kelly ripa reno wildfire reno wildfire osu osu reno news shonn greene
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Real Estate in Tampa FL News You Can Use! | Tampa Home ...
Starting an environmentally friendly routine ?t home ?s ? goal f?r many families wh? ?r? concerned w?th reducing th??r environmental footprints.
Th? age-old reduce, reuse ?nd recycle mantra ?s ? great start, but what many don?t kn?w ?s th?t th?r? ?r? ?ls? simple changes y?u c?n m?k? t? your health ?nd beauty routine th?t c?n m?k? ? b?g impact ?n th? environment. Wh? knew ?green? preening c?uld b? s? easy?
In addition t? finding beauty products y?u love, y?u c?n ?ls? support brands th?t promote sustainable living. As Earth Day approaches ?n April 22, consider making changes ?n your health ?nd beauty care routines th?t w?ll h?lp reduce your environmental footprint. It?s th? small changes y?u m?k? th?t c?n lead t? ? b?g environmental impact.
Here ?r? s?m? ideas t? h?lp y?u g?t started:
* Products th?t ?r? offered ?n bulk - Buying products y?u frequently use ? like skin lotion ?r tooth paste ? ?n bulk sizes h?lps y?u t? reduce th? amount ?f packaging th?t ends up being thrown away ?r recycled. And n?t ?nly does ?t h?lp y?u reduce your waste, but buying bulk ?ls? tends t? provide better savings. Wh?n shopping, however, ?nly bulk up ?n items y?u use frequently ?n?ugh, s? y?u won?t end up w?th ?ny spoiling b?f?r? y?u use ?t.
* Packaging that?s ? l?ttl? easier ?n th? environment - Purchasing products packaged ?n ? sustainable manner ?s ? good w?y t? h?lp reduce your environmental footprint. F?r example, th? Pantene Nature Fusion collection ?s packaged ?n renewable, sugarcane-based plastic, helping t? reduce greenhouse gases ?n th? atmosphere. Both th? Pantene Nature Fusion shampoo ?nd conditioner bottles reduce th? use ?f fossil fuels by m?r? th?n 70 percent versus traditional petroleum-based plastics, ?nd release up t? 170 percent fewer greenhouse gasses ?n th? manufacturing process. But y?u don?t h?v? t? sacrifice beauty t? b? eco-savvy ? th? collection combines Pro-V science w?th naturally derived cassia t? g?v? your hair healthy strength ?nd shine.
* Eco-conscious manufacturers - Many manufacturers ?f health ?nd beauty products ?r? becoming m?r? conscience ?f h?w th?s? products ?r? developed. F?r example, s?m? companies like P&G ?r? developing techniques t? reuse waste ?n th? manufacturing process, combining reduce, reuse ?nd recycle into ?n? process. And many companies ?r? adopting environmentally friendly manufacturing processes th?t h?lp t? reduce energy usage ?nd use m?r? renewable energy sources.
* Good th?ngs ?n smaller packages - Concentrated ?r condensed products allow y?u t? purchase smaller quantities ?n smaller packages, resulting ?n less waste th?t end up being recycled ?r thrown away. In addition, concentrated products ?n smaller packages allow m?r? packages per truck shipment, helping t? reduce th? environmental impact ?n th? shipping industry. Th?s h?lps t? reduce th? product?s footprint b?f?r? ?t ?v?n reaches th? store shelves. D? ? l?ttl? research t? s?? ?f your makeup ?r lotion brands offer ? concentrated option, s? y?u c?n put th? mantra, ?a l?ttl? dab w?ll d? y?u,? t? good use.
F?r m?r? tips ?n h?w y?u c?n add m?r? sustainable practices t? your health ?nd beauty routine, ?r ?th?r areas ?f your home, visit www.facebook.com/futurefriendly. You?ll discover h?w small changes ?n your daily preening c?n really m?k? ? significant change.
Real Estate in Tampa FL News You Can Use!
Real Estate in Tampa FL News is updated every week with a variety of information that you can use in and around your home. In the Real Estate in Tampa FL News, we share home decorating and home improvement ideas, as well as information on senior living, green living and much more.
Make Real Estate in Tampa FL News your exclusive source for information and ideas related to your home!
Plus, be sure to check out all of the wonderful local Tampa FL businesses here on our website! They stand ready to serve you today! ?Please don?t forget to mention to the merchant that you saw their information here in the Real Estate in Tampa FL News.
Here are some other real estate related sites that we found for you to browse. Thanks for visiting Tampa Real Estate News.
Downtown Tampa Real Estate - Grand Central Condo Tour - YouTube
Bargains: The sunny side of the housing slump - MSN Real Estate
Tampa Real Estate - Tampa Homes - Tampa Bay Real Estate ... - Flickr
Foreclosures weigh on metro home prices - USATODAY.com
Florence Villa Tampa Florida real estate and housing - CNNMoney ...
pearl harbor day discovery channel lea michele michael buble michael buble teddy roosevelt rita hayworth
Solar energy panels Intended for Residences Save Cash Electrical ...
?
Electric power has become very costly so we are created aware about it just through contrasting our previous electric powered invoice with this regarding A few years in the past. Usually the latest electro-mechanical invoice has grown through 25-30%.
?
But you are we without doubt electricity is vital to the lifestyles? A few research workers requested themselves if we may live without electrical power as well as soon after several weeks involving exploration, physical exercises explained ?no, currently electrical energy is vital to the lives. We can not live without it?.
?
As opposed to seeking a brand-new style of strength we will consider lowering the power bills. Very often this specific probability just isn?t considered, however might not an individual be happy if you had to repay to 60-70% below your current genuine monthly bill for all your up coming electrical bills?
?
There?s a way that this tends to occur and it is not so difficult at all to relieve the electrical monthly bill through 60-70%: you just need to develop your personal electrical energy through solar panels. These kind of solar power panels acquire whilst the power from the sun?s rays along with switch it in to electric power that any of us will use daily within our normal existence. Usually, many individuals which first listen to solar panels imagine that they don?t benefit from it?s make use of because they just operate in sun-drenched parts. It?s not so, the truth is with all the brand-new creation involving solar panel systems they?re able to make a wide range of electrical power even during wet climate.
?
Using solar power systems, we can easily save up in order to 60-70% with electricity bills since all of us employ your own energy (the action made by your screen).
?
That this solar panels work is super easy: initial they must be fitted (most of the time, on the roof of residences) and they consider the energy through the sun rays involving sunshine as well as transform this through solar energy to help electrical power.
?
The particular solar power panels are a great strategy to protecting our world by smog in addition to smog. The issue is the fact solar energy panels are certainly not published plenty of, along with too many people do not have any idea what they are.
storage auctions les miles les miles beyonce dance for you video beyonce dance for you video asu football asu football
AVG Internet Security Business Edition 2012 12.0 Build 2126a4890 ...
Please Donation By Clicking Below.
Thank You Very Much !!!
