• NASA Negotiates Six, One-Month Options With United Space Alliance
  NASA has incorporated six, one-month content adjustments that provide options for continuation of services to support fly-out of the space shuttle manifest beyond Thursday, March 31.
• NASA Spacecraft Reveal Mysteries Of Jupiter And Saturn Rings
  In a celestial forensic exercise, scientists analyzing data from NASA’s Cassini, Galileo and New Horizons missions have traced telltale ripples in Saturn and Jupiter’s rings to specific collisions with cometary fragments that occurred decades, not millions of years, ago.
• Salt-Seeking Spacecraft Arrives At Launch Site NASA Instrument Will Measure Ocean Surface Salinity
  An international spacecraft that will take NASA’s first space-based measurements of ocean surface salinity has arrived at its launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

After just two years in orbit, ESA’s GOCE satellite has gathered enough data to map Earth’s gravity with unrivalled precision. Scientists now have access to the most accurate model of the ‘geoid’ ever produced to further our understanding of how Earth works.
 
The new geoid was unveiled today at the Fourth International GOCE User Workshop hosted at the Technische Universität München in Munich, Germany. Media representatives and scientists from around the world have been treated to the best view yet of global gravity.

The geoid is the surface of an ideal global ocean in the absence of tides and currents, shaped only by gravity. It is a crucial reference for measuring ocean circulation, sea-level change and ice dynamics – all affected by climate change.

Prof. Reiner Rummel, former Head of the Institute for Astronomical and Physical Geodesy at the Technische Universität München, said, “We see a continuous stream of excellent GOCE gradiometry data coming in. With each new two-month cycle, our GOCE gravity field model is getting better and better.  
 
“Now the time has come to use GOCE data for science and applications. I am particularly excited about the first oceanographic results.

“They show that GOCE will give us dynamic topography and circulation patterns of the oceans with unprecedented quality and resolution. I am confident that these results will help improve our understanding of the dynamics of world oceans.”

The two-day workshop provides the science community with the latest information on the performance of the satellite and details about data products and user services.
 
Participants are also discussing how the GOCE geoid will make advances in ocean and climate studies, and improve our understanding of Earth’s internal structure.

For example, the gravity data from GOCE are helping to develop a deeper knowledge of the processes that cause earthquakes, such as the event that recently devastated Japan.

After just two years in orbit, ESA’s GOCE satellite has gathered enough data to map Earth’s gravity with unrivalled precision. Scientists now have access to the most accurate model of the ‘geoid’ ever produced to further our understanding of how Earth works.
 
The new geoid was unveiled today at the Fourth International GOCE User Workshop hosted at the Technische Universität München in Munich, Germany. Media representatives and scientists from around the world have been treated to the best view yet of global gravity.

The geoid is the surface of an ideal global ocean in the absence of tides and currents, shaped only by gravity. It is a crucial reference for measuring ocean circulation, sea-level change and ice dynamics – all affected by climate change.

Prof. Reiner Rummel, former Head of the Institute for Astronomical and Physical Geodesy at the Technische Universität München, said, “We see a continuous stream of excellent GOCE gradiometry data coming in. With each new two-month cycle, our GOCE gravity field model is getting better and better.  
 
 
“Now the time has come to use GOCE data for science and applications. I am particularly excited about the first oceanographic results.

“They show that GOCE will give us dynamic topography and circulation patterns of the oceans with unprecedented quality and resolution. I am confident that these results will help improve our understanding of the dynamics of world oceans.”

The two-day workshop provides the science community with the latest information on the performance of the satellite and details about data products and user services.
 
Participants are also discussing how the GOCE geoid will make advances in ocean and climate studies, and improve our understanding of Earth’s internal structure.

For example, the gravity data from GOCE are helping to develop a deeper knowledge of the processes that cause earthquakes, such as the event that recently devastated Japan.

Since this earthquake was caused by tectonic plate movement under the ocean, the motion cannot be observed directly from space. However, earthquakes create signatures in gravity data, which could be used to understand the processes leading to these natural disasters and ultimately help to predict them.

