Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
LONDON (Reuters) – Scientists are turning to genetic testing to see if they can prove the existence of the elusive hairy humanoid known across the world as bigfoot, yeti and sasquatch.
A joint project between Oxford University and Switzerland’s Lausanne Museum of Zoology will examine organic remains that some say belong to the creature that has been spotted in remote areas for decades.
“It’s an area that any serious academic ventures into with a deal of trepidation … It’s full of eccentric and downright misleading reports,” said Bryan Sykes at Oxford’s Wolfson College.
But the team would take a systematic approach and use the latest advances in genetic testing, he added.
“There have been DNA tests done on alleged yetis and other such things but since then the testing techniques, particularly on hair, have improved a lot due to advances in forensic science,” he told Reuters.
Modern testing could get valid results from a fragment of a shaft of hair said Sykes, who is leading the project with Michel Sartori, director of the Lausanne museum.
Ever since a 1951 expedition to Mount Everest returned with photographs of giant footprints in the snow, there has been speculation about giant Himalayan creatures, unknown to science.
There have been eyewitness reports of the “yeti” or “migoi” in the Himalayas, “bigfoot” or “sasquatch” in America, “almasty” in the Caucasus mountains and ‘orang pendek’ in Sumatra.
Tests up to now have usually concluded that alleged yeti remains were actually human, he said. But that could have been the result of contamination. “There has been no systematic review of this material.”
The project will focus on Lausanne’s archive of remains assembled by Bernard Heuvelmans, who investigated reported yeti sightings from 1950 up to his death in 2001.
Other institutions and individuals will also be asked to send in details of any possible yeti material. Samples will be subjected to “rigorous genetic analysis”, and the results published in peer-reviewed science journals.
Aside from the yeti question, Sykes said he hoped the project would add to the growing body of knowledge on the interaction between humanity’s ancestors.
“In the last two years it has become clear that there was considerable inter-breeding between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals … about 2 to 4 percent of the DNA of each individual European is Neanderthal,” he said.
One hypothesis is that yetis are surviving Neanderthals. The joint project will take DNA samples from areas where there have been alleged sightings to see whether the Neanderthal DNA traces are stronger in the local population.
As for the project’s chances of success? “The answer is, of course, I don’t know,” said Sykes. “It’s unlikely but on the other hand if we don’t examine it we won’t know.”
(Reporting by Chris Wickham; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/scientists-deploy-genetics-search-bigfoot-140229632.html
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Private spaceflight supporters saw a major validation today (May 22) with the successful launch of the first commercial vehicle to visit the International Space Station.
The unmanned Dragon capsule, built by the commercial firm Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX), lifted off atop the company’s Falcon 9 rocket at 3:44 a.m. EDT (0744 GMT) from a pad here at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
“I think we’re really at the dawn of a new era for space exploration and one where there’s a much bigger role for commercial companies,” SpaceX founder and chief designer Elon Musk said during a news briefing following the launch. Musk, a billionaire entrepreneur, watched over the flight from SpaceX’s mission control center at its Hawthorne, Calif., headquarters.
Dragon wings into orbit
The flawless pre-dawn launch came after SpaceX officials called off a first try on Saturday (May 19) because of an engine glitch. The SpaceX team was able to investigate and repair the problem over the weekend, and try again successfully three days later.
“I just want to really congratulate the SpaceX team for just an absolutely amazing countdown, launch and orbit insertion today,” said William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for NASA‘s Human Exploration Operations Directorate. “The SpaceX team, there is none better than this team. They did a great job recovering from the shutdown a couple days ago.” [Launch Photos for SpaceX's Dragon Capsule]
Dragon is due to rendezvous with the space station on Thursday (May 24); the next day, astronauts inside the outpost plan to grab onto the capsule with the station’s robotic arm and berth it to the laboratory.
The mission is the final test flight for the Dragon capsule before it can start delivering cargo to the space station. SpaceX is contracted to fly at least 12 delivery missions over the next few years for a total of $1.6 billion.
