloud cataloged as LDN1774.

Rather than showing spectacular objects, some of the most surprising images of the Universe instead focus on emptiness. This new image from the 2.2-meter MPG/ESO telescope shows dark tentacles swirling outwards from a dark, blank spot of space in the center of the frame, particularly conspicuous against the dense peppering of bright gold and red stars across the rest of the image.

This region is not a hole in the cosmos, or an empty patch of sky. The dark lanes are actually made up of thick, opaque dust lying between us and the packed star field behind it. This obscuring dust forms part of a dark molecular cloud, cold and dense areas where large quantities of dust and molecular gas mingle and block the visible light emitted by more distant stars.

It is still unclear how these clouds form, but they are thought to be the very early stages of new star formation — in the future, the subject of this image may well collapse inwards on itself to form a new star system.

Although the cloud in this image is a fairly anonymous resident of the nearby Universe — cataloged as LDN1774 — one of the most famous examples of a molecular cloud is the very similar Barnard 68, which lies some 500 light-years away from us. Barnard 68 has been observed extensively using ESO telescopes, both in visible (eso9924a) and infrared light (eso9934, eso0102a). As shown in these different images, it is possible to probe through dark cosmic dust using infrared light, but visible-light observations such as those shown in this VLT image cannot see beyond the smokescreen.

This image was taken by the Wide Field Imager, an instrument mounted on ESO’s 2.2-metre MPG/ESO telescope at La Silla, Chile.

Source: ESO

Image: ESO

Scientists Find Evidence of Briny Water at Gale Crater

Data from NASA’s Curiosity rover reveals transient liquid water and water activity at Gale Crater on Mars.

Fayatteville, Arkansas – Data collected on Mars by NASA’s Curiosity rover and analyzed by University of Arkansas researchers indicate that water, in the form of brine, may exist under certain conditions on the planet’s surface.

The finding, published in the May 2015 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, is based on almost two years of weather data collected from an impact crater near the planet’s equatorial region. Vincent Chevrier, an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas Center for Space and Planetary Sciences, and Edgard G. Rivera-Valentin, a former Doctoral Academy Fellow at the center who is now a scientist at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, were members of the team that analyzed the data as part of a grant from NASA.

“What we demonstrated is that under specific circumstances, for a few hours per day, you can have the right conditions to form liquid brines on the surface of Mars,” Chevrier said.

The existence of briny water may explain a phenomenon observed by Mars orbiters called “recurring slope lineae,” which are dark streaks on slopes that appear and grow during the planet’s warm season.

Water is also necessary for the existence of life as we know it, and on Earth, organisms adapt and thrive in extremely briny conditions. Chevrier, however, believes that conditions on Mars are too harsh to support life.

“If we combine observations with the thermodynamics of brine formation and the current knowledge about terrestrial organisms, is it possible to find a way for organisms to survive in Martian brines? My answer is no,” he said.

Mars is cold, extremely dry, and has 200 times lower atmospheric pressure than Earth. Any pure water on the surface would freeze or boil away in minutes. If it sounds alien for water to both freeze and boil, that’s because it is alien to Earth, but not so much for Mars because of the planet’s very low atmospheric pressure.

However, in 2008, NASA’s Phoenix lander identified perchlorate salts in polar soil samples. Perchlorates are rare on Earth, but they are known to absorb moisture from the atmosphere and lower the freezing temperature of water. The widespread existence of perchlorates makes liquid water possible on Mars.

The Curiosity rover confirmed the existence of perchlorates in equatorial soil, and provided detailed observations of relative humidity and ground temperature in all Martian seasons. With that data in hand, Chevrier and Rivera-Valentin were able to conclude that liquid brines can exist today on Mars. Future Mars missions could sample for the brines directly.

Though the briny water on Mars may not support life, it does have implications for future manned missions that would need to create life-sustaining resources such as water and oxygen on the planet, Chevrier said. There is also the possibility that life once existed on ancient Mars.

“We need to understand the earliest environment,” he added. “What was happening 4 billion years ago?”

Publication: F. Javier Martín-Torres, et al., “Transient liquid water and water activity at Gale crater on Mars,” Nature Geoscience 8, 357–361 (2015); doi:10.1038/ngeo2412

Source: University of Arkansas

Image: NASA

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Moves Closer to the Lunar Surface

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is now within 20 kilometers of the lunar South Pole, the closest the spacecraft has ever been to the lunar surface.

On Monday, May 4, 2015 flight controllers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland performed two station keeping burns to change LRO’s orbit. The new orbit allows LRO to pass within 20 km (12 miles) of the South Pole and 165 km (103 miles) over the North Pole.

“We’re taking LRO closer to the moon than we’ve ever done before, but the maneuver is similar to all other station keeping maneuvers, so the mission operations team knows exactly what to do,” said Steve Odendahl, LRO mission manager from NASA Goddard.

