SOUTH AMERICA ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND HEALTH NEWSLETTER

220 t h issue, February 20, 2013 NASA: Hosts Its First Google+ Hangout Connecting with Space Station

NASA will host its first Google+ Hangout live with the International Space Station from 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. EST, Friday, Feb. 22. This event will connect NASA's social media followers with astronauts on the ground and living and working aboard the laboratory orbiting 240 miles above Earth. Google+ Hangouts allow as many as 10 people to chat face-to-face, while thousands more can tune in to watch the conversation live on Google+ or YouTube. NASA's social media followers may submit video questions prior to the Hangout. During the event, several video questions will be selected and answered by the station crew and astronauts on the ground. Unique and original questions are more likely to be selected. Additionally, NASA also will take real-time questions submitted by fans on Google+, Twitter and Facebook. Also use #askAstro to ask real-time questions on Google+, YouTube or Twitter during the event. On the morning of the event, NASA will open a thread on its Facebook page where questions may be posted. The hangout can be viewed live on NASA's Google+ page or on the NASA Television YouTube channel. To join the hangout, and for updates and opportunities to participate in upcoming hangouts, visit the NASA's Google+ page at: http://www.google.com/+NASA Astronauts Kevin Ford and Tom Marshburn of NASA and Chris Hadfield of the Canadian Space Agency will answer questions and provide insights about life aboard the station. Crews conduct a variety of science experiments and perform station maintenance during their six-month stay on the outpost. Their life aboard the station in near-weightlessness requires different approaches to everyday activities such as eating, sleeping and exercising. For information about the space station, research in low-Earth orbit, NASA's commercial space programs and the future of American spaceflight, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/exploration To follow Marshburn and Hadfield on Twitter, visit: h t t p : / / w w w . t w i t t e r . c o m / A s t r o M a r s h b u r n ; and http://www.twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield

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* Free translation prepared by REO staff.

NASA: Hosts its first

Google+ Hangout from Space Station.

Science: Cosmos may

be inherently unstable.

Environment: First test

on reformed U.N. formula for making planet greener.

CHILE: Amazing photo

captures 84 million stars in our Milky Way Galaxy.

Science: Urban noise

makes flycatchers change their songs.

Energy: Company says it

can make fuel from thin air.

Health: Astronomers and

cancer researchers team up to beat cancer.

March 22, 2013 World Water Day

March 23, 2013 Earth Hour

April17-19, 2013

International Fair of Technologies Energy, Santiago, Chile

April 22, 2013

Earth Day

June 5, 2013 World Environment Day

July 10-12, 2013 Eolica, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Next events:

In this issue:

Photo by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

Scientists say they may be able to determine the eventual fate of the cosmos as they probe the properties of the Higgs boson. A concept known as vacuum instability could result, billions of years from now, in a new universe opening up in the present one and replacing it. It all depends on some precise numbers related to the Higgs that researchers are currently trying to pin down. A "Higgs-like" particle was first seen at the Large Hadron Collider last year. Associated with an energy field that pervades all space, the boson helps explain the existence of mass in the cos-mos. In other words, it underpins the workings of all the matter we see around us. Since detecting the particle in their accelerator experiments, researchers at the Geneva lab and at related institutions around the world have begun to theorise on the Higgs' implications for physics. One idea that it throws up is the possibility of a cyclical universe, in which every so often all of space is renewed. "It turns out there's a calculation you can do in our Standard Model of particle physics, once you know the mass of the Higgs boson," explained Dr Joseph Lykken. "If you use all the physics we know now, and you do this straightforward calculation - it's bad news. "What happens is you get just a quantum fluctuation that makes a tiny bubble of the vacuum the Universe really wants to be in. And because it's a lower-energy state, this bubble will then expand, basically at the speed of light, and sweep everything before it," the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory theoretician told BBC News. It was not something we need worry about, he said. The Sun and the Earth will be long gone by this time. Dr Lykken was speaking here in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He was participating in a session that had been organised to provide an update on the Higgs investigation. Two-year hiatus. The boson was spotted in the wreckage resulting from proton particle collisions in the LHC's giant accelerator ring. Data gathered by two independent detectors observing this subatomic debris determined the mass of the Higgs to be about 126 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).

Read more at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21499765

A new United Nations plan to involve all nations in marshalling science to fix environmental problems ranging from toxic chemicals to climate change will be put to the test from Monday at talks in Nairobi. The 40-year-old U.N. Environment Programme will open its annual governing council to all the world's almost 200 nations, up from a current group of 58, under reforms aimed at making the world economy greener at a time of weak economic growth. "A strengthened UNEP will ... improve and enhance international cooperation on the environment," Achim Steiner, executive director of UNEP, said of the annual February 18-22 meeting in a tele-phone interview with Reuters. Environment ministers or senior officials from about 150 nations are due to attend, out of almost 200 possible worldwide. Until now, UNEP's governing council has left out many smaller states, from Guyana to Albania. The shift is meant to sharpen world focus on problems such as toxic chemicals, over-fishing and global warming. Getting more countries in the room will not necessarily make reaching agreements easier but should give UNEP decisions more authority. Steiner said the talks would be a first chance to see how the new approach works. UNEP oversees many scientific studies guiding U.N. work, such as monitoring climate change or the pace of extinction of animals and plants. Under an agreement last year at an Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, UNEP will get a bigger budget. "By (February 22) the plan is that we will have the final steps in im-plementing the Rio summit's decisions to reform UNEP," Steiner said. The Rio deal fell short of calls by some nations, such as France, to create a completely new U.N. environment agency. "The seeds of what we are seeing will be seen only 5 or 10 years down the line," Steiner said. "One of the major issues is a new strategy for the organization and a programme of work for the next 3 years," Steiner said of the Nairobi talks that will lay guidelines for work on issues from oceans to slