Did You Know.....

[Warph]

....that the Hubble Telescope Traveled 13.2 Billion Years into the Past and finds lost episode of 'The Honeymooners' ...amazing, huh?  

Okay... just kidding.  Actually it was "Leave It To Beaver."

Seriously tho', it's only 450 million years after the Big Bang!  To put it into perspective, that's roughly the time it takes for a letter to get from Phoenix to Tucson via the Post Office.

The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field, made up of some 2,000 images taken over a decade, provides a stunning
"time tunnel" capturing light from dim proto galaxies within 500 million years of the big bang.
(Credit: NASA )

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57520234-76/hubble-looks-back-13.2-billion-years-in-deepest-view-yet/

"The XDF is the deepest image of the sky ever obtained and reveals the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen," Garth Illingworth, a Hubble researcher at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said in a NASA statement. "XDF allows us to explore further back in time than ever before."

Earlier observations of pulsating Cepheid variable stars in remote galaxies allowed Hubble astronomers to conclude the universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old. The XDF photograph represents a look back across time from the present to within 450 million years of the big bang, showing the broad spectrum of galactic evolution in a single image.

Mature spiral galaxies that look similar to Earth's Milky Way and nearby Andromeda can be seen, along with spherical ellipticals and smaller, dimmer infant galaxies from much further back in time.

     
The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field is made up of images shot
in the same small region of the southern Fornax constellation.
The full moon is shown for comparison.
(Credit: NASA )

"So we [see] a time when the first galaxies were forming, the metals, all the elements that make our bodies, make the Earth and basically our whole solar system were starting to be built up in this time," said Illingworth. "So it was a time...when the universe was being transformed, the first galaxies were being built up, a dramatic time in the life of the universe."


Dramatic, I'll say.  What with prom and getting into a good college and preparing that first resume (especially in an economy that was probably pretty bleak).

Soooooo... basically we took a picture of the past from the present, which of course is the past's future.  Can we send a copy of the future to the past, so it will know what to expect and maybe think twice about the whole thing?

[Warph]

It was reported today that some 250,000 (that is a quarter million) people are leaving the state of California every year............

So I did some math.........

Assuming no one would want to move to California, and using the census figures, there were, in 2010, 37,253, 956 people in this state.  Now, if a quarter million people are leaving each year, then that figure is now reduced to 36,795,623, or so, by the end of this month.

Which means, that in the year 2159 on or about Christmas Day, I will be the only one left living here.

Scary thought.

Larryj

Yeah... I'd cry too.  Let's see, that would make you about 116 years old.

                                         

Okay... I also did the numbers:  http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_71.htm#.UGHwe7R7Ws2

...and, by cracky... you're right!      

[larryJ]

Warph, did you do well in math in school?  I think the number here is 216 years old.   

Larryj

[Warph]

Okay... Warph,




216.49793455382679625668773862117498870.13 years old to be precise!

[Warph]

First commercial cargo flight heading to International Space Station

By the CNN Wire Staff
October 8, 2012 -- Updated 0220 GMT (1020 HKT)

....that the SpaceX rocket, the first commercial flight to the International Space Station, lifted off Sunday night carrying an unmanned cargo capsule.

The Falcon 9 rocket with its Dragon capsule launched on schedule at 8:35 p.m. ET from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with an orange blaze against the black night sky. About 10 minutes into the flight, the Dragon separated from the rocket and was on its way to the station.

Mission control called it "a picture-perfect launch and a flawless flight of Falcon."

It is is the first of a dozen NASA-contracted flights to resupply the International Space Station, at a total cost of $1.6 billion.

"It's a great evening," said SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell after the launch. "It's just awesome."

The launch comes nearly five months after a demonstration mission in which a Dragon capsule successfully berthed at the station and returned to Earth. Shotwell said the Sunday mission isn't "substantially different" from that flight, "with the exception that we got there once."

The unmanned capsule is packed with about 1,000 pounds of cargo -- everything from low-sodium food kits to clothing and computer hard drives. It's scheduled to return in late October with about 2,000 pounds of cargo, including scientific experiments and failed equipment that can be repaired and sent back, ISS Program Manager Mike Suffredini said.

"These flights are critical to the space station's sustainment and to begin full utilization of the space station for research and technology development," he said.

The Dragon spacecraft is supposed to catch up with the space station early Wednesday. Station Commander Sunita Williams and Aki Hoshide from the Japanese Space Agency will use the robotic arm to grab Dragon and berth it to the station.

Much of Dragon's cargo is material to support extensive experimentation aboard the space station. One deals with plant growth. Plants on Earth use about 50% of their energy for support to overcome gravity. Researchers want to understand how the genes that control that process would operate in microgravity -- when objects are in free-fall in space. Down the road, that could benefit food supplies here on the planet.

The spacecraft is also carrying nearly two dozen microgravity experiments designed and being flown through the Student Experiment Spaceflight Program.

SpaceX is not the only commercial company in the spacefaring business. Within the next few months, Orbital Sciences is expected to fly its own demonstration flight to the space station. Instead of using Cape Canaveral as its launch site, the company's rocket will take off from Wallops Island off the coast of Virginia.

Orbital has a nearly $2 billion contract with NASA for station resupply missions.

Shuttle makes final landing

SpaceX founder Elon Musk is looking well beyond just these cargo flights to the station. SpaceX is one of three companies NASA has selected to continue work developing a human-rated spacecraft that would carry astronauts to the International Space Station.

Boeing and Sierra Nevada are the other two companies.

The SpaceX plan is to modify the Dragon capsule to carry people.

NASA Administror Charles Bolden praised Sunday's launch as an example of private industry's capability. By hiring private companies to conduct the resupply missions, he said, NASA can focus on exploring even deeper in the solar system, including missions to an asteroid and to Mars.

[larryJ]

Did you know that the stock-ticker symbol for the auction house, Sotheby's, is BID.......appropriate.

George Burn's wife, Gracie Allen, ran for president in 1940 on the "Surprise Party" ticket.

The award for the most expensive suitcase in the world goes to Henk.  The Henk suitcase was created by Henk van de Meene, who runs a real estate business.  He designed a suitcase for his personal use.  The suitcase is custom made in the Netherlands.  According to the company website, it is carried by only eight stores in seven countries.  It costs over $1,000 and is not found in the U.S.

Larryj

[W. Gray]

George Burn's wife, Gracie Allen, ran for president in 1940 on the "Surprise Party" ticket.
Larryj

We have sixteen people on the ballot running for President here in Colorado.

Included is Roseanne Barr and Cindy Lee Sheehan on the Peace and Freedom Party.

[Warph]

       


...that a new theory put forward by Harvard scientists suggests the Moon was once part of the Earth that spun off after a giant collision with another body. 


In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Science, Sarah Stewart and Matija Cuk said their theory would explain why the Earth and Moon have similar composition and chemistry.

The Earth was spinning much faster at the time the Moon was formed, and a day lasted only two to three hours, they said.

With the Earth spinning so quickly, a giant impact could have launched enough of the Earth's material to form a moon, the scientists said in an explanation published on a Harvard website.

According to the new theory, the Earth later reached its current rate of spinning through gravitational interaction between its orbit around the Sun and the Moon's orbit around Earth.

The scientists noted that their proposition differed from the current leading theory, which holds that the Moon was created from material from a giant body that struck the Earth.

Stewart is a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Harvard, and Cuk, an astronomer and an investigator at the SETI Institute, which supports research into the search for extraterrestrial life.

HARVARD?? 

[Warph]

Why Do Men Have Nipples?

Brace yourselves for a low blow, tough guy. Nipples remind us that gender is anything but clear-cut, especially in utero. Whatever your sex, everyone starts off as a woman in the womb... tho' some experts despute this.

For the first several weeks a developing embryo follows a "female blueprint," from reproductive organs to nipples. Only after about 60 days does the hormone testosterone kick in (for those of us with a Y chromosome), changing the genetic activity of cells in the genitals and brain. But by then those mammary papillae aren't going anywhere.

So the real question is: why do male nipples come equipped with nerves and blood vessels? In many male mammals nipple formation is stunted by hormones, but not in humans. Did prehistoric men nurse their young? The lack of evidence suggests not. More likely, full-grown nipples—being harmless—don't get weeded out by natural selection.

There's a new theory on why men love breasts. 

Why do straight men devote so much headspace to those big, bulbous bags of fat drooping from women's chests? Scientists have never satisfactorily explained men's curious breast fixation, but now, a neuroscientist has struck upon an explanation that he says "just makes a lot of sense."

Larry Young, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University who studies the neurological basis of complex social behaviors, thinks human evolution has harnessed an ancient neural circuit that originally evolved to strengthen the mother-infant bond during breast-feeding, and now uses this brain circuitry to strengthen the bond between couples as well. The result? Men, like babies, love breasts.

When a woman's nipples are stimulated during breast-feeding, the neurochemical oxytocin, otherwise known as the "love drug," floods her brain, helping to focus her attention and affection on her baby. But research over the past few years has shown that in humans, this circuitry isn't reserved for exclusive use by infants.

Recent studies have found that nipple stimulation enhances sexual arousal in the great majority of women, and it activates the same brain areas as vaginal and clitoral stimulation. When a sexual partner touches, massages or nibbles a woman's breasts, Young said, this triggers the release of oxytocin in the woman's brain, just like what happens when a baby nurses. But in this context, the oxytocin focuses the woman's attention on her sexual partner, strengthening her desire to bond with this person.