All Software Full Version with Serial Keygen Patch and Crack
AVG Internet Security provides multiple layers of protection for everything you do online, which means you don?t have to worry about identity theft, viruses, or visiting harmful sites.
AVG Protective Cloud Technology and AVG Community Protection Network are included, meaning we collect the latest threat information and share it with our community to make sure you receive the best protection.
? Shop and bank online safely with AVG Firewall, AVG Anti-Spam & AVG Identity Protection
? Stay safe on social networks with AVG Social Networking Protection
? Surf and search with confidence with AVG LinkScanner?s real-time protection
Key features of AVG Internet Security 2012:
Shop and bank with confidence:
? AVG Firewall and AVG Identity Protection
? Provides additional layers of security, keeping your private information safe at all times.
Block spammers and scammers:
? AVG Anti-Spam
? Marks all unwanted emails as spam, protecting you from online scams and keeping your inbox clutter free.
Download, share files and chat safely:
? AVG Online Shield
? Download and share files without risk of infection. You are also protected when you exchange files through online chat.
Stay protected on social networks:
? AVG Social Networking Protection
? Automatically checks links exchanged on Facebook and MySpace in real time so that you and your friends stay safe.
Support and assistance:
? Our technical experts are available to help with any problems you might have.
Scan smarter and faster:
? AVG Smart Scanning works while you play
? AVG Smart Scanning works while you're away and runs in low-priority mode when you return.
Keep tough threats out:
? AVG Protective Cloud Technology, AVG Community Protection Network and AVG Anti-Spyware
? AVG's core layers of protection make sure you can't receive or unintentionally spread even the toughest threats.
Download AVG Internet Security Business Edition 2012 12.0 Build 2126a4890 Full Serial Key
Download From Filefactory
Download AVG Internet Security Business Edition 2012 12.0 Build 2126a4890 Full Serial Key
Homepage : AVG Internet Security Business Edition 2012 12.0 Build 2126a4890
Visit Other My Site :
? Backlink
? Tutorial Blog
Source: http://www.ulil-amri.com/2012/03/avg-internet-security-business-edition.html
acapulco mexico hines ward alex smith alex smith robert deniro mexico news the talented mr ripley
Defend Christmas ? Blog Archive ? Christmas Amongst Words ...
Christmas is a controversial word. Or so says the New York City Department of Education.
Divorce. Dinosaurs, Birthdays. Religion. Halloween. Christmas. Television. These are a few of the 50-plus words and references the New York City Department of Education is hoping to ban from the city?s standardized tests.
The banned word list was made public ? and attracted considerable criticism ? when the city?s education department recently released this year?s ?request for proposal? The request for proposal is sent to test publishers around the country trying to get the job of revamping math and English tests for the City of New York.
The Department of Education?s says that avoiding sensitive words on tests is nothing new, and that New York City is not the only locale to do so. California avoids the use of the word ?weed? on tests and Florida avoids the phrases that use ?Hurricane? or ?Wildfires,? according to a statement by the New York City Department of Education.
In its request for proposal, the NYC Department of Education explained it wanted to avoid certain words if the ?the topic is controversial among the adult population and might not be acceptable in a state-mandated testing situation; the topic has been overused in standardized tests or textbooks and is thus overly familiar and/or boring to students; the topic appears biased against (or toward) some group of people.?
Matthew Mittenthal, a spokesman for the NYC Department of Education, said this is the fifth year they have created such a list. He said such topics ?could evoke unpleasant emotions in the students.?
?Dinosaurs? evoking unpleasant emotions? The New York Post speculated that the ?dinosaurs? could ?call to mind evolution, which might upset fundamentalists.?
But what the tabloid failed to realize is that those ?fundamentalists? who oppose evolution on religious grounds, believe wholeheartedly in dinosaurs.
Young Earth creationists, or Biblical creationists as they prefer to be called, often point to dinosaurs in making their arguments. They say dinosaurs and humans roamed Earth together, citing legends of dragons and say the fossil record shows the earth is 6,000 years old, though few paleontologists and geologists share this theory.
At the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, the heart of the Young Earth Creationism movement, dinosaur models and exhibits fill the museum displays and gift shop.
Apparently many of the words on New York?s list were avoided because of faith-based concerns.
For instance, the use of the word ?birthday? or the phrase ?birthday celebrations? may offend Jehovah?s Witnesses, who do not celebrate birthdays. A spokesperson for the Jehovah?s Witnesses declined to comment on the use of the word ?birthday.?
The Department of Education would not go on the record to explain the specific reasons for each word, which has left many to speculate and draw their own conclusions.
Halloween may suggest paganism; divorce may conjure up uneasy feelings for children in the midst of a divorce within their family. One phrase that may surprise many, the term ?Rock ?n? Roll? was on the ?avoid? list.
And not good news for Italians: the Department of Education also advised avoiding references to types of food, such as pepperoni, products they said ?persons of some religions or cultures may not indulge in.?
The Department of Education said, ?This is standard language that has been used by test publishers for many years and allows our students to complete practice exams without distraction.?
Stanford University Professor Sam Wineburg is an expert in the field of education and director of the Stanford History Education Group.
When reached by phone said Wineburg, after a brief pause on the line, ?the purpose of education is to create unpleasant experiences in us. ? The Latin meaning if education is ?to go out.? Education is not about making us feel warm and fuzzy inside.?
Wineburg questioned the idea that the New York City Department of Education would want to ?shield kids from these types of encounters.? He said the goal of education is to ?prepare them,? adding ?this is how we dumb down public schools?
