Gizmorama

July 26, 2010
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Good Morning,

Scientist dive into the enigma of the mind to exercise its
ability to tell time. Read all about this futuristic study
and why it is so important in the third article.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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Satellite giving scientists 'ice' insights

PARIS - Scientists have a new satellite tool for studying
changes in polar ice and the effect of those changes on the
global climate, European space officials say. The European
Space Agency's CryoSat-2 orbiting satellite is providing
data which should lead to a better understanding of how
Earth's ice fields are behaving and what those measurements
might mean, an ESA release said Tuesday. Data from CryoSat-2,
launched in April, allow scientists to determine tiny varia-
tions in the thickness of ice floating in polar oceans and
of the large ice sheets that cover Antarctica and Greenland,
the release said. The data has been made available to around
150 researchers from 40 scientific institutions around the
world. "This is the first release of CryoSat data to users
outside our project team, and notably early for a mission of
this type," ESA's CryoSat-2 Mission Manager Tommaso
Parrinello said. Mission planners say they're pleased with
the satellite's performance. "We have been very excited by
the level of detail we find in the data. We are seeing things
beyond what we had expected," Project Manager Richard Francis
said. "I'm pleased that we can share this excitement with
the scientists who now have access, and look forward to the
added insight they will be able to bring."



'Cool' roofs could combat climate change

BERKELEY, Calif. - Light-colored rooftops and roads could
significantly cut emissions and combat global climate change
by cooling cities and the world, researchers say. Scientists
at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California say
cool roofs and cool pavements in cities around the world
could cancel the heating effect of up to two years of world-
wide carbon dioxide emissions, ScienceDaily.com reported
Tuesday. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has announced ef-
forts at the Department of Energy to implement cool roof tech-
nologies on department facilities and on buildings across the
federal government, ScienceDaily said. "Cool roofs are one
of the quickest and lowest cost ways we can reduce our global
carbon emissions and begin the hard work of slowing climate
change," said Chu. Berkeley Lab researchers found that in-
creasing the reflectivity of roof and pavement materials in
cities with a population greater than 1 million would achieve
a one-time offset of CO2 emissions double the worldwide CO2
emissions levels in 2006. "These offsets help delay warming
that would otherwise take place if actual CO2 emissions are
not reduced," Berkeley Lab scientist Surabi Menon said. "Cool
roofs have worked for thousands of years in the Mediterranean
and Middle Eastern cities, where demand for air conditioning
is low," Menon's colleague Hashem Akbari said. "If you have
a cool roof on your house, that will reduce your energy use
from air conditioning and it's a gift that keeps on giving
for many, many years, for the life of the roof."



Brain cells 'trained' to tell time

LOS ANGELES - The brain's ability to tell time is key to how
humans interact with the world, U.S. scientists say, so
they're "training" brain cells to keep time in a laboratory.
Researchers say timing is fundamental to many human abilities
such as recognizing speech patterns and creating music,
ScienceDaily.com reported last week. How the brain keeps time
and recognizes patterns has been a mystery, so scientists at
UCLA have attempted to test whether networks of brain cells
kept alive in cultures in a laboratory could be "trained" to
keep time. They stimulated the cells with simple patterns,
stimuli separated by fixed intervals of time ranging from a
twentieth of a second up to half a second. After two hours
of "training," measurable changes were observed in cell net-
works' response to a single stimulus. Those trained with a
short interval showed network activity for a short time,
while those trained at longer intervals responded with act-
ivity that lasted a longer amount of time. The networks had
"learned" to generate simple timed intervals, the UCLA re-
searchers said. The study sheds light on how the brain tells
time, they said, and will enhance understanding of how the
brain works.


Boeing enters commercial spacecraft race

SEATTLE - U.S. company Boeing says it is accelerating plans
for a capsule-based spaceship to carry people to the ISS
space station and future private space stations. Boeing's
Crew Space Transportation-100 spacecraft proposal is just
one of several efforts by different U.S. companies to develop
the first private spaceship capable of flying humans to
space, SPACE.com reported Monday. Impetus for such plans
comes President Barack Obama's goals for NASA, which call
for commercial spacecraft to assume the role of transporting
astronauts to the space station when the space shuttle pro-
gram is phased out in 2011. Boeing's CST-100 craft is similar
in appearance to NASA's Apollo spacecraft but is larger and
can carry up to seven people. It has been designed for com-
patibility with a variety of commercial rockets, including
United Launch Alliance's Atlas and Delta boosters, and
SpaceX's Falcon rockets, SPACE.com said.

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