Sifting through atmospheres of far-off worlds

Sifting through atmospheres of far-off worlds

One breakthrough to come in recent years is direct imaging of exoplanets. Ground-based telescopes have begun taking infrared pictures of the planets posing near their stars in family portraits. But to astronomers, a picture is worth even more than a thousand words if its light can be broken apart into a rainbow of different wavelengths.

Those wishes are coming true as researchers are beginning to install infrared cameras on ground-based telescopes equipped with spectrographs. Spectrographs are instruments that spread an object's light apart, revealing signatures of molecules. Project 1640, partly funded by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., recently accomplished this goal using the Palomar Observatory near San Diego.

"In just one hour, we were able to get precise composition information about four planets around one overwhelmingly bright star," said Gautam Vasisht of JPL, co-author of the new study appearing in the Astrophysical Journal. "The star is a hundred thousand times as bright as the planets, so we've developed ways to remove that starlight and isolate the extremely faint light of the planets."

Along with ground-based infrared imaging, other strategies for combing through the atmospheres of giant planets are being actively pursued as well. For example, NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes monitor planets as they cross in front of their stars, and then disappear behind. NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will use a comparable strategy to study the atmospheres of planets only slightly larger than Earth.

In the new study, the researchers examined HR 8799, a large star orbited by at least four known giant, red planets. Three of the planets were among the first ever directly imaged around a star, thanks to observations from the Gemini and Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, in 2008. The fourth planet, the closest to the star and the hardest to see, was revealed in images taken by the Keck telescope in 2010.

That alone was a tremendous feat considering that all planet discoveries up until then had been made through indirect means, for example by looking for the wobble of a star induced by the tug of planets.

Those images weren't enough, however, to reveal any information about the planets' chemical composition. That's where spectrographs are needed -- to expose the "fingerprints" of molecules in a planet's atmosphere. Capturing a distant world's spectrum requires gathering even more planet light, and that means further blocking the glare of the star.

Project 1640 accomplished this with a collection of instruments, which the team installs on the ground-based telescopes each time they go on "observing runs." The instrument suite includes a coronagraph to mask out the starlight; an advanced adaptive optics system, which removes the blur of our moving atmosphere by making millions of tiny adjustments to two deformable telescope mirrors; an imaging spectrograph that records 30 images in a rainbow of infrared colors simultaneously; and a state-of-the-art wave front sensor that further adjusts the mirrors to compensate for scattered starlight.

"It's like taking a single picture of the Empire State Building from an airplane that reveals a bump on the sidewalk next to it that is as high as an ant," said Ben R. Oppenheimer, lead author of the new study and associate curator and chair of the Astrophysics Department at the American Museum of Natural History, N.Y., N.Y.

Their results revealed that all four planets, though nearly the same in temperature, have different compositions. Some, unexpectedly, do not have methane in them, and there may be hints of ammonia or other compounds that would also be surprising. Further theoretical modeling will help to understand the chemistry of these planets.

Meanwhile, the quest to obtain more and better spectra of exoplanets continues. Other researchers have used the Keck telescope and the Large Binocular Telescope near Tucson, Ariz., to study the emission of individual planets in the HR8799 system. In addition to the HR 8799 system, only two others have yielded images of exoplanets. The next step is to find more planets ripe for giving up their chemical secrets. Several ground-based telescopes are being prepared for the hunt, including Keck, Gemini, Palomar and Japan's Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

Ideally, the researchers want to find young planets that still have enough heat left over from their formation, and thus more infrared light for the spectrographs to see. They also want to find planets located far from their stars, and out of the blinding starlight. NASA's infrared Spitzer and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) missions, and its ultraviolet Galaxy Evolution Explorer, now led by the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, have helped identify candidate young stars that may host planets meeting these criteria.

"We're looking for super-Jupiter planets located faraway from their star," said Vasisht. "As our technique develops, we hope to be able to acquire molecular compositions of smaller, and slightly older, gas planets."

