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So far, all systems go with Webb ...
Here is a time lapse film of when they tested the sunshield deployment on earth, very different conditions from in space, of course ...Webb telescope successfully unfurls its tennis court-size sunshield in space
The James Webb Space Telescope, which launched on Christmas Day, successfully completed the deployment of its 70-foot (21-meter) sunshield on Tuesday. This critical milestone is one of several that must occur for the NASA observatory to function properly in space, and having achieved it was a big relief for the Webb team.
"Unfolding Webb's sunshield in space is an incredible milestone, crucial to the success of the mission," said Gregory L. Robinson, Webb's program director at NASA Headquarters, in a statement. "Thousands of parts had to work with precision for this marvel of engineering to fully unfurl. The team has accomplished an audacious feat with the complexity of this deployment -- one of the boldest undertakings yet for Webb."
The massive five-layer sunshield will protect Webb's giant mirror and instruments from the sun's heat. Both the mirror and instruments need to be kept at a very frigid negative 370 degrees Fahrenheit (negative 188 degrees Celsius) to be able to observe the universe as designed. Each of the five sheets is as thin as a human hair and is coated with reflective metal.
When Webb launched, the sunshield was folded up to fit inside the Ariane 5 rocket that carried the telescope into space. The eight-day process to unfold and tighten the protective shield began on December 28. This included unfolding the support structure for the shield over the course of multiple days before the tensioning, or tightening, of each layer could begin.
https://us.cnn.com/2022/01/04/world/...scn/index.html
Gassho, J
STLahLeave a comment:
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Such amazing technology! I am deeply grateful to all the people involved in the project and I'm looking forward to all the beauty in the universe it will capture.
Gassho
Seibu
Sattoday/lahLeave a comment:
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Incredible stuff, even though I do not understand half of what I read, the news regarding this telescope is very exciting
! Thanks for sharing
Gassho, Tomás
SatLeave a comment:
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More on the Webb Telescope ... one of humankind's greatest achievements in history, by the way ... if it all works ...
Gassho, J'29 days on the edge:' What's next for NASA's newly launched James Webb Space Telescope
"The Webb observatory has 50 major deployments … and 178 release mechanisms to deploy those 50 parts," Webb Mission Systems Engineer Mike Menzel, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a deployment-explaining video called "29 Days on the Edge" that the agency posted in October.
"Every single one of them must work," Menzel said. "Unfolding Webb is hands-down the most complicated spacecraft activity we’ve ever done."
Webb has notched a few major milestones already. About half an hour after liftoff, for example, it deployed its solar panels and started soaking up energy from the sun. And last night, the big telescope performed a crucial 65-minute engine burn that put it on course for L2.
The following is a brief rundown of the big steps yet to come.
...
One day after launch, Webb will rotate its high-gain antenna toward Earth to further facilitate communications with its handlers. A day after that, the spacecraft will perform another engine burn to refine its trajectory toward L2. And three days after launch, the pallet holding Webb's huge sunshield — a five-layer structure designed to keep the infrared telescope and its instruments cool — will be lowered.
Each of the shield's five sheets is about the size of a tennis court when fully extended, far too wide to fit inside the payload fairing of any currently operational rocket. So the sunshield launched in a compact configuration and must be unfurled.
This is an incredibly complex process. The sunshield structure has 140 release mechanisms, 70 hinge assemblies, 400 pulleys, 90 cables and eight deployment motors, all of which have to work properly for the five layers to deploy as planned, NASA officials said in the video.
... more here:
https://www.livescience.com/nasa-jam...ope-next-steps
STLahLast edited by Jundo; 12-29-2021, 01:19 AM.Leave a comment:
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Gassho, JBaby Fitz was born without an immune system. His treatment offers hope for curing rare diseases.
Fitz Kettler was born June 21, 2019, without a functioning immune system.
Babies with his condition, commonly known as "bubble boy disease," rarely survive to toddlerhood. Normal colds and germs prove lethal.
But Fitz was seemingly cured before his first sniffle.
... He became one of the first babies anywhere to get a specific diagnosis within days of birth and an experimental therapy several months later that appears to have worked. ...
...
