Solar System Scope What It's Like to Be an Astronaut: Amazing Videos of the View From Space | Wired Science If you're the sort of person who enjoys looking out of airplane windows, watching landscapes pass and Earth unfold, then see these videos from the International Space Station. Assembled from photographic sequences captured in April and May, the videos show Earth from an orbital perspective. Continents pass in minutes. Glories like the northern lights and a solar eclipse fit in their entirety within one person's sight. Online gamers crack AIDS enzyme puzzle By Agence France-PresseSunday, September 18, 2011 14:41 EDT PARIS — Online gamers have achieved a feat beyond the realm of Second Life or Dungeons and Dragons: they have deciphered the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus that had thwarted scientists for a decade. The exploit is published on Sunday in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, where — exceptionally in scientific publishing — both gamers and researchers are honoured as co-authors. Their target was a monomeric protease enzyme, a cutting agent in the complex molecular tailoring of retroviruses, a family that includes HIV. Figuring out the structure of proteins is vital for understanding the causes of many diseases and developing drugs to block them. But a microscope gives only a flat image of what to the outsider looks like a plate of one-dimensional scrunched-up spaghetti. This is where Foldit comes in. It is believed to be the first time that gamers have resolved a long-standing scientific problem.
Movie Quotes and Inside Jokes, 99 Life Hacks to make your life easier! The Rosette Nebula A Beginner's Guide to DSLR Astrophotography This book on CD-ROM for beginning astrophotographers explains how to take beautiful images with your digital single lens reflex (DSLR) camera using simple step-by-step techniques that anyone can learn. You will see how easy it is to take great pictures with very modest equipment and basic methods that are within everyone's ability. With this book you will learn how to take amazing images of the night sky with your DSLR camera. Get Started in DSLR Astrophotography Today! Click here to learn more about the book or to order it now! Gene Therapy May Thwart HIV This past year, a Berlin man, Timothy Brown, became world famous as the first—and thus far only—person to apparently have been cured of his HIV infection. Brown's HIV disappeared after he developed leukemia and doctors gave him repeated blood transfusions from a donor who harbored a mutated version of a receptor the virus uses to enter cells. Now, researchers report promising results from two small gene-therapy studies that mimic this strategy, hinting that the field may be moving closer to a cure that works for the masses. At the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in Chicago, Illinois, this weekend, researchers reported preliminary results from tests of a novel treatment in 15 HIV-infected people designed to free them from the need to take antiretroviral drugs. The trial participants had T cells removed from their blood and then modified in the laboratory with a designer enzyme engineered by Sangamo BioSciences in Richmond, California.
The Making of a Mind-Blowing Space Photo | Wired Science One late night in 2007, Rogelio Bernal Andreo and his wife were driving down Highway 1 along California’s Lost Coast, when his wife opened the moon roof. What spread out above them looked nothing like the mauve sky near their Sunnyvale home. “It was like the Milky Way was in front of us,” said Andreo, a former early eBay employee, who runs a Spanish-language internet company. “It looked like it was gonna fall on us.” He pulled out his digital SLR camera and spent two hours trying to capture the vast galaxy. “I started to look on the internet and see all these pictures, really gorgeous pictures,” Andreo said. Two years of intensive study, rigorous practice, and perhaps $10,000 of equipment later, he knows. Thanks to cheaper high-quality digital cameras and editing equipment, creating beautiful images of galaxies, nebulae and star clusters is now within the reach of anyone with a few thousand dollars to spend. But that doesn’t mean the photos aren’t “real.” His equipment list is long.
China to launch Heavenly Palace space test unit next week StereoMan » Hubble photos M64 “Black Eye” Galaxy click the picture 17 million light-years from Earth lies Messier 64, otherwise known as the Black Eye Galaxy, or Sleeping Beauty. Discovered in 1779 by Edward Pigott, astronomers thought for centuries that it was a fairly ordinary spiral galaxy. But recent observations, including those of the Hubble telescope, have revealed something truly extraordinary about M64. While it is true that all of the stars are rotating in the same direction, it appears that the gases in the outer regions of the galaxy are going the other way! Astronomers believe that perhaps a billion or so years ago, a smaller galaxy was sucked into M64. Ant Nebula This Hubble photo of the dying star Menzel 3, popularly known as the “Ant Nebula” because of its shape, gives us a dramatic new insight into how our own sun is likely to expire: not with a whimper, but a bang. There are many other sunlike stars that have been observed in their death dance, but none is quite like the Ant Nebula.
Earthquake Scientists On Trial In Italy | Kiwis Last updated 10:46 21/09/2011 The public will lose out if court cases like the one faced by scientists, accused of failing to warn residents about a deadly Italian earthquake, push experts into safer fields, says a New Zealand researcher. GNS scientists and quake experts are among a number of New Zealand seismologists who have signed a petition supporting the seven scientists and other experts, who are charged with manslaughter. The New Zealand scientists had joined about 5200 international researchers in signing the petition. The seven Italian scientists and other experts are accused of giving "inexact, incomplete and contradictory information" about whether smaller tremors felt by L'Aquila residents in the six months before the April 6, 2009, magnitude 6.3 quake should have constituted grounds for a quake warning. The defendants are facing manslaughter charges over the deaths of 308 people who were killed in the tremor. He said he signed the petition "to basically say this is ridiculous".
Current position of the ISS