The Planetary Society Celebrates 35 Years of
Voyager

post from Planetary Society Blog on 07 September 2012 03:12:22 PM. © Planetary Society Blog

The Planetary Society welcomed Dr. Ed Stone, Voyager Project Scientist for the past forty (yes, forty) years to the stage for an intimate evening discussing the past, present, and future events for the enduring Voyager spacecraft.

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http://www.planetary.org/blogs/casey-dreier/20120906-thirty-five-years-of-voyager
.html

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Video of the Week: NASA's Perpetual Ocean Proves
Data can be Art

post from Visionlearning blog on 07 September 2012 02:20:00 PM. © Visionlearning blog

video details and more

Video courtesy: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Who says data have to come in a dry table? The scientists and animators at NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) have made a career out of doing just the opposite. Using some of the same software tools employed by Pixar, they create images and animations that bring data sets to life and make them easier to understand--for both the public and the scientific community. Our video of the week, Perpetual Ocean, is one artful example of their work that recently became popular on social media. By synthesizing a numerical model and a slew of different types of data collected between 2005 and 2007, the SVS team has created a beautiful visualization of the "swirling flows of tens of thousands of ocean currents."

Enjoy. Happy Friday.

LEARN MORE
Read a Q&A with Dr. Horace Mitchell, Director of NASA Scientific Visualization Studio from Mashable

Learn how the process of visualizing data can help scientists interpret it more easily in our module Data: Using Graphs and Visual Data

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/VisionlearningBlog/~3/PYb8tGB-azg/video-of-week-na
sas-perpetual-ocean.html

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Outcrop Ahead for Opportunity!

post from Planetary Society Blog on 07 September 2012 02:12:37 PM. © Planetary Society Blog

Oppy is opening an exciting new chapter in her adventure at Cape York. Having driven down to, over and past Whim Creek, she has now explored halfway down Cape York, to a promising fin-like ridge of dark rock.

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http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/20120907-atkinson-opportunity.html

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Sharper Curve, Stronger Egg

post from Physics Buzz on 07 September 2012 12:16:59 PM. © Physics Buzz

Breaking an egg is a lot easier along its side than at its tip, and scientists can now say exactly why -- and by how much.

This new information could help bioengineers better understand the biological structure of egg-shaped cells -- and how those cells might respond to medications.

Two different research teams independently developed a way to derive how strong an egg-like object is based on its shape and what it's made of.

Egg-shaped objects, or ovoids, are common throughout nature, and can be seen in chicken eggs, the organelles of cells and the outer shells of some viruses. Up to now, finding the rigidity of any size of egg-shaped shell had to either be approximated with estimates based on the properties of spheres and cylinders, or measured directly using specialized lab equipment.

It's well known that the strongest part of an ovoid is at its narrow tip. The sharper the curve of an ovoid, the stronger and more rigid it is at its tip.

"What's new is that we kind of tried to study a class of shapes," said Dominic Vella, a mathematician at the University of Oxford, in the U.K., and lead author of one of the papers.

In the past, researchers studying the structural properties of ovoids had to approximate their calculations using equations for other shapes for simplicity's sake.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineer Arnaud Lazarus, and lead author of the second paper, said that the two teams? work could be used to infer the properties of an ovoid without breaking it open.

"Our formula is that if you apply a force on that shell, and it deforms, you can predict how thick the shell is," said Lazarus.

Conversely, a researcher can deduce the cell?s internal pressure by knowing the thickness and material properties of a cell?s outer casing. This is important when developing new treatments because if a cell is under a lot of internal pressure, it might be harder for a new medicine to seep inside, but could be more prone to bursting.

"The field of cellular mechanics is always searching for theoretical models through which to extract material parameters from experiments," said K.C. Huang, a bioengineer at Stanford University who did not work on the research. "Beyond important fundamental questions of biological material properties, these studies may also find applications in the design of thin shell geometries with specific mechanical behaviors such as differential rigidity and buckling."

