NEW YORK ? A Space Age treasure trove of artifacts is being assembled here at the American Museum of Natural History.
Objects ranging from space garbage to spacesuits, a Mars meteorite, a space shuttle bolt and more are being gathered for the museum's new temporary exhibition, "Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration," which opens to the public Saturday (Nov. 19).
Pulling together a diverse inventory of artifacts and models to illustrate space exploration's past, present and future has been a complex process spanning more than 18 months.
Planning for the show started with the curator and AMNH's exhibition department, with input from many others, such as the museum's education department. These teams researched the best possible ways to tell their story, and reached out to other museums, scientists, companies and collectors to ask to borrow their treasures. [Top Milestones in Human Spaceflight]
"The objects from the space program are some of the most exciting objects we've had," said Martin Schwabacher, one of the exhibition writers who worked on the show. "We have real space food and real space garbage and a prototype spacesuit from MIT. At the last minute we got a Mars meteorite."
Bringing space history down to Earth
But the process of transporting and taking care of such unique and valuable items is complex. The museum's registrars office helps organize arrangements with lending institutions, and the objects make their way to New York.
That's when AMNH's conservators come in. These experts painstakingly inspect every object that arrives at the museum to document its condition and determine how best to preserve and protect it while it's in AMNH's care.
"I have an understanding of the material science, how things are potentially going to degrade, how they're going to be affected by various environments, and that's what I bring to the table," said Elizabeth Nunan, the museum's conservator overseeing the objects in the space show. "There's a high dork factor."
A conservator needs to know, for example, that "rubber degrades in certain conditions and certain environments," Nunan told SPACE.com."So if you have a pair of gloves that are made of rubber, you can kind of know, by breaking down the object into its materials."
This knowledge came in handy when analyzing a set of prototype space gloves lent by independent spacesuit glove designer Peter Homer, two-time winner of NASA's Astronaut Glove Challenge, a contest for inventors to improve on the current gloves used by NASA.
Other objects are less worrisome.
"Meteorites, for example, tend to be less susceptible to environmental risks, except if they are iron-containing meteorites, then they are susceptible to relative humidity and rusting," Nunan said.
Space Age detective story
For some objects, conservators are like detectives, hunting down clues about an item's nature, composition, and needs.
For example, the museum borrowed a frangible nut from NASA, a bolt that was used to hold down the space shuttle on the launch pad until liftoff, when it would explode to release the shuttle into the sky.
Nunan said the first time she picked up the bolt, it felt surprisingly heavy.
"These are the kinds of 'tells' that objects give me," she said."When you pick up an object like this and it's heavier than you expect, that generally means there's some lead content, because lead is a heavy metal, and here you see rust, so that tells me that there's some iron content. So this is part of my assessment process; it's really telling me what it needs to stay in good condition."
Items like the bolt, as well as a packet of compressed food, wrappings and other garbage from a space mission, and a helmet from the Soviet Union's lunar program, help show the achievements mankind has already made in space.
"The historical objects really do resonate with you after you see them for real," said Eliza McCarthy, the lead Exhibition writer for the show.
Other objects, such as a 1/30 scale model of a moon colony being developed by Bigelow Aerospace, a commercial space firm in Las Vegas, and a model of Spaceport America, a facility being constructed in New Mexico that's billed as the first purpose-built commercial spaceport, are helping to show the possibilities for future space exploration.
Overall, the objects in an exhibition are just one part of the whole experience. The museum weaves together text, images, videos, interactive technologies, dioramas and environmental models to immerse visitors in the space mood.
"Our show is really a chance to convey what actually is happening, all the unmanned missions that I feel like don't get their proper due," McCarthy said. "It was really fun to learn about, and there is so much more going on than I think people are aware of if you only read the popular press. People are devoting their lives to trying to send spacecraft to space, and it's really amazing. That's what we're trying to convey."
You can follow SPACE.com Senior Writer Clara Moskowitz on Twitter @ClaraMoskowitz.?Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcomand on Facebook.
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If you want to save the contents of the Mac OS X clipboard, or just don't want to bother with it at all, you don't have to. You can just drag text (or, presumably, any other media) from one app to another using the dock or even the app switcher.
