NASA completed the latest in a series of parachute tests for its Orion spacecraft Thursday at the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground in southwestern Arizona, marking another step toward a first flight test in 2014. The test verified Orion can land safely even if one of its two drogue parachutes does not open during descent.

A mockup Orion capsule is poised to drop from a plane 25,000 feet above the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona to test the parachute design for the spacecraft that will take humans farther than they’ve ever been before – and return them to Earth at greater speeds than ever before. (Credit: NASA)

Orion will take humans farther into space than ever before, but one of the most challenging things the multipurpose vehicle will do is bring its crew home safely. Because it will return from greater distances, Orion will reenter Earth's atmosphere at speeds of more than 20,000 mph. After re-entry, the parachutes are all that will lower the capsule carrying astronauts back to Earth.

"The mockup vehicle landed safely in the desert and everything went as planned," said Chris Johnson, a NASA project manager for Orion's parachute assembly system. "We designed the parachute system so nothing will go wrong, but plan and test as though something will so we can make sure Orion is the safest vehicle ever to take humans to space."Orion will take humans farther into space than ever before, but one of the most challenging things the multipurpose vehicle will do is bring its crew home safely. Because it will return from greater distances, Orion will reenter Earth's atmosphere at speeds of more than 20,000 mph. After re-entry, the parachutes are all that will lower the capsule carrying astronauts back to Earth.

Orion uses five parachutes. Three are main parachutes measuring 116 feet wide and two are drogue parachutes measuring 23 feet wide. The 21,000-pound capsule needs only two main parachutes and one drogue. The extra two provide a backup in case one of the primary parachutes fails.

To verify Orion could land safely with only one drogue parachute, engineers dropped a spacecraft mockup from a plane 25,000 feet above the Arizona desert and simulated a failure of one of the drogues. About 30 seconds into the mockup's fall, the second drogue parachute opened and slowed the mockup down enough for the three main parachutes to take over the descent.

The next Orion parachute test is scheduled for February and will simulate a failure of one of the three main parachutes.

In 2014, an uncrewed Orion spacecraft will launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Exploration Flight Test-1. The spacecraft will travel 3,600 miles above Earth's surface. This is 15 times farther than the International Space Station's orbit and farther than any spacecraft designed to carry humans has gone in more than 40 years. The main flight objective is to test Orion's heat shield performance at speeds generated during a return from deep space.

For information about Orion, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/orion

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Baylor University researchers are one step closer to understanding the algae that causes a substantial number of fish deaths in more than 18 states.

The study was published in the December issue of Harmful Algae.Golden algae, Texas Tide orPrymnesium parvum, as it is known by its scientific name, produces toxins that can severely impact aquatic organisms. Over the past decade, golden algae blooms have been responsible for the death of tens of millions of fish in Texas reservoirs.

Bryan W. Brooks, Ph.D., professor of environmental science and biomedical studies at Baylor and director of the environmental science graduate program and the environmental health science program, and his research team found that neutral pH levels prevented the algae's bloom development and the toxicity of the algae was greatly diminished.

"Our novel findings identify that surface water pH is a very important factor influencing whether harmful algal blooms of Prymnesium parvum will even occur in a lake or reservoir," Brooks said. "In addition to better understanding the ecology and toxicology of this invasive species, this new information promises to support more sustainable environmental management of fisheries and drinking water supplies."

Brooks and his research team conducted two experiments -- one during pre-bloom period and another during bloom development -- over 21 days to gauge the effect of pH 7 and 7.5 on toxicity of golden algae. The study -- in Lake Granbury, Texas, a common site of destructive golden algae blooms -- also included untreated lake water with pH of 8.5.

"In the bloom development experiment, acute toxicity to fish was observed in the untreated lake water (pH 8.5) and in the pH 7.5 treatment level as early as Day 7. However, the pH 7 treatment levels remained free from acute toxicity throughout the 21-day study," said Krista N. Prosser, Baylor environmental science graduate student and lead author of the study.

Researchers can now better identify when and where harmful blooms may occur and develop solutions to minimize the impact of golden algae.