The GOCE satellite was launched in March 2009 and has now collected more than 12-months of gravity data.
 
 
Volker Liebig, Director of ESA’s Earth Observation Programmes said, “Benefiting from a period of exceptional low solar activity, GOCE has been able to stay in low orbit and achieve coverage six weeks ahead of schedule.

“This also means that we still have fuel to continue measuring gravity until the end of 2012, thereby doubling the life of the mission and adding even more precision to the GOCE geoid.”

GOCE has achieved many firsts in Earth observation. Its gradiometer – six highly sensitive accelerometers measuring gravity in 3D – is the first in space.

It orbits at the lowest altitude of any observation satellite to gather the best data on Earth’s gravity. The design of this sleek one-tonne satellite is unique.

In addition, GOCE uses an innovative ion engine that generates tiny forces to compensate for any drag the satellite experiences as it orbits through the remnants of Earth’s atmosphere.
 
 
Prof. Liebig added, “You could say that, at its early conception, GOCE was more like science fiction. GOCE has now clearly demonstrated that it is a state-of-the-art mission.”

Rune Floberghagen, ESA’s GOCE Mission Manager, noted “This is a highly significant step for the mission. We now look forward to the coming months, when additional data will add to the accuracy of the GOCE geoid, further benefiting our data users.”

Source: European Space Agency

A Cornell electrical engineering professor is helping art historians do a little detective work by using computing algorithms to identify which of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings came from the same original rolls of canvas.

C. Richard Johnson Jr., the Geoffrey S.M. Hedrick Senior Professor of Engineering, is on leave from Cornell this semester to serve as an adjunct research fellow at the Van Gogh Museum and other museums in the Netherlands. Computer algorithms are allowing Johnson and colleague

Richard Johnson has created weave density maps of the canvas threads in Vincent Van Gogh paintings to help authenticate and date the works of art. Painting F651, "Falling Leaves," matches the thread pattern of F659, "Garden of the Asylum," providing evidence that the canvases came from the same roll.

s to count the number of individual threads per centimeter in the canvases Van Gogh painted on — tasks that would take multiple lifetimes to complete by hand.

“There is a long tradition of interaction between scientists and museums in the materials science area, but what’s not been done so much is this kind of image processing and analysis that can be done by the computer,” said Johnson, whose academic expertise is in signal processing, which he has long wanted to mix with his Ph.D. minor in art history.

To analyze the paintings, researchers first X-ray them to unveil the thread patterns from beneath layers of opaque white primer. These images are then fed into the computer so individual weave densities can be calculated.

These canvas “weave maps” plot the average thread count of either horizontally or vertically oriented threads, represented by colors. Matching patterns allows observers to quickly determine whether paintings came from the same roll of canvas, giving historians a clearer view of the order in which Van Gogh painted his most famous works.

“This is pretty extraordinary,” Johnson said. “What’s happening is some doubted paintings are being authenticated, and some that had been placed at a funny date are now being moved.”

When Johnson began working with the Van Gogh Museum in 2007, he knew he wanted to use signal processing to help art conservators; he just wasn’t sure exactly how. Much of his early work involved fraud detection — using computers to identify fakes — a “sexy” topic, he says, from which he’s been wanting to branch out.

Now, as the Van Gogh Museum readies an exhibition years in the making on the methods, practice and technique of Van Gogh, Johnson’s technical expertise will have played a significant role.

Johnson and collaborators Don Johnson of Rice University and Rob Erdmann of the University of Arizona have counted the threads in all 320 Van Goghs owned by the Van Gogh Museum, and more than two dozen other museums — approximately 60 percent of all those in museums worldwide. The ones in private collections are a trickier matter, Johnson said, but he’s hoping more collectors will come forward so engineers can account for the threads in every Van Gogh painting in the world.

These types of technologies could continue revolutionizing people’s understanding of how artists worked, Johnson said. For example, he and his colleagues are also looking at how the canvases were mounted onto various frames during their preparation and use. Using similar image-processing techniques to look at the scalloped patterns at the edges of the paintings, they can help identify whether the paintings were cut down at some point in time. This could help art historians piece together missing clues about lost works or provide a clearer understanding of the artist’s original intentions.

