Mini-SAR map of the Circular Polarization Ratio (CPR) of the north pole of the Moon. Fresh, “normal” craters (red circles) show high values of CPR inside and outside their rims. This is consistent with the distribution of rocks and ejected blocks around fresh impact features, indicating that the high CPR here is surface scattering. The “anomalous” craters (green circles) have high CPR within, but not outside their rims. Their interiors are also in permanent sun shadow. These relations are consistent with the high CPR in this case being caused by water ice, which is only stable in the polar dark cold traps. We estimate over 600 million cubic meters (1 cubic meter = 1 metric ton) of water in these features.

Using data from a NASA radar that flew aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, scientists have detected ice deposits near the moon’s north pole. NASA’s Mini-SAR instrument, a lightweight, synthetic aperture radar, found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 1 to 9 miles (2 to15 km) in diameter. Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it’s estimated there could be at least 1.3 trillion pounds (600 million metric tons) of water ice.

The Mini-SAR has imaged many of the permanently shadowed regions that exist at both poles of the Moons. These dark areas are extremely cold and it has been hypothesized that volatile material, including water ice, could be present in quantity here.  The main science object of the Mini-SAR experiment is to map and characterize any deposits that exist.

Mini-SAR is a lightweight (less than 10 kg) imaging radar.  It uses the polarization properties of reflected radio waves to characterize surface properties.  Mini-SAR sends pulses of radar that are left-circular polarized.  Typical planetary surfaces reverse the polarization during the reflection of radio waves, so that normal echoes from Mini-SAR are right circular polarized.  The ratio of received power in the same sense transmitted (left circular) to the opposite sense (right circular) is called the circular polarization ratio (CPR).  Most of the Moon has low CPR, meaning that the reversal of polarization is the norm, but some targets have high CPR.  These include very rough, fresh surfaces (such as a young, fresh crater) and ice, which is transparent to radio energy and multiply scatters the pulses, leading to an enhancement in same sense reflections and hence, high CPR.  CPR is not uniquely diagnostic of either roughness or ice; the science team must take into account the environment of the occurrences of high CPR signal to interpret its cause.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Mini-RF/multimedia/feature_ice_like_deposits.html

In a bid to discover the secrets of the universe, scientists have restarted the world’s most powerful atom smasher, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said on Sunday.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 16.8 mile underground tunnel located on the French-Swiss border near Geneva, produced its first beam of 2010 at 4:10 CET (0310 GMT). “The LHC is on its way again,” said CERN in a tweet on its website.

The 5.6 billion dollar LHC was shut down in December to get it ready for the new project. In the weeks before the shutdown, the collider achieved over a million particle collisions and accelerated proton beams to unfathomable energy levels, according to CERN.

The scientists were able to produce a world record energy level of 2.36 teraelectronvolts (TeV). But they are now hoping to reach 7.0 TeV to try to recreate conditions around the time of the Big Bang, and run those levels for up to 24 months. Eventually, CERN wants to be able to reach 14 TeV, but only after another long shutdown scheduled for late 2011.

CERN spent $40 million to repair and improve the LHC over 14 months before it made a successful 4 week run in November and December of last year. The latest shutdown was used to improve electrical connections and other parts of the machine. Preliminary testing of the machine is being done to ready it for operation at higher levels.

After the current vigilant restart, CERN will increase the energy output little by little, reaching levels 3.5 times greater than the levels reached in Chicago. After modifications are completed, scientists will try for 7 TeV. But for the foreseeable future — the next 18 – 24 months — they intend to keep it at 3.5 TeV.

“There’s a long way to go between getting the first bunches of protons to go around and actually getting the machine to its top working levels,” a spokesman for CERN said. “It’s a lot like having designed a Formula One racing car. The first time you send it out, the guy doesn’t go round the circuit as fast as he can. You have to learn about the controls, how the car handles.”

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1829603/scientists_restart_worlds_most_powerful_atom_smasher/

Mercedes-Benz is introducing a “research vehicle,” er, concept at the Geneva Motor Show next month that combines hydrogen fuel cells with plug-in hybrid.

That means the F800 Style can travel for 18 miles on electric power alone after being plugged in overnight — and when it runs out of juice it can cruise for another 375 miles on hydrogen. The result: no emissions.

