National Security Space: Then.Now.Tomorrow
Colorado Springs CO (SPX) May 20, 2014 -
Well that was far too generous of an introduction. I didn't even recognize any of that myself. It is great to be back at the symposium this year and thank you all for attending this morning. It's an honor to stand before this particular audience and it's a remarkable collection of space experts, including many friends, and by the way at this point in my life I refuse to call you old friends.
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Apollo 13 astronaut's toothbrush sells for $11,794
Los Angeles (AFP) May 30, 2014 -
A toothbrush used by one of the American astronauts who flew to the Moon was sold at auction for nearly $12,000, or triple the starting bid, the auction house said Friday.
The clear Oral B-40 toothbrush was used by command module pilot Jack Swigert during the 1970 Apollo 13 mission and sold for $11,974, said the Nate D. Sanders auction house, which did not reveal the buyer.
Swigert was p ...
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Earth's gravitational pull stretches moon surface
Greenbelt, Md. (UPI) May 30, 2013 -
Anyone who's been to the beach - and seen the ocean's tides - knows the moon's gravitational effects on Earth are rather obvious. The effects of Earth's gravitational pull on the moon are less apparent.
But a new study by scientists at NASA - published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters - shows even the shape of the moon's all-solid surface changes in response to the positi ...
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SpaceX unveils capsule to ferry astronauts to space
Los Angeles (AFP) May 30, 2014 -
A sleek, white gumdrop-shaped space capsule that aims to carry up to seven astronauts to the International Space Station and return to land anywhere on Earth was unveiled Thursday by SpaceX.
The Dragon V2, short for version two, is the first attempt by a private company to restore Americans' ability to send people to the orbiting space station in the wake of the space shuttle program's retir ...
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NASA faces identity crisis, funding battle
Washington (UPI) May 30, 2013 -
As NASA funding continue to dissipate, space agency officials are left trying - frustratingly - to figure out what's worth paying for. And the Spitzer Space Telescope is just the latest in a growing list of defunded and soon-to-be-extinct projects.
Since the Apollo missions to the moon ended in 1973, NASA's budget has steadily declined - from 1.35 percent of the federal government's ...
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Buried fossil soils found to be awash in carbon
Madison WI (SPX) May 28, 2014 -
Soils that formed on the Earth's surface thousands of years ago and that are now deeply buried features of vanished landscapes have been found to be rich in carbon, adding a new dimension to our planet's carbon cycle.
The finding, reported May 25, 2014 in the journal Nature Geoscience, is significant as it suggests that deep soils can contain long-buried stocks of organic carbon which coul ...
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New study finds Antarctic Ice Sheet unstable at end of last ice age
Corvallis OR (SPX) May 29, 2014 -
A new study has found that the Antarctic Ice Sheet began melting about 5,000 years earlier than previously thought coming out of the last ice age - and that shrinkage of the vast ice sheet accelerated during eight distinct episodes, causing rapid sea level rise.
The international study, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, is particularly important coming on the heels of rece ...
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Ancient rocks yield clues about Earth's earliest crust
Edmonton, Canada (SPX) Jun 01, 2014 -
It looks like just another rock, but what Jesse Reimink holds in his hands is a four-billion-year-old chunk of an ancient protocontinent that holds clues about how the Earth's first continents formed. The University of Alberta geochemistry student spent the better part of three years collecting and studying ancient rock samples from the Acasta Gneiss Complex in the Northwest Territories, part of ...
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NASA IceBridge Concludes Arctic Field Campaign
Pasadena CA (JPL) May 29, 2014 -
Researchers with NASA's Operation IceBridge have completed another successful Arctic field campaign. On May 23, NASA's P-3 research aircraft left Thule Air Base, Greenland, and returned to Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia marking the end of 11 weeks of polar research.
During this campaign, researchers collected data on Arctic sea and land ice - both repeating measurements on rapidly cha ...
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Unexpected water explains surface chemistry of nanocrystals
Berkeley CA (SPX) Jun 01, 2014 -
Danylo Zherebetskyy and his colleagues at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) found unexpected traces of water in semiconducting nanocrystals. The water as a source of small ions for the surface of colloidal lead sulfide (PbS) nanoparticles allowed the team to explain just how the surface of these important particles are passivated, meaning how th ...