earthquake today droid razr oklahoma news earthquake map geoffrey mutai fred davis fred davis
Friday, March 30, 2012
Thunder beat Lakers 102-93 for 5th straight win
[ [ [['A JetBlue flight from New York to Las Vegas', 3]], 'http://yhoo.it/GV9zpj', '[Related: View photos of the JetBlue plane in Amarillo]', ' ', '630', ' ', ' ', ], [ [['Afghan security forces and police killed three', 3]], 'http://yhoo.it/H9BcJE', '[Related: Bales\' wife on his alleged shooting: \'He would not do that\']', ' ', '630', ' ', ' ', ], [ [['looking for fireworks between the opposing camps', 16]], 'http://yhoo.it/GSvEsj', '[RELATED:\?It?s going to be a circus\?: Activists begin protests outside Supreme Court]', ' ', '630', ' ', ' ', ], [ [['entirely respectable way to put off the searing constitutional controversy', 8]], 'http://yhoo.it/GE6jSh', '[RELATED: Obama\?s health care law passed 2 years ago, but where are we now\?]', ' ', '630', ' ', ' ', ], [ [['Witnesses said the gunman pulled up on a black scooter', 7]], 'http://yhoo.it/GzwOIW', '[Related: New York police tighten security at Jewish sites]', ' ', '630', ' ', ' ', ], [ [['test Zimmerman for alcohol or drugs', 11]], 'http://yhoo.it/Gzn6VF', '[Related: White House says Trayvon Martin is local issue]', ' ', '630', ' ', ' ', ], [ [['Trayvon Martin decked the Neighborhood', 7]], 'http://yhoo.it/GUovUP', 'Click image to see more photos', 'http://l.yimg.com/a/p/us/news/editorial/2/61/261d2c36bccf0971c2734a4d4398aa5a.jpeg', '512', ' ', 'AP/David Goldman', ], [ [['Can you create commerce in order to regulate it', 9]], 'http://yhoo.it/GSgtu8', 'Click image to see more photos', 'http://l.yimg.com/a/p/us/news/editorial/7/78/778e2416573870cd705774e92403447d.jpeg', '630', ' ', 'AP/Charles Dharapak', ], [ [['associated with such a small earthquake', 4]], 'http://yhoo.it/GTco9z', 'Click image to see more photos', 'http://l.yimg.com/a/p/us/news/editorial/0/b4/0b493c1a47b6e3f97f8f48a2b251d7d4.jpeg', '630', ' ', 'AP Photo/Carrie Antlfinger', ], [ [['Fox News host Geraldo Rivera sparked outrage', 3]], 'http://yhoo.it/GKMVTk', 'Click image to see more photos', 'http://l.yimg.com/a/p/us/news/editorial/2/7c/27c7367bc512d233ae1790b320a5e92c.jpeg', '630', ' ', 'AP Photo/John Minchillo', ], [ [['The charges signed against Bales include', 1]], 'http://yhoo.it/wZT5zV', 'Click image to see more photos', 'http://l.yimg.com/a/p/us/news/editorial/7/a0/7a07c51b2aa0f39b1a23355046d13870.jpeg', '512', ' ', 'AP Photo/DVIDS\, Spc\. Ryan Hallock\, File', ], [ [['George Zimmerman, if I had a son', 6]], 'http://news.yahoo.com/photos/thousands-protest-fla-teen-death-1332387124-slideshow/', 'Click image to see more photos', 'http://l.yimg.com/os/152/2012/03/22/d761a49f3fcc99080a0f6a70670053cd-jpg_150905.jpg', '500', ' ', 'AP Photo/John Minchillo', ], [ [['Mohamed Merah', 10], ['prosecutor Francois Molins', 5]], 'http://news.yahoo.com/photos/four-dead-in-french-jewish-school-shooting-1332173151-slideshow', 'Click image to see more photos', 'http://l.yimg.com/cv/ip/ap/default/120321/2012_03_21t151508z_425380421_gm1e83l1sqs01_rtrmadp_3_france_shootings_raid.jpg', '630', ' ', 'REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier', ], [ [['Shortly after he wrapped up his victory remarks', 2]], 'http://news.yahoo.com/photos/4-straight-romney-wins-washington-gop-caucus-1330835515-slideshow/', 'Click image to see more photos', 'http://l.yimg.com/a/p/us/news/editorial/3/e9/3e9b0082c3c3111dcc19e3527ae94cc7.jpeg', '500', ' ', 'AP Photo/Steven Senne', ], [ [['best understands the problems of average Americans', 2]], 'http://news.yahoo.com/photos/4-straight-romney-wins-washington-gop-caucus-1330835515-slideshow/', 'Click image to see more photos', 'http://l.yimg.com/a/p/us/news/editorial/3/e9/3e9b0082c3c3111dcc19e3527ae94cc7.jpeg', '500', ' ', 'AP Photo/Steven Senne', ], [ [['Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery', 7]], 'http://yhoo.it/GB2RVy', 'Click image to see more photos', 'http://l.yimg.com/os/152/2012/03/20/photo-1332257995646-4-0-jpg_171722.jpg', '630', ' ', 'AFP', ], [ [['xxxxxxxxxxxx', 11]], 'http://news.yahoo.com/photos/russian-grannies-win-bid-to-sing-at-eurovision-1331223625-slideshow/', 'Click image to see more photos', 'http://l.yimg.com/a/p/us/news/editorial/1/56/156d92f2760dcd3e75bcd649a8b85fcf.jpeg', '500', ' ', 'AP', ] ]
[ [ [['measure all but certain to fail in the face of bipartisan', 4]], '28771014', '0' ], [ [['matter what you do in this case', 5]], '28759848', '0' ], [ [['presume laws are constitutional', 7]], '28747556', '0' ], [ [['has destroyed 15 to 25 houses', 7]], '28744868', '0' ], [ [['short answer is yes', 7]], '28746030', '0' ], [ [['opportunity to tell the real story', 7]], '28731764', '0' ], [ [['entirely respectable way to put off the searing constitutional controversy', 7]], '28723797', '0' ], [ [['point of my campaign is that big ideas matter', 9]], '28712293', '0' ], [ [['As the standoff dragged into a second day', 7]], '28687424', '0' ], [ [['French police stepped up the search', 17]], '28667224', '0' ], [ [['Seeking to elevate his candidacy back to a general', 8]], '28660934', '0' ], [ [['The tragic story of Trayvon Martin', 4]], '28647343', '0' ], [ [['Karzai will get a chance soon to express', 8]], '28630306', '0' ], [ [['powerful storms stretching', 8]], '28493546', '0' ], [ [['basic norm that death is private', 6]], '28413590', '0' ], [ [['songwriter also saw a surge in sales for her debut album', 6]], '28413590', '1', 'Watch music videos from Whitney Houston ', 'on Yahoo! Music', 'http://music.yahoo.com' ], [ [['keyword', 99999999999999999999999]], 'videoID', '1', 'overwrite-pre-description', 'overwrite-link-string', 'overwrite-link-url' ] ]
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/thunder-beat-lakers-102-93-5th-straight-win-053911783--spt.html
college football ncaa football brian van gorder blazing saddles lsu alabama national championship beezow doo doo zopittybop bop bop
Bots of Burden: U.S. Army Recruiting an Array of Animal-Inspired Robots to Assist Battlefield Troops [Video]
NEW RECRUITS: Boston Dynamics is developing a number of robots to assist the military, including (clockwise, from the top left) the Sand Flea, Cheetah and RHex.
Image: Images courtesy of Boston Dynamics
Three of the U.S. military's newest recruits reported for duty this week at the Army Test and Evaluation Command. These troops are different from normal soldiers in several ways?for starters, each has six feet. And they are robots designed to look and move like cockroaches. Aside from those details, the Army is hoping its new Boston Robotics RHex bots will soon join grunts in Afghanistan.
RHex furthers the U.S. military's ongoing efforts to deploy aerial drones and land robots to assist troops in the field. Weighing 13.5 kilograms, the camera-equipped RHex is designed to be carried in a backpack until it is needed to provide reconnaissance in rough terrain areas such as rocky inclines, riverbanks, mud and loose sandy soil. A fully charged robot can operate via remote control for six hours at a distance of up to 600 meters from its controller.
The key to RHex's mobility is the shape of its feet, which resemble apostrophes and swing in circles, slapping the ground to propel the bot forward (see video). The feet can also serve as paddles in water. RHex moves much like a similar, four-legged robot developed a few years ago by a team of Georgia Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, and University of Pennsylvania researchers.
