This incredible video from CNN is an amazing story of not just what modern science is capable of, but also of the inspiring spirit of this young boy who dealt with cancer and overcame the odds by choosing this rare corrective surgery.
Source: http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/health/2011/05/10/dnt.leg.attached.backwards.wjw?iref=allsearch
(CNN) — Interstellar radio has lost one of its most avid and high-profile listeners.
A collection of sophisticated radio telescopes in California that scan the heavens for extraterrestrial signals has suspended operations because of lack of funding, a spokeswoman said Monday.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute operates the Allen Telescope Array, the field of dish-like scopes some 300 miles north of San Francisco. The telescopes are a joint effort of SETI and University of California-Berkeley’s Radio Astronomy Lab and have been funded largely by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who donated more than $25 million to the project.
A state budget crisis and reduced federal dollars have choked the project of funding, said Karen Randall, SETI’s director of special projects. SETI put the Allen Telescope Array on hold a week ago — a situation publicly revealed by Franck Marchis, a principal investigator for SETI who doesn’t work on the affected project, on his blog.
SETI CEO Tom Pierson sent an April 22 letter to donors saying the telescope array had been put into “hibernation,” Randall said. Pierson’s letter stated in part, “Starting this week, the equipment is unavailable for normal observations and is being maintained in a safe state by a significantly reduced staff.”
The Allen Telescope Array will resume operations by 2013, when SETI’s new round of funding goes into effect, Randall said. The funding will cover the project until 2018, she said. In the meantime, SETI is searching for quick cash.
“Obviously, we want to be prepared for these kinds of things,” Randall said of financial obstacles. “We are working on some other angles that have bubbled up that will basically not be so vulnerable to budget cycles.”
SETI since last month has been soliciting donations to fund the Allen project. The organization says it needs to raise $5 million. Randall said she hasn’t talked with Allen about contributing additional funds.
The idea for constructing the telescope dishes was conceived in 1997. Four years later, Allen agreed to fund the venture and construction of the initial 42 antennas, located in Northern California’s rural Cascade Mountains. SETI has said it plans to eventually grow the number of dishes to 350.
The array’s 20-foot-wide telescopes, spread across several acres, don’t send messages into space but scan the cosmos for signals of extraterrestrial origin. Unlike previously existing radio telescopes, which scan the sky for limited periods, the Allen Telescope Array probed the universe round the clock.
Each of the 42 dishes is aimed at a different area of the sky, collecting reams of data that are being studied by computers for unusual patterns.
SETI also is known for its most visible staffer, astronomer Jill Tarter, current director of the Center for SETI Research and the real-life inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in the 1997 movie “Contact.”
“At SETI, our current mission isn’t to broadcast, but rather to listen to the universe and see what else might be out there,” she wrote last year in a commentary published on CNN.com. “If signals are detected, everyone on the planet should have a voice in deciding how to respond.”
The cutbacks at SETI and UC-Berkeley come at a challenging time for space exploration. NASA is ending its space shuttle program, and the agency faces “tough fiscal times, tough choices” for its 2012 budget, Administrator Charles Bolden said recently.
California’s fiscal woes have also reduced the amount of money available to the Berkeley lab, Randall said.
The lab will lay off four people due to a lack of operating revenue, leaving two support staff, said Robert Sanders, a spokesman for the school. The group begun shrinking in 2009 when Berkeley laid off several staff, he said.
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/04/25/seti/index.html?hpt=C2
By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
Last updated at 1:17 PM on 12th April 2011
Colonies of aliens living on planets within black holes may not be as far-fetched as it sounds.
Some black holes have a complex internal structure that allows photons, particles and planets to orbit a central singularity, according to one scientist.
A singularity is the region in a black hole when space and time become infinite.
However, Professor Vyacheslav Dokuchaev claims that at the centre of certain black holes, and under the right conditions, is an area where the fabric of space and time exists once more.
If a charged and rotating black hole is large enough, he said, it can weaken the tidal forces that are beyond the event horizon – the point where nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole’s gravity.
Scientists have long known that photons can survive in stable periodic orbits inside such charged black holes.
However Professor Dokuchaev said that a black hole’s inner Cauchy horizon – the area where dimensions switch back again – can also accommodate particles and even planets.
These manage to exist without ever getting sucked all the way into the black hole and would derive light and heat from the orbiting protons and from the energy of the central singularity, he said.
He said: ‘This internal black hole domain, hidden by two horizons from the whole external universe, is indeed a suitable place.