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Smart lifestyle takes centre stage at Asia tech show
Taipei (AFP) May 31, 2014 -
Asia's largest tech trade show will be a battleground for smart innovations when it kicks off in Taiwan Tuesday - from car systems which warn when you are driving badly to a toothbrush-style camera that films the user's teeth.
More than 1,500 exhibitors, including some of the world's leading technology brands, will set out their stalls at Computex, in the capital Taipei, with 130,000 visito ...
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German village takes digital fate into own hands
Loewenstedt, Germany (AFP) June 01, 2014 -
Too isolated and with few inhabitants, the tiny village of Loewenstedt in northern Germany is simply too small to show up on the radars of national Internet operators.
So the villagers took their digital fate into their own hands and built a broadband Internet network of their own.
Peter Kock, who runs an agricultural technology supply firm in the village, couldn't be happier.
Dat ...
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'Star Trek' teleportation style works on sub-atomic particles
Delft, Netherlands (UPI) May 31, 2013 -
Scientists at a university in Netherlands said it could be possible to beam people up - a la Star Trek - sometime in the future.
A team of researchers at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands recently demonstrated the ability to teleport information in sub-atomic particles between two points about 10 feet apart.
"What we are teleporting is the state of a particl ...
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Japan plans more proactive role in Asian security
Singapore (AFP) May 30, 2014 -
Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe vowed Friday that his country would play a larger role in promoting peace in Asia, and called for the rule of law to be upheld in the region.
Laying out a vision of Tokyo as a counterweight to the growing might of China, Abe offered Japan's help to regional partners "to ensure security of the seas and skies".
He said Japan and the United States stood rea ...
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A First for NASA's IRIS: Observing a Gigantic Eruption of Solar Material
Greenbelt MD (SPX) Jun 02, 2014 -
A coronal mass ejection, or CME, surged off the side of the sun on May 9, 2014, and NASA's newest solar observatory caught it in extraordinary detail.
This was the first CME observed by the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, which launched in June 2013 to peer into the lowest levels of the sun's atmosphere with better resolution than ever before. Watch the movie to see how a c ...
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NASA Widens 2014 Hurricane Research Mission
Greenbelt MD (SPX) Jun 01, 2014 -
During this year's Atlantic hurricane season, NASA is redoubling its efforts to probe the inner workings of hurricanes and tropical storms with two unmanned Global Hawk aircraft flying over storms and two new space-based missions. NASA's airborne Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel or HS3 mission, will revisit the Atlantic Ocean for the third year in a row.
HS3 is a collaborative effort th ...
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Russia preparing to launch Okno space surveillance system at full capacity
Moscow (Voice of Russia) Jun 02, 2014 -
State tests of the Okno (Window) complex for tracking and monitoring man-made space objects in Tajikistan will take place during the summer months in the interests of the Russian aerospace defence troops. After that the facility will be put on duty, representative of the aerospace defence troops Colonel Alexey Zolotukhin told RIA Novosti.
According to open sources, the facility is part of ...
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Private Space Race Heats Up
Washington DC (VOA) Jun 02, 2014 -
Privately-funded, manned space exploration and tourism received two boosts on Thursday. SpaceX unveiled its Dragon V2 spacecraft, which the company hopes will one day take astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk presented the new spacecraft at a company facility in California. Dragon V2 could "land anywhere on Earth with the accuracy of a helicopter ...
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SpaceX founder unveils his 'future of space travel' capsule
Moscow (Voice of Russia) Jun 02, 2014 -
Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) presented its new space capsule, expected to carry up to seven astronauts into space and bring them back to Earth, with the capacity to land anywhere 'with the accuracy of a helicopter.'
The Dragon V2 (version two) was unveiled in Hawthorne, California on May 29 by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The sleek capsule is the company's first spacecraft ...
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Rush a light wave and you'll break its data
Washington DC (SPX) Jun 02, 2014 -
Quantum information can't break the cosmic speed limit, according to researchers* from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland's Joint Quantum Institute.
The scientists have shown how attempts to "push" part of a light beam past the speed of light results in the loss of the quantum data the light carries. The results could clarify how noise ...
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