ALMATY (Reuters) – A Soyuz spacecraft carrying a Russian, an American and a Canadian blasted off on Wednesday to the International Space Station (ISS), where the men are to spend half a year in orbit.

The Russian-built Soyuz TMA-07M lifted off on time, at 1212 GMT, from Russia’s Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

On the crew’s two-day trip to the ISS, Canadian Chris Hadfield is joined by U.S. astronaut Tom Mashburn and Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko.

They will join U.S. astronaut Kevin Ford and Russians Oleg Novitsky and Yevgeny Tarelkin, who have been manning the $100-billion, 15-nation research complex since October.

(Reporting by Dmitry Solovyov; Editing by Alison Williams)

]]> http://news.co.cr/three-nation-crew-blasts-off-for-space-station/21498/feed/ 0 http://news.co.cr/nasa-crashes-two-probes-into-a-mountain-on-the-moon/21459/ http://news.co.cr/nasa-crashes-two-probes-into-a-mountain-on-the-moon/21459/#comments Tue, 18 Dec 2012 15:22:13 +0000 Reuters http://news.co.cr/nasa-crashes-two-probes-into-a-mountain-on-the-moon/21459/ Read more »]]>

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – A pair of NASA moon-mapping probes smashed themselves into a lunar mountain on Monday, ending a year-long mission that is shedding light on how the solar system formed.

The Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL, spacecraft had been flying around the moon, enabling scientists to make detailed gravity maps. The probes sped up slightly as they encountered stronger gravity from denser regions and slowed down as they flew over less-dense areas.

By precisely measuring the distance between the two probes, scientists discovered that the moon’s crust is thinner than expected and that the impacts that battered its surface did even more damage underground.

Out of fuel and edging closer to the lunar surface, the probes were commanded to smash themselves into a mountain near the moon’s north pole, avoiding a chance encounter with any Apollo or other relics left on the surface during previous expeditions.

“We do feel the angst about the end of the mission,” said Charles Elachi, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which oversaw the mission. “On the other hand, it is a celebration because this mission has accomplished tremendous science.”

The U.S. space agency lost radio communications with the first spacecraft at 5:28 p.m. EST and the second about 20 seconds later, a NASA mission commentator said.

The probes’ final resting place was named after the first U.S. woman in space, Sally Ride, who orchestrated GRAIL’s educational outreach program before her death in July. The spacecraft included cameras that were operated by students.

After completing their primary mission in May, the GRAIL twins, each about the size of a small washing machine, moved closer to the lunar surface, dropping their orbits from about 34 miles to less than half that altitude to increase their sensitivity.

On December 6, the probes, nicknamed Ebb and Flow, flew down to about 7 miles to make one last detailed map of the moon’s youngest crater.

“Ebb and Flow have removed a veil from the moon,” said lead researcher Maria Zuber, with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The discoveries not only will help scientists better understand how the moon formed and evolved, but what happened to Earth and the other inner planets which were similarly showered with comets and asteroids early in their history.

Several follow-up studies are planned, including coordinating the moon’s new gravity maps with the locations where Apollo soil and rock samples were collected, Zuber said.

(Editing by Kevin Gray and Phil Berlowitz)

]]> http://news.co.cr/nasa-crashes-two-probes-into-a-mountain-on-the-moon/21459/feed/ 0 http://news.co.cr/mind-controlled-robotic-arm-has-skill-and-speed-of-human-limb/21403/ http://news.co.cr/mind-controlled-robotic-arm-has-skill-and-speed-of-human-limb/21403/#comments Mon, 17 Dec 2012 17:25:25 +0000 Reuters http://news.co.cr/mind-controlled-robotic-arm-has-skill-and-speed-of-human-limb/21403/ Read more »]]>

LONDON (Reuters) – A paralyzed woman has been able to feed herself chocolate and move everyday items using a robotic arm directly controlled by thought, showing a level of agility and control approaching that of a human limb.

Jan Scheuermann, 53, from Pittsburgh, was diagnosed with a degenerative brain disorder 13 years ago and is paralyzed from the neck down.