NASA’s private space taxi plan
NASA hopes private vehicles can take over the job of flying supplies, and eventually astronauts, to low-Earth orbit, to allow the agency to pursue manned missions to places people have never gone before.
“It demonstrates what we said was the future of American space exploration, and it’s actually using private industry to provide for access to low-Earth orbit while NASA goes off and does what NASA does best, and that’s exploring, doing things that private industry cannot do, or should not do,” NASA administrator Charles Bolden told SPACE.com after the liftoff. “Taking the risks in things like sending humans to an asteroid, to Mars, to other places in our solar system.”
However the plan has been criticized by some, including members of Congress, who question the safety and reliability of commercial vehicles.
“I hope that the success of this mission thus far will dispel some of the doubts that people have,” Musk said. “I do think in some cases people had legitimate concerns because there’s no precedent for what we’re doing here. We’ve had three successes of Falcon 9, two successful flights of Dragon, and hopefully we’ll have a successful berthing at the space station. I think this should dispel the doubts of anyone if they’re reasonable.”
Falcon 9 flew on two previous missions in 2010, with the second of them taking Dragon into orbit for the first time. When the capsule links up with the station this week, it will become the first non-governmental vehicle to do so.
“Every launch into space is a thrilling event, but this one is especially exciting because it represents the potential of a new era in American spaceflight,” White House science advisor John Holdren said in a statement. “Partnering with U.S. companies such as SpaceX to provide cargo and eventually crew service to the International Space Station is a cornerstone of the President’s plan for maintaining America’s leadership in space.”
You can follow SPACE.com assistant managing editor Clara Moskowitz on Twitter @ClaraMoskowitz. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
- Lift-Off! SpaceX Dragon Heads to Space Station | Video
- SpaceX to Space Station: Complete Coverage
- Gallery: SpaceX’s 1st Mission to Space Station – How It Works
Copyright 2012 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/private-rocket-launch-vindicates-commercial-spaceflight-model-114804964.html
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Scotty has finally been beamed up. The ashes of the actor James Doohan, who played Scotty on the 1960s television series “Star Trek,” were launched to space this morning (May 22) on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The unmanned Falcon 9 blasted off at 3:44 a.m. EDT (0744 GMT) from here at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, carrying the Dragon capsule filled with cargo bound for the International Space Station. Also packed aboard the rocket was a secondary payload carrying remains from 308 people, including Doohan and Mercury program astronaut Gordon Cooper, according to ABC News and Reuters.
The ashes were flown under an agreement between the spacecraft’s builder, private rocket company SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corp. of Hawthorne, Calif.) and Celestis, a company that books memorial spaceflights to “launch a symbolic portion of your loved one’s ashes into space,” according to its website.
“We had a Celestis canister on the second stage, not on Dragon,” SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said at a news conference after the launch. “They’ve actually been a customer of ours since 2005 or 2006.”
The Falcon 9 rocket’s second stage separated from the capsule nine minutes and 49 seconds into the flight, and is now orbiting on its own above Earth. The second stage will likely stay in orbit for about a year before it falls back toward the ground and is burned up during re-entry. [Photos: SpaceX's Dragon Launches to Space Station]
In addition to the human ashes, SpaceX’s Falcon 9/Dragon flight launched about 1,014 pounds (460 kilograms) of cargo for the space station, including food and supplies for the crew, student-designed science experiments, computer equipment and commemorative souvenirs like mission patches and pins.
Burial in space
Celestis charges $2,995 to launch 1 gram of a person’s ashes to Earth orbit. Deep space launches to the solar system start at $12,500, while suborbital flights that return to Earth begin at $995.
The human remains payload was not officially announced by SpaceX before today, although news reports publicized the inclusion of the ashes onboard Falcon 9.
“So much for our ‘secret’ launch,” Charles Chafer, CEO of Celestis’ parent company, Space Services Inc., wrote on his Facebook page Sunday (May 20). However, the payload was apparently secret enough to fool SpaceX founder and chief designer Elon Musk.