Still lower-mass planets, down to the size of Saturn, will be targets for imaging studies by the James Webb Space Telescope.

"Rocky Earth-like planets are too small and close to their stars for the current technology, or even for James Webb to detect. The feat of cracking the chemical compositions of true Earth analogs will come from a future space mission such as the proposed Terrestrial Planet Finder," said Charles Beichman, a co-author of the P1640 result and executive director of NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech.

Though the larger, gas planets are not hospitable to life, the current studies are teaching astronomers how the smaller, rocky ones form.

"The outer giant planets dictate the fate of rocky ones like Earth. Giant planets can migrate in toward a star, and in the process, tug the smaller, rocky planets around or even kick them out of the system. We're looking at hot Jupiters before they migrate in, and hope to understand more about how and when they might influence the destiny of the rocky, inner planets," said Vasisht.

NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute manages time allocation on the Keck telescope for NASA. JPL manages NASA's Exoplanet Exploration program office. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

A visualization from the American Museum of Natural History showing where the HR 8799 system is in relation to our solar system is online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDNAk0bwLrU .

More information about exoplanets and NASA's planet-finding program is at http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov .

TAG:Extrasolar Planets NASA Pluto Astronomy Space Exploration Space Telescopes

Do markets erode moral values? People ignore their own moral standards when acting as market participants, researchers say

Do markets erode moral values? People ignore their own moral standards when acting as market participants, researchers say

The results are presented in the latest issue of the journal Science.

Prof. Dr. Armin Falk from the University of Bonn and Prof. Dr. Nora Szech from the University of Bamberg, both economists, have shown in an experiment that markets erode moral concerns. In comparison to non-market decisions, moral standards are significantly lower if people participate in markets.

In markets, people ignore their individual moral standards

"Our results show that market participants violate their own moral standards," says Prof. Falk. In a number of different experiments, several hundred subjects were confronted with the moral decision between receiving a monetary amount and killing a mouse versus saving the life of a mouse and foregoing the monetary amount. "It is important to understand what role markets and other institutions play in moral decision making. This is a question economists have to deal with," says Prof. Szech.

"To study immoral outcomes, we studied whether people are willing to harm a third party in exchange to receiving money. Harming others in an intentional and unjustified way is typically considered unethical," says Prof. Falk. The animals involved in the study were so-called "surplus mice," raised in laboratories outside Germany. These mice are no longer needed for research purposes. Without the experiment, they would have all been killed. As a consequence of the study many hundreds of young mice that would otherwise all have died were saved. If a subject decided to save a mouse, the experimenters bought the animal. The saved mice are perfectly healthy and live under best possible lab conditions and medical care.

Simple bilateral markets affect moral decisions

A subgroup of subjects decided between life and money in a non-market decision context (individual condition). This condition allows for eliciting moral standards held by individuals. The condition was compared to two market conditions in which either only one buyer and one seller (bilateral market) or a larger number of buyers and sellers (multilateral market) could trade with each other. If a market offer was accepted a trade was completed, resulting in the death of a mouse. Compared to the individual condition, a significantly higher number of subjects were willing to accept the killing of a mouse in both market conditions. This is the main result of the study. Thus markets result in an erosion of moral values. "In markets, people face several mechanisms that may lower their feelings of guilt and responsibility," explains Nora Szech. In market situations, people focus on competition and profits rather than on moral concerns. Guilt can be shared with other traders. In addition, people see that others violate moral norms as well.

"If I don't buy or sell, someone else will."

In addition, in markets with many buyers and sellers, subjects may justify their behavior by stressing that their impact on outcomes is negligible. "This logic is a general characteristic of markets," says Prof. Falk. Excuses or justifications appeal to the saying, "If I don't buy or sell now, someone else will." For morally neutral goods, however, such effects are of minor importance. Nora Szech explains: "For goods without moral relevance, differences in decisions between the individual and the market conditions are small. The reason is simply that in such cases the need to share guilt or excuse behavior is absent."

