Clipmarks | rmowery's Space collection

Latest food-fad -- 'space potatoes'

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 02:30:43 GMT

clipped by: rmowery
clipper's remarks: Now - do we wait for people to become aliens from this or perhaps find out people are sybiotic hosts?

Clip Source: www.cnn.com

Latest food-fad -- 'space potatoes'

Story Highlights

• Purple Orchid Three 'space potato' is sweet, purple in color
• Restaurants are serving it fried, in salads, as desserts or drinks
• China has reportedly produced other mutated fruits and vegetables
• Seeds exposed to space radiation, capsule pressure and weightlessness

SHANGHAI, China (AP) -- Having boldly gone where no spud has before, Chinese space potatoes are now the latest culinary fad to hit the country's ultra-trendy commercial hub of Shanghai.

Slightly sweet and purple in color, the potatoes, named Purple Orchid Three, are bred from seeds that mutated while being carried aboard a Chinese spacecraft, the Shanghai Daily newspaper reported Monday.

Grower Haikou Purple Orchid Co. Ltd. is promoting them as a unique food option, and restaurants in the city are offering them for Valentine's Day dinners, served crispy fried, or in salads, desserts and even iced drinks, the newspaper said.

China's space program claims to have produced numerous mutated fruits and vegetables by exposing seeds to space radiation, capsule pressure and weightlessness.

Chinese agricultural experts say plants grown from such seeds can be hardier, more nutritious and produce higher yields, although many scientists say similar effects could be achieved in ordinary laboratories.

The space program, which has successfully completed two manned missions, is a source of massive national pride for China, and companies marketing everything from milk to magazines have bought the rights to be endorsed by it.

Tags: space, chine, radiated food

Ocean real estate: The next boom?

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 14:58:55 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: money.cnn.com

Ocean real estate: The next boom?

With land getting so crowded, the age-old fantasy of sea-based living is becoming reality. Business 2.0 dives in.

We remember those pledges, ruefully. But with all of our attention on the skies above, we tend to forget about the seas below and another once-popular 21st century prediction: that one day we'll be living on and under the oceans.

(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- We've been promised many things in the world of Tomorrowland: jet packs, flying cars, picnics on the moon.

The idea isn't so far-fetched. As Earth gets increasingly crowded and polluted, some 225 million square miles or prime real estate representing 71 percent of the planet's surface is largely unused. It's remarkable considering the oceans promise plenty of living space, fresh seafood, entertainment, and desalinized water. Surely, technology can make this happen.

In 1964, at the New York World's Fair, General Motors (Charts) sponsored an exhibit of the "near future." The model featured a city 10,000 feet under the sea, with atomic submarines cruising in and out of the Hotel Atlantis and nearby "Aquacopters" mining for minerals and drilling for oil.

Turns out, it can and it soon will - if not quite the way we first imagined. But before diving into what the near future holds, let's resurface what the distant past once promised.

Famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, meanwhile, was busy chasing his own underwater dreams. His experimental habitat, called Conshelf, was built 85 feet below the ocean's surface and was intended to be the future home of a new human species, dubbed Homo Aquaticus, with gills for lungs.

Tags: ocean, housing, real estate, ocean floor, water world

What are the chances of aliens sniffing us out?

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 20:34:43 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: www.newscientistspace.com

What are the chances of aliens sniffing us out?

12:05 24 October 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Jeff Hecht

Beaming signals into space to find ET could potentially be risky for Earth and its inhabitants. So researchers are developing a Richter-like scale to assess the chance that extraterrestrials could detect – and potentially react to – such signals.

Decades of passively monitoring microwave frequencies have failed to find any evidence of signals from extraterrestrial civilisations. Frustrated by the long silence, some researchers want to start transmitting signals towards nearby stars with possible habitable planets in a plan called "active SETI".

However, others warn that this would be the equivalent of "shouting in the jungle", and that it is better to keep quiet for the time being. "Concerns range from worries about potential existential danger all the way to a desire for consensus about what should be said in such messages," says astrophysicist and science fiction writer David Brin, a leading voice of caution on an International Academy of Astronautics committee considering the issue.

To give the debate a "modest analytical basis", Iván Almár of Konkoly Observatory in Hungary and Paul Shuch of the SETI League in Little Ferry, New Jersey, US, have written a study proposing a way to rate the chance that aliens might detect terrestrial signals.

Called the San Marino Scale because it was first proposed in Europe's tiny Republic of San Marino, it rates the chance of a detection from 1 to 10 based on the strength and type of the transmission. The scale is split into two halves, each worth between 1 and 5. One part is based on signal intensity (compared to solar noise), the is other based on the type of signal.

Decades of monitoring the skies for signals from extraterrestrial life have turned up nothing (Image: NAIC/Arecibo Observatory/NSF)

Tags: aliens, e, seti, radio waves, space, astronomy

Mock lunar landers to go head-to-head in X Prize Cup

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 21:35:11 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: www.newscientistspace.com

Mock lunar landers to go head-to-head in X Prize Cup

20:46 13 October 2006

NewScientist.com news service

Kelly Young

Mock moon landers are set to compete for millions of dollars in prize money at next week's Wirefly X Prize Cup in Las Cruces, New Mexico, US.

