International Space Station update: Astronauts' activity schedule

In this photo posted to Twitter by Flight Engineer Reid Wiseman, he and ESA Flight Engineer Alexander Gerst (right) pose for a picture with spacesuits in the International Space Station's Quest airlock.

Image Credit: NASA

Reid Wiseman and Alexander Gerst spent much of the afternoon in the Quest airlock to configure tools and equipment for a pair of U.S. spacewalks set for October.

Wiseman and Gerst are slated to suit up for the first Expedition 41 spacewalk on Oct. 7, while newly-arrived astronaut Barry Wilmore will join Wiseman for the Oct. 15 excursion.

Among the tasks scheduled for the spacewalks will be the transfer of a previously uninstalled pump module from its temporary stowage location to the External Stowage Platform-2 and the replacement of a failed sequential shunt unit designed to regulate current from one of the station’s solar arrays.

A Russian spacewalk on Oct. 21 is also on the schedule.

Throughout the day, Wiseman participated in the Pro K study, as nutritionists monitor how dietary changes may affect the loss of bone density that occurs during long-duration spaceflight.

Wiseman has been following a prescribed diet and testing his urine samples to provide data for the researchers.

On Sunday, Wiseman and Gerst will once again review the procedures for grappling Dragon and conduct a final Canadarm2 robotics training session with the Robotics Onboard Trainer.

Over the weekend, all three crew members also will take care of weekly housekeeping chores and continue their daily 2.5-hour exercise sessions to stay fit.

Research Shows Buildings can Amplify Tsunami Waves

Scientists have re-created an entire city in miniature to model the way a tsunami crashes onshore, and have found that buildings can exacerbate the oncoming rush of water.

The findings, presented Monday at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, show that even if a city overall tolerates the force of a massive tsunami well, certain buildings and alleyways may concentrate the rushing wave, generating 80 to 100 times the speed of waves without buildings.

"When we think about designing structures or planning for city layouts, understanding the real, detailed tsunami flow through the built environment is very, very important," said study co-author Patrick Lynett, a civil engineer at the University of Southern California.

In the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2011 Japanese tsunami, building engineers routinely noticed that there were often two buildings standing, while one located in the middle behind it was completely washed away.

Lynett and his colleagues wanted to understand why that occurred. Such an understanding is particularly important given studies showing that the West Coast is more vulnerable to tsunamis than previously thought.

To understand how a tsunami affects a coastal city, Lynett and his team created a 1:50 scale replica of the entire town of Seaside, Ore. They then flooded it with a simulated tsunami 7.9 inches (20 centimeters) high and 5 seconds long that mimicked the relative height and duration of a 200-year tsunami, Lynett reported.

As water broke over the tiny buildings, the team noticed that certain hotspots concentrated the effects of the waves. A U-shaped hotel on the coast seemed to focus the impact of the tsunami, Lynett said. "We call it the tsunami-catcher because it really amplifies the speed," he said.

Buildings arranged in a T, with two buildings in front of the wave and another building behind them, also seemed to emphasise the wave's impact.

Overall, some parts of the city experienced 80 to 100 times the maximum speed and momentum that would occur without any buildings in the landscape, Lynett added. In addition to T-shaped building layouts, narrow alleyways could lead to much higher speeds of rushing water.

The findings suggest that engineers designing seaside buildings should use some of the same modeling approaches used to assess wind forces on skyscrapers, Lynett said.

"This is an argument here that, when we're trying to understand the fluid flow through a city, shadowing and concentration of fluid flow through the built environment becomes very important."

Tungurahua Volcano, Ecuador, puts on a fiery show

Tungurahua volcano has been very active the past days, with continous ash emissions and occasional large explosions producing ash plumes up to 32,000 ft (ca. 10 km) altitude.

IG scientists on an overflight observed strombolian activity from the inner summit crater which has filled with fresh lava.

At the time of updating, tremor and seismic activity have decreased somewhat.

X-rays illuminate the interior of the Moon

This is an image of an artificial moon rock sample, measuring about half a millimeter across, made with an electron microprobe at ambient temperature after the experiment with X-rays. 

The fragmentation of the sample occurred when it was extracted from the small diamond cylinder in which it had been melted under high pressure and temperature. Credit: Nature.

Contrary to Earth, our Moon has no active volcanoes, and the traces of its past volcanic activity date from billions of years ago.

This is surprising, because recent Moonquake data suggest that there is plenty of liquid magma deep within the Moon because part of the rocks residing there are thought to be molten.

Scientists have now identified a likely reason for this peaceful surface life: the hot, molten rock in the Moon's deep interior could be so dense that it is simply too heavy to rise to the surface like a bubble in water.

For their experiments, the scientists produced microscopic copies of moon rock collected by the Apollo missions and melted them at the extremely high pressures and temperatures found inside the Moon.

They then measured their densities with powerful X-rays. The results are published in the Journal Nature Geosciences on 19 February 2012.

The team was led by Mirjam van Kan Parker and Wim van Westrenen from VU University Amsterdam and comprised scientists from the Universities of Paris 6/CNRS, Lyon 1/CNRS, Edinburgh, and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble.

Five decades after the Apollo missions, the formation and geological history of the Moon still hold many secrets. The astronauts not only returned 380 kg of Moon rocks to Earth but also placed many scientific instruments on the lunar surface.

Last year, NASA scientists published a new model for the make-up of the interior of the Moon, using Moonquake data from these Apollo-era seismometers. Renee Weber and her colleagues claim that the deepest parts of the lunar mantle, bordering on the small metallic core, are partially molten, by up to 30 per cent.