The Army Rapid Equipping Force plans to deliver four RHex robots for testing in Afghanistan once safety evaluations are completed stateside. These bots could be joined shortly by nine Boston Dynamics so-called Sand Flea reconnaissance robots, expected to undergo similar tests later this year. Sand Flea is a four-wheel, five-kilogram dynamo that drives like a remote-control car on flat surfaces but can jump as high as nine meters to overcome obstacles (see video). The robot, which can pop up about 25 times on a single charge, uses gyro stabilization to stay level while airborne both to provide clear recon from its onboard camera and to ensure a smooth landing. Earlier versions of Sand Flea were developed by Sandia National Laboratories with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Army's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO).
Boston Dynamics has several other robots in the works for the military, including its Legged Squad Support System (LS3) and a fleet-footed newcomer called Cheetah that can run nearly 30 kilometers per hour, breaking the 21 kph land speed record for legged robots set in 1989 at the Leg Laboratory, part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Like its namesake in the animal kingdom, the mechanized Cheetah increases its stride and running speed by flexing and un-flexing its metallic spine on every step. The Cheetah is confined to a laboratory treadmill for now because it is connected to a hydraulic pump for power and tethered to a boomlike device overhead to keep it running in the center of the mill. Boston Dynamics designed the treadmill to move at speeds up to more than 80 kph?child's play for a real cheetah, which can run upward of 120 kph, faster than any other land animal.
It is too early to tell exactly when Cheetah, (or Sand Flea and RHex, for that matter) might see action alongside troops and how it will be utilized, but one idea is to use it as a robotic scout that can move swiftly through rougher terrain than today's wheeled or tracked robots.
DARPA, sponsoring Boston Dynamics's Cheetah work through its Maximum Mobility and Manipulation (M3) program, hopes to see a free-running prototype by the end of the year.
Right now Cheetah is more of a basic research project than a program with a specific mission, says Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert. "The emphasis is on getting fundamental results that could have broad impact in advancing robotics," he adds. "Indeed, work on the Cheetah robot has already forced us to rethink how a back works in locomotion to increase running speed, and to create better models for the measurement and exchange of momentum in legged locomotion."
Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=2ee0493a6c8e20471aaa7bfbfad9f275
unitarian new black panther party lost in space elizabeth banks palm sunday battle royale key largo
IPO market heats up, more startups going public
NEW YORK (AP) ? The IPO market is heating up. A growing economy and rising stock market are prompting more startups to go public, and investors appear hungry to invest.
This week, organic mac n' cheese maker Annie's and mobile ad firm Millennial Media posted the biggest first-day gains since networking site LinkedIn debuted last May. And Facebook's highly anticipated initial public stock offering is just weeks away.
After lying largely dormant for three years, the IPO market is churning again. And it's poised to get further lift. Congress is loosening restrictions in an attempt to make it easier for young companies to raise money. Still, high gas prices and stubborn unemployment rates continue to put a damper on growth, making it too early to tell whether an IPO recovery is here to stay.
The willingness of more startups to open their books and court wider investment suggests that they are optimistic about their business and the broader economy. And a strong IPO market could itself drive growth, as companies loaded with fresh cash injections hire workers to expand their operations.
Berkeley, Calif.-based Annie's Inc. saw shares soar 89 percent on Wednesday to close at $35.92. They rose another 5.6 percent on Thursday to finish at $37.92. The shares, originally expected to sell for $14 to $16, ended up pricing at $19 each. Baltimore-based Millennial Media Inc., which makes software that helps games makers and media companies decide what ads to push to smart phones and tablet computers, saw shares jump 92 percent from their $13 IPO price to close at $25. In total, 10 companies are expected to go public this week, the most since December 2010.
It marks an enthusiastic end to a strong quarter for IPOs. There have been more IPOs in the first three months of 2012 than there have been since the 2011 second quarter, said Richard Peterson, credit analyst at S&P Capital IQ. And on average, stocks hitting the market in the past three months have gained an average of 13 percent on their first trading day, according to the IPO advisory firm Renaissance Capital. That's the best performance since 2008.
The rush has come after the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 3 percent in the final three months of 2011, the best pace in a year and a half. Hiring is picking up. Earlier this month the Standard & Poor's 500 index closed at its highest point since May 2008. An improving stock market helps fuel demand for IPOs, which are considered riskier investments.
But the IPO market may yet peter out. There were signs of optimism at the start of 2011, but the European debt crisis and renewed economic weakness in the second half of the year froze the IPO market for months. And while more companies are going public now, they're pulling in less cash. U.S. IPOs have raised $5.5 billion so far this year, less than half of the $13 billion that newly public companies pulled in during the 2011 first quarter, according to Renaissance Capital.
It's also still too early to tell whether efforts by lawmakers to make it easier for small companies to raise money through IPOs will help rev up the market. President Obama is expected to soon sign a bill that would reduce the cost of going public for companies with less than $1 billion in annual revenue.
Splashy market debuts are drawing big headlines, but what matters for investors is what a company's stock does beyond the first day, said Kathleen Smith, principal at Renaissance Capital. Small investors may even lose money if they get swept up in first-day buying and end up paying much more than the price that big investors, such as hedge funds and mutual funds, got the night before.
"A more thoughtful investor might wait until the frenzy is over," Smith said.
LinkedIn Corp. shares, for example, more than doubled in their debut, closing up 109 percent at $94.25. But the hubbub didn't last and shares fell as low as $55.98 by November. The stock has recovered its losses, however, and closed Thursday at $102.67.
Though far from the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, much of the investor demand in the past year has centered on technology stocks like LinkedIn, especially companies engaged in mobile devices and social networking.
Facebook's much-awaited IPO is expected later this spring. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company has said it anticipates raising at least $5 billion. If all goes as expected, the world's biggest online social network could be valued at as much as $100 billion. That would be the biggest Internet IPO ever.
S&P's Peterson said the "Facebook factor" and gains in the broader stock market are both helping stoke investor demand for IPOs. It's also the end of the first quarter, so it's not uncommon for banks to want to get deals done before the period closes, he added.
Associated Pressheartbreak hotel don cornelius whitney houston i will always love you breaking news whitney houston carmen whitney houston last performance cpac straw poll
Clocking an accelerating universe: First results from BOSS
![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](http://www.eurekalert.org/images/back2e.gif){kind=small}
Public release date: 30-Mar-2012[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Paul Preuss
paul_preuss@lbl.gov
510-486-6249
DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Berkeley Lab scientists are leaders of BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey- They and their colleagues in the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey have announced the most precise measurements ever made of the era when dark energy turned on
Some six billion light years ago, almost halfway from now back to the big bang, the universe was undergoing an elemental change. Held back until then by the mutual gravitational attraction of all the matter it contained, the universe had been expanding ever more slowly. Then, as matter spread out and its density decreased, dark energy took over and expansion began to accelerate.