In other words, men can make themselves more desirable by stimulating a woman's breasts during foreplay and sex. Evolution has, in a sense, made men want to do this.

Attraction to breasts "is a brain organization effect that occurs in straight males when they go through puberty," Young told Life's Little Mysteries. "Evolution has selected for this brain organization in men that makes them attracted to the breasts in a sexual context, because the outcome is that it activates the female bonding circuit, making women feel more bonded with him. It's a behavior that males have evolved in order to stimulate the female's maternal bonding circuitry." [Why Do Men Have Nipples?]

So, why did this evolutionary change happen in humans, and not in other breast-feeding mammals? Young thinks it's because we form monogamous relationships, whereas 97 percent of mammals do not. "Secondly, it might have to do with the fact that we are upright and have face-to-face sex, which provides more opportunity for nipple stimulation during sex. In monogamous voles, for example, the nipples are hanging toward the ground and the voles mate from behind, so this didn't evolve," he said. "So, maybe the nature of our sexuality has allowed greater access to the breasts."

Young said competing theories of men's breast fixation don't stand up to scrutiny. For example, the argument that men tend to select full-breasted women because they think these women's breast fat will make them better at nourishing babies falls short when one considers that "sperm is cheap" compared with eggs, and men don't need to be choosy. 

But Young's new theory will face scrutiny of its own. Commenting on the theory, Rutgers University anthropologist Fran Mascia-Lees, who has written extensively about the evolutionary role of breasts, said one concern is that not all men are attracted to them. "Always important whenever evolutionary biologists suggest a universal reason for a behavior and emotion: how about the cultural differences?" Mascia-Lees wrote in an email. In some African cultures, for example, women don't cover their breasts, and men don't seem to find them so, shall we say, titillating.

Young says that just because breasts aren't covered in these cultures "doesn't mean that massaging them and stimulating them is not part of the foreplay in these cultures. As of yet, there are not very many studies that look at [breast stimulation during foreplay] in an anthropological context," he said.

Young elaborates on his theory of breast love, and other neurological aspects of human sexuality, in a new book, "The Chemistry Between Us" (Current Hardcover, 2012), co-authored by Brian Alexander.

[Warph]

         

The end of the world (but not as we know It)


A Q&A with Craig Childs, who tells a tale of a slow but steady doomsday

By Rachel Feltman | Posted October 31, 2012

Craig Childs is a modern-day adventurer. A commentator for National Public Radio's Morning Edition and author of several books on the natural sciences, Childs traveled across the globe to write "Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the End of the World." Published in October 2012, the book chronicles Childs' journey to a better understanding, through firsthand exposure, of just how the earth is changing.

In your book, you go looking for different disaster scenarios around the world. How did you choose which locations to visit?

I sat down and looked at the planet and thought about all the ways it could end, from smallest to biggest. I wanted to go as far out as a planet with no more water, but I also wanted to look at more immediate problems like global sea rising and ice melting. I came up with about nine endings, so I just went out into the world to find places to match them. For sea level rise, I went to the last standing remnant of the land bridge at the Bering Strait, and so on.


You have a great way of alternating a personal narrative with very in-depth scientific information. Did you have that knowledge going in, or did you research the climate science behind your observations after visiting your "apocalypses"?

Both. I did a lot of research leading up to each trip, but afterwards I'd say, "Now that I've seen this, now that I've stood there and watched how fast ice can disappear" ... The landscape itself is what generates the questions, so when I finished a trip there'd be tons of research to do. In the end I took a lot of it out, because I didn't want to overload it with so much science that a nonscientist couldn't withstand it. It's a tricky balance!

Who exactly are you trying to reach with this book, and what do you want them to take away from it?

I want this to be read by people who just can't wait for the apocalypse to come. I want them to fall into this book and think, "Oh great, we're going to get all the grizzly details." They will, but not in the way they're thinking. I'm trying to sneak into their folds and say, "Hey apocalypse people, the end is not coming, but there are many changes that you will consider to be end-like, and you've got to do something about that."


You end the book with an analogy of the earth as a seed: We are not gardeners, but part of the seed itself. Is this how you felt going in?

I went in thinking we were stewards, but I realized that we're not in charge of this, we're just a major player. This isn't ours to take care of. We can change the way we play and what we put into it, but we're not in charge of it. I've been afraid that people would see my attitude towards the earth and think, oh, the earth is going to be fine, we don't have to change anything, but I'm trying to say that the planet is unstable. We may just be an effect, but we're a major one, and we're changing the earth and the fate of every species on earth.