Is 2012 the real end of our World...???

Some time ago, i got interested in the end of the world. Er, what i mean to say is "I wanted to know what exactly the hoax spread during my school times that 2012 would be our last year on earth". Really widespread that even NASA released some press releases that 2012 is not the end of the year. Some media people even preached that 2012 the end of the world is little bit late and is postponed towards the end of the 21st century and so on., many stories and silly humors, etc etc etc., . So I was really interested in knowing what these things are and went to one of my friend's home where I can browse about these things through the internet. At that time i was aw-struck to read from a website that stated 'periodically some angels of God came to Earth to visit us and make the things in the Earth CLEAN. They wander in some planets which are not under any solar system control. they were called "Annunakis"[link here] (about which you can even search in WIKIPEDIA and also Google it)'. After this I just went to search about other possibilities Earth could be destroyed or how end of the Earth is predicted like that and just went on....

Now come back from the past. that happened really 4 years before. Today when i was just skimming the newspaper(for sure i didn't read the paper) in the morning. suddenly i saw this article[link here]. I was just aw-struck to read this article that stated "Nomad Planets Wandering In Milky Way"(our Galaxy). Why? Just because the article which i had studied about the "Annunakis" flashed in my mind. I really got terrified to know about this. and many connections i could make. Some of them are : 1. Annunakis traveled in the wandering planets which the researchers have found now that many wandering planets are there in our Galaxy system. 2.What i really thought after getting to know about this was, "those are just a HOAX". but now i really felt that there may be some possibility of such a planet in existence with Annunakis in it.(purely its my thinking about the existence). After all these cross - thoughts, I just started to google about this. but now there are many websites illustrating these things even some hosted animation too. Right now i really think very weird about this. But i too have a doubt, "will the Earth would END at 21-12-2012..??".

Also take a look on this link[link here]. 

Biologists' Discovery May Force Revision Of Biology Textbooks

Basic biology textbooks may need a bit of revising now that biologists at UC San Diego have discovered a never-before-noticed component of our basic genetic material.

According to the textbooks, chromatin, the natural state of DNA in the cell, is made up of nucleosomes. And nucleosomes are the basic repeating unit of chromatin.

Credit: James Kadonaga, UC San Diego

When viewed by a high powered microscope, nucleosomes look like beads on a string (photo at right). But in the August 19th issue of the journal Molecular Cell, UC San Diego biologists report their discovery of a novel chromatin particle halfway between DNA and a nucleosome (photo at left). While it looks like a nucleosome, they say, it is in fact a distinct particle of its own.

"This novel particle was found as a precursor to a nucleosome," said James Kadonaga, a professor of biology at UC San Diego who headed the research team and calls the particle a "pre-nucleosome." "These findings suggest that it is necessary to reconsider what chromatin is. The pre-nucleosome is likely to be an important player in how our genetic material is duplicated and used."

The biologists say that while the pre-nucleosome may look something like a nucleosome under the microscope, biochemical tests have shown that it is in reality halfway between DNA and a nucleosome.

These pre-nucleosomes, the researchers say, are converted into nucleosomes by a motor protein that uses the energy molecule ATP (see graphic).

Credit: James Kadonaga, UC San Diego

"The discovery of pre-nucleosomes suggests that much of chromatin, which has been generally presumed to consist only of nucleosomes, may be a mixture of nucleosomes and pre-nucleosomes," said Kadonaga. "So, this discovery may be the beginning of a revolution in our understanding of what chromatin is."

"The packaging of DNA with histone proteins to form chromatin helps stabilize chromosomes and plays an important role in regulating gene activities and DNA replication," said Anthony Carter, who oversees chromatin grants at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health, which funded the research. "The discovery of a novel intermediate DNA-histone complex offers intriguing insights into the nature of chromatin and may help us better understand how it impacts these key cellular processes."