On Aug. 4, the family drove to the University of California, San Francisco, where they would live, again in isolation, for four months, as Fitz became the seventh child to participate in a gene therapy clinical trial for Artemis SCID.
Doctors harvested his bone marrow. In a lab, scientists corrected the genetic mistakes in his stem cells.
Fitz was cranky, but nothing worse during his two days of chemo on Aug. 27 and 28. The toxic chemicals were meant to make room for the treated cells to become established and build an immune system.
The next day, a milky white liquid containing these corrected cells was infused into his tiny body. It took all of 20 minutes. "The transplant itself feels a little anticlimactic," Christina Kettler said.
...
He is now building up a genetic database of at least 10,000 babies with rare diseases, sequencing samples from the sickest children in 70 hospitals across the U.S. and Canada. The “Tipping Point 10,000” project aims to train providers to use genetic information and build evidence to persuade payors that rapid whole genome sequencing should be standard-of-care for newborns hospitalized with diseases of unknown cause.
Getting kids out of intensive care units and home faster saves money as well as families' emotional distress. Rady has been charging $8,500 per child for the sequencing, but is trying to get the price below $5,000, Kingsmore said. In the next year or two, he hopes to develop a $200 test that could be used by hospitals around the world to rapidly diagnose 600 known rare diseases in newborns.
...
Russell Kirby, an epidemiologist specializing in maternal and child health, said he's optimistic about the idea of fetal gene therapy over the long-term, but skeptical at the moment. He and several colleagues wrote a critique of the approach earlier this year.
Even after fetal surgery, children born with spina bifida have lingering health problems, Kirby said, probably because scientists don't fully understand the condition and all its ramifications. Most research tracks whether a fetus who had heart surgery lived or died, not the long-term outcomes of children with congenital heart defects.
"We need to let our scientific and clinical trials processes play out and make sure we really understand both," said Kirby, a professor at the University of South Florida School of Public Health.
Many birth defects, probably more than half, remain poorly understood. Some genetic diseases are evident in only some of the cells, which would make it harder to diagnose and correct before birth, or even to know if they need correcting, he said.
But it's now feasible to identify genetic disorders early in pregnancy, simply by analyzing the mother's blood.
Stephen Quake, a professor of bioengineering and applied physics at Stanford University, developed the technology that finds fetal DNA in the bloodstream of the mother – a proverbial needle in a haystack.
...
The medical advance doesn't mean an end to all rare diseases. Not every one of the 7,000 known childhood conditions is caused by a simple glitch in a gene. And even if a genetic fluke can be reversed shortly after birth, the child might already have lost brain or muscle cells, requiring extensive, ongoing therapy to participate in daily activities.
In the coming years, scientists hope to end a number of illnesses that have caused misery for generations – sickle cell disease, cystic fibrosis, hemophilia, PKU and a host of lesser known conditions – at least in places and among people who can afford state-of-the-art care.
"It's a wonderful time in gene therapy," said Harvard geneticist George Church, a pioneer in genetic sequencing and editing.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ba...ses/ar-AAS9wfj
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This headline today ...
Virginia family gets keys to Habitat for Humanity's first 3D-printed home in the US
One Virginia family received the keys to their new 3D-printed home in time for Christmas.
The home is Habitat for Humanity's [a charity in the USA that builds houses for low income families] first 3D-printed home in the nation, according to a Habitat news release.
Janet V. Green, CEO of Habitat for Humanity Peninsula and Greater Williamsburg, told CNN it partnered with Alquist, a 3D printing company, earlier this year to begin the process.
The technology allowed the home to be built in just 12 hours, which saves about four weeks of construction time for a typical home.
April Stringfield purchased the home through the Habitat Homebuyer Program. She will move in with her 13-year-old son just in time for the holidays.
Gassho, J
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And on this day there way born ... the Webb Space Telescope ... following the stars ... real time travel ...
In a historic launch, the Webb Telescope blasts off into space
Heads up, Hubble — another massive space telescope just launched on a historic mission to observe the faintest, oldest objects in the universe in unprecedented detail.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a school-bus-size satellite observatory weighing about 14,000 pounds (6,350 kilograms), lifted off the launch pad on Saturday (Dec. 25) at 7:20 a.m. ET ...
