The Koyal Group InfoMag News: NASA prepares to capture asteroid, drag it into Earth’s orbit

NASA prepares to a drag an asteroid into Earth’s orbit.

What is the goal for the Asteroid Redirect Mission?

Through the Asteroid Redirect Mission, NASA will identify, capture and redirect an asteroid to a stable orbit around the moon, which astronauts will explore in the 2020s, returning with samples. The mission is an important early step as we learn to be more independent of Earth for humans to explore Mars. It will be an unprecedented technological feat that will lead to new scientific discoveries and technological capabilities, while helping us learn to protect our home planet. The overall objectives of the Asteroid Redirect Mission are:

• Conduct a human exploration mission to an asteroid in the mid-2020s, providing systems and operational experience required for human exploration of Mars.

• Demonstrate an advanced solar electric propulsion system, enabling future deep-space human and robotic exploration with applicability to the nation’s public and private sector space needs.

• Enhance detection, tracking and characterization of Near Earth Asteroids, enabling an overall strategy to defend our home planet.

• Demonstrate basic planetary defense techniques that will inform impact threat mitigation strategies to defend our home planet.

• Pursue a target of opportunity that benefits scientific and partnership interests, expanding our knowledge of small celestial bodies and enabling the mining of asteroid resources for commercial and exploration needs.

What are the requirements for the asteroid NASA hopes to capture?

NASA is working on two concepts for the mission: the first is to fully capture a very small asteroid in open space, and the second is to collect a boulder-sized sample off of a much larger asteroid. Both concepts would require redirecting an asteroid mass less than 32 feet (10 meters) in size into the moon’s orbit.

NASA’s search for candidate asteroids for ARM is a component of the agency’s existing efforts to identify all Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) that could pose a threat to the Earth. More than 11,140 NEOs have been discovered as of June 9. Approximately 1,483 of those have been classified as potentially hazardous. Some of these NEOs become potential candidates for ARM because they are in orbits very similar to Earth’s and come very close to the Earth-Moon system in the early 2020s, which is required to be able to redirect the asteroid mass to be captured into lunar orbit.

To date, nine asteroids have been identified as potential candidates for the ARM full capture option, having favorable orbits and estimated to be within the right size range. Sizes have been established for three of the nine candidates. Another asteroid — 2008 HU4 — will pass close enough to Earth in 2016 for interplanetary radar to determine some of its characteristics, such as size, shape and rotation. The other five will not get close enough to be observed again before the final mission selection, but NASA’s NEO Program is finding a few additional potential candidate asteroids every year. One or two of these get close enough to Earth each year to be well characterized.

Boulders have been directly imaged on all larger asteroids visited by spacecraft so far, such as Itokawa by the Japanese Hayabusa mission, making retrieval of a large boulder a viable concept for ARM. During the next few years, NASA expects to add several candidates for this option, including asteroid Bennu, which will be imaged up close by the agency’s Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission in 2018. High resolution interplanetary radar is also able to image the surfaces of asteroids that pass close to the Earth and infer the presence of large boulders.

Where will the asteroid be redirected to – reports suggest above the Moon?

After an asteroid mass is captured, the spacecraft will redirect it to a stable orbit around the moon called a “Lunar Distant Retrograde Orbit.” Astronauts aboard an Orion spacecraft, launched from a Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, will explore the asteroid there in the mid-2020s. Learning to maneuver large objects utilizing the gravity fields of the Earth and moon will be valuable capabilities for future activities. Potentially, either mission concept might test technology and techniques that can be applied to planetary defense if needed in the future.

How will ARM fit NASA’s goal to visit Mars?

The mission provides experience in human spaceflight beyond low-Earth orbit, building on our experiences on the International Space Station, and testing new systems and capabilities in the proving ground of cis-lunar space, toward the ultimate goal of a crewed mission to Mars. ARM leverages and integrates existing programs in NASA’s Science, Space Technology, and Human Explorations and Operations to provide an affordable – and compelling — opportunity to exercise our emerging deep space exploration capabilities on the path to Mars. ARM will test the transport of large objects using advanced high power, long life solar electric propulsion; automated rendezvous and docking; deep space navigation; integrated robotic and crewed vehicle stack operations in deep space environment; and spacewalks out of Orion that will be needed for future cis-lunar space and Mars missions.

NASA’s strategy is that the ARM SEP module and spacecraft bus would be upgradable for the first cargo missions to Mars and its moons. We might do so by procuring these systems commercially to lower cost and for reproducibility. Another option is to repurpose the ARM vehicle after its first mission, as a lowest cost option for transportation. These are among the options being studied this year.