Contacts and sources:
Kim McDonald
University of California - San Diego

Airplane Plus Heat Plus Ice Equals Mystery

It's difficult to believe that an airplane flying in the tropics in the summer could have an engine fill up with ice, freeze, and shut down. But the phenomenon, known as engine core ice accretion, has happened more than 150 times since 1988 — frequently enough to attract the attention of NASA aviation safety experts, who are preparing a flight campaign in northern Australia to learn more about this occasional hazard and what can be done to prevent it.

"It's not happening in one particular type of engine and it's not happening on one particular type of airframe," said Tom Ratvasky, an icing flight research engineer at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. "The problem can be found on aircraft as big as large commercial airliners, all the way down to business-sized jet aircraft." And it has happened at altitudes up to 41,000 feet.

No accident has been attributed to the phenomenon in the 23 years since it was identified, but there have been some harrowing moments in the air. In most of the known cases, pilots have managed to restore engine power and reach their destinations without further problems. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, there have been two forced landings. For example, in 2005, both engines of a Beechcraft business jet failed at 38,000 feet above Jacksonville, Fla. The pilot glided the aircraft to an airport, dodging thunderstorms and ominous clouds on the way down. Engine core ice accretion was to blame.

Little is understood about ice crystal properties at high altitude and how ice accumulates inside engines. The engines may be toasty warm inside at such heights, but the air outside is frosty cold. The prevailing theory holds the trouble occurs around tropical storms in which strong convection currents move moist air from low altitudes to high altitudes where the local temperatures are very cold, creating high concentrations of ice crystals. But the properties of the ice crystals, such as their size and how many of them are in a given volume of air, are a mystery — one that an international research team led by NASA aims to solve.

This graphic explains what researchers believe might happen to cause engine icing. Credit: NASA/Maria Werries › Link to larger photo

The FAA has proposed new certification standards for engines that will be operated in atmospheric conditions that generate ice crystals. The rules will take effect next year, just as the NASA team heads to Darwin, Australia, aboard an aircraft specially equipped with instruments to study cloud physics during the Southern Hemisphere summer. Analyses of the Darwin flight tests and additional tests in ground-based facilities in the United States and Canada will provide the FAA the means for ensuring compliance with the new standards.

"We need to understand what that environment is out there and, even though it may be a rare case, be able to fly through those icing conditions unscathed. Or if we can find ways of detecting this condition and keep aircraft out of it, that's something we're interested in doing," Ratvasky said.

Researchers explain the phenomenon this way: Small ice crystals found in storm clouds get sucked into the core of an aircraft engine, where the pressure is high and the temperature is warm. Some of the ice melts and covers the warm engine parts with a thin film of water that traps additional ice crystals. The super-cooled water chills the engine components enough that ice can accumulate on them. If the built-up ice breaks away in chunks it can damage compressor blades, reduce the power level, or snuff out the engine altogether.

This Gulfstream 2 business jet is being outfitted over the next few months with special sensors to probe cloud properties during the High Ice Water Content experiments.

 

Image credit: NASA › Link to larger photo

For the flight research, NASA is outfitting a Gulfstream 2 business jet with more than 20 meteorological sensors that will be used to probe cloud properties, such as water content and the size and concentration of ice particles, which can lead to engine and air data sensor failures that threaten aviation safety. The data gathered will aid scientists' understanding of cloud growth processes, help them create reliable detection methods and realistic ground-based simulations, and provide a foundation for possible new aircraft design and certification standards. FAA can use what the team learns over the course of its research project to verify the range of atmospheric conditions addressed in the new standards.

The flight campaign has three primary goals:

• Characterize the range of environmental conditions in which internal engine icing can take place, with an emphasis on how much water or ice is present in a given volume of air.
• Determine how to identify geographic regions where such weather threatens and ways to detect the conditions in real time in order to develop guidance that pilots can use to avoid the hazard.
• Collect enough data to enable researchers to simulate the weather conditions for aircraft engine tests in ground facilities such as Glenn’s Propulsion Systems Laboratory.“Our plan is to study the weather patterns that lead to these conditions, not to test a particular engine configuration. We do not plan to intentionally cause our engines to have an icing event,” Ratvasky said. 

