Friday, May 31, 2013

Oil posts slight gain, stays in $93-a-barrel range

BANGKOK (AP) ? The price of oil rose slightly Thursday as data pointing toward an improvement in the U.S. economy raised expectations of an increase in energy demand.

Benchmark oil for July delivery was up 3 cents to $93.16 per barrel at midday Bangkok time in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract fell $1.88 to close at $93.13 a barrel on Wednesday on concerns that the U.S. Federal Reserve may ease up on its stimulus measures and that the Wall Street rally was cooling.

Carl Larry of Oil Outlooks and Opinions said that he believes U.S. economic indicators make a convincing case for recovery and that energy demand will grow in step with an improving economy.

On Tuesday, reports showed that consumer confidence was stronger and home prices were rising at their fastest rate in seven years.

"I think the US economy is in a good position and looking better week by week. I also think that demand is just around the corner," Larry said in a market commentary.

Brent crude, a benchmark for many international oil varieties, rose 32 cents to $102.75 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange in London.

In other energy futures trading on Nymex:

? Wholesale gasoline dropped 0.5 cent to $2.793 a gallon.

? Heating oil rose 0.2 cent to $2.867 per gallon.

? Natural gas shed 0.4 cent to $4.175 per 1,000 cubic feet.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/oil-posts-slight-gain-stays-93-barrel-range-052630531.html

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Thursday, May 30, 2013

Asteroid has its own moon, NASA radar reveals

May 30, 2013 ? A sequence of radar images of asteroid 1998 QE2 was obtained on the evening of May 29, 2013, by NASA scientists using the 230-foot (70-meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, Calif., when the asteroid was about 3.75 million miles (6 million kilometers) from Earth, which is 15.6 lunar distances.

The radar imagery revealed that 1998 QE2 is a binary asteroid. In the near-Earth population, about 16 percent of asteroids that are about 655 feet (200 meters) or larger are binary or triple systems. Radar images suggest that the main body, or primary, is approximately 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers) in diameter and has a rotation period of less than four hours. Also revealed in the radar imagery of 1998 QE2 are several dark surface features that suggest large concavities. The preliminary estimate for the size of the asteroid's satellite, or moon, is approximately 2,000 feet (600 meters) wide. The radar collage covers a little bit more than two hours.

The radar observations were led by scientist Marina Brozovic of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

The closest approach of the asteroid occurs on May 31 at 1:59 p.m. Pacific (4:59 p.m. Eastern / 20:59 UTC), when the asteroid will get no closer than about 3.6 million miles (5.8 million kilometers), or about 15 times the distance between Earth and the moon. This is the closest approach the asteroid will make to Earth for at least the next two centuries. Asteroid 1998 QE2 was discovered on Aug. 19, 1998, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) program near Socorro, N.M.

The resolution of these initial images of 1998 QE2 is approximately 250 feet (75 meters) per pixel. Resolution is expected to increase in the coming days as more data become available. Between May 30 and June 9, radar astronomers using NASA's 230-foot-wide (70 meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, Calif., and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, will perform an extensive campaign of observations on asteroid 1998 QE2. The two telescopes have complementary imaging capabilities that will enable astronomers to learn as much as possible about the asteroid during its brief visit near Earth.

Radar is a powerful technique for studying an asteroid's size, shape, rotation state, surface features and surface roughness, and for improving the calculation of asteroid orbits. Radar measurements of asteroid distances and velocities often enable computation of asteroid orbits much further into the future than if radar observations weren't available.

NASA places a high priority on tracking asteroids and protecting our home planet from them. In fact, the United States has the most robust and productive survey and detection program for discovering near-Earth objects. To date, U.S. assets have discovered more than 98 percent of the known Near-Earth Objects.

In 2012, the Near-Earth Object budget was increased from $6 million to $20 million. Literally dozens of people are involved with some aspect of near-Earth object research across NASA and its centers. Moreover, there are many more people involved in researching and understanding the nature of asteroids and comets, including those objects that come close to Earth, plus those who are trying to find and track them in the first place.