"Because golden algae blooms appears to originate in coves that experience lower inflows than the main reservoir stems, coves may represent more reasonable management units to create refuge habitats and potentially preempt bloom formation," Brooks said.

Golden algae can be found in the following states: Ala., Ariz., Ark., Calif., Fla., Hawaii, La., Maine, Miss., N.C., N.M., Okla., Pa., S.C., Texas, Wash., W.Va. and Wyo.

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Dec. 21, 2012 — Forget solid, liquid, and gas: there are in fact more than 500 phases of matter. In a major paper in a recent issue of Science, Perimeter Faculty member Xiao-Gang Wen reveals a modern reclassification of all of them.

To understand symmetry, imagine flying through liquid water in an impossibly tiny ship: the atoms would swirl randomly around you and every direction -- whether up, down, or sideways -- would be the same. The technical term for this is "symmetry" -- and liquids are highly symmetric. Crystal ice, another phase of water, is less symmetric. If you flew through ice in the same way, you would see the straight rows of crystalline structures passing as regularly as the girders of an unfinished skyscraper. Certain angles would give you different views. Certain paths would be blocked, others wide open. Ice has many symmetries -- every "floor" and every "room" would look the same, for instance -- but physicists would say that the high symmetry of liquid water is broken.Condensed matter physics -- the branch of physics responsible for discovering and describing most of these phases -- has traditionally classified phases by the way their fundamental building blocks -- usually atoms -- are arranged. The key is something called symmetry.

Classifying the phases of matter by describing their symmetries and where and how those symmetries break is known as the Landau paradigm. More than simply a way of arranging the phases of matter into a chart, Landau's theory is a powerful tool which both guides scientists in discovering new phases of matter and helps them grapple with the behaviours of the known phases. Physicists were so pleased with Landau's theory that for a long time they believed that all phases of matter could be described by symmetries. That's why it was such an eye-opening experience when they discovered a handful of phases that Landau couldn't describe.

Beginning in the 1980s, condensed matter researchers, including Xiao-Gang Wen -- now a faculty member at Perimeter Institute -- investigated new quantum systems where numerous ground states existed with the same symmetry. Wen pointed out that those new states contain a new kind of order: topological order. Topological order is a quantum mechanical phenomenon: it is not related to the symmetry of the ground state, but instead to the global properties of the ground state's wave function. Therefore, it transcends the Landau paradigm, which is based on classical physics concepts.

Topological order is a more general understanding of quantum phases and the transitions between them. In the new framework, the phases of matter were described not by the patterns of symmetry in the ground state, but by the patterns of a decidedly quantum property -- entanglement. When two particles are entangled, certain measurements performed on one of them immediately affect the other, no matter how far apart the particles are. The patterns of such quantum effects, unlike the patterns of the atomic positions, could not be described by their symmetries. If you were to describe a city as a topologically ordered state from the cockpit of your impossibly tiny ship, you'd no longer be describing the girders and buildings of the crystals you passed, but rather invisible connections between them -- rather like describing a city based on the information flow in its telephone system.

This more general description of matter developed by Wen and collaborators was powerful -- but there were still a few phases that didn't fit. Specifically, there were a set of short-range entangled phases that did not break the symmetry, the so-called symmetry-protected topological phases. Examples of symmetry-protected phases include some topological superconductors and topological insulators, which are of widespread immediate interest because they show promise for use in the coming first generation of quantum electronics.

In the paper featured in Science, Wen and collaborators reveal a new system which can, at last, successfully classify these symmetry-protected phases.

Using modern mathematics -- specifically group cohomology theory and group super-cohomology theory -- the researchers have constructed and classified the symmetry-protected phases in any number of dimensions and for any symmetries. Their new classification system will provide insight about these quantum phases of matter, which may in turn increase our ability to design states of matter for use in superconductors or quantum computers.

This paper is a revealing look at the intricate and fascinating world of quantum entanglement, and an important step toward a modern reclassification of all phases of matter.

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Dec. 20, 2012 — In most cities, traffic growth has outpaced road capacity, leading to increased congestion, particularly during the morning and evening commutes. In 2007, congestion on U.S. roads was responsible for 4.2 billion hours of additional travel time, as well as 2.8 billion gallons of fuel consumption and an accompanying increase in air pollution.