The Koyal Group InfoMag News: First standardized way to measure stars

The same way we need values to measure everything from temperature to time, astronomers have now developed a new stellar scale as a "ruler" to help them classify and compare data on star discoveries.

Previously, as with the longitude problem 300 years earlier for fixing locations on earth, there was no unified system of reference for calibrating the heavens.

The astronomers selected 34 initial 'benchmark' stars to represent the different kinds of stellar populations in our galaxy, such as hot stars, cold stars, red giants and dwarfs, as well as stars that cover the different chemical patterns - or "metallicity" in their spectrum, as this is the "cosmic clock" which allows astronomers to read a star's age.

This detailed range of information on the 34 stars form the first value set for measuring the millions of stars that the Gaia satellite, an unmanned space observatory of the European Space Agency, aims to catalogue.

Many of the benchmark stars can be seen with the human eye, and have been studied for most of human  history — dating to the very first astronomical records from ancient Babylon.

"We took stars which had been measured a lot so the parameters are very well-known, but needed to be brought to the same scale for the new benchmark - essentially, using the stars we know most about to help measure the stars we know nothing about," said Paula Jofre from Institute of Astronomy at Britain's University of Cambridge.

"This is the first attempt to cover a wide range of stellar classifications, and do everything from the beginning - methodically and homogenously," Jofre added.

The Koyal Group InfoMag News: Curiosity rover celebrates one (Martian) year aniversary

NASA's Curiosity rover has now been exploring the Red Planet for a full Martian year.

Curiosity wraps up its 687th day on Mars today (June 24), NASA officials said, meaning the 1-ton robot has completed one lap around the sun on the Red Planet. (While Earth orbits the sun once every 365 days, Mars is farther away and thus takes considerably longer to do so.)

Curiosity touched down on the night of Aug. 5, 2012, kicking off a mission to determine if Mars has ever been capable of supporting microbial life. The six-wheeled rover quickly delivered, finding that an area near its landing site called Yellowknife Bay was indeed habitable billions of years ago.

The $2.5-billion mission, known officially as the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), has made other important discoveries during its time on the Martian surface, too. For example, Curiosity's measurements of radiation levels — made during its eight-month cruise through space and while on the planet's surface — suggest that the risk of radiation exposure is not a "showstopper" for manned Mars missions. The rover's data should should help researchers design the shielding astronauts will require on such missions, NASA officials said.

Curiosity has also scanned Mars' air for methane, a gas that here on Earth is predominantly produced by living organisms. The rover's instruments have found no traces of the gas, in contrast to some previous observations made by Red Planet orbiters.

Curiosity left Yellowknife Bay last July and is now on the way to the base of Mount Sharp, which rises more than 3 miles (5 kilometers) into the sky from the center of Mars' Gale Crater. The huge mountain has long been Curiosity's ultimate science destination; mission scientists want the rover to climb up Mount Sharp's foothills, reading a history of the planet's changing environmental conditions along the way.

Unexpected damage to Curiosity's metal wheels has slowed progress toward Mount Sharp a bit, forcing the mission team to rethink and revise its driving plans. The rover has made it about halfway to the mountain's base, with about 2.4 miles (3.9 km) left to cover, NASA officials said.

"Over the next few months, the science team is really excited to get to Mount Sharp, where we think the layered rocks there have captured the major climate changes in Mars' history," Curiosity deputy project scientist Ashwin Vasavada said in a new NASA video marking the rover's first Martian year. "We can't wait to get there and figure it all out, but it's going to take a lot of driving."

The Koyal Group InfoMag News: SA contributes to science breakthrough

South African scientists contributed significantly towards the knowledge base that helped an international experiment make a breakthrough in proving a particle discovered in July 2012 is a type of Higgs boson, a finding that could be the most substantial physics discovery of our time.

The Higgs particle is the missing piece of the Standard Model of Physics, a set of rules that outline the fundamental building blocks of the universe, such as protons, electrons and atoms. Finding it starts a new era for science, because scientists will be able to probe previously uninvestigated parts of the universe.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) yesterday said the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had found new results on an important property of the Higgs particle. The discovery of the elusive particle was announced almost two years ago.

Home-grown contribution

Bruce Mellado, an associate professor at the University of the Witwatersrand's School of Physics, says the finding is "certainly an important milestone in determining that what we discovered is a Higgs boson". He notes the ATLAS experiment, in which SA is involved, has reported a similar result.

