Design your own way to get Jupiter & win prizes!

There are a few 'pesky' rules to follow, and to succeed is decidedly non-trivial, but could be interesting for some people.

Note that the ESA is the European Space Agency - NASA is not not the only Western organization associated with Space Exploration.

Mission Analysis and Design
This yearly competition aims at advancing the automation of the trajectory design process. The competition has been taken up by the community after its first edition organized by the Advanced Concepts Team.
[...]
To organise the first international competition to find the global optimal of an interplanetary trajectory was a risky idea. We saw it, a bit romantically perhaps, as a sort of "sailing challenge", with our galaxy as the racing waters and mathematical tools as the competing boats. In keeping with this idea, we hoped each successive winner would become the host (and referee) for the next event. The competition was opened to the widest international community including industry, academia and research groups. Still it was far from certain that any of these specialists and researchers would be willing to devote their (usually scarce) free time to such a contest. As it turned out, luck was indeed on the side of those who dare, and not only seventeen different groups participated to the first contest, but the winner also accepted to carry on and organise the next event, thereby fully supporting the original vision.
[…]

See also comments on slashdot, one of which related to an existing game called Orbiter, which is a space flight simulator.

Another of the Slashdot comments says:
[…]
Also, it's a decent example of the sort of thing possible with HTML5 crap, and it's GPL, so at least it's got that going for it.
[…]

Note that Firefox 3.6 has some support HTML5, and Firefox 4 will support HTML5 even better!

UFO alert – Alien spaceship seen masquerading as a moon of Saturn!

The REAL TRUTH will be revealed, once you read the Bad Astronomers blog!

See the photo of the moon like spaceship with full afterburners!

Note how a real Astronomer reacts to this exciting discovery.

Unlike fake photos of UFOs, this is real, and so is the science involved.

Plait Tech-Tonics - Astronomer goes Entrepreneurial

With the recent bad times and consequential budget cuts, Astronomers have had to look for other sources of remuneration to supplement their incomes so that they can properly support their families...

So Bill Plait came up with a new product 'Plait Tech-Tonics', and he states that "With a slogan like "Dark energy, light taste" it can’t lose!"

So never write of Scientists as boring and lacking in Entrepreneurial spirit!

Photographs of the Moon, processed by a New Zealander

(I had accidentally posted this to another blog about open source software)

Maurice Collins, in Palmerston North, reprocessed images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera to produce some stunning photographs.

Unfortunately, he uses somewhat non-standard HTML, so I was unable too look at most of his pages at his website using Firefox.

http://www.universetoday.com/74082/the-moon-in-stunning-wide-angle/
[...]
However, the raw wide-angle images are somewhat distorted by the camera, but Maurice Collins, a Moon enthusiast from New Zealand, found that putting several images together in a mosaic removes a lot of the distortions and produces a much clearer image. The results are nothing short of stunning; here are a few example of Maurice’s handiwork, including this jaw-dropping image of the Marius Hills region of the Moon. Click on any of these images for a larger version on Maurice’s website, Moon Science
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LHC beautiful diagrams of Quark 'atoms'

In the 6 September 2010: Beautiful atoms entry of the LHCb experiment web site, they have some wonderful diagrams showing how they found 'atoms' of Beauty and anti-Beauty quarks. They show how the experimental results can be mapped to the transitions where the 2 quarks drop from higher to lower energy orbitals, just like as in an Hydrogen atom.

In other news: the actual number of protons in the LHC beam is now about a millions times more than when they started this year!

How humans adapt to eating new types of foods

Most people who realize humans can adapt to digesting new types of food, think they know that there are one or two ways for humans to adapt to new food: by having new types of bacteria in our intestines and the other is to evolve news ways of digesting.

However, there are other ways, as we can sometimes pick up new DNA from other species, as well as pick up the required bacteria to properly digest the new foods.

I suppose that most people would never have consider that a virus could ever have a positive impact on our health!


Viruses and Other Gene Transfer Mechanisms
[...]
The Transfer of DNA Across Species Boundaries
Bacteria trade genes more frantically than a pit full of traders on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange — Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan (3)

While recombination moves whole blocks of genetic instructions within a cell, other processes move whole blocks of genetic information from one bacterium to another bacterium of a different kind. In the analogy between genes and written text, this move is a transfer of paragraphs or pages from one library to another
[...]

Sushi may 'transfer genes' to gut
[...]
A traditional Japanese diet could transfer the genes of "sushi-specific" digestive enzymes into the human gut.

This is according to researchers who discovered a substance in marine bacteria that breaks seaweed down into digestible pieces.
[...]

LHC experiments described

I thought initially that there were 8 main experiments at the Large Hardron Collider (LHC), there are in fact 6.

Note that While they are looking at the same types of collisions, they are constructed in different ways to look at different aspects.

You can see that a large number of scientists are involved from all around the world.

It is important to have short names to refer to the experiments rather than a long but more meaningful phrase. However, you can see some groups were struggling to come up with good short names!

The following are brief excerpts about each of the experiments, click on the links for more details.


ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment)
For the ALICE experiment, the LHC will collide lead ions to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang under laboratory conditions. The data obtained will allow physicists to study a state of matter known as quark‑gluon plasma, which is believed to have existed soon after the Big Bang.
[…]
A collaboration of more than 1000 scientists from 94 institutes in 28 countries works on the ALICE experiment (March 2006).


ATLAS
ATLAS is one of two general-purpose detectors at the LHC. It will investigate a wide range of physics, including the search for the Higgs boson, extra dimensions, and particles that could make up dark matter. ATLAS will record sets of measurements on the particles created in collisions - their paths, energies, and their identities.
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More than 2900 scientists from 172 institutes in 37 countries work on the ATLAS experiment (December 2009).


CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid)
The CMS experiment uses a general-purpose detector to investigate a wide range of physics, including the search for the Higgs boson, extra dimensions, and particles that could make up dark matter. Although it has the same scientific goals as the ATLAS experiment, it uses different technical solutions and design of its detector magnet system to achieve these.
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More than 2000 scientists collaborate in CMS, coming from 155 institutes in 37 countries (October 2006).


LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty)
The LHCb experiment will help us to understand why we live in a Universe that appears to be composed almost entirely of matter, but no antimatter.

It specialises in investigating the slight differences between matter and antimatter by studying a type of particle called the 'beauty quark', or 'b quark'.
[...]
The LHCb collaboration has 650 scientists from 48 institutes in 13 countries (April 2006).


TOTEM (TOTal Elastic and diffractive cross section Measurement)
The TOTEM experiment studies forward particles to focus on physics that is not accessible to the general-purpose experiments. Among a range of studies, it will measure, in effect, the size of the proton and also monitor accurately the LHC's luminosity.
[...]
The TOTEM experiment involves 50 scientists from 10 institutes in 8 countries (2006).


LHCf (Large Hadron Collider forward)
The LHCf experiment uses forward particles created inside the LHC as a source to simulate cosmic rays in laboratory conditions.

Cosmic rays are naturally occurring charged particles from outer space that constantly bombard the Earth's atmosphere. They collide with nuclei in the upper atmosphere, leading to a cascade of particles that reaches ground level.
[...]
The LHCf experiment involves 22 scientists from 10 institutes in 4 countries (September 2006).