Since it’s a concept and an automaker can can hog-wild — not that staid Mercedes would ever call it that — the F800 has cool sliding rear doors and a sparse interior.

“We are dedicated to reconciling our responsibility for the environment with practical customer utility in a fascinating automobile,” says Thomas Weber, the Daimler Board of Management member responsible for R&D.

The plug-in hybrid powerplant pairs big batteries with a V-6 engine capable of 300 horsepower, or 409 horsepower when the electric motors kick in.

For driving on fuel-cell power, Mercedes-Benz engineers somehow found a way to tuck that componant under the hood with an electric motor near the rear axle nd four hydrogen tanks, two of which are between the passengers.

by Alan Boyle

A Toyota Scion converted to all-electric power is plugged into California’s electrical
grid during a demonstration at the annual meeting of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science in San Diego.

Someday, someone will pay you to hook your car into the electrical grid. It’s one of those almost-a-sure-thing business opportunities enabled by the expected rise of plug-in vehicles. But will the payoff be worth the cost? That’s where the calculations get a little complicated.

Experts on the future of the electrical grid and plug-in electric cars came together this week in San Diego at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to discuss their common interests.
The concept of moving power back and forth between a smarter grid and more capable electric cars, known as vehicle-to-grid or V2G, is a “perfect bridge technology” for two complementary energy frontiers, said Jasna Tomic, new-fuels project manager for Calstart, a nonprofit energy research center headquartered in California.

It’s a concept that utilities are willing to shell out money to support, said Ken Huber, senior technology and education principal at Pennsylvania-based PJM Interconnection.

PJM coordinates power transmission for a region that takes in all or part of 13 states and the District of Columbia. One of the big challenges for companies like PJM is to keep the load on the regional grids as stable as possible. Too much of a load is bad, potentially leading to brownouts. Too little of a load can also be bad, especially as electric utilities move toward renewable sources such as wind and solar energy.

To keep its regional grid stable, PJM needs to have battery storage capability equal to 1 percent of its peak load. Since PJM’s peak is around 100,000 megawatts, “we have 1,000 megawatts moving up and down,” Huber explained.

So here’s where your future electric car enters the picture: PJM is currently paying battery providers somewhere around $25 to $35 per megawatt-hour to have that electrical storage available. If you have a plugged-in car just sitting idle, PJM would love to have a system that could take a little bit of the power out of your car battery during peak times, and send it back out to your battery during off-peak hours.

“It has a very, very high value to the grid,” Huber said.

How much is it worth?
Exactly how much value? That’s the point of a pilot project operated by a group called the MAGIC Consortium. The consortium started small, connecting just a few cars from the University of Delaware’s campus fleet. The cars were Toyota Scions that were converted into all-electric “eBoxes” using AC Propulsion’s kit.

The conversion also required the addition of a power control box that could transmit and receive data about the battery’s state as well as the electric company’s power requirements over a secure Internet connection. After all, the last thing you want is to have somebody hack into your car.

Three or four cars are hardly worth developing a system for, but for the University of Delaware test, the AES power company served as an aggregator for battery capacity. The payment to the customer – in this case, the University of Delaware – was based on how much capacity the cars’ batteries held (19 kilowatt-hours), and how long the car was plugged in (on average, 21.5 hours a day).

The payments typically amounted to $300 per month per car, said Willett Kempton, senior policy scientist at the University of Delaware’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy.

Not ready for prime time
If you consider merely the $500 cost of adding the control box and software, that’s a good deal. But if you factor in the cost of converting the car into a plug-in vehicle – an expense that can range into tens of thousands of dollars – you definitely wouldn’t do it just for the power company’s payout.

“Right now, because batteries are expensive, the value is less than the cost,” Kempton acknowledged.

You’d have to consider other benefits – for example, the fact that you could charge up your eBox for a 150-mile trip for just a couple of dollars, which is less than the price for a gallon of gasoline.

AP file: The Chevy Volt goes on display at the Washington Auto Show.

Although converted plug-ins such as AC Propulsion’s eBox are available now, most people will probably wait to make their plug-in purchase until they get a look at mass-market vehicles such as the Chevy Volt (a gas-electric hybrid) and the Nissan Leaf (which is all-electric). Both those models should be available starting late this year.