The Propulsion Systems Laboratory recently underwent upgrades to equip it for ground-based simulations of high-altitude icing conditions. Work to transform the Gulfstream 2 into a working airborne science laboratory is under way at a NASA contractor site, Flight Test Associates in Mojave, Calif., and will be completed early in 2012. Engineers will mount six instruments on each wing and additional instruments on the fuselage to measure cloud particle size and shape and water content, whether the particles are liquid or crystal, and the speed of the updraft as cloud particles form.

The research team – with representatives from FAA, The Boeing Company, the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, Environment Canada, the National Research Council of Canada, Transport Canada, Airbus and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology – will conduct trial runs during the monsoon season in February and March 2012, develop findings and address lessons learned, and then return in January through March 2013 for the primary flight campaign.

The team chose Darwin for several reasons: its ground-based weather observing systems are the best in the tropics, there will be plenty of storms to sample, there is plenty of data from previous atmospheric characterization efforts with which to compare, and the Southeast Asia region has seen a large number of engine power-loss events.
Contacts and sources:

Jim Banke
NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate

Dying Star Makes Graphene, Buckyballs, First Cosmic Detection Of Materials

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has spotted the signature of flat carbon flakes, called graphene, in space. If confirmed, this would be the first-ever cosmic detection of the material -- which is arranged like chicken wire in flat sheets that are one atom thick.

Graphene in Space: An artist's concept of graphene, buckyballs and C70 superimposed on an image of the Helix planetary nebula, a puffed-out cloud of material expelled by a dying star. 

Image credit: IAC/NASA/NOAO/ESA/STScI/NRAO

Graphene was first synthesized in a lab in 2004, and subsequent research on its unique properties garnered the Nobel Prize in 2010. It's as strong as it is thin, and conducts electricity as well as copper. Some think it's the "material of the future," with applications in computers, screens on electrical devices, solar panels and more.

Graphene in space isn't going to result in any super-fast computers, but researchers are interested in learning more about how it is created. Understanding chemical reactions involving carbon in space may hold clues to how our own carbon-based selves and other life on Earth developed.

Spitzer identified signs of the graphene in two small galaxies outside of our own, called the Magellanic Clouds, specifically in the material shed by dying stars, called planetary nebulae. The infrared-sensing telescope also spotted a related molecule, called C70, in the same region – marking the first detection of this chemical outside our galaxy.

C70 and graphene belong to the fullerene family, which includes molecules called "buckyballs," or C60. These carbon spheres contain 60 carbon atoms arranged like a soccer ball, and were named after their resemblance to the architectural domes of Buckminister Fuller. C70 molecules contain 70 carbon atoms and are longer in shape, more like a rugby ball.

Fullerenes have been found in meteorites carrying extraterrestrial gases, and water has been very recently encapsulated in buckyballs by using new laboratory techniques. These findings suggest fullerenes may have helped transport materials from space to Earth long ago, possibly helping to kick-start life.

Spitzer definitively detected both buckyballs and C70 in space for the first time in July 2010 (see http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-243). It later spotted buckyballs -- equivalent in mass to 15 full moons -- in the Small Magellanic Cloud. These latter results demonstrated that, contrary to what was previously believed, fullerenes and other complex molecules could form in hydrogen-rich environments (see http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-351).

According to astronomers, the graphene, buckyballs and C70 might be forming when shock waves generated by dying stars break apart hydrogen-containing carbon grains.

The team that performed the Spitzer research is led by Domingo Aníbal García-Hernández of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain. The results appear in the Astrophyscial Journal Letters. García-Hernández is also the lead author of the study that used Spitzer to detect heaps of buckyballs in the Small Magellanic Cloud.

Read the news release from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson athttp://www.noao.edu/news/2011/pr1103.php .

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For more information about Spitzer, visit http://spitzer.caltech.edu/andhttp://www.nasa.gov/spitzer .

 Contacts and sources:
Whitney Clavin 
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.