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The Other Mexicans
Source: National Geographic News
Posted on:
Tuesday, Jun 25, 2013, 8:07am
Views: 13
Source: http://www.labspaces.net/128772/The_Other_Mexicans_
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Public release date: 24-Jun-2013
Share ] Contact: Diana Lutz
dlutz@wustl.edu
314-935-5272
Washington University in St. Louis
A film director looking for a location where a movie about Mars could be shot might consider the Atacama Desert, one of the harshest landscapes the planet has to offer. Due to the accidents of its geography, Atacama is the driest place on Earth. Some scientists believe there was no rain to speak of in part of the Atacama between 1570 and 1971. With little moisture in the air its salt lakes, sand dunes and lava flows broil or freeze and are blasted by ultraviolet radiation.
The conditions make the Atacama a splendid place to test instruments for future Mars missions.
"If you're practicing to find life on Mars, you don't want to go to a lush environment," says Alian Wang, PhD, research professor in the earth and planetary sciences Washington University in St. Louis and a participant in NASA's ASTEP program to advance the technology and techniques used in planetary exploration.
This month, under the auspices of ASTEP, a Carnegie-Mellon University rover named Zoe set out into the Atacama. It is scheduled to spend the next four weeks traveling between waypoints with interesting geology and analyzing soil samples, both ones from the surface and ones dredged up from deep underground.
Subsurface samples pulled up by a meter-long drill and dumped into sample cups carried by a carousal to be examined by a laser Raman spectrometer called the Mars Microbeam Raman Spectrometer, or MMRS.
Wang, the principle investigator for the spectrometer, also remotely operates it from her office in St. Louis. Her colleague Jie Wei, PhD, a research scientist in earth and planetary sciences, is traveling with the rover in the Atacama.
Wang says they are hoping Zoe will drive 40 to 50 kilometer and drill 10 to 15 boreholes.
Ready for prime time
The MMRS in its current compact, robust configuration is the culmination of 18 years of work at WUSTL and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), led first by former WUSTL professor Larry Haskin, and now by Wang.
The MMRS was originally scheduled to ride on the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity but after NASA lost two missions on approach to Mars the Polar Lander and the Climate Orbiter the MER rovers were downsized and offloaded. The Raman spectrometer, because it was the newest analytical instruments on the rovers, was a casualty of this process.
However, it is now the top candidate among instruments being considered for a 2020 mission to Mars and Wang has just received $3 million from NASA to make sure that it will be mission ready.
What's special about Raman? The spectrometer shines a laser on the sample and measures the energy of the photons the sample scatters back. "Compared to other spectroscopies," Wang says, "Raman spectroscopy returns a very clear spectrum. So if you analyze a mixture (rock or soil) you see peaks for each mineral phase and organic molecule. You don't have to do complicated spectral processing to identify what's in the sample. So compared to other spectroscopies," Wang says, " its very diagnostic. "
Don't fail me now
The journeys in the Atacama are intended is to test the MMRS (and other instruments) until they fail. If a power system is going to fail on Mars, it will probably fail as well in the Atacama. And far better it should fail while still Earth-bound, than when it is 34 million miles away on the Martian surface. Last year Wang was part of a team that tested instruments in the desert, without the rover, boring holes with hand-held equipment and operating the instruments manually.
Wang was the PI for three of the instruments. "We found some problems we never expected," she says.
"The heat generated by cooling the Raman spectrometer's detector is dissipated by a cooling fan. When we came to the Atacama we were sometimes as high as 4,500 meters (14,800 feet) above sea level. The air is so thin at that altitude, the fan labored to get rid of the heat. That's one lesson we learned."
"Of course it will be different on Mars, "she says, " where the atmosphere is much thinner, but we learned where the instrument is vulnerable. "
On the other hand the laser in the Raman probe has to stay within a certain temperature range to operate properly. "But when we came to Laguna Lejia suddenly we weren't getting a strong enough signal," Wang says. "We started checking and discovered the laser power was only a fifteenth of its normal value. It was so windy and cold the laser couldn't warm up. We had to run it longer before taking measurements to get a good signal. So we learned we had to work out a better temperature control for this laser."
Both discoveries were invaluable since they will allow the team to safeguard against these problems so that they don't occur on Mars.
It's alive!
After the Viking landers failed to find evidence of life on Mars in the late 1970s, a group of scientists took duplicate instruments into the Atacama, where they, too, failed to find evidence life. They did, however, encounter oxidizing soil conditions in the Atacama that destroyed organic molecules, a leading hypothesis for the apparent sterility of the Martian soils.