It’s too early to judge just how much impact plug-in cars will have, particularly when it comes to vehicle-to-grid technology. But if a million electric vehicles hit the streets in the next five years, as President Barack Obama has suggested, something will have to be done to accommodate that extra load on the grid, Huber said. That could take the form of demand-sensitive pricing for electricity – which would make V2G more attractive.

“I don’t believe we’re going to be in the situation we’re in today for very much longer,” Huber said.

Boosting the batteries
Better battery packs will be key to the success of plug-in vehicles, said Tony Posawatz, vehicle line director for the Chevy Volt. General Motors has developed a new breed of 16-kilowatt-hour batteries based on lithium-manganese chemistry – as well as a cooling and heating system to keep those batteries at a stable temperature.

“We call the battery the ‘fifth passenger’ sometimes, because we take such good care of it,” Posawatz told me.

As more plug-ins are sold, more and more batteries will be available to store and eventually use the energy that’s generated by solar and wind. “We’re going to make this asset available to plug in all the time to collect the energy created by this green technology,” Posawatz said.

GM is working on a number of initiatives for smart charging and automatic software upgrades, including technologies that take advantage of the automaker’s OnStar service. But it will be a while before vehicle-to-grid technology is built into the Volt, Posawatz said. “Two-way energy transfer is several years out,” he told me.

It’s more likely that car owners will use their own “smarts,” once cars like the Volt have been around for a while. Some might sign up for a V2G upgrade from the utility, like the system pioneered by the MAGIC Consortium. Others might install solar panels at home and use their plugged-in car as a storage device for home-brewed electricity.

In the long run, car owners might even save their old plug-in batteries to store more power at home. “We believe the battery will have a life outside the car,” Posawatz said.

But pretty much everyone agrees that the most important milestone on the road to plug-in paradise will be cheaper batteries. Right now, the batteries for plug-in cars cost $1,000 or more per kilowatt-hour – which makes the plug-ins much more expensive than their petroleum-fueled counterparts. The battery cost is so significant that the National Research Council concluded it would take decades for the benefits of plug-ins to outweigh the costs.

“That’s the biggest challenge,” Posawatz acknowledged. “How can we quickly move down the cost curve and get the technological advances going? Certainly the automotive industry does not move as quickly as the telecommunications industry. … Can we make that kind of progress on a shorter time scale?”

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2010/02/19/2206517.aspx

Ewen MacAskill in Washington
guardian.co.uk, Friday 12 February 2010 23.39 GMT

An infrared image released by the US department of defense shows the Missile Defense Agency’s airborne laser destroying its target. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

The US this week achieved a goal that has eluded it since Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program by knocking out a ballistic missile using a high-powered laser beam mounted on a plane.

The successful test was carried out yesterday in California, the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) said, making real what had previously been confined to the realms of science fiction.

The plane uses a combination of lasers to lock on to the missile and track its trajectory, and then bring it down with a ­single shot fired from the nose turret, all in less than 12 seconds.

According to analysts, the breakthrough could have an impact on the North Korean and Iranian missile programs, forcing them to develop faster missiles and adopt measures to counter the laser beams.

The MDA said today: “The revolutionary use of directed energy is very attractive for missile defense, with the potential to attack multiple targets at the speed of light, at a range of hundreds of kilometers, and at a low cost per intercept attempt compared to current technologies.”

Work on the laser weapons system has been under way in earnest for at least a decade, at a cost of more than $1bn. In the past, laser beams have been used successfully against stationary targets from stationary platforms, but in this test the beam was directed from a plane against a moving target, a much more challenging feat.

However, some scientists and military analysts expressed skepticism about its long-term viability, saying that other such projects that had been hailed as revolutionary did not work when confronted by all the problems thrown up by war.

Michael Elleman, a senior fellow for missile research in the Washington office of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, traced a direct line from the controversial program set out by Reagan three decades ago that was dubbed Star Wars, which envisaged lasers based in outer space intercepting missiles. “Reagan had a grand vision but did not know what the architecture would look like. They were looking more at space-based laser technology. The laser [in the latest test] is not necessarily what Reagan envisaged but it fits inside the grander scheme of what he wanted to achieve.”

Elleman said the laser could force North Korea, whose Unha missile is slow, to look at accelerated missiles and that Iran was already doing this.

The MDA said the test was carried out at Point Mugu’s Naval Air Warfare Center near Ventura.

“The Missile Defense Agency demonstrated the potential use of directed energy to defend against ballistic missiles when the Airborne Laser Test-bed (ALTB) successfully destroyed a boosting ballistic missile,” the agency said.

The system is being developed by ­Boeing, which uses the airframe of a modified 747 jumbo, and the MDA. Aerospace and defense contractor Northrop Grumman supplies the higher-energy laser, while Lockheed Martin is developing the beam and fire control systems.

“This was the first directed energy lethal intercept demonstration against a liquid-fuel boosting ballistic missile target from an airborne platform,” the agency added.

The system successfully intercepted a missile in August last year but did not bring it down.

Last year the defense secretary, Robert Gates, decided that the program should be scaled back, keeping research to a single plane, because of skepticism about how practical it would be.

John Pike, a defense analyst and founder of Virginia-based Global Security, said he doubted the test would change Gates’s view. “Gates seemed to believe that there was no prospect of the plane engaging targets at ranges of several hundred kilometers, and that engagements at ranges of less than 100 kilometers were not militarily interesting,” he said.

The MDA statement did not specify what the range was during the test.

Ivan Oelrich, a physicist and vice-president for strategic security programs at the Federation of American Scientists, said: “What would be interesting would be how far away it [the missile] is.” He said that to be useful, the laser would have to be able to shoot down missiles from at least 100 miles. It would also be expensive to keep one or more planes on stations waiting for a missile.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/feb/12/star-wars-laser-ballistic-missile

Halo Reach Video c/o computerandvideogames.com

http://www.edge-online.com/news/halo-reach-%E2%80%9Cbending-the-xbox-as-far-as-itll-bend%E2%80%9D

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2010/01/18/funny-pictures-your-prozac/

Jeff Bertolucci, PC World

Who among us hasn’t played Tetris? This simple yet addictive video game, the creation of Russian computer engineer Alexey Pajitnov in 1984, celebrated its 25th anniversary last June. And now it’s reached a new achievement: 100 million paid mobile phone downloads since 2005.

The ubiquitous Tetris is a puzzle game where players manipulate a random sequence of falling, four-block tetrominos to create a horizontal line of blocks without gaps. Versions for desktop computers appeared in the 1980s, and the first handheld edition for the Nintendo Game Boy debuted in 1989.

The Game Boy version proved wildly successful, selling over 35 million units, according to the official Tetris site. EA Mobile released Tetris for the iPhone and iPod touch in 2008.

EA Mobile, which licenses Tetris from Blue Planet Software, says the game is available on some 64,000 handsets in 60 countries, according to an Associated Press report.

What makes Tetris so appealing? Is it the shallow learning curve? The lack of gratuitous sex and violence? (Yeah, right.) Or perhaps there’s something strangely spiritual about the game that few of us comprehend.

This brief prayer from the Church of Tetris says it best:

Oh, Tetris, thy Glory great,
Give us today our daily blocks,
So that we may clear them.
And give us strength,
Through our gaps and mistakes,
To obtain a tetris.
Start.

Whatever hold Tetris has over us, its popularity doesn’t appear to be waning. In fact, it’s the best-selling mobile game ever. Human Tetris, anyone?

http://www.pcworld.com/article/187423/tetris_100_million_mobile_downloads_and_counting.html

BY STEPHEN CLARK

NASA says they heard no signals from the Phoenix lander this week during 30 communications passes over the probe’s icy landing site, an expected outcome because the craft was never designed to survive the dark and cold Martian winter.

The HiRISE high-resolution camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped this enhanced color image of the Phoenix landing site on Jan. 6, 2010. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

The Odyssey orbiter circling Mars listened for potential radio signals from Phoenix 30 times over three days this week. NASA announced late Thursday that Odyssey did not detect any communications from Phoenix.

“After all their tries so far, they haven’t recovered it yet,” said Peter Smith, the Phoenix mission’s principal investigator at the University of Arizona.