TAG:Consumer Behavior Behavior Perception Ethics Bioethics Economics

What Nook could buy Microsoft

What Nook could buy Microsoft

Microsoft has bid $1 billion to buy the digital assets of Nook Media, the e-book business led by Barnes & Noble, according to a report published late Wednesday.The news sparked immediate enthusiasm on Wall Street, where the bookseller's stock price was up 18% as of early Thursday afternoon. But, despite the excitement, an all-important question remains: If Microsoft goes on to consummate the rumored deal, what will it get out of the acquisition?

TechCrunch broke the news, claiming it had acquired internal documents that revealed not only Microsoft's offer, but also plans to phase out Nook's Android-based tablets by the end of 2014. An anonymous source told The New York Times that the documents are authentic and only a few weeks old. According to the Times, which noted that Nook was valued at $1.8 billion as recently as December, it is not yet clear if a deal will be closed. Microsoft has so far declined to comment, but the Times source claimed any announcements are at least weeks away.

Click to read the rest of this story on InformationWeek.


TAG:Barnes and Noble Microsoft Nook E Reader

Kestrels, other urban birds are stressed by human activity

Kestrels, other urban birds are stressed by human activity

The peer-reviewed paper "Reproductive failure of a human-tolerant species, the American kestrel, is associated with stress and human disturbance," was published in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology (May 10, 2013). Boise State University graduate student Erin Strasser, now with the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory, and Julie Heath, a professor in the Boise State Department of Biological Sciences and Raptor Research Center, conducted the research.

Strasser and Heath conducted research along one of Idaho's major expressways, Interstate 84, and in suburban and rural areas south of the state's capital city of Boise. Since 1987, researchers from Boise State and the U.S. Geological Survey have monitored a number of nest boxes located along the area's roadways, in people's back yards, and in sagebrush-steppe habitat.

In this study, Strasser and Heath were interested in understanding how human-dominated landscapes affect breeding kestrels, with particular attention paid to the link between disturbance, stress and nest failure. The two monitored the boxes to determine nest fate, and collected a small blood sample from adult birds. The researchers were looking at corticosterone levels, which indicate stress levels (the equivalent in humans is cortisol). Corticosterone can lead to behavioral and physiological changes that allow individuals to cope with stressful situations, while suppressing other activities such as reproduction.

The data showed that female kestrels nesting in areas with high human activity, such as along noisy roadways, have higher corticosterone levels, but males do not. This could be because females spend more time in the nesting box and thus are exposed more often to stressors such as vehicle noise. Too much ambient noise may make it difficult for them to assess the level of danger, leading to higher stress levels and increased vigilance behavior, decreased parental care or the decision to abandon their nest. Kestrels nesting in high disturbance areas were almost 10 times more likely to abandon their nest than those in more isolated areas, and this effect lessened the further a nest was from the road.

"We hypothesized that this was a mechanism for how humans are impacting wildlife," Heath said. "To birds, areas with human activity may be perceived as a high-risk environment."

Given that the vast majority of land in the continental United States is within a mile of a road, wildlife increasingly are exposed to chronic levels of road noise. The resulting increase in stress levels could cause fundamental changes in physiology and behavior across species inhabiting human-dominated environments, which over time could lead to population declines.

As scientists continue to connect the dots between human disturbances and the resulting long-term effects on wildlife, changes already are yielding positive results. Research conducted in preserve areas, such as state parks, has led to reduced speeds and attempts to limit noise, although noise mitigation, while locally effective, may not protect widespread populations such as kestrels from the pervasive threat of traffic noise.

The study concludes that until regulations or economic incentives are developed to encourage engineering innovations that result in quieter roads, projects in areas of human activity with favorable habitat should be discouraged to decrease the risk of ecological traps. In the meantime, Boise State's nesting boxes have been moved from freeway locations to more suitable areas.

"Birds evolved in an environment that was not dominated by humans," Heath noted. "In recent history, human roads and structures have left few areas untouched. We're just starting to understand the real consequences."

