May 21, 2012
Good Morning,
NASA has completed its best yet assessment of potentially dangerous asteroids. The findings reveal numbers, sizes, and origins amongst additional information on these asteroids. Check out the third article for more details.
Until Next Time,
Erin
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NYC unveils high-tech employment mapNEW YORK - New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg says a digital map called Made in New York will be a resource for job seekers. The map released Tuesday displays the locations of tech startups in New York, indicating the high-tech hubs within the city and can connect job hunters with employment listings, Mashable reported. "We expect this map to be another tool that helps propel our tech industry forward," Bloomberg said. "The growth of the tech industry in New York City has been a critical part of weathering the nation's economic downturn, far better than the rest of the country." New York is the second-highest ranked city in the United States for attracting venture capital dollars, moving ahead of Boston and trailing only California's Silicon Valley. At its launch, the digital map displayed more than 500 local companies in the city's five boroughs. Locations of companies are given on the map so job seekers can explore their desired neighborhoods, and entrepreneurs can add their companies to the map.
Smartphones can help visually impairedCHICAGO - While smartphones can be of great assistance help to the visually impaired, few vision doctors are recommending them to patients, a U.S. study says. Researchers at Loyola University of Chicago's Stritch School of Medicine said a survey of 46 low-vision adults, with best-corrected vision ranging from 20/70 to complete blindness, found only 15 percent had a vision doctor recommend a smartphone for the devices' accessibility features. Twenty-four of the patients, with an average age of 36, used smartphones while 30 patients, average age 67, had basic cellphones. "Young, visually impaired patients are getting ahead of their doctors," Walter M. Jay, an ophthalmologist and senior author of the study, said in a Loyola release Wednesday. "Low-vision specialists should be getting out in front on this rather than being behind the curve," he said. Smartphones offer a number of accessibility features for the visually impaired, researchers said, including the ability to increase font sizes to large as 56 point, enabling users with very poor vision to read texts and e-mails, screens whose brightness can be increased significantly, and global positioning system and voice features that can help the visually impaired to navigate. "Smartphones can dramatically improve the quality of life of people with poor vision," Jay said.
Survey counts Earth-threatening asteroidsWASHINGTON - A NASA space telescope has completed the best assessment yet of our solar system's population of potentially hazardous asteroids, the space agency said. Observations from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have revealed new information about the total numbers, origins and the possible dangers the asteroids may pose, NASA reported. Potentially hazardous asteroids, or PHAs, are a subset of the larger group of near-Earth asteroids that have the closest orbits to Earth -- approaching within 5 million miles -- and are big enough to survive passing through Earth's atmosphere and causing damage on a regional, or greater, scale, scientists said. The results come from the asteroid-hunting portion of the WISE mission called NEOWISE. "The NEOWISE analysis shows us we've made a good start at finding those objects that truly represent an impact hazard to Earth," said Lindley Johnson of the Near-Earth Object Observation Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "But we've many more to find, and it will take a concerted effort during the next couple of decades to find all of them that could do serious damage or be a mission destination in the future." Findings indicate there are roughly 4,700 PHAs with diameters larger
than 330 feet. An estimated 20 percent to 30 percent of these objects have been located and identified. "NASA's NEOWISE project, which wasn't originally planned as part of WISE, has turned out to be a huge bonus," said Amy Mainzer, NEOWISE principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Study: Galaxies evolved quicklyCOPENHAGEN, Denmark - Galaxies in the young universe evolved faster than previously thought, offering the potential for early planet formation and life, Danish researchers say. Astrophysicists at the University of Copenhagen's Niels Bohr Institute said up until now it was thought it had taken billions of years for stars to form and create galaxies with a high content of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium -- like carbon and oxygen -- necessary for the formation of planets and life as we know it. But this process went surprisingly quickly in some galaxies, they said. "We have studied 10 galaxies in the early universe and analyzed their light spectra. We are observing light from the galaxies that has been on a 10-12 billion year journey to Earth, so we see the galaxies as they were then," Johan Fynbo from the Dark Cosmology Center at the Niels Bohr Institute said. "Our expectation was that they would be relatively primitive and poor in heavier elements, but we discovered somewhat to our surprise that the gas in some of the galaxies and thus the stars in them had a very high content of heavier elements," he said. "The gas was just as enriched as our own sun." The findings suggest galaxies from the very early universe had a surprisingly large quantity of heavier elements, researchers said, noting one of the galaxies studied was especially interesting. "For one of the galaxies, we observed the outer regions and here there was also a high element content. This suggests that large parts of the galaxy are enriched with a high content of heavier elements and that means that already in the early history of the universe there was potential for planet formation and life," Fynbo said.
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