Locally, about 70 South Africans are involved in the global project and, while the team is small in comparison to those from other countries, there are substantial benefits coming out of its involvement. Four universities are participating in the programme: Wits, University of Cape Town, the University of Johannesburg, and the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

As a result, says Mellado, SA has contributed "significantly" towards the knowledge base that paved the way for yesterday's announcement. The Higgs boson gives matter mass and holds the physical fabric of the universe together.

Missing piece

The particle is named after Peter Higgs, who, in the 1960s, was one of six authors who theorised about the existence of the particle. It is commonly called the "God Particle", after the title of Nobel physicist Leon Lederman's "The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?" (1993), according to Wikipedia.

Yesterday's announcement, hailed as a major breakthrough, is the result of work done at the LHC, the £2.6 billion "Big Bang" particle accelerator at the centre of the hunt for the Higgs boson. The LHC has been dubbed the world's largest experiment and is housed at CERN.

The LHC is the largest scientific instrument ever built. It lies in an underground tunnel with a circumference of 27km that straddles the French-Swiss border, near Geneva, and has been heralded as the most important new physics discovery machine of all time.

"With our ongoing analyses, we are really starting to understand the mechanism in depth," says CMS spokesperson Tiziano Camporesi. "So far, it is behaving exactly as predicted by theory."

The LHC was offline for maintenance and upgrading during the last 18 months, and preparations are now under way for it to restart early in 2015 for its second three-year run. The experiment will run until 2030 and will be upgraded to 10 times its initial design specification, with the ability to collect 100 times more data.

"Much work has been carried out on the LHC over the last 18 months or so, and it's effectively a new machine, poised to set us on the path to new discoveries," says CERN DG Rolf Heuer.

The Koyal Group InfoMag News│This summer, NASA will begin keeping an eye on your garden

When you’re working in the yard this summer, take a look up: Using a satellite, NASA scientists are paying attention to how healthy your lawn and garden are.

Next month, the agency plans to launch the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2. Its primary aim is to create a global map of carbon sources and carbon sinks. The OCO-2 mission will provide the most detailed map of photosynthetic fluorescence — that is to say, of how plants glow — ever created. Using this data, scientists should be able to estimate how quickly the world’s plants are absorbing carbon from the atmosphere.

JET PROPULSION LABORATORY/NASA -  With data from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory, or OCO-2, scientists should be able to estimate how quickly the world’s plants are absorbing carbon.Photo from Washingtonpost.

 The applications of the project are wide-ranging, but the science is easy enough to understand.

During photosynthesis, a plant absorbs light, then immediately re-emits it at a different wavelength. This is known as fluorescence. In a laboratory setting, botanists can measure the intensity of fluorescence to estimate how actively a plant is photosynthesizing. A satellite could, in theory, detect the light emitted by the world’s plants to estimate how much carbon the plants are absorbing. But there has always been a big, fiery problem: the sun.

The sun is, in most ways, a nice thing to have around. It makes life possible by supplying energy to our planet. From an observational standpoint, though, it can be a major pain. There are huge swaths of the universe that we simply cannot see because the brightness of the sun obscures our view.

In much the same way, the sun was thought to make it impossible to measure global photosynthetic fluorescence. The signals we want to observe are subtle and represent a narrow slice of the electromagnetic spectrum. The sun’s broad-spectrum rays were presumed to overwhelm the wavelengths of plant fluorescence, making them virtually impossible to detect.

That’s where NASA’s Joanna Joiner of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and Christian Frankenberg of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., came in, with their innovative use of an electromagnetic phenomenon known as Fraunhofer lines. In the early 19th century, German optician Joseph Fraunhofer noticed that, in between the beautiful bands of colored light that emerged from a prism, several dark lines appeared. That’s because, by the time sunlight reaches Earth, molecules in the atmosphere have absorbed certain wavelengths of light. In other words, our atmosphere blocks out the sun in certain wavelength bands of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Joiner and Frankenberg realized that they could look for plant fluorescence in the bands of the electromagnetic spectrum where the sun’s light has been dimmed. Data from the Japanese Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite, which was launched in 2009, confirmed their hunch. Although the OCO-2 project was already in motion by the time Joiner and Frankenberg made their breakthrough, adding fluorescence readings will massively amplify the satellite’s ability to carry out its carbon-measuring mission.

A detailed map of photosynthetic activity and carbon absorption will better inform conservation efforts. It is widely believed that tropical forests absorb approximately 20 percent of global carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion. But where else is carbon absorption highest? If the satellite data detect other areas of intense photosynthetic activity, we ought to be working hard to preserve them.

The carbon-uptake map should also help settle some long-running disputes. Conventional wisdom once held that old-growth forests were bad at carbon sequestration, because they seemed to be finished growing. Some analysts suggested that turning those trees into houses or furniture would make room for newer trees to absorb more carbon.