“It’s so cool,” said Scheuermann during a news conference. “I’m moving things. I have not moved things for about 10 years … It’s not a matter of thinking which direction anymore it’s just a matter of thinking ‘I want to do that’.”

She was shown feeding herself string cheese and chocolate unaided as well as moving a series of objects in tests designed for recovering stroke victims, and she was able to do it with speeds comparable to the able bodied.

Experts are calling it a remarkable step forward for prosthetics controlled directly by the brain. Other systems have already allowed paralyzed patients to type or write in freehand simply by thinking about the letters they want.

In the past month, researchers in Switzerland also used electrodes implanted directly on the retina to enable a blind patient to read.

The development of brain-machine interfaces is moving quickly and scientists predict the technology could eventually be used to bypass nerve damage and re-awaken a person’s own paralyzed muscles.

In the meantime, they say, systems like the one developed by the U.S. researchers could be paired with robotic “exoskeletons” that allow paraplegics and quadriplegics to walk.

For Scheuermann, the experience has already been transforming.

“It’s given her a renewed purpose,” Michael Boninger, who worked on the study published in The Lancet, told Reuters. “On the first day that we had her move the arm, there was this amazing smile of joy. She could think about moving her wrist and something happened.”

COMPLEX ALGORITHM

The research team from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center implanted two microelectrode devices into the woman’s left motor cortex, the part of the brain that initiates movement.

The medics used a real-time brain scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging to find the exact part of the brain that lit up after the patient was asked to think about moving her now unresponsive arms.

The electrodes were connected to the robotic hand via a computer running a complex algorithm to translate the signals that mimics the way an unimpaired brain controls healthy limbs.

“These electrodes are remarkable devices in that they are very small,” Boninger said. “You can’t buy them in Radio Shack.”

But Boninger said the way the algorithm operates is the main advance. Accurately translating brain signals has been one of the biggest challenges in mind-controlled prosthetics.

“There is no limit now to decoding human motion,” he said. “It gets more complex when you work on parts like the hand, but I think that, once you can tap into desired motion in the brain, then how that motion is effected has a wide range of possibilities.”

It took weeks of training for Scheuermann to master control of the hand, but she was able to move it after just two days, and over time she completed tasks – such as picking up objects, orientating them, and moving them to a target position – with a 91.6 percent success rate. Her speed increased with practice.

The researchers plan to incorporate wireless technology to remove the need for a wired connection between the patient’s head and the prosthesis.

They also believe a sensory loop could be added that gives feedback to the brain, allowing the user to tell the difference between hot and cold, or smooth and rough surfaces.

Grégoire Courtine, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, hailed the project. “This bioinspired brain-machine interface is a remarkable technological and biomedical achievement.”

“Though plenty of challenges lie ahead, these sorts of systems are rapidly approaching the point of clinical fruition,” Courtine, who was not involved in the study, said in a comment piece in the Lancet linked to the study.

ETHICAL QUESTIONS

Although using technology to restore movement, sight or hearing in the disabled would for many seem uncontroversial, some disability rights groups and ethicists are wary.

They argue that restoring hearing, for instance, could fuel a prejudice that a deaf life is less rich, or less well lived.

Andy Miah, a professor at the University of the West of Scotland who has written extensively about human enhancement in the context of the Paralympics, says it is far from straightforward.

“For instance, a few years ago, there was a case of a deaf lesbian couple who sought to use in vitro fertilization to select for deafness,” he said.

“They argued that absence of hearing is precisely not an impairment, but allows access to a rich community.”

The ethics become more complex with the prospect of using these technologies to enhance the able-bodied.

“It’s quite likely that therapy is the back door to enhancement in these kinds of technological interventions,” says Miah. “People will question whether this is desirable, but we already live in a society that tolerates such modifications.

“Laser eye surgery interventions have grown astronomically over the last decade and nobody complains that it is making people superhuman.”