In addition to the resources NASA puts into understanding asteroids, it also partners with other U.S. government agencies, university-based astronomers, and space science institutes across the country that are working to track and better understand these objects, often with grants, interagency transfers and other contracts from NASA.

NASA's Near-Earth Object Program at NASA Headquarters, Washington, manages and funds the search, study, and monitoring of asteroids and comets whose orbits periodically bring them close to Earth. JPL manages the Near-Earth Object Program Office for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

In 2016, NASA will launch a robotic probe to one of the most potentially hazardous of the known Near-Earth Objects. The OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid (101955) Bennu will be a pathfinder for future spacecraft designed to perform reconnaissance on any newly-discovered threatening objects. Aside from monitoring potential threats, the study of asteroids and comets enables a valuable opportunity to learn more about the origins of our solar system, the source of water on Earth, and even the origin of organic molecules that lead to the development of life.

NASA recently announced development of a first-ever mission to identify, capture and relocate an asteroid for human exploration. Using game-changing technologies this mission would mark an unprecedented technological achievement that raises the bar of what humans can do in space. Capturing and redirecting an asteroid will integrate the best of NASA's science, technology and human exploration capabilities and draw on the innovation of America's brightest scientists and engineers.

More information about asteroids and near-Earth objects is available at: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ , http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroidwatch and via Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/asteroidwatch .

More information about asteroid radar research is at: http://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/

More information about the Deep Space Network is at: http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/dsn .

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/space_time/nasa/~3/FNX-ZB-Eb6g/130530145308.htm

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Beer-pouring robot programmed to anticipate human actions

May 28, 2013 ? A robot in Cornell's Personal Robotics Lab has learned to foresee human action in order to step in and offer a helping hand, or more accurately, roll in and offer a helping claw.

Understanding when and where to pour a beer or knowing when to offer assistance opening a refrigerator door can be difficult for a robot because of the many variables it encounters while assessing the situation. A team from Cornell has created a solution.

Gazing intently with a Microsoft Kinect 3-D camera and using a database of 3D videos, the Cornell robot identifies the activities it sees, considers what uses are possible with the objects in the scene and determines how those uses fit with the activities. It then generates a set of possible continuations into the future -- such as eating, drinking, cleaning, putting away -- and finally chooses the most probable. As the action continues, the robot constantly updates and refines its predictions.

"We extract the general principles of how people behave," said Ashutosh Saxena, Cornell professor of computer science and co-author of a new study tied to the research. "Drinking coffee is a big activity, but there are several parts to it." The robot builds a "vocabulary" of such small parts that it can put together in various ways to recognize a variety of big activities, he explained.

Saxena will join Cornell graduate student Hema S. Koppula as they present their research at the International Conference of Machine Learning, June 18-21 in Atlanta, and the Robotics: Science and Systems conference June 24-28 in Berlin, Germany.

In tests, the robot made correct predictions 82 percent of the time when looking one second into the future, 71 percent correct for three seconds and 57 percent correct for 10 seconds.

"Even though humans are predictable, they are only predictable part of the time," Saxena said. "The future would be to figure out how the robot plans its action. Right now we are almost hard-coding the responses, but there should be a way for the robot to learn how to respond."

The research was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office, the Alfred E. Sloan Foundation and Microsoft.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaa_wEkCvG0

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_technology/~3/Q-WusbqRSK8/130528143623.htm

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MyCadbox Is A Dropbox For CAD Files, But With Evernote-Style Ambitions

Screen-Shot-2013-04-25-at-10.43.00MyCadbox, from Finland's CadFaster, is probably best described as a Dropbox for CAD files, but unlike its competitors it largely shuns the Web for native desktop and mobile apps that it says affords it the ability to share and view much larger 3D models and at a higher frame?rate than browser-based technologies allow. In the future, however, it has more ambitious plans to add Evernote-style search features to help unlock the huge amount of metadata potentially associated with 3D files. But first, let's drill down into MyCadbox's current offering.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/E-asLsoW3U8/

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Monday, May 6, 2013

NASA Mulls Missions for Donated Spy Satellite Telescopes

NASA is sorting through a variety of possible uses for a pair of powerful spy satellite telescopes that fell into the agency's lap last year.