As the US prepares to return humans to the Moon, ambitious young companies are trying to build their own versions of a Moon lander for the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, a NASA-backed contest. It will be one of the headline events at the competition promoting private spaceflight on 20 and 21 October.

There are actually two levels to the competition. In Level 1, the mock landers will launch up to 50 metres high, hover for 90 seconds and then land vertically on a concrete pad 100 metres away.

For Level 2, entrants will launch their rockets, hover for 180 seconds and then land on an uneven simulated Moon surface 100 metres away. For both levels, the rockets can refuel before making the return launch back to the first pad.

Time will present a big challenge. Teams have just two and a half hours to drive from a staging area to the launch pad, pressurise and fuel their vehicles, and complete the challenges.

One company in particular has emerged as the frontrunner. Armadillo Aerospace of Mesquite, Texas, US, is run by John Carmack, creator of the hugely successful Doom video games. He was also a contender in the $10 million Ansari X Prize, a contest for the first private group to send a reusable crewed spacecraft to the edge of space twice within two weeks.

Tags: private space flight, lunar landers, space

Russian Refuses to Accept Math Prize

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 14:58:29 GMT

clipped by: rmowery
clipper's remarks: I don't think the world realizes how valuable this proof really is yet. A million bucks is just chump change.

Clip Source: abcnews.go.com

MADRID, Spain Aug 22, 2006 (AP)— A reclusive Russian won an academic prize Tuesday for work toward solving one of history's toughest math problems, but he refused to accept the award a stunning renunciation of accolades from the top minds in his field.

By DANIEL WOOLLS

Grigory Perelman, a 40-year-old native of St. Petersburg, was praised for work in the field known as topology, which studies shapes, and for a breakthrough that might help scientists figure out nothing less than the shape of the universe.

But besides shunning the medal, academic colleagues say he also seems uninterested in a separate, $1 million prize he might be awarded for his feat, which proved a theorem about the nature of multidimensional space that has stumped people for 100 years.

The Fields Medal was announced at the International Congress of Mathematicians, an event held every four years, this time in Madrid.

Tags: math, russian, perelman, st petersburg, topology

Carved stone still mystifies scholars

Thu, 20 Jul 2006 05:05:34 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: www.cnn.com

Carved stone still mystifies scholars

CONCORD, New Hampshire (AP) -- In 1872, so the story goes, workers digging a hole for a fence post near Lake Winnipesaukee in the central part of this New England state found a lump of clay that seemed out of place.

Wednesday, July 19, 2006; Posted: 12:19 p.m. EDT (16:19 GMT)

No one knows for sure who made this stone (discovered in 1872), why, how, or when it was made.

There was something inside -- a dark, odd-looking, egg-shaped stone with a variety of carvings, including a face, teepee, ear of corn and starlike circles.

And there were many questions: Who made the stone and why? How old was it? How was it carved?

To date, no one has been able to say for sure, and the item has come to be known as the "Mystery Stone." Seneca Ladd, a local businessman who hired the workers, was credited with the discovery.

Tags: mystery stone, space, science, geology, carvings, carved stone

Asteroid on collision course with earth

Sat, 11 Feb 2006 06:00:12 GMT

clipped by: rmowery
clipper's remarks: Not sure if this info is true or not. But interesting......

Clip Source: 216.239.39.104

Asteroid on collision course with earth

D it to 18.12.2004 discovered Asteroid the Alh2804-c as "category 2" classified as "Beinahecrash", since he comes on his erring course by internal sun nsystem of the earth very close and in approximately 100,000 km distance these should pass.
Newest computations show however that the course changed in the letzen months easily and the Asteroiden still more near to the earth will bring. According to estimations of the astronomers of the kit peak Observatory a 98%ige probability exists that the Asteroid collides in August 2006 with the earth.

D it Asteroid Alh2804-c possesses a diameter of 2km and as "global a killer" is classified. If it should hit on country, it will release a global climatic disaster. If he falls into the sea, he will release world-wide enormous Tsunamis, against which the Tsunami of Southeast Asia was only a light wave. The wave combs would probably reach a height of 100m and would move many hundred kilometers in the interior whereby them everything in their way to destroy.

N ASP , ESA and the Russian space agency have to advise-strike now a conference of urgency called up over, which could be undertaken against the Asteroiden.
NASA possesses concepts for such emergency and these concepts according to information of a speaker already longer will now be discussed.

N och is unclear, to link where the Asteroid will hit and it feverful searched for a solution around the Asteroiden of its course. The space shuttle fleet is to play thereby a large role, such a speaker of NASA .

A lle large telescopes world-wide pursue at present the Asteroiden and measure its course constantly again.

Tags: asteriod, earth, collision