HELP SAVE ARECIBO RADIO TELESCOPE!

A request from the SETI@Home Team:

Arecibo Observatory, the world's largest radio telescope and the source for
the SETI@home data that your computer analyzes, faces massive budget cuts that
will END its ability to continue the search for life beyond Earth. The decision
to ensure full funding currently rests upon votes in Congress on Senate Bill S.
2862 and House Resolution H.R. 3737. These bills desperately need more support.

Please take a moment to help us SAVE ARECIBO.

Clicking the link below will direct you to a web page that allows you to print
out letters prepared for your Senators and Congressional Representative urging
them to support Arecibo. Printing and mailing the letters is really easy, too!
You will also have the chance to add a few personal thoughts, if you wish, to
let your Senators and Representative know why this funding is important to you!
And if you're really feeling passionate about saving Arecibo, please use these
letters as the basis for letters you write yourself, urging your congressmen
and women to vote to save Arecibo.

Because our representatives in Congress rarely give much attention to all the
email they receive, printing out and MAILING these letters via standard U.S.
Postal mail remains our best option for contacting them and our best hope for
saving Arecibo (The second best option is to call your representatives). Your
42 cent stamps on these letters could help us get the millions of dollars
needed to save Arecibo.

Our search cannot continue without the necessary support. Your work, as
SETI@home participants, represents an indispensable resource for conducting the
search. Now, we need your help to ensure that our other most valuable resource
- our eyes and ears to the cosmos - can continue to probe the universe as we
seek to answer the question: Is there anybody out there?

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/arecibo_letter.php

Thank you for your help,

The SETI@home Team

Phoenix Spacecraft Lands on Mars!

NASA's Phoenix spacecraft landed in the northern polar region of Mars Sunday to begin three months of examining a site chosen for its likelihood of having frozen water within reach of the lander's robotic arm.

Radio signals received at 4:53:44 p.m. Pacific Time (7:53:44 p.m. Eastern Time) confirmed the Phoenix Mars Lander had survived its difficult final descent and touchdown 15 minutes earlier. The signals took that long to travel from Mars to Earth at the speed of light.

Mission team members at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver; and the University of Arizona, Tucson, cheered confirmation of the landing and eagerly awaited further information from Phoenix later Sunday night.

Among those in the JPL control room was NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, who noted this was the first successful Mars landing without airbags since Viking 2 in 1976.

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"For the first time in 32 years, and only the third time in history, a JPL team has carried out a soft landing on Mars," Griffin said. "I couldn't be happier to be here to witness this incredible achievement."

During its 422-million-mile flight from Earth to Mars after launching on Aug. 4, 2007, Phoenix relied on electricity from solar panels. The cruise stage with those solar panels was jettisoned seven minutes before the lander, encased in a protective shell, entered the Martian atmosphere. Batteries will now provide electricity until the lander's own pair of solar arrays spread open.

"We've passed the hardest part and we're breathing again, but we still need to see that Phoenix has opened its solar arrays and begun generating power," said JPL's Barry Goldstein, the Phoenix project manager. If all goes well, engineers will learn the status of the solar arrays between 7 and 7:30 p.m. Pacific Time from a Phoenix transmission relayed via NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter.

[Update: The solar arrays have deployed!]

Above: First pictures beamed back to Earth from Phoenix's arctic landing site. Image credits: NASA/JPL-Calech/University of Arizona. [more]

The team will also be watching for the Sunday night transmission to confirm that masts for the stereo camera and the weather station have swung to their vertical positions.

[Update: The stereo camera and weather station have swung to their vertical positions.]

"What a thrilling landing! But the team is waiting impatiently for the next set of signals that will verify a healthy spacecraft," said Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, principal investigator for the Phoenix mission. "I can hardly contain my enthusiasm. The first landed images of the Martian polar terrain will set the stage for our mission."

Another critical deployment will be the first use of the 7.7-foot-long robotic arm on Phoenix, which will not be attempted for at least two days. Researchers will use the arm during future weeks to get samples of soil and ice into laboratory instruments on the lander deck.

The signal confirming that Phoenix had survived touchdown was relayed via Mars Odyssey and received on Earth at the Goldstone, Calif., antenna station of NASA's Deep Space Network.

Check http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix for updates.

