Saturday, January 6, 2018

On Wednesday, a team of over 200 scientists led by astronomer Tabetha Boyajian announced the mysterious dim-and-recover behavior of stellar object KIC 8462852, also called “Boyajian’s Star” or “Tabby’s Star,” is likely to be due to clouds of color-warping space dust and not a planet, another star or, as some astronomers have hypothesized, a giant structure built by a distant civilization.

“If a solid, opaque object like a megastructure was passing in front of the star, it would block out light equally at all colors,” Dr. Boyajian told the press. “This is contrary to what we observe.” And, in a separate statement, “Dust is most likely the reason why the star’s light appears to dim and brighten. The new data shows that different colors of light are being blocked at different intensities. Therefore, whatever is passing between us and the star is not opaque, as would be expected from a planet or alien megastructure.”

The research team analyzed 22 months of data collected by an array of ground-based telescopes that covered many wavelengths of light. The study period lasted from March 2016 to December 2017, which included a number of decreases in brightness. The first dip started on the night of Thursday May 18. A robotic 14-inch Celestron telescope at Fairborn Observatory in Arizona watched Tabby’s star lose brightness by a dramatic 3% by Friday, confirming a prediction the star would undergo its unusual dimming events once every 750 days. Other major telescope projects and citizen astronomers confirmed these findings. That dip was complex and continued through to the following Sunday, after a brief rise in brightness over the weekend. It ended a few days later, with Boyajian and fellow astronomer and co-author of the recent paper Jason Wright discussing the phenomena with the public via Twitter: “will we have a flurry of dips to come? Stay tuned!”

“Tabby’s star[…] went through a lot of very strange dimming events that got up to 22% dimmer during the Kepler Mission, and since then we’ve been eagerly awaiting another dip. And the reason that we’ve been waiting for that is that whatever is causing the star to get dimmer will leave a spectral fingerprint behind,” said Dr. Jason Wright of Pennsylvania State University, after the May event, now a co-author of the current work. “So if it’s a lot of dust between us and the star that’s passing by, it should block more blue light than red light. If there’s gas in that dust, that gas should absorb very specific wavelengths. So we’ve been eager to see one of these changes, these dips in the star, so we can take the spectra.” He also addressed space fans at the time via Twitter: “ALERT:@tsboyajian’s star is dipping This is not a drill. Astro tweeps on telescopes in the next 48 hours: spectra please!”

The primary mission of the Kepler project monitored more than 150,000 stars with the primary goal of detecting exoplanets. If a star gets dimmer but then recovers, a planet may have passed in front of it. But Tabby’s star has shown something else. An exoplanet can cause its sun to dim by perhaps 1% and not for very long. Some of Tabby’s dips have been this mild, but others have hit 20% and lasted weeks. It also tends to recover only partially, slowly showing a net dimming over the years.

The plethora of hypotheses behind Tabby’s star has made it a favorite among space fans and both professional and amateur astronomers. Space dust was one of the many hypothesized explanations, but if that’s the reason, its origin was and remains a mystery with stargazers speculating many giant comets could be on elliptical orbits or breaking up in front of it or the dips in brightness could be aftereffects of the star consuming a planet. Some even hypothesized alien civilizations might have been harvesting the sun’s energy using a Dyson sphere. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) devoted some observation time to Tabby’s star in the fall of 2016 as part of the Breakthrough Listen project. No radio or laser pulse signals were detected.

“This latest research rules out alien megastructures, but it raises the plausibility of other phenomena being behind the dimming,” said Dr. Wright. “There are models involving circumstellar material — like exocomets, which were Boyajian’s team’s original hypothesis — which seem to be consistent with the data we have […] some astronomers favor the idea that nothing is blocking the star — that it just gets dimmer on its own — and this also is consistent with this summer’s data.”

This study is a departure from many previous works in that it relies heavily on the work of citizen scientists, volunteers who help examine the great quantities of data produced by NASA’s Kepler mission. The follow-up observations after the Kepler project were funded by a $100,000 Kickstarter to continuously monitor Tabby’s star. The unusual behavior of Tabby’s star was discovered in 2011 by volunteers for the Planet Hunters citizen science project, which was implemented to search for planets in the Kepler data.

“It’s exciting. I am so appreciative of all of the people who have contributed to this in the past year — the citizen scientists and professional astronomers. It’s quite humbling to have all of these people contributing in various ways to help figure it out,” Dr. Boyajian said in a statement.