Officials cautioned the odds of hearing anything from Phoenix were very slim because the lander was not designed to weather the bone-chilling temperatures and months of darkness during winter on Mars’ northern polar plains.

NASA last communicated with Phoenix in November 2008, when the lander’s solar panels stopped producing enough electricity to power communications and scientific equipment.

Images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show Phoenix encased in a dry ice field. The ice is now retreating as spring arrives at the landing site.

“That picture shows the reason we’re not seeing it yet,” Smith said in an interview on Thursday.

Artist’s concept of Phoenix on the Martian surface. Credit: University of Arizona

Odyssey’s antenna will again turn toward Phoenix in February and March for more communications attempts. The sun will be higher in the sky by then, increasing the odds the lost spacecraft could receive enough sunlight for electricity.

“We think the odds are very low that Phoenix has survived the winter environment,” said Chad Edwards, chief telecommunications engineer for Mars prorgrams at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “But if it has, the available energy to it will be increasing over the next few months.”

Phoenix will be in constant sunlight by April, but NASA says the lander will still be unlikely to wake up then.

If Phoenix is alive, it would transmit UHF radio signals on two antennas for two hours each day, according to Edwards.

The probe landed on Mars in May 2008 and operated on the ground for about five months, two months longer than originally planned. Phoenix verified the existence water ice just below the surface at the landing site.

Smith said the Phoenix science team is no longer receiving funding, but researchers are seeking money from NASA research programs and government grants to restart data analysis.

“We went through it as much as we were able to do before we lost funding, Smith said.

Phoenix also returned more than 25,000 pictures from the Red Planet, ranging from panoramic stereo images to snapshots with a microscopic camera.

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1001/21phoenix/

Certain regions of striatum were larger in best players, study found.

By Randy Dotinga
HealthDay Reporter
Lifestyle

HealthDay/ScoutNews LLC

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 20 (HealthDay News) — How adeptly you play a video game may indicate how big some parts of your brain are, the authors of a new study report.

Researchers found that certain regions of the brain are larger in young people who do a better job of playing a specially designed video game.

In other words, all those people who devote their days to their Wiis and XBoxes may be packing some cerebral heat, at least when it comes to the sheer size of what’s inside their skulls.

The findings “can help us understand how individual differences contribute to cognitive differences and how we can enhance brain function by increasing the volume of these regions,” said study co-author Arthur F. Kramer, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Scientists have long wondered if big brains translate into extra intelligence, but that’s not always true in the animal kingdom. Small birds, for example, have huge brains for their physical size, but they aren’t the sharpest critters around.

In the new study, researchers turned to a decades-old video game called Space Fortress. Scientists developed the game, akin to a flight simulator and the classic Space Invaders, to study learning. According to Kramer, it takes about 20 hours for undergraduate students to learn how to become good at the game.

Using MRIs, the study authors measured the size of specific brain regions of 42 participants (aged 18 to 28) before they began playing the video game.

Then the researchers tried to find links between the sizes of different brain regions and how well people played the game. “We wanted to know if individual differences are important in how well people can learn a complex new skill over a limited period of time,” Kramer said. “We decided to look into these areas because we’ve learned an awful lot about the neural circuits that contribute to learning new skills.”

The findings are scheduled to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex.

The researchers found that certain regions of the brain, the striatum in particular, were indeed bigger in the most successful players. “Bigger is better in this case, at least among healthy tissue,” Kramer said.

The findings seem to confirm that parts of the striatum, which is nestled deep inside the cerebral cortex, determine a person’s ability to learn both motor skills and new concepts, and also to adapt to changing situations, the researchers wrote.

The size of another region, the hippocampus, wasn’t larger in those people, suggesting that the researchers are onto something regarding the importance of the other regions when it comes to learning skills.

Joe Verghese, director of the Division of Cognitive & Motor Aging at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, said the study is preliminary, but it’s “an important step.”

Verghese said it would have been interesting to know if the video game training itself changed the sizes of those brain regions or boosted their activity.

As for the future, researchers are trying to figure out how to help people boost their brain power by boosting the size of regions of the brain, Kramer said.

For now, another approach works well: Exercise. It helps make the brain larger, he said, because “as you become more physically fit, the brain changes.”

Learning new skills also seems to have the same effect, he noted.

http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/healthday/635135.html