Quantum fluctuations in science, space and society, from quarks to Hubble and Mars. Served up by Alan Boyle, NBC News Digital science editor. E-mail Alan, or connect via Facebook, Twitter or Google+.
is image of Markarian 509 was taken in April 2007 with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 2. Observations reveal bullets of gas being driven away from the galaxy's supermassive black hole, and a corona of hot gas hovering above the disk of in-falling matter.
By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News
Astronomers have taken an unprecedented look at the tumult surrounding a supermassive black hole, using a quintet of space telescopes. And they're finding out that it's a horribly messy eater.
The black hole in question is at the center of the galaxy Markarian 509, which is nearly 500 million light-years away. Unlike the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, Markarian 509's colossal black hole is sucking huge amounts of dust and gas into its gravitational maw. Its mass is 300 million times that of the sun, or roughly 75 times the mass of the Milky Way's central black hole.
The telescopes couldn't see the black hole itself, but they could see the strong emissions of radiation in various wavelengths from the wreckage that's swirling around it. The X-ray observatories — XMM-Newton and Chandra — were particularly useful.
Markarian 509's gravitational monster is known for its variability. During the 100-day observing campaign, its brightness in the soft X-ray band jumped up by 60 percent, signaling a cosmic feeding frenzy. In a news release, the European Space Agency said giant, blobby bullets of gas were stripped away from the whirlpool and ejected at speeds of millions of miles per hour.
The astronomers were surprised to find that the bullets were coming from a dusty reservoir of matter waiting to fall into the black hole, situated more than 15 light-years away. That's farther away than some astronomers thought was possible.
"There has been a debate in astronomy for some time about the origin of the outflowing gas," said Jelle Kaastra of the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research. Kaastra coordinated the international black-hole research team of 26 astronomers from 21 institutes.
M. Weiss / CXC / NASA
In this artist's illustration, turbulent winds of gas swirl around a black hole. Some of the gas is spiraling inward toward the black hole, but another part is blown away.
The dusty reservoir forms a doughnut-shaped torus around the black hole. Material spirals in toward the black hole, creating a whirling accretion disk. The disk appears to give rise to a "corona" that hovers above it.
"This corona absorbs and reprocesses the ultraviolet light from the disk, energizing it and converting it into X-ray light," Kaastra said in a SRON news release. "It must have a temperature of a few million degrees. ... This discovery allows us to make sense of some of the observations of active galaxies that have been hard to explain so far."
The researchers said the corona appears to be the source of the X-rays and gamma rays that drive the bullets outward.
The initial results are being published as a series of seven papers in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, titled "Multiwavelength Campaign on Mrk 509." SRON said still more results are in preparation.
This visualization of dark matter is one-thousandth of the gigantic Bolshoi cosmological simulation, zooming in on a region centered on the dark matter halo of a very large cluster of galaxies. (Credit: Chris Henze, NASA ARC)
If you're going to create a virtual universe, you're going to need a big computer — like the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. Researchers have just made the most accurate computer simulation showing the evolution of large-scale structure in the universe, known as the Bolshoi simulation, available to astrophysicists around the world.
Bolshoi (which takes its name from the Russian word for "grand" or "big") took in data from ground-based and space-based instruments, including the best readings of the big bang's afterglow from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP. Then it used 6 million CPU hours on Pleiades, ranked as the world's seventh-fastest supercomputer, to crunch all that data into a virtual representation of the universe evolving over time.
The first two papers in a series describing the simulation have been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. "A lot more papers are on the way," one of the co-authors, physicist Joel Primack, said in a news release from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
So far, the simulation has been in close agreement with what astronomers are seeing in the actual universe.
"In one sense, you might think the initial results are a little boring, because they basically show that our standard cosmological model works," Primack said. "What's exciting is that we now have this highly accurate simulation that will provide the basis for lots of important new studies in the months and years to come."
The standard model suggests that only 4 percent of the universe's mass-energy content consists of ordinary matter — the kind that we can see. Another 22 percent is cold dark matter, which can be detected only by its gravitational influence. Physicists surmise that dark matter is made up of exotic particles that interact only weakly with ordinary matter, but they haven't yet identified any of those particles. It's the weightiness of dark matter that is thought to shape galaxy clusters into a "cosmic web," which you can easily see forming in the animation above. (Remember to go full-screen and HD for optimal effect, or check out this music-enhanced Vimeo version.)
The biggest constituent of the cosmos, at least based on current models, is dark energy: This mysterious energy, which is thought to account for around 74 percent of cosmic density, serves to counteract the force of gravity and cause the accelerating expansion of the universe. Its existence is required to reconcile cosmological theories with WMAP's observations as well as observations of distant supernovae — but no one has figured out what it is, which has led some astronomers to look for alternative theories.
"These huge cosmological simulations are essential for interpreting the results of ongoing astronomical observations and for planning the new large surveys of the universe that are expected to help determine the nature of the mysterious dark energy," he said.
The first paper based on Bolshoi analysis focuses on the role of dark-matter halos in the universe's development, while the second paper looks at Bolshoi's predictions for the abundance and properties of galaxies. The researchers have found that the simulation correctly predicts the number of galaxies as bright as our own Milky Way that have satellite galaxies as bright as the Milky Way's major satellite galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg: So far, less than 1 percent of the Bolshoi project's output has been released, Primack said. The Bolshoi simulation computes the evolution of a cubic volume measuring about a billion light-years on a side, following the interactions of 8.6 billion particles of dark matter. A variant of the simulation, called BigBolshoi or MultiDark, was run with the same number of particles in a volume 64 times larger. Another variant called MiniBolshoi is currently being run on Pleiades. It focuses on a smaller portion of the universe with higher resolution.
Update for 5:50 p.m. Oct. 7: In a follow-up phone call, Primack told me that "the agreement between predictions that come from the simulations and the actual observations are really getting spectacular." The previous top-of-the-line virtual universe, known as the Millennium Simulation, showed galaxies as being "much more clustered than they actually are," he said, while the Bolshoi version is "bang-on." Primack said still more revelations are coming from the Bolshoi team. "It's like things are coming into sharp focus," he said.
The 'artificial leaf,' a device that can harness sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen without needing any external connections, is seen with some real leaves, which also convert the energy of sunlight directly into storable chemical form.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
It doesn't look like the leaves changing colors and piling up on the lawn, but a nature-inspired "artificial leaf" technology has taken a notable step toward the goal of producing storable and clean energy to power everything from factories to tablet computers.
The leaf is a silicon solar cell coated with catalytic materials on its side that, when placed in a container of water and exposed to sunlight, splits the H2O into bubbles of oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen can be stored and used as an energy source, for example to power a fuel cell.
"The device both captures the solar energy and stores it in the chemical bonds of the hydrogen and oxygen that are produced from the water," Steven Reece, a research scientist with Sun Catalytix and lead author of a paper describing the breakthrough, told me Friday.
You can check out the device in action the video below.
An "artificial leaf" made by Daniel Nocera and his team, using a silicon solar cell with novel catalyst materials bonded to its two sides, is shown in a container of water with light (simulating sunlight) shining on it. The light generates a flow of electricity that causes the water molecules, with the help of the catalysts, to split into oxygen and hydrogen, which bubble up from the two surfaces.
The artificial leaf is made entirely with earth-abundant, inexpensive materials — mostly silicon, cobalt, and nickel — and it works in ordinary water. Other attempts have required more expensive catalysts such as platinum and/or extremely caustic water, noted Reece.
"What was really novel about our work is that we were able to integrate our earth-abundant catalysts with this commercial triple junction solar photovoltaic technology that would then operate under benign conditions without wires and a reasonable efficiency," he said
The breakthrough was led by Daniel Nocera at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was reported Thursday in the journal Science. Reece worked in Nocera's lab before moving to Sun Catalytix, which was started by Nocera to commercialize his solar energy inventions.
This new paper is the latest step in a process that has generated buzz over the years.
In 2008, the team reported on the cobalt part of the equation, which releases oxygen from water. They've now coated the other side of the silicon sheet with the nickel-molybdenum-zinc alloy, which releases hydrogen from water molecules.
"You just drop it in a glass of water, and it starts splitting it," Nocera said in a statement.
He added that the device is not ready for commercial production as the systems to collect, store, and use the gases remain to be developed. "It's a step," he said. "It's heading in the right direction."
The collection and storage of the sun's energy as hydrogen fuel is a key step in overcoming one of the limitations of solar power — it generates energy when the sun is shining, but it needs to be stored somewhere to be useful at night and in cloudy weather.
Batteries are one place to store the energy, but battery technology, while improving, is limited. Storing solar energy as hydrogen fuel could be an answer.
"Nobody disputes the beauty of the chemistry," reads a Nature News article about the technology. "But whether the system is actually useful will come down to how expensive the hydrogen is to make, and how efficiently the system can use the available energy from sunlight."
John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.
When Sal Khan began posting free math lectures on YouTube, he became the darling of education reform advocates. But now that his Khan Academy is expanding into real classrooms, teachers are arguing over the value of the approach.