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Monday, April 3, 2006

Sometime during the night of Friday, January 28, 15 year-old Jenissa Ryan was assaulted and raped in Alice Springs. She was discovered near the entrance of Centralian Senior Secondary College around 10:30 a.m., and a college employee called an ambulance. The attack was not reported in the mainstream national media until this week, when it became known that the victim was the great-granddaughter of famous indigenous artist Albert Namatjira.

In an article published in Saturdays Sydney Morning Herald, Russell Skelton said that the fact that she was an Aborigine, and the location of her bashing, contributed to her death. “If Jenissa had been white, she might be alive today, though the scars of her brutal bashing and rape could never be erased. If she had been bashed and left for dead almost anywhere else, assistance would have been immediate and the outrage strident.” He also said that if her connection to Namatjira had been known, Jenissa’s death would have been a “national scandal.”

Police believe that she was attacked by a number of youths her own age while walking home. She continued to walk home, but collapsed unconscious near the entrance to the college. Here, according to police, she was found by three teenage boys, who dragged her out of view and raped her.

Jenissa was still alive when found. Skelton considered it likely that people had seen her during the morning but done nothing. “That means a number of residents of middle-class Grevillea Drive probably noticed. The white T-shirt and striped tracksuit pants were hard to miss,” he said.

She was taken to Alice Springs Hospital, and then flown to Adelaide’s Women and Children’s Hospital.

On February 13 Northern Territory Police charged a 16 year-old male and a 15 year-old female with assaulting Jenissa Ryan. Three other males, aged 14, 15, and 16, have been charged with having unlawful sexual intercourse with Jenissa Ryan. Police expressed gratitude for the assistance they had received from members of the public.

Father Asaeli Raass said that both indigenous and non-indigenous people were in denial about the incident. “Yes, it’s a painful thing, but people are sweeping it under the carpet when they should be confronting the big issues Jenissa’s death raises,” he said. He also said that the initial wave of publicity “never travelled outside Alice Springs.”

Jenissa’s mother, Carmel Ryan, said that her daughter wanted to be a painter, like her great-grandfather. “She wanted to be like him, to make a creative contribution we would all be proud of. Tragically that can never be, but I feel nothing but sorrow for the parents of the children involved in this terrible event,” she said.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

As the National Disaster Coordinating Agency continues to evaluate the reports coming from regions all over the Philippines, bodies of those who drowned or perished while at sea have started to float into the shores of islands in Central Philippines. On Thursday, the Philippines Coast Guard reported that villagers recovered 124 bodies whose identities are still uncertain.

Advanced decomposition has made identification difficult for authorities and, fearing a health epidemic, all of the bodies were immediately buried in makeshift graves.

The identification of the victims has caused a stir among relatives looking for their missing family members, as forensic investigators were rendered helpless in proceeding to the scattered locations where bodies have been washing ashore.

Over 100 divers from the combined Philippines and United States naval forces have been working overtime to retrieve the bodies of passengers trapped inside the capsized MV Princess of the Stars.

Disaster management officials in the country announced that the dead from the weekend battering from Typhoon Fengshen could reach to a high of 1,300 people nation-wide. State officials reported that some 2.4 million Filipinos were affected by the disaster, putting property damage at a conservative estimate of $125 million.

Relatives of missing passengers were finally brought near the site where the ferry capsized. On board a tug boat, relatives became severely emotional after a Roman Catholic mass was celebrated to commemorate the memory of those lost at sea.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

On Friday evening, an explosion in Chengdu, China caused partial shutdown of a facility operated by Foxconn, one of the world’s biggest electronics manufacturers and a major supplier to companies like Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sony, Apple, Motorola and Nokia. Initial investigations now suggest the explosion was caused by poor ventilation, which lead to high concentrations of combustible dust.

The blast happened at 7:18PM, around the time workers change shifts. A fire followed. Emergency services had control by 7:30PM. At least three people were killed, at least fifteen injured. Foxconn halted production to investigate, saying “All operations at the affected workshop remain suspended and production at all other workshops that carry out similar processing functions have also been halted pending the results of the investigation. All other production operations in our facilities in China continue operating normally.”

On Monday, city officials gave the cause as combustible dust in the air at a polishing workshop. Hong Kong-based labor rights group Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior said they reported aluminium dust problems in March when they reviewed working conditions at Foxconn. After the explosion, they commented that workers were complaining “the ventilation of the department is poor. Workers polish the iPad cases to make them shiny. In the process, there is lots of aluminum (aluminium) dust floating in the air. Workers always breathe in aluminum dust even though they put on masks. When workers take off their cotton gloves, their hands are covered with aluminum dust.”

