Nov 18, 2015 08:26 PM
Extreme radiation makes life unlikely on Earth’s twin
http://www.futurity.org/radiation-kepler-438b-1051902/
EXCERPT: Vast amounts of radiation may have left one of the most Earth-like planets discovered uninhabitable. The radiation is the result of a superflaring Red Dwarf star, Kepler-438. The flares occur regularly every few hundred days and are ten times more powerful than those ever recorded on the Sun—and equivalent to the same energy as 100 billion megatons of TNT.
While superflares themselves are unlikely to have a significant impact on Kepler-438b’s atmosphere, a dangerous phenomenon associated with powerful flares, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), has the potential to strip away any atmosphere and render the planet uninhabitable. The planet Kepler-438b, to date the exoplanet with the highest recorded Earth Similarity Index, is both similar in size and temperature to the Earth but is in closer proximity to the Red Dwarf than the Earth is to the Sun....
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What Growing Potatoes on Mars Means for Earth's Farmers
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-na...180957241/
EXCERPT: In the blockbuster movie The Martian, Matt Damon plays Mark Watney, a brainy botanist who coaxes spuds to sprout in otherwise lifeless dirt. As the population rises here on Earth, there are plenty of harsh, foodless environments that could be improved with a little ingenuity. And in a plot rooted in plausible science, it turns out that much of what Damon’s character did to turn his Martian "hab" into a makeshift greenhouse is applicable here. [...] One issue The Martian didn't address is that on the real Mars, astronaut farmers would have to contend with contaminants in the dirt. In 1999, NASA's Phoenix lander discovered a nasty material called perchlorate in Mars soil that's "very harmful to life as we know it," Bell says....
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NASA: "MIT to Create Algorithms for Humanoid Robot for Space Missions to Mars & Beyond"
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/201...eyond.html
EXCERPT: NASA announced today that MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is one of two university research groups nationwide that will receive a 6-foot, 290-pound humanoid robot to test and develop for future space missions. The MIT team is led by Russ Tedrake of CSAIL to develop algorithms the “Valkyrie” robot to travel to Mars and beyond....
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ESO Discovers a Horde of Monster, Hidden Galaxies from Infant Universe
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/201...eyond.html
EXCERPT: [...] The ESO’s VISTA survey telescope has spied a horde of previously hidden massive galaxies that existed when the Universe was in its infancy. By discovering and studying more of these galaxies than ever before, astronomers have, for the first time, found out exactly when such monster galaxies first appeared. A team of astronomers, led by Karina Caputi of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute at the University of Groningen, has now unearthed many distant galaxies that had escaped earlier scrutiny. They used images from the UltraVISTA survey, one of six projects using VISTA to survey the sky at near-infrared wavelengths, and made a census of faint galaxies when the age of the Universe was between just 0.75 and 2.1 billion years old. “We uncovered 574 new massive galaxies — the largest sample of such hidden galaxies in the early Universe ever assembled,” explains Karina Caputi. “Studying them allows us to answer a simple but important question: when did the first massive galaxies appear?”....
http://www.futurity.org/radiation-kepler-438b-1051902/
EXCERPT: Vast amounts of radiation may have left one of the most Earth-like planets discovered uninhabitable. The radiation is the result of a superflaring Red Dwarf star, Kepler-438. The flares occur regularly every few hundred days and are ten times more powerful than those ever recorded on the Sun—and equivalent to the same energy as 100 billion megatons of TNT.
While superflares themselves are unlikely to have a significant impact on Kepler-438b’s atmosphere, a dangerous phenomenon associated with powerful flares, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), has the potential to strip away any atmosphere and render the planet uninhabitable. The planet Kepler-438b, to date the exoplanet with the highest recorded Earth Similarity Index, is both similar in size and temperature to the Earth but is in closer proximity to the Red Dwarf than the Earth is to the Sun....
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What Growing Potatoes on Mars Means for Earth's Farmers
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-na...180957241/
EXCERPT: In the blockbuster movie The Martian, Matt Damon plays Mark Watney, a brainy botanist who coaxes spuds to sprout in otherwise lifeless dirt. As the population rises here on Earth, there are plenty of harsh, foodless environments that could be improved with a little ingenuity. And in a plot rooted in plausible science, it turns out that much of what Damon’s character did to turn his Martian "hab" into a makeshift greenhouse is applicable here. [...] One issue The Martian didn't address is that on the real Mars, astronaut farmers would have to contend with contaminants in the dirt. In 1999, NASA's Phoenix lander discovered a nasty material called perchlorate in Mars soil that's "very harmful to life as we know it," Bell says....
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NASA: "MIT to Create Algorithms for Humanoid Robot for Space Missions to Mars & Beyond"
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/201...eyond.html
EXCERPT: NASA announced today that MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is one of two university research groups nationwide that will receive a 6-foot, 290-pound humanoid robot to test and develop for future space missions. The MIT team is led by Russ Tedrake of CSAIL to develop algorithms the “Valkyrie” robot to travel to Mars and beyond....
- - - - - - - - -
ESO Discovers a Horde of Monster, Hidden Galaxies from Infant Universe
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/201...eyond.html
EXCERPT: [...] The ESO’s VISTA survey telescope has spied a horde of previously hidden massive galaxies that existed when the Universe was in its infancy. By discovering and studying more of these galaxies than ever before, astronomers have, for the first time, found out exactly when such monster galaxies first appeared. A team of astronomers, led by Karina Caputi of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute at the University of Groningen, has now unearthed many distant galaxies that had escaped earlier scrutiny. They used images from the UltraVISTA survey, one of six projects using VISTA to survey the sky at near-infrared wavelengths, and made a census of faint galaxies when the age of the Universe was between just 0.75 and 2.1 billion years old. “We uncovered 574 new massive galaxies — the largest sample of such hidden galaxies in the early Universe ever assembled,” explains Karina Caputi. “Studying them allows us to answer a simple but important question: when did the first massive galaxies appear?”....