Researcher Peter Snyder explains the serious point behind his seemingly silly study of full bladders, pain and decision making. Snyder is among this year's Ig Nobel Prize winners.
Beetles who boink beer bottles ... a car-crunching mayor ... and researchers who study the link between pee pressure and decision-making? These have got to be the silliest science laureates of the year. At least that's what the folks behind this year's Ig Nobel Prizes intended.
Every year, the Ig Nobels recognize scientific achievements that make you laugh, and then make you think. The ceremony, organized at Harvard University by a science humor magazine called the Annals of Improbable Research, is timed to come just before the Nobel Prizes are announced, and around the time that the list is issued for the National Medals of Science and Technology.
Most of the Ig Nobel laureates are real scientists, although there are always a few honorees who would probably just as soon not be so "honored." For example, this year's mathematics prize went to a procession of failed doomsday prophets — including Harold Camping, the preacher who stirred up such a fuss earlier this year over the Rapture that didn't come. They won the award "for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations."
Last year marked a milestone for the Ig Nobels: Dutch-Russian physicist Andrei Geim, who received a funny physics prize in 2000 for his experiments in magnetic frog levitation, won a share of the honest-to-goodness Nobel Prize in physics for his work with graphene — thus becoming the first Ig recipient to win a Nobel as well.
As is traditional for the Ig Nobels, real live Nobel laureates helped hand out the awards at Harvard, and one of them was appointed to sweep up the paper airplanes that were thrown during the ceremony. An 8-year-old girl stood by to chant, "Please stop, I'm bored," if any recipient went over the 60-second limit for acceptance speeches.
Darryl Gwynne / UT-Mississauga
A male Australian jewel beetle attempts to mate with a "stubby" beer bottle.
Beer goggles for beetles This year's biology prize went to Australian researcher David Rentz and his colleague at the University of Toronto at Mississauga, Darryl Gwynne, for writing a research paper about Australian jewel beetles who become so enamored with "stubby" brown beer bottles that they try to mate with them. In fact, they try so vigorously that they can die in the hot sun during their repeated attempts. It turns out that the bottles have the texture and sparkly orange-brown color that male beetles associate with a "super female" beetle, Gwynne said.
During tonight's ceremony, Gwynne joked that the research demonstrates that "only males make mistakes, not females." It also shows how humans and their trash can unwittingly interfere with evolution — which is the serious point behind the silliness.
Gwynne was a bit surprised to win an Ig Nobel for research published back in 1983. "I'm honored, I think," he said in a UT-Mississauga news release. "The awards make people think, and they're a bit of a laugh. Really, we've been sitting here by the phone for the past 20-plus years waiting for the call. Why did it take them so long?"
Focusing on peace and pee The winner of this year's Ig Nobel Peace Prize is Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, capital of Lithuania. Zuokas made a splash by driving an armored personnel carrier over cars that violated the city's parking rules.
"I just decided that it was time to teach bullies who had no respect for the rights of others a lesson that left an impression," he told The Associated Press in an email. Although the city currently uses more traditional methods to fight parking scofflaws — such as issuing tickets and towing vehicles — Zuokas says he keeps the tank on standby.
Vilnius Mayor Arturas Zuokas won this year's Ig Nobel "Peace Prize" for running over illegally parked cars with a tank. This clip from Lithuania shows his diplomacy at work.
The studies on pee pressure were conducted by two groups of researchers who found that the need to urinate affected decision-making by their experimental subjects. One group found that moderate stress seemed to focus attention on the tasks at hand, but the other group concluded that an extreme need to urinate reduced attention span and the ability to make decisions.
"When people reach a point when they are in so much pain they just can't stand it anymore, it was like being drunk," Peter Snyder, a professor of neurology at Brown University, told AP. "The ability to hold information was really impaired."
Actually, the point behind Snyder's study wasn't really to see how long people can hold it. He and his colleagues were focusing more generally on how pain affects decision making. It just turns out that keeping people from voiding their bladders was a "low-cost, low-risk" way to create pain that's easily relieved after a quick zip to the bathroom.
Makes you think, doesn't it? Which of today's winners make you laugh? Which make you scratch your head ... and wonder how they ever got paid for doing this? Feel free to weigh in with your Ig Nobel ratings in the comment section below.
Chemistry prize: Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm. Reference: US patent application 2010/0308995 A1. Filing date: Feb 5, 2009.
Literature prize: John Perry for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important. Reference: "How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done," later republished elsewhere under the title "Structured Procrastination."
Mathematics prize: Dorothy Martin (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet (who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping (who predicted the world would end on Sept. 6, 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on Oct. 21, 2011), for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.
From May 24, 2011: California preacher Harold Camping, who said the world would end on May 21, now says the Rapture will happen in October. NBC's George Lewis reports.
Peace prize: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank. Video: "Vilnius Mayor Fights Illegally Parked Cars With Tank."
Public safety prize: John Senders for conducting a series of safety experiments in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face, blinding him. Reference: "The Attentional Demand of Automobile Driving." Video: "Pioneer Days on Rt 128."
Research on the "attentional demands of automobile driving," conducted on I-495 and Route 128 outside of Boston in the mid-1960s.
Nissan and Swiss researhers are collaborating on a car of the future that will read drivers' minds to make the task at hand easier and safer.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
What's on your mind as you drive down the road? Cars of the future may tap into those thoughts in order to keep you and our roads safer.
The technology builds on brain-machine interface research pioneered at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland that allows wheelchairs users to get around using their minds.
A wheelchair controlled by thought alone, from the EPFL Lab of José Millan.
Now, in collaboration with Nissan, the team has announced the car and driver is the next frontier.
"The idea is to blend driver and vehicle intelligence together in such a way that eliminates conflict between them, leading to a safer motoring environment," Jose del Millan, who the EPFL researcher leading the project, said in a media statement.
The system will measure brain activity, eye movement patterns, and the environment around the car to predict what the driver plans to do — such as turn left or change lanes to pass a slowpoke — and then help the driver make the move.
The idea of cars that help drivers get along down the road isn't entirely new. Earlier this year, we reported on a group of German researchers who have a car that turns left and right using brain waves.
More stores on cars, technology, and mind control:
John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.
As computing power increases exponentially, the ways we relate to computers become more natural — and more ubiquitous. Msnbc.com's Wilson Rothman explores the evolution of interfaces, from primitive punch cards to interactive buildings.
To help urban planners determine where to build new roads, subways, skyscrapers and shopping malls to absorb their new residents, researchers are turning to data collected by GPS systems in taxicabs.
"Most taxicabs in Beijing have been embedded with a GPS sensor when they were built for the purpose of dispatching and management," Yu Zheng with Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, explained to me in an email.
(Msnbc.com is a joint venture with Microsoft and NBC Universal.)
The taxicabs also carry a sensor that lets dispatch know when a passenger is on board. The combined data paints a picture of where, when and how people travel around the city.
Zheng and his colleagues gained access to this Big-Brother-like dataset for 30,000 taxicabs spanning the years 2009 and 2010 and analyzed it with computers.
The results point out well-known flaws in urban planning such as busy business and entertainment districts with inadequate roads and subway lines as well as local knowledge including detours cabbies take to avoid known choke points at rush hour.
"Essentially, GPS-equipped taxicabs can be viewed as ubiquitous sensors constantly probing a city's rhythm and pulse such as traffic flows on road surfaces and city-wide travel patterns of people," reads a paper Zheng presented at the 13th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing earlier this month.
The comparison of 2009 to 2010 data highlights where urban planning is working or not. For example, the data shows how a newly constructed road in one part of the city eased traffic congestion for people trying to access a highway.
Despite the improvements, the number of regions experiencing traffic headaches increased and some of the snarls that were occurring in 2009 still exist, Zheng noted.
The good news for Beijing dwellers is that urban planners are on top of some of these problems. An analysis of these plans shows, for example, that the construction of two new subway lines will solve a well-known traffic problem in the densely populated residential Wangjing area of the city.
To date, the researchers have been able to identify where the traffic flaws are. In coming months, they plan to analyze the reason behind the flaws such as why people are traveling where and when they do.
In the future, Zheng said, the team hopes to apply this approach to other cities. That could be good news to residents everywhere from Mexico City to Johannesburg and many points in between that show up in the 2011 iteration of IBM's Commuter Pain Index.
John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.
When Sal Khan began posting free math lectures on YouTube, he became the darling of education reform advocates. But now that his Khan Academy is expanding into real classrooms, teachers are arguing over the value of the approach.
The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, shown in this artist's conception, made a survey of the entire sky in mid-infrared wavelengths.
By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News
Scientists laid out the results of an all-sky asteroid survey conducted by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. Sorry, no Planet X has been discovered yet ... which is good news, come to think of it. "Planet X is not coming to get us," said Amy Mainzer, principal investigator for the probe's NEOWISE mission.
