and research student Michael Yartsev of the Weizmann Institute's Neurobiology Department published today in Science reveals for the first time how three-dimensional volumetric space is perceived in mammalian brains.
The question of how animals orient themselves in space has been studied extensively but until now experiments were conducted only in two-dimensional settings.
which they launched rats into space (aboard a space shuttle). However although the rats moved around in zero gravity they ran along a set of straight one-dimensional lines.
in order to understand movement in three-dimensional volumetric space it is necessary to allow animals to move through all three dimensions--that is to research animals in flight.
while the experiment required their flights to fill a three-dimensional space. The solution was to be found in a previous study in Ulanovsky's group
when bats arrive at a fruit tree they fly around it utilizing the full volume of space surrounding the tree.
Measuring the activity of hippocampus neurons in the bats'brains revealed that the representation of three-dimensional space is similar to that in two dimensions:
The findings suggest that each place cell responds to a spherical volume of space i e. the perception of all three dimensions is uniform.
because on the one hand humans evolved from apes that moved in three-dimensional space when swinging from branch to branch but on the other hand modern ground-dwelling humans generally navigate in two-dimensional space.
The findings provide new insights into some basic functions of the brain: navigation spatial memory and spatial perception.
Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation the Nature Conservancy Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District Feliadae Conservation Fund and UC Santa cruz
and dried in sun light and sterilization method began with these grains and beans which were roasted on a hot plate to prevent germination.
People Prosperity and Planet Student Design Competition for Sustainability. One of the Johns Hopkins student projects focuses on growing large masses of algae to address three sustainability issues:
The University of Cincinnati proved to be an ideal location for Townsend-Small's project thanks to the proximity of the managed green spaces on campus and the natural environment of nearby city parks.
and it's a great research site for us because of the access to urban green spaces Townsend-Small says.
and moregenes from the family of bacteria that produce vinegar Kombucha tea and nata de coco have become stars in a project
#NASA flies radar south on wide-ranging expeditiona versatile NASA airborne imaging radar system is showcasing its broad scientific prowess for studying our home planet during a month-long
These studies assist scientists preparing for the launch of NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite in 2014.
Reionization occurred a few hundred million years after the Big bang as the first stars were turning on
During this period the space between the galaxies changed from an opaque neutral fog to a transparent charged plasma as it is today.
As for how this happened the prevailing theory holds that massive stars in the early galaxies produced an abundance of high-energy ultraviolet light that escaped into intergalactic space.
The Green peas are compact highly star-forming galaxies that are very similar to the early galaxies in the universe Jaskot said.
The researchers focused on six of the most intensely star-forming Green pea galaxies which are between one billion and five billion light years away.
and in this case they helped the astronomers understand the relationship between the stars and gas in these galaxies.
and how many stars they contain. The galaxies the researchers determined produced more radiation than the researchers detected so they infer that some of it must have escaped.
source that powers the sun in a laboratory setting. The method known as fast ignition uses lasers capable of delivering more than a petawatt of power (a million billion watts) in a fraction of a billionth of a second to heat compressed deuterium
and just as water resistant as Styrofoam but they won't sit around taking up space in a landfill.
Earth Observatory and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Much of the arid U S. Southwest is expected to get even drier as winter precipitation declines under climate change
which is roughly about the area of the USA--resembling the vegetation that occurs further to the south says Dr. Compton Tucker Senior Scientist NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt Maryland.
and in particular sports stars in advertising unhealthy or High Fat Salt and Sugar (HFSS) products.
This study provides unequivocal evidence of the rapid demise of one of the planet's most charismatic and intelligent species. The world must wake up to stem this destruction of species due to conspicuous consumption.
they need adequate space in which to range normally and they need protection. Unprotected roads most often associated with exploitation for timber
If the planet continues to warm by 1. 5-to-3. 0 degrees Celsius over the next century as the models predict we need to know not only what the warming will do to plants
#Hunt for distant planets intensifieswhen astronomers discovered planet GJ 1214b circling a star more than 47 light-years from Earth in 2009 their data presented two possibilities.