More recent findings, however, suggest that old trees continue to breathe in carbon at high rates. OCO-2’s data will shed light, so to speak, on the relative photosynthetic activity of old and new forests.

The data will also provide an early warning system. In 2005, for example, a drought severely hampered the Amazon rain forest’s ability to absorb carbon, but scientists didn’t realize the full scale of the impact for several years. Satellite fluorescence data could have identified the situation almost as it was happening.

There may not be much we can do to stave off a drought in the Amazon, but there are other ways the data can be used. A decline in photosynthesis rates, as identified by falling fluorescence, could alert farmers to crop failure much earlier. It could help planners manage irrigation resources, as well as alert global relief organizations to potential famines before they happen.

Managing a garden from space sounds a bit futuristic, but horticulture is about to enter the space age. From now on, you’re not just trying to impress the neighbors with your green thumb.

More discoveries you might want to know about

The Koyal Group InfoMag News: Work Together to Complete a “Social Revolution"

Molecular biologist Nancy Hopkins, the Amgen, Inc., Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recalled personal trials as a female scientist and challenged graduates to overcome invisible barriers in an inspiring Baccalaureate Address to the Class of 2014 at Marsh Chapel Sunday morning.

She mentioned some of the great breakthroughs of the last 50 years: the internet, the Higgs particle, and notably, the “discovery of unconscious biases and the extent to which stereotypes about gender, race, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and age deprive people of equal opportunity in the workplace and equal justice in society.”

Hopkins was later awarded an honorary Doctor of Science at BU’s 141st Commencement.

She spoke before a packed audience at Marsh Chapel and was enthusiastically applauded for her remarks. President Robert A. Brown, University Provost Jean Morrison, Marsh Chapel Dean Robert Hill, and Emma Rehard (CAS’14) also addressed the graduates and their families. Scott Allen Jarrett (CFA’99,’08), director of music at Marsh Chapel, led the Marsh Chapel Choir in “Clarissima” and “For the Beauty of the Earth.”

Early in her career, Hopkins worked in the lab of James Watson, the codiscoverer of the structure of DNA. She earned a PhD at Harvard and became a faculty member at MIT, working at the Center for Cancer Research. There, she focused her research on RNA tumor viruses, then considered to be a likely cause for many cancers in humans. Hopkins also studied developmental genetics in zebra fish, and helped to design the first successful method for making insertional mutagenesis work in a vertebrate model. That accomplishment enabled her team to identify genes essential for zebra fish development, with implications for better understanding development in other species.

While advancing science in the lab, Hopkins was discouraged by some of the systemic problems she observed in academic research. “When a man and a woman made discoveries of equal scientific importance,” she told the Baccalaureate audience, “the man and his discovery were valued more highly than the woman and her discovery.”

Hopkins cited research by psychologists “who documented the irrationality of our brains, and our inability to make accurate judgments of even simple numerical facts if the conclusions contradict our unconscious biases.

“You can demonstrate gender bias,” she said, “simply by making copies of a research article, putting a man’s name on half the copies and a woman’s on the other half, and sending the two versions out for review: reviewers judge the identical work to be better if they believe it was done by a man. Surprisingly, it doesn’t matter if the reviewers are men or women.”

For years, Hopkins said, she avoided calling attention to the problem, for fear of being accused of whining. Then on a whim, in 1994 she measured all of the labs in her building at MIT and found that female scientists had less lab space than male colleagues. She needed more quantitative data and discovered that only 8 percent of MIT’s science faculty were women (Harvard and BU had similar statistics). At MIT, her findings led to a university-wide examination of possible gender bias against women scientists.

“We learned that the unconscious undervaluation of women’s work can cause women of equal accomplishment not to be hired, and cause women who are hired to receive fewer resources for their research,” she said. “The women were marginalized. No wonder there were still so few women science professors 20 years ago. More amazing was that the ones who were there were so successful.”

When the results were published in 1999, Hopkins started receiving emails from women around the world writing that they had experienced the same problems. Hopkins was named cochair, along with BU President Robert A. Brown, then MIT provost, of MIT’s first Council on Faculty Diversity. MIT went on to write new family leave policies, and in 2001, the school’s new computer science building was designed to include a large day-care center. Today, many junior women faculty at MIT have children, proving they can be both scientists and mothers, said Hopkins, who famously walked out of a 2005 speech by Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, when he suggested that “intrinsic aptitude” might explain why there were relatively few high-achieving women in engineering fields.

In her parting words, Hopkins told the graduates that while they should first care about finding work they love, men and women must work together to complete a social revolution.

