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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HISTORY OF THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION

the theory of evolution

HISTORY OF the theory of evolution, by DARWIN
Charles Darwin was an English naturalist who proposed the theory of evolution and the origin of organism. This theory became the basis for modern evolutionary theory and the principle of the same lineage (Common Descent) with natural selection mechanism. Darwin's theory is an integral component biology. Darwin selection suggests that nature is a major cause of evolutionary agents. Darwin (and Wallace) concluded selection of the principles put forward by Malthus that any such populations tend geometrically increasing in number, and as a result, sooner or later be afoot clash between members of resource utilization especially when its availability is limited. Only a portion, often a small part, of the other big live. While last offspring eliminated. While immemorial man has always questioned the origin of life and himself. While the answer that question, there are three alternatives, namely the creation, transformation, or evolutionary biology. 

Definition of biological evolution varies from that in the biological aspects of the review. Some common definitions include: the evolution of living things is the changes in the natural living things slowly over a period of time and at lower, so that over time can form new species. Evolution is the change in gene frequency in a population over time. Idea of ​​biological evolution has long been a human thought. However among the various theory of evolution who ever in are proposing, seems theory of evolution by Darwin who most can be his theory. Darwin (1858) proposed two basic theories, the species living today are descended from previously lived species, and evolution occurs through natural selection. The development of the theory of evolution is very interesting to follow. Darwin argued that based on the pattern of evolution is gradual, based on the direction of adaptation is divergent and based on the results themselves are always in the starting formation of the new variant.

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WAS FOUND HEAVEN SITES GREEK WERE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS YEARS OLD

Illustration of Neanderthal Primordial man

ATHENA - Anthropologists find sites beach "paradise" Greek who once inhabited by Neanderthal humans approximately 100,000 years ago. These findings reveal a population derived from Kalamakia Middle Paleolithic cave site in Mani peninsula, southern Greece.

Neandhertal believed to be extinct about 30 thousand years ago. Researchers also believe that Greece become Neandhertal protection areas, where early humans tend to be on the site approximately 40 thousand years ago.

So, this site dubbed "paradise" for early humans who inhabit the waterfront in Mani peninsula, southern Greece. Various kind of food sources, like a hunted animal and plants found in this location.

Katerina Harvati, chief investigator Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironments, University of Tubingen said, researchers studying the remains and identify some Neanderthal who represented children, adolescents and adult men and women.

"The site is very close to the sea. During glacial time’s lower sea level, so there will likely be open coastal plains. These would be ideal habitat for wildlife species that are hunted man," said Harvati, as quoted by Discovery, Thursday (23/5 / 2013).

Several types of deer and the Pyrenean ibex hunting target Neanderthals. Researchers also revealed that these early humans to consume turtle meat, shells and manufacture tooling through the shell.

Researchers also believe that Neandhertal inhabits caves along the coast of Mani Peninsula. "Identification of bones and teeth Neandhertal represent many individuals in the cave Kalamakia that supports the emergence of the human species in southern Greece," said Eric Delson of Lehman College of the City University, New York. (FMH)

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OKLAHOMA TORNADO

Oklahoma Tornado

On May 20, 2013, NASA and NOAA satellites observed the system that generated severe weather in the south central United States and spawned the Moore, Okla., tornado.

The tornado that struck Moore on the afternoon of Monday, May 20, was an F-4 tornado on the enhanced Fujita scale, according to the National Weather Service. F-4 tornadoes have sustained winds from 166 to 200 mph. This tornado was about twice as wide as the tornado that struck Moore on May 3, 1999. Moore is located 10 miles south of Oklahoma City. 

Before, during and after the tornado, satellites provided imagery and data to forecasters. The first tornado warning was issued around 2:40 p.m. CDT (local time). By 3:01 p.m. CDT a tornado emergency was issued for Moore, and 35 minutes later at 3:36 p.m. CDT, the tornado spun down and dissipated.

NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible-light image that provided a detailed look at the supercell thunderstorm. NOAA's GOES-13 satellite provided continuously updated satellite imagery depicting the storm's movement. After the tornado, the NASA-NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite's lightning observations showed that the thunderstorm complex was still active after nightfall.

NOAA's GOES-13 satellite provided forecasters with images of the storm system every 15 minutes. One GOES-13 satellite image was captured at 19:55 UTC (2:55 p.m. CDT) as the tornado began its deadly swath. The tornado was generated near the bottom of a line of clouds resembling an exclamation mark. The GOES-13 satellite imagery from the entire day was assembled into an animation by the NASA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. 

Four minutes after the tornado dissipated (19:40 UTC / 3:40 p.m. EDT), the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite captured a visible image of the supercell thunderstorm that spawned the Moore tornado. That image was created by the NASA Goddard MODIS Rapid Response Team and Adam Voiland, NASA Earth Observatory. 

Later as the storm system continued through the region, another satellite captured an image of the storm at night that showed it was still powerful. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite aboard Suomi NPP observed lightning in a nighttime image on May 21 at 07:27 UTC (3:27 a.m. EDT). Lightning appeared as rectangular shapes in the image. The VIIRS imagery showed the city lights in the Oklahoma City area, but there was reduced light output in Moore as a result of tornado damage.

The Suomi NPP satellite carries an instrument so sensitive to low light levels that it can detect lightning in the middle of the night. The Day/Night band on Suomi NPP produces nighttime visible imagery using illumination from natural (the moon, forest fires) and man-made sources (city lights). The data were captured by the direct broadcast antenna at University of Wisconsin.

Source:
www.nasa.gov

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