In November, NASA asked scientists to suggest missions for the telescopes, which were donated by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and are comparable in size and appearance to the famous Hubble Space Telescope.

More than 60 serious proposals came flooding in, the most promising of which were presented in early February at the Study on Applications of Large Space Optics (SALSO) workshop in Huntsville, Ala. [Declassified U.S. Spy Satellites (Gallery)]

"There was a lot of excitement in the scientific community when these were transferred to NASA, because they are world-class, Hubble-class telescopes, optics," said SALSO project manager George Fletcher, of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.

The two scopes were originally?built to carry out surveillance missions under a multibillion-dollar NRO program called Future Imagery Architecture. But cost overruns and delays killed the program in 2005, and NASA announced in June 2012 that the NRO had bequeathed the instruments to the space agency.

While the telescopes' 8-foot-wide (2.4 meters) main mirrors are comparable to that of Hubble, the NRO instruments are designed to have a much wider field of view, NASA officials have said.

Seven big ideas

The ideas presented at the SALSO workshop fall into seven broad categories, meeting organizers and a technical review team determined:

  • Mars-orbiting space telescope
  • Exoplanet observatory
  • General-purpose faint object explorer
  • Advanced, Hubble-like visible light/ultraviolet telescope
  • Optical communications node in space (which would aid transmissions to and from deep-space assets)
  • Geospace dynamic observatory (which would study space weather and the sun-Earth system)
  • Research of Earth's upper atmosphere (from a spot aboard the International Space Station)

The SALSO workshop did not look into another possible use ? incorporating one of the NRO scopes into NASA's proposed $1.5 billion Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, a high-priority mission that would hunt for exoplanets and probe the mysteries of dark energy ? because a separate research team is already investigating this possibility.

The results of that second study, known as AFTA (Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets), are expected any day now. Once AFTA is done, a more serious examination of the ideas presented at SALSO can begin.

"Completion and release of the AFTA study report are planned for late April or early May," NASA officials wrote in a post-SALSO update in March. "In the meantime, possible detailed follow-on design studies of a subset of the SALSO concepts will be deferred until this integrated assessment can be carried out."

A long road to launch

Whatever missions NASA ultimately assigns to the NRO scopes, the instruments are a long way from launch.

For starters, they're far from being fully outfitted spacecraft.

"There are no instruments on these two telescopes ? just primary and secondary mirrors and the support structures," Fletcher told SPACE.com. "It's going to take a while to develop the instruments and integrate them into the structure."

Further, the funding to bring the scopes up to speed, launch them into space and maintain their operations has not been granted. And in today's tough budget climate, there's no guarantee that it will be.

"At this point, we're just hoping that Congress can see their way to give enough money to handle these, to do something useful with these, or that the [Obama] Administration can find enough money somewhere else in the budget," Fletcher said. "But with budget realities the way they are, it's a bit of a challenge."

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter?@michaeldwall?and?Google+.?Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebookor Google+. Originally published on?SPACE.com.

Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-mulls-missions-donated-spy-satellite-telescopes-111241014.html

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Friday, May 3, 2013

Evidence shows how Jamestown colonists really survived: cannibalism

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Scientists revealed Wednesday that they have found the first solid archaeological evidence that some of the earliest American colonists at Jamestown, Va., survived harsh conditions by turning to cannibalism.

For years, there have been tales of people in the first permanent English settlement in America eating dogs, cats, rats, mice, snakes and shoe leather to stave off starvation. There were also written accounts of settlers eating their own dead, but archaeologists had been skeptical of those stories.

