July 16, 2012

Good Morning,

First off, I apologize for the late issue, there was a
mailing problem. Last week I featured an article about
feathers having been characteristic of all dinosaurs.
I found another article last week that examines the
similarities between bird eggs and dinosaur eggs. Check
out the second article for all the details.

Until Next Time,
Erin

Questions? Comments? Email me at: mailto:gizmo@gophercentral.com
Email your comments

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System can warn of dangerous solar storms

NEWARK, Del. - Solar radiation that could kill astronauts in space can be forecast nearly 3 hours in advance, giving them time to take protective action, researchers say. The radiation comes from massive explosions on the sun that send streams of charged particles toward Earth. "Traveling nearly at the speed of light, it takes just 10 minutes for the first particles ejected from a solar storm to reach Earth," University of Delaware researcher John Bieber said. Bieber, along with colleagues from Chungnam National University in South Korea, said data collected by two neutron monitors installed years ago at the South Pole by the University of Delaware can determine the intensity of the high-energy, fast-moving particles that arrive to Earth first from solar storms. By examining the properties of the first-arriving particles, scientists can make useful predictions about the slower-moving, yet more dangerous particles to follow, Beiber said. "These slower-moving particles are more dangerous because there are so many more of them. That's where the danger lies," Bieber said. The system can provide a warning time up to 166 minutes about the arrival of the more dangerous particles, which would give astronauts time to seek out an armored area in their spacecraft, Bieber said. Most astronauts have flown in low Earth orbit in recent years, but if we go back to the moon or decide to send humans to Mars, Beiber said, the danger from radiation is significant. In fact, he said, he thinks some of the Apollo astronauts were just lucky. "Somehow they got these moon launches between big solar flares that would have killed them right then and there."


Oval eggs suggest dinosaur/bird link

BARCELONA, Spain - The discovery of dinosaur eggs with a unique shape -- they are oval -- suggests a link between dinosaurs and modern birds, Spanish researchers say. Unlike most non-avian dinosaur eggs, which are symmetrical, the oval shape of some non-avian theropod eggs from the upper Cretaceous period discovered in Spain suggests birds and the theropods could have a common ancestor. The oval form is rarely seen in eggs from the period and is similar to that of modern day eggs, researchers from Complutense University of Madrid and the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona said. The oval shape of bird eggs is associated with their physiology -- they take on this shape given the existence of only one oviduct, which can form only one egg at a time. The region in the oviduct creating the eggshell membrane is what gives the egg its asymmetrical oval shape. The wider end contains a bag of air that allows the bird to breathe in the last stages of its development, an evolutionary step relatively underdeveloped in most dinosaurs, researchers said. The egg discovered by the Spanish researchers may therefore represent a missing link between dinosaurs and birds, a release from the Barcelona university said Thursday.


Planet-hunting camera could be surgery aid

LOS ANGELES - An ultraviolet-light camera used to explore the galaxy could be used in operating rooms to aid surgeons performing delicate brain surgery, U.S. doctors say. Neurosurgeons and researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles say when focused on brain tissue, the camera could give surgeons a real-time view of changes invisible to the naked eye and difficult to see even with magnification of current medical imaging technologies. A pilot study will seek to determine whether the camera can provide visual detail to help surgeons distinguish areas of healthy brain from deadly tumors called gliomas, which have irregular borders as they spread into normal tissue. "Our goal is to revolutionize the way neurological disorders are treated," neurosurgeon Keith L. Black said. "Ultraviolet imaging is one of several intraoperative technologies we are pursuing." Delineating the margin where tumor cells end and healthy cells begin never has been easy, but the camera could, by seeing below the surface during open-skull surgery, be a help in identifying the cancer cells, surgeons say. The camera, on loan from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, employs ultraviolet technology used to study planets and distant galaxies. "The ultraviolet imaging technique may provide a 'metabolic map' of tumors that could help us differentiate them from normal surrounding brain tissue, providing useful, real-time, intraoperative information," Ray Chu, one of the neurosurgeons leading the study, said in a Cedars-Sinai release.


U.S. laser experiment sets power record

LIVERMORE, Calif. - U.S. researchers say they've conducted a laser experiment that briefly generated more power than the United States uses in any one instant of time. The system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility in California used 192 laser beams to deliver more than 500 trillion watts (500 terawatts or TW) of peak power and 1.85 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to its target. Five hundred terawatts is 1,000 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time, and 1.85 megajoules of energy is about 100 times what any other laser regularly produces today, a Lawrence Livermore lab release said Thursday. In the experiment, NIF's 192 lasers fired within a few trillionths of a second of each other onto a 2-millimeter-diameter target. The achievement is a vital step toward achieving one of physics' grand challenges, igniting hydrogen fusion fuel in the laboratory and producing more energy than that supplied to the target, researchers said. "NIF is becoming everything scientists planned when it was conceived over two decades ago," NIF Director Edward Moses said. "It is fully operational, and scientists are taking important steps toward achieving ignition and providing experimental access to user communities for national security, basic science and the quest for clean fusion energy."

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