The Atacama soil tests done last year confirmed the presence of microorganisms in the desert soils. The presence of life in the Atacama does not of course guarantee its presence on Mars. But it does show that if there is subsurface life, the instruments will be able to detect it.
###
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Public release date: 24-Jun-2013 Share ] Contact: Diana Lutz
dlutz@wustl.edu
314-935-5272
Washington University in St. Louis
A film director looking for a location where a movie about Mars could be shot might consider the Atacama Desert, one of the harshest landscapes the planet has to offer. Due to the accidents of its geography, Atacama is the driest place on Earth. Some scientists believe there was no rain to speak of in part of the Atacama between 1570 and 1971. With little moisture in the air its salt lakes, sand dunes and lava flows broil or freeze and are blasted by ultraviolet radiation.
The conditions make the Atacama a splendid place to test instruments for future Mars missions.
"If you're practicing to find life on Mars, you don't want to go to a lush environment," says Alian Wang, PhD, research professor in the earth and planetary sciences Washington University in St. Louis and a participant in NASA's ASTEP program to advance the technology and techniques used in planetary exploration.
This month, under the auspices of ASTEP, a Carnegie-Mellon University rover named Zoe set out into the Atacama. It is scheduled to spend the next four weeks traveling between waypoints with interesting geology and analyzing soil samples, both ones from the surface and ones dredged up from deep underground.
Subsurface samples pulled up by a meter-long drill and dumped into sample cups carried by a carousal to be examined by a laser Raman spectrometer called the Mars Microbeam Raman Spectrometer, or MMRS.
Wang, the principle investigator for the spectrometer, also remotely operates it from her office in St. Louis. Her colleague Jie Wei, PhD, a research scientist in earth and planetary sciences, is traveling with the rover in the Atacama.
Wang says they are hoping Zoe will drive 40 to 50 kilometer and drill 10 to 15 boreholes.
Ready for prime time
The MMRS in its current compact, robust configuration is the culmination of 18 years of work at WUSTL and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), led first by former WUSTL professor Larry Haskin, and now by Wang.
The MMRS was originally scheduled to ride on the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity but after NASA lost two missions on approach to Mars the Polar Lander and the Climate Orbiter the MER rovers were downsized and offloaded. The Raman spectrometer, because it was the newest analytical instruments on the rovers, was a casualty of this process.
However, it is now the top candidate among instruments being considered for a 2020 mission to Mars and Wang has just received $3 million from NASA to make sure that it will be mission ready.
What's special about Raman? The spectrometer shines a laser on the sample and measures the energy of the photons the sample scatters back. "Compared to other spectroscopies," Wang says, "Raman spectroscopy returns a very clear spectrum. So if you analyze a mixture (rock or soil) you see peaks for each mineral phase and organic molecule. You don't have to do complicated spectral processing to identify what's in the sample. So compared to other spectroscopies," Wang says, " its very diagnostic. "
Don't fail me now
The journeys in the Atacama are intended is to test the MMRS (and other instruments) until they fail. If a power system is going to fail on Mars, it will probably fail as well in the Atacama. And far better it should fail while still Earth-bound, than when it is 34 million miles away on the Martian surface. Last year Wang was part of a team that tested instruments in the desert, without the rover, boring holes with hand-held equipment and operating the instruments manually.
Wang was the PI for three of the instruments. "We found some problems we never expected," she says.
"The heat generated by cooling the Raman spectrometer's detector is dissipated by a cooling fan. When we came to the Atacama we were sometimes as high as 4,500 meters (14,800 feet) above sea level. The air is so thin at that altitude, the fan labored to get rid of the heat. That's one lesson we learned."
"Of course it will be different on Mars, "she says, " where the atmosphere is much thinner, but we learned where the instrument is vulnerable. "
On the other hand the laser in the Raman probe has to stay within a certain temperature range to operate properly. "But when we came to Laguna Lejia suddenly we weren't getting a strong enough signal," Wang says. "We started checking and discovered the laser power was only a fifteenth of its normal value. It was so windy and cold the laser couldn't warm up. We had to run it longer before taking measurements to get a good signal. So we learned we had to work out a better temperature control for this laser."
Both discoveries were invaluable since they will allow the team to safeguard against these problems so that they don't occur on Mars.
It's alive!