(Editing by Alison Williams)

]]> http://news.co.cr/mind-controlled-robotic-arm-has-skill-and-speed-of-human-limb/21403/feed/ 0 http://news.co.cr/human-link-to-climate-change-stronger-than-ever-draft-report/21316/ http://news.co.cr/human-link-to-climate-change-stronger-than-ever-draft-report/21316/#comments Fri, 14 Dec 2012 16:20:28 +0000 Reuters http://news.co.cr/human-link-to-climate-change-stronger-than-ever-draft-report/21316/ Read more »]]>

LONDON (Reuters) – International climate scientists are more certain than ever that humans are responsible for global warming, rising sea levels and extreme weather events, according to a leaked draft report by an influential panel of experts.

The early draft, which is still subject to change before a final version is released in late 2013, showed that a rise in global average temperatures since pre-industrial times was set to exceed 2 degrees Celsius by 2100, and may reach 4.8 Celsius.

“It is extremely likely that human activities have caused more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperatures since the 1950s,” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) draft report said.

“Extremely likely” in the IPCC’s language means a level of certainty of at least 95 percent. The next level is “virtually certain”, or 99 percent, the greatest possible certainty for the scientists.

The IPCC’s previous report, in 2007, said it was at least 90 percent certain that human activities, led by burning fossil fuels, were the cause of rising temperatures.

The draft was shown on a climate change skeptic blog.

The IPCC said the unauthorized, premature posting of the draft may lead to confusion because the report was still work in progress and was likely to change before it is released.

A United Nations conference last week aimed at curbing emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for global warning yielded no progress and three countries – Canada, Russia and Japan – have abandoned the Kyoto Protocol limiting the emissions.

The United States never ratified it in the first place, and it excludes developing countries where emissions are growing most quickly.

Countries agreed to extend Kyoto to 2020, but only those covering less than 15 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions signed up. Developing nations said they would push next year for a radical U.N. mechanism to compensate them for the impact of climate change.

The IPCC said it had “high confidence” that human activity had caused large-scale changes in oceans, in ice sheets or mountain glaciers, and in sea levels in the second half of the twentieth century, according to the draft.

It said some extreme weather events had also changed due to human influences.

THREAT TO CITIES

The draft’s scenarios forecast a rise in temperatures of between 0.2 and 4.8 Celsius this century – a narrower band than in 2007. But in almost all of the scenarios, the rise would exceed 2 degrees Celsius.

Governments pledged in 2010 to try to stop global temperatures rising by more than 2 degrees, a threshold seen by scientists as the maximum to avoid more extreme weather, droughts, floods, and other climate change impacts.

Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were the highest in 800,000 years, according to the draft report.

The draft also said that sea levels were likely to rise by between 29 and 82 centimeters by the end of the century – compared to 18-59 centimeters projected in the 2007 report.

Rising sea levels are a threat to people living in low-lying areas, from Bangladesh to the cities of New York, London and Buenos Aires. They open up the risk of storm surges, coastal erosion and, in the worst case scenario, the complete swamping of large areas of land.

The IPCC carries weight because it brings together all scientific research on climate change and informs policymakers.

Many countries want to study the final IPCC report before signing up to a new global pact to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The draft included a possible future acceleration of ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland, which was omitted in 2007. It stopped short of including some research carried out since 2007 that suggested seas may rise by up to 2 meters by 2100.

(Editing by Tom Pfeiffer)

]]> http://news.co.cr/human-link-to-climate-change-stronger-than-ever-draft-report/21316/feed/ 0 http://news.co.cr/nasa-moon-mapping-mission-to-come-to-a-crashing-end/21317/ http://news.co.cr/nasa-moon-mapping-mission-to-come-to-a-crashing-end/21317/#comments Fri, 14 Dec 2012 01:43:07 +0000 Reuters http://news.co.cr/nasa-moon-mapping-mission-to-come-to-a-crashing-end/21317/ Read more »]]>

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – NASA plans to crash a pair of small robotic science probes into the moon next week after a successful year-long mission to learn what lies beneath the lunar surface, officials said on Thursday.

The twin Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL, spacecraft will make suicidal plunges on Monday into a mountain near the moon’s north pole, a site selected to avoid the chance of hitting any of the Apollo or other lunar relics.

