I Would Sure Like To See Something Like The Hyperloop Or Evacuated Tube Technology Come To Be A Common

Spectroscopic Observations of The Atmospheres and possibly even The Surfaces of Extrasolar Planets and Extrasolar Satellites.

ESA’s next science mission to focus on nature of exoplanets

The nature of planets orbiting stars in other systems will be the focus for ESA’s fourth medium-class science mission, to be launched in mid 2028.

Ariel, the Atmospheric Remote‐sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large‐survey mission, was selected by ESA today as part of its Cosmic Vision plan.

The mission addresses one of the key themes of Cosmic Vision: What are the conditions for planet formation and the emergence of life?

Thousands of exoplanets have already been discovered with a huge range of masses, sizes and orbits, but there is no apparent pattern linking these characteristics to the nature of the parent star. In particular, there is a gap in our knowledge of how the planet’s chemistry is linked to the environment where it formed, or whether the type of host star drives the physics and chemistry of the planet’s evolution.

Ariel will address fundamental questions on what exoplanets are made of and how planetary systems form and evolve by investigating the atmospheres of hundreds of planets orbiting different types of stars, enabling the diversity of properties of both individual planets as well as within populations to be assessed.

Observations of these worlds will give insights into the early stages of planetary and atmospheric formation, and their subsequent evolution, in turn contributing to put our own Solar System in context.

“Ariel is a logical next step in exoplanet science, allowing us to progress on key science questions regarding their formation and evolution, while also helping us to understand Earth’s place in the Universe,” says Günther Hasinger, ESA Director of Science.

“Ariel will allow European scientists to maintain competitiveness in this dynamic field. It will build on the experiences and knowledge gained from previous exoplanet missions.”

The mission will focus on warm and hot planets, ranging from super-Earths to gas giants orbiting close to their parent stars, taking advantage of their well-mixed atmospheres to decipher their bulk composition.

Ariel will measure the chemical fingerprints of the atmospheres as the planet crosses in front of its host star, observing the amount of dimming at a precision level of 10–100 parts per million relative to the star.

As well as detecting signs of well-known ingredients such as water vapour, carbon dioxide and methane, it will also be able to measure more exotic metallic compounds, putting the planet in context of the chemical environment of the host star.

For a select number of planets, Ariel will also perform a deep survey of their cloud systems and study seasonal and daily atmospheric variations.

Ariel’s metre-class telescope will operate at visible and infrared wavelengths. It will be launched on ESA’s new Ariane 6 rocket from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou in mid 2028. It will operate from an orbit around the second Lagrange point, L2, 1.5 million kilometres directly ‘behind’ Earth as viewed from the Sun, on an initial four-year mission.

Following its selection by ESA’s Science Programme Committee, the mission will continue into another round of detailed mission study to define the satellite’s design. This would lead to the ‘adoption’ of the mission – presently planned for 2020 – following which an industrial contractor will be selected to build it.

Ariel was chosen from three candidates, competing against the space plasma physics mission Thor (Turbulence Heating ObserveR) and the high-energy astrophysics mission Xipe (X-ray Imaging Polarimetry Explorer).

Solar Orbiter, Euclid and Plato have already been selected as medium-class missions.

Glass Gem is a unique strain of corn with kernels that look like pieces of rainbow-colored glass. Source

Carl Barnes, an Oklahoma farmer, started growing older corn varieties to connect with his Cherokee heritage. 

He isolated ancestral strains Native American tribes lost in the 1800s when they were relocated to Oklahoma.

Soon he began exchanging ancient corn seed with growers from all over the country, while simultaneously saving and replanting seeds from the most colorful cobs.

This eventually resulted in rainbow-colored corn.

When the rainbow corn mixed with the traditional varieties it created new strains, displaying more vibrant colors and patterns over time.

Glass Gem is a flint corn, so it isn’t really eaten off the cob. It’s usually ground into cornmeal and used in tortillas or grits, but it can also be used to make popcorn.

If you love corn and rainbows, seeds can be purchased online for about $7.95.

Nice Scenery!  

Blanes, Catalunya -S Amazing World beautiful things

Climate Changes can possibly harm Human Health.

Climate Change Harms Human Health

Climate change is already making people sicker, according to a deep-dive written by Renee Cho for Columbia University's Earth Institute.

Excerpt:

Climate change is already making people sicker, according to a deep-dive written by Renee Cho for Columbia University’s Earth Institute on Monday.

Cho pointed to the example of doctors in Florida who are noticing that their patients run through prescriptions faster as conditions like asthma worsen due to heat waves.