To optimize science return, team members made the decision to change the orbit after determining that the new orbit configuration poses no danger to the spacecraft. LRO can operate for many years at this orbit.

The new orbit enables exciting new science and will see improved measurements near the South Pole. Two of the instruments benefit significantly from the orbit change. The return signal from the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) laser shots will become stronger, producing a better signal. LOLA will obtain better measurements of specific regions near the South Pole that have unique illumination conditions. Diviner will be able to see smaller lunar features through the collection of higher resolution data.

“The lunar poles are still places of mystery where the inside of some craters never see direct sunlight and the coldest temperatures in the solar system have been recorded,” said John Keller, LRO project scientist at NASA Goddard. “By lowering the orbit over the South Pole, we are essentially magnifying the sensitivity of the LRO instruments which will help us understand the mechanisms by which water or other volatiles might be trapped there.”

Launched on June 18, 2009, LRO has collected a treasure trove of data with its seven powerful instruments, making an invaluable contribution to our knowledge about the moon. LRO is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

For more information on LRO visit: http://www.nasa.gov/lro

Source: Nancy Neal Jones, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Image: NASA/GSFC/SVS

Deep Dielectric Charging May Alter Evolution of Lunar Soil

Data from the Cosmic Ray Telescope and the Advanced Composition Explorer has revealed that energetic charged particles (such as galactic cosmic rays and solar energetic particles) can penetrate deep within the lunar surface, possibly altering the properties of the soil.

The moon appears to be a tranquil place, but modeling done by University of New Hampshire (UNH) and NASA scientists suggests that, over the eons, periodic storms of solar energetic particles may have significantly altered the properties of the soil in the moon’s coldest craters through the process of sparking—a finding that could change our understanding of the evolution of planetary surfaces in the solar system.

The study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets, proposes that high-energy particles from uncommon, large solar storms penetrate the moon’s frigid, polar regions and electrically charge the soil. The charging may create sparking, or electrostatic breakdown, and this “breakdown weathering” process has possibly changed the very nature of the moon’s polar soil, suggesting that permanently shadowed regions, which hold clues to our solar system’s past, may be more active than previously thought.

“Decoding the history recorded within these cold, dark craters requires understanding what processes affect their soil,” said Andrew Jordan of the UNH Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space and lead author of the paper. “To that end, we built a computer model to estimate how high-energy particles detected by the Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation (CRaTER) instrument on board NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) can create significant electric fields in the top layer of lunar soil.”

The scientists also used data from the Electron, Proton, and Alpha Monitor (EPAM) on the Advanced Composition Explorer. CRaTER, which is led by scientists from UNH, and EPAM both detect high-energy particles, including solar energetic particles (SEPs). SEPs, after being created by solar storms, stream through space and bombard the moon. These particles can buildup electric charges faster than the soil can dissipate them and may cause sparking, particularly in the polar cold of permanently shadowed regions—unique lunar sites as cold as minus 240 degrees Celsius (minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit) that may contain water ice.

“Sparking is a process in which electrons, released from the soil grains by strong electric fields, race through the material so quickly that they vaporize little channels,” said Jordan. Repeated sparking with each large solar storm could gradually grow these channels large enough to fragment the grains, disintegrating the soil into smaller particles of distinct minerals, Jordan and colleagues hypothesize.

The next phase of this research will involve investigating whether other instruments aboard LRO could detect evidence for sparking in lunar soil, as well as improving the model to better understand the process and its consequences.

“If breakdown weathering occurs on the moon, then it has important implications for our understanding of the evolution of planetary surfaces in the solar system, especially in extremely cold regions that are exposed to harsh radiation from space,” said coauthor Timothy Stubbs of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Coauthors from the UNH CRaTER team include Jody Wilson, Nathan Schwadron, Harlan Spence and Colin Joyce.

The University of New Hampshire, founded in 1866, is a world-class public research university with the feel of a New England liberal arts college. A land, sea and space-grant university, UNH is the state’s flagship public institution, enrolling 12,300 undergraduate and 2,200 graduate students.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center developed and manages the LRO mission. LRO’s current science mission is implemented for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate sponsored LRO’s initial one-year exploration mission that concluded in September 2010. The research was supported in part by NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. It was also funded by the DREAM2 SSERVI science team (Dynamic Response of the Environments at Asteroids, the Moon, and the moons of Mars).

Publication: Deep dielectric charging of regolith within the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions,” Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets, Volume 119, Issue 8, August 2014, Pages 1806–1821; DOI: 10.1002/2014JE004648

Source: David Sims, Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space, University of New Hampshire

Image: NASA

Detian Falls

Detian Falls on the border of China and Vietnam.It is currently the 4th largest waterfall along a national border after Iguazu Falls,Victoria Falls and Niagara Falls

Kalemegdan

Kalemegdan Park,Belgrade,Serbia

Eiffel Tower

Eiffel Tower,Paris

Panarea

Panarea,Italy