Building the telescope cost nearly $10 billion — almost doubling the estimated cost since 2009, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office — and that very expensive observatory is now headed for a destination that's nearly 1 million miles (1,600,000 kilometers) from Earth.
... Six months from now, when JWST is up and running, it's going to be very, very busy. Its sensitive imaging and spectroscopy instruments will enable researchers to penetrate dense clouds of cosmic dust and collect data from objects that are so faint they are almost undetectable by other telescopes, and JWST's infrared "eyes" are the most powerful ever sent into space, said astrophysicist Jackie Faherty, a senior scientist in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
... Infrared instruments will also enable JWST to detect and look through cosmic dust clouds surrounding starburst galaxies, which are hotbeds of star formation. Other researchers will use JWST to investigate dust shrouds enveloping energetic baby stars, known as Herbig-Haro objects, and to create and test models of the explosion that created the spectacular Crab Nebula. Astrophysicists are also lining up to investigate the atmospheres of exoplanets in the Trappist-1 system about 39 light-years from Earth, and to peer backward in time to discover the earliest galaxies. Because star birth begins in cosmic dust clouds, using JWST to "follow the dust" will offer new insights into the birth of stars, planets and galaxies that make up our universe, Faherty said.
Gassho, J
STLahLast edited by Jundo; 12-25-2021, 02:47 PM.Leave a comment:
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Is it a bird? ... No, it is a dinosaur perfectly preserved in an egg ... a mere 66 million years old ... in position, like a bird, to peck out of its shell ...
Blue Cliff Record, Case 16 ...
A monk asked Kyôsei, "I, your student, am picking from inside the shell. I beg you,
Master, please peck from outside." Kyôsei said, "But will you be alive or not?" The monk
said, "If I were not alive, people would all laugh." Kyôsei said, "You useless fool!"
Gassho, J
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You always had this but just never knew ... like Buddha Nature! ...
I bet this muscle is very helpful in screen licking!
Scientists discover new part of the body
The newfound structure sits within the masseter, a key muscle for chewing.
... The newly discovered muscle layer runs from the back of the cheekbone to the anterior muscular process of the lower jaw. (S= superficial layer, D= deep layer, C= coronoid layer)
https://www.livescience.com/new-body...jaw-discovered
And, just in case we mess things up, well, the world and universe will just hit the reset button ... and it ain't in no rush... !
Gassho, JWhen humans are gone, what animals might evolve to have our smarts and skills?
Other primates, like chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus), our closest living relatives, already have opposable thumbs that they use to make tools in the wild. It's possible that if humans go extinct, these hominids might replace us hominins, à la "Planet of the Apes." There is precedent for that kind of overlap — after all, our species managed to outlast the intelligent Neanderthals during the most recent ice age 40,000 years ago, according to a 2021 study published in the journal Nature. That said, it would probably take hundreds of thousands or even millions of years of evolution for other apes to develop the ability to create and use sophisticated, human-like tools. To add context to this scenario, the common ancestor of modern humans and chimpanzees lived about 7 million years ago, Live Science previously reported.
... Despite stereotypes to the contrary, birds are very brainy: Some birds, such as crows and ravens, have intellects that rival even chimps, according to research published in 2020 in the journal Science. And some birds can use their dexterous feet and beaks to fashion wire into hooks, according to a famous 2002 study published in Science. Meanwhile, trained African grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) can learn upward of 100 words and do simple math, including understanding the concept of zero,
... octopuses would be hard-pressed to adapt to life on land. Vertebrates have iron in their blood cells, which binds to oxygen very efficiently. In contrast, octopuses and their relatives have copper-based blood cells. These molecules still bind to oxygen, but less readily, and as a result octopuses are confined to oxygen-saturated waters as opposed to thin air. "They've taken an inefficient metabolism as far as they can go," Mather said.
Because of this, Mather thinks that octopuses and other cephalopods are unlikely to make the transition to land and take over humanity's mantle as the smartest and most ecologically impactful land animal. Her money is on social insects, like ants and termites. ...
https://www.livescience.com/what-ani...l-human-niches
STLahLeave a comment:
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Okay, maybe not the most attractive product in the age of Covid and, anyway, who wants to lick their pizza off a screen?