In the Earth, such bodies of magma tend to move towards the surface leading to volcanic eruptions. If the deep interior of the Moon contains so much magma, why don't we see spectacular volcanic eruptions at its surface?

Read more of this article here

Massage has beneficial Affect on Gene Activity: Reduces Muscle Inflammation

New research conducted at the McMaster University in Canada has indicated that apart from inducing deep relaxation, kneading sore muscles after a vigorous exercise can help them recover faster.

The scientists, through a series of experiments on young test subjects, have found that massaging sore muscles affected the activity of certain genes in the body. These genes were found to have a direct impact on reduced inflammation of the concerned muscles.

In fact, this "gene-stimulating" technique reportedly has the same effect on sore muscles that drugs like Ibuprofen or Aspirin boast.

Researchers tested 11 young men, who were asked to undergo "exhaustive aerobic exercises" by riding stationary bikes till they reached the point of exhaustion.

After the completion of the sessions, each subject was given a Swedish-style massage on one of their legs.

The other received no such treatment and was treated as point of comparison. The test subjects then underwent gene-profiling techniques in order to check the chemical changes in their muscle cells.

The first impact was that it switched on the genes involved in inflammation reduction. In addition, it activated the genes that promote the creation of mitochondria - structures that are the energy factories inside cells. The fitter a muscle cell is the more mitochondria it tends to have.

Electric sense in dolphins: cetaceans with a seventh sense

One extra sense isn't quite enough for Guiana dolphins. In addition to echolocation, they can sense the electric fields of their prey – the first time this has been seen in true mammals.

Wolf Hanke at the University of Rostock in Germany and colleagues were intrigued by thermal images showing intense physiological activity in the pits on the upper jaw of the dolphins, Sotalia guianensis. 

Fish, some amphibians and primitive egg-laying mammals such as the duck-billed platypus use similar pits to pick up electric fields generated by nearby animals.

By examining the structures in a dead dolphin, and training a live one to respond to an electric field comparable to that generated by a fish, the team showed that dolphins also have electro-sensory perception.

"Electroreception is good for sensing prey over short distances, where echolocation isn't so effective," says Hanke. Other species of dolphin, and even whales, may be similarly gifted, he says.

"Most people don't realise that whales also feed on the floor of the ocean, so it is possible that they also use electrosensing."

Hanke points out that the electro-sensory organs are derived from whiskers in ancestral animals. These mechanoreceptor organs, like the hair cells in the human ear, mechanically transmit the stimulus of touch or sound waves. 

The adaptation in Guiana dolphins is fairly new, Hanke says, and he suspects that "it is relatively easy to evolve, to change mechanoreceptor organs into electroreceptors".

Indeed, the finding suggests nearly all mammals have at least the potential to evolve it too.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2011.1127

Icelandic Tectonic Plate activity may trigger Katla

As scientists and air travellers alike keep a close eye on Iceland's ongoing volcanic eruption, some reports suggest that another, much bigger, volcano could stir in the near future.

Katla is Eyjafjallajokull's more active neighbour, and scientists believe that there may be a link between the two volcanoes.

This link has not been physically proven, explains Magnus Tumi Gudmundsson a geophysicist from the University of Iceland.

A circumstantial, historical connection "is putting people's eyes on Katla," he says.

"We know of four Eyjafjallajokull eruptions in the past [dating back to AD 500] and in three out of these four cases, there has been a Katla eruption either at the same time or shortly after.

"By shortly, I mean timescales of months to a year. "We consider that the probability of Katla erupting in the near future has increased since Eyjafjallajokull went."

Kathryn Goodenough from the British Geological Survey points out that, as yet, there is no physical explanation for this apparent link.

It seems that when Eyjafjallajokull goes off, Katla tends to follow. "Scientists don't yet know what the connection is," she says. "But we know there are fissures running between the two volcanoes. And they're quite close to each other.

"They're also being subjected to the same tectonic forces. So the chances are that if magma can find a pathway to rise beneath one of them, it can find its way to rise beneath the other."

Researchers do know that the two volcanoes have separate magma chambers, but many suspect that these chambers are physically linked in some way, deep beneath the surface of the Earth.

"But this is only speculative," says Dr Goodenough. "We don't have geophysical evidence that makes that clear."

Monserrat Volcano activity shown from ISS Astronauts viewpoint

Image above: This picture of the active Soufriere Hills volcano on Montserrat Island was photographed on Oct. 11, 2009 by the Expedition 21 crew members onboard the International Space Station. Photo credit: NASA

The Expedition 21 crew focused Thursday on science and maintenance as the latest unpiloted Russian cargo craft makes its way to the International Space Station.

Sun Spot activity renewed

Two sunspots are visible on our star’s face for the first time in more than a year, possibly ending an unexpected lull in solar activity.

Solar flares rise and fall on an 11-year cycle, so scientists thought sunspot activity would pick up some time in 2008. It didn’t. And this year has been quiet, too. No sunspots have been visible on the sun for 80 percent of the days this year.

Sunspot activity is correlated with the total amount of energy we receive from the sun. If the sun’s activity were to change remarkably, it would have an influence on global climate. So, in the context of climate change, the fact that the current solar minimum has been the longest and deepest in more than a century has been of special interest.

In May, a big sunspot seemed to augur a return to normal, but it faded away and sunspotless days returned. The latest activity might not mark the end of the solar minimum, however. People have been counting sunspots since Galileo first observed one in the early 17th century. Through the 28 documented cycles, stretching from 1745 to today, some variation in cycle length has been observed.

That’s why NASA’s former chief sunspot watcher, Michael Kaiser, told us earlier this year that the minimum was “not out of the extreme ordinary.”