The color of the road segments in this image represents the number of neighborhoods that are major sources of drivers for that segment. Red is more than 100, yellow is 61 to 100, green is 41 to 60, dark blue is 1 to 20 and purple is none. (Credit: Pu Wang)

The study, published in the Dec. 20 issue of the journal Scientific Reports, demonstrates that canceling or delaying the trips of 1 percent of all drivers across a road network would reduce delays caused by congestion by only about 3 percent. But canceling the trips of 1 percent of drivers from carefully selected neighborhoods would reduce the extra travel time for all other drivers in a metropolitan area by as much as 18 percent.One way to prevent traffic tie-ups is to have fewer cars on the road by encouraging alternatives such as public transportation, carpooling, flex time and working from home. But a new study -- by researchers at MIT, Central South University in China, the University of California at Berkeley and the Austrian Institute of Technology -- incorporates data from drivers' cellphones to show that the adoption of these alternatives by a small percentage of people across a metropolitan area might not be very effective. However, if the same number of people, but from a carefully selected segment of the driving population, chooses not to drive at rush hour, this could reduce congestion significantly.

"This has an analogy in many other flows in networks," says lead research Marta González, the Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Assistant Professor in MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. "Being able to detect and then release the congestion in the most affected arteries improves the functioning of the entire coronary system."

The study, designed by González and former MIT postdoc Pu Wang, now a professor at Central South University, is the first large-scale traffic study to track travel using anonymous cellphone data rather than survey data or information obtained from U.S. Census Bureau travel diaries. Both of these are prone to error because of the time lag between gathering and releasing data and the reliance on self-reporting.

González and Wang used three weeks of cellphone data to obtain information about anonymous drivers' routes and the estimated traffic volume and speed on those routes. They inferred a driver's home neighborhood from the regularity of the route traveled and from the locations of cell towers that handled calls made between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. They combined this with information about population densities and the location and capacity of roads in the networks of two metropolitan areas -- Boston and San Francisco -- to determine which neighborhoods are the largest sources of drivers on each road segment, and which roads these drivers use to connect from home to highways and other major roadways.

In the Boston area, they found that canceling 1 percent of trips by select drivers in the Massachusetts municipalities of Everett, Marlborough, Lawrence, Lowell and Waltham would cut all drivers' additional commuting time caused by traffic congestion by 18 percent. In the San Francisco area, canceling trips by drivers from Dublin, Hayward, San Jose, San Rafael and parts of San Ramon would cut 14 percent from the travel time of other drivers.

"These percentages are averages based on a one-hour commute with additional minutes caused by congestion," Wang says. "The drivers stuck in the roads with worst congestion would see the greatest percentage of time savings, because the selective strategy can more efficiently decrease the traffic flows in congested roads."

To validate the study's methodology, Alexandre Bayen, an associate professor of systems engineering at Berkeley, and graduate student Timothy Hunter compared González and Wang's estimations of travel time based on cellphone data with their own data obtained from GPS sensors in taxis in the San Francisco area. Using GPS data, Bayen and Hunter computed taxis' speed based on travel time from one location to another; from that speed of travel, they then determined congestion levels. Their findings agreed with those of González and Wang.

Because the new methodology requires only three types of data -- population density, topological information about a road network, and cellphone data -- it can be used for almost any urban area.

"In many cities in the developing world, traffic congestion is a major problem and travel surveys don't exist," González says. "So the detailed methodology we developed for using cellphone data to accurately characterize road network use could help traffic managers control congestion and allow planners to create road networks that fit a population's needs."

González and Wang are currently studying road use in the Dominican Republic, France, Portugal, Rwanda and Spain. They treat the anonymous cellphone data with the privacy-protection measures required for the treatment of human subjects under an institutional review board.

Katja Schechtner, head of the Dynamic Transportation Systems group at the Austrian Institute of Technology and a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab, is a co-author on theScientific Reports paper with González, Wang, Bayen and Hunter.