Either it was a mini-Neptune shrouded in a thick atmosphere of hydrogen and helium or it was a water world nearly three times the size of Earth.
& astrophysics at the University of Chicago who used a new method called multi-object spectroscopy to analyze the planet s atmosphere from large ground-based telescopes.
and his colleagues are surmounting the challenge of inferring the atmospheric composition of planets that were invisible to humans just a few years ago.#
whether it s like the gas giants we know about or something fundamentally different from what we ve seen in our solar system#an atmosphere predominantly composed of water#Bean said.
The search for exoplanets-planets beyond our own solar system-has taken off over the last decade
and is now a growing component of UCHICAGO s research agenda in astronomy. One estimate published in January calculated that our Milky way galaxy alone contains at least 17 billion Earth-sized planets with a vast potential for life-sustaining worlds.
Pursuing the exoplanet search via complementary methods are Bean and Daniel Fabrycky another assistant professor in astronomy & astrophysics.
Bean has received a 60-orbit allocation on the Hubble Space Telescope to continue his observations on GJ 1214b a sign of the work s importance.
Bean will use a technique called transmission spectroscopy to measure the chemical composition of the planet s atmosphere with unprecedented precision.
A big prizea definitive assessment of the planet s atmosphere could lead to a larger prize:
#If GJ 1214b is a water world#oeit would be very different than anything in our own solar system#said Harvard university astronomy Professor David Charbonneau whose team discovered the planet.
In one prescient passage Bruno wrote#oein space there are countless constellations suns and planets; we see only the suns
because they give light; the planets remain invisible for they are small and dark. There are also numberless earths circling around their suns no worse and no less than this globe of ours.#
#Discoveries of new exoplanets have flowed like oil from a gushing wellhead in recent years. The number has topped 850
and continues to climb. Starting in the 1990s exoplanet hunters initially were only able to find giant Jupiter-like gas planets
because they were bigger and thus easier to find.##oethey were closer to their stars than Jupiter is from the sun
so we nicknamed them#hot Jupiters#Charbonneau said. But in recent years scientists began pursuing a new more interesting goal:
find planets that are more Earthlike. One major push along that front was the $600-million Kepler mission launched in 2009.
This mission encompassing a 100-member science team is conducting a survey of planets orbiting other sun-like stars.#
#oekepler is on the cusp of finding small planets in the habitable zone around both sun-like and small stars#Fabrycky said.#
#oethis is the goal of the mission and it s almost there.##A Kepler research veteran Fabrycky began his UCHICAGO faculty appointment last October.
Fabrycky precisely measures the timing of transits the mini eclipses that planets cause as they pass in front of their stars.
Timing inconsistencies in the transits often result from the gravitational influence of other planets. So far Kepler has confirmed 105 planet discoveries to its credit
and has identified 2740 planet candidates. As a postdoctoral scientist at the University of California Santa cruz two years ago Fabrycky was a member of a team that discovered six planets orbiting a single star called Kepler-11.#
#oekepler-11 is hanging on#for the moment#as the one with the most number of planet signals#among exoplanetary systems Fabrycky said.
Bean and his colleagues have made the best observations of planetary atmospheres so far using the Hubble Telescope the Spitzer Space Telescope and in Chile the Very Large Telescope array and the twin Magellan Telescopes.
But the planned Giant Magellan Telescope of which UCHICAGO is a founding partner and the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope should eclipse the capabilities of today s observatories
when they go into service late this decade. The new telescopes will be able to do the same sort of exoplanetary atmospheric studies underway now#oebut actually do it for the smaller planets that might even be said habitable#Charbonneau.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by University of Chicago. The original article was written by Steve Koppes.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length r
#Reduced sea ice disturbs balance of greenhouse gasesthe widespread reduction in Arctic sea ice is causing significant changes to the balance of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Normally the white ice reflects sunlight which then bounces out into space but when the sea-ice cover shrinks the amount of sunlight reflected is reduced also.
and weigh the seed for yields this will have tremendous value to the breeding program in terms of saving time space
Yet despite an abundance of seething swamps and flooded forests in the tropics ground-based measurements of methane have fallen well short of the quantities detected in tropical air by satellites.