“If they were onboard I didn’t actually know that,” Musk said after the liftoff. “I was focused on other things.”
Space memorials
This isn’t the first launch for Celestis.
Ashes from “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry and his wife Majel Barrett Roddenberry, as well as many others, have been booked on flights by Celestis. The ashes are packed into special capsules and added as payloads on orbital and suborbital rockets.
In fact, the company tried to launch Doohan and Cooper’s ashes on an earlier SpaceX flight, but the smaller Falcon 1 rocket carrying them in August 2008 failed to reach space. The company is trying again now as part of its guarantee to send another sample of a person’s ashes if a rocket fails to launch the first time.
Today’s SpaceX flight was the company’s “largest launch event ever,” according to Chafer’s Facebook page.
Dragon launched Tuesday after an earlier attempt at liftoff was called off at the last second due to an engine valve problem. The issue was fixed and the vehicle had a smooth blastoff into the predawn skies here on the second try.
The Dragon capsule will become the first private spacecraft to rendezvous and berth at the International Space Station when it arrives at the orbiting lab later this week. The mission is the final test flight for SpaceX under NASA’s COTS program (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services), which has funded the development of private vehicles capable of delivering cargo to the orbiting laboratory.
You can follow SPACE.com assistant managing editor Clara Moskowitz on Twitter @ClaraMoskowitz. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
- Gallery: SpaceX’s 1st Mission to Space Station – How It Works
- SpaceX to Space Station: Complete Coverage
- Now Boarding: The Top 10 Private Spaceships
Copyright 2012 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/ashes-star-treks-scotty-ride-private-rocket-space-121538679.html
Dozens of newly discovered optical illusions competed for the title of “Best Illusion of 2012″ last week at the annual meeting of the Vision Sciences Society in Florida. An illusion known as the “disappearing hand trick,” which causes people to feel as though their hand has vanished, earned the top prize at the eighth annual contest.
The illusion narrowly edged out the “flashed face distortion effect,” which took second place for making attractive people look hideously deformed when viewed in a particular way.
Vision scientists from across the globe cast their votes May 14 at the Vision Sciences Society meeting, selecting from 10 finalists chosen from 59 entries. All the competing optical illusions are recent scientific discoveries.
The best of the bunch, the hand-vanishing illusion, works like this: A participant places both hands inside a box and tries to keep them still. Meanwhile, a live video of her hands is projected on the top of the box, and the footage is manipulated so that the hands appear to drift slowly toward one other. The participant, instructed to keep her hands apart, moves them accordingly. She eventually moves them out of reach of one other without knowing it, because the video continues to display footage of her hands close together. [Video of 'Disappearing Hand Trick' Illusion]
Next, the image of her right hand disappears, and the experimenter asks her to touch it with her left hand. She reaches toward it, but to her complete astonishment, her right hand isn’t there where she thought it was! (It is farther to the right, of course.) The participant then pulls her hands out of the box, and to her great joy and relief, finds them both to be intact.
“It’s the combined loss of vision and touch that creates an experience that the hand is missing,” said Roger Newport, who discovered the trick with his colleagues Helen Gilpin and Catherine Preston, all of the University of Nottingham in the U.K. “It’s very striking, and works for everybody who does it.”
The runner-up is equally as striking, by way of hideousness. While celebrities are generally an attractive bunch, they don’t appear so when viewed in pairs and cycled through in quick succession. It’s called the “flashed face distortion effect,” and it was discovered by accident by Jason Tangen, Sean Murphy and Matthew Thompson of the University of Queensland in Australia.
In the researchers’ video, pairs of different faces are flashed in sequence, with empty space separating the left and right slideshows of faces. If you stare at the individual faces, they appear normal, but if you fix your eyes on the space between the faces, they suddenly become hideously deformed. [Video of 'Face Distortion' Illusion]
Cognitive scientists can’t yet fully explain the newly discovered distortion effect, though it may result from the way our vision becomes normalized to the features of a face, causing the face that immediately follows it to appear abnormal by contrast. “If someone has a large jaw, [the effect makes it appear] almost ogrelike. If they have an especially large forehead, then it looks particularly bulbous. We’re conducting several experiments right now to figure out exactly what’s causing this effect.”