As you can see above, dragging a link out of TextEdit and onto Firefox's icon results in Firefox loading the page automatically. This is a bit quicker than copying and pasting the link. You can also drag text from a web site onto TextEdit's icon and it'll create a new document with that text. The same should go for any other kind of media, letting you transport it around as you please without the aid of the clipboard. Just use the dock or bring up OS X's app switcher (Command+Tab) and drag away.
Six unexpected uses for the Application Switcher | MacWorld
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Jennifer Hudson, Victoria Justice will also perform at show, which airs December 16 on TNT.
By Gil Kaufman
Justin Bieber
Photo: Christopher Polk/ Getty Images
Justin Bieberwill slip on his Santa hat next month for a command performance for the First Family when he takes the stage for TNT's annual "Christmas in Washington" holiday special.
JB will be joined by Cee Lo Green, Jennifer Hudson, Victoria Justice and the Band Perry on the show, which will be hosted by Conan O'Brien. The special will air on December 16 at 8 p.m. The 30th anniversary program — which will be taped at the National Building Museum in Washington on December 11 — will benefit the Children's National Medical Center. Among the attendees will be President Obama and the First Lady, along with other Washington VIPs, according to a release announcing the show.
While in England to promote the release of his Under the Mistletoe album, Bieber stopped by radio station Kiss FM, where he not only discussed his fans in the White House, but also spilled the beans that he would be performing at the annual show.
"President Obama ... his kids really like me, which is cool," Bieber said. "I'm actually doing 'Christmas in Washington,' and I'm performing for him and the whole Senate and all that."
Bieber previously performed at the event in 2009 — much to the delight of Sasha and Malia Obama — sharing the stage with the likes of Usher, Mary J. Blige and Sugarland. He also took the stage at the White House's annual Easter Egg Roll in 2010, and he's created a kind of bond with the commander-in-chief.
"[Obama] was really nice, and I was just happy to be [at the White House]," Bieber said last year. "We met [Sasha and Malia], took pictures with them, took pictures with the First Lady.
"The first time I met him was a couple months back," he continued. "I got to hang out with him in the Oval Office, which is pretty crazy, because no one really gets to go in there. It was pretty incredible. I got pictures with him."
Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1674464/justin-bieber-cee-lo-green-christmas-in-washington.jhtml
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Scientists find evidence for 'great lake' on Europa and potential new habitat for life
Wednesday, November 16, 2011In a significant finding in the search for life beyond Earth, scientists from The University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere have discovered what appears to be a body of liquid water the volume of the North American Great Lakes locked inside the icy shell of Jupiter's moon Europa.
The water could represent a potential habitat for life, and many more such lakes might exist throughout the shallow regions of Europa's shell, lead author Britney Schmidt, a postdoctoral fellow at The University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics, writes in the journal Nature.
Further increasing the potential for life, the newly discovered lake is covered by floating ice shelves that seem to be collapsing, providing a mechanism for transferring nutrients and energy between the surface and a vast ocean already inferred to exist below the thick ice shell.
"One opinion in the scientific community has been, 'If the ice shell is thick, that's bad for biology ? that it might mean the surface isn't communicating with the underlying ocean,' " said Schmidt. "Now we see evidence that even though the ice shell is thick, it can mix vigorously. That could make Europa and its ocean more habitable."
The scientists focused on Galileo spacecraft images of two roughly circular, bumpy features on Europa's surface called chaos terrains. Based on similar processes seen here on Earth ? on ice shelves and under glaciers overlaying volcanoes ? the researchers developed a four-step model to explain how the features form on Europa. It resolves several conflicting observations, some of which seemed to suggest that the ice shell is thick and others that it is thin.
"I read the paper and immediately thought, yes, that's it, that makes sense," said Robert Pappalardo, senior research scientist at NASA's Planetary Science Section who did not participate in the study. "It's the only convincing model that fits the full range of observations. To me, that says yes, that's the right answer."
The scientists have good reason to believe their model is correct, based on observations of Europa from the Galileo spacecraft and of Earth. Still, because the inferred lakes are several kilometers below the surface, the only true confirmation of their presence would come from a future spacecraft mission designed to probe the ice shell. Such a mission was rated as the second-highest priority flagship mission by the National Research Council's recent Planetary Science Decadal Survey and is currently being studied by NASA. On Earth, radar instruments are used to image similar features within the ice, and are among the instruments being considered for a future Europa mission.
