How to make Oxygen on mars..?

Nasa Looks to Make Oxygen on Mars Using Microbes

Future human missions to the Red Planet may not have to carry heavy oxygen cylinders with them. Scientists are working on ways to produce the life gas on Mars itself. Nasa is looking at creating ecosystems able to support life, for future human missions.

As part of this goal, it is funding Indiana-based company Techshot Inc. to research a solution that will produce oxygen that won't rely heavily on the Earth for future Martian colonies, www.ign.com reported.

"This is a possible way to support a human mission to Mars, producing oxygen without having to send heavy gas canisters," Eugene Boland, chief scientist at Techshot, was quoted as saying.

"Let's send microbes and let them do the heavy lifting for us," he added.

Techshot's experiments are carried out in a "Mars room" which simulates Mars' atmospheric pressure, day-night temperature changes and the solar radiation.

Using Martian soil, the scientists test the feasibility of using ecosystem-building pioneer organisms to produce oxygen. The organisms could also remove nitrogen from the Martian soil.

Boland believes habitable biodomes that "enclose ecopoiesis-provided oxygen through bacterial or algae-driven conversion systems" could exist on the Martian surface in the near future.

Nasa says its goal of landing astronauts on Mars in the 2030s is vital for obtaining evidence of life.

Nasa's Curiosity rover recently found evidence of fixed nitrogen and carbon-containing organic molecules -ingredients for life - on Mars' surface.

It is also now thought that ancient Mars held waterways and vast oceans covering its northern hemisphere.

Cheapest microcomputer CHIP

Meet Chip, the 'World's First $9 microcomputer

Next Thing, the company that launched OTTO (a hackable gif camera) last year, is now back on Kickstarter with its $9 (approximately Rs. 575) microcomputer, called Chip. The Chip is an Open Hardware microcomputer of the type popularised by the Raspberry Pi, with a single circuit board the size of a credit card and no screen or keyboard; though it can be connected to a monitor and keyboard and put to use. The company touts that the Chip is the "world's first $9 computer". At the time of writing, the Kickstarter campaign of Next Thing had crossed the $50,000 (approximately Rs. 32 lakh) goal and was around $620,000 (approximately Rs. 4 crore) mark.

For a pledge of $9, backers will get the Chip microcomputer single circuit board and is expected to start shipping in December this year. Backers can opt for an optional VGA adaptor or HDMI adaptor by shelling out extra $19 and $25 respectively. Both optional adaptors are expected to start shipping in May next year. Importantly, the Chip unlike other similar microcomputers comes with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity built-in.

It's worth noting that Next Thing's plan is not just limited to the Chip and extends to the PocketChip (see above), which makes the single circuit board portable. It features a 4.3-inch (272x470 pixels) touchscreen with resistive touch; QWERTY keyboard; 5 hour battery backup with a 3000mAh battery, and sports a rugged injection molded shell. Backers will have to pledge for $49 to get the PocketChip, which is also expected to start shipping worldwide May next year.

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Some of the key specifications of Chip microcomputer include 1GHz Allwinner 'R8' A13 processor; Mali-400 GPU; 512MB of RAM (DDR3); 4GB of built-in storage; a USB port; a Micro-USB port with OTG functionality support; a microphone jack that doubles as a composite video-out; Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, and Bluetooth 4.0. The Chip also comes preloaded with various open source software including the LibreOffice, for working on documents; Chromium browser, to surf the web, and Scratch, a coding tool to learn the basics of programming by making stories, games, and animations. It is based on an open source operating system.

Explaining the motive behind Chip, Dave Rauchwerk, one of Next Thing's founders, told DIY publication Make, "The $9 becomes really interesting when lots of people can help make it awesome. We wanted to find a way to not only give everyone access to it but to give them the ability to participate in this process of developing it."

"Success for us is them seeing what we've done and being excited about it and backing it," Rauchwerk added.

Next Thing's Chip microcomputer is seen as a direct competitor to Raspberry Pi 2 Model B priced at $35, which was launched in February.

We are the Most advanced Civilisation in The Universe

No Evidence of Advanced Civilisations in 100,000 Galaxies, Say Scientists

After searching 100,000 galaxies for signs of highly advanced extraterrestrial life, a team of scientists using observations from Nasa's WISE orbiting observatory has found no evidence of advanced civilisations in them.