The impacts, which are not expected to be visible from Earth, will take place about 20 seconds apart at 5:28 p.m. EST (2228 GMT) on Monday.

“They’re going to be completely blown apart,” GRAIL project manager David Lehman, with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, told reporters on a conference call.

Almost out of fuel and currently flying just 7 miles above the lunar surface, the probes will make a final steering maneuver on Friday and shut down their science instruments in preparation for Monday’s crash.

The two spacecraft, each about the size of a small washing machine, have been flying in close formation around the moon for nearly a year to map the lunar gravity.

Scientists precisely measure the distance between the two, a figure that slightly changes as they fly over denser regions of the moon. The gravitational pull of the additional mass causes first the leading probe and then the following one to speed up, altering the gap between them.

Gravity maps from the first part of the mission, collected between March and May 2012 when the spacecraft were about 34 miles above the lunar surface, revealed the moon has a shallower and much more fractured crust than expected – the result of asteroid and comet impacts billions of years ago.

“We know that the moon had been bombarded by impacts but what we found is just how broken up and fractured the crust of the moon is,” said lead scientist Maria Zuber, with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Similar bombardments happened on all the solid bodies of the inner solar system though the evidence on Earth has been erased by erosion, plate tectonics and other phenomena.

“With Mars, there’s a questions about where did the water that we think was on the surface go,” Zuber said. “These fractures provide a pathway deep inside the planet and it’s very easy to envision now how a possible ocean on the surface could have found its way deep into the crust.”

Scientists also discovered lava-filled subterranean cracks inside the moon, evidence that the body expanded early in its history.

In addition to planetary science, the gravity maps, along with detailed images of the lunar surface, should help engineers pick landing sites for future robotic and human expeditions to the moon, Zuber said.

“In my wildest dreams, I could not have imagined that this mission would have gone any better than it has,” she said, adding that NASA will be getting $8 million or $9 million back from the mission’s $471 million budget.

The spacecraft will hit the surface at about 3,760 miles per hour. No pictures are expected because the region will be dark at the time of impact, but a sister spacecraft circling the moon, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, will attempt to survey the crash site.

“These are two small spacecraft with empty fuel tanks, so we’re not expecting a flash that is visible from Earth,” Zuber said.

(Editing by Kevin Gray and Mohammad Zargham)

]]> http://news.co.cr/nasa-moon-mapping-mission-to-come-to-a-crashing-end/21317/feed/ 0 http://news.co.cr/agriculture-teacher-in-costa-rica-sentenced-paid-students-for-sex/21224/ http://news.co.cr/agriculture-teacher-in-costa-rica-sentenced-paid-students-for-sex/21224/#comments Thu, 13 Dec 2012 16:20:05 +0000 Marcel Evans http://news.co.cr/?p=21224 Read more »]]> A 51 year old agriculture teacher in both high school and primary school, was sentenced to 45 years in prison for paying students between 15,000 and 20,000 colones to have sex with him.

The sentence was handed down in a Bribri, Talamanca, court in Limon province. The judges extended defendant Jorge Alberto Conejo’s preventive detention for another six months while his sentence is automatically given a review by an appeals court.

The panel of judges dismissed several serious charges but found Conejo guilty of two counts of rape, one of sexual relations with minors, three counts of sexual acts for money with minors and two counts of sexual abuse of minors.

According to court testimony, the crimes occurred in 2010, involving victims between the ages of 10 and 16 years old. Among 17 witnesses testifying in the trial were fellow teachers and persons close to the victims.

But Conejo is not the only teacher abusing his position of confidence. Under investigation is another teacher in a Puntarenas high school who is accused of raping a 15-year-old student. The professor is a neighbor of the girl and is accused of raping her during a home visit.

Still another case surfaced last June when the principal and a teacher at San Marcos Scientific Institute at El Llano in Alajuela province were accused of sexually abusing a 14-year-old student.

La Nacion reported that authorities have warned parents to keep watch on their school-age children and to report suspicious activities in the teacher-student relationship.

Source: Fijatevos.com

(Reuters) – A large asteroid that flies in nearly the same orbit as Earth will make a close pass by the planet, but there’s no chance of an impact – at least for hundreds of years, astronomers said on Wednesday.

