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bananas's JournalAstronauts Could Survive Mars Radiation for Long Stretches, Rover Study Suggests
Astronauts Could Survive Mars Radiation for Long Stretches, Rover Study Suggests
by Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior Writer | December 04, 2012 10:51am ET
SAN FRANCISCO — Astronauts could endure a long-term, roundtrip Mars mission without receiving a worryingly high radiation dose, new results from NASA's Mars rover Curiosity suggest.
A mission consisting of a 180-day outbound cruise, a 600-day stay on Mars and another 180-day flight back to Earth would expose an astronaut to a total radiation dose of about 1.1 sieverts (units of radiation) if it launched now, according to measurements by Curiosity's Radiation Assessment Detector instrument, or RAD.
That's a pretty manageable number, researchers said.
"The rough ballpark average for an astronaut career limit is on the order of a sievert," RAD principal investigator Don Hassler, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., said in a presentation here Monday (Dec. 3) at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. [Video: Curiosity Takes First Cosmic Ray Sample on Surface]
"NASA has a much more complicated determination for that, but ESA [the European Space Agency], for example, generally uses 1 sievert for that number," he added.
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Anadarko’s Kerr-McGee Held Liable in Tronox Spinoff
Source: Bloomberg
Anadarko Petroleum Corp. (APC) and its Kerr-McGee unit acted improperly in the 2005 spinoff of Tronox Inc. and may have to pay as much as $14 billion related to environmental cleanup and health claims, a judge ruled.
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According to the complaint in the lawsuit, Anadarko’s Kerr-McGee unit was part of a two-step transaction that defrauded the Environmental Protection Agency of money to clean the polluted sites. The U.S., as Tronox’s largest creditor, intervened on behalf of the EPA.
The U.S. had sought $25 billion to clean 2,772 polluted sites and compensate about 8,100 tort claimants. A trust set up to pay plaintiffs calls for 88 percent of a judgment to go to trusts for cleanup, according to court papers. The remainder is to go to toxin claimants.
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Kerr-McGee, founded in 1929 near Oklahoma City, left a toxic legacy that stretches from uranium mines in Navajo territories in the West to wood-treatment plants in Mississippi and Pennsylvania, the EPA said in court papers.
Labor activist Karen Silkwood died in a car accident in 1974 after claiming that Kerr-McGee was contaminating her and others at its nuclear materials plant near Crescent, Oklahoma. That plant, the Cimarron facility, is one of the sites for which the U.S. has been seeking cleanup costs, according to court papers.
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The lawsuit is Tronox Inc. v. Anadarko Petroleum Corp., 09-ap-01198; the bankruptcy is Tronox Inc., 09-bk-10156, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
To contact the reporters on this story: Steven Church in Wilmington, Delaware, at [email protected]; Tiffany Kary in New York at [email protected]; Bradley Olson in Houston at [email protected]
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andrew Dunn at [email protected]
Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-12/anadarko-s-kerr-mcgee-held-liable-in-tronox-spinoff.html
It's disgusting to read about Kerr-McGee's ongoing criminal activities, they should have been put out of business long ago.
And it's disgusting to read "died in a car accident" instead of "murdered by criminals".
Scientists demonstrate quantum phenomenon for the first time using a plastic film (BEC)
Scientists demonstrate quantum phenomenon for the first time using a plastic film
Dec 11, 2013
For the first time, scientists at IBM Research have demonstrated a complex quantum mechanical phenomenon known as Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC), using a luminescent polymer (plastic) similar to the materials in light emitting displays used in many of today's smartphones.
This discovery has potential applications in developing novel optoelectronic devices including energy-efficient lasers and ultra-fast optical switches—critical components for powering future computer systems to process massive Big Data workloads. The use of a polymer material and the observation of BEC at room temperature provides substantial advantages in terms of applicability and cost.
IBM scientists around the world are focused on an ambitious data centric exascale computing program, which is aimed at developing systems that can process massive data workloads fifty times faster than today. Such a system will need optical interconnects capable of high-speed processing of Petabytes to Exabytes of Big Data. This will enable high-performance analytics for: energy grids, life sciences, financial modelling, business intelligence and weather and climate forecasting.
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A Bose-Einstein Condensate is a peculiar state of matter which occurs when a dilute gas of particles (bosons) are cooled to nearly absolute zero (-273 Celsius, -459 Fahrenheit). At this temperature intriguing macroscopic quantum phenomena occur in which the bosons all line up like ballroom dancers.
In 1995 this was demonstrated for the first time at these extreme temperatures, but today in a paper appearing in Nature Materials, IBM scientists have achieved the same state at room temperature using a thin non-crystalline polymer film developed by chemists at the University of Wuppertal in Germany.
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Former whistleblowers: open letter to intelligence employees after Snowden
Former whistleblowers: open letter to intelligence employees after Snowden
Blowing the whistle on powerful factions is not a fun thing to do, but it is the last avenue for truth, balanced debate and democracy
Thomas Drake, Daniel Ellsberg, Katharine Gun, Peter Kofod, Ray McGovern, Jesselyn Radack, Coleen Rowley
theguardian.com, Wednesday 11 December 2013 09.45 EST
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At least since the aftermath of September 2001, western governments and intelligence agencies have been hard at work expanding the scope of their own power, while eroding privacy, civil liberties and public control of policy. What used to be viewed as paranoid, Orwellian, tin-foil hat fantasies turned out post-Snowden, to be not even the whole story.
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By and large the media have paid scant attention to this, even as more and more courageous, principled whistleblowers stepped forward. The unprecedented persecution of truth-tellers, initiated by the Bush administration and severely accelerated by the Obama administration, has been mostly ignored, while record numbers of well-meaning people are charged with serious felonies simply for letting their fellow citizens know what's going on.