Starved for content? New Japanese TV offers "lickable" screen
A professor in Japan has created a television that uses ten different flavor "canisters" to create different tastes.
Gassho ... and are they serious? ... J
STLahLast edited by Jundo; 12-25-2021, 11:17 AM.Leave a comment:
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We can stop off for a quick drink after touching the sun ...
Gassho, J'Significant amounts of water' found in Mars' massive version of the Grand Canyon
Mars has its own version of the Grand Canyon, and scientists have learned this dramatic feature is home to "significant amounts of water" after a discovery made by an orbiter circling the red planet, according to the European Space Agency.
The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, launched in 2016 as a joint mission between the European Space Agency and Roscosmos, detected the water in Valles Marineris on Mars. This canyon system is 10 times longer, five times deeper and 20 times wider than the Grand Canyon.
The water is located beneath the surface of the canyon system and was detected by the orbiter's FREND instrument, or Fine Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector. This instrument is able to map hydrogen in the top meter (3.28 feet) of Martian soil.
Most water on Mars is located in the planet's polar regions and remains frozen as water ice. Valles Marineris is just south of the planet's equator, where temperatures typically aren't cold enough for water ice to remain.
https://us.cnn.com/2021/12/16/world/...scn/index.html
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It has been confirmed! The sun is really HOT!
This illustration shows Parker Solar Probe reaching the outer atmosphere of the sun.NASA's Parker Solar Probe becomes first spacecraft to 'touch' the sun
Sixty years after NASA set the goal, and three years after its Parker Solar Probe launched, the spacecraft has become the first to "touch the sun." The Parker Solar Probe has successfully flown through the sun's corona, or upper atmosphere, to sample particles and our star's magnetic fields.
"Parker Solar Probe 'touching the Sun' is a monumental moment for solar science and a truly remarkable feat," said Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, in a statement.
"Not only does this milestone provide us with deeper insights into our Sun's evolution and (its) impacts on our solar system, but everything we learn about our own star also teaches us more about stars in the rest of the universe." The announcement was made at the 2021 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in New Orleans on Tuesday, and research from the solar milestone has been published in the Physical Review Letters.
The Parker Solar Probe launched in 2018 and set out to circle closer and closer to the sun. Scientists, including the spacecraft's namesake astrophysicist Eugene Parker, want to answer fundamental questions about the solar wind that streams out from the sun, flinging energetic particles across the solar system.
The sun's corona is much hotter than the actual surface of the star, and the spacecraft could provide insight about why. The corona is one million degrees Kelvin (1,800,000 degrees Fahrenheit) at its hottest point, while the surface is around 6,000 Kelvin (10,340 degrees Fahrenheit).
I look forward to the day that we land the FIRST MAN ON THE SUN!
Gassho, J
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A very Japanese story. 'Hikikomori' are young folks, usually in their 20s but sometimes older, who stay in their room, usually at their parent's house, and refuse social interaction...
Kobe to use avatar robots to ease 'hikikomori' shut-ins back into society
The municipal government of this west Japan city will introduce avatar robots to help "hikikomori" shut-ins ease back into society by giving them a way to interact with others remotely.
In the initiative, the government aims to nudge shut-ins to step outside their homes and socialize with other participants at hikikomori support facilities
The blue-eyed, 23-centimeter-tall avatar robot is called OriHime. It was developed by Tokyo-based Ory Lab Inc., which was founded in 2012. Users can remotely make conversation with people around the robot and move its arms through a smartphone or computer. The robots have been used in business for people to participate in remote conferences, and at schools for hospitalized children to attend classes virtually.
There are an estimated 6,600 or so recluses in Kobe, and the city's social welfare council and community activity centers have set up 13 places for them to spend time as they gradually transition back into society, such as by eventually getting a job. The approach at each facility is different. At one, people read comics and play games, and at another, they do light work such as bagging products. The municipal government's office for social recluse support came up with the idea of using OriHime because several shut-ins with interest in the programs have held back from joining, saying they "want to know the atmosphere first," or, "I'm anxious about meeting people I don't know."
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles...0m/0na/012000c
Gassho, J
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