“If you look around and see that the people you work or study with all look like you, you’ll know something’s wrong, and work to change it,” she said. “Completing this revolution won’t happen by the passage of time, but because you make it happen.”

The Koyal Group InfoMag News: Why so Much Fake, Unduplicable Stem Cell Research?

Hi. I am Art Caplan, from the NYU Langone Medical Center, Division of Medical Ethics. What is going on in the field of regenerative medicine with respect to stem cell research? We have recently had yet another in a long series of scandals involving claims about the ability to manipulate stem cells in ways that turned out to be utterly untrue and fraudulent. In this case, a scientist in Japan said that she was able to make adult stem cells revert to embryo-like stem cells with some pretty simple chemical exposures. It was announced in leading journals and covered extensively by the media. Then she had to admit that no one could duplicate what she had done and confessed that she had made it up.

This is not the first time that this has happened in the stem cell field. Going back all the way to right after Dolly the sheep was cloned, people were trying to clone human embryos to see if they could get cloned human embryos from stem cells. A group in Korea announced that they had made the first cloned human embryos. Nobody could replicate what they did, and they ultimately had to retract their claims published in leading scientific journals that they had cloned human embryos. Stem cell research seems again and again to go off the rails when it comes to the ethics of research. What is going on and why is that so?

I think there are a couple of reasons why this particular area has gotten itself in so much hot water. One is that there is a relative shortage of funding. Because of the controversial nature of cloning -- getting stem cells from human embryos -- some avenues of funding have dried up, and it puts pressure on people to come up with other ways to try to make human stem cells. With less funding, there is more pressure. Sometimes people cut corners. I think that can lead to trouble.

Another problem in the stem cell field is that if you can come up with a way to produce human stem cells without sacrificing or cloning embryos from humans, you are going to find yourself being a hero to the world. That is what happened in Japan. There was so much pressure to come up with an alternative to using human embryos to generate stem cells, that if anybody said that they had done it, people wanted to believe that it was true. When we are looking at science, we have a tendency to think that it is a breakthrough, but there are no breakthroughs. There are only breakthroughs that are confirmed.

There is a lesson here: Until somebody replicates and until somebody can show that they can also do what has been alleged, there isn't a breakthrough. There is only confirmation and then breakthroughs. I think we have to be a lot more careful -- both in science and in media coverage -- before we start saying, "Aha -- here is a single study, a single report, a presentation. Now we have shown that something can be done." It doesn't work that way. It has to be duplicated before we can say that it is true.

Another major problem in the stem cell field is that the number of people doing research in this area has shrunk. It is obviously of keen interest to come up with regenerative medicine solutions to all kinds of healthcare problems. I think a lot of post-docs and graduate students are saying, "I am not sure that I want to set my career track into a field that is sometimes controversial and where funding may be dipping." That may mean that there are fewer people to watch one another. It is not a big field, so maybe part of the reason that it keeps getting in trouble is less ability to do peer review. There are fewer mentors and fewer students because it is seen as an area that is too controversial to stake one's career in.

I think a combination of factors is getting stem cell research in trouble: shortage of money, our willingness to look for breakthroughs because we want them so badly without demanding the kind of replication and duplication that is a key part of science, and small numbers leading to less peer review.

I am Art Caplan, at the Division of Medical Ethics at the NYU Langone Medical Center. Thanks for watching.

The Koyal Group InfoMag News Doubts Shroud Big Bang Discovery

Perhaps it was too good to be true. Two months ago, a team of cosmologists reported that it had spotted the first direct evidence that the newborn universe underwent a mind-boggling exponential growth spurt known as inflation. But last week a new analysis suggested the signal, a subtle pattern in the afterglow of the big bang, or cosmic microwave background (CMB), could be an artifact produced by dust within our own galaxy.

"We're certainly not retracting our result," says John Kovac, a cosmologist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and co-leader of the team, which used a specialized telescope at the South Pole known as BICEP2. Others say the BICEP team has already lost its case. "At this time, I think the fair thing to say is that you cannot claim detection—period," says Paul Steinhardt, a theoretical physicist at Princeton University.

From 2010 through 2012, BICEP2 peered at a small patch of the CMB to measure the polarization of the microwaves as it varies from point to point. On 17 March, BICEP researchers announced at a press conference in Cambridge that they had spotted ultrafaint pinwheel-like swirls in the sky. Those swirls, or B modes, are most likely traces of gravitational waves rippling through space and time during the 10–32 seconds that inflation lasted, the BICEP team says, and they fulfill a key prediction of the theory of inflation. Many cosmologists hailed the detection as a smoking gun for that theory.