It works for normal people’s faces, too — though perhaps ogrelike mugs are less of a surprise in that case.
Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover. Follow Life’s Little Mysteries on Twitter @llmysteries, then join us on Facebook.
- The Most Amazing Optical Illusions (and How They Work)
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Copyright 2012 Lifes Little Mysteries, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/optical-illusions-expose-more-foibles-brain-131648249.html
At a time when black magic was relatively common, two curses involving snakes were cast, one targeting a senator and the other an animal doctor, says a Spanish researcher who has just deciphered the 1,600-year-old curses.
Both curses feature a depiction of a deity, possibly the Greek goddess Hekate, with serpents coming out of her hair, possibly meant to strike at the victims. Both curses contain Greek invocations similar to examples known to call upon Hekate.
The two curses, mainly written in Latin and inscribed on thin lead tablets, would have been created by two different people late in the life of the Roman Empire. Both tablets were rediscovered in 2009 at the Museo Archeologico Civico di Bolonga, in Italy, and were originally acquired by the museum during the late 19th century. Although scholars aren’t sure where the tablets originated, after examining and deciphering the curses, they know who victims of the curses were.
Kill the pig
One of the curses targets a Roman senator named Fistus and appears to be the only known example of a cursed senator. The other curse targets a veterinarian named Porcello. Ironically, Porcello is the Latin word for pig.
Celia Sánchez Natalías, a doctoral student at the University of Zaragoza, explained that Porcello was probably his real name. “In the world of curse tablets, one of the things that you have to do is to try to identify your victim in a very, very, exact way.”
Sánchez Natalías added that it isn’t certain who cursed Porcello or why. It could be for either personal or professional reasons. “Maybe this person was someone that (had) a horse or an animal killed by Porcello’s medicine,” said Sánchez Natalías.
“Destroy, crush, kill, strangle Porcello and wife Maurilla. Their soul, heart, buttocks, liver …” part of it reads. The iconography on the tablet actually shows a mummified Porcello, his arms crossed (as is the deity) and his name written on both of his arms. [See images of the curse tablets]
The fact that both the deity and Porcello have their arms crossed is important. Sánchez Natalías believes that the spell forced the deity, and thus Porcello, to become bound. “This comparison may be understood in two ways: either ‘just as the deity is bound, so will Porcello be’ or else ‘until Porcello is bound the deity will stay bound,’” she writes in a recent edition of the journal Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik.
May all his limbs dissolve …
The case of Fistus, a Roman senator, is also remarkable. The senate in ancient Rome was a place of great wealth and, earlier in Roman history, was a place of considerable power. By the time this curse was written toward the end of the Roman Empire, the influence of the senate had diminished in favor of the emperor, the army and the imperial bureaucracy.
Fistus would still have been a person of some wealth, however, and whoever wrote the curse had it in for him. The Latin expression for “crush” is used at least four times in the curse. “Crush, kill Fistus the senator,” part of the curse reads, “May Fistus dilute, languish, sink and may all his limbs dissolve …”
Again Sánchez Natalías isn’t sure of the motives behind the curse; but whatever they were, even by the standard of modern-day political attack ads, this was a nasty senatorial blow.
Sánchez Natalías’ translation and study of the senator curse is detailed in two recent articles published in the German journal Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik.
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Copyright 2012 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/black-magic-revealed-two-ancient-curses-133638359.html
With the NBA and NHL gearing up for their championship series, a new poll shows employers should be readying for an influx of “sports flu” going around the office.
A survey by The Workforce Institute at Kronos, Inc. discovered a significant number of employees worldwide admit to calling in sick to work because of a sporting event.