Johnson hopes to persuade art conservators and technical art historians to buy into these technologies as a way to enhance their professional capabilities.

Source: Cornell University

At 5:20 am EDT on Mar. 29, 2011, MESSENGER captured this historic image of Mercury. This image is the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit about the Solar System’s innermost planet. Over the subsequent six hours, MESSENGER acquired an additional 363 images before downlinking some of the data to Earth. The MESSENGER team is currently looking over the newly returned data, which are still continuing to come down. Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

• NASA Extends Contract For Supercomputing Support Services
  NASA will exercise the third one-year option on a contract with Computer Sciences Corp. in Lanham, Md., to provide supercomputing support services at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.
• NASA Offers Schools And Education Groups Chance To Talk To Space
  NASA is offering opportunities for schools and educational groups to speak with astronauts aboard the International Space Station to learn about the challenges and rewards of their work.

Posted by Tom_C

Today Google announced the release of a new social feature: +1

Read more about the launch from these in-depth blog posts:

• Danny’s ever-excellent coverage: http://searchengineland.com/meet-1-googles-answer-to-the-facebook-like-button-70569
• Official Google post: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/1s-right-recommendations-right-when-you.html
• Official Google page: http://www.google.com/+1/button/

Quick Summary

Rolling out across English Google over the next few days is a new "+1" feature that allows you to endorse URLs. If you’re not yet seeing it in your search results enable it in Google experimental. Once enabled you see a little grey +1 next to all search results – including adwords listings:

Once you click a result you see something like this:

All of your +1 results appear on your Google Profile:

I’m a really big fan of this from Google – they seem to be doing a lot of things right with social at the moment and this seems to be universally received as positive by the twittersphere. It’s a lot of fun and ridiculously intuitive to +1 something and I can really see this catching on.

The Impact of +1 on SEO

So what’s the impact of this for SEOs? Well I’m struck by the opening paragraph from the Google +1 page (emphasis mine):

The +1 button is shorthand for "this is pretty cool" or "you should check this out."

Click +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1′s can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search.

Note how Google is emphasising right from the start that this is going to influence search results. Another quote from the official Google Blog (again, emphasis mine):

Say, for example, you’re planning a winter trip to Tahoe, Calif. When you do a search, you may now see a +1 from your slalom-skiing aunt next to the result for a lodge in the area. Or if you’re looking for a new pasta recipe, we’ll show you +1’s from your culinary genius college roommate. And even if none of your friends are baristas or caffeine addicts, we may still show you how many people across the web have +1’d your local coffee shop.

So the bottom line is that getting people to +1 your content is going to help you get more organic traffic from Google. Maybe even more/cheaper paid traffic too!

The Rise of Social SEO

Of course, for me this isn’t so much a new direction as much as a continuation of the social circle work that Google has been doing recently. I’m a massive fan of results from your social circle – as I’m searching around these appear on a crazy high % of search results:

These social results pop up all the time and are immediately obvious and useful to me. The more that Google rolls out this integration the better imho.

Is this how Google are going to reduce the emphasis on links? Maybe.

Social Metrics Are Already Well Correlated With Rankings

I’m not going to go into too much detail here as we’re still in the middle of gathering data and running analysis but here’s a sneak peak from Rand’s presentation that he’s giving in SMX Munich next week. We’ve run a correlation analysis on a whole bunch of search results (~10,000) for a wide range of factors and there’s some surprising results. Check out this graph:

It shows that Facebook shares are well correlated with rankings. In fact, comparing to other factors we see Facebook shares are similarly correlated to the number of linking root domains.

It’s early days in the analysis and all we’re showing here is correlation not causation but it’s kind of surprising the correlation is so strong!

(Aside: I should point out a few things here – when we say Facebook shares we’re talking about the aggregated number of Facebook interactions; comments, likes and shares as reported by the Facebook graph API. The full analysis will breakdown the different types of Facebook interactions in more detail. We should also say a big thankyou to Topsy as we have been using their totally awesome API to gather Twitter information)

In my opinion this is why inbound marketing is going to overtake SEO as the primary function of SEO professionals. Engaging across social channels to get links, shares, likes, comments and +1s is going to be the future for generating organic traffic to your site. Not just from Google but these channels are increasingly driving significant volumes of traffic in their own right.