The even better news is that there appear to be significantly fewer threatening near-Earth objects than previously thought. "We believe that the hazard to the earth may be somewhat less," Mainzer. an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, reported today during a news briefing at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Mainzer and her colleagues shared all this good news after taking the most accurate census to date of the asteroids in Earth's orbital vicinity, within 120 million miles (195 kilometers) of the sun. Results from NEOWISE (which stands for Near-Earth Object WISE) are being published in The Astrophysical Journal, with Mainzer as lead author.
WISE was launched in 2009 to scan the full sky twice in infrared wavelengths, which provide a clearer picture of dark asteroids than visible-light observations — just as infrared-sensing goggles improve a soldier's night vision on Earth.
The space telescope observed more than 100,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, plus at least 585 near Earth. That sampling was sufficient to produce an estimate of how many asteroids of various sizes exist in the target area — just as a population census provides a good demographic picture even though the census-takers didn't knock on every door.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
NEOWISE observations indicate there are at least 40 percent fewer near-Earth asteroids in total that are larger than 100 meters (330 feet). Our solar system's four inner planets are shown in green, with the sun in the center. Each red dot represents one asteroid. Object sizes are not to scale.
Mainzer said the WISE results confirmed that astronomers worldwide "have now found more than 90 percent" of the near-Earth asteroids that are wider than a kilometer (0.6 miles). That's the sort of space rock that scientists believe could create a mass-extinction event of the type that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The NEOWISE team's computer model suggests that there are 981 of such asteroids, compared with previous estimates of around 1,000. Astronomers currently have identified 911 of these "planet-buster" asteroids, none of which pose a threat to Earth over the next few centuries.
The 90 percent figure is important because Congress specified that figure in 1998 as the initial goal for NASA's Spaceguard program.
"The risk of a really large asteroid impacting the Earth before we could find and warn of it has been substantially reduced," Tim Spahr, the director of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in NASA's news release.
However ... there's another category of bad-news asteroids, ranging in size from 100 meters (330 feet) to a kilometer in width. These midsize rocks could wipe out a metropolitan area or create a "cosmic Katrina" if they were to hit in just the wrong place. The NEOWISE team estimated that there are 19,500 of such rocks in the near-Earth zone.
The good news is, that's a significantly smaller figure than previous estimates of 35,000 midsize near-Earth objects. The bad news is, astronomers are currently tracking 5,500 asteroids in that size range, which suggests that 14,000 or so remain to be detected. And there are an estimated million asteroids smaller than 100 meters capable of causing lesser amounts of damage if they were to blast through Earth's atmosphere.
In 2005, Congress revised the Spaceguard Survey's initial goal to call on NASA to find 90 percent of the near-Earth objects that are at least 140 meters (460 feet) wide, and Mainzer said tracking down all those rocks is "going to keep us busy for a long time."
"NEOWISE was just the latest asset NASA has used to find Earth's nearest neighbors," Lindley Johnson, program executive for the Near Earth Object Observation Program at NASA Headquarters, said in today's release. "The results complement ground-based observer efforts over the past 12 years. These observers continue to track these objects and find even more."
NASA / JPL-Caltech
This chart shows how data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has led to revisions in the estimated population of near-Earth asteroids. Each of the rocks shown here represents 100 near-Earth asteroids detected in space.
During today's briefing, Johnson said the results of asteroid surveys would feed into NASA's plans to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid sometime in the mid-2020s. In fact, the asteroids that come closest to Earth and pose more of a potential threat would be of "particular interest for exploration destinations," he said.
As for Planet X, or Nibiru, or Nemesis ... Mainzer said there's not been any sign of a large object that could bring about a doomsday in 2012 or anytime soon. "We don't think that there's anything hazardous in the outer solar system," she said.
But that doesn't mean there's nothing interesting out there. Mainzer pointed out that the $320 million WISE mission has already detected 100 brown dwarfs in Earth's vicinity, including some of the coldest brown dwarfs ever seen. Although the WISE spacecraft was shut down earlier this year, the data analysis continues, and there's still a chance that other strange cosmic objects could come to light.
It's been a banner year for auroral displays, as seen from Earth as well as from space. This time-lapse view of the northern lights in Finnish Lapland has to rank as one of the year's more stellar compilations. The video was produced by Flatlight Films as a travel come-on for Visit Finland. The views were captured from several locations, using DSLR cameras with remote pan/tilt heads. For the full effect, go full-screen HD on the YouTube video (or the Vimeo version).
For decades, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has worked to separate myth and religion from hard-headed facts, through science books such as "The Greatest Show on Earth" as well as philosophical tracts such as "The God Delusion." But until now, he's mostly been talking to the grown-ups. In a new work titled "The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True," Dawkins goes after the younger set as well.
"Magic" is notable for three reasons:
It casts the search for the explanations behind natural phenomena as a progression from supernatural stories to natural reasoning, throwing biblical stories in the same bin with outdated tales of Egyptian sky gods and Norse deities. (Would you expect anything less from Dawkins?)
Dawkins argues that the scientific explanations for the origins of our planet or the reasons for a rainbow can hold as much wonder as any poetic passage from Genesis. "The truth is more magical — in the best and most exciting sense of the word — than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle," he writes. "Science has its own magic: the magic of reality."
Perhaps most intriguingly, "The Magic of Reality" takes advantage of the magic of technology in a tablet version created for Apple's iPad. The 678-megabyte iPad edition costs less than the 272-page book ($13.99 vs. a list price of $29.99, which is being widely discounted). But in addition to providing the full text, the e-book literally puts Dave McKean's scores of illustrations into motion. It also offers more than a dozen games, interactive graphics, videos and audio clips to click on.
My favorite clickables include a chamber that lets you turn up the heat and the pressure on a solid/liquid/gas to see Boyle's law at work (you can even slosh the liquid around by shaking the iPad) ... a graphic that lets you use virtual prisms, lenses and slits to play with on-screen rainbows (and illustrate how a spectrograph works) ... a game that lets you breed frogs for optimal leg length (too bad you have to kill off six frogs in every generation) ... and a series of virtual photographs that trace evolution backwards into the mists of time (which plays off a concept Dawkins used in an earlier book about evolution, "The Ancestor's Tale").
Each chapter of the book focuses on an age-old question, ranging from "What is the sun?" and "What is an earthquake?" to "Why do bad things happen?" and "What is a miracle?" Sometimes, Dawkins ends up shrugging his shoulders. For example, after noting that time and space itself are thought to have begun with the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, he adds: "Don't ask me to explain that, because, not being a cosmologist, I don't understand it myself."
And don't ask Dawkins to accept any supernatural explanation for natural phenomena, unless you want a tongue-lashing: "If you claim that anything odd must be 'supernatural' you are not just saying you don't currently understand it; you are giving up and saying that it can be never understood," he writes.
Biologist Richard Dawkins talks about "The Magic of Reality" on BBC "Newsnight."
Is "The Magic of Reality" the consummate children's book about science? I'm hesitant to go that far, partly because Dawkins is so militant about going after Judeo-Christian beliefs. "As it happens, we know that lots of fiction has been made up about this particular preacher called Jesus," he writes. Religious families might feel threatened by Dawkins' preachiness, while non-religious families might wonder what all the fuss is about. I wonder whether "The Magic of Reality" would pass muster as a public-school science textbook, in light of Supreme Court rulings that say the government should not be actively involved in opposing religion.
Beyond those qualms, there are lots of intriguing scientific topics that Dawkins just had to pass up, ranging from the workings of the brain to the nature of dark energy and dark matter. Think of "Magic" as a jumping-off point for a young adult's scientific inquiry, rather than an all-encompassing reference work.
To Dawkins' credit, he acknowledges that there are still wide gaps in our understanding of the cosmos:
"There is much that remains deeply mysterious, and it is not likely that we will ever uncover all the secrets of a universe as vast as ours; but, armed with science, we can at least ask sensible, meaningful questions about it and recognize credible answers when we find them. We don't have to invent wildly implausible stories; we have the joy and excitement of real scientific investigation and discovery to keep our imaginations in line. And in the end that is more exciting than fantasy."
I might quibble with Dawkins' perspective on the roles that imagination and spirituality play in making sense out of reality, but his central point is that we shouldn't let our beliefs hold back the search for truth. And to that, I say amen.
If you've ever looked up to the stars and wondered what is up there; now you can help scientist all over the world find out with the Planet Hunters project. In-Game's Todd Kenreck reports.
E. coli engineered to glow certain colors when excited by the right light can convey a top-secret message.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
Scientists are tweaking bacteria to send encrypted messages that can be shipped via snail mail on sheets of paper-like material called nitrocellulose.
The recipient grows the bacteria with a select cocktail of nutrients and other chemicals. Once grown, each microbe glows one of seven colors when exposed to the right kind of light. Different colored microbes are arranged to represent different letters and symbols. If you know the nutrient and chemical cocktail as well as the keys to the code, you can decipher the message.
For an added layer of security, many glowing microbes can be sent along, but only those that survive a dose of a particular antibiotic will reveal the intended message when exposed to the right light.
"There are several layers of encoding in the message," Manuel Palacios, a chemist at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., and lead author of a paper on the technique, told me today.
