NASA in Final Preparations for Nov. 8 Asteroid Flyby. Answer simple question – win an iPad | Open Parachute. The catch – you are limited to 140 characters on Twitter. Oh, yes, also the entry must “explain the origins of the Universe.” Credit: Wikipedia Simple – should be plenty of entries for that! I guess the trick is in the syntax, as well as the science. Have a look at Otago University‘s Centre for Science Communication Twitter Competition for the details. Deadline is Tuesday 15 November. And, Professor Lawrence Krauss, author of the forthcoming book A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing , will then select the winning tweet from the five tweets receiving the highest number of votes.
I still have a week or so to solve that problem and send my entry. Thanks to: Best Science Tweet Competition. The Self Preservation of Grass | Digging the Dirt. The sun is hot outside, the cicadas are buzzing, the next door neighbour is mowing their lawn, the beginning of summer is here…. You step outside your house into the noise and heat of the day, and…. Mmmm…. that lovely smell of newly cut grass. Its fresh, green and very inviting. But the same cannot be said for the small, generally unseen members of our gardens. While we might love the smell of fresh cut grass; insects and other ground bugs don’t have the same reaction. This week Gerald Smith, Associate Professor at Victoria Universities Chemistry Department and Heritage Materials Science programme presented a paper to members of the New Zealand Conservators of Cultural Materials conference at the Carter Observatory in Wellington.
Smith and a team of chemists and heritage professionals, including weaving and fibre expert Rangi Te Kanawa, have been looking at the effect of acetic acid on Maori textile fibre. Coumarin is volatile, plus a natural anti fungal and pesticide. Visualising a curriculum. I’m always looking around for ways to improve my teaching, & my students’ learning. (The two go hand in hand. I might think I’m a good teacher, but unless my classroom practices improve my students’ learning experiences & outcomes, then I’m not. Not really.) Part of my search involves quite a bit of reading from the science education literature, and recently I read something that gave me a bit of a wake-up call. So what was the idea that made us that little bit uncomfortable, & shifted our thoughts on communicating science in the classroom?
I bought the book because I’d been wondering for a while how better to communicate with my first-years about my papers: what they’ll be doing, when they’ll be doing it, that sort of thing. We use paper outlines (syllabi – or should that be syllabuses??) Nilson suggests there are good reasons why many students don’t or, if they do, why they don’t seem to process the information particularly well.
What’s more, Sciblogs Events | SciBlogs.co.nz.
A Laser to Give the Universe a Hernia? Think back to 2008, when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was about to be switched on for the first time. Remember all those “micro-black hole,” “spacetime-ripping,” “stranglet-creating” doomsday headlines? TOP 5: Misconceptions About the LHC Although much of the hype was complete nonsense, those pesky physicists are at it again; they want to build a laser so powerful that it will literally rip spacetime apart.
(Keanu Reeves, over to you.) The headlines write themselves. What’s more, by giving spacetime a hernia, it is hoped that theorized “ghost particles” may spill from the fissure, providing evidence for the hypothesis that extra-dimensions exist and the vacuum of space isn’t a vacuum at all — it is in fact buzzing with virtual particles. SCIENCE CHANNEL: DIY Wormhole Such a laser could also help in understanding the nature of dark matter, the “missing” mass that is thought to pervade the entire observable Universe. Big “Frickin’ Laser Beams” WIDE ANGLE: Surfing Spacetime via The Telegraph. Boeing to Build Commercial Spacecraft at Kennedy, Create 550 Jobs. Steven Siceloff, John F. Kennedy Space Center The Boeing Company will set up Orbiter Processing Facility-3 at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to manufacture and assemble its CST-100 spacecraft for launches to the International Space Station under a newly signed agreement with NASA and Space Florida.
And that deal could provide a glimpse of how Kennedy's unique facilities will be used in the future. "It's a clear sign that NASA will continue to be an engine for growth," said Lori Garver, the agency's deputy administrator, in announcing the deal during a ceremony Oct. 31 at OPF-3. "Together we're going to win the future right here. " This deal, expected to produce 550 jobs by 2015, may be the first of several affecting other Kennedy facilities as the center sorts through what it needs for the future and what can be turned over to others. "Kennedy is moving forward," said Bob Cabana, the center's director. The White House also praised the agreement in a statement released Monday.
How Much Does the Internet Weigh? Search for Elusive Higgs Boson Particle on Hold Until 2012 | Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Particle Accelerator | Search for Higgs Boson New Physics. One of the world's most elusive particles will stay hidden a while longer, it seems. Scientists at the gigantic Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator at the CERN physics lab in Switzerland have wrapped up — at least for 2011 — the kind of experiments that might have shown a glimpse of the long-sought Higgs boson particle.
The Higgs boson, which has been theorized but never observed, is thought to give all other particles their mass. Physicists have been hoping to see signs of it ever since they began colliding particles at the LHC in 2008. Yet there is still no sign of the Higgs. "LHC is running fantastically, it's marvelous," said CERN particle physicist Christoph Rembser, who works on LHC's ATLAS experiment. Yet Rembser and others urged caution, saying that they knew in advance it would take time for enough data to accumulate to reveal new particles.
Switching tacks For 180 days this year, LHC was colliding protons together inside its 17-mile (27 kilometer) underground loop. Alternate ending: Living on without telomerase. Scientists of the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) have discovered an alternative mechanism for the extension of the telomere repeat sequence by DNA repair enzymes.
The ends of the chromosomes, the telomeres, are repetitive DNA sequences that shorten every time a cell divides during the process of duplicating its genome. Once the telomeres become very short the cell stops dividing. Thus, telomeres work like a cellular clock that keeps an eye on the number of cell divisions. And once the cell's time is over it can no longer divide. Circumventing this control mechanism is crucial for tumor cells in order to proliferate without limits. ALT-tumors can be identified by the presence of APBs on fluorescence microscopy images since normal cells do not have these structures. The German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ), employing over 2,500 staff members, is the largest biomedical research institute in Germany. Aussie scientists develop radioactivity-trapping nanofibers. High performance access to file storage Scientists from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have developed a new material for cleaning up contaminated water from radioactive leaks and medical processes.
The team mixed titanate nanofiber and nanotubes into a powder that, it says, will clean the radioactive particles in a ton of water with a single gram, provided it’s properly distributed or filtered. The outsides of the nanotubes are coated with silver oxide nanocrystals to hold and fix radioactive iodine ions, even if the material becomes wet again. "One gram of the nanofibers can effectively purify at least one ton of polluted water," Professor Zhu said in a statement. Professor Zhu makes exceedingly good nuke cleaners The materials were co-developed with the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) and Pennsylvania State University in the US.