+1 & Social Metrics Will Be Hard To Game

Previously the biggest objection I’ve heard from SEOs about user-generated signals is that they are easy to game. Well I’m not so sure. Think about how much information Google has on you and all the ways they can justify your profile is tied to a real human being account. For example – to show you’re a real human being Google could look for the following signals:

• Gmail
• Google analytics
• Google calendar
• Adwords
• Google voice
• Google checkout
• Chrome sync
• Search history
• Google docs
• Google reader
• Youtube
• …. etc

Don’t believe me? Why not head on over to your Google dashboard and see just how much information Google knows about you.

Still think it’ll be easy to fake?

Combine this with some measure of author authority, which we know Google and Bing are looking at, and you have a pretty good picture of which accounts are influential and which are spammers.

Let’s also not forget that Google are smart. I very much doubt that social signals will impact search results equally – some industries just don’t have a strong social footprint. For these industries I think (hope) Google will normalise the impact and won’t let the "fun" site outrank the "useful" site – they can easily tell which niches have a lot of social activity and those that don’t. For the more mundane/commercial industries Google will fall back on the regular signals of links.

What’s Next for Google +1?

Google are already talking about a new publisher button that you will be able to embed on your page to allow people to +1 content from your site – very similar to the Facebook like and tweet this buttons that already exist. Once you enable +1 you’re also opted in to show this information on 3rd party sites in exactly the same was as Facebook buttons:

Here’s a few other more speculative things to think about:

1. Will Google create aggregated pages for the "hot" +1 content on the web?
2. How will Google persuade regular people to create their Google profile page and add their friends?
3. It seems like this is a very direct threat to the Facebook like button – how will Facebook react?
4. How will +1 results impact Adwords listings?
5. What kind of dashboard/analytics information will be available to publishers to see who is +1′ing their content?

For now, why not do us a favour and go give SEOmoz a nice juicy +1 :-D

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• NASA Awards Earth And Space Science Studies Cooperative Agreement
  NASA has awarded a cooperative agreement to the University Space Research Association in Columbia, Md., to facilitate experimental, analytical and theoretical research in support of NASA’s strategic Earth and space science objectives.
• NASA Satellites Detect Extensive Drought Impact On Amazon Forests
  A new NASA-funded study has revealed widespread reductions in the greenness of Amazon forests caused by last year’s record-breaking drought.
• NASA Opens Voting For Original Songs To Awaken Next Shuttle Crew
  NASA is inviting the public to vote for its favorite original song to wake up space shuttle Commander Mark Kelly and his five crewmates during their STS-134 mission to the International Space Station.

Graphical representation of the experiment. The X-ray beam impinges on a gold surface, which is chemically dissolving. A fast X-ray detector captures the reflected beam. From the fluctuations of the beam intensity with time, the atomic-scale changes at the surface are deduced. Copyright: CAU, artwork: J. Golks

A breakthrough in the study of chemical reactions during etching and coating of materials was achieved by a research group headed by Kiel physicist, Professor Olaf Magnussen. The team from the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (CAU), Germany, in collaboration with staff from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, have uncovered for the first time just what happens in manufacturing processes, used for the formation of metal contacts thinner than a human hair in modern consumer electronics, such as flat-screen television. The results appear as the cover feature in the current issue (23.3.2011) of the renowned Journal of the American Chemical Society.

For their research the scientists used the intense X-ray radiation of the experimental station ID32, one of the ESRF’s instruments. The X-ray beam was directed onto a gold surface while it dissolved in diluted hydrochloric acid. Because the reflected X-rays are sensitive to tiny changes in the atomic arrangement at the material’s surface, the metal removal during the reaction can be precisely measured. “Such studies were only possible during very slow changes of the material so far”, Olaf Magnussen explains. To gain insight into the fast reactions going on in industrially employed processes the speed of the measurements had to be increased more than a hundredfold. Even during very fast etching the removal of the metal proceeded very uniformly. “The material dissolves quasi atomic layer by atomic layer, without formation of deeper holes”, Magnussen remarks. In a similar way, the team could follow the attachment of atoms during the chemical coating of materials.