"This new understanding of processes on Europa would not have been possible without the foundation of the last 20 years of observations over Earth's ice sheets and floating ice shelves," said Don Blankenship, a co-author and senior research scientist at the Institute for Geophysics, where he leads airborne radar studies of Earth's ice sheets.
Schmidt and Blankenship's co-authors are Wes Patterson, planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and Paul Schenk, planetary scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.
The research was funded by the Institute for Geophysics at The University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences, the Vetlesen Foundation and NASA.
The paper, "Active formation of 'chaos terrain' over shallow subsurface water on Europa," will appear as an advance online publication of the journal Nature on Nov. 16.
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University of Texas at Austin: http://www.utexas.edu
Thanks to University of Texas at Austin for this article.
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Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/45310298#45310298
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) ? Police arrested a 21-year old man on Wednesday suspected of shooting at the White House last week, after federal agents found two bullets that had hit the mansion, including one that struck a window.
Oscar Ortega-Hernandez was picked up by Pennsylvania state troopers at a hotel near Indiana, Pennsylvania, some four hours drive time from Washington, the U.S. Secret Service said.
No one was hurt in the Friday night shooting.
The Secret Service said earlier on Wednesday one of the bullets broke a window but was stopped by protective ballistic glass behind the executive mansion's historic external glass, said Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan. The other round struck the exterior of the building.
The rounds were found on the south side of the White House, where the master bedroom and the Lincoln bedroom of the presidential private residence are located, as well as other bedrooms and spaces that could be used by the first family.
Secret Service officers had heard shots fired on the street, between 700 and 800 yards (meters) south of the president's residence.
Two cars were seen racing away from that scene. One of those vehicles was later found abandoned nearby with a semi-automatic rifle on board.
President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle were out of town on Friday night. The president was attending a basketball game in San Diego, California, before heading to Hawaii, where he hosted a weekend APEC summit of Asia-Pacific regional leaders.
The shooting was being investigated by Secret Service, the Washington and U.S. Parks police, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
(Reporting by Alister Bull; editing by Philip Barbara)
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CHICAGO ? Catholic Charities announced Monday that it was ending its legal battle over Illinois' civil unions law and no longer is providing state-funded services.
The move ends the group's long history in Illinois of providing foster care and adoptions. Catholic Charities held foster care contracts with the state of Illinois for about four decades.
The group had wished to continue its state contracts, while also referring unmarried couples who want to be adoptive or foster parents to other agencies, citing principles of religious liberty and freedom of conscience.
The state of Illinois had said that longstanding practice is discriminatory, a violation of the new law, which allows unmarried couples ? gay or straight ? to legally enter into civil unions.
In a joint statement Monday, diocese officials in Joliet, Springfield and Belleville said the decision was reached "with great reluctance." The Catholic Diocese of Peoria withdrew from the litigation last month.
It became financially impossible for the remaining Roman Catholic agencies to continue and the courts had refused to grant a stay in the case, the officials said.
"Since we now need to close offices and terminate employees, further appeals would be moot," said the statement from the three dioceses.
Officials with the Thomas Moore Society, which represented Illinois Catholic Charities in the litigation, said the state was already canceling its contracts and moving services to other agencies.
Gay rights advocates called the decision a step forward.
"Finding a loving home for the thousands of children in the foster/adoption system should be the priority, not trying to exclude people based on religious dogma," said Anthony Martinez of The Civil Rights Agenda, an Illinois gay rights group. "Dropping this suit is a step in the right direction for what is best for all the citizens of this great state."
The four dioceses ? Peoria, Joliet, Springfield, and Bellville ? represented up to 2,200 foster care and adoption cases.
Illinois ended contracts in July with Catholic Charities in all four dioceses because of the group's practice of referring unmarried couples to other agencies. A Sangamon County judge sided with Illinois and said the state could begin canceling contracts worth more than $30 million.
But Catholic officials appealed, saying the group shouldn't be forced to place children in unmarried couples' homes.
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ScienceDaily (Nov. 15, 2011) ? For decades, scientists have dreamed of building computer systems that could replicate the human brain's talent for learning new tasks.
MIT researchers have now taken a major step toward that goal by designing a computer chip that mimics how the brain's neurons adapt in response to new information. This phenomenon, known as plasticity, is believed to underlie many brain functions, including learning and memory.