The asteroid, named Toutatis, flies by Earth every four years. During its closest approach on Wednesday, the celestial rock will pass about 4.3 million miles (7 million km) from Earth, which is about 18 times farther away than the moon.

“There is no danger of a collision with Earth,” NASA astronomer Lance Benner said in a statement.

The 0.6-mile (4.3-km) long asteroid circles the sun in an orbit that is very closely aligned with Earth’s, making it a potentially hazardous object for the future.

The asteroid was first spotted in 1934 and its orbit was confirmed in 1989. In 2004, Toutatis passed by Earth just four times farther away than the moon, much closer than this week’s encounter.

Astronomers are using radar and optical telescopes to get a better fix on the asteroid’s location, its unusual spin and the flight path in hopes of refining estimates on where it will travel in the future.

“We already know that Toutatis will not hit Earth for hundreds of years,” Benner said. “These new observations will allow us to predict the asteroid’s trajectory even farther into the future.”

(Reporting by Irene Klotz in Phoenix; Editing by Jane Sutton and Eric Beech)

]]> http://news.co.cr/big-asteroid-flying-by-no-threat-to-earth/21223/feed/ 0 http://news.co.cr/hubble-telescope-spies-seven-galaxies-from-baby-years-of-universe/21222/ http://news.co.cr/hubble-telescope-spies-seven-galaxies-from-baby-years-of-universe/21222/#comments Wed, 12 Dec 2012 22:47:26 +0000 Reuters http://news.co.cr/hubble-telescope-spies-seven-galaxies-from-baby-years-of-universe/21222/ Read more »]]>

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., December 12 – Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have found seven galaxies that formed relatively shortly after the universe’s birth some 13.7 billion years ago, scientists said on Wednesday, describing them “as baby pictures of the universe.”

One of the objects may be the oldest galaxy yet found, dating back to a time when the universe was just 380 million years old, a fraction of its current age.

“These early galaxies represent the building blocks of present-day galaxies,” John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science, told reporters in a conference call.

The discovery of galaxies dating back to the universe’s early years should help scientists figure out what happened after the “dark ages,” a period of time about 200 million years after the Big Bang explosion when cooling clouds of hydrogen, clumped together by gravity, began to ignite, triggering the first generation of stars.

“It was a very important moment in cosmic history,” said astronomer Richard Ellis, with the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Scientists do not know exactly when this “cosmic dawn” occurred and whether it was a single, dramatic event that caused all the galaxies to form their first stars, or whether it happened more gradually over millions of years.

The discovery of seven galaxies spanning a period between 350 million and 600 million years after the Big Bang supports theories that the cosmic dawn was a drawn-out affair, with galaxies slowly building up their stars and chemical elements over time, said Brant Robertson of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Astronomers plan follow-up studies after Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, launches in 2018.

The research appears in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

(Editing by Jane Sutton and Peter Cooney)

]]> http://news.co.cr/hubble-telescope-spies-seven-galaxies-from-baby-years-of-universe/21222/feed/ 0 http://news.co.cr/humans-made-cheese-7500-years-ago-researchers-say/21220/ http://news.co.cr/humans-made-cheese-7500-years-ago-researchers-say/21220/#comments Wed, 12 Dec 2012 19:17:27 +0000 Reuters http://news.co.cr/humans-made-cheese-7500-years-ago-researchers-say/21220/ Read more »]]>

LONDON (Reuters) – Scientists have found the earliest evidence of prehistoric cheese-making from a study of 7,500-year-old pottery fragments that are perforated just like modern cheese strainers.

Milk production and dairy processing allowed early farmers to produce food without slaughtering precious livestock, and making cheese turned milk into a less perishable food that was more digestible for a population who at the time would have been intolerant to the lactose contained in milk.

Researchers from the University of Bristol in Britain, with colleagues in the United States and Poland, analyzed fatty acids embedded in prehistoric pottery from the Polish region of Kuyavia, and found they had been used to separate milk into fat-rich curds for cheese and lactose-containing whey.