TAG:Birds Nature Pollution Environmental Issues Urbanization Land Management

Markets erode moral values

Markets erode moral values

May 10, 2013 — Many people express objections against child labor, exploitation of the workforce or meat production involving cruelty against animals. At the same time, however, people ignore their own moral standards when acting as market participants, searching for the cheapest electronics, fashion or food. Thus, markets reduce moral concerns. This is the main result of an experiment conducted by economists from the Universities of Bonn and Bamberg.

The results are presented in the latest issue of the journal Science.

Prof. Dr. Armin Falk from the University of Bonn and Prof. Dr. Nora Szech from the University of Bamberg, both economists, have shown in an experiment that markets erode moral concerns. In comparison to non-market decisions, moral standards are significantly lower if people participate in markets.

In markets, people ignore their individual moral standards

"Our results show that market participants violate their own moral standards," says Prof. Falk. In a number of different experiments, several hundred subjects were confronted with the moral decision between receiving a monetary amount and killing a mouse versus saving the life of a mouse and foregoing the monetary amount. "It is important to understand what role markets and other institutions play in moral decision making. This is a question economists have to deal with," says Prof. Szech.

"To study immoral outcomes, we studied whether people are willing to harm a third party in exchange to receiving money. Harming others in an intentional and unjustified way is typically considered unethical," says Prof. Falk. The animals involved in the study were so-called "surplus mice," raised in laboratories outside Germany. These mice are no longer needed for research purposes. Without the experiment, they would have all been killed. As a consequence of the study many hundreds of young mice that would otherwise all have died were saved. If a subject decided to save a mouse, the experimenters bought the animal. The saved mice are perfectly healthy and live under best possible lab conditions and medical care.

Simple bilateral markets affect moral decisions

A subgroup of subjects decided between life and money in a non-market decision context (individual condition). This condition allows for eliciting moral standards held by individuals. The condition was compared to two market conditions in which either only one buyer and one seller (bilateral market) or a larger number of buyers and sellers (multilateral market) could trade with each other. If a market offer was accepted a trade was completed, resulting in the death of a mouse. Compared to the individual condition, a significantly higher number of subjects were willing to accept the killing of a mouse in both market conditions. This is the main result of the study. Thus markets result in an erosion of moral values. "In markets, people face several mechanisms that may lower their feelings of guilt and responsibility," explains Nora Szech. In market situations, people focus on competition and profits rather than on moral concerns. Guilt can be shared with other traders. In addition, people see that others violate moral norms as well.

"If I don't buy or sell, someone else will."

In addition, in markets with many buyers and sellers, subjects may justify their behavior by stressing that their impact on outcomes is negligible. "This logic is a general characteristic of markets," says Prof. Falk. Excuses or justifications appeal to the saying, "If I don't buy or sell now, someone else will." For morally neutral goods, however, such effects are of minor importance. Nora Szech explains: "For goods without moral relevance, differences in decisions between the individual and the market conditions are small. The reason is simply that in such cases the need to share guilt or excuse behavior is absent."

TAG:Consumer Behavior Behavior Perception Ethics Bioethics Economics

Huawei CEO dismisses security, spying concerns

Huawei CEO dismisses security, spying concerns

The founder and CEO of Chinese networking equipment manufacturer Huawei, in his first-ever media interview, Thursday dismissed allegations that backdoors may have been built into the company's products to facilitate Chinese espionage.

"Huawei has no connection to the cybersecurity issues the U.S. has encountered in the past, current and future," Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei, 68, told local reporters -- through an interpreter -- while on a visit to New Zealand this week, according to news reports.

Since founding the company 26 years ago, Ren had previously refused to conduct media interviews. But during his visit this week to New Zealand, he agreed to meet with reporters from four of the country's news outlets.

Click to read the rest of this article on Information Week.
TAG:security China Huawei ZTE backdoor cyber spy telecommunications cyber espionage

河南南阳：金黄石添彩玉雕之乡

河南南阳：金黄石添彩玉雕之乡

　　近日,“田黄”现身南阳,玉雕之乡又添“皇”石金印的说法在奇石爱好者中引起轰动.