Indeed, Florida doctors have observed enough instances of climate-related health issues that they’ve banded together to form Florida Clinicians for Climate Action, The Miami Herald reported in February.

“Being in Florida especially, you can’t not realize what’s happening to our climate. I see it right now on a day-to-day basis,” Dr. Cheryl Holder, president of the Florida State Medical Association, told The Herald.

Florida doctors have also noticed that heat waves coincide with more hospital visits due to heart failure, Florida Institute for Health Innovation head Roderick King told The Herald. He hopes to fund a study investigating the link.

In the Earth Institute article, Cho also mentioned the spread of diseases like Lyme disease, which have sickened people in Pennsylvania for the first time.

Cho’s analysis comes a week after an article published in Undark examining the spread of Lyme disease into Canada, where there were more than six times the number of Lyme disease cases reported in 2016 compared to 2009.

Project Blue for Alpha Centauri.

One Search for Planets in The Alpha_Centauri System is: Project Blue. https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/10/project-blue-aims-to-snap-the-first-picture-of-an-exoplanet-in-alpha-centauri/

Here's some more information on NASA's Juno_Mission.

Juno: Join the Mission!

Our Juno spacecraft may be millions of miles from Earth, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get involved with the mission and its science. Here are a few ways that you can join in on the fun:

Juno Orbit Insertion

This July 4, our solar-powered Juno spacecraft arrives at Jupiter after an almost five-year journey. In the evening of July 4, the spacecraft will perform a suspenseful orbit insertion maneuver, a 35-minute burn of its main engine, to slow the spacecraft by about 1,212 miles per hour so it can be captured into the gas giant’s orbit. Watch live coverage of these events on NASA Television:

Pre-Orbit Insertion Briefing Monday, July 4 at 12 p.m. EDT

Orbit Insertion Coverage Monday, July 4 at 10:30 p.m. EDT

Join Us On Social Media

Orbit Insertion Coverage Facebook Live Monday, July 4 at 10:30 p.m. EDT

Be sure to also check out and follow Juno coverage on the NASA Snapchat account!

JunoCam

The Juno spacecraft will give us new views of Jupiter’s swirling clouds, courtesy of its color camera called JunoCam. But unlike previous space missions, professional scientists will not be the ones producing the processed views, or even choosing which images to capture. Instead, the public will act as a virtual imaging team, participating in key steps of the process, from identifying features of interest to sharing the finished images online.

After JunoCam data arrives on Earth, members of the public will process the images to create color pictures. Juno scientists will ensure JunoCam returns a few great shots of Jupiter’s polar regions, but the overwhelming majority of the camera’s image targets will be chosen by the public, with the data being processed by them as well. Learn more about JunoCam HERE.

Follow our Juno mission on the web, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Here are 10_Things that Einstein got right.

10 Things Einstein Got Right

One hundred years ago, on May 29, 1919, astronomers observed a total solar eclipse in an ambitious  effort to test Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity by seeing it in action. Essentially, Einstein thought space and time were intertwined in an infinite “fabric,” like an outstretched blanket. A massive object such as the Sun bends the spacetime blanket with its gravity, such that light no longer travels in a straight line as it passes by the Sun.

This means the apparent positions of background stars seen close to the Sun in the sky – including during a solar eclipse – should seem slightly shifted in the absence of the Sun, because the Sun’s gravity bends light. But until the eclipse experiment, no one was able to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity, as no one could see stars near the Sun in the daytime otherwise.

The world celebrated the results of this eclipse experiment— a victory for Einstein, and the dawning of a new era of our understanding of the universe.

General relativity has many important consequences for what we see in the cosmos and how we make discoveries in deep space today. The same is true for Einstein’s slightly older theory, special relativity, with its widely celebrated equation E=mc². Here are 10 things that result from Einstein’s theories of relativity:

1. Universal Speed Limit

Einstein’s famous equation E=mc² contains “c,” the speed of light in a vacuum. Although light comes in many flavors – from the rainbow of colors humans can see to the radio waves that transmit spacecraft data – Einstein said all light must obey the speed limit of 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second. So, even if two particles of light carry very different amounts of energy, they will travel at the same speed.

This has been shown experimentally in space. In 2009, our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected two photons at virtually the same moment, with one carrying a million times more energy than the other. They both came from a high-energy region near the collision of two neutron stars about 7 billion years ago. A neutron star is the highly dense remnant of a star that has exploded. While other theories posited that space-time itself has a “foamy” texture that might slow down more energetic particles, Fermi’s observations found in favor of Einstein.