Personal Care Products Linked To Pollution And Health Concerns

Parental concerns in maintaining germ-free homes for their children have led to an ever-increasing demand and the rapid adoption of anti-bacterial soaps and cleaning agents. But the active ingredients of those antiseptic soaps now have come under scrutiny by the EPA and FDA, due to both environmental and human health concerns.

Two closely related antimicrobials, triclosan and triclocarban, are at the center of the debacle. Whereas triclosan (TCS) has long captured the attention of toxicologists due to its structural resemblance to dioxin (the Times Beach and Love Canal poison), triclocarban (TCC) has ski-rocketed in 2004 from an unknown and presumably harmless consumer product additive to one of today’s top ten pharmaceuticals and personal care products most frequently found in the environment and in U.S. drinking water resources.

Now, Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University researcher Rolf Halden and co-workers, in a feat of environmental detective work, have traced back the active ingredients of soaps — used as long ago as the 1960s — to their current location, the shallow sediments of New York City’s Jamaica Bay and the Chesapeake Bay, the nation’s largest estuary.

“Our group has shown that antimicrobial ingredients used a half a century ago, by our parents and grandparents, are still present today at parts-per-million concentrations in estuarine sediments underlying the brackish waters into which New York City and Baltimore discharge their treated domestic wastewater,” said Halden, a new member of the institute’s Center for Environmental Biotechnology. “This extreme environmental persistence by itself is a concern, and it is only amplified by recent studies that show both triclosan and triclocarban to function as endocrine disruptors in mammalian cell cultures and in animal models.”

Aiding in his team’s research was another type of contamination: the radioactive fallout from nuclear testing conducted in the second half of the last century. Using the known deposition history and half-lives of two radioactive isotopes, cesium-137 and beryllium-7, Halden and his collaborators Steven Chillrud, Jerry Ritchie and Richard Bopp were able to assign the approximate time at which sediments observed to contain antimicrobial residues had been deposited in the two East Coast locations.

By analyzing vertical cores of sediment deposited over time in the two sampling locations on the East Coast, they showed that TCC, and to a lesser extent, TCS, can persist in estuary sediments. TCC was shown to be present at parts per million levels, which could represent unhealthy levels for aquatic life, especially the bottom feeders that are important to commercial fishing industries like shellfish and crabs.

In the Chesapeake Bay samples, the group noticed a significant drop in TCC levels that corresponded to a technology upgrade in the nearby wastewater treatment plant back in 1978. However, earlier work by the team had shown that enhanced removal of TCC and TCS in wastewater treatment plants leads to accumulation of the problematic antimicrobial substances in municipal sludge that often is applied on agricultural land for disposal. Lead author Todd Miller concludes that “little is actually degraded during wastewater treatment and more information is needed regarding the long term consequences these chemicals may have on environmentally beneficial microorganisms.”

Along the way of studying the deposition history of antimicrobials in sediments, the team also discovered a new pathway for the breakdown of antimicrobial additives of consumer products. Deep in the muddy sediments of the Chesapeake Bay, they found evidence for the activity of anaerobic microorganisms that assist in the decontamination of their habitat by pulling chlorine atoms one by one off the carbon backbone of triclocarban, presumably while obtaining energy for their metabolism in the process. “This is good news,” said Halden, “but unfortunately the process does not occur in all locations and furthermore it is quite slow. If we continue to use persistent antimicrobial compounds at the current rate, we are outpacing nature’s ability to decompose these problematic compounds.”

While combining bioenergy production and pollutant destruction has its own appeal, Halden sees a simpler solution to combating the pollution his team discovered: limit the use of antimicrobial personal care products to situations where they improve public health and save lives.

“The irony is that these compounds have no measurable benefit over the use of regular soap and water for hand washing; the contact time simply is too short.” Unfortunately this cannot be said for the bottom-dwelling organisms in the sampling locations on the East Coast. “Here,” Halden concludes, “the affected organisms are experiencing multi-generational, life-time exposures to our chemical follies.”

Halden is planning to continue his research on persistent antimicrobials by studying their body burden and associated health effects in susceptible populations including mothers and their babies.

[Joe Caspermeyer @ Arizona State University]

Some Things Never Change!