"We are now at a time where it is less difficult to get mobility data, thanks to mobile phones and other devices, and the main problem we have is how to extract useful information from all these data," says Marc Barthelemy, a senior researcher at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at CEA in France. "[González] and her team proposed a very interesting and new idea of constructing the network of road usage, which allows us to understand where individuals on a given road are coming from, and enables us to propose new strategies for mitigating congestion. This approach will certainly open new avenues of research in the very active field of mobility in urban systems."

The study was funded by grants from the New England University Transportation Center, the NEC Corporation Fund, the Solomon Buchsbaum Research Fund and the National Natural Science Foundation of China. Wang received funding from the Shenghua Scholar Program of Central South University.

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Dec. 20, 2012 — As we hurtle toward the end of 2012, the conversation about a certain date with roots in an ancient Maya calendar has reached a fever pitch.

But the truth regarding the date, according to renowned Maya scholar and University of Texas at Austin art history professor David Stuart, is that the day is indeed meaningful -- but not in the way you might think.Dec. 21, 2012, has taken over popular culture this year: It's been the subject of movies, books and news shows. The date and its supposed prophecy that the world will come to an end has been the subject of water cooler conversations and international media attention.

"The Maya never actually predicted the end of times," says Stuart, who recently won a UNESCO medal for his lifetime contributions to the study of ancient Maya culture and archaeological sites, including UNESCO World Heritage Sites. "In the Maya scheme of time, the approaching date was thought to be the turn of an important cycle, or as they put it, the end of 13 bak'tuns. The thing is, there are many more bak'tuns still to come."

Earlier this year, Stuart was working with colleagues at the ruins of La Corona in the Guatemalan jungle, where they excavated many inscribed stones that had been part of a staircase. As the world's leading epigrapher of Maya script, Stuart was brought in to decipher the 56 glyphs carved into the stones. He discovered 200 years of political history and, to his surprise, the second known reference in Maya culture to the so-called end date of Dec. 21, 2012.

But despite the popular misconception, the date doesn't predict the end of times. Rather, it was intended to promote continuity during a time of crisis.

"The hieroglyphs emphasized seventh century history and politics, linking the reign of an ancient king to the turn of the 13th bak'tun many centuries later," Stuart explains. "The point was to associate the divine king's time on the throne to time on a cosmic scale.

"The monument commemorated a royal visit to La Corona in AD 696 by the most powerful Maya ruler of that time, a few months after his defeat by a longstanding rival in AD 695," said Stuart. "This ruler was visiting allies and allaying their fears after his defeat. It was a time of great political turmoil in the Maya region, and this king felt compelled to allude to a larger cycle of time that happens to end in 2012."

Rather than prophesy, the 2012 reference served to place this king's troubled reign and accomplishments into a larger cosmological framework. In times of crisis, the ancient Maya used their calendar to promote continuity and stability.

Assuming 21st century soothsayers are incorrect about the impending end of the world, Stuart's research will continue in 2013, starting in January with the Maya Meetings, an international conference held, alternately, in Austin and Antigua, Guatemala, each year. Stuart has served as director of the event since 2004, and this year it is a family affair. Stuart's father, George E. Stuart, will be the keynote speaker at this year's meeting, which will be in Austin.

The elder Stuart was hired as a cartographer for the National Geographic Society and remained on staff for nearly 40 years working in a variety of capacities, including as editor for archaeology of National Geographic Magazine and chairman of the Committee for Research and Exploration. He founded the Center for Maya Research in 1984.

Dec. 19, 2012 — A carbon-nanotube-coated lens that converts light to sound can focus high-pressure sound waves to finer points than ever before. The University of Michigan engineering researchers who developed the new therapeutic ultrasound approach say it could lead to an invisible knife for noninvasive surgery.

The beams that today's technology produces can be unwieldy, says Hyoung Won Baac, a research fellow at Harvard Medical School who worked on this project as a doctoral student in Guo's lab.Today's ultrasound technology enables far more than glimpses into the womb. Doctors routinely use focused sound waves to blast apart kidney stones and prostate tumors, for example. The tools work primarily by focusing sound waves tightly enough to generate heat, says Jay Guo, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, mechanical engineering, and macromolecular science and engineering. Guo is a co-author of a paper on the new technique published in the current issue of Nature's journal Scientific Reports.

"A major drawback of current strongly focused ultrasound technology is a bulky focal spot, which is on the order of several millimeters," Baac said. "A few centimeters is typical. Therefore, it can be difficult to treat tissue objects in a high-precision manner, for targeting delicate vasculature, thin tissue layer and cellular texture. We can enhance the focal accuracy 100-fold."

The team was able to concentrate high-amplitude sound waves to a speck just 75 by 400 micrometers (a micrometer is one-thousandth of a millimeter). Their beam can blast and cut with pressure, rather than heat. Guo speculates that it might be able to operate painlessly because its beam is so finely focused it could avoid nerve fibers. The device hasn't been tested in animals or humans yet, though.

"We believe this could be used as an invisible knife for noninvasive surgery," Guo said. "Nothing pokes into your body, just the ultrasound beam. And it is so tightly focused, you can disrupt individual cells."

To achieve this superfine beam, Guo's team took an optoacoustic approach that converts light from a pulsed laser to high-amplitude sound waves through a specially designed lens. The general technique has been around since Thomas Edison's time. It has advanced over the centuries, but for medical applications today, the process doesn't normally generate a sound signal strong enough to be useful.

The U-M researchers' system is unique because it performs three functions: it converts the light to sound, focuses it to a tiny spot and amplifies the sound waves. To achieve the amplification, the researchers coated their lens with a layer of carbon nanotubes and a layer of a rubbery material called polydimethylsiloxane. The carbon nanotube layer absorbs the light and generates heat from it. Then the rubbery layer, which expands when exposed to heat, drastically boosts the signal by the rapid thermal expansion.

The resulting sound waves are 10,000 times higher frequency than humans can hear. They work in tissues by creating shockwaves and microbubbles that exert pressure toward the target, which Guo envisions could be tiny cancerous tumors, artery-clogging plaques or single cells to deliver drugs. The technique might also have applications in cosmetic surgery.

In experiments, the researchers demonstrated micro ultrasonic surgery, accurately detaching a single ovarian cancer cell and blasting a hole less than 150 micrometers in an artificial kidney stone in less than a minute.

"This is just the beginning," Guo said. "This work opens a way to probe cells or tissues in much smaller scale."

The researchers will present the work at the SPIE Photonics West meeting in San Francisco. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

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Once upon a long time ago, living in ancient Egypt had its good times as well as its bad times. Some scribe wrote that during the good times, kindness within the family seemed to increase the ability of Egyptians to get the most out of life. Egyptian pyramid builders had to know about the stuff of geometry and the scribe figured out that there were two sorts of geometry. One sort was about lifeless things like stone pyramids and the other sort was about living feelings. The feeling stuff was different, because it could be used to think about ideas that went on forever, while the lifeless stuff did not. The living geometry was used to try and figure out about the feeling stuff belonging to the geometry that went on forever. They called that the sacred geometry of the immortal soul.

We know a bit about this subject because it was used to describe the meaning of ancient Egyptian paintings that were painted during the 1st Kingdom of Egypt. Egyptian writings in stone tells us that about 4000 years ago a terrible drought wiped out the 1st Kingdom and one hundred years later the people restored government back into existence. However, new rules applied, the geometry used to explain mercy, compassion and justice had to be used to put those ideas into political law. We might refer to the people doing this as belonging to a sort of mystery school. Some Greeks, including our old school friend Pythagoras, went to Egypt to learn more about the secrets of these Mystery Schools.

After a while several Greek Universities were set up to figure out more about the eternal mysteries and the ancient Greeks added more good stuff ideas to those of mercy,compassion and justice, including love, freedom, and truth. In geometry all of these ideas had to balance each other in order to correctly solve political and scientific problems. Things got more and more complicated and the universities decided to invent a science devoted to the living stuff as well as the logic about the dead stuff. Their life-science was known as the Science for Ethical Ends. The idea of good and evil was sorted out. Good was about the health of the universe and evil was figured out to be the destructive property of unformed matter inside the atom. Those Greeks were getting so clever they figured out a way to measure how much the earth weighed and how far away it was from the sun and they had figured out some pretty incredible stuff about atoms.
Pythagoras learned about The Music of the Spheres, that as the moon and stars moved about they sang a sort of song that could be heard by the atoms moving about within humans. This sort of musical communication between celestial bodies and small atoms is well known today and it's a bit like the communication force that shatters a wine glass when singing a high note. The moon could be considered to influence the female fertility cycle and therefore the celestial music might represent a science to explain a mum's love and compassion for children.