But dust within our galaxy can also emit microwaves that mimic the signal. Much or all of the BICEP signal could come from that dust, says Raphael Flauger, the theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who performed the new analysis. He presented it at Princeton University on 15 May.

BICEP researchers estimated that “galactic foreground" was negligible. They modeled it several ways, as they report in the paper announcing their claim, which has been submitted to a journal that Kovac declined to name. The most sophisticated model relied on a map of that foreground generated by the European Space Agency's spacecraft Planck, which mapped the CMB across the entire sky from 2009 until last year. Because Planck has not yet released that data, researchers scanned the map from a slide for a talk.

The BICEP team apparently assumed the map shows radiation only from dust inside our own galaxy. In reality, it may also contain an unpolarized haze from other galaxies, which would make the microwaves from within the galaxy look less polarized than they are. So using the map could have led the researchers to underestimate the galactic foreground and overestimate the CMB signal.

To test that idea, Flauger used other Planck data—also scraped from a talk—to correct the map BICEP used (see figure). The foreground appears stronger in the corrected map and could account for the entire BICEP signal, he reported.

BICEP's Kovac says his team always made it clear that they couldn't be sure how much of their signal really comes from the CMB. And he won't put a number on it. "The six models of polarized dust that we use are all quite uncertain," he says, "so the statements that we make about the interpretation are necessarily more qualitative."

Flauger stresses that he hasn't proved that BICEP’s signal is spurious. "I'm still hoping that after all I've done there is a signal there," he says. However, the claim already has a couple of strikes against it. The polarization signal is twice as big as an upper limit Planck researchers set indirectly by measuring temperature variations in the CMB. Making the two results jibe would be difficult, researchers say. The size of the signal also causes headaches for theorists trying to explain how inflation happened.

The flap over the BICEP signal may have been predictable. Sampling microwaves at multiple frequencies would have allowed BICEP2 to separate foreground from CMB by itself. But the telescope was designed to maximize overall sensitivity and tracked only one frequency. "All the other experiments that I know of use multiple frequencies," says Charles Bennett of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Clarity may come in October, when Planck researchers plan to release their polarization data. If Planck shows that the foreground is small and the BICEP signal is real, then the BICEP team should still get credit for the discovery, says Marc Kamionkowski, a cosmologist at Johns Hopkins. But David Spergel, a cosmologist at Princeton, says that in that case, the Planck team alone should get the credit.

If Planck shoots down the result, the credibility of science may suffer, Bennett says: "You talk about something like climate change and the public says, ‘Yeah, but you guys say you found something and then you take it back all the time.’ ”

MythBusters: Behind the Myths by The Koyal Group InfoMag News

The live show MythBusters: Behind the Myths, starring Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, co-hosts of the Emmy-nominated Discovery series "MythBusters," returns to the The Bushnell's Mortensen Hall for one night only on Wednesday, December 3 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are on sale now. The show promises to be an outrageous evening of entertainment featuring brand new onstage experiments, behind-the-scenes stories and some of your all-time favorites. A new immersive video experience will keep you bolted to your seat.

MythBusters: Behind the Myths brings you face-to-face with the curious world of Jamie and Adam as the duo matches wits on stage with each other and members of the audience. The show played a first sold out date at The Bushnell in March 2012. Tickets for Mythbusters: Behind the Myths are available at The Bushnell box office, 166 Capitol Avenue in Hartford, by phone at 860-987-5900, and online at bushnell.org.

One of the most highly regarded and watched series on the Discovery Channel, "MythBusters" is now in its twelfth season. Co-hosted by Hyneman and Savage, the show mixes scientific method with gleeful curiosity and plain old- fashioned ingenuity to create its own signature style of explosive experimentation - and the supporting or de-bunking of urban myths that we live with day to day.

Adam and Jamie have become spokespersons at large for applying science to real life - most recently as hosts of the Discovery Channel special ""iGenius: How Steve Jobs Changed the World," and have appeared on numerous shows including "Late Show with David Letterman," "Good Morning America," "The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson," "The Colbert Report," NPR's "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition," "Countdown with Keith Olberman," and many more. They were invited to participate in Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Fear and/or Sanity and have received the Young Artist Award for inspiring young people in the interest of science. The MythBusters have been invited to participate on a panel at Comic-Con, where their appearances have sold-out four years running.

Adam and Jamie serve as guest editors for Popular Mechanics and were featured on the cover of the September 2009 issue. That same year, they were inducted as honorary members into Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society. They are Honorary Lifetime Members of the California Science Teachers Association and were named Honorary Engineers and Honorary Members of the Francis Crowe Society at the University of Maine. Both Hyneman and Savage were given honorary Doctorates at the University of Twente in the Netherlands for their efforts at popularization of science.

Adam and Jamie produced and starred in an H1N1 Public Service Announcement for the White House, and were chosen by the President to retest the Archimedes legend using 500 schoolchildren as surrogate soldiers.

They appeared as themselves in the movie Darwin Awards and have made several cameos on other TV shows, including CSI. And In 2010, Hyneman and Savage received the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism from the Harvard Secular Society.

Jamie Hyneman is the owner of M5 Industries, an effects company specializing in problematic custom builds. Besides serving as headquarters of "MythBusters," M5 continues to work on various research & development projects for private clients.

After trying his hand at careers as various as librarian at the United Nations in Geneva to running a diving and sailing charter business in the Caribbean, Hyneman began his career in show business as special effects shop assistant in New York and later in San Francisco as a crew member on films including "Robocop," "Arachnophobia" and "Naked Lunch."

While managing Colossal Pictures' model shop in San Francisco, Hyneman was given the opportunity to take over - and M5 Industries was born.

Hyneman graduated from Indiana University with a degree in Russian. He has received an honorary engineering degree from the University of Maine as well as an honorary doctorate of engineering from Villanova University, with whom he has an ongoing collaborative relationship to help develop new safety concepts for the military. He is the holder of several patents and the winner of numerous industry awards.

The Koyal Group InfoMag News on Antarctic Glaciers Melting “Past Point-of-no-Return”

Western Antartica’s immense glaciers are melting fast and giving up ice to the sea at a rate that is considered already past “the point of no return," according to recent research work done by two different groups of scientists.

The resulting scenario is compelling: an increase in the world sea levels of 4 feet or more in the next centuries, according to findings announced Monday by scientists from the University of Washington, the University of California-Irvine and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA.

"It truly is a startlingly disturbing situation," says Pennsylvania State University glaciologist Sridhar Anandakrishnan, who was not associated with any of the research studies. "This is a big part of West Antarctica, and it appears to have been pushed violently over the edge."

The researchers claim the glaciers are most certainly bound to be lost.

One study confirms that a river of ice named Thwaites Glacier is possibly starting to collapse and that complete collapse is likely to occur.

A second research illustrates that six glaciers are giving up ice into the sea at an ever-increasing rate. At that rate, there will be a 4-feet increase in the sea-level, states study author Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California-Irvine, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"The ice retreat in that area is inescapable," Rignot said at a briefing Monday, adding that the glaciers have gone beyond “the point-of-no-return."

Rignot and his group utilized data from satellites and aircraft to monitor changes in six West Antarctic glaciers and the terrain beneath these massive ice floes. The data gathered confirm that the glaciers are spreading out and decreasing in thickness and volume. They are also moving faster from the continent's center toward the sea, giving up more volumes of ice into the ocean than before and raising sea levels as a result.

Simultaneously, the area of each glacier protruding into the sea is being melted underwater by the surrounding warm ocean water. This results in the vicious process of increased thinning and more rapid flow, and the local terrain provides no barrier to the glaciers' retreat, the researchers announce in the next issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

An article in this week's Science says the Thwaites Glacier is predicted to collapse completely in 200 years. The paper, however, does not specify the height of sea-level increase associated with Thwaites' disappearance.

The Koyal Group InfoMag News: Big Science More Important Than Ever

Alvin M. Weinberg introduced the term "big science" into the national lexicon in 1961. Big science is research that requires the coordination of massive resources, including thousands of our best minds and cutting-edge technologies to solve massive, complex problems.

With visionary gusto, Weinberg wrote that "the monuments of big science, the huge rockets, the high-energy accelerators, the high-flux research reactors ... will be symbols of our time as surely as Notre Dame is a symbol of the Middle Ages."

The concept of big science is especially timely in a highly charged political environment with the debate focused on the Affordable Care Act, streamlining services and controlling costs. As a result, vital research often gets short shrift.

Big science is expensive and time-consuming, but the results can have exponential benefits: the potential for dramatically improved health outcomes throughout the world.

I've been privileged to see this firsthand at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. In 2011, after more than a decade of rigorous trials in the Republic of Malawi and eight other countries, a team led by UNC's Myron Cohen discovered that the antiretroviral drugs used to treat people with HIV would also significantly reduce their ability to pass the disease on to others.

At a Washington, D.C., event attended by three U.S. presidents and titled "The Beginning of the End of AIDS," Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government's top HIV/AIDS scientist, called the study "astounding." The prestigious journal Science honored it as its 2011 "Breakthrough of the Year."

This breakthrough never would have happened without enormous resources and strategic, coordinated teamwork by large, interdisciplinary teams of scientists. Cohen's study brought together investigators at 13 sites in nine different countries. More than 4,000 subjects participated, and the study cost more than $70 million.

AIDS is such a formidable enemy that this number, while large, represents only a small percentage of the $15 billion per year that is devoted to AIDS research and treatment. In addition, the president's Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and numerous other world-wide organizations, centers of research excellence and the pharmaceutical industry support a community of more than 20,000 scientists, health-care providers and advocates.

While historical legends of science had the luxury of being solo artists, today's best scientists must be more akin to conductors of orchestras. Developing hypotheses and rigorous trials to test them is only the start. Today's scientists must also be charismatic leaders, relentless fundraisers and lithe improvisers who arbitrate and resolve the fierce disputes of passionate scientists -- all often in the same day.

The public often views medical research from a prism of giant breakthroughs that lead to treatments or cures. The reality is less dramatic.

Most scientific breakthroughs result from small steps along paths with no clear destination in sight. By addressing one problem followed by another, researchers inch their way forward. It is a path often littered with blind alleys, but with enough resources these blind alleys can sometimes lead to serendipitous avenues.

One of these serendipitous avenues was found in Malawi in the 1990s. Since the special equipment needed to analyze the samples was not available, the specimens were frozen and transported by plane back to UNC. This was before 9/11, when there were far fewer regulations. Post-9/11 the study might have ended right there.

Shortly after the study was published, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "The goal of an AIDS-free generation may be ambitious, but it is possible."

At a time of budgetary constraints, it reminds us that true breakthroughs depend on thoughtful investment. Big science -- fully funded and full of global collaborations -- is the key to solving our most challenging and entrenched medical and public health problems.

No one knows when the cure for AIDS will be found or what it will entail, but a cure will be found and proven, and we'll have big science to thank.

Scientists add Letters to DNA’s Alphabet by The Koyal Group InfoMag News

Scientists reported Wednesday that they had taken a significant step toward altering the fundamental alphabet of life — creating an organism with an expanded artificial genetic code in its DNA.

The accomplishment might eventually lead to organisms that can make medicines or industrial products that cells with only the natural genetic code cannot.

The scientists behind the work at the Scripps Research Institute have already formed a company to try to use the technique to develop new antibiotics, vaccines and other products, though a lot more work needs to be done before this is practical.

The work also gives some support to the concept that life can exist elsewhere in the universe using genetics different from those on Earth.

“This is the first time that you have had a living cell manage an alien genetic alphabet,” said Steven A. Benner, a researcher in the field at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Fla., who was not involved in the new work.

But the research, published online by the journal Nature, is bound to raise safety concerns and questions about whether humans are playing God. The new paper could intensify calls for greater regulation of the budding field known as synthetic biology, which involves the creation of biological systems intended for specific purposes.

“The arrival of this unprecedented ‘alien’ life form could in time have far-reaching ethical, legal and regulatory implications,” Jim Thomas of the ETC Group, a Canadian advocacy organization, said in an email. “While synthetic biologists invent new ways to monkey with the fundamentals of life, governments haven’t even been able to cobble together the basics of oversight, assessment or regulation for this surging field.”

The Koyal Group InfoMag News about Open Access on ScienceOpen

More and more scientists are publishing their results online. And as a result, it's becoming easier to link to new knowledge. A Berlin-based platform called ScienceOpen wants to tap into that.

"It's really important for me that everyone gets immediate access to the wonderful work that scientists do," says Stephanie Dawson. The Yale-educated biologist is the managing director for ScienceOpen, a research platform that went live this week.

"Access to this research is like a human right," Dawson told DW. "After all, it's all research funded with taxpayers' money."

But it's not only about who pays - it's also about what gets done with the research, and who is allowed to work with it.

Then there are the traditional publishers of science research. They criticize online open access journals and portals for lacking editorial quality control.

It hasn't stopped the trend towards open access in Europe, though.

Lateral thinking

The science historian Professor Jürgen Renn has been an advocate of open access for some time.

Renn, who is director of science history at the Max-Planck-Institute, says the only way to achieve groundbreaking insights is through a permanent exchange of ideas between scientists - wherever they are in the world.

"There should be no artificial barriers stopping you from getting from one article to another," says Renn. "We should all be allowed to surf freely in knowledge!"

It would certainly make it easier to do interdisciplinary work. Renn says Darwin and Einstein mastered that approach with their respective theories of evolution and relativity.

"Both of them spotted connections which other scientists - with their specialist's view - may have missed."

He says it's all about "findability and linkability."