Today BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, the largest component of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III), announced the most accurate measurement yet of the distance scale of the universe during the era when dark energy turned on.
"We've made precision measurements of the large-scale structure of the universe five to seven billion years ago the best measure yet of the size of anything outside the Milky Way," says David Schlegel of the Physics Division at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), BOSS's principal investigator. "We're pushing out to the distances when dark energy turned on, where we can start to do experiments to find out what's causing accelerating expansion."
How to measure expansion in an accelerating universe
Accelerating expansion was announced less than 14 years ago by both the Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP) based at Berkeley Lab and the competing High-z Supernova Search Team, a discovery that resulted in 2011 Nobel Prizes for the SCP's Saul Perlmutter and High-z Team members Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess. Acceleration may result from an unknown something dubbed "dark energy" or, dark energy may be just a way of saying we don't understand how gravity really works.
The first step in finding out is to establish a detailed history of expansion. Unlike supernova searches, which depend on the brightness of exploding stars, BOSS uses a technique called baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) to determine the distances to faraway galaxies.
Baryon acoustic oscillation measures the angle across the sky of structures of known size, the peaks where galaxies cluster most densely in the network of filaments and voids that fill the universe. Since these density peaks recur regularly, the angle between appropriate pairs of galaxies as precisely measured from Earth reveals their distance the narrower the apparent angle, the farther away they are.
Knowing the distance to an object tells its age as well, since its light travels from there to here at known speed. And the redshift of the light reveals how the universe has expanded since that time, as expansion stretches space itself; the wavelength of light traveling through space toward Earth stretches proportionally, becoming redder and revealing the expansion of the universe since the light left its source.
"BOSS's first major cosmological results establish the accurate three-dimensional positions of 327,349 massive galaxies across 3,275 square degrees of the sky, reaching as far back as redshift 0.7 the largest sample of the universe ever surveyed at this high density," says Martin White of Berkeley Lab's Physics Division, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California at Berkeley and chair of the BOSS science survey teams. "BOSS's average redshift is 0.57, equivalent to some six billion light-years away. BOSS gives that distance to within 1.7 percent 2,094 megaparsecs plus or minus 34 megaparsecs the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey."
The origin of BAO, the regular clustering of ordinary matter (called "baryons" by astronomical convention), was the pressure of sound waves ("acoustic") moving through the universe when it was still so hot that light and matter were mixed together in a kind of soup, in which the sound waves created areas of regularly varying density ("oscillation"). By 380,000 years after the big bang, expansion had cooled the soup enough for ordinary matter to condense into hydrogen atoms (invisible dark matter was also part of the soup) and for light to go its separate way.
At that moment variations in density were preserved as variations in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a phenomenon first measured by Berkeley Lab astrophysicist George Smoot, for which he shared the 2006 Nobel Prize. The warmer regions of the CMB signal areas where the density of matter was greater; these regions seeded the galaxies and clusters of galaxies that form the large-scale structure of the universe today. Thus the cosmic microwave background establishes the basic scale of baryon acoustic oscillation used to measure the expansion history of the universe.
BOSS's data on galaxy clustering and redshifts can be applied not only to BAO but also to a separate technique called "redshift space distortions" a direct test of gravity that measures how fast neighboring galaxies are moving together to form galaxy clusters.
What if dark energy isn't an unknown force or substance, but instead a shortcoming of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, our best-yet theory of gravity? General Relativity predicts how fast galaxies should be moving toward one another in galaxy clusters, and, in the aggregate, how fast the structure of the universe should be growing. Any departure from its predictions would mean the theory is flawed.
"We depend on redshift to know expansion rates and how structure was growing at different times in the past," says Beth Reid, a Hubble Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who directed the BOSS study of redshift space distortions. "But redshifts aren't uniform. Galaxies are carried along in the Hubble flow as the universe expands, but they also have their own velocities. They tend to fall toward denser regions, for example. Because the ones on the far side of a dense region are coming toward us, their redshift makes them look closer than they really are; the opposite is true for the galaxies on the near side, which are falling away from us they look farther away."
Statistical analysis of the redshifts of the hundreds of thousands of galaxies in the BOSS dataset can take into account the peculiarities of local variation and still produce a dependable measure of distance, the Hubble expansion rate, and the growth rate of structure in the universe. With these techniques, Reid and her colleagues have measured gravity on a scale of 100 million light years, far larger than the most accurate gravity measure yet, which is based on the distance from Earth to the moon.
The right tools to do the job
BOSS obtained these best-yet measures with the wide-field Sloan Telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, designed especially for galaxy surveys but mounting a spectrograph far more sophisticated than was available to earlier SDSS surveys.
"The 2.5-meter Sloan Telescope remains the world's premier facility for wide-field spectroscopy because it uses fiber-fed spectrographs, which offer a huge numerical advantage," says Natalie Roe, director of Berkeley Lab's Physics Division and instrument scientist for BOSS, who directed construction of the new spectrographs.
For each 15-minute exposure, covering three degrees of the sky, a thousand optical fibers are inserted by hand into aluminum "plug plates" and positioned at the telescope's focal plane; each fiber is targeted on a specific distant bright galaxy, selected from earlier SDSS imaging. The BOSS instrument uses 50 percent more fibers than earlier SDSS runs, each with finer diameter; for more coverage and finer resolution the new spectrograph incorporates two red cameras using the thick, red-sensitive astronomical CCDs invented and fabricated at Berkeley Lab, as well as two new blue cameras.
"All the data collected by BOSS flows through a data-processing pipeline at Berkeley Lab," says Stephen Bailey of the Physics Division, who describes himself as the "baby sitter of the pipeline." Working with Schlegel at Berkeley Lab and Adam Bolton at the University of Utah, Bailey "turns the data into something we can use catalogues of the hundreds of thousands galaxies, eventually well over a million, each identified by their two-dimensional positions in the sky and their redshifts." The data are processed and stored on the Riemann computer cluster, operated by Berkeley Lab's High-Performance Computing Services group.
The current crop of BOSS papers is based on less than a quarter of the data BOSS will continue to collect until the survey ends in 2014. So far, all lines of inquiry point toward the so-called "concordance model" of the universe: a "flat" (Euclidean) universe that bloomed from the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, a quarter of which is cold dark matter plus a few percent visible, ordinary, baryonic matter (the stuff we're made of). All the rest is thought to be dark energy in the form of Einstein's cosmological constant: a small but irreducible energy of puzzling origin that's continually stretching space itself.
But it's way too soon to think that's the end of the story, says Schlegel. "Based on the limited observations of dark energy we've made so far, the cosmological constant may be the simplest explanation, but in truth, the cosmological constant has not been tested at all. It's consistent with the data, but we really have only a little bit of data. We're just beginning to explore the times when dark energy turned on. If there are surprises lurking there, we expect to find them."