　　不久前,一位奇石爱好者在伏牛山一山坡处捡到一块晶莹的石头,此石颜色金黄、润如和田,石友们竞相传看,并以金黄石命名之.见到金黄石印章,北京一位收藏家惊讶地说:“南阳是玉雕之乡,南阳宝玉石家族又添新的‘皇’石金印,盛世出玉啊.”

　　印石专家见到样石后认为,此石色泽、质地均与福建田黄接近,色彩丰富度超过寿山石,乃中原腹地不可多得的印石材料.发现印石的地点在中原腹地河南南阳伏牛山,这种成矿环境与田黄石十分一致,也在山麓泥土之中.

　　专家指出,中国古代印章多用美石材质,故名印石,尤以田黄石、青田石、寿山石、鸡血石最为著名.田黄石,位居印石榜首,俗语有“一两田黄十两金”之说,自近代以来身价逐年倍增.一般来说,田黄具有珍珠光泽、玻璃光泽、油脂光泽,微透明至半透明.田黄出自山上,成于稻田,成矿环境十分苛刻,故田黄石极为罕见和珍贵,全国各地尚且没有发现过同样石头.金黄石成矿的复杂性,决定其金属元素蕴含丰富,色彩艳丽,在其黄色底色上,还往往会出现丰富的黑色花纹,俗称“水草花”.

　　这种印石的价值究竟有多大？如今,产于印尼的金田黄的价格已经炒到500元一克,或者说十多万元一公斤.可以说,南阳金黄石在颜色和质地,以及成矿环境上与田黄更为接近,比金田黄更具收藏价值.著名印石大师马少堂说:“此石密度没有独玉大,所以更吸墨,且刀感好,软硬适中,适宜走刀,其奶白色细腻纯净,堪比和田；其粉红色质的光滑细腻,适合做印章、手把件、砚台.”中国故宫[微博]博物院副研究员张寿山指出:“伏牛山出现的这种石头很有价值,也相当有品位.”

来源:新浪收藏


TAG:河南南阳：金黄石添彩玉雕之乡 翡翠 翡翠手镯 中国翡翠网 翡翠新闻

Epson AR glasses aim at industry

Epson AR glasses aim at industry

PORTLAND, Ore. -- When Epson first announced its augmented reality (AR) head-mounted display (HMD) called Moverio last year, it was aimed at the same consumer applications as the Google Glass research project, only Epson's solution was here today. However, if Epson's experience is any indicator, Google Glass will be a failure. Now Epson is one generation ahead of Google Glass, since it is readying a second-generation Moverio, but this time their aim is the industrial market, for which they already have succeeded by signing up professional customers such as Scope Technologies (Edmonton, Alberta).

"We immediately saw the potential for Epson's Moverio for industrial applications, such as eliminating the need for service manuals by showing technicians exactly how to perform maintenance tasks with heads up information displayed right on the device being repaired," said founder of Scope Technologies founder, Scott Montgomerie.

Scope Technologies uses Moverio to project tactical information -- such as showing virtual tools performing the necessary task right on the equipment to be repaired. Thus instead of consulting a service manual, the technician merely dons the Moverio glasses and looks at the device to be repaired, with the location of the faults and the steps to repair them appearing to be projected right onto the parts.

Epson's Moverio augmented reality (AR) glasses obsolete the service manual by directing personnel in how-to with arrows and text added right on top of the device being serviced. SOURCE: Epson Click on image to enlarge.

"We are currently working with our industrial partners like Scope Technologies, to bring this wearable see-through technology to the professional market," said Eric Mizufuka, new markets product manager at Epson.
Next: Micro-miniaturized projectors
TAG:EETimes NextGenLog Electronics

Earliest archaeological evidence of human ancestors hunting and scavenging

Earliest archaeological evidence of human ancestors hunting and scavenging

May 10, 2013 — A recent Baylor University research study has shed new light on the diet and food acquisition strategies of some the earliest human ancestors in Africa.