To prove the point, the team created a message that when exposed to ampicillin read "this is a bioencoded message from the walt lab at tufts university 2011." The drug kanamycin gave different glowing bacteria that encoded the message: "you have used the wrong cipher and the message is gibberish."
Palacios and his colleagues named this biological messaging steganography by printed arrays of microbes, or SPAM. They describe it in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The technology is rooted in funding from DARPA, the military's high-tech research agency, which suggests real-world spies could be communicating with messages encoded in arrays of glowing bugs.
"I love that this triggers all this discussion about spies and stuff," Palacios noted, but said practical applications are more likely to be found in the biotech world.
For example, a biotech company that develops a high-yielding variety of genetically modified corn could use this technique to give the plant an easily-identifiable characteristic that thwarts attempts to steal it.
Currently, biotech companies stamp the genetic code of their modified crops, but genetic sequencing in the lab is required to read the stamp.
"With this method, we are demonstrating that we can encode genetic information and we can decode it into something that just by looking at it you will be able to know what the message is," Palacios explained.
In this case, the message isn't top secret. Rather it is not obvious. So, for example, a corn stalk could be engineered to carry a biobarcode that can identify the plant as proprietary.
"That's where we might be seeing an application in the future," Palacios said.
John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.
Sal Khan, a math whiz with an encouragingly at-ease lecture style, explains how his online education classes will be able to branch out into subjects beyond his expertise.
Watch an 11-second satellite video that tracks Earth's shifting orientation with respect to the sun, through northern autumn, winter, spring, summer and back to autumn. (Credit: NASA / EUMETSAT)
By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News
In the wake of last week's equinox, the days are shorter than the nights in the Northern Hemisphere, and longer in the south. Every day from now until December will increase the imbalance. How does that happen? It has to do with Earth's changing tilt with respect to the sun, as explained in this tutorial. But sometimes a moving picture can be worth a thousand words.
This 12-second video clip has been assembled from a year's worth of imagery captured by a visible-light and infrared camera on EUMETSAT's Meteosat-9 satellite. Meteosat-9, like other satellites in geosynchronous orbit, has an unchanging view of Earth from a height of about 22,000 miles. Every day, around 6 a.m. local time, the satellite watches the terminator line between night and day move across Africa.
As it spins, Earth is tipped 23.5 degrees on its axis relative to the sun, with the northern point of the axis pointing away from the sun in December and pointing toward the sun in June. That means the Northern Hemisphere is more shadowed in winter and more sunlit in summer. That back-and-forth shift is exactly what you're seeing in the video. At the midpoints between those extremes — for instance, last week's equinox — the terminator line goes straight down the middle of Earth's disk, as seen by Meteosat-9.
Many auroral displays appear green, but sometimes, as in this Sept. 26 image from the International Space Station, other colors such as red can appear.
"Red sky at night, sailor's delight": That's one of the oldest sayings in the book when it comes to weather prediction, but this picture adds a new twist. The red sky is an aurora, seen from above by astronauts on the International Space Station. And the weather that's causing this phenomenon is space weather from the sun.
Auroras arise when electrically charged particles from the sun interact with atoms in the upper atmosphere, sparking emissions of light at various wavelengths. The displays are most likely to be visible around Earth's magnetic poles, where the interaction is strongest. The sun has been going through an upswing of activity over the past couple of months, which has generated a colorful series of northern and southern lights.
North or south, the most common shade of auroral light is green. That's the wavelength that's typically emitted when solar particles mix it up with oxygen atoms. But if there are lower-energy collisions with oxygen atoms or nitrogen atoms, the emissions edge toward the reddish end of the spectrum. That's what's happening in this picture, captured on Monday. You should be able to make out the space station's solar panels toward the upper left corner of the photo.
Space weather can create disruptions for satellite communication systems as well as electric grids on Earth, but so far the most noticeable effect from this year's solar storms has been a string of glorious auroras. We weathered the latest geomagnetic storm overnight, and SpaceWeather.com is offering up a selection of snapshots — including this red-and-green stunner from Russia's Kola Peninsula.
To learn more about the colors of the aurora, check out this "Causes of Color" explanation. And if you live in northern or southern climes, there's always a chance of seeing the lights for yourself. Last night, the aurora was visible from Minnesota, Germany and Poland in the north, as well as New Zealand in the south. The University of Alaska at Fairbanks provides this handy-dandy online guide to aurora-watching.
The country's first electric bike sharing program was recently launched at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
Bikes with an electric-motor assist are beginning to change the way people get around town, according to experts who declare the age of the e-bike is upon us.
E-bikes look and operate similar to their traditional pedal-powered equivalents, but contain a battery-powered motor that kicks on when, for example, pedaling up a menacing hill.
"The attraction is related to overcoming a lot of the barriers in bicycling," Christopher Cherry, a civil engineer at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, explained to me today.
He did his dissertation research on e-bikes in China where, over the past decade, their use grew from practically nothing to more than 100 million. "They are ubiquitous in every city on every street," he said.
The same thing, he thinks, could happen here, where the proliferation of lightweight, long-lasting lithium-ion batteries are making e-bikes an appealing alternative to the car.
E-bike sharing For most people, traditional bicycles are too much work. They don't like showing up for work or class hot and sweaty and hate having to pedal to regain speed after every stop sign and red light.
These barriers, Cherry said, are what keep people in their cars. Or, at least that's the hypothesis he's testing with his recently launched e-bike-sharing program on his university's campus.
The program is the first of its kind in the U.S. It is similar in concept to the automated bike kiosks found in Washington, D.C., and European cities such as Paris, only these bikes are electric.
The hope is that e-bikes will appeal to students who would rather drive a car than pedal around the campus' many hills.
"Bicyclists who are really into biking already ride bikes," he noted.
The program is in its initial stages with about 30 student participants and one station. So far, so good, Cherry said.
To keep the bikes in rotation, the iZip bikes have been modified so that their rechargeable batteries are easily swapped out. That way, when a bike is returned with a dead battery, the next user doesn't have to wait four hours for a charge.
"We are trying to have a lot of turnover of our bikes, that's what bike-sharing systems do. In order to do that with electric bikes, you have to have a lot of batteries," he said.
Larger trend? The rising popularity of e-bikes extends beyond the University of Tennessee campus, with concept e-bikes unveiled by Ford and Smart at the Frankfurt Motor Show.
While Ford has no immediate plans to build its bike, Smart does, according to PC Magazine. And Ford does see opportunity.
"The e-bike market is growing very, very rapidly, with some 30 million units sold globally last year," Ford Europe's Axel Wilke told PC Magazine. "We see e-bikes as an important element of urban electric mobility."
An article in MIT's Technology Review notes that "with a wider set than ever of e-bikes on the market, concepts in the works, and design challenges under way, now just might be the e-bike's moment."
A slide show on e-bikes over on the Daily Green provides a good feel for what's on the market, ranging from the $13,995 Optibike OB1 carbon fiber machine to more modest Urban Mover 55 Cruiser ($1,699).
Battery challenge In China, one of the major challenges with e-bikes is what to do with the batteries once they die. There, they primarily use lead acid batteries and the country lacks an efficient recycling infrastructure, Cherry noted.
In the U.S., a recycling infrastructure for lead acid batteries exists. However, most e-bikes use lithium ion batteries and there's not a great system to recycling lithium-ion batteries yet, he said.
"It's something that needs to be taken care of," Cherry said. "It is a challenge. It is a challenge with electric cars, cell phones and so on. Hopefully with more demand … there'll be a more systematic take-back policy."
John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.
When Sal Khan began posting free math lectures on YouTube, he became the darling of education reform advocates. But now that his Khan Academy is expanding into real classrooms, teachers are arguing over the value of the approach.
When viewers tune in to Fox's "Terra Nova" time-travel TV series, premiering tonight on Fox, they'll see an 85 million-year-old world that's pretty much "terra incognita" for dinosaur experts. And that's just fine with world-famous paleontologist Jack Horner.
"I suggested 85 million, because it's a time that we know the least about, and it's kind of in the middle of the Cretaceous period, which means we could bring some older dinosaurs forward and take some younger dinosaurs back without getting in too much trouble," Horner told me.
So even though the long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur known as Brachiosaurus died out long before Tyrannosaurus rex came onto the scene, their cousins can mix it up in the computer-generated landscape created for "Terra Nova."
"We just cannot use a T. rex, but there are tyrannosaurs, so we can certainly create an animal that looks very similar to T. rex," Horner said.
Tonight's premiere raises the curtain on a series that some critics have characterized as a cross between "The Lost World" and "Lost," with a flashy "Stargate" time portal and an extra dash of "Swiss Family Robinson" thrown in. There are family dramas, shadowy conspiracies and seemingly indecipherable rock markings to stir the pot, but the success of the mega-expensive series arguably depends on the dinosaurs — just as it did for the "Jurassic Park" movie series.
Horner is familiar with the terrain — not only because of his roles as curator of paleontology at Montana's Museum of the Rockies, professor at Montana State University and one of the world's foremost fossil-hunters, but also because he was a consultant for "Jurassic Park" and a model for the movie's alpha-scientist character.