###
"The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Baryon acoustic oscillations in the Data Release 9 spectroscopic galaxy sample," by Anderson et al, has been submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
"The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Measurements of the growth of structure and expansion rate at z=0.57 from anisotropic clustering," by Reid et al, has been submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Berkeley Lab researchers who are members of BOSS and contributed to these papers include Stephen Bailey, Shirley Ho, Beth Reid, Natalie Roe, Nicholas Ross, David Schlegel, Hee-Jong Seo, and Martin White.
Funding for SDSS-III has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. The SDSS-III web site is http://www.sdss3.org.
SDSS-III is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions of the SDSS-III Collaboration including the University of Arizona, the Brazilian Participation Group, Brookhaven National Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Florida, the French Participation Group, the German Participation Group, Harvard University, the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, the Michigan State/Notre Dame/JINA Participation Group, Johns Hopkins University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, New Mexico State University, New York University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Portsmouth, Princeton University, the Spanish Participation Group, University of Tokyo, University of Utah, Vanderbilt University, University of Virginia, University of Washington, and Yale University.
DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit the Office of Science website at science.energy.gov/.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory addresses the world's most urgent scientific challenges by advancing sustainable energy, protecting human health, creating new materials, and revealing the origin and fate of the universe. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab's scientific expertise has been recognized with 13 Nobel prizes. The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. For more, visit www.lbl.gov.
Scientific contacts:
David Schlegel, 510-495-2595, djschlegel@lbl.gov
Martin White, 510-486-6130, mjwhite@lbl.gov
Beth Reid, 510-486-5604, bareid@lbl.gov
Natalie Roe, 510-486-6380, naroe@lbl.gov
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Public release date: 30-Mar-2012[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Paul Preuss
paul_preuss@lbl.gov
510-486-6249
DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Berkeley Lab scientists are leaders of BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey- They and their colleagues in the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey have announced the most precise measurements ever made of the era when dark energy turned on
Some six billion light years ago, almost halfway from now back to the big bang, the universe was undergoing an elemental change. Held back until then by the mutual gravitational attraction of all the matter it contained, the universe had been expanding ever more slowly. Then, as matter spread out and its density decreased, dark energy took over and expansion began to accelerate.
Today BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, the largest component of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III), announced the most accurate measurement yet of the distance scale of the universe during the era when dark energy turned on.
"We've made precision measurements of the large-scale structure of the universe five to seven billion years ago the best measure yet of the size of anything outside the Milky Way," says David Schlegel of the Physics Division at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), BOSS's principal investigator. "We're pushing out to the distances when dark energy turned on, where we can start to do experiments to find out what's causing accelerating expansion."
How to measure expansion in an accelerating universe
Accelerating expansion was announced less than 14 years ago by both the Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP) based at Berkeley Lab and the competing High-z Supernova Search Team, a discovery that resulted in 2011 Nobel Prizes for the SCP's Saul Perlmutter and High-z Team members Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess. Acceleration may result from an unknown something dubbed "dark energy" or, dark energy may be just a way of saying we don't understand how gravity really works.
The first step in finding out is to establish a detailed history of expansion. Unlike supernova searches, which depend on the brightness of exploding stars, BOSS uses a technique called baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) to determine the distances to faraway galaxies.
Baryon acoustic oscillation measures the angle across the sky of structures of known size, the peaks where galaxies cluster most densely in the network of filaments and voids that fill the universe. Since these density peaks recur regularly, the angle between appropriate pairs of galaxies as precisely measured from Earth reveals their distance the narrower the apparent angle, the farther away they are.
Knowing the distance to an object tells its age as well, since its light travels from there to here at known speed. And the redshift of the light reveals how the universe has expanded since that time, as expansion stretches space itself; the wavelength of light traveling through space toward Earth stretches proportionally, becoming redder and revealing the expansion of the universe since the light left its source.
"BOSS's first major cosmological results establish the accurate three-dimensional positions of 327,349 massive galaxies across 3,275 square degrees of the sky, reaching as far back as redshift 0.7 the largest sample of the universe ever surveyed at this high density," says Martin White of Berkeley Lab's Physics Division, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California at Berkeley and chair of the BOSS science survey teams. "BOSS's average redshift is 0.57, equivalent to some six billion light-years away. BOSS gives that distance to within 1.7 percent 2,094 megaparsecs plus or minus 34 megaparsecs the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey."
The origin of BAO, the regular clustering of ordinary matter (called "baryons" by astronomical convention), was the pressure of sound waves ("acoustic") moving through the universe when it was still so hot that light and matter were mixed together in a kind of soup, in which the sound waves created areas of regularly varying density ("oscillation"). By 380,000 years after the big bang, expansion had cooled the soup enough for ordinary matter to condense into hydrogen atoms (invisible dark matter was also part of the soup) and for light to go its separate way.
At that moment variations in density were preserved as variations in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a phenomenon first measured by Berkeley Lab astrophysicist George Smoot, for which he shared the 2006 Nobel Prize. The warmer regions of the CMB signal areas where the density of matter was greater; these regions seeded the galaxies and clusters of galaxies that form the large-scale structure of the universe today. Thus the cosmic microwave background establishes the basic scale of baryon acoustic oscillation used to measure the expansion history of the universe.
BOSS's data on galaxy clustering and redshifts can be applied not only to BAO but also to a separate technique called "redshift space distortions" a direct test of gravity that measures how fast neighboring galaxies are moving together to form galaxy clusters.
What if dark energy isn't an unknown force or substance, but instead a shortcoming of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, our best-yet theory of gravity? General Relativity predicts how fast galaxies should be moving toward one another in galaxy clusters, and, in the aggregate, how fast the structure of the universe should be growing. Any departure from its predictions would mean the theory is flawed.
"We depend on redshift to know expansion rates and how structure was growing at different times in the past," says Beth Reid, a Hubble Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who directed the BOSS study of redshift space distortions. "But redshifts aren't uniform. Galaxies are carried along in the Hubble flow as the universe expands, but they also have their own velocities. They tend to fall toward denser regions, for example. Because the ones on the far side of a dense region are coming toward us, their redshift makes them look closer than they really are; the opposite is true for the galaxies on the near side, which are falling away from us they look farther away."
Statistical analysis of the redshifts of the hundreds of thousands of galaxies in the BOSS dataset can take into account the peculiarities of local variation and still produce a dependable measure of distance, the Hubble expansion rate, and the growth rate of structure in the universe. With these techniques, Reid and her colleagues have measured gravity on a scale of 100 million light years, far larger than the most accurate gravity measure yet, which is based on the distance from Earth to the moon.
The right tools to do the job
BOSS obtained these best-yet measures with the wide-field Sloan Telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, designed especially for galaxy surveys but mounting a spectrograph far more sophisticated than was available to earlier SDSS surveys.
"The 2.5-meter Sloan Telescope remains the world's premier facility for wide-field spectroscopy because it uses fiber-fed spectrographs, which offer a huge numerical advantage," says Natalie Roe, director of Berkeley Lab's Physics Division and instrument scientist for BOSS, who directed construction of the new spectrographs.