“The presence of milk residues in sieves … constitutes the earliest direct evidence for cheese-making,” said Mélanie Salque from Bristol, one of the authors of the research, which was published in the journal Nature.

Peter Bogucki, another researcher involved in the work, said: “Making cheese allowed them to reduce the lactose content of milk, and we know that, at that time, most of the humans were not tolerant to lactose.”

Milk residues have been found at ancient sites up to 8,000 years old in Turkey and Libya, but there was no evidence that the milk had been processed into cheese.

Until now, the earliest evidence of cheese-making came from depictions of milk processing in murals several thousand years younger than the pottery fragments.

The researchers believe other vessels found in the same region were used for other specific purposes. Jars lined with beeswax were probably for storing water, and pottery containing the remnants of carcass fats was probably used for cooking meat.

“It is truly remarkable, the depth of insights into ancient human diet and food processing technologies these ancient fats preserved in archaeological ceramics are now providing us with,” said Richard Evershed, who heads the Bristol team.

(Reporting by Chris Wickham; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

]]> http://news.co.cr/humans-made-cheese-7500-years-ago-researchers-say/21220/feed/ 0 http://news.co.cr/ten-commandments-join-isaac-newtons-notes-online/21221/ http://news.co.cr/ten-commandments-join-isaac-newtons-notes-online/21221/#comments Wed, 12 Dec 2012 19:03:11 +0000 Reuters http://news.co.cr/ten-commandments-join-isaac-newtons-notes-online/21221/ Read more »]]>

LONDON (Reuters) – A copy of The Ten Commandments dating back two millennia and the earliest written Gaelic are just two of a number of incredibly rare manuscripts now freely available online to the world as part of a Cambridge University digital project.

The Nash Papyrus — one of the oldest known manuscripts containing text from the Hebrew Bible — has become one of the latest treasures of humanity to join Isaac Newton’s notebooks, the Nuremberg Chronicle and other rare texts as part of the Cambridge Digital Library, the university said on Wednesday.

“Cambridge University Library preserves works of great importance to faith traditions and communities around the world,” University Librarian Anne Jarvis said in a statement.

“Because of their age and delicacy these manuscripts are seldom able to be viewed – and when they are displayed, we can only show one or two pages.”

Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nash Papyrus, was by far the oldest manuscript containing text from the Hebrew Bible and like most fragile historical documents, only available to select academics for scrutiny.

The university’s digital library is making 25,000 new images, including an ancient copy of the New Testament, available on its website (cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/), which has already attracted tens of millions of hits since the project was launched in December 2011.

The latest release also includes important texts from Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism.

In addition to religious texts, internet users can also view the 10th century Book of Deer, which is widely believed to be the oldest surviving Scottish manuscript and contains the earliest known examples of written Gaelic.

“Now… anyone with a connection to the Internet can select a work of interest, turn to any page of the manuscript, and explore it in extraordinary detail,” Jarvis said.

The technical infrastructure required to get these texts to web was in part funded by a 1.5 million pound ($2.4 million) gift from the Polonsky Foundation in June 2010.

($1 = 0.6210 British pounds)

(Reporting by Dasha Afanasieva, editing by Paul Casciato)

]]> http://news.co.cr/ten-commandments-join-isaac-newtons-notes-online/21221/feed/ 0 http://news.co.cr/u-s-militarys-secret-mini-shuttle-lifts-off-from-florida/21219/ http://news.co.cr/u-s-militarys-secret-mini-shuttle-lifts-off-from-florida/21219/#comments Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:50:55 +0000 Reuters http://news.co.cr/u-s-militarys-secret-mini-shuttle-lifts-off-from-florida/21219/ Read more »]]>

(Reuters) – An unmanned Atlas 5 rocket carrying a small robotic space shuttle lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Tuesday for the third flight in a classified military test program.

The 196-foot (60-meter) rocket blasted off at 1:03 p.m. ET (1603 GMT) carrying the military’s original X-37B experimental space plane, also known as an Orbital Test Vehicle, or OTV.