After the Viking landers failed to find evidence of life on Mars in the late 1970s, a group of scientists took duplicate instruments into the Atacama, where they, too, failed to find evidence life. They did, however, encounter oxidizing soil conditions in the Atacama that destroyed organic molecules, a leading hypothesis for the apparent sterility of the Martian soils.
The Atacama soil tests done last year confirmed the presence of microorganisms in the desert soils. The presence of life in the Atacama does not of course guarantee its presence on Mars. But it does show that if there is subsurface life, the instruments will be able to detect it.
###
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-06/wuis-drf062413.php
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With Google Reader ready to tap out, it seems like everyone is keen to throw their hat into the feed reader ring. The latest offering is from AOL and it's simple, fast and lacking any unique features?though that's not necessarily a bad thing.
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Just a few short steps off Central Park West you have the means of traveling back through time to explore the diversity of life in ways you may not consider. Before humans, before dinosaurs, before fish even, there was another life form that achieved dominance. Something that we would likely overlook today, but once flourished with with great success. I?m talking, of course, about trilobites, and the opportunity to step back in time through a temporary exhibit at the American Museum of History to the age of the trilobites.
Trilobites represent some of the earliest forms of complex life. They had a solid 300 million year run, which allowed them to develop into some very diverse forms. Scientists have identified over 20,000 species that swam, crawled, and burrowed in the oceans at some point between the Cambrian (542 mya) and Permian (251 mya) periods before succumbing to a final mass extinction. The fossil record shows that their numbers dwindled a few times during this time frame, but they were able to rebound to varying degrees of success.
We?ve been able to learn a great deal about these creatures because they?re arthropods and have exoskeletons, and when you combine this with a marine environment we have the optimal conditions for detailed fossils. Exhibit curator Dr. Neil Landman finds them fascinating. ?They?re exquisitely preserved,? he said.?Some have eyes on stalks some have spines. And all this information tells us how the animals lived on the ocean floor.?
The display is meant to capture the diversity and complexity of life through a different lens. Trilobites themselves seem like creatures from another planet?it?s a great reminder that life can be successful in many different ways.
Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=trilobites-everywhere
Alec Baldwin, Matt Damon and John Cusack are among an array of A-list actors starring in a new video urging President Barack Obama to "set the world's course" for an end to nuclear weapons at next week's G8 Summit in Northern Ireland.
"Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped, cannot be checked," actor Robert De Niro says in the video.
"Such fatalism is a deadly adversary," Damon responds.
Whoopi Goldberg, Morgan Freeman, Naomi Watts and Christoph Waltz also appear in the two-and-a-half minute spot.
The video was produced by Global Zero, a Washington, D.C.-based grassroots organization whose mission is "to eliminate all nuclear weapons by 2030."
?The message from national security experts and citizens around the world is clear: the only way to eliminate the global nuclear danger is to eliminate all nuclear weapons,? Michael Douglas says. ?It's time to set the world's course to zero.?
To do so, Global Zero said in a press release, President Obama "will have to go beyond the bilateral process President Reagan started of U.S.-Soviet/Russian arms reductions and bring the other leading nuclear powers into international arms negotiations for the first time in history."
The group also sent an open letter to Obama recalling a 2009 speech in which the president committed to their cause.
President Obama,
Four years ago in Prague, [y]ou stated clearly and with conviction your commitment to seek a world without nuclear weapons. You asked for perseverance. You dared us to overcome our differences. You challenged us to ignore the voices that tell us the world cannot change. And you told us words must mean something.
We heard you.
On June 17-18, when you meet with President Putin on the side of the G8 Summit, we urge you to negotiate further cuts to the massive U.S.-Russian Cold War stockpiles and pave the way to bringing world leaders into the first international negotiations in history for the elimination of all nuclear weapons.
Of course, there are other pressing issues for Obama and Putin to discuss. Namely, Syria, and its deadly civil war.
After authorizing U.S. weapons for Syrian rebels, Obama faces difficult talks with the Russian president, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's most powerful ally.
"There are no illusions that that's going to be easy," Ben Rhodes, the White House deputy national security adviser, told Reuters.
?It?s in Russia?s interest to join us in applying pressure on Bashar Assad to come to the table in a way that relinquishes his power and his standing in Syria,? Rhodes told the Associated Press. ?We don?t see any scenario where he restores his legitimacy to lead the country.?