In the United States, 11 percent of the workers surveyed phoned in sick because of sports — from staying home to watch a game on television, attending an event live, playing a sport themselves or needing a day off after staying up late to watch a matchup.
Yet, U.S. employees’ sports enthusiasm paled in comparison to their peers’ around the world. Nearly 60 percent of Chinese workers have missed work because of a sporting event, the survey found, and India, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Australia and Canada also had higher instances than the U.S.
France was the only country surveyed with fewer workers, just 1 percent, calling in sick because of a sporting event.
[What Workers Really Do on Sick Days]
The research found that football was the most likely sport to keep American employees out of the office, while soccer took the top spot in Australia, France, Mexico and the U.K.
“This survey indicates that sporting events of all kinds can be a trigger for unscheduled absences,” said Joyce Maroney, director of The Workforce Institute. “Managers would do well to speak with employees when they know there is a big sporting event coming up to try to determine who is likely to be out.”
Despite their willingness to miss work, the majority of those surveyed said they felt guilty about doing so. In the U.S., nearly 65 percent of those who have called in sick for a sporting event felt at least somewhat guilty because of it.
Employees in every country surveyed said the best way to prevent such absences is to offer flexible work hours. Allowing employees to take unpaid leave and establishing a benefit like summer Fridays (leaving work early) were other popular suggestions.
This story was provided by BusinessNewsDaily, a sister site to LiveScience. Chad Brooks is a Chicago-based freelance business and technology writer who has worked in public relations and spent 10 years as a newspaper reporter. You can reach him at chadgbrooks@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @cbrooks76.
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Copyright 2012 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/sports-flu-season-ready-sweep-office-142244485.html
HOUSTON (AP) — Pups in her womb, a large eye visible behind the rib cage, one baby stuck in the birth canal: all fossilized evidence that this ancient marine beast, the Ichthyosaur, died in childbirth.
Jurassic Mom’s almost certainly painful death is perfectly preserved in a rare fossil skeleton, one of the many unique items that will go on display in the Houston Museum of Natural Science‘s $85 million dinosaur hall when it opens to the public June 2. The Associated Press got a first peek at the exhibit as the finishing touches were put in place.
Paleontologists and scientists at the museum and the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in Hill City, S.D. have worked tirelessly for three years to collect, clean and preserve artifacts designed to give visitors a look at how life evolved beginning 25 billion years ago.
“You’ll actually be able to touch a fossil that’s 3.5 billion years old,” Robert Bakker, the museum’s curator of paleontology, says in a conspiratorial whisper. “A microbe, simpler than bacteria, which had in its DNA the kernel that would flower later on into dinosaurs, mammals, then us. That’s the beginning of the safari.”
His long white beard and locks bobbing with all-too-obvious excitement, Bakker raises his brows below his cowboy hat as he continues to describe the journey visitors will experience when they enter “The Prehistoric Safari,” expected to be among the top six dinosaur exhibits in the United States.
Jack Horner, curator of the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont., who acted, along with Bakker, as an adviser on the Jurassic Park movie series, agreed there will be some unique and exclusive items on display in Houston, including Triceratops skin. But he said that to him, an object’s value is determined by science and should always be peer-reviewed before being displayed.
“Anybody can have stuff,” Horner said, adding that he is curious to see the scientific findings on the items displayed in Houston. “Opinions are cheap.”
Bakker says the safari is designed to teach about evolution. Visitors, he explains, will experience the Cambrian explosion, when life went from “literally slime” into “beautiful, elegantly sculptured things, the trilobites, which are gorgeous.”
These bizarre, insect-like creatures, which are sometimes horned or sporting antennae, roamed the Earth’s seas in the Paleozoic era before the dinosaurs and were one of the most complex living things that existed to that point. At the Houston museum, visitors will be treated to one of the largest displays of trilobite fossils in the world, and Bakker rubs his hands with enthusiasm at the thought of young children pressing their nose to the glass to get a glimpse or reaching a tiny finger out to touch an impossibly old piece of rock.