For each 15-minute exposure, covering three degrees of the sky, a thousand optical fibers are inserted by hand into aluminum "plug plates" and positioned at the telescope's focal plane; each fiber is targeted on a specific distant bright galaxy, selected from earlier SDSS imaging. The BOSS instrument uses 50 percent more fibers than earlier SDSS runs, each with finer diameter; for more coverage and finer resolution the new spectrograph incorporates two red cameras using the thick, red-sensitive astronomical CCDs invented and fabricated at Berkeley Lab, as well as two new blue cameras.
"All the data collected by BOSS flows through a data-processing pipeline at Berkeley Lab," says Stephen Bailey of the Physics Division, who describes himself as the "baby sitter of the pipeline." Working with Schlegel at Berkeley Lab and Adam Bolton at the University of Utah, Bailey "turns the data into something we can use catalogues of the hundreds of thousands galaxies, eventually well over a million, each identified by their two-dimensional positions in the sky and their redshifts." The data are processed and stored on the Riemann computer cluster, operated by Berkeley Lab's High-Performance Computing Services group.
The current crop of BOSS papers is based on less than a quarter of the data BOSS will continue to collect until the survey ends in 2014. So far, all lines of inquiry point toward the so-called "concordance model" of the universe: a "flat" (Euclidean) universe that bloomed from the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, a quarter of which is cold dark matter plus a few percent visible, ordinary, baryonic matter (the stuff we're made of). All the rest is thought to be dark energy in the form of Einstein's cosmological constant: a small but irreducible energy of puzzling origin that's continually stretching space itself.
But it's way too soon to think that's the end of the story, says Schlegel. "Based on the limited observations of dark energy we've made so far, the cosmological constant may be the simplest explanation, but in truth, the cosmological constant has not been tested at all. It's consistent with the data, but we really have only a little bit of data. We're just beginning to explore the times when dark energy turned on. If there are surprises lurking there, we expect to find them."
###
"The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Baryon acoustic oscillations in the Data Release 9 spectroscopic galaxy sample," by Anderson et al, has been submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
"The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Measurements of the growth of structure and expansion rate at z=0.57 from anisotropic clustering," by Reid et al, has been submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Berkeley Lab researchers who are members of BOSS and contributed to these papers include Stephen Bailey, Shirley Ho, Beth Reid, Natalie Roe, Nicholas Ross, David Schlegel, Hee-Jong Seo, and Martin White.
Funding for SDSS-III has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. The SDSS-III web site is http://www.sdss3.org.
SDSS-III is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions of the SDSS-III Collaboration including the University of Arizona, the Brazilian Participation Group, Brookhaven National Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Florida, the French Participation Group, the German Participation Group, Harvard University, the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, the Michigan State/Notre Dame/JINA Participation Group, Johns Hopkins University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, New Mexico State University, New York University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Portsmouth, Princeton University, the Spanish Participation Group, University of Tokyo, University of Utah, Vanderbilt University, University of Virginia, University of Washington, and Yale University.
DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit the Office of Science website at science.energy.gov/.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory addresses the world's most urgent scientific challenges by advancing sustainable energy, protecting human health, creating new materials, and revealing the origin and fate of the universe. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab's scientific expertise has been recognized with 13 Nobel prizes. The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. For more, visit www.lbl.gov.
Scientific contacts:
David Schlegel, 510-495-2595, djschlegel@lbl.gov
Martin White, 510-486-6130, mjwhite@lbl.gov
Beth Reid, 510-486-5604, bareid@lbl.gov
Natalie Roe, 510-486-6380, naroe@lbl.gov
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-03/dbnl-caa032912.php
nitrous oxide rihanna thug life tattoo chuck pagano arizona governor seal team 6 patrick witt nflx
Titanium paternity test fingers Earth as moon's sole parent
Public release date: 29-Mar-2012[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Steve Koppes
s-koppes@uchicago.edu
773-702-8366
University of Chicago
A new chemical analysis of lunar material collected by Apollo astronauts in the 1970s conflicts with the widely held theory that a giant collision between Earth and a Mars-sized object gave birth to the moon 4.5 billion years ago.
In the giant-collision scenario, computer simulations suggest that the moon had two parents: Earth and a hypothetical planetary body that scientists call "Theia." But a comparative analysis of titanium from the moon, Earth and meteorites, published by Junjun Zhang, graduate student in geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago, and four co-authors indicates the moon's material came from Earth alone.
If two objects had given rise to the moon, "Just like in humans, the moon would have inherited some of the material from the Earth and some of the material from the impactor, approximately half and half," said Nicolas Dauphas, associate professor in geophysical sciences at UChicago, and co-author of the study, which appears in the March 25 edition of Nature Geoscience.
"What we found is that the child does not look any different compared to the Earth," Dauphas said. "It's a child with only one parent, as far as we can tell."
The research team based their analysis on titanium isotopes forms of titanium that contain only slight subatomic variations. The researchers selected titanium for their study because the element is highly refractory. This means that titanium tends to remain in a solid or molten state rather than becoming a gas when exposed to tremendous heat. The resistance of titanium isotopes to vaporization makes it less likely that they would become incorporated by the Earth and the developing moon in equal amounts.
Titanium also contains different isotopic signatures forged in countless stellar explosions that occurred before the sun's birth. These explosions flung subtly different titanium isotopes into interstellar space. Different objects in the newly forming solar system gobbled up those isotopes in different ways through collisions, leaving clues that let scientists infer where the solar materials including the moon came from.
Planetary DNA
"When we look at different bodies, different asteroids, there are different isotopic signatures. It's like their different DNAs," Dauphas said. Meteorites, which are pieces of asteroids that have fallen to Earth, contain large variations in titanium isotopes. Measurements of terrestrial and lunar samples show that "the moon has a strictly identical isotopic composition to the Earth," he said.
"We thought that the moon had two parents, but when we look at the composition of the moon, it looks like it has only one parent," Zhang said.
Zhang initially found variations in the titanium isotopic composition between the lunar and terrestrial samples. She then corrected the results for the effects of cosmic rays, which could have changed the titanium isotopic composition of the lunar samples.
The Earth and the moon are constantly bombarded by cosmic rays from the sun and from more distant sources in the galaxy. Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field prevents most of these rays from reaching its surface, but the moon has no such protection.
"We compared the titanium isotopic composition with samarium and gadolinium since those two systems are very sensitive to the cosmic-ray effect," Zhang said. The only compositional differences the scientists expected to see in samarium and gandolinium between Earth and moon would be the result of cosmic rays. "We found a very nice linear correlation between titanium and samarium or gadolinium," she said.
Zhang's titanium analyses greatly reinforce previous work by other researchers who came to the same conclusion after comparing terrestrial and lunar oxygen isotopes, which are less refractory and thus more likely to gasify during a giant impact than titanium.
Lunar Conundrum
Solving the conundrum of the moon's origin probably will prove challenging because all of the alternative scenarios for the moon's formation have drawbacks.
