Gizmorama

May 11, 2011
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Good Morning,

In this issue: a couple of updates from NASA. Check out the
first article for specifics on the pending launch of space
shuttle Endeavour. Also, details on a purposed study of one
of the moons of Saturn can be found in the fourth article.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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NASA sets May 16 shuttle launch target

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - NASA says the launch of space shuttle
Endeavour will take place no earlier than next Monday on a
mission lasting 16 days rather than the original planned 14.
If the launch does in fact occur on the 16th, liftoff would
be at 8:56 a.m. EDT, a NASA release said Monday. Kennedy
technicians have installed and tested new wiring that by-
passes the suspect electrical wiring connecting the switch
box to fuel system heaters that scrubbed the original launch
date. Workers said they expected to close out Endeavour's aft
compartment where the repairs were done and begin launch
countdown preparations Monday. Endeavour Commander Mark
Kelly, Pilot Gregory H. Johnson and Mission Specialists
Michael Fincke, Greg Chamitoff, Andrew Feustel and European
Space Agency astronaut Roberto Vittori will deliver an Alpha
Magnetic Spectrometer and spare parts to the International
Space Station during the STS-134 mission, NASA said.


Teenagers value 'virtual' belongings

PITTSBURGH - Virtual possessions -- digital imagery, Facebook
updates, online music collections, e-mail threads -- have a
powerful hold on teenagers, U.S. researchers say. Researchers
at Carnegie Mellon University say the very fact that virtual
possessions are without physical form may actually enhance
their value, a university release reported Monday. "A digital
photo is valuable because it is a photo but also because it
can be shared and people can comment on it," said John
Zimmerman, associate professor of human-computer interaction
and design. For the 21 teenagers in the CMU study, a digital
photo that friends have tagged, linked and annotated was
more meaningful than a photo in a frame or a drawer, the
researchers found. One study subject said she takes photos
at events and uploads them immediately so she and her friends
can tag and talk about them. "It feels like a more authentic
representation of the event," the 16-year-old told the
researchers. "We comment and agree on everything together ?
then there's a shared sense of what happened." Those in the
study said they could display things online, such as a
photograph of a boyfriend disliked by parents, which were
important to their identity but could never be displayed in
a bedroom. In fact, the teenagers said, the online world
allowed them to present different facets of themselves to
appropriate groups of friends or to family.


Ancient marsupials seen as gregarious

PITTSBURGH - Ancient marsupials may have been social animals,
unlike their modern ancestors who are, for the most part,
solitary animals, European researchers say. Palaeontologists
have long assumed marsupials have been loners throughout
their evolutionary history, a theory being overturned by the
analysis of a fossil site in Bolivia containing many marsu-
pials that seem to have been living together, an article in
the journal Nature reported Sunday. The site contains the
fossil remains of 35 specimens of Pucadelphys andinus, a
primitive opossum from the early Paleocene Epoch, 64 million
years ago. Sandrine Ladeveze, a palaeontologist at the Royal
Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, said the
marsupial specimens were fossilized in two clusters, neither
covering an area larger than one square yard, with 12 nestled
together at one location and 23 at another, just 3 yards
away. Ladeveze and her colleagues believe the marsupials were
living together in two burrows when some sort of disaster,
such as a flash flood, buried them alive. "Sociality of this
sort has been seen in fossils of other groups before [such
as dinosaurs], but this is the earliest example of social
gathering in marsupials that we have ever seen," said Zhe-Xi
Luo, a palaeontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural
History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "That such a mix of
marsupials lived together hints that their modern solitary
lifestyle was not present 64 million years ago," Ladeveze
said.


Mission to study Titan seas proposed

LAUREL, Md. - A proposal to explore the seas of Saturn's
moon Titan is one of three selected by NASA this week as
candidates for the agency's next Discovery Program mission.
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in
Laurel, Md., is managing the Titan Mare Explorer, or TiME,
which would perform the first direct exploration of an ocean
environment beyond Earth by landing in, and floating on, a
large methane-ethane sea on the cloud-covered moon, a Johns
Hopkins release said last week. Also selected for consider-
ation as mission candidates were a NASA Jet Propulsion Lab-
oratory lander that would study the Martian interior and a
NASA Goddard project to land on a comet multiple times and
observe its interaction with the sun. The three proposals,
selected from among 28 submissions, will each receive $3
million to develop a detailed concept study. The TiME cap-
sule would launch in 2016 and reach Titan in 2023, para-
chuting onto the moon's second-largest northern sea, the
Ligeia Mare. In addition to studying the composition and
behavior of the sea and its interaction with Titan's weather
and climate, TiME would also seek evidence of complex organ-
ic chemistry that may be active on Titan today and could be
similar to processes involved in the development of life on
the early Earth, Johns Hopkins researchers said.


Cost effective CO2 removal decades away

PRINCETON, N.J. - Technologies to remove carbon dioxide from
the atmosphere to slow human-driven climate change won't be
economically feasible for decades, U.S. researchers say. The
report by the American Physical Society analyzed technologies
known as "Direct Air Capture," using chemicals to absorb
carbon dioxide from the open air, concentrating the carbon
dioxide and then storing it safely underground. The commit-
tee, co-chaired by Princeton University engineer Robert
Socolow, found such a strategy would be far more expensive
than simply preventing the emission of the carbon dioxide in
the first place, a Princeton release said Monday. "We humans
should not kid ourselves that we can pour all the carbon
dioxide we wish into the atmosphere right now and pull it
out later at little cost," Socolow, a professor of mechan-
ical and aerospace engineering, said. DAC is not likely to
become worthwhile until nearly all the significant point
sources of carbon dioxide are eliminated, the report said.
"We ought to be developing plans to bring to an end the
carbon dioxide emissions at every coal and natural gas power
plant on the planet," Socolow said. "We don't have to do
this job overnight. But the technologies we studied in this
report, capable of removing carbon dioxide from the air,
are not a substitute for addressing power plants directly."

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