Foxconn responded by saying the group was trying to “capitalize on the tragic accident” and misrepresented “Foxconn’s commitment to the health and safety of our employees.”

Foxconn is responsible for making iPads and iPhones for Apple. Research group IHS iSuppli said the explosion may cause loss of production of 500,000 iPads during this quarter of the year. They said there is a larger facility in Shenzhen, but it cannot cope with re-compensating the possible loss.

Sunday, August 10, 2014

A research team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering has developed a robot that assembles itself within four minutes from a flat sheet into a 3D (three-dimensional) moving structure. Unlike previous self-folding machines, the robot can function autonomously. Science published the study this Friday.

Also on Friday, Science published a report of a Cornell University-led research team on applications of origami in design of programmable metamaterials.

As The Guardian reported, MIT–Harvard team lead author Sam Felton, a Harvard University Ph.D. candidate, priced the manufacturing equipment for the robot at $3,000, which could then make each individual unit — a 13cm-long, Transformer-like robot — for about $100.

As described by MIT researchers, the initially flat sheet consists of five layers: copper wires in the middle, then two layers of paper (above and below), and two outer layers of shape memory polymer. The embedded heating circuits activate the robot’s self-folding by heating shape memory polymers at the hinges. The parameters defining the fold pattern which determines the final 3D shape are placement of the self-folding hinges, and the order of their triggering. Felton told about creation of the pattern: “Cyclic folds are used by a software program called ‘Origamizer’ as building blocks to create any polyhedron. We’ve discovered that we can […] create a wide variety of structures and machines.”

Once the battery is attached to the design, the robot folds itself into the pre-determined shape and walks away, with motion of the four-legged robot controlled by the included microprocessor and two small motors synchronised by it. Each of the four legs has eight “linkages” which convert the force applied by a motor into motion. “It lets you transfer just one degree of freedom into a whole complicated motion, all through the mechanics of the structure,” says coauthor Erik Demaine, MIT professor of computer science and engineering.

The robot moved during testing at about 5.4 centimeters per second, over a pre-determined route, not just a straight line — without any outside assistance. Marc Lavine, a senior Science editor, suggested such robots might be put in place “through a confined passageway, such as a collapsed building, after which they would assemble into their final form autonomously”.

The folding pattern studied by the Cornell-led research team is well-known in origami as Miura-ori, whose unusual engineering properties caught the attention of team member Chris Santangelo of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Cornell University lead author Jesse Silverberg commented on potential of origami-based engineering: “When incorporated into more complex devices, these materials will enable on-the-fly transformation of mechanical function. We envision combining these origami-inspired materials with computer-controlled actuators to build more complex machines, such as hardening shells, locked-in joints and deployable barriers; and ultimately, this transformer technology will revolutionize the way we think about materials, moving them beyond their current static form, and revealing more functionality than what originally meets the eye”.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) conference, held in Canberra, Australia, received mixed messages on Tuesday about the health of Australians. While average life expectancy is 81.4 years, second only to Japan’s 82.2, and rates of cancer, heart disease and stroke are dropping, incidence of obesity, alcohol-related diseases, and sexually transmitted infections are on the increase.

The AIHW report highlighted the increasing gap between Australia’s Indigenous population and the rest of the nation. Australian Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders have a life expectancy around 17 years lower than the general populace, and in at least four states 71% of Aboriginals who died were under 65-years old, compared with 21% for the rest of the population. Indigenous Australians are reported to have higher rates of obesity, diabetes, respiratory illness, teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. People living in rural and regional areas were also found to have lower life expectancies and higher illness rates than their suburban and metropolitan counterparts.

While obesity is a growing concern in Australia, AIHW director Penny Allbon expressed skepticism over a recent report from the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute that claimed that Australia had overtaken the United States as the “fattest” nation in the world, with “over four million adult Australians […] currently obese”. Allben commented that the institute’s sample from 100 locations across the country may not be representative of the whole population. “At the moment the ABS [Australian Bureau of Statistics] is out there measuring height and weight in a population-based survey, so we don’t know the results,” Dr Allbon said. “We were just a bit concerned that the statistics that came out about us being the fattest in the world is not based on a population survey.” AIHW reported the number of Australians being obese as closer to 2.5 million, with 7.4 million being overweight.

Between 1997 and 2005, the number of general practitioners in Australia has dropped 9%, although in regional areas there has been an increase of 15%.