Reis said that their work could also be extended to a variety of applications in addition to biomechanics.

"If you know the material properties and the geometry of your shell quite well, and if you are sure that there are not too many imperfections such as micro-cracks in it, the results predicted by our formula ? are indeed very accurate," said Pedro Reis a mechanical engineer at MIT, who worked with Lazarus.

Ironically these micro-cracks limit the formula's usefulness for chicken eggs. Though the perfect shape and seemingly smooth, eggs have a lot of tiny imperfections along the surface of their shells, and are prone to break at the weakest spots. A hard-boiled egg would be more in line with what their formula can easily predict.

"We didn't set out to understand the shape of an egg, it was just an inspiration," said Reis.

Though the two teams arrived at nearly identical conclusions, they took complementary approaches to reach them. Lazarus?s team used a 3-D printer to make molds for silicone casts of four different ovoid egg shapes. Using a precision laboratory scale, the team pressed down on the tip of the mold, and measured how much each "egg" pushed back. The team ran the experiment several times using different molds with different densities and shapes to get a general understanding of how the shape of an egg affects its strength.

"You can tune that stiffness, you can tune that rigidity by playing with the shape," said Reis.

Vella's team started from the ground up, using computer models of egg shapes. They built an idealized eggshell inside a computer-modeling program, and ran simulations based on different possible shapes, shell materials and internal pressures.

"We tried to base that more mathematically on equations that we know govern elastic shells," said Vella.

"Thin shells are everywhere," said Yves Pomeau, a mathematics professor emeritus at Arizona University. "I expect applications in biology to measure small scale elasticity, and perhaps in other fields as well."

The two papers are both set to be published in an upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters.

-Mike Lucibella, Inside Science News Service Contributor

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/physicscentral/PhysicsBuzz/~3/oAL7SZTNg4E/sharper-
curve-stronger-egg.html

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What is Manufacturing

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 07 September 2012 12:00:00 PM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

There seems to be a lot of confusion these days about manufacturing. As a guy who has worked his entire life in manufacturing, I'd like to eliminate this confusion.The word "Manufacture" is made up from two Latin Roots "manu" and "factura."(To make with hands)"Manu" means "by hand""Factu

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http://cr4.globalspec.com/blogentry/20998/What-is-Manufacturing?from_rss=1

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Sept. 7, 1948: Where the Rubber Is the Road

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 07 September 2012 11:19:31 AM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

From Wired Top Stories: A mile-long stretch of Exchange Street in Akron, Ohio, is the first in the United States to be paved with a rubber-asphalt compound. Read the whole article

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http://cr4.globalspec.com/blogentry/20997/Sept-7-1948-Where-the-Rubber-Is-the-Roa
d?from_rss=1

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Organic Food 'Not Any Healthier'

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 07 September 2012 11:03:26 AM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

From BBC News - Science & Environment: Eating organic food confers no health benefit, according to researchers at Stanford University, although it can cut your exposure to pesticides. Read the whole article

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TED: Antony Gormley: Sculpted space, within and
without - Antony Gormley (2012)

Legendary sculptor Antony Gormley riffs on space and the human form. His works explore the interior space we feel within our own bodies -- and the exterior space we feel around us, knowing that we are just dots in space and time.

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ted_space_within_and_without.html

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Cheetah robot breaks own land speed record by
10.3 mph

From The Engineer - News: The world's fastest robot has broken its own land speed record by 10.3mph. Watch the video

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http://cr4.globalspec.com/blogentry/20995/Cheetah-robot-breaks-own-land-speed-rec
ord-by-10-3-mph?from_rss=1

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Create 3D Scans of Everything

From Design News: The Kinect@Home crowdsourcing project will help engineers create a catalog of scans that will help robots recognize what's around them. Read the whole article and watch the video

Read The Full Article:
http://cr4.globalspec.com/blogentry/20994/Create-3D-Scans-of-Everything?from_rss=
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