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Since the summer of 2013, the public has witnessed a shift in debate over these matters. The reason is that one courageous person: Edward Snowden. He not only blew the whistle on the litany of government abuses but made sure to supply an avalanche of supporting documents to a few trustworthy journalists. The echoes of his actions are still heard around the world – and there are still many revelations to come.
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You can be part of the solution; provide trustworthy journalists – either from old media (like this newspaper) or from new media (such as WikiLeaks) with documents that prove what illegal, immoral, wasteful activites are going on where you work.
There IS strength in numbers. You won't be the first – nor the last – to follow your conscience and let us know what's being done in our names. Truth is coming – it can't be stopped. Crooked politicians will be held accountable. It's in your hands to be on the right side of history and accelerate the process.
Courage is contagious.
Signed by:
Peter Kofod, ex-Human Shield in Iraq (Denmark)
Thomas Drake, whistleblower, former senior executive of the NSA (US)
Daniel Ellsberg, whistleblower, former US military analyst (US)
Katharine Gun, whistleblower, former GCHQ (UK)
Jesselyn Radack, whistleblower, former Department of Justice (US)
Ray McGovern, former senior CIA analyst (US)
Coleen Rowley, whistleblower, former FBI agent (US)
NASA's Juno video shows a starship's view of Earth and the moon
Source: NBC
A new video shows Earth and the moon whirling through space, as seen by NASA's Jupiter-bound Juno spacecraft in October.
"If Captain Kirk of the USS Enterprise said, 'Take us home, Scotty,' this is what the crew would see," the Southwest Research Institute's Scott Bolton, principal investigator for the $1.1 billion Juno mission, said in a NASA news release. “In the movie, you ride aboard Juno as it approaches Earth and then soars off into the blackness of space. No previous view of our world has ever captured the heavenly waltz of Earth and moon."
This clip even has an original score — by the composer Vangelis, no less.
Pale blue dot
Ever since its launch in 2011, Juno has been making its way to a 2016 encounter with Jupiter. To get there, the bus-sized spacecraft took advantage of a gravitational slingshot maneuver on Oct. 9 that came within 350 miles (560 kilometers) of Earth's surface. The two-minute video released on Tuesday shows the view from four cameras that are mounted near the tip of one of Juno's solar arrays. The cameras are designed to track faint stars and get the right orientation for Juno's magnetic-field sensors. In October, they were pressed into duty to watch Earth pass by.
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Read more: http://www.nbcnews.com/science/nasas-juno-video-shows-earth-moon-starship-would-see-them-2D11723752`
Mars One Crowdfunding Campaign 2018 Mars Mission
http://igg.me/at/marsone/x/4366300
The Mars One foundation will establish a permanent human settlement on Mars. This Indiegogo campaign will help us jumpstart the first major step in our project -- a private Mars Lander and Satellite mission in 2018. Your participation will help fund the 2018 mission and above all, show our partners & sponsors that the world is ready for this to happen. Mars One gives you the opportunity to participate in this historic project. This can be your mission to Mars!
Mars One plans unmanned mission for 2018
Source: CBS
A privately funded unmanned Mars mission will launch in 2018, officials with the non-profit Mars One foundation announced Tuesday. The mission will include an orbiting communications relay station, a lander equipped with a robotic arm, water generating gear, experimental thin-film solar panels and student experiments.
Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp, Mars One founder and CEO, told reporters the foundation has signed contracts with two major aerospace firms, Lockheed Martin and Surrey Satellite Technology, to develop mission concept studies, a first step toward eventual construction and launch.
The lander will be based on the design of the 2007 Phoenix Mars lander that Lockheed Martin developed for NASA. The communications satellite -- the first such "geostationary" comsat in orbit around the red planet -- will incorporate technologies developed by Surrey and used in a variety of operational spacecraft.
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The unmanned Mars One technology demonstration mission is a precursor to the foundation's seemingly quixotic long-range goal of launching humans to Mars starting in 2025, assuming funding and technology hurdles can be overcome. The foundation envisions launching follow-on crews of four astronauts every two years to establish a permanent outpost on the red planet.
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Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/mars-one-plans-unmanned-mission-for-2018/
Seymour Hersh on DemocracyNow: Obama "Cherry Picked" Intel on Syrian Chemical Attack (Part 1 of 2)
democracynow
Published on Dec 9, 2013
http://www.democracynow.org - Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh joins us to discuss his new article casting doubt on the veracity of the Obama administration's claims that only the Assad regime could have carried out the chemical attacks in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta earlier this year. Writing in the London Review of Books, Hersh argues that the Obama administration "cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad." The administration failed to disclose it knew Syrian rebels in the al-Nusra front had the ability to produce chemical weapons. Evidence obtained in the days after the attack was also allegedly distorted to make it appear it was gathered in real time.
Full transcript at http://www.democracynow.org/2013/12/9/seymour_hersh_obama_cherry_picked_intelligence
Nuclear war would 'end civilization' with famine: study
Source: Agence France-Presse
A nuclear war between India and Pakistan would set off a global famine that could kill two billion people and effectively end human civilization, a study said Tuesday.
Even if limited in scope, a conflict with nuclear weapons would wreak havoc in the atmosphere and devastate crop yields, with the effects multiplied as global food markets went into turmoil, the report said.
The Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and Physicians for Social Responsibility released an initial peer-reviewed study in April 2012 that predicted a nuclear famine could kill more than a billion people.
In a second edition, the groups said they widely underestimated the impact in China and calculated that the world's most populous country would face severe food insecurity.
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Read more: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hRgYyfu_3ZzSXs1o2ZjE43fV3F5Q?docId=d8137f0e-fad1-4034-9569-b1fab419a8cc
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