Beginning around two million years ago, early stone tool-making humans, known scientifically as Oldowan hominin, started to exhibit a number of physiological and ecological adaptations that required greater daily energy expenditures, including an increase in brain and body size, heavier investment in their offspring and significant home-range expansion. Demonstrating how these early humans acquired the extra energy they needed to sustain these shifts has been the subject of much debate among researchers.

A recent study led by Joseph Ferraro, Ph.D., assistant professor of anthropology at Baylor, offers new insight in this debate with a wealth of archaeological evidence from the two million-year-old site of Kanjera South (KJS), Kenya. The study's findings were recently published in PLOS One.

"Considered in total, this study provides important early archaeological evidence for meat eating, hunting and scavenging behaviors -cornerstone adaptations that likely facilitated brain expansion in human evolution, movement of hominins out of Africa and into Eurasia, as well as important shifts in our social behavior, anatomy and physiology," Ferraro said.

Located on the shores of Lake Victoria, KJS contains "three large, well-preserved, stratified" layers of animal remains. The research team worked at the site for more than a decade, recovering thousands of animal bones and rudimentary stone tools.

According to researchers, hominins at KJS met their new energy requirements through an increased reliance on meat eating. Specifically, the archaeological record at KJS shows that hominins acquired an abundance of nutritious animal remains through a combination of both hunting and scavenging behaviors. The KJS site is the earliest known archaeological evidence of these behaviors.

"Our study helps inform the 'hunting vs. scavenging' debate in Paleolithic archaeology. The record at KJS shows that it isn't a case of either/or for Oldowan hominins two million years ago. Rather hominins at KJS were clearly doing both," Ferraro said.

The fossil evidence for hominin hunting is particularly compelling. The record shows that Oldowan hominins acquired and butchered numerous small antelope carcasses. These animals are well represented at the site by most or all of their bones from the tops of their head to the tips of their hooves, indicating to researchers that they were transported to the site as whole carcasses.

Many of the bones also show evidence of cut marks made when hominins used simple stone tools to remove animal flesh. Some bones also bear evidence that hominins used fist-sized stones to break them open to acquire bone marrow.

In addition, modern studies in the Serengeti--an environment similar to KJS two million years ago--have also shown that predators completely devour antelopes of this size within minutes of their deaths. As a result, hominins could only have acquired these valuable remains on the savanna through active hunting.

The site also contains a large number of isolated heads of wildebeest-sized antelopes. In contrast to small antelope carcasses, the heads of these somewhat larger individuals are able to be consumed several days after death and could be scavenged, as even the largest African predators like lions and hyenas were unable to break them open to access their nutrient-rich brains.

"Tool-wielding hominins at KJS, on the other hand, could access this tissue and likely did so by scavenging these heads after the initial non-human hunters had consumed the rest of the carcass," Ferraro said. "KJS hominins not only scavenged these head remains, they also transported them some distance to the archaeological site before breaking them open and consuming the brains. This is important because it provides the earliest archaeological evidence of this type of resource transport behavior in the human lineage."

Other contributing authors to the study include: Thomas W. Plummer of Queens College & NYCEP; Briana L. Pobiner of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution; James S. Oliver of Illinois State Museum and Liverpool John Moores University; Laura C. Bishop of Liverpool John Moores University; David R. Braun of George Washington University; Peter W. Ditchfield of University of Oxford; John W. Seaman III , Katie M. Binetti and John W. Seaman Jr. of Baylor University; Fritz Hertel of California State University and Richard Potts of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution and National Museums of Kenya.

The research was supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, Leakey Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, National Geographic Society, The Leverhulme Trust, University of California, Baylor University and the City University of New York. Additional logistical support was provided by the Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program and the Peter Buck Fund for Human Origins Research, the British Institute of Eastern Africa and the National Museums of Kenya.

TAG:Environmental Policy Global Warming Sustainability Cultures Ancient Civilizations Lost Treasures