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/damon-obama-nuclear-weapons-g8-summit-151729687.html
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SANTA MONICA, Calif. (AP) ? A woman who was critically wounded in last week's Santa Monica shooting rampage died Sunday, bringing the total number of victims killed by the gunman to five.
Marcela Franco, 26, died of her injuries at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, according to Santa Monica College spokeswoman Tricia Ramos.
Franco had been a passenger in a Ford Explorer driven by her father, campus groundskeeper Carlos Navarro Franco, 68, who also was killed in Friday's attack.
Investigators trying to determine why the gunman planned the shooting spree were focusing on a deadly act of domestic violence that touched off the mayhem.
The heavily armed man's attack against his own family at their home led to the violence in Santa Monica streets, lasting just a matter of minutes until he was shot to death in a chaotic scene at the college library by police.
Investigators were looking at family connections to find a motive because the killer's father and brother were the first victims, an official briefed on the probe who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly told The Associated Press.
The killer, who died a day shy of his 24th birthday, was connected to a home that went up in flames after the first shootings, said police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks.
Police were not naming the shooter or the two men found dead in the house because next of kin was out of the country and hadn't been notified. Neighbors and colleagues of the boys' mother said she was visiting family in Lebanon.
SWAT team officers searched the mother's Los Angeles apartment and officers interviewed neighbors about the son who lived with her, said Beverly Meadows who lives in the adjoining unit.
Public records show that Meadows' neighbor is Randa Abdou, 54, the ex-wife of Samir Zawahri and former co-owner of the house where the first shooting took place.
Abdou was wasn't expected home for another week, Meadows said. It wasn't clear if the son who lived with Abdou was a victim or the suspected gunman.
Zawahri, 55, brought his family to the neighborhood of small homes and apartment buildings tucked up against Interstate 10 in the mid-1990s, according to property records.
Not long after arriving on Yorkshire Avenue, the couple went through a difficult divorce and split custody of their two boys, said Thomas O'Rourke, a neighbor.
When the sons got older, one went to live with his mother while the other stayed with the father.
Standing next to the weapons and ammo found at multiple crime scenes, Seabrooks said at a Saturday news conference that the "cowardly murderer" planned the attack and was capable of firing 1,300 rounds.
The killer had a run-in with police seven years ago, but Seabrooks wouldn't offer more details because he was a juvenile at the time.
The gunman was enrolled at Santa Monica College in 2010, Seabrooks said.
After neighbors watched in shock as he shot at his father's house and it went up in flames, he opened fire on a woman driving by, wounding her, and then carjacked another woman.
He directed her to drive to the college, ordering her stop along the way to shoot at a city bus and people on the street. Two people on the bus were injured.
Police had received multiple 911 calls by the time the mayhem shifted to the college, a two-year school with about 34,000 students located more than a mile inland from the city's famous pier, promenade and expansive, sandy beaches.
On campus, he opened fired on a Ford Explorer driven by Navarro Franco, who plowed through a brick wall into a faculty parking lot.
Joe Orcutt heard gunshots and went to see what happened in the parking lot. He said he saw the Explorer in the brick wall and was looking for the shooter when, suddenly, there he was 30 feet away firing at people like it was target practice.
The gunman then moved on foot across campus, firing away. Students were seen leaping out windows of a classroom building and running for their lives. Others locked themselves behind doors or bolted out of emergency exits.
Trena Johnson, who works in the dean's office, heard gunshots and looked out the window and saw a man in black with a "very large gun" shoot a woman in the head outside the library. That victim was transported to a hospital, where she died.
At some point, police say the gunman dropped an Adidas duffel bag loaded with ammunition magazines, boxes of bullets and a .44 revolver. Police also found a small cache of ammunition in a room in the burned-out house.
Surveillance photos showed the gunman in black strolling past a cart of books into the library with an assault-style rifle by his side.
The shooter fired at least 70 rounds in the library. Miraculously, no one was injured until two Santa Monica police officers and a campus cop arrived and took out the shooter.
___
Associated Press writer Christopher Weber contributed to this story. Tami Abdollah can be reached at: http://www.twitter.com/latams
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/5th-victim-santa-monica-shooting-dies-183258886.html
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Mad Men episode titles have been especially literal this season, haven't they? "Favors," last night's episode, falls in the same naming vein as the previous week's "A Tale of Two Cities," in which the allusions are evident from the start. Can people do things for other people without expectations in return? What's in a favor, anyway? (Plenty.)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/police-gunman-arrested-shooting-san-antonio-military-210458461.html
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