Steven Spielberg, co-executive producer for "Terra Nova," was the one who brought in Horner as a consultant for the "Jurassic Park" movies. "I guess he liked what I did there, so [the TV show's producers] called and asked if I could do it" for "Terra Nova" as well, Horner recalled.
Horner works with the artists and the writers on the dino concepts. "My job really is to make sure the dinosaurs are as accurate as they can be, even if we invent them," he said. "If they're going to be raptorlike dinosaurs, they have to have the characteristics of a raptorial dinosaur ... but when it comes to headgear, we can do a lot of things."
Slasher movie That last comment relates to the first dinosaur invented for the series: a nasty critter referred to as the "Acceraptor" and nicknamed the "Slasher."
"He's got some characteristics that are new, but still within the realm of possibility," Horner said. "The only detail I can tell you is, it's going to be a scary dinosaur. Let's put it this way: I wouldn't want to be in the forest with a Slasher, especially at night."
Further details have seeped out through the dinosaur blogs: The Slasher sports some gaudy headgear that Brian Switek, who blogs about paleontology for Smithsonian magazine and Wired, has criticized as a "horribly lame" look (see below for more). It has some fearsome-looking claws, but its deadliest weapons are the sharp barbs that whip around at the end of its yards-long tail. "As far as I know, that's totally made up," Bob Strauss, who manages About.com's guide to dinosaurs, told me.
Horner said he's willing to give the writers and artists wide latitude when it comes to dreaming up dinosaurs. "If we know something for sure, then we'll keep it within the bounds of science," but if there are blank spaces in the scientific picture, a little (or a lot of) imagination is allowed. This is Hollywood, after all.
"Just like the people in the movie, the dinosaurs are actors. They will go faster than we think dinosaurs can go," Horner admitted.
Food for thought for dino fans That was the case for "Jurassic Park," and Horner is hoping that "Terra Nova" will offer even greater dramatic possibilities, for the dinosaurs as well as for the human actors.
"It's one thing to make a movie. Movies are two hours of a single story," Horner said. "The really cool thing about 'Terra Nova' is that it is a series, so we have the capability of building and building and building on it, each time seeing new animal and plant characters and still being able to follow the family that the story is about. In many ways, it's a lot better than a movie, just on a smaller screen."
And if dinosaur fans want to argue over the finer points of the dinosaur depictions, that's just fine with Horner, too. "If people are watching and paying attention like that, that would be great," he told me.
Here are some of the reviews from experts who are paying attention:
The main reason why the "Terra Nova" colonists go through a rupture in space-time is because the world has become an environmental wasteland by the year 2149. People have to wear "re-breathers" on their faces to cope with the polluted air. But Holtz noted that the world of 85 million B.C. wasn't exactly a breath of fresh air, either.
"If you're trying to escape climate change by going back to the past, you wouldn't want to go back to 85 million years ago, where CO2 is almost 1,000 parts per million, as opposed to 392 at present," he observed. Holtz acknowledged, however, that an elevated carbon dioxide level isn't the only environmental problem facing the smoggy, run-down world of 2149.
As for the dinosaurs, Holtz had a couple of pieces of advice for the writers. First, don't get too specific about the dinosaur names. Instead of referring to Brachiosaurus (the long-necked plant-eater that makes an early appearance on tonight's show) or Carnotaurus (the toothy, horned dinosaur that almost runs down Terra Nova's patriarch in the episode), use more generic names (brachiosaurs or abelisaurs, respectively). There's no evidence that either Brachiosaurus or Carnotaurus was around 85 million years ago, but it's plausible to claim that their distant cousins were.
"Saying it more generically is safer," Holtz said.
Also, as the series goes on, Holtz hopes the writers get the locale right. For example, no Carnotaurus fossils have been found in North America, so if the series claims that the "Terra Nova" colonists are settling in Cretaceous Chicago, coming upon Carnotaurus' older cousins there would be "as unlikely as encountering a koala in Montana," Holtz said.
Most of the TV audience might not care that much about the terminology, but it's better to have the dino-geeks for you than against you. "They get mad enough with the dinosaur documentaries," said Holtz, speaking from experience.
"All I have seen of the 'slasher' is the promotional artwork, but, yes, I'm sorry to say that the creature design for the dinosaur is horribly lame. The poor creature looks as if the special effects artists took one of the Jurassic Park raptors, stuck a crest from an oviraptorid dinosaur on its head, and then gave it a bad toupee. So many fantastic and terrifying dinosaurs have been found — dromaeosaurs with double sickle-claws (Balaur), Allosaurus-cousins with sail backs (Concavenator), crocodile-snouted hunters (Baryonyx), and others — that the I think the show's creators would have done better to draw inspiration from actual dinosaurs rather than trying to dress up a Deinonychus.
"Then there's the scientific issue. Thanks to multiple discoveries of feathered dinosaurs during the past 15 years, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that many coelurosaurs — the group to which raptors, tyrannosaurs, oviraptorids and others belong — were at least partly covered in feathers. Even Velociraptor arm bones have been found with quill knobs for the attachment of feathers! (The significance of this is that we can now detect the presence of feathers on some dinosaurs even if the feathers themselves are not preserved.) Therefore, the 'slasher' should be a feathery beast and look less like a dinosaur with a comb-over. Every year more feathered coelurosaurs are found, and it's time that television shows and movies featuring these dinosaurs restore the animals with their full plumage. ...
"It is true that our knowledge of dinosaur life around 85 million years ago (the beginning of the Santonian age) is relatively limited. Compared to what we know about the later Campanian (83 million to 70 million years ago) and Maastrichtian (70 million to 65 million years ago) ages, the world of dinosaurs during the Santonian is still fuzzy and waiting to be fleshed out by new discoveries. That said, I don't have a problem with a show creating new dinosaurs or even bringing in dinosaurs from slightly older or younger time periods. (If I recall correctly, Carnotaurus — a Campanian dinosaur from prehistoric Argentina — is in the show.) Sometimes scientific accuracy needs to be bent a little to make compelling television. That's just the way it goes when you want to tell a story.
"Nevertheless, I don't think any imaginary dinosaur can really compare to the real animals we're finding. Spielberg and the show's co-creators can dream up as many dinosaurs as they want, but, to me, speculative creatures like the slasher are always going to pale in comparison to the bizarre array of wonderful dinosaurs paleontologists have uncovered."
Strauss said "Jurassic Park" stirred up a lot of controversy on the subject of dinosaur verisimilitude. For example, real Velociraptors were nowhere near smart enough or agile enough to turn a doorknob, and pterosaurs weren't strong enough to carry off a kid.
"Terra Nova" could well do the same, and not just because of slasher's barb-whipping tail. Did brachiosaurs really eat small lizards, or were they strictly herbivores? Shouldn't the TV series' Carnotaurus have arms as wimpy as the real thing? Where's the slasher's hind-foot claw?
But judging by the first show, Strauss thinks dino-geeks will stick with the series, if for no other reason than to get their weekly Cretaceous fix and debate how the Hollywood monsters compare with the real things. "They're just so happy to have dinosaurs on TV," he told me.
Flood waters innundate Memphis, Tenn., in this NASA satellite photo acquired on May 10, 2011. NASA announced a challenge to leverage its data such as imagery and new technology such as smartphone computers to create applications that benefit humanity.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
Over the decades, NASA has collected mountains of data that could, potentially, improve life for us Earthlings — if only we could make sense of it all. And that's where you — and the computer in your pocket — come into play.
The space agency recently announced the International Space Apps Challenge to "leverage data and new technology to create practical applications that benefit humanity." The challenge is open anyone on Earth (and space) and will culminate with a two-day event in 2012 that showcases the best concepts.
The idea is similar to other distributed computing efforts such as the wildly popular SETI@home project where idle computers around the world help scientists identify potential communication signals from ET.
Problems that could be tackled, the agency suggests in its announcement, include harnessing weather satellite data to study the impact of storms on the global economy, to studying depletion of ocean resources.
Proposed concepts posted to the program website include a Solar Map, akin to Google Maps, to help people make decisions about solar power projects and using satellite imagery for city planning and population density studies.
John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.
When Sal Khan began posting free math lectures on YouTube, he became the darling of education reform advocates. But now that his Khan Academy is expanding into real classrooms, teachers are arguing over the value of the approach.
Transmission electron microscopy reveals the new conducting polymer's improved binding properties. At left, silicon particles embedded in the binder are shown before cycling through charges and discharges (closer view at bottom). At right, after 32 charge-discharge cycles, the polymer is still tightly bound to the silicon particles.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
The ability of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries to store up to eight times more energy than conventional designs is getting a boost thanks to a new conducting material that doesn't break down after repeated usage.
Lithium-ion batteries are found everywhere from laptop computers and hybrid cars to electric power grids. The market for them is expected to soar by a factor of more than 80 between 2012 and 2020, rising to $5.8 billion a year, according to a new report from research firm IHS.
