http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HBJa279i8M#t=1151
Published on 22 Mar 2013 - a TED talk
View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/your-elusiv...

Elizabeth Gilbert (author of best-selling book 'Eat, Pray, Love' - now made into a film) muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius. It's a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.

Sep. 12, 2013 — Previously believed to be only human-made, a natural example of a functioning gear mechanism has been discovered in a common insect -- showing that evolution developed interlocking cogs long before we did.

The juvenile Issus - a plant-hopping insect found in gardens across Europe -- has hind-leg joints with curved cog-like strips of opposing 'teeth' on the upper portion of the rear legs that intermesh, rotating like mechanical gears to synchronise the animal's legs when it launches into a jump.  These gears are lost as the animal ages and are thus rather like training gears.

The finding demonstrates that gear mechanisms previously thought to be solely human-made have an evolutionary precedent. Scientists say this is the "first observation of mechanical gearing in a biological structure."

The gears in the Issus hind-leg bear remarkable engineering resemblance to those found on every bicycle and inside every car gear-box. Each gear tooth has a rounded corner at the point it connects to the gear strip; a feature identical to human-made gears such as bike gears -- essentially a shock-absorbing mechanism to stop teeth from shearing off.

The gear teeth on the opposing hind-legs lock together like those in a car gear-box, ensuring almost complete synchronicity in leg movement -- the legs always move within 30 'microseconds' of each other, with one microsecond equal to a millionth of a second.

Through a combination of anatomical analysis and high-speed video capture of normal Issus movements, scientists from the University of Cambridge have been able to reveal these functioning natural gears for the first time. The findings are reported in the latest issue of the journal Science.

You can read the complete article at : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130912143627.htm

SecretYoga  :  http://www.youtube.com/watch/?v=nWneiMwlI3I

Sept. 12, 2013:  NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft officially is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. The 36-year-old probe is about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from our sun. New and unexpected data indicate Voyager 1 has been traveling for about one year through plasma, or ionized gas, present in the space between stars. Voyager is in a transitional region immediately outside the solar bubble, where some effects from our sun are still evident. A report on the analysis of this new data, an effort led by Don Gurnett and the plasma wave science team at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, is published in Thursday's edition of the journal Science.

A new NASA video describes how Voyager 1 crossed the threshold into Interstellar Space. 

"Now that we have new key data, we believe this is mankind's historic leap into interstellar space," said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "The Voyager team needed time to analyze those observations and make sense of them. But we can now answer the question we've all been asking -- 'Are we there yet?' Yes, we are."

Voyager 1 first detected the increased pressure of interstellar space on the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles surrounding the sun that reaches far beyond the outer planets, in 2004. Scientists then ramped up their search for evidence of the spacecraft's interstellar arrival, knowing the data analysis and interpretation could take months or years.

Voyager 1 does not have a working plasma sensor, so scientists needed a different way to measure the spacecraft's plasma environment to make a definitive determination of its location. A coronal mass ejection, or a massive burst of solar wind and magnetic fields, that erupted from the sun in March 2012 provided scientists the data they needed. When this unexpected gift from the sun eventually arrived at Voyager 1's location 13 months later, in April 2013, the plasma around the spacecraft began to vibrate like a violin string. On April 9, Voyager 1's plasma wave instrument detected the movement. The pitch of the oscillations helped scientists determine the density of the plasma. The particular oscillations meant the spacecraft was bathed in plasma more than 40 times denser than what they had encountered in the outer layer of the heliosphere. Density of this sort is to be expected in interstellar space.

The plasma wave science team reviewed its data and found an earlier, fainter set of oscillations in October and November 2012. Through extrapolation of measured plasma densities from both events, the team determined Voyager 1 first entered interstellar space in August 2012.
You can read the rest of the story at : http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/12sep_voyager1/

September 13, 2013 – SPACE – Move over Comet ISON. You’ve got company.  Australian amateur astronomer Terry Lovejoy, discoverer of three previous comets, including the famous, long-tailed sungrazer C/2011 W3 (Lovejoy), just added a 4th to his tally. This new comet will add to a lineup of comets that should grace early November skies in the northern hemisphere: Comets ISON, Encke and now the new Lovejoy.

The discovery of C/2013 R1 Lovejoy was announced on Sept. 9 after two nights of photographic observations by Lovejoy with an 8-inch (20 cm) Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector. When nabbed, the comet was a faint midge of about 14.5 magnitude crossing the border between Orion and Monoceros. Subsequent observations by other amateur astronomers peg it a bit brighter at 14.0 with a small, condensed coma.

Mid to late November is also the time when Comet ISON, the current focus of much professional and amateur observation, will be at its brightest in the morning sky at around magnitude 2-3. Get ready for some busy nights at the telescope!

C/2013 R1 will whip by the sun on Christmas Day at a distance of 81 million miles (130.3 million km) and then return back to the deeps from whence it came. The charts here give you a general idea of its location and path over the next couple months. As the comet crosses into small-scope territory in early November, I’ll provide maps for you to find it. And as Stuart Atkinson noted on his website, Cumbrian Sky a great lineup should be in the northern hemisphere skies on November 9, 2013.

