Birth Of Tornado

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back to life after 400 years of death

 

Bryophytes

Plants found in the Arctic and from the Little Ice Age back to life.

This plant is not typical of ordinary houseplants. This species is often called bryophytes dry all winter long last showing signs of life again after some time.

But that they could survive in a frozen glacier for 400 years is a surprise.

Researchers from the University of Alberta found that these plants originated from the Canadian Arctic glaciers, according to BBC News.

This glacier is frozen partially so scientists can see this plant. They then picked up and brought to the lab.

"When we look at the plants in detail and take it to the lab, I realized there are stalks that grow new lateral branches, and I know this is being regenerated plants in the field, and I was very surprised," said Catherine La Farge who reports their findings on BBC News.

This is not the first unique finding in the Arctic. Scientists revealed last month that they found evidence of an ancient camel there - as is now found in the Sahara desert - in Arctic Canada, 3.5 million years ago.

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Japan Tsunami

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3D Printing: Food in Space

3D Printing

NASA and a Texas company are exploring the possibility of using a "3D printer" on deep space missions in a way where the "D" would stand for dining.

NASA has awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I contract to Systems and Materials Research Consultancy of Austin, Texas to study the feasibility of using additive manufacturing, better known as 3D printing, for making food in space. Systems and Materials Research Consultancy will conduct a study for the development of a 3D printed food system for long duration space missions. Phase I SBIR proposals are very early stage concepts that may or may not mature into actual systems. This food printing technology may result in a phase II study, which still will be several years from being tested on an actual space flight.

As NASA ventures farther into space, whether redirecting an asteroid or sending astronauts to Mars, the agency will need to make improvements in life support systems, including how to feed the crew during those long deep space missions. NASA's Advanced Food Technology program is interested in developing methods that will provide food to meet safety, acceptability, variety, and nutritional stability requirements for long exploration missions, while using the least amount of spacecraft resources and crew time. The current food system wouldn't meet the nutritional needs and five-year shelf life required for a mission to Mars or other long duration missions. Because refrigeration and freezing require significant spacecraft resources, current NASA provisions consist solely of individually prepackaged shelf stable foods, processed with technologies that degrade the micronutrients in the foods.

Additionally, the current space food is selected before astronauts ever leave the ground and crew members don't have the ability to personalize recipes or really prepare foods themselves. Over long duration missions, a variety of acceptable food is critical to ensure crew members continue to eat adequate amounts of food, and consequently, get the nutrients they need to maintain their health and performance. 

NASA is funding this phase I six-month $125,000 study on 3D printing of foods to determine the capability of this technology to enable nutrient stability and provide a variety of foods from shelf stable ingredients, while minimizing crew time and waste. NASA selected this proposal because the research team, subcontractors and consultants included premier food rheology and flavor expertise that would be required for a novel product development system. The work plan for this feasibility study also was well laid out and the technology offers the potential to meet some of the food requirements using basic food components for long duration missions. 

NASA recognizes in-space and additive manufacturing offers the potential for new mission opportunities, whether "printing" food, tools or entire spacecraft. Additive manufacturing offers opportunities to get the best fit, form and delivery systems of materials for deep space travel. This's why NASA is a leading partner in the president's National Network for Manufacturing Innovation and the Advanced Manufacturing Initiative. 

3D printing is just one of the many transformation technologies that NASA is investing in to create the new knowledge and capabilities needed to enable future space missions while benefiting life here on Earth. 

Source:

www.nasa.gov

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CHARLES DARWIN

Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin (February 12, 1809 – April 19, 1882) was an English naturalist who gained great fame within his lifetime as well as long after his death for the development of evolutionary theory. Most of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory is contained in the book Origin of Species (1859).

Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire England in 1809. He was the fifth of six children of a wealthy doctor and financier and although his family was Unitarian he attended the Anglican Shrewsbury School as a boarder in 1818. By 1825 he was an apprentice doctor at the University of Edinburgh Medical school but he did not like the work involved. In his second year he joined the Plinian Society, a student natural history group that engaged in discussions of radical materialism. He assisted Robert Edmund Grant in the research of marine invertebrates' anatomy and life cycle and in 1827 presented one of his own findings of black spores to the Plinian Society. Darwin also assisted collections at the University Museum. Darwin's voracious interest in natural history angered his father and he was sent to Christ's College at Cambridge in 1828 to study to become a parson but was unqualified to take anything but the ordinary degree course. At this time he took up beetle collecting under the influence of his cousin William Duncan Fox and again was noted for his discoveries and was published in Steven's Illustrations of British Entomology. He ended up doing rather well in the ordinary courses and graduated tenth in his class in 1831.