That's primarily because the batteries are likely to be integrated with gusto to the so-called "smart grid" that increasingly relies on intermittent technologies such as solar and wind energy. Batteries provide a place to store energy when excess is generated and deliver it when it's needed.
"Because of this, lithium ion is set to emerge as the dominant rechargeable battery technology for electrical smart grids during the coming years," Satoru Oyama, principal analyst for Japan electronics research at IHS, said in a statement.
A limitation of lithium-ion batteries, though, is the amount of energy they are able to store. Researchers have identified silicon as a material that can store 10 times more energy than conventional technology, but it swells more than three times its volume when fully charged then shrinks again during discharge.
This swelling and shrinking, according to the DOE, quickly breaks down the electrical contacts in the anode, rendering the battery ineffective. This sent Gao Liu and colleagues at the Berkeley lab looking for an anode that can stay in contact with lithium-storing silicon particles.
They ended up developing a polymer that does just this. The new anode can absorb eight times the lithium of current designs and, in more than a year of testing and many hundreds of charge-discharge cycles, it hasn't broken down.
We're passing along updates on the fall of NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite vla msnbc's Space section today. Because I'm traveling, that's the best place to monitor UARS' descent and re-entry, as well as the aftermath. But you know I'll be passing along nuggets of information via my Twitter account as well.
These bacterial smears show common E. coli strains that allow unnatural amino acid (Uaas) incorporation at one site only (left side), and an engineered strain that enables the incorporation of Uaas at multiple sites simultaneously (right side). The glow indicates the bacteria are producing full-length proteins with Uaas incorporated at different numbers of sites (as indicated by the surrounding numbers), a necessary step for their potential use in the production of new drugs and biofuels.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
Scientists have successfully added multiple "unnatural" amino acids to a strain of bacteria, a breakthrough on the path to genetically engineered microbes that create useful things for people such as life-saving medicines and biofuels.
"We are adding components to the bug so that the bug can do something that a natural bug usually can't do," Lei Wang at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies told me today. "We are trying to make it do new tricks."
Amino acids are molecules built primarily from carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. They assemble into various shapes and patterns to form the larger proteins. Proteins, in turn, carry out specific biological functions.
All life on Earth relies on a standard set of 20 amino acids. For years, researchers have genetically altered bacteria to perform certain tasks, such as produce the synthetic insulin diabetics use to regulate blood sugar levels. But until now, all such genetic engineering has relied on the 20 natural amino acids.
In the eyes of Wang, the world might be a better place if there were more building blocks available.
"If you can provide more building blocks, then you may be able to generate a new function for the proteins," he said. "And if you can create new functions for the proteins, then you may be able to synthesize new compounds using these proteins."
Examples of the potential compounds include drugs, industrial chemicals, and biofuels.
Expanded genetic code To do this, Wang's team created an essentially expanded genetic code for the bacteria, a strain of E. coli, with instructions to use multiple unnatural amino acids in the construction of proteins.
The technology to put one unnatural amino acid at one place in the DNA has been around for about a decade, Wang said. The problem is that with just one position, "you cannot evolve anything, you cannot produce anything useful," he said.
This limitation stemmed from that fact that bacteria produce another protein called release factor 1 (RF1) that stops the production of the protein containing the unnatural amino acid. To get around this, Wang's team removed RF1 and altered another protein, RF2, to keep the bug alive in the absence of RF1.
"We can now put unnatural amino acids at multiple places simultaneously and with very, very high efficiency … therefore you significantly increase your chance of generating new protein function and therefore generating new biosynthesis ability," he said.
Complementary to 'synthetic life' This approach to creating useful products with genetically enhanced bugs is complementary to efforts such as Craig Venter's well publicized effort to create synthetic lifeforms that could, potentially, produce biofuels, Wang said.
That effort, Wang explained, essentially attempts to reorganize and optimize the natural components of the genome to "make it better." The Salk team's effort gives the bug new building blocks.
"They sort of help each other out," Wang said of the two approaches. "What they achieve can help us and what we helped achieve here can also help them."
A map from Analytical Graphics Inc. shows the ground track for NASA's UARS satellite for the 28 hours from 2 a.m. ET Friday to 6 a.m. ET Saturday — which reflects The Aerospace Corp.'s estimate for the time of re-entry. During that time frame, the satellite will follow the narrow blue tracks shown on the map, but will not fly above the areas shown between the tracks.
By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News
Updated 6 p.m. ET Sept. 23:
Now that experts are narrowing down their forecasts for the fall of the six-ton Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, you can easily work out when to look for it streaking through the sky.
Select your "current observing site" ... the easiest way to do that is to click on the "from database" link, select your country ("U" for the United States), then enter a search string for a city name (say, "Dubuque," which is where I'll be on Friday). You can also use a map, or enter in your latitude and longitude manually.
Submit your choice for observing site. That will bring you back to the home page, with your latitude/longitude listed.
Click on the link for "All Passes of UARS."
Check out the chart that comes up, and make sure the correct time zone is listed. This chart lists all the times when UARS is within the line of sight from your location. Sometimes the satellite may passing by, but you can't see it because it's lost in the daylight, or it's not reflecting any sunglint. At other times, the satellite catches the glint of the sun just right to become visible in the sky. You can get a list of those sighting opportunities by clicking the "Visible Only" button instead of the "All" button.
Heavens-Above
This chart shows UARS' sighting opportunities between now and Friday from Dubuque, Iowa.
This shows you when the UARS satellite is passing through between now and the end. But if you want to find out when there's any chance of seeing the UARS satellite fall, you have to focus on the passes that occur on Sept. 23 or early Sept. 24. For Dubuquers, there was an opportunity at 4:36 a.m. CT Sept. 24, as listed on the chart. The satellite wouldn't have been visible at that time — unless flaming pieces of debris were falling to the ground.
In that theoretical scenario, I would be watching for something streaking from west-northwest toward the south. But I wouldn't be looking very high in the sky. Heavens-Above is telling me that the maximum height above the horizon would be about 22 degrees. Ten degrees is roughly equivalent to the width of your fist held out at arm's length, so I'd look a little more than two fist-widths high.
The chart also tells me that debris from the satellite wouldn't have hit anywhere close to me, even if it was falling at the time, because the flyover is too far away. The "Alt" (altitude) listing is the key. "If your location has a pass with elevation above 80 degrees — that is, nearly overhead — then yes, you are in the potential debris scatter field," NBC News space analyst James Oberg said in an email explaining the process.
Fireworks on tap What could observers see? Space.com's skywatching columnist, Joe Rao, said the blazing re-entry would look like a "short-lived but spectacular fireworks display." At an altitude of about 50 miles (80 kilometers), chunks of the burning satelllite would break off and create a series of meteoric streaks. Large pieces would flare into fireballs that could blaze as brightly as the full moon, if the re-entry occurred at night, Rao said.
AGI
An illustration by Analytical Graphics Inc. shows the UARS satellite breaking up in the upper atmosphere.
It's far from certain that such a sight would be visible from the United States, based on NASA's estimates. The space agency said there was just a "low probability" that the satellite would be crossing North America when it made its final plunge, sometime late Friday or early Saturday.
Other experts are offering different forecasts that have been all over the map ... literally.
The Aerospace Corp.'s prediction is being updated more frequently than NASA's. At one time, it pinpointed UARS' re-entry in the south Pacific, and then the crosshairs shifted to Chad in central Africa, and then back to the Pacific. All these predictions have a wide margin of error. NASA estimates that there'll be a 6,000-mile (10,000-kilometer) margin of error even two hours in advance of the fall.
Satellite-watchers are really hoping the debris from UARS falls somewhere near them, so they can witness a spectacular sky show (and maybe even catch it on video). But others are worried about the risk of injury or damage.
NASA says the chances that anyone in particular will be hurt by UARS debris are incredibly small: A couple of weeks ago, Nicholas Johnson, head of the space agency's Orbital Debris Program Office, estimated that there's a 1-in-3,200 chance of anyone being struck by fragments. When you divide that risk among the nearly 7 billion people in a potential debris zone that stretches in latitude from northern Canada to the southern tip of South America, the risk to any particular person comes to less than 1 in 20 trillion.
NASA doesn't intend to update those odds as more becomes known about UARS' path. Those are merely the generic risk statistics for the re-entry of any space debris as big as the six-ton satellite. Johnson said one object that big comes down through the atmosphere roughly once a year. "The odds don't change," he said.
Aerospace engineers from Analytical Graphics Inc. used the company's analysis and visualization software to create this video, showing the UARS satellite in its current orbit, its potential debris area, and models for its burn-up and breakup. More info: http://blogs.agi.com
Thousands of space objects streak through the atmosphere every year: Just last week, for example, a fireball sighted over the southwestern U.S. caused a huge stir. But Oberg said the case of UARS is special because we know in advance that a fiery fall is coming.
"Unlike most rocks from space that fall on our heads, this falling satellite is known in advance, and it is that lengthy anticipation, not the inherent hazard, that makes it so newsworthy," he said. "Bigger rocks fall to Earth much faster and every day — all naturally, but out of sight, out of mind."