2. Strong Lensing

Just like the Sun bends the light from distant stars that pass close to it, a massive object like a galaxy distorts the light from another object that is much farther away. In some cases, this phenomenon can actually help us unveil new galaxies. We say that the closer object acts like a “lens,” acting like a telescope that reveals the more distant object. Entire clusters of galaxies can be lensed and act as lenses, too.

When the lensing object appears close enough to the more distant object in the sky, we actually see multiple images of that faraway object. In 1979, scientists first observed a double image of a quasar, a very bright object at the center of a galaxy that involves a supermassive black hole feeding off a disk of inflowing gas. These apparent copies of the distant object change in brightness if the original object is changing, but not all at once, because of how space itself is bent by the foreground object’s gravity.

Sometimes, when a distant celestial object is precisely aligned with another object, we see light bent into an “Einstein ring” or arc. In this image from our Hubble Space Telescope, the sweeping arc of light represents a distant galaxy that has been lensed, forming a “smiley face” with other galaxies.

3. Weak Lensing

When a massive object acts as a lens for a farther object, but the objects are not specially aligned with respect to our view, only one image of the distant object is projected. This happens much more often. The closer object’s gravity makes the background object look larger and more stretched than it really is. This is called “weak lensing.”

Weak lensing is very important for studying some of the biggest mysteries of the universe: dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter is an invisible material that only interacts with regular matter through gravity, and holds together entire galaxies and groups of galaxies like a cosmic glue. Dark energy behaves like the opposite of gravity, making objects recede from each other. Three upcoming observatories – Our Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, WFIRST, mission, the European-led Euclid space mission with NASA participation, and the ground-based Large Synoptic Survey Telescope — will be key players in this effort. By surveying distortions of weakly lensed galaxies across the universe, scientists can characterize the effects of these persistently puzzling phenomena.

Gravitational lensing in general will also enable NASA’s James Webb Space telescope to look for some of the very first stars and galaxies of the universe.

4. Microlensing

So far, we’ve been talking about giant objects acting like magnifying lenses for other giant objects. But stars can also “lens” other stars, including stars that have planets around them. When light from a background star gets “lensed” by a closer star in the foreground, there is an increase in the background star’s brightness. If that foreground star also has a planet orbiting it, then telescopes can detect an extra bump in the background star’s light, caused by the orbiting planet. This technique for finding exoplanets, which are planets around stars other than our own, is called “microlensing.”

Our Spitzer Space Telescope, in collaboration with ground-based observatories, found an “iceball” planet through microlensing. While microlensing has so far found less than 100 confirmed planets,  WFIRST could find more than 1,000 new exoplanets using this technique.

5. Black Holes

The very existence of black holes, extremely dense objects from which no light can escape, is a prediction of general relativity. They represent the most extreme distortions of the fabric of space-time, and are especially famous for how their immense gravity affects light in weird ways that only Einstein’s theory could explain.

In 2019 the Event Horizon Telescope international collaboration, supported by the National Science Foundation and other partners, unveiled the first image of a black hole’s event horizon, the border that defines a black hole’s “point of no return” for nearby material. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope all looked at the same black hole in a coordinated effort, and researchers are still analyzing the results.

6. Relativistic Jets

This Spitzer image shows the galaxy Messier 87 (M87) in infrared light, which has a supermassive black hole at its center. Around the black hole is a disk of extremely hot gas, as well as two jets of material shooting out in opposite directions. One of the jets, visible on the right of the image, is pointing almost exactly toward Earth. Its enhanced brightness is due to the emission of light from particles traveling toward the observer at near the speed of light, an effect called “relativistic beaming.” By contrast, the other jet is invisible at all wavelengths because it is traveling away from the observer near the speed of light. The details of how such jets work are still mysterious, and scientists will continue studying black holes for more clues. 

7. A Gravitational Vortex

Speaking of black holes, their gravity is so intense that they make infalling material “wobble” around them. Like a spoon stirring honey, where honey is the space around a black hole, the black hole’s distortion of space has a wobbling effect on material orbiting the black hole. Until recently, this was only theoretical. But in 2016, an international team of scientists using European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and our Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NUSTAR) announced they had observed the signature of wobbling matter for the first time. Scientists will continue studying these odd effects of black holes to further probe Einstein’s ideas firsthand.

Incidentally, this wobbling of material around a black hole is similar to how Einstein explained Mercury’s odd orbit. As the closest planet to the Sun, Mercury feels the most gravitational tug from the Sun, and so its orbit’s orientation is slowly rotating around the Sun, creating a wobble.