But now, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and archaeologists from Jamestown are announcing the discovery of the bones of a 14-year-old girl that show clear signs that she was cannibalized. Evidence indicates clumsy chops to the body and head of the girl, who appears to have already been dead at the time.

Smithsonian forensic anthropologist Douglas Owsley said the human remains date back to a deadly winter known as the "starving time" in Jamestown from 1609 to 1610. Hundreds died during the period. Scientists have said the settlers likely arrived during the worst drought in 800 years, bringing severe food shortages for the 6,000 people who lived at Jamestown between 1607 and 1625.

The historical record is chilling. Early Jamestown colony leader George Percy wrote of a "world of miseries," that included digging up corpses from their graves to eat when there was nothing else. "Nothing was spared to maintain life," he wrote.

In one case, a man killed, "salted," and began eating his pregnant wife. Both Percy and Capt. John Smith, the colony's most famous leader, documented the account in their writings. The man was later executed.

"One amongst the rest did kill his wife, powdered her, and had eaten part of her before it was known, for which he was executed, as he well deserved," Smith wrote. "Now whether she was better roasted, boiled or carbonado'd (barbecued), I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of."

Archaeologists at Jamestown and Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia were somewhat skeptical of the stories of cannibalism in the past because there was no solid proof, until now.

"Historians have questioned, well did it happen or not happen?" Owsley said. "And this is very convincing evidence that it did."

Owsley has been working with William Kelso, the chief archaeologist at Jamestown, since their first burial discovery in 1996.

The remains of the 14-year-old girl, discovered in the summer of 2012, mark the fourth set of human remains uncovered at Jamestown outside of graves. Researchers named her "Jane" to give her an identity for a book explaining her story. Her remains were found in a cellar at the site that had been filled with trash, including bones of horses and other animals consumed in desperation, according to archaeologists.

The discovery detracts from the happier mythology of John Smith and Pocahontas that many associate with Jamestown. The vice president of research at nearby Colonial Williamsburg, which oversees excavations of the original Jamestown site, said visitors will have a fuller view of a terrible time in early American history.

"I think we are better served by understanding history warts and all because I think it gives us a better understanding of who we are as a people," James Horn said. "It gives us a better sense of the sacrifices that people made, ordinary people like Jane, to survive in the new world."

Owsley, who has also done forensic analysis for police investigations, analyzed the girl's remains and how the body had been dismembered, including chops to the front and back of the head. The girl was likely already dead at the time. There was a cultural stigma against killing someone for food.

But it was clear to Owsley immediately that there were signs of cannibalism.

"It is the evidence found on those bones that put it within the context of this time period," he said. "This does represent a clear case of dismemberment of the body and removing of tissues for consumption."

It was the work of someone not skilled at butchering, Owsley said. There was a sense of desperation.

The bones show a bizarre attempt to open the skull. Animal brains and facial tissue would be considered accepted and desirable meat in the 17th century, Owsley said.

The human remains will be placed on display at Jamestown to explain the horrid conditions early settlers faced. At the Smithsonian, curators will display a digital reconstruction of the girl's face in an exhibit about life at Jamestown.

Owsley said archaeology is helping to fill in details from a time when few records were kept ? details that won't likely be found in history books.

Kelso, whose archaeology team discovered the bones, said the girl's bones will be displayed to help tell a story, not to be a spectacle.

"We found her in a trash dump, unceremoniously trashed and cannibalized, and now her story can be told," Kelso said. "People will be able to empathize with the time and history and think to themselves, as I do: What would I do to stay alive?"

The Smithsonian and Jamestown archaeologists are publishing their findings in a new book but decided against waiting to announce the discovery through a peer-reviewed journal.

"In a lot of ways, I say Jane is us," Kelso said. "She brings the past to the present."

___

National Museum of Natural History: http://www.mnh.si.edu/

Jamestown Rediscovery Archaeological Project: http://historicjamestowne.org/

___

Follow Brett Zongker on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DCArtBeat

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/scholars-cannibalism-jamestown-settlement-155950852.html

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