"The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced; the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled." -- Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC)

Ballast-Free Ship Could Cut Costs While Blocking Aquatic Invaders

I love stories where the search for the solution of one problem results in at least a partial solution to the original problem but also an unexpected bonus solution to an entirely different problem:

University of Michigan researchers are investigating a radical new design for cargo ships that would eliminate ballast tanks, the water-filled compartments that enable non-native creatures to sneak into the Great Lakes from overseas.

At least 185 non-native aquatic species have been identified in the Great Lakes, and ballast water is blamed for the introduction of most-including the notorious zebra and quagga mussels and two species of gobies.

This week, the U.S. Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corp. will implement new rules designed to reduce Great Lakes invaders. Ships will be required to flush ballast tanks with salt water before entering the Seaway, a practice corporation officials describe as an interim measure, not a final solution.

Meanwhile, Congress is considering legislation that would force freighters to install costly onboard sterilization systems to kill foreign organisms in ballast water. The systems use filters, ultraviolet irradiation, chemical biocides and other technologies, and can cost more than $500,000.

The U-M ballast-free ship concept offers a promising alternative that could block hitchhiking organisms while eliminating the need for expensive sterilization equipment, said Michael Parsons, professor of naval architecture and marine engineering and co-leader of the project.

“There is no silver bullet. But the ballast-free ship has the potential to be an economic winner while addressing the ballast problem in a serious way,” Parsons said.

Ships take on ballast water for stability when they’re not carrying cargo. They discharge ballast when they load freight, expelling tons of water and anything else-from pathogenic microbes to mollusks and fish-that’s in it.

Instead of hauling potentially contaminated water across the ocean, then dumping it in a Great Lakes port, a ballast-free ship would create a constant flow of local seawater through a network of large pipes, called trunks, that runs from the bow to the stern, below the waterline.

“In some ways, it’s more like a submarine than a surface ship,” Parsons said. “We’re opening part of the hull to the sea, creating a very slow flow through the trunks from bow to stern.

“You’re continuously sweeping water through the ship and out,” he said. “So you’re always filled with local sea water, not hauling water from one part of the world to the other.”

The U-M ballast-free ship concept was conceived in 2001 and patented in 2004. It is intended for new-vessel construction only.

With funding from the Great Lakes Maritime Research Institute, Parsons and his colleagues recently built a 16-foot, $25,000 wooden scale model of an oceangoing bulk carrier to test the concept.

The work is underway at the U-M Marine Hydrodynamics Laboratory’s towing tank, the oldest facility of its kind that is owned by a U.S. educational institution.

In addition to helping fine tune the design, results from the latest round of tank tests and computer simulations suggest the ballast-free ship will deliver an unforeseen benefit. The design appears to provide a significant savings-possibly as much as 7.3 percent-in the power needed to propel the ship.

For a 650-foot bulk carrier hauling 32,000 metric tons of cargo from the Great Lakes to Europe and back, that translates into a roundtrip fuel savings of roughly $150,000. A report on the latest test results, including their economic implications, will be published next month in the Transactions of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers.

In upcoming towing tests, tentatively set for late June, the naval engineers will try to confirm and explain the unexpected power savings. Most of the improvement is likely due to the fact that water expelled from the stern-end of the trunks “smooths out the flow” into the propeller, allowing it to operate more efficiently, Parsons said.

“It’s a huge power reduction, a hard-to-believe improvement in power, and we have to convince ourselves that all of it is real,” he said.

Building an oceangoing bulk carrier can cost $70 million. The added construction costs of the ballast-free design-for extra hull steel, trunk-isolation valves, piping and welding-would be more than offset by eliminating the filtration system and the ballast tanks.

The researchers conclude that the new design would result in a net capital-cost savings of about $540,000 per ship. Combined with the expected fuel savings, total cargo transport costs would be cut by $2.55 per metric ton.

“It seems that, compared to other ballast treatment systems, it’s a viable alternative,” SUNY Maritime College engineer Miltiadis Kotinis said of the ballast-free ship concept.

“We have proven that the technical part is feasible and that it can be applied to new vessel construction,” said Kotinis, a collaborator on the project and a U-M alumnus. “And we have also shown that, regarding the economics, it can reduce the operating cost and reduce or even eliminate the introduction of non-indigenous aquatic species.”

The Basics of Space Flight

Description from the website:

The people of Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory create, manage, and operate NASA projects of exploration throughout our solar system and beyond.

