Help NASA sort through thousands of Mars images and have fun learning about space exploration at the same time! There have been so many images taken of Mars that scientists cannot sort through all of them by themselves. So, they have asked the public to help them sort through the images through their website Be A Martian, which was created with the help of Microsoft.
From BBC News article:
Players at Be A Martian can earn points in one game by helping Nasa examine and organize the images into a more complete map of the planet.
Another game gets users to count impact craters to help scientists understand better the relative age of rocks on Mars' surface.
Nasa hopes the mix of real data and fun will also inspire the planetary scientists of tomorrow.
"We really need the next generation of explorers," says Michelle Viotti, from the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which oversees Mars missions.
"And we're also accomplishing something important for Nasa. There's so much data coming back from Mars. Having a wider crowd look at the data, classify it and help understand its meaning is very important."
How do you know when you are truly in love? Scientists from Stony Brook University in New York claim they have discovered true love.
Previous research suggested that the first stages of romantic love, a rollercoaster ride of mood swings and obsessions that psychologists call limerence, start to fade within 15 months. After 10 years the chemical tide has ebbed away.
The scans of some of the long-term couples, however, revealed that elements of limerence mature, enabling them to enjoy what a new report calls “intensive companionship and sexual liveliness”.
The researchers nicknamed the couples “swans” because they have similar mental “love maps” to animals that mate for life such as swans, voles and grey foxes.
The reactions of the swans to pictures of their beloved were identified on MRI brain scans as a burst of pleasure-producing dopamine more commonly seen in couples who are gripped in the first flush of lust.
“The findings go against the traditional view of romance – that it drops off sharply in the first decade – but we are sure it’s real,” said Arthur Aron, a psychologist at Stony Brook.
Jason wrote up a post over at Hackszine.com about an interesting study that was conducted over at Harvard Medical School about a second circadian clock in mammals.
There was an interview with Clifford Saper, a professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School, in last week's Science Friday. The discussion was about a study which was just published in the journal Science about a second circadian clock in mammals that is driven by food availability. The research suggests that this second clock evolved as a sleep-cycle "reset" mechanism which allows mammals to very quickly adapt to optimize their wake period and maximize the chances of finding food during times when food is scarce.
This starvation override can take effect after only 16 hours of fasting. When the fast is cancelled by a sufficient caloric intake (read: real food), the body will shift its natural wake time to coincide with the event. So if you want to ditch your jet lag, or if you want to get up earlier in the morning, it might be as simple as fasting for the 16 hours prior to the time you would like to wake up, then eat a big meal. Your body will then override its normal light-based rhythm and wake at that same time going forward.
Planetary systems much like our own may be more common than what we thought:
Dr Dominik told BBC News: "We found a system with two planets that take the roles of Jupiter and Saturn in our Solar System. These two planets have a similar mass ratio and similar orbital radius and a similar orbital period.
"It looks like this may have formed in a similar way to our Solar System. And if this is the case, it looks like [our] Solar System cannot be unique in the Universe. There should be other similar systems out there which could host terrestrial planets."
The Seattle Biomedical Research Institute is seeking volunteers who are willing to be bitten by mosquitoes infected with malaria. Volunteers could be paid up to $4000.
Scientists say no lives are in danger because the volunteers can be cured. The institute is testing which vaccines work fastest.
The head of the program, Dr. Patrick Duffy, said volunteers will spend several nights under medical supervision in a hotel.
The Schwarz-Christoffel formula is a mathematical tool that translates information from a complicated shape to a simpler circular shape. Although useful, for 140 years it only worked for shapes that did not contain any holes or irregularities.
Professor Darren Crowdy has solved this mathematical problem and complicated shapes can now be used with this formula.
"This formula is an essential piece of mathematical kit which is used the world over. Now, with my additions to it, it can be used in far more complex scenarios than before. In industry, for example, this mapping tool was previously inadequate if a piece of metal or other material was not uniform all over - for instance, if it contained parts of a different material, or had holes."
Professor Crowdy's work has overcome these obstacles and he says he hopes it will open up many new opportunities for this kind of conformal mapping to be used in diverse applications.
"With my extensions to this formula, you can take account of these differences and map them onto a simple disk shape for analysis in the same way as you can with less complex shapes without any of the holes," he added.
By using a new technique which uses attosecond pulses, scientists can now film an electron in motion.
Previously it was impossible to photograph electrons because of their extreme speediness, so scientists had to rely on more indirect methods. These methods could only measure the effect of an electron's movement, whereas the new technique can capture the entire event.
Extremely short flashes of light are necessary to capture an electron in motion. A technology developed within the last few years can generate short pulses of intense laser light, called attosecond pulses, to get the job done.
"It takes about 150 attoseconds for an electron to circle the nucleus of an atom. An attosecond is 10^-18 seconds long, or, expressed in another way: an attosecond is related to a second as a second is related to the age of the universe," said Johan Mauritsson of Lund University in Sweden.
Research is showing that artificial sweeteners may not be fooling our bodies into losing weight.
In a series of experiments, scientists at Purdue University compared weight gain and eating habits in rats whose diets were supplemented with sweetened food containing either zero-calorie saccharin or sugar. The report, published in Behavioral Neuroscience, presents some counterintuitive findings: Animals fed with artificially sweetened yogurt over a two-week period consumed more calories and gained more weight — mostly in the form of fat — than animals eating yogurt flavored with glucose, a natural, high-calorie sweetener. It's a continuation of work the Purdue group began in 2004, when they reported that animals consuming saccharin-sweetened liquids and snacks tended to eat more than animals fed high-calorie, sweetened foods. The new study, say the scientists, offers stronger evidence that how we eat may depend on automatic, conditioned responses to food that are beyond our control.