As well as an unhindered appetite for natural history, Darwin was also a rampant reader and works that he devoured at this time were Paley's Natural Theology, Alexander von Humboldt's Personal Narrative and work by John Herschel. He was fresh from studying geology with Adam Sedgewick when his mentor John Stevens Henslow recommended him to accompany Robert FitzRoy on the HMS Beagle. On the Beagle, Darwin also read Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology and was impressed with his findings of geological formations over time. On the voyage, Darwin took many notes and gathered specimens, sending letters of report back to England. By the time he returned his fame was already underway and he began to work on the variety of specimens he brought back of which there were so many that there was cause for concern for how well they would keep before they were able to be studied. In 1837 he was elected to the Council of the Geological Society and all this time we was feverishly working on writing and rewriting his journal taken during his voyage and the specimens he procured were being studied at the Royal College of Surgeons under the supervision of Richard Owen who Darwin had met through his enthusiastic new friend Lyell.

Darwin's findings at this time began to reveal what would come to be his major contribution to evolutionary science. Not only did Owen find extinct creatures such as gigantic ground sloths, a hippopotamus-sized skull resembling a rodent and armor fragments from a creature not unlike the armadillo, but there was some consternation over a mixture of bird specimens that Darwin had brought back and were being studied by ornithologist, John Gould. Not only did Gould find that Darwin's initial impression that he collected a mixture of finches and blackbirds prove to be false, but that the birds were in fact twelve completely separate species of finches. Darwin went back over his notes and realized in conjunction with Gould that the twelve species could be allocated to different islands and that there was a geographical influence on perhaps just one species that augured the separation of development into twelve different species. It was at this point that Darwin began to develop his ideas on the transmutation of species that was not hierarchical in nature, but was reliant on species "to adapt and alter the race to changing world." This went against Lamarck's claim that lineages would progress to higher forms and of this Darwin said that "it is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another."

It was also in 1838 that he decided after deliberation (which is found in his notebooks in a pro/con type list) to marry his cousin Emma Wedgewood. She was strong in her Unitarian beliefs and was concerned that Darwin's developing doubts about spirituality and religion would separate them in the afterlife, however, on the whole, she accepted their differences. For the next fifteen years into their married life, Darwin would continue to work on his large theory, but in the meantime was taken up with writing about geology. He even enjoyed a return to marine invertebrates in 1846 after his third geological book was published, going over the barnacles that he had collected while on the Beagle. He continued to have issues with his health and in 1849 found that hydrotherapy was somewhat successful in easing his pains, but in 1851 he was much distressed to lose his daughter Annie.

The work on barnacles earned Darwin the Royal Society's Royal medal in 1853 as he was able to find "homologies" that extrapolated on some of his view that began to be stirred with the finches. Here he saw that body parts of the barnacles varied depending on the environment that surrounded them and that by evolution the creatures were able to adapt to their environment. He also located an intermediate stage in the evolution of sexes when he found in genera, tiny male specimens parasitic on hermaphrodites. this work cemented his stature as eminent biologist and he resumed his work on a theory of species in 1854. Darwin had yet to feel the pressure to publish the extent of his thoughts on evolutionary science within species, however. Lyell pointed out to him the similarities of what he was proposing in 1856 in Alfred Russel Wallace's paper on species and Darwin began a short paper to explicate his own ideas. It wasn't until 1858, however when it appeared that Wallace was very close to publishing a treatise on natural selection that Darwin struggled through his own illnesses and the death of a baby son to scarlet fever to get On the Origin of Species out by the end of 1859. All through this time it is important to note that Wallace and himself were friends with Wallace looking up to Darwin. They were to present jointly at the Linnean Society On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection, but this occurred at the time that Darwin experienced the loss of his son.

On the Origin of Species was wildly popular and heavily debated from the moment of its release in 1859. Darwin was careful to speak of common descent and not evolution, but controversy ensued all the same. Darwin continued to work and published even more after the success of his great tome broaching heredity, the animality of humans as well as psychology. He died in 1882 at Down House his last words being to his dear wife Emma, "I am not the least afraid of death - Remember what a good wife you have been to me - Tell all my children to remember how good they have been to me." Darwin had expected to be buried in the nearby st Mary's churchyard at Downe, but his colleagues had something rather different in mind. the president of the Royal Society, William Spottiswoode, arranged a state funeral for Darwin and he is buried in Westminster Abbey, perceived a national hero.

First Sketch of the theory of evolution 1842

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