From the left, Comet Encke will be magnitude 6, ISON should be at about magnitude 6 or 7; then Mars, followed by the new Comet Lovejoy, which will be still very faint at around magnitude 9, topped off by a bright Jupiter. The comets will not likely be of naked eye visibility, but this should be a great chance for astrophotographer to capture this lineup! –Universe Today

European sky watchers are reporting an outburst of September epsilon Perseid meteors. "The outburst occurred around UT midnight on Sept. 9-10," says Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "During a two hour period, meteors appeared at a rate equivalent to ~50 per hour (ZHR). We did not see the outburst in North America because it was still daylight at the time." NASA all-sky cameras have been recording epsilon Perseid fireballs for days, albeit at a much lower rate than what the Europeans saw. The shower has been active since early September, allowing Cooke's team to calculate orbits for more than a dozen meteoroids:

In the diagram, orbits are color-coded by velocity. Epsilon Perseid meteoroids hit Earth's atmosphere at a "blue-green" speed of about 62 km/s (139,000 mph). According to NASA data, the debris stream appears to be rich in fireball-producing meteoroids.

The epsilon Perseid shower peaks every year around this time, but the shower is not well known because it is usually weak, producing no more than 5 meteors per hour. In 2008 the shower surprised observers with an outburst five times as active, and this year the shower may have doubled even that. Clearly, the epsilon Perseid debris stream contains some dense filaments of material that Earth usually misses but sometimes hits.

No one knows the source of the September epsilon Perseid meteor shower. Whatever the parent is, probably a comet, its orbit must be similar to the green ellipses shown in the orbit-map above. As NASA cameras continue to gather data on this shower, orbital parameters will become more accurately known, possibly leading to a match.

Meanwhile, sky watchers should be alert for more epsilon Perseids in the nights ahead. The shower is waning but still active and more outbursts are possible.               http://spaceweather.com/

September 11, 2013 – ALABAMA – A baseball-sized meteor blasted over the southeastern United States on Monday night, creating a bright streak of light, a sonic boom and a ruckus on Twitter, officials said on Tuesday. The meteor appeared at 9:18 p.m. EDT over Alabama, traveling at about 76,000 mph. It exploded 25 miles above Woodstock, Alabama, located about 30 miles from Birmingham.

“Objects of this size hit the Earth’s atmosphere on a daily basis, but this one happened near Birmingham, which is a fairly decently sized city and lot of people saw it,” Bill Cooke, head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, told Reuters. Many of the more than 180 eyewitness reports came from people attending a Mumford & Sons concert in Birmingham. “This one wasn’t at 2 in the morning, so a lot of people were out and about,” Cooke said. “I saw what I first thought was a falling star and then it turned bright green,” an observer from Anniston, Alabama, posted on the American Meteor Society website. “I saw it near Dallas Highway in Marietta, (Georgia), near the National Battlefield,” wrote another witness. “At first, I thought it was an errant firework, but it was bigger, neon green, came straight down and then disappeared.”

Scientists calculated the meteor’s orbit and determined that it came from an unknown comet. It exploded so low in Earth’s atmosphere that it triggered a sonic boom. The meteor was too bright to be picked up by NASA’s All-sky Fireball Network, which tracks meteors brighter than Venus with 12 cameras in the eastern United States and New Mexico but whose parameters are set to screen out things like lightning. The network did detect nearly two dozen other meteors on Monday night, including five that are part of the little-known annual Epsilon Perseids meteor shower, which peaks in early- to mid-September.

Sky watchers also are on the lookout for Comet ISON, which is due to pass by Mars this month and by Earth in November. The comet, which was discovered last September by a pair of amateur astronomers in Russia, is expected to pass relatively close to the sun on November 28. As it approaches, heat from the sun vaporizes ice in the comet’s body, creating a bright tail. But so far, Comet ISON hasn’t brightened as much as astronomers had predicted. “People are no longer thinking it is going to be visible in daylight,” Cooke said. – Yahoo
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2013/09/11/baseball-sized-meteor-blows-up-over-alabama-creates-sonic-boom/

Sept. 10, 2013:  We all know what comes out of the bottom of thunderstorms: bolts of lightning. Jagged columns of light plunge Earthward, heating the air to 50,000 degrees F, about five times hotter than the surface of the sun. Claps of thunder announce this process somewhere on Earth as often as 50 times a second. Have you ever wondered, though, what comes out of the top?

In recent decades researchers have discovered some strange things happening in the cloud tops.  High above ordinary lightning, exotic forms known as red sprites and blue elves shoot toward the heavens, cold cousins to the fiery bolts below. In some places jets of antimatter fly upwards, triggering the detectors on NASA's orbiting high-energy observatories.  And as often as 500 times a day, Earth briefly mimics a supernova, producing a powerful blast of gamma-rays known as a Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flash or TGF.

No know knows exactly how these phenomena are related either to each other or to the lightning down below.

A new experiment called "Firestation" onboard the ISS aims to find out.  Firestation is a package of sensors designed to explore the links between TGFs, ordinary lightning, and sprites.

A new ScienceCast video explores the strange things coming from the tops of thunderstorms.

Read the full story at : http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/10sep_firestation/

What did the first galaxies look like? To help answer this question, the Hubble Space Telescope has just finished taking the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), the deepest image of the universe ever taken in visible light. Pictured above, the XDF shows a sampling of some of the oldest galaxies ever seen, galaxies that formed just after the dark ages, 13 billion years ago, when the universe was only a few percent of its present age.

The Hubble Space Telescope’s ACS camera and the infrared channel of the WFPC3 camera took the image. Combining efforts spread over 10 years, the XDF is more sensitive, in some colors, than the original Hubble Deep Field (HDF), the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) completed in 2004, and the HUDF Infrared completed in 2009. Astronomers the world over will likely study the XDF for years to come to better understand how stars and galaxies formed in the early universe. – apod.nasa.gov/apo….