The unmanned, reusable space shuttle, one of two operated by the U.S. Air Force, spent 224 days circling Earth during its debut mission in 2010. A sister ship blasted off in 2011 and landed itself after 469 days in space, completing the second orbital test flight.

The military is not saying how long the third X-37B mission will last, nor what the vehicle will be doing in orbit.

“The focus of the program remains on testing vehicle capabilities and proving the utility and cost-effectiveness of a reusable spacecraft,” Air Force spokeswoman Tracy Bunko wrote in an email to Reuters.

While launching from Florida, the military has been landing the robotic space planes at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The agency is considering landing and refurbishing its X-37B spaceships at NASA and Air Force bases in Florida, which has been courting new customers since the retirement of NASA’s space shuttles last year.

“We are investigating the possibility of using the former shuttle infrastructure for X-37B OTV landing operations and are looking into consolidating landing, refurbishment and launch operations at Kennedy Space Center or Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in an effort to save money,” Bunko wrote.

“Those investigations are in an early state, and any specifics will not be known for some time,” she added.

The vehicles, which were built by Boeing, are about one-fourth the size of a NASA shuttle and use solar panels to generate power, rather than chemical fuel cells that limited the space shuttles’ time in orbit.

Neither NASA nor the Air Force has plans to upgrade the X-37B to carry people.

The OTV-3 flight had been delayed several months pending the results of an investigation into an upper-stage engine problem during an October 4 Delta 4 flight to put a Global Positioning System satellite into orbit.

The Delta 4 upper-stage is similar to one used on Atlas rockets. Both vehicles are built and flown by United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

(Editing by Jane Sutton and Philip Barbara)

]]> http://news.co.cr/u-s-militarys-secret-mini-shuttle-lifts-off-from-florida/21219/feed/ 0 http://news.co.cr/toothy-prehistoric-lizard-named-obamadon-after-smiling-president/21218/ http://news.co.cr/toothy-prehistoric-lizard-named-obamadon-after-smiling-president/21218/#comments Tue, 11 Dec 2012 22:43:03 +0000 Reuters http://news.co.cr/toothy-prehistoric-lizard-named-obamadon-after-smiling-president/21218/ Read more »]]>

(Reuters) – Researchers have named a newly discovered, prehistoric lizard “Obamadon gracilis” in honor of the 44th president’s toothy grin.

The small, insect-eating lizard was first discovered in eastern Montana in 1974, but a recent re-examination showed the fossil had been wrongly classified as a Leptochamops denticulatus and was in fact a new species, researchers told Reuters on Tuesday.

Obamadon gracilis was one of nine newly discovered species reported on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In naming the new species, scientists from Yale and Harvard universities combined the Latin “Obamadon” for “Obama’s teeth” and “gracilis,” which means slender.

“The lizard has these very tall, straight teeth and Obama has these tall, straight incisors and a great smile,” said Nick Longrich, a paleontologist at the school in New Haven, Connecticut.

It was believed to have lived during the Cretaceous period, which began 145.5 million years ago. Along with many dinosaurs from that era, the lizard died out about 65 million years ago when a giant asteroid struck earth, scientists say.

Longrich said he waited until after the recent U.S. election to name the lizard.

“It would look like we were kicking him when he’s down if he lost and we named this extinct lizard after him,” he said in an interview.

“Romneydon” was never under consideration and “Clintondon” didn’t sound good, said Longrich, who supported Hillary Clinton’s failed run against Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary.

Obama is not the first politician whose name has been used to help classify organisms. Megalonyxx jeffersonii, an extinct species of plant-eating ground sloth, was named in honor of President Thomas Jefferson, an amateur paleontologist who studied the mammal.

Earlier this year, researchers announced they had named five newly identified species of freshwater perch after Obama, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter and Theodore Roosevelt.

In 2005, entomologists named three species of North American slime-mold beetles agathidium bushi, agathidium cheneyi and agathidium rumsfeldi in honor of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld – the U.S. president, vice president and secretary of defense at the time.

Other celebrity names also have been used to name new species. A small Caribbean crustacean has been named after reggae icon Bob Marley, an Australian horsefly has been named in honor of hip-hop star Beyonce, and an endangered species of marsh rabbit has been named after Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner.