Among the diverse industrial applications of chemical etching and coating are high-tech manufacturing processes, for example in the production of electronic devices. These require precisely controlled reactions. In order to optimize such etching and coating processes they are intensely studied worldwide. Until now it was only possible to analyse the finished product. With the method developed by the scientists, changes within a few thousandth seconds may be detected so that the reactions at the material’s surface can be tracked on the atomic scale under realistic conditions.

Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel is a North German research university with proven international expertise in the field of nanoscience, including research using synchrotron radiation. In a number of research networks, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Kiel scientists develop new methods and instruments. In addition, the CAU competes for a Cluster of Excellence in the area of nanoscience and surface science within the ongoing round of the German Excellence Initiative.

The ESRF is a European research institution, funded by 19 nations, providing and utilizing brilliant synchrotron X-rays for advanced scientific research.

Original publication:
F. Golks, K. Krug, Y. Gründer, J. Zegenhagen, J. Stettner, O. Magnussen: High-speed in situ surface X-ray diffraction studies of the electrochemical dissolution of Au(001).
Journal of the American Chemical Society 2010, 133, 3772
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja1115748

Levels of the hormone ghrelin are low in obese women, and a study by Yale School of Medicine researchers reports that mice whose mothers had low ghrelin levels were less fertile due to a defect in implantation. The results appear in the April issue of Endocrinology, a publication of The Endocrine Society.

Hormones involved in energy balance and metabolism, such as ghrelin, have been shown to regulate reproductive function in animals and humans. However ghrelin’s role in reproductive tract development remains unclear. The current study examined the effect of ghrelin deficiency on the developmental programming of female fertility.

“While our study involved mice, we believe our findings have significant implications for women,” said lead author Hugh Taylor, M.D., in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences at Yale School of Medicine. “Our results suggest that low ghrelin levels could program the development of the uterus in the female children of obese women. These women may then be less fertile as adults.”

In this study, researchers observed that female mice born of mice with ghrelin deficiency had diminished fertility and produced smaller litters than mice born of mice with normal ghrelin levels. Mice exposed to ghrelin deficiency in-utero demonstrated alterations in uterine gene expression, which lead to impaired embryo implantation and consequently low fertility.

Other Yale researchers on the study include: J. Ryan Martin, Sarah Lieber, James McGrath, Marya Shanabrough and Tamas Horvath.

Source: Yale University

Posted by Hannah Smith

Hello there. You look lovely. I’m Hannah and I’m an SEO Consultant for Distilled. I’m British which means I spell things strangely sometimes, we like to make things more complicated than they really need to be here. This is my first post for SEOmoz, I hope you find it useful.

1. It enables the search engines to index all of pages on the site
2. It provides suitable landing pages for all of the keywords (or search phrases) that you might wish to rank for 

1. If the search engines can’t index your content you will not rank.
2. If you don’t have a page for each keyword (or at least each sub-set of keywords – you can of course target more than one keyword per page), again you’ll struggle to rank.
3. A lack of rankings means a lack of traffic. A lack of traffic will likely mean a lack of revenue.
4. A sitemap will not fix this. 

1.       How many facets do you need in order to get everything indexed?

•  Womens
•  T Shirt Type
•  Designer

2.       Facets versus filters

3.       Do you have pages to enable you to rank for all of the keywords that are important to you?

4.       Pagination

5.       Sorting

6.       Duplicate Content

1. Use as many facets as you need to ensure that your deepest faceted pages contain 100 products or fewer AND to ensure you have all the pages you need to target the keywords you want to rank for.
2. Pagination and sorting options can cause duplicate content – use Ajax / JavaScript to avoid this.
3. No matter which route a user takes to reach a particular page there can be only one (think Highlander) indexable URL
4. Remember to create unique content for each page – the more important the page, the more awesome the content 

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