For example, it is possible that even though titanium is refractory, it might still have gasified in the giant impact and then became incorporated into the disk of Earth-orbiting material that developed into the moon. This might have erased the signature of the titanium from Theia, which could explain the UChicago team's observations. The problem with this scenario is that the disk may have fallen back to Earth if too much material was exchanged between the two bodies.
An old idea, long abandoned, is that the moon arose via fission from a molten, rapidly rotating Earth following a giant impact. This idea explains the similarity between Earth and moon, but how such a large, concentrated mass could spin fast enough to split in two remains problematical.
According to a third scenario, Earth collided with an icy body lacking entirely in titanium. There are no bodies made purely of ice in the solar system, however. "They would always have a significant fraction of solid material, so you would still expect the object to deliver some titanium," Dauphas said.
It's also possible that Theia had the same composition as Earth. This is unlikely, however, because of the widely accepted view that the Earth incorporated material over tens of millions of years in collisions with smaller bodies that flew in from different regions of the developing solar system.
"We thought we knew what the moon was made of and how it formed, but even 40 years after Apollo, there is still a lot of science to do with those samples that are in curatorial facilities at NASA," Dauphas said.
###
Citation: "The proto-Earth as a significant source of lunar material," by Junjun Zhang, Nicolas Dauphas, Andrew M. Davis, Ingo Leya, and Alexei Fedkin, Nature Geoscience, Advance Online Publication, March 25, 2012.
Funding: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Science Foundation, Packard Foundation and the Swiss National Science Foundation.
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Public release date: 29-Mar-2012[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Steve Koppes
s-koppes@uchicago.edu
773-702-8366
University of Chicago
A new chemical analysis of lunar material collected by Apollo astronauts in the 1970s conflicts with the widely held theory that a giant collision between Earth and a Mars-sized object gave birth to the moon 4.5 billion years ago.
In the giant-collision scenario, computer simulations suggest that the moon had two parents: Earth and a hypothetical planetary body that scientists call "Theia." But a comparative analysis of titanium from the moon, Earth and meteorites, published by Junjun Zhang, graduate student in geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago, and four co-authors indicates the moon's material came from Earth alone.
If two objects had given rise to the moon, "Just like in humans, the moon would have inherited some of the material from the Earth and some of the material from the impactor, approximately half and half," said Nicolas Dauphas, associate professor in geophysical sciences at UChicago, and co-author of the study, which appears in the March 25 edition of Nature Geoscience.
"What we found is that the child does not look any different compared to the Earth," Dauphas said. "It's a child with only one parent, as far as we can tell."
The research team based their analysis on titanium isotopes forms of titanium that contain only slight subatomic variations. The researchers selected titanium for their study because the element is highly refractory. This means that titanium tends to remain in a solid or molten state rather than becoming a gas when exposed to tremendous heat. The resistance of titanium isotopes to vaporization makes it less likely that they would become incorporated by the Earth and the developing moon in equal amounts.
Titanium also contains different isotopic signatures forged in countless stellar explosions that occurred before the sun's birth. These explosions flung subtly different titanium isotopes into interstellar space. Different objects in the newly forming solar system gobbled up those isotopes in different ways through collisions, leaving clues that let scientists infer where the solar materials including the moon came from.
Planetary DNA
"When we look at different bodies, different asteroids, there are different isotopic signatures. It's like their different DNAs," Dauphas said. Meteorites, which are pieces of asteroids that have fallen to Earth, contain large variations in titanium isotopes. Measurements of terrestrial and lunar samples show that "the moon has a strictly identical isotopic composition to the Earth," he said.
"We thought that the moon had two parents, but when we look at the composition of the moon, it looks like it has only one parent," Zhang said.
Zhang initially found variations in the titanium isotopic composition between the lunar and terrestrial samples. She then corrected the results for the effects of cosmic rays, which could have changed the titanium isotopic composition of the lunar samples.
The Earth and the moon are constantly bombarded by cosmic rays from the sun and from more distant sources in the galaxy. Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field prevents most of these rays from reaching its surface, but the moon has no such protection.
"We compared the titanium isotopic composition with samarium and gadolinium since those two systems are very sensitive to the cosmic-ray effect," Zhang said. The only compositional differences the scientists expected to see in samarium and gandolinium between Earth and moon would be the result of cosmic rays. "We found a very nice linear correlation between titanium and samarium or gadolinium," she said.
Zhang's titanium analyses greatly reinforce previous work by other researchers who came to the same conclusion after comparing terrestrial and lunar oxygen isotopes, which are less refractory and thus more likely to gasify during a giant impact than titanium.
Lunar Conundrum
Solving the conundrum of the moon's origin probably will prove challenging because all of the alternative scenarios for the moon's formation have drawbacks.
For example, it is possible that even though titanium is refractory, it might still have gasified in the giant impact and then became incorporated into the disk of Earth-orbiting material that developed into the moon. This might have erased the signature of the titanium from Theia, which could explain the UChicago team's observations. The problem with this scenario is that the disk may have fallen back to Earth if too much material was exchanged between the two bodies.
An old idea, long abandoned, is that the moon arose via fission from a molten, rapidly rotating Earth following a giant impact. This idea explains the similarity between Earth and moon, but how such a large, concentrated mass could spin fast enough to split in two remains problematical.
According to a third scenario, Earth collided with an icy body lacking entirely in titanium. There are no bodies made purely of ice in the solar system, however. "They would always have a significant fraction of solid material, so you would still expect the object to deliver some titanium," Dauphas said.
It's also possible that Theia had the same composition as Earth. This is unlikely, however, because of the widely accepted view that the Earth incorporated material over tens of millions of years in collisions with smaller bodies that flew in from different regions of the developing solar system.
"We thought we knew what the moon was made of and how it formed, but even 40 years after Apollo, there is still a lot of science to do with those samples that are in curatorial facilities at NASA," Dauphas said.
###
Citation: "The proto-Earth as a significant source of lunar material," by Junjun Zhang, Nicolas Dauphas, Andrew M. Davis, Ingo Leya, and Alexei Fedkin, Nature Geoscience, Advance Online Publication, March 25, 2012.
Funding: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Science Foundation, Packard Foundation and the Swiss National Science Foundation.
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-03/uoc-tpt032912.php
jon hamm kim kardashian law school rankings ncaa bracket predictions jeff foxworthy heather morris the bachelor finale march madness bracket
Exactly What You May Expect About A Major In Psychology | ADGV ...
[unable to retrieve full-text content]Obtaining a major in psychology requires a large amount of work, though the incentives may also be fantastic. Lots of people are considering receiving a degree in psychology, because there is absolutely nothing as exciting ...
underwood buffalo wings superbowl kick off time 2012 new york giants hot wings recipe 7 layer dip recipe chris carter
4 Africa presidents turn back from Mali
|
Essential News from The Associated Press |
|||
? ?Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
rhodes scholar cranberry sauce recipe mls cup amas 2011 black friday elliot elliot
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)