(Reporting by Jason McLure in Littleton, N.H.; Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Eric Walsh)

]]> http://news.co.cr/toothy-prehistoric-lizard-named-obamadon-after-smiling-president/21218/feed/ 0 http://news.co.cr/hawking-and-cern-scoop-worlds-richest-science-prize/21217/ http://news.co.cr/hawking-and-cern-scoop-worlds-richest-science-prize/21217/#comments Tue, 11 Dec 2012 17:52:37 +0000 Reuters http://news.co.cr/hawking-and-cern-scoop-worlds-richest-science-prize/21217/ Read more »]]>

LONDON (Reuters) – Stephen Hawking, the British cosmologist who urged people to “be curious” in the Paralympics opening ceremony, has landed the richest prize in science for his work on how black holes emit radiation.

Wheelchair-bound Hawking won $3 million from Russian Internet entrepreneur Yuri Milner, who set up his prize this year to address what he regards as a lack of recognition in the modern world for leading scientists.

Alongside Hawking, a second $3 million award has gone to the scientists behind the discovery this year of a new subatomic particle that behaves like the theoretical Higgs boson, imagined almost half a century ago and responsible for bestowing mass on other fundamental particles.

The scale of the awards from the Milner foundation – and being able to give them to multiple recipients for huge projects – could, over time, see them compete in prestige terms with the annual Nobel prizes.

The Nobel committee has had to scale back the size of its awards in line with the performance of the investments which support it. Each prize is now worth $1.2 million, down from about $1.5 million in recent years.

Diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 21 and told in 1963 he had two years to live, Hawking, now 70, has become one of the world’s most recognizable scientists after guest appearances on The Simpsons and on Star Trek.

At the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games in London in August, speaking through his computerized voice system, he said: “Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Be curious.”

He was awarded the Special Fundamental Physics prize for what the committee called his “deep contributions to quantum gravity and quantum aspects of the early universe” as well has his discovery that black holes emit radiation.

“No one undertakes research in physics with the intention of winning a prize. It is the joy of discovering something no one knew before,” Hawking said in comments emailed to Reuters.

“Nevertheless prizes like these prizes play an important role in giving public recognition for achievement in physics.”

Hawking said he planned to use the money to help his daughter with her autistic son and may buy a holiday home.

HIGGS DISCOVERY

He shares the limelight with leaders of the project to build and run the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator at the CERN research center near Geneva, which led to the discovery of the particle that is thought to be the boson imagined by theorist Peter Higgs in 1964.

In the Standard Model, which governs scientific understanding of the basic make-up of the universe, the Higgs boson gives mass to other fundamental particles.

But in the half century before scientists at CERN started smashing particles together in the LHC and studying the results, it sat in the realm of theory.

Although the work of building the LHC and running experiments in the particle accelerator involved thousands of scientists and engineers, the prize has been awarded to past and present team leaders.

The winners include the head of the LHC Lyn Evans, and the two spokespeople, Fabiola Gianotti and Joe Incandela, who presented the discovery to applause and cheers from the gathered physicists at CERN earlier this year.

Michel Della Negra, another prize-winner who for 15 years from 1990 led a team that built one of the two giant detectors used to find the Higgs, said the award was a big surprise.

“I didn’t even know the prize existed,” he told Reuters.

Della Negra receives $250,000 because the $3 million is to be split three ways between Evans, and the two teams working on the Atlas and CMS detectors. Two leaders of the Atlas team will get $500,000 each while the four from CMS get $250,000 apiece.

Gianotti and Incandela both plan to put their prize money back into science.

“We have 3,000 people from 38 countries in the Atlas collaboration, so the money will be used for helping young scientists who need financial support,” Gianotti said.

Because the Nobel rules allow a maximum of three people to share one prize, some scientists argue they are out of touch with the large-scale collaborations that are a feature of much modern research.

Milner’s new prize is more flexible, significantly more lucrative.

“I’m really impressed,” said Incandela. “They are trying to modernize the way prizes are done.”

(Editing by Alison Williams)

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