For the past 10,000 years or so, farmers have been waking at the crack of dawn to tend their fields. Such a bleary-eyed chore could become a thing of the past thanks to robots geared up for the farm.
Among the tools getting a robotic makeover is the tractor. In recent days, a pair of research projects aimed at automating the mechanical workhorses have worked their way into the news.
The Wall Street Journal reported on a partnership between Kinze Manufacturing and Jaybridge Robotics that has produced an autonomous planter that allows a driverless tractor to sow seeds without hitting any unexpected obstacles. At harvest time, a flesh-and-bone farmer would drive the combine, but a robotic cart next to it receives the grain and, when full, heads off to a waiting truck to drop its load.
These robots would cut down on labor costs and allow farmers to get their plants sowed and harvested in a timely fashion, but some farmers are likely to keep an eye on the machines.
For example, instead of catching a few extra Z's, a farmer could program multiple machines to work at once and then keep an eye on the mechanical workforce, hands firmly grasping a cup of coffee.
"It's expensive equipment, it's big equipment and I would expect farmers would want to be nearby," Jeremy Brown, president of Jaybridge Robotics, told the Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, Flemish engineers announced a fully automated, self-steering robotic tractor that adapts itself to terrain conditions and adjusts its speed and turning radius automatically.
K.U. Leuven
A driverless tractor that adapts to terrain conditions and adjusts its speed and turning radius automatically could help farmers cope with skilled labor shortages.
In previous systems, a different setting had to be calibrated for each terrain type. "We developed a steering system that intuits terrain conditions and estimates the expected wheel slippage," he said in a statement.
"Based on a model of the tractor, the optimal speed and turning radius is calculated, in real time, for the current terrain type. This 'smart steering' allows for precision down to the centimeter."
While such systems could be a boon to farmers facing labor shortages when they need help the most, road trippers will have to get used to the eerie sight of driverless tractors working the land as they whiz by at 70 miles per hour.
Aerospace engineers from Analytical Graphics Inc. used the company's analysis and visualization software to create this video, showing the UARS satellite in its current orbit, its potential debris area, and models for its burn-up and breakup. More info: http://blogs.agi.com
Update for 4:30 p.m. ET Sept. 23: NASA revised its forecast since this report was first posted to note that the Upper Atmospheric Research Satellite was not sinking as quickly as expected, and that there was a "low probability" that debris from the re-entry could fall on North America. The revised forecast said the satellite could come down late Friday or early Saturday, Eastern Daylight Time.
Earlier report from Wednesday: NASA says its derelict Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite is expected to make its final fiery plunge sometime on Friday afternoon ET and notes that "the satellite will not be passing over North America during that time period."
This afternoon's update suggests that Americans are not at any risk for injuries or property damage due to satellite debris. It also means they'll miss out on the fireworks.
For two weeks, experts on orbital debris have been telling people that the 20-year-old, bus-sized spacecraft would soon fall through the atmosphere and drop about two dozen pieces of debris on Earth — but until today, there was too much uncertainty to say exactly which day that would happen. In the morning update, NASA narrowed the time frame down to Friday. The forecast was refined further at 6:35 p.m. ET. But NASA said it couldn't yet be any more precise than to say it'll be Friday afternoon, Eastern Daylight Time.
"It is still too early to predict the time and location of re-entry with any more certainty, but predictions will become more refined in the next 24 to 48 hours," NASA said.
The six-ton satellite's orbit is limited to between 57 degrees north latitude and 57 degrees south, spanning the width of the world between northern Canada and the tip of South America. In the past, Nicholas Johnson, the head of NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office, has estimated that the chances that any of the UARS debris would hit anybody were 1 in 3,200 — which translates into a 1-in-20 trillion risk for any particular person.
NASA's Johnson told me today that he won't be recalculating the odds as the prediction becomes more precise. "At that point, we don't compute odds," he said.
NASA and its partners at the U.S. Strategic Command will be issuing updates on the timing at 24 hours before the expected fall, then at T-minus-12 hours, T-minus-6 hours and T-minus-2 hours — and we'll be passing those predictions along. But even two hours before re-entry, experts won't be able to project exactly where the debris will end up.
When UARS' predicament first came to light a couple of weeks ago, Johnson said the margin of error for the 500-mile (800-kilometer) fall zone would be somewhere around 6,000 miles, or a quarter of the way around the planet. The uncertainty arises because of a couple of factors: Solar outbursts, like the ones we've been getting over the past few weeks, lead to a faster decay of orbits for low-flying spacecraft. Also, the satellite is tumbling, which leads to unpredictable atmospheric-drag effects. Because there's no fuel left for orbital maneuvering, no one has any control over UARS' orbital course.
Most of the satellite will burn up in the atmosphere, but NASA estimates that about a half-ton's worth of fragments will survive re-entry and fall to Earth. The computer models suggest that the biggest chunk would weigh about 300 pounds (150 kilograms), or as much as a refrigerator. Anyone who happened to be in the vicinity of the debris fall would see bright streaks in the sky, much like the fireworks seen when pieces of Russia's Mir space station fell to Earth in 2001.
The most likely outcome is that the remnants of the UARS satellite would fall into a desolate patch of ocean or an uninhabited stretch of land, far away from any witnesses or potential victims. "Throughout the entire 54 years of the Space Age, there has been no confirmed report of anybody in the world being injured or severely impacted by any re-entering debris," Johnson noted two weeks ago.
A dead satellite the size of a school bus is getting lower and lower and will crash into Earth, NASA said. The best guess is that it falls on Friday. NBC's Brian Williams reports.
UARS was deployed from the shuttle Discovery in 1991, beginning a $750 million mission to study the upper atmosphere and its interaction with the solar wind. In 2005, it was shut down and placed into a disposal orbit, and its altitude has been slowly decaying ever since. Now the descent is picking up speed: NASA said its altitude at 1:30 p.m. ET today ranged from roughly 120 to 130 miles (190 to 205 kilometers).
Nowadays, satellite operators lay out a well-defined procedure for the safe disposal of Earth-orbiting satellites at the end of their lifetimes. In fact, NASA and its international partners are already devoting attention to what needs to be done when it comes time to get rid of the International Space Station, sometime after 2020. But back in the 1990s, when the UARS mission was launched, such issues were "really not given a lot of thought," Johnson said.
Update for 9 p.m. ET: If North America is out of the picture, what about the rest of the world? Take a look at the graphic on this webpage from The Aerospace Corp. to see why NASA has ruled out North America based on its time estimate.
The circled icon on the map indicates the position of the UARS satellite at 4 p.m. ET Friday. The blue curves show its orbital track before 4 p.m., and the yellow curves show the track after 4. If UARS re-enters the atmosphere before 4, the potential fall zones include the Atlantic, Africa, Middle East, north Asia and the Pacific. If it happens after 4, South and Central America, south Asia and Australia come into the mix. But it'd be well into Friday evening by the time the orbital track goes over the U.S. and Canadian East Coast.
Video of a pass of UARS satellite on Sept. 15, at an altitude of 250 kilometers, taken from the ground with a 14" telescope. More info at http://legault.perso.sfr.fr/uars_110915.html
When NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite descends from orbit, will we see it coming? Veteran French astrophotographer Thierry Legault has already seen it, using a 14-inch telescope. The ghostly video clip above shows the UARS satellite tumbling at an altitude of 155 miles (250 kilometers) on Sept. 15.
Legault teamed up with Emmanuel Reitsch to create the clip, using imagery from a Lumenera Skynyx L2-2 camera mounted on a Celestron EdgeHD 14-inch Schmidt Cassegrain telescope on an automated tracking system. When he includes the angle of observation, Legault figures that he got the shot from a distance of 200 miles (316 kilometers). The action in the clip has been sped up by a factor of two, compared with real time.
Here's an artist's conception of the satellite in orbit that may give you a better sense of what you're seeing in the video:
NASA
An artist's conception shows NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite in orbit.
The UARS satellite has been out of commission since 2005, and its orbit has been decaying since then. Two weeks ago, NASA alerted the world that the satellite's atmospheric re-entry was imminent. Today's forecast has the satellite making a fiery final fall on Friday, plus or minus one day. An estimated two dozen pieces of debris, including a roughly 300-pound (150-kilogram) chunk, could rain down anywhere in latitude between northern Canada and the tip of South America. NASA can't be more precise than that right now because there's no way to control the satellite's descent.
That makes the situation sound a bit scarier than it really is: Because our planet has so many empty expanses of land and sea, NASA's orbital debris experts say there's just a 1-in-3,200 chance that any of the debris will hit anybody. That translates to a 1-in-21 trillion chance that any one particular person (you, for instance) would be struck. As it gets closer to re-entry time, NASA expects that the predictions for the debris zone will get more precise.
For updates, check NASA's UARS status page and our Space News section. Today's story focuses on how prepared the Federal Emergency Management Agency is in case the satellite re-enters over U.S. territory. Feel free to discuss the satellite's imminent fall in the comment section below — but whatever you do, DON'T PANIC!
