More on the Solar Knights :

STS9’s “Solar Knights” capture solar car prize!

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/05/origins-of-life-on-earth/#ixzz0rHQBxS2s

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

In January an earthquake in Haiti killed up to 230,000 people and left more than one million homeless.

As the rainy season began, photographer Jake Price travelled to a number of the many camps that house some of those left homeless and presents his impressions of those struggling to rebuild their lives.

***SEE/HEAR AUDIO SLIDESHOW @ BBC***

WikiLeaks

No Secrets : Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency (the New Yorker)

WikiLeaks in the New York Times

‘I Can’t Believe What I’m Confessing to You’: The Wikileaks Chats (Wired)

With Rumored Manhunt for Wikileaks Founder and Arrest of Alleged Leaker of Video Showing Iraq Killings, Obama Admin Escalates Crackdown on Whistleblowers of Classified Information (Democracy Now)

The strange and consequential case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks (Salon)



Pacific Star II from Colin Rich on Vimeo.

This is the second trip of my home made high altitude weather balloon photography project, Pacific Star.

The balloon was launched at 5:37pm (PST) from Oxnard, CA and reached an altitude of 125,000 feet snapping photos and recording video along the way.

The balloon burst, the parachute deployed, and the payload floated down for 35 minutes, landing near an old olive orchard Northeast of Santa Paula.

Created by Colin Rich
facebook.com/colinrich1

For the first time, a building block of proteins — and hence of life as we know it — has been found in a comet.

That adds to the prevailing notion that many of the ingredients for the origin of life showered down on the early Earth when asteroids (interplanetary rocks orbiting the inner solar system) and comets (dirty ice balls that generally congregate in the outer solar system beyond Neptune) made impact with the planet.

In the new research, scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Md., detected the amino acid glycine in comet bits brought back in 2006 by the NASA space probe Stardust.

“It tells us more about the inventory of organics in the early solar system,” said Jamie Elsila, an astrochemist at Goddard who led the research.

Amino acids are small molecules that, when strung together into chains, form a diversity of proteins. For four decades, scientists have found a multitude of amino acids in some meteorites, the bits of asteroids that land on Earth. More recently, astronomers reported that amino acids might float throughout the cosmos, a belief resulting from their detection of the color signatures of glycine, the simplest of the amino acids, in distant interstellar gas clouds.

Some doubts remain about that claim, but if it is true, it would then not be surprising that when the clouds condense into stars and planets, the building blocks of life might be readily available there.

As for our solar system, meteorite data show that amino acids are present in its inner neighborhood, where asteroids orbit, but until now nothing has been known for certain about what might have formed farther out, where comets gather.

But on Jan. 2, 2004, the Stardust spacecraft flew through the tail of dust and gas of the comet Wild 2 (pronounced vilt two). Two years later, the probe returned to Earth, sending collected samples to the ground by parachute for scientists to analyze. Comets are thought to preserve material of the early solar system, largely unchanged for the last 4.5 billion years.

Within a few months, the Goddard scientists found glycine embedded in aluminum foil of the collecting apparatus. They had spent the time since then confirming that the glycine indeed came from the comet and not from contamination.

“It’s not necessarily particularly surprising,” Dr. Elsila said of her extraterrestrial glycine in a phone conversation Tuesday. “I would have been surprised if it wasn’t there.”

Dr. Elsila and her colleagues were able to show that the glycine from the comet had heavier quantities of the isotope carbon 13 than what occurs on Earth. They also detected a second amino acid, beta-alanine, but the quantities were too minuscule to confirm.

The findings were presented Sunday at a Washington meeting of the American Chemical Society and will be published in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science.

Donald E. Brownlee, a professor of astronomy at the University of Washington and principal investigator of the Stardust mission, said the discovery indicated that the chemical reactions that produce glycine, and presumably other amino acids, occurred throughout the early solar system.

“That means production of amino acids is fairly common,” Dr. Brownlee said.

That had not been a foregone conclusion, he said. Some scientists had suggested that the chemical reactions might have required warm and wet conditions that existed in early asteroids but not comets.

The seed vault, built to protect the world’s food supply in the event of a global crisis, is located on a remote Norwegian island in the Arctic Svalbard archipelago. It was built high enough to avoid rising sea levels, and deep enough into the mountain to be able to withstand a nuclear explosion. The vault is kept at a constant temperature of zero degrees to preserve its contents.