‘Advanced civilisations may live safely inside the supermassive black holes in the galactic nuclei without being visible from the outside.’
Earlier this year scientists discovered that the black hole M87 is almost twice as big as had previously been thought.
It was observed in M87, by far the largest and most distant galaxy some 50million light years away.
Researchers said that it may have formed as a result of hundreds of smaller black holes merging into one at some point in the past.
As a point of comparison, the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way is 1,000 times smaller.
More than 100,000 people are waiting for organ transplants in the U.S. alone; every day 18 of them die. Not only are healthy organs in short supply, but donor and patient also have to be closely matched, or the patient’s immune system may reject the transplant. A new kind of solution is incubating in medical labs: “bioartificial” organs grown from the patient’s own cells. Thirty people have received lab-grown bladders already, and other engineered organs are in the pipeline.
The bladder technique was developed by Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Researchers take healthy cells from a patient’s diseased bladder, cause them to multiply profusely in petri dishes, then apply them to a balloon-shaped scaffold made partly of collagen, the protein found in cartilage. Muscle cells go on the outside, urothelial cells (which line the urinary tract) on the inside. “It’s like baking a layer cake,” says Atala. “You’re layering the cells one layer at a time, spreading these toppings.” The bladder-to-be is then incubated at body temperature until the cells form functioning tissue. The whole process takes six to eight weeks.
Solid organs with lots of blood vessels, such as kidneys or livers, are harder to grow than hollow ones like bladders. But Atala’s group—which is working on 22 organs and tissues, including ears—recently made a functioning piece of human liver. One tool they use is similar to an ink-jet printer; it “prints” different types of cells and the organ scaffold one layer at a time.
Other labs are also racing to make bioartificial organs. A jawbone has sprouted at Columbia University and a lung at Yale. At the University of Minnesota, Doris Taylor has fabricated a beating rat heart, growing cells from one rat on a scaffold she made from the heart of another by washing off its own cells. And at the University of Michigan, H. David Humes has created an artificial kidney from cells seeded onto a synthetic scaffold. The cell-phone-size kidney has passed tests on sheep—it’s not yet implantable, but it’s wearable, unlike a dialysis machine, and it does more than filter toxins from blood. It also makes hormones and performs other kidney functions.
I remember hearing about a similar scenario back in the mid-90’s, when some scientists also announced evidence of fossilized bacteria in a meteorite. How did the scientific community react to their claims then, and how will they react to this one now?
*******************************************************************
Aliens exist, and we have proof.
That astonishingly awesome claim comes from Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, who says he has found conclusive evidence of alien life — fossils of bacteria found in an extremely rare class of meteorite called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites. (There are only nine such meteorites on planet Earth.) Hoover’s findings were published late Friday night in the Journal of Cosmology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
“I interpret it as indicating that life is more broadly distributed than restricted strictly to the planet earth,” Hoover, who has spent more than 10 years studying meteorites around the world, told FoxNews.com in an interview. “This field of study has just barely been touched — because quite frankly, a great many scientist would say that this is impossible.”
Hoover discovered the fossils by breaking apart the CI1 meteorite, and analyzing the exposed rock with a scanning-electron microscope and a field emission electron-scanning microscope, which allowed him to detect any fossil remains. What he found were fossils of micro-organisms (pictured below), many of which he says are strikingly similar to those found on our own planet (pictured above).
“The exciting thing is that they are in many cases recognizable and can be associated very closely with the generic species here on earth,” said Hoover. Some of the fossils, however, are quite odd. “There are some that are just very strange and don’t look like anything that I’ve been able to identify, and I’ve shown them to many other experts that have also come up stumped.”
In order to satisfy the inevitable hoard of buzz-killing skeptics, Hoover’s study and evidence were made available to his peers in the scientific community in advance of the study’s publications, giving them a chance to thoroughly dissect his findings. Comments from those who decided to sift through the evidence will be published online, alongside the study.
“Given the controversial nature of his discovery, we have invited 100 experts and have issued a general invitation to over 5,000 scientists from the scientific community to review the paper and to offer their critical analysis,” writes Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics scientist Dr. Rudy Schild, who serves as the Journal of Cosmology’s editor-in-chief. “No other paper in the history of science has undergone such a thorough vetting, and never before in the history of science has the scientific community been given the opportunity to critically analyze an important research paper before it is published.”
Needless to say, if Hoover’s conclusions are found to be accurate, the implications for human life will be staggering. Here’s hoping that he’s right.
Read the rest of this story (and it’s predictable update) here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/digitaltrends/nasascientistfindsevidenceofalienlife