Basics of Space Flight is a tutorial designed primarily to help operations people identify the range of concepts associated with deep space missions, and grasp the relationships among them. It also enjoys popularity with college and high-school students, as well as faculty, and people everywhere who are interested in interplanetary space flight.

This website attempts to offer a broad scope, but limited depth, as a robust framework to accommodate further training or investigation. Many other resources are available for delving into each of the topics related here; indeed, any one of them can involve a lifelong career of specialization. This module's purpose is met if the participant learns the scope of concepts that apply to interplanetary space exploration, and how the relationships among them work.

Basics of Space Flight is intended to be used online via the worldwide web (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/basics). Links to external sites provide further depth to many topics. There are interactive quizzes to let you check your own progress. No records are kept. Caltech does not offer academic credit for this training.

What You See Is Not What You Get

Another site showing how we can be misled by media. This is an interesting German site that compares the pictures of food products used on the packaging with what the products actually look like.

Point of View

A click on the title of this entry will take you to an interesting video. We often only see one aspect of a situation. And what we see may be misleading. So the responsible thing to do is to not rush to judgement until you've checked all the facts.

Interesting Quote

"Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

HIGH SPEED FIGHTER JET PASSES

If you feel the need for speed!

Atlantis Launch

Cool photo of recent Atlantis space shuttle launch.

NETWORK TOOLS

If you run a small business or home network, please have a look at this article from Computer World about some potentially useful network tools. I can personally vouch for Network Magic. It's kept my home network up and running for over six months.

Great Alaskan Aurora Photos

See these excellent aurora photos taken by Dave Taylor and posted on Spaceweather.com.

Bio-Crude

One of the problems of bio fuels has been the reliance of crops that are easy to crack. The cost- benefit calculation when using corn, grains and other food crops to make alcohol is that the energy input to convert these sorts of crops to usable fuel is greater than the amount of energy you can gain. Add in the reduction of land diverted from food production plus the rise in food prices in addition to distortions in tax policy and all you've achieved is another boon for the farm lobby with no net increase in fuel supplies and no reduction in carbon emissions.

The hope has been to use less valuable bio matter to produce fuel. However these sorts of raw material have been difficult to crack into usable fuel. The CSIRO and Monash University recently announced that they have developed efficient and cheap chemical processes that could achieve this dream by making is possible to use cellulose to make fuel. Lignocellulose is both renewable and potentially greenhouse gas neutral. It is predominantly found in trees and is made up of cellulose. Waste material that is currently burned or buried could be used to make fuel without using more land and using energy inputs that already exist and not increase the carbon cost to the environment.

If the chemical processes can be scaled up, even those farmers and distillers who currently benefit from high corn and grain prices and tax benefits may sign on as they could use material that is now merely treated as waste. For instance, all the paper devoted to describing, reporting, calculating, checking, proposing and regulating our current system of taxation could be used to make fuel. The results: lower carbon emissions, lower food prices, less drain on the treasury and an alternative source of energy. Sounds like a good idea to me.

Now if we could only find a way to harness all the hot air blown by politicians into usable fuel!

Xerox Printers

I am intrigued with the latest series of printers from Xerox that use solid ink sticks. I write this as I look at a box of empty Epson and HP ink jet cartridges. I can't throw them away; we throw away too much crap already. I've looked into giving them to charities that collect such things to be recycled. But nobody wants the Epson cartridges. And there aren't really many charities actually collecting these things around where I live. So a printer that doesn't create more garbage is attractive to me.

Furthermore, I do wish for a printer of higher quality than existing ink jets using ink that's clean and easy to load into the printer, prints that don't smear, doesn't go through cartridges like they're going out of style and doesn't jam at the least little deviation in paper quality. Have you ever run out of ink in the middle of the night when the stores are closed and you have a big presentation the next day? Thank God for Kinkos! And nothing irritates me more than having to replace a cartridge when I know there's more ink in the damn thing. I can hear it when I shake it!

I do appreciate the work my battle worn HP's and a relatively new Epson have done. But my requirements are exceeding the occasional use that such printers are built for and going up a step to the laser printers offered by those companies doesn't satisfy my desire for simplicity and green behavior.

So I'm going to look into the costs associated with the Xerox Phaser series of printers and actually see if I can play with one somewhere to see what this new line Xerox can do.