In an effort to increase production much of the acreage has been converted to sun coffee which involves thinning
Vandermeer suspects that the shift to sun coffee may be contributing to the severity of the latest coffee rust outbreak.
The move to sun coffee results in a gradual breakdown of the complex ecological web found on shade plantations.
One element of that web is the white halo fungus which attacks insects and also helps keep coffee rust fungus in check.
Both the widespread use of pesticides and fungicides and the low level of biodiversity found at sun-coffee plantations have contributed likely to the decline of white halo fungus in recent years Vandermeer said.
Without white halo fungus to restrain it coffee rust also known as roya has been able to ravage coffee plantations from Colombia to Mexico he said.
and the parched grass visible on modern satellite images also suggested its presence Dr Wickstead said.
I was fascinated to see how much information could be gleaned from such a small space he said.
These little open spaces are like pieces of jigsaw puzzle and no one has ever put them all together.
Lee and colleagues found that the planet's greenhouse-icehouse oscillations are a natural consequence of plate tectonics.
Additional co-authors include Yusuke Yokoyama of the University of Tokyo Mark Jellinek of the University of British columbia Jade Star Lackey of Pomona College Tapio Schneider of Caltech and Michael Tice of Texas A&m.
Zimmerer designed this data collection and analysis to use with high-resolution satellite imagery and Geographic Information systems.
#Lungs of the planet reveal their true sensitivity to global warmingtropical rainforests are called often the lungs of the planet
So the trace of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere holds a record of how the lungs of the planet respond
#New retention model explains enigmatic ribbon at edge of solar systemsince its October 2008 launch NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) has provided images of the invisible interactions between our home in the galaxy and interstellar space.
The Sun continually sends out a solar wind of charged particles or ions traveling in all directions at supersonic speeds.
As solar wind ENAS leave the solar system the majority move out in various directions never to re-enter.
However some ENAS leave the solar system and impact other neutral atoms becoming charges particles again.
These newly formed pickup ions begin to gyrate around the local interstellar magnetic field just outside the solar system.
From those regions some of those particles return to the solar system as secondary ENAS--ENAS that leave the solar system
and then re-neutralized only to travel back into the solar system as ENAS a second time.
The secondary ENAS coming into the solar system after having been trapped temporarily in a region just outside the solar system do the same thing.
IBEX is the latest in NASA's series of low-cost rapidly developed Small Explorer space missions.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Md. manages the Explorers Program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
Or to put it another way that's 4 to 6 trips from Earth to the Moon and back again with plenty of miles to spare.
Called corn by most people in North america modern variants of the Zea mays plant are among the indispensable food crops that feed billions of the planet's people.
and ultimately after pollination seeds--will provide more physical space for the development of the structures that mature into kernels.
In order to conquer this space and subsequently develop the aquaculture and agriculture--mainly rice cultivation--the coastal swamp areas have been transformed into polders (3). To this end dikes have been built reducing the 1km mangrove strip to just a few dozen metres wide.
These included the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) the University of California at Santa barbara (UCSB) Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and The Nature Conservancy (TNC.
and that the burning of fossil fuels is releasing an additional 9 billion metric tons of excess atmosphere-warming carbon each year both the planet and the American economy stand to benefit from a large-scale domestic advanced
Once the leaves come out energy from the sun is used increas ingly to evap o rate water from the leaves rather than to heat up the sur face.
#Shedding light on role of Amazon forests in global carbon cycleearth's forests perform a well-known service to the planet absorbing a great deal of the carbon dioxide pollution emitted into the atmosphere from human activities.
Essentially they found that tree mortality is clustered in both time and space. It's not blowdown
After the masks were washed away graphene was grown via CVD in the open spaces where it bonded edge-to-edge with the h-BN.
and subsequently transported by wind around our planet. Among these chemicals are nitrogen dioxide carbon monoxide and non-methane hydrocarbons.
By combining satellite observations of how much heat ozone absorbs in Earth's atmosphere with a model of how chemicals are transported in the atmosphere the researchers discovered significant regional variability--in some places by more than a factor of 10--in how efficiently ozone trapped heat
National Institute for Space Research Sao Jose dos Campos Sao paulo Brazil; Boston University Mass.;and NASA's Ames Research center Moffett Field Calif. For more on NASA's scatterometry missions visit:
#Photovoltaics beat biofuels at converting suns energy to miles drivenin 2005 President George w bush and American corn farmers saw corn ethanol as a promising fossil fuel substitute that would reduce both
Since the U s. also accounts for 40 percent of the world's corn U s. ethanol production has affected corn prices around the planet.
what if the energy comes from the ultimate clean and renewable source--the sun itself?
The energy source for biofuels is the sun through photosynthesis he says. The energy source for solar power is also the sun
. Which is better? To find out Geyer joined former Brenschool researcher David Stoms and James Kallaos of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology to model the relative efficiencies of the technologies at converting a given amount of sunlight to miles driven.
The results which appear in a paper titled Spatially Explicit Life cycle Assessment of Sun-to-Wheels Transportation Pathways in the U s
and his colleagues examined five prominent sun-to-wheels energy conversion pathways--ethanol from corn
life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and fossil fuel requirements--the researchers identified PV electricity for battery electric vehicles as the superior sun-to-wheels conversion method.
The team concludes that the rapid changes observed by satellites over the last 20 years at Pine Island
#NASA Mars rover preparing to drill into first Martian rocknasa's Mars rover Curiosity is driving toward a flat rock with pale veins that may hold clues to a wet history on the Red planet.
If the rock meets rover engineers'approval when Curiosity rolls up to it in coming days it will become the first to be drilled for a sample during the Mars Science Laboratory mission.
The size of a car Curiosity is inside Mars'Gale Crater investigating whether the planet ever offered an environment favorable for microbial life.
Curiosity landed in the crater five months ago to begin its two-year prime mission. Drilling into a rock to collect a sample will be this mission's most challenging activity
since the landing It has never been done on Mars said Mars Science Laboratory project manager Richard Cook of NASA's Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena Calif. The drill hardware interacts energetically with Martian material we don't control.
The rock chosen for drilling is called John Klein in tribute to former Mars Science Laboratory deputy project manager John W. Klein who died in 2011.
when we arrived has been a great surprise said Mars Science Laboratory project scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of technology in Pasadena.
Researchers have used the rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) to examine sedimentary rocks in the area.
All of these are sedimentary rocks telling us Mars had environments actively depositing material here said MAHLI deputy principal investigator Aileen Yingst of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson Ariz.
JPL a division of Caltech manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
http://www. jpl. nasa. gov/msl http://www. nasa. gov/msl and http://mars. jpl. nasa. gov/msl.
The Oregon Data Trailthe Landsat program has been observing Earth's land surfaces consistently since 1972 when the first Landsat satellite
Since then it has compiled the longest continuous satellite record of change across our planet. But a left over pay for-data policy from the commercialization of the program in the 1980s
Not that long ago the size of an individual Landsat scene would have crippled most desk top computers says Doug Morton a physical scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Md. who uses Landsat
and we realize that we're actually starting to see something that we had never been able to see before from space.
NASA and the USGS will continue providing the means to see it with the next satellite in the Landsat series to be called Landsat 8 scheduled to launch in early 2013.
The above story is provided based on materials by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length h
Those factors play a bigger role than even skin colour and exposure to the sun according to Dr. Jonathon Maguire a researcher and pediatrician at St michael's Hospital.
or when the skin is exposed to the sun's ultraviolet rays. Lighter skin produces more Vitamin d than darker skin colours.
or measures of exposure to the sun. When it comes to maintaining sufficient Vitamin d stores in young children the story is about dietary intake of Vitamin d through Vitamin d supplementation
The mantle is the planet's middle layer a buffer of rock between the crust--the top 5 miles or so--and the core.
This slow but constant convection brings materials from deep within the planet to the surface--and occasionally higher through volcanoes.
Scientists determine the mantle's density by measuring the speed of a seismic wave after an earthquake from its origin to other points on the planet.
This deep melting makes the silicate differentiation of the planet much more efficient than previously thought Dasgupta said.
In Dasgupta's high-pressure lab at Rice volcanic rocks are windows to the planet's interior.
and as a consequence it has the capacity to affect geophysical and geochemical properties of the planet as a whole.
#Exocomets may be as common as exoplanetscomets trailing wispy tails across the night sky are a beautiful byproduct of our solar system's formation icy leftovers from 4. 6 billion years ago
when the planets coalesced from rocky rubble. The discovery by astronomers at the University of California Berkeley and Clarion University in Pennsylvania of six likely comets around distant stars suggests that comets--dubbed exocomets--are just as common in other stellar systems with planets.
Though only one of the 10 stars now thought to harbor comets is known to harbor planets the fact that all these stars have massive surrounding disks of gas
and dust#a signature of exoplanets--makes it highly likely they all do said Barry Welsh a research astronomer at UC Berkeley's Space sciences Laboratory.
We see dust disks--presumably the primordial planet-forming material--around a whole load of stars
and we see planets but we don't see much of the stuff in between: the asteroid-like planetesimals and the comets.
Now I think we have nailed it. These exocomets are more common and easier to detect than people previously thought.
Welsh summarized the current theory of planet formation as interstellar dust under the influence of gravity becomes blobs
and become bigger things--planetesimals and comets--and finally you get planets. Many stars are known to be surrounded by disks of gas
and dust and one of the closest beta-Pictoris (Î-Pic) was reported to have comets in 1987.
In 2009 astronomers found a large planet around Î-Pic about 10 times larger than Jupiter.
Three other stars--one discovered by Welsh in 1998--were subsequently found to have comets.
But then people just lost interest. They decided that exocomets were done a deal and everybody switched to the more exciting thing exoplanets Welsh said.
But I came back to it last year and thought'Four exocomets is not all that many compared to the couple of thousand exoplanets known--perhaps I can improve on that.'
'Detecting comets may sound difficult--after all the snowballs are typically only 5-20 kilometers (3-13 miles) in diameter.
But Welsh said that once comets are knocked out of their parking orbit in the outer reaches of a stellar system
and fall toward a star they heat up and evaporate. The evaporating comet which is what we see with comets such as Halley
and next year's highly anticipated Comet ISON creates a brief telltale absorption line in the spectrum of a star.
The six new exocomet systems were discovered during three five-nightlong observing runs between May 2010
and November 2012 using the 2. 1-meter telescope of the Mcdonald Observatory in Texas. The telescope's high resolution spectrograph revealed weak absorption features that were found to vary from night to night an outcome that Welsh
and Montgomery attributed to large clouds of gas emanating from the nuclei of comets as they neared their central stars.
type A stars which are about 5 million years old because Welsh's detection technique works best with them.
With a higher resolution spectrograph he might be able to detect comets around the older
and yellower G and F stars around which most exoplanets have been found. Nevertheless all evidence suggests that these dusty A stars should have planets
and planets are the only thing that could knock a comet out of its orbit
and make it fall toward its star. If it quacks waddles and has feathers then it's probably a duck he said.
The work was supported by the National aeronautics and space administration. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by University of California-Berkeley.
#New tree of life traces evolution of a mysterious cotinga birdsthey are some of the brightest loudest oddest-looking least-understood birds on the planet.
but the male sings one of the loudest songs on the planet says Yale's Rick Prum.
The sun's rays are stronger the temperatures rise and there are areas where the wind is provided with a more effective target.
When learning to do math it helps to see that two marbles take up less space than twenty.
Such opportunistic contamination is hard to guard against as most growing takes place in open outdoor spaces with little opportunity for control.
Now researchers at A*STAR have used a process known as friction stir processing (see image) to produce an evenly distributed mix of nanosized aluminum oxide (Al2o3) particles in aluminum1.
and has exciting potential for the car space and defense industries. Current powder metallurgy or liquid processing methods fail to achieve uniform processing says research leader Junfeng Guo who is from the A*STAR Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology.
The above story is provided based on materials by The Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR.
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