All the ethical stuff had to be put into a medical science to guide ennobling government so that humans could learn how to evolve to become good enough to act for the good of the spiritual universe. Spiritual in that ancient science referred to modern day spooky holographic stuff, anyhow, by being good, that is, by caring for the holographic environment, humans could become godlike and avoid extinction from the evil residing within the atom. This science was called The science of universal love and its teachers were called Saviours, saving humanity from atomic evil. It was taught throughout Italy during the 1st Century BCE and Cicero the Roman Historian complained that it was not suitable for Roman rule.

The science of universal love was a strange idea about a whirling force that pulled little bits of material stuff together to make worlds, which we know today was an attempt to explain the effects of gravity. As well as doing this the whirling force, called the Nous, was thought to evolve intelligence in the universe. It was thought that when the Nous had created parts of the universe it went away to create more parts, leaving humans to evolve as part of universal creation. The idea of good being for the health of the universe and that humans could, in some mysterious way, become responsible for such goodness became a source of intense study for several hundred years, until the Romans burnt down the Great Library of Alexandria and most of the ancient scrolls were lost

Attempts to rediscover the lost science became known as the Renaissance. Things got into a fine old pickle causing the greatest scientific mix up imaginable. The Knights Templar dug up some of the ancient scrolls from underneath a temple in Jerusalem and decided that Jesus Christ was the greatest teacher of the lost science, and hundreds of years later The President of America Thomas Jefferson wrote his own Bible about it. The East India Company sent Charles Darwin on a voyage to find the secrets of evolution and he came back to write that the universe was ruled by the same scientific laws that governed the running of steam engines. Albert Einstein thought that was a great idea and science became so ridiculous that it became impossible to even think scientifically about the magical importance of a young mothers love for her child.
The world had gone chasing after money, the silly science that we got stuck with, is falling into a mess causing a global economic confusion. Recently the ancient science of spiritual reality has been photographed working within the human DNA and we appear to be in danger of changing into some form of robot ruled by bits of endless governmental forms to fill out. All around the world scientists are trying to measure the loving forces that come into play between a mum and her baby. Einstein's steam engine law, considered that when all the heat in the universe gets lost into cold space all life must be destroyed, is no longer considered to be a complete picture of everything. The female loving force does not allow for that to happen at all.
The amazing thing about the new science struggling to emerge from a world of greed is that a new medical science has been created by some of the world's greatest scientists. A mother's love and compassion is so essential to future human survival that not only are the ancient mysteries being upgraded into a new science but as mothers become aware of their importance, the magical song of life can now be measured by delicate instruments. Already plans are in existence based upon a mother's lullaby to her babe, to be put into a computer game quite the opposite to the existing computer games of violence and destruction, so that the leaders of commercial gain might be able to balance their enterprises.
Professor Robert Pope

http://www.science-art.com.au Professor Robert Pope is the Director of the Science-Art Research Centre of Australia, Uki, NSW, Australia. The Center's objective is to initiate a second Renaissance in science and art, so that the current science will be balanced by a more creative and feminine science. More information is available at the Science-Art Centre website: http://www.science-art.com.au/books.html Professor Robert Pope is a recipient of the 2009 Gold Medal Laureate for Philosophy of Science, Telesio Galilei Academy of Science, London. He is an Ambassador for the Florentine New Measurement of Humanity Project, University of Florence, is listed in Marquis Who's Who of the World as an Artist-philosopher, and has received a Decree of Recognition from the American Council of the United Nations University Millennium Project, Australasian Node. He is also registered with the Oprah Winfrey Ezine Bookclub as a classified Platinum Expert Author.

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