Based on the report, the AIHW has recommended that Australians consider lifestyle change, such as healthier eating and more exercise, to alleviate the pressure on Australia’s public health system. “In rank order, the greatest improvements can be achieved through reductions in tobacco smoking, high blood pressure, overweight/obesity, physical inactivity, high blood cholesterol and excessive alcohol consumption,” according to Dr. Allbon.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Muslim groups from across the world are criticising the organisers of the 2012 Olympics in London after it was revealed that the games will take place over Ramadan. The most holy month in the Muslim calendar, which will take place from the 21 July to 20 August in 2012, involves fasting during daylight hours and will affect an estimated 3,000 athletes.

Joanna Manning Cooper, spokesman for the games said: “We did know about it when we submitted our bid and we have always believed that we could find ways to accommodate it.” Nevertheless, this will come as a huge embarrassment for the organisers who have tried to ensure the event involve all of Britain’s ethnic communities. A quarter of the athletes who took part in the 2004 Athens Olympics were from predominantly Muslim countries and the fast will put any athletes involved at a clear disadvantage.

The chairman of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, Massoud Shadjared said: “This is going to disadvantage the athletes and alienate the Asian communities by saying they don’t matter. It’s not only going to affect the participants, it’s going to affect all the people who want to watch the games.”

The president of the National Olympic Committee of Turkey, Togay Bayalti, said: “This will be difficult for Muslim athletes. They don’t have to observe Ramadan if they are doing sport and travelling but they will have to decide whether it is important to them. “It would be nice for the friendship of the Games if they had chosen a different date.”

The games will run from the 27 July to 12 August to coincide with the British Summer holidays. The summer holidays are a six week period running from mid July to early September. During this time, public transportation is generally less crowded and it will be easier to find the 70,000 volunteers needed to keep the games running. The International Olympics Committee has specified that the games must take place between July 15 to August 31. Giselle Davies, IOC spokesperson said, “We give a window to the five bid cities. The host city selects the dates within that window.”

The organisers are working with the Muslim Council of Great Britain to find ways around the problem.

Monday, June 29, 2009

Kristina Higgins, who won the title of Miss Georgia 2009 Saturday evening at the RiverCenter for the Performing Arts in downtown Columbus, gave up the crown almost as quickly as she received it. On Sunday morning, Emily Cook, the first runner-up, received word that she would be the new Miss Georgia 2009, and would compete for the title of Miss America next January in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Higgins, 24, having previously won the title of Miss Capital City, beat out 34 other pageant hopefuls to take the crown, only to relinquish it privately the next morning. In a rather confusing twist, Higgins had competed twice before in the Miss Georgia pageant, placing second just last year.

In a prepared statement via the Miss Georgia Scholarship Pageant, Higgins said, “Due to my current job responsibilities as a middle school teacher and the responsibilities and time commitment as Miss Georgia, I have decided to not fulfill the duties of Miss Georgia 2009. I am grateful for the opportunity to have been chosen as Miss Georgia and fully support the system and wish Emily Cook the best of luck.” Higgins is a 2008 graduate from Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, receiving her degree in special education.

Cook, 22, won the title of Miss Cobb County before eventually placing second in Saturday’s competition, and now takes over duties for Higgins effective immediately. A 2005 graduate of Kennesaw Mountain High School, Cook graduated this May with a degree in music from the University of Miami, and will be pursuing a law degree this year at the University of Georgia in Athens.

Cook was scheduled to make her first televised appearance as Miss Georgia 2009 on Sunday evening, during WTVM‘s six o’clock news.

Saturday, January 29, 2011

U.S. Prohibition Party presidential candidate Jim Hedges of Thompson Township, Pennsylvania took some time to answer a few questions about the Prohibition Party and his 2012 presidential campaign.

The Prohibition Party is the third oldest existing political party in the United States, having been established in 1869. It reached its height of popularity during the late 19th century. The party heavily supported the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which banned the sale of alcohol, and resulted in the US period known as Prohibition (1919–33). It was repealed in 1933. The party has declined since this period, but has continued to nominate candidates for the presidential election.

In 2003, the party split into two factions. Preacher Gene Amondson and perennial candidate Earl Dodge were nominated for the presidency by their respective factions. After Dodge’s death in 2007, the party reunified and named Amondson as its sole presidential nominee for 2008. During the election, Amondson was interviewed by Wikinews. He died in 2009, leaving an opening in the party for 2012.

Jim Hedges is a longtime Prohibition activist, who holds the distinction of the first individual of the 21st century (and the first since 1959) to be elected to a political office under the Prohibition Party banner. In 2001, he was elected as the Thompson Township tax assessor, and was re-elected to the post in 2005. He served until his term expired in 2010. Hedges declared his intent to run for the Prohibition Party presidential nomination on February 18, 2010. This marks his first run for the presidency.