Watch the first part of "No Fish Left Uncounted," one of the episodes in WPBT's "Changing Seas" TV series. The series is one of this year's award-winners in science communication.
Are you looking for a million-dollar story? How about a dozen tales produced by folks who have been awarded more than a million dollars in the past week? Here's a roundup of award-winning tales with a scientific twist from the MacArthur Foundation's "genius" fellowships ($500,000 each), the National Academies' Communication Awards ($20,000 each), the National Association of Science Writers' Science in Society Journalism Awards ($2,500 each) and the Council for the Advancement of Science Writers' Victor Cohn Medical Science Reporting Prize ($3,000).
MacArthur Fellows:
Among this year's 22 fellows are two journalists who have been known to delve into scientific subjects:
MacArthur Foundation
Radio host Jad Abumrad at work.
Jad Abumrad is co-host and producer of Radiolab, a nationally syndicated public radio program that focuses on the intersection of science and society. His co-host is another well-known science journalist, Robert Krulwich. "The structure of Radiolab episodes often mimics the scientific process itself, complete with moments of ambiguity, digressions, reversals, and surprising conclusions that evoke in audiences a sense of adventure and re-create the thrill of discovery," the MacArthur Foundation said. It cited two examples of RadioLab goodness: "A Very Lucky Wind," which analyzed the seemingly improbable circumstances surrounding a balloon's journey across England; and "Cities," which took an up-close and personal look at urban demographics.
Peter Hessler is a writer for The New Yorker and National Geographic, as well as an author with several books about China under his belt. He has a special ability to weave "multiple narrative threads into richly illuminating depictions of people and places confronted with a staggering pace of change," the foundation said. One of his books, "Oracle Bones," takes its name from an article he wrote for The New Yorker about the tragedy of a modern-day Chinese scholar and the history of Chinese writing. Check out "Oracle Bones" to see how Hessler works his magic.
Annual prizes are awarded in four categories — books, film/radio/TV, magazines/newspapers and online — by the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine, with support by the W.M. Keck Foundation. I won the online award in 2008 and served as a judge this year. Here are the 2011 winners, with quotes from the academies' news release:
Book: "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot, telling the story of the family behind the most famous cancer cells in medical history. "A compelling and graceful use of narrative that illuminates the human and ethical issues of scientific research and medical advances."
Film/radio/TV:"Changing Seas: Sentinels of the Seas," submitted by producer Alexa Elliott and WPBT2 Production Team. This series from South Florida Public Television focuses on the biological riches in the sea, and how human activities are harming (and saving) those treasures. "What Florida's bottlenose dolphins tell us about the health of coastal waters and our own exposure to chemical contaminants."
Magazine/Newspaper:"Target: Cancer," a series by the New York Times' Amy Harmon that looks at how cancer therapies are being tested. "The promises and realities of clinical drug trials as seen through the eyes of passionate researchers and worried, sometimes desperate patients."
Online:Dot Earth Blog by Andrew Revkin, a New York Times weblog examining the efforts to balance human affairs with the planet's limits. "Pioneering social media abut the issues of climate and sustainability with worldwide readership and impact." Revkin is the first person to win the Communication Award twice: He was a winner in the magazine/newspaper category in 2003.
For still more science you can read, watch or listen to, check out the list of finalists on the National Academies website.
Science in Society Journalism Awards:
NASAW awards prizes in four categories, for books, science reporting, science reporting for a local or regional audience, and commentary or opinion. Here are this year's winners, with quotes from the judges:
Book:"Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA," by Maryn McKenna. "This is really original reporting; it had wide impact, particularly in the medical community and the infectious disease community in a way that popular science writing often doesn't."
Local/regional reporting:"Power Politics," by Barbara Moran for Boston Globe Magazine, chronicling the science and politics surrounding the decision to close Vermont Yankee, the state's only nuclear power plant. "In the midst of talk of nuclear renaissance, here's this thoughtful, fresh assessment of the nuclear power plant issue."
Commentary/Opinion:"Hot Air," by Charles Homans for Columbia Journalism Review. Homans examines the curious fact that a large number of TV weather anchors don't believe in the scientific evidence for climate change. "I felt this piece just dragged the dirty secret of the whole climate change debate kicking and screaming out into the public."
Victor Cohn Medical Science Reporting Prize:
CASW awards an annual prize for a body of work in medical reporting, and this year's winner is Ron Winslow, The Wall Street Journal's New York-based deputy bureau chief for health and science. Winslow joined the Journal in 1983 as a reporter covering electric utilities and nuclear power, and he's been covering health and medicine for more than three decades. "When I read a Ron Winslow story, I know I'm in completely trustworthy hands," one of the judges said. Among the stories submitted on Winslow's behalf were "Major Shift in War on Cancer,""A New Rx for Medicine" and "The Case Against Stents." Check out the Journal's Winslow file for the latest from Ron. (Disclosure: I'm on CASW's board, but was not a judge for this competition.)
The CLUB Club prize:
I'm awarding a less pricey prize of my own today, to Cosmic Log correspondent Rebecca Roberts for suggesting "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created" by Charles C. Mann as a selection for the Cosmic Log Used Book Club. The CLUB Club recognizes books with cosmic themes that have been out long enough to show up at your local library or used-book shop. "1493" is unusual in this regard because it was published just last month, but online booksellers are already starting to offer used copies, so it counts.
The book follows up on Mann's earlier book, "1491," which was a CLUB Club selection back in 2006. This sequel focuses on the "Columbian exchange" that followed Christopher Columbus' landing in the New World. Mann makes the case that this marked the start of a grand round of globalization that has continued to this day.
"I heard an interview with the author, Charles Mann, on NPR ('Fresh Air With Terry Gross')," Roberts told me in an email. "It was one of those stories where I sat in the car listening until it was over. The part about the earthworms coming over in European ship ballast — that there weren't any earthworms here before, and then they swept through the country like a plague changing everything — I was fascinated. I could almost see computer-generated imagery of that happening as some sort of educational sequence on 'NOVA.' I have a couple of degrees and consider myself well-educated, but I think my mouth was hanging open a bit."
Roberts' suggestion earns her a book from the Cosmic Log shelf, and she's selected "Physics of the Future" by Michio Kaku as her prize. Congratulations to our latest CLUB Club laureate!
Shwetak Patel of the University of Washington won a 2011 MacArthur Fellowship for his work on easy-to-deploy sensor technology that tracks household energy consumption and makes buildings more responsive to our needs.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
Your credit card bill tells you how much you spent on gas last Tuesday, groceries on Wednesday, and football tickets on Friday night. Wouldn't it be helpful if your electric bill did something similar?
This isn't pie in the sky for Shwetak Patel, a 29-year-old technologist who received a $500,000 "genius" grant Tuesday for his work on inexpensive and easy-to-deploy sensors that can make our lives more efficient and enjoyable.
The computer science professor at the University of Washington in Seattle is among 22 innovators in fields ranging from music and journalism to genetics and history who were named 2011 MacArthur Fellows.
Patel is the techiest of the august bunch, a recognition he told me "that shows computer science can play a huge role beyond what people typically think of computing as."
He received the honor for work on sensor technology that measures things such as energy and water use down to the level of individual appliances and faucets.
This is akin, he explained, to a credit card bill or telephone bill that details the price of individual purchases and calls, information that might compel a consumer to eat out less or call grandma more often.
"Right now if you get your water or electric bill it only tells you the aggregate amount of consumption which a lot of people don't really get a good understanding of what that means," Patel said.
Knowing how much energy you consume watching reruns on TV or keeping beer cold in a second fridge in the basement might prompt a change in behavior.
His sensors aren't the first products to provide details of individual component consumption, but unlike other approaches, all a consumer needs to do is plug or screw one sensor into an outlet or hose bib to get information on all the appliances in a house.
The sensors read the "noise" that is generated by individual appliances or toilets to infer when something like the TV is turned on or the upstairs toilet flushed.
For example, a TV makes a different noise as it pulls on the power supply than does a compact fluorescent light bulb. The sensor infers this difference and then presents it to the consumer with a user-friendly graphical interface.
In the future, the data could also be supplied to utility companies so they can better understand when people do certain types of activities or shipped off to appliance manufacturers.
"We have a way to feed that information back to Whirlpool or GE and say here is how often your appliance is in the duty cycle," Patel said. "That can really help to design the system in a different way to make it more efficient and more reliable."
Patel sold a startup with this technology to Belkin International in 2010 and said the company plans to begin selling commercial versions of them this fall. Going forward, he is turning his focus to health.
First up are health-monitoring systems that use mobile phones to keep a consistent check on people with breathing conditions such as asthma.
"You can't be in the hospital all the time, nor can you see your doctor everyday or every hour," he noted.
A mobile phone equipped with his sensor technology, though, could turn the phone's microphone into a monitor that listens for coughing fits or changes in lung capacity.
These types of applications, according to Patel, show that computer science is more than nerds in a corner writing code. It can "solve really important health problems and really important energy problems."
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