• New NASA Map Reveals Patterns Of Tropical Forest Carbon Storage
  A NASA-led research team has used a variety of NASA satellite data to create the most precise map ever produced depicting the amount and location of carbon stored in Earth’s tropical forests.

• Space Shuttle Endeavour Returns to Earth for Final Time Wednesday
  CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Space shuttle Endeavour is scheduled to return to Earth for the final time on Wednesday, June 1, completing a 16-day mission to outfit the International Space Station. If Endeavour lands Wednesday, it will have spent 299 days in space and traveled more than 122.8 million miles during its 25 flights.

Since December 2010, astronomers have been keeping an eye on a massive storm encircling Saturn, the renowned planet with rings that is 10 times bigger than Earth. Saturn, say the experts, has an atmosphere that is relatively calm. But every 30 years or so, the giant planet is impacted by a stirring so deep that it triggers much disturbance. Researchers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and NASA have measured the storm’s effects clocking in at 600 kilometres (km) into the stratosphere. The findings are published in the journal Science.

The astronomers initially used NASA’s Cassini spacecraft to detect the storm five months ago and then the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) array in Chile, together with the ‘Composite InfraRed Spectrometer’ (CIRS) instrument on Cassini, to reveal in detail the fast-moving northern-hemisphere storm. Thunderstorms on Earth meanwhile do not encircle our planet and they usually never surpass 20 km. It should be noted that amateur astronomers also tracked the storm last December.

This is the sixth massive storm to be spotted since 1876, and it is the first ever to be probed in the thermal infrared in order to see the variations of temperature within a Saturnian storm, the astronomers say. It is also the first storm ever to be observed by an orbiting spacecraft.

‘This disturbance in the northern hemisphere of Saturn has created a gigantic, violent and complex eruption of bright cloud material, which has spread to encircle the entire planet,’ says lead author Leigh Fletcher of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. ‘Having both the VLT and Cassini investigating this storm at the same time gives us a great chance to put the Cassini observations into context. Previous studies of these storms have only been able to use reflected sunlight, but now, by observing thermal infrared light for the first time, we can reveal hidden regions of the atmosphere and measure the really substantial changes in temperatures and winds associated with this event.’

The team speculates that the storm originated deep down in the water clouds, where a phenomenon similar to a thunderstorm helped a huge convective plume emerge. That is, the mass of gas rose up and punched through Saturn’s usually placid upper atmosphere. According to the astronomers, these disturbances mix with the circulating winds moving east and west, triggering significant changes in the atmosphere’s temperature.

‘Our new observations show that the storm had a major effect on the atmosphere, transporting energy and material over great distances, modifying the atmospheric winds – creating meandering jet streams and forming giant vortices – and disrupting Saturn’s slow seasonal evolution,’ says Glenn Orton of Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the United States, a co-author of the study.

Dr Fletcher concludes: ‘We were lucky to have an observing run scheduled for early in 2011, which ESO allowed us to bring forward so that we could observe the storm as soon as possible. It was another stroke of luck that Cassini’s CIRS instrument could also observe the storm at the same time, so we had imaging from VLT and spectroscopy of Cassini to compare. We are continuing to observe this once-in-a-generation event.’

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ESO

NASA

Science

What would you think if you woke up one morning and imagined that your body had shrunk down to a doll’s size? You might think that you were your normal size but everyone else was huge, or that you were tiny. So the question is: how does our body size affect how we see our world? Researchers in Sweden tackled this question and got results. Published in the journal PLoS ONE, the study was funded in part by a European Research Council (ERC) grant under the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

Classical theory suggests that we perceive size and distance as being a product of how the brain interprets different visual cues like the size of an object on the retina and how this object moves across the field of vision. Some experts believe this is also the case for body size and its relation to perception. They claim that the taller you are, the shorter distances appear to be.

Putting these assumptions to the test, the researchers from Karolinska Institutet examined how people would experience a tiny body or a huge body as their own in a laboratory setting.

After having successfully created the illusion of body-swapping with other people or mannequins, the Karolinska team used the same techniques to create the illusion of a person having either a large body or doll-sized body. Subjects experienced the ownership of a doll’s body (80 centimetres or 30cm) and a giant’s body (400cm). Their work reveals how our body size influences our perception of the space around us.

‘Tiny bodies perceive the world as huge, and vice versa,’ explains senior author and leader of the study Dr Henrik Ehrsson from the Brain, Body and Self Laboratory, Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet.

The team evaluated the altered perception of space by asking study participants to estimate the size of various blocks and then walk over to the blocks with their eyes shut. When the subjects imagined having a small body, they overestimated size and distance. The opposite occurred when large bodies were imagined.

The researchers point out that one of the strategies the brain uses to assess size is to compare two objects; for example a body and a tree (standing side by side). But when the subjects experienced a sense of ownership of the artificial bodies, the ‘body size effect’ was greater, they say.

‘Even though we know just how large people are, the illusion makes us perceive other people as giants; it’s a very weird experience,’ Dr Ehrsson says.

The research also reveals how the chances of creating an illusion of body-swapping with significantly small or large artificial bodies are high. This effect could have practical applications in the long run.

‘It’s possible, in theory, to produce an illusion of being a microscopic robot that can carry out operations in the human body, or a giant robot repairing a nuclear power plant after an accident,’ Dr Ehrsson explains.

The researchers say the findings are ‘fundamentally important as they suggest a causal relationship between the representations of body space and external space. Thus, our own body affects how we perceive the world’.

For more information, please visit:

Karolinska Institutet

PLoS ONE

A fish-eye lens attached to an electronic still camera was used to capture this image of NASA astronaut Greg Chamitoff during the mission’s fourth STS-134 spacewalk. During the spacewalk, Chamitoff and fellow astronaut Michael Fincke stowed the 50-foot-long boom and added a power and data grapple fixture to make it the Enhanced International Space Station Boom Assembly, which extends the reach of the space station’s robotic arm. The docked space shuttle Endeavour is visible at top right. Image Credit: NASA

(Jackson Laboratory) Jackson Laboratory Professor Gary Churchill and Fernando Pardo-Manuel de Villena, Ph.D., of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill created a genome-wide, high-resolution map of most of the inbred mouse strains used today. Their conclusion, published in Nature Genetics: Most of the mice in use today represent only limited genetic diversity, which could be significantly expanded with the addition of more wild mouse populations.

(University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science) New study in Nature Climate Change by University of Miami, Australian Institute of Marine Science, Max-Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology shows ocean acidification will likely reduce diversity and resiliency in coral reef ecosystems.

(European Synchrotron Radiation Facility) Scientists from Finland and France have developed a new synchrotron X-ray technique that may revolutionize the chemical analysis of rare materials like meteoric rock samples or fossils. The results have been published May 29, 2011, in Nature Materials as an advance online publication.

(The Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry) A new position paper by researchers at the European Centre for the Environment and Human Health and the University of Birmingham has compared the benefits of interaction with actual and virtual natural environments and concluded that the development of accurate simulations are likely to be beneficial to those who cannot interact with nature because of infirmity or other limitations: but virtual worlds are not a substitute for the real thing.

(Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center) Scientists identify in the journal Nature a new molecular pathway used to suppress blood vessel branching in the developing retina — a finding with potential therapeutic value for fighting diseases of the retina and a variety of cancers. Researchers in the same study researchers also were able to reverse this pathway to accelerate the growth of branching vessels, which could be important to developing new methods for repairing damaged tissues.