 8. Gravitational Waves

Ripples through space-time called gravitational waves were hypothesized by Einstein about 100 years ago, but not actually observed until recently. In 2016, an international collaboration of astronomers working with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors announced a landmark discovery: This enormous experiment detected the subtle signal of gravitational waves that had been traveling for 1.3 billion years after two black holes merged in a cataclysmic event. This opened a brand new door in an area of science called multi-messenger astronomy, in which both gravitational waves and light can be studied.

For example, our telescopes collaborated to measure light from two neutron stars merging after LIGO detected gravitational wave signals from the event, as announced in 2017. Given that gravitational waves from this event were detected mere 1.7 seconds before gamma rays from the merger, after both traveled 140 million light-years, scientists concluded Einstein was right about something else: gravitational waves and light waves travel at the same speed.

9. The Sun Delaying Radio Signals

Planetary exploration spacecraft have also shown Einstein to be right about general relativity. Because spacecraft communicate with Earth using light, in the form of radio waves, they present great opportunities to see whether the gravity of a massive object like the Sun changes light’s path.  

In 1970, our Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that Mariner VI and VII, which completed flybys of Mars in 1969, had conducted experiments using radio signals — and also agreed with Einstein. Using NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), the two Mariners took several hundred radio measurements for this purpose. Researchers measured the time it took for radio signals to travel from the DSN dish in Goldstone, California, to the spacecraft and back. As Einstein would have predicted, there was a delay in the total roundtrip time because of the Sun’s gravity. For Mariner VI, the maximum delay was 204 microseconds, which, while far less than a single second, aligned almost exactly with what Einstein’s theory would anticipate.

In 1979, the Viking landers performed an even more accurate experiment along these lines. Then, in 2003 a group of scientists used NASA’s Cassini Spacecraft to repeat these kinds of radio science experiments with 50 times greater precision than Viking. It’s clear that Einstein’s theory has held up! 

10. Proof from Orbiting Earth

In 2004, we launched a spacecraft called Gravity Probe B specifically designed to watch Einstein’s theory play out in the orbit of Earth. The theory goes that Earth, a rotating body, should be pulling the fabric of space-time around it as it spins, in addition to distorting light with its gravity.

The spacecraft had four gyroscopes and pointed at the star IM Pegasi while orbiting Earth over the poles. In this experiment, if Einstein had been wrong, these gyroscopes would have always pointed in the same direction. But in 2011, scientists announced they had observed tiny changes in the gyroscopes’ directions as a consequence of Earth, because of its gravity, dragging space-time around it.

BONUS: Your GPS! Speaking of time delays, the GPS (global positioning system) on your phone or in your car relies on Einstein’s theories for accuracy. In order to know where you are, you need a receiver – like your phone, a ground station and a network of satellites orbiting Earth to send and receive signals. But according to general relativity, because of Earth’s gravity curving spacetime, satellites experience time moving slightly faster than on Earth. At the same time, special relativity would say time moves slower for objects that move much faster than others.

When scientists worked out the net effect of these forces, they found that the satellites’ clocks would always be a tiny bit ahead of clocks on Earth. While the difference per day is a matter of millionths of a second, that change really adds up. If GPS didn’t have relativity built into its technology, your phone would guide you miles out of your way!

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

According to a recent study, adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) show an atypical amount of increased functional connectivity in brain networks that are crucial for social recognition. A group of researchers from San Diego State University compared the brain networks of 25 individuals...

Could the demand for a cure to autism be coming exclusively from neurotypical parents given the existence of advocates against a cure who...

It could be that most of The Demand for a Cure for Autism comes from Neurotypicals. Answer by Zem Jones:

To "cure" me would be to change the person I am into someone I don't recognise. To "cure" some of the issues caused by my autism, such as my heightened anxiety, or hyperacusis, or my bowel problems, would be a blessed relief. People who want a cure for autism do not understand what needs curing and generally they must be people who don't know autism from the inside, or people who have been taught that it is autism that is the whole problem when it is probably a sensory difference or comorbid condition or combination of them that causes the discomfort and distress they see on the outside. I have a friend who has a child with Kanner's autism. He also has epilepsy. She tells me that when his epilepsy is under control he thrives as if his presentation was more like Asperger's rather than Kanner's but she always knows when a big fit is coming because he regresses into classic autistic behaviours for days beforehand. To me this says the autism is not the problem for him and I suspect the same is true for most children diagnosed with classic autism - if they could tell us what the problem really is and we could cure that then how much better would their lives be? I think people who want to cure the autism itself don't even know what autism really is.

Could the demand for a cure to autism be coming exclusively from neurotypical parents given the existence of advocates against a cure who...

http://www.newsweek.com/2016/06/24/3d-printing-makerbot-stratasys-469704.html

The Age of 3D_Printing has indeed finally begun!