The team also discovered some mysterious new phenomena in our own Milky Way galaxy.

"The idea behind our research is that, if an entire galaxy had been colonized by an advanced space-faring civilisation, the energy produced by that civilisation's technologies would be detectable in mid-infrared wavelengths," said lead researcher Jason T. Wright, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the Centre for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Penn State University.

Freeman Dyson, a theoretical physicist, had proposed in the 1960s that advanced alien civilizations beyond Earth could be detected by the tell-tale evidence of their mid-infrared emissions.

It was not until space-based telescopes like the WISE satellite that it became possible to make sensitive measurements of this radiation emitted by objects in space.

Roger Griffith, researcher at Penn State and the lead author of the paper, scanned almost the entire catalogue of the WISE satellite's detections - nearly 100 million entries - for objects consistent with galaxies emitting too much mid-infrared radiation.

He also examined and categorized around 100,000 of the most promising galaxy images.

"This research is a significant expansion of earlier work in this area," said Brendan Mullan, director of the Buhl Planetarium at the Carnegie Science Centre in Pittsburgh.

"As we look more carefully at the light from these galaxies, we should be able to push our sensitivity to alien technology down to much lower levels and to better distinguish heat resulting from natural astronomical sources from heat produced by advanced technologies. This pilot study is just the beginning," Wright concluded.

The study will be published in Astrophysical Journal Supplement

Facebook & women

Women, Don't Get 'Thinspired' on Facebook

Viewing images of extremely thin women on Facebook and other social media platforms can trigger body dissatisfaction and eating disorders among women, reveals a new study. Such images, often cropped to remove heads or focus on specific body parts, lead young women to think that is what they should look like.

Imagine a teenage girl or even a young woman looking for inspiration using terms such as attractive, fit or pretty.

"She will likely find images of headless, scantily clad, sexualized women and their body parts on social media," said Jannath Ghaznavi from the University of California, Davis.

For the study, Ghaznavi and associate professor Laramie Taylor examined about 300 images from Twitter and Pinterest postings that used the terms "thinspiration" and "thinspo" to tag images and ideas promoting extreme thinness and often casting eating disorders in a positive light.

Images from Twitter, popular among younger audiences, were most likely to be cropped to remove heads and focus on specific body parts compared to Pinterest.

"This could prompt these girls and women to resort to extreme dieting, excessive exercise or other harmful behaviours in order to achieve this thin ideal," Ghaznavi added.

Repeated exposure to such content can result in body dissatisfaction and disordered eating attitudes.

The paper was published in the journal Body Image: An International Journal of Research.

END OF A MESSENGER

Nasa's Messenger Probe Crashes on Mercury After 11-Year Mission

An unmanned Nasa spacecraft has crashed on the surface of the planet Mercury, after it ran out of fuel following a successful 11-year mission, the US space agency said Thursday. The MESSENGER probe short for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging was the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, and issued a final farewell on Twitter shortly before its demise at 3:26 pm (1926 GMT).

"Well, I guess it's time to say goodbye to all my friends, family, support team. I will be making my final impact very soon."

Shortly after, the official @MESSENGER2011 Twitter account posted another image of Mercury's surface, with the caption: "MESSENGER's LAST ACT? THAT'S SMASHING!"

The image was not of Mercury's fall. Nasa has said previously that there could be no real-time pictures of the impact, which would take place on the side of the planet facing away from the Earth.

But the US space agency confirmed that the probe had indeed crash-landed.

"A Nasa planetary exploration mission came to a planned, but nonetheless dramatic, end Thursday when it slammed into Mercury's surface at about 8,750 miles per hour (3.91 kilometers per second) and created a new crater on the planet's surface," the agency said in a statement.

The spacecraft itself was just about three meters long.

The crater it would cause was expected to be 16 meters (52 feet) in diameter, Nasa said.

The mission, which launched in 2004, had achieved "unprecedented success," with its top discovery being that Mercury had lots of frozen water and other volatile materials in its permanently shadowed polar craters on the planet closest to the Sun, the US space agency said.

"Going out with a bang as it impacts the surface of Mercury, we are celebrating MESSENGER as more than a successful mission," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for Nasa's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

"The MESSENGER mission will continue to provide scientists with a bonanza of new results as we begin the next phase of this mission analyzing the exciting data already in the archives, and unravelling the mysteries of Mercury.