With about 400 transistors, the silicon chip can simulate the activity of a single brain synapse -- a connection between two neurons that allows information to flow from one to the other. The researchers anticipate this chip will help neuroscientists learn much more about how the brain works, and could also be used in neural prosthetic devices such as artificial retinas, says Chi-Sang Poon, a principal research scientist in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.
Poon is the senior author of a paper describing the chip in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Nov. 14. Guy Rachmuth, a former postdoc in Poon's lab, is lead author of the paper. Other authors are Mark Bear, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, and Harel Shouval of the University of Texas Medical School.
Modeling synapses
There are about 100 billion neurons in the brain, each of which forms synapses with many other neurons. A synapse is the gap between two neurons (known as the presynaptic and postsynaptic neurons). The presynaptic neuron releases neurotransmitters, such as glutamate and GABA, which bind to receptors on the postsynaptic cell membrane, activating ion channels. Opening and closing those channels changes the cell's electrical potential. If the potential changes dramatically enough, the cell fires an electrical impulse called an action potential.
All of this synaptic activity depends on the ion channels, which control the flow of charged atoms such as sodium, potassium and calcium. Those channels are also key to two processes known as long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD), which strengthen and weaken synapses, respectively.
The MIT researchers designed their computer chip so that the transistors could mimic the activity of different ion channels. While most chips operate in a binary, on/off mode, current flows through the transistors on the new brain chip in analog, not digital, fashion. A gradient of electrical potential drives current to flow through the transistors just as ions flow through ion channels in a cell.
"We can tweak the parameters of the circuit to match specific ion channels," Poon says. "We now have a way to capture each and every ionic process that's going on in a neuron."
Previously, researchers had built circuits that could simulate the firing of an action potential, but not all of the circumstances that produce the potentials. "If you really want to mimic brain function realistically, you have to do more than just spiking. You have to capture the intracellular processes that are ion channel-based," Poon says.
The new chip represents a "significant advance in the efforts to incorporate what we know about the biology of neurons and synaptic plasticity onto CMOS [complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor] chips," says Dean Buonomano, a professor of neurobiology at the University of California at Los Angeles, adding that "the level of biological realism is impressive.
The MIT researchers plan to use their chip to build systems to model specific neural functions, such as the visual processing system. Such systems could be much faster than digital computers. Even on high-capacity computer systems, it takes hours or days to simulate a simple brain circuit. With the analog chip system, the simulation is even faster than the biological system itself.
Another potential application is building chips that can interface with biological systems. This could be useful in enabling communication between neural prosthetic devices such as artificial retinas and the brain. Further down the road, these chips could also become building blocks for artificial intelligence devices, Poon says.
Debate resolved
The MIT researchers have already used their chip to propose a resolution to a longstanding debate over how LTD occurs.
One theory holds that LTD and LTP depend on the frequency of action potentials stimulated in the postsynaptic cell, while a more recent theory suggests that they depend on the timing of the action potentials' arrival at the synapse.
Both require the involvement of ion channels known as NMDA receptors, which detect postsynaptic activation. Recently, it has been theorized that both models could be unified if there were a second type of receptor involved in detecting that activity. One candidate for that second receptor is the endo-cannabinoid receptor.
Endo-cannabinoids, similar in structure to marijuana, are produced in the brain and are involved in many functions, including appetite, pain sensation and memory. Some neuroscientists had theorized that endo-cannabinoids produced in the postsynaptic cell are released into the synapse, where they activate presynaptic endo-cannabinoid receptors. If NMDA receptors are active at the same time, LTD occurs.
When the researchers included on their chip transistors that model endo-cannabinoid receptors, they were able to accurately simulate both LTD and LTP. Although previous experiments supported this theory, until now, "nobody had put all this together and demonstrated computationally that indeed this works, and this is how it works," Poon says.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The original article was written by Anne Trafton, MIT News Office.
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Yes Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary Edition is coming Soon(Tomorrow), And I am, a Gaming Freak, But yet I don?t have All the time in the world I need in order to keep up with All of these great games, AND Tech, And This Blog, So I took time out to talk to a couple of friends of mine, So IFWT has a Review of the Gaming scene in 2011, So Hit the Jump How to get a FREE Copy of HALO Combat Evolved Anniversary Edition!!!


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