“Dinosaurs are the jumper cables to the human mind. Kids can’t curb their enthusiasm when they’re in a hall of dinosaurs and mammoths and mammoth hunters and trilobites and giant fish that could chomp up a shark. These natural objects in motion and context make kids want to read, you can’t stop them from reading and thinking,” said Bakker, who in the 1970s was one of the first to argue the massive prehistoric beasts were warm-blooded and further challenged scientific thinking in his 1986 book “The Dinosaur Heresies.”
For scientists, and the museum community, the exhibit offers unique objects, including the only Triceratops skin found to date, a specimen that showed they had been wrong in believing the horned vegetarians had smooth skin. In fact, it had bristles, Bakker said.
Then there is the museum’s skeleton of a T. rex, one of only two with complete hands, two long fingers and one stub, which Bakker believes could be proof this massive, feared predator also had a soft side. The fingers, too small and badly configured, wouldn’t have helped in hunting, or even grabbing things, leaving Bakker and other paleontologists to believe they were for tickling, fondling and even falling in love. The fossil also has a piece of its tail missing, likely because it was bitten off by another Tyrannosaurus Rex.
The hall also will house the world’s only complete fossil of a snake-type creature from 50 million years ago, said David Temple, the museum’s associate curator of paleontology. The snake is related to the constrictor, and the only other fossil of this type disappeared about 60 years ago.
Original sculptures, paintings and murals will depict scenes scientists and paleontologists believe occurred based on the fossil evidence, Temple said. And there are creatures native to Texas, including a Glyptodon, an Ice Age, armadillo-type creature the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, and one of the best preserved fin-backed reptiles that preceded the dinosaurs.
“This is what life was like at the beginning of natural history,” Temple said.
___
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Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/houston-museum-unveils-85-million-dinosaur-hall-074014835.html
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A first-of-its-kind commercial supply ship rocketed toward the International Space Station following a successful liftoff early Tuesday, opening a new era of dollar-driven spaceflight.
The SpaceX company made history as its Falcon 9 rocket rose from its seaside launch pad and pierced the pre-dawn sky, aiming for a rendezvous in a few days with the space station. The unmanned rocket carried into orbit a capsule named Dragon that is packed with 1,000 pounds of space station provisions.
It is the first time a private company has launched a vessel to the space station. Before, that was something only major governments had done.
“Falcon flew perfectly!!” SpaceX’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk, said via Twitter. “Dragon in orbit … Feels like a giant weight just came off my back.”
Musk later told reporters: “I feel very lucky … For us, it’s like winning the Super Bowl.”
This time, the Falcon‘s nine engines kept firing all the way through liftoff. On Saturday, flight computers aborted the launch with a half-second remaining in the countdown; a bad engine valve was replaced.
The White House quickly offered congratulations.
“Every launch into space is a thrilling event, but this one is especially exciting,” said John Holdren, President Barack Obama’s chief science adviser. “This expanded role for the private sector will free up more of NASA‘s resources to do what NASA does best — tackle the most demanding technological challenges in space, including those of human space flight beyond low Earth orbit.”
Flight controllers applauded when the Dragon reached orbit nine minutes into the flight, then embraced one another once the solar panels on the spacecraft popped open. Many of the SpaceX controllers wore untucked T-shirts and jeans or even shorts, a stark contrast to NASA’s old suit-and-tie shuttle crowd.
The hopes of SpaceX employees were riding on that rocket, Musk noted, and everyone felt “tremendous elation.”
So did NASA.
The space agency is banking on the switch from government to commercial cargo providers in the U.S., now that the shuttles no longer are flying. Astronauts could begin taking commercial rides to the space station in three to five years, if all goes well.
“The significance of this day cannot be overstated,” said a beaming NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “It’s a great day for America. It’s actually a great day for the world because there are people who thought that we had gone away, and today says, ‘No, we’re not going away at all.’”
The real test comes Thursday when the Dragon reaches the vicinity of the space station. It will undergo practice maneuvers from more than a mile out. If all goes well, the docking will occur Friday. Musk will preside over the operation from the company’s Mission Control in Hawthorne, Calif., where he monitored the liftoff.
The space station was zooming over the North Atlantic, just east of Newfoundland, when the Falcon took flight.
NASA is looking to the private sector to take over orbital trips in this post-shuttle period and several U.S. companies are vying for the opportunity. The goal is to get American astronauts launching again from U.S. soil — creating jobs at home and halting the outsourcing, as Bolden put it.
Until their retirement last summer to museums, NASA’s shuttles provided the bulk of space station equipment and even the occasional crew member. American astronauts are riding Russian rockets to orbit until SpaceX or one of its competitors takes over the job. Russia also is making periodic cargo hauls, along with Europe and Japan.
Musk, a co-creator of PayPal, founded SpaceX a decade ago. He’s poured millions of his own money into the company, and NASA has contributed $381 million as seed money. In all, the company has spent more than $1 billion on the effort.
Hundreds of SpaceX and NASA guests poured into the launching area in the early morning hours Tuesday, eager to see firsthand the start of this new commercial era. The company had a single second to get its rocket flying, and that’s all it needed.
Everyone, it seemed, was rooting for a successful flight — even Musk’s rivals.
“The shuttle may be retired, but the American dream of space exploration is alive and well,” said Mark Sirangelo, chairman of Sierra Nevada Corp.’s space systems, which is developing a mini-shuttle to carry space station crews in another few years.
The six space station astronauts were especially enthusiastic. The crew beamed down a picture on the eve of the launch, showing the two who will use a robot arm to snare the Dragon.
In December 2010, SpaceX became the first private company to launch a spacecraft into orbit and retrieve it. That test flight of a Dragon capsule paved the way for this mission, which also is meant to culminate with a splashdown of the capsule in the Pacific.
This newest capsule is supposed to remain at the space station for a week before bringing back experiments and equipment. None of the other types of current cargo ships can return safely; they burn up on the way down.
SpaceX and NASA officials stress this is a demonstration flight and that even if something goes wrong, much can be learned. Two more Dragon supply missions are planned this year, regardless of what happens during this week’s rendezvous.
While acknowledging the difficult course ahead in the next few days, Musk and NASA officials savored Tuesday’s triumph.
“I would really count today as a success, no matter what happens the rest of the mission,” Musk said.
Musk, 40, is the chief executive officer and chief designer for SpaceX. He also runs Tesla Motors, his electric car company.
Hitching a ride into space, aboard the discarded second stage of the rocket, were the ashes of more than 300 people, including Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper and “Star Trek” actor James Doohan, who played Scotty. It’s a redo flight for a paying customer, Houston-based Celestis Inc. The Falcon 1 that carried the first batch of their ashes failed in 2008.
Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/private-supply-ship-rockets-toward-space-station-083731657.html
LONDON (AP) — A London museum is putting the conductor’s baton in visitors’ hands, allowing guests to direct a virtual orchestra using three-dimensional motion sensors.
The “Universe of Sound” installation at the British capital’s Science Museum uses Microsoft‘s Kinect technology to capture the hand movements of visitors who stand in specially made pods.
Raise your left hand and the orchestra — which appears on a set of television screens — plays louder. Speed your right hand and the tempo of the music increases.
The pods are part of the Science Museum‘s effort to pick apart the traditional orchestra, using specially shot film footage, immersive sound, and electronic instruments to give an unusually close-up view of how classical music is made.
“Universe of Sound” opens Wednesday. Entry is free.
Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/uk-virtual-orchestra-puts-conductors-stand-144742480.html
Apple Stores are increasingly seen as a sign of affluence, a sign that a neighborhood “has arrived.” It turns out that some cities are more anxious to arrive than others, offering Apple sweetheart deals to open new stores — deals … Continue …
Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/google-provides-temporary-cornell-science-campus-200000080.html