US Coast Guard Visual Information Gallery

I put the the US Coast Guard in the same category as fire departments: unreservedly necessary, money well spent and incredibly brave.

Shark Labs Tested Software

From the that hotbed of computing innovation in Buena Park, CA, Shark Labs tests various software. Attributes we look for are as follows: free or low cost, stable, secure, efficient and a small footprint in terms of resources and space. All have been tested on old, used and decrepit equipment for at least 6 months.

WinPatrol: A useful addition to your system. This award winning software is a system support utility and security monitor. It also features a dog named Scottie as an added benefit. See http://www.winpatrol.com/.

Comet 8P /Tuttle

Emerald Comet 8P/Tuttle glided by spiral galaxy M33 producing a heavenly scene for astrophotographers around the world.  Dozens of photos may be found in Spaceweather's Comet Tuttle gallery: http://spaceweather.com/comets/gallery_tuttle_page4.htm.

Blue Angels 2008 Schedule

The Navy Flight Demonstration Squadron, The Blue Angels, announced its show schedule for the 2008 season. Following winter training, the team begins their season at Naval Air Facility El Centro, Calif., March 8 and will conclude the season Nov. 16 at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Fla. The Blue Angels are scheduled to perform 68 shows at 35 locations throughout the U.S. and Canada. For more information, including a complete show schedule, visit www.blueangels.navy.mil.

SETI @Home

The longest-running search for radio signals from alien civilizations is getting a burst of new data from an upgraded Arecibo telescope, which means the SETI@home project needs more desktop computers to help crunch the data.

Since SETI@home launched eight years ago, the project based at the University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory has signed up more than 5 million interested volunteers and boasts the largest community of dedicated users of any Internet computing project: 170,000 devotees on 320,000 computers.

Yet, new and more sensitive receivers on the world’s largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and better frequency coverage are generating 500 times more data for the project than before. The SETI@home software has been upgraded to deal with this new data as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) enters a new era and offers a new opportunity for those who want to help find other civilizations in the universe.

“The next generation SETI@home is 500 times more powerful then anything anyone has done before,” said project chief scientist Dan Werthimer. “That means we are 500 times more likely to find ET than with the original SETI@home.”

According to project scientist Eric Korpela, the new data amounts to 300 gigabytes per day, or 100 terabytes (100,000 gigabytes) per year, about the amount of data stored in the U.S. Library of Congress. “That’s why we need all the volunteers,” he said. “Everyone has a chance to be part of the largest public participation science project in history.”

The 1,000-foot diameter Arecibo dish, which fills a valley in Puerto Rico, is part of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center operated by Cornell University with funds from the National Science Foundation. Since 1992, Werthimer and his team have piggybacked on radio astronomy observations at Arecibo to record signals from space and analyze them for patterns that could indicate they were transmitted by an intelligent civilization.

When the team’s incoming data overwhelmed its ability to analyze it, the scientists conceived a distributed computing project to harness many computers into one big supercomputer to do the analysis. Since SETI@home was launched, other distributed computing projects have arisen, from folding@home to predict the three-dimensional tangle of a protein to the newly-launched cosmology@home to model possible universes. Most are now on a platform called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), which was developed by SETI@home’s director David Anderson so that the various projects could share resources.

“There are now 42 projects on BOINC, and, until now, there has been enough computing power to go around,” Werthimer said.

What triggered the new flow of data was the addition of seven new receivers at Arecibo, which now allow the telescope to record radio signals from seven regions of the sky simultaneously instead of just one. With greater sensitivity and the ability to detect the polarization of the radio signals, plus 40 times more frequency coverage, Arecibo is set to survey the sky for new radio sources.

These improvements also prime the telescope for an improved search for intelligent signals from space.

“The multiple receivers help us weed out interference better and make us less susceptible to thinking that things terrestrial are extraterrestrial,” Werthimer said.

Werthimer noted that, despite the fact that UC Berkeley has been analyzing radio signals from space since 1978 on various telescopes, no telltale signals from an intelligent civilization have yet been found.

“Earthlings are just getting started looking at the frequencies in the sky; we’re looking only at the cosmically brightest sources, hoping we are scanning the right radio channels,” he said. “The good news is, we’re entering an era when we will be able to scan billions of channels. Arecibo is now optimized for this kind of search, so if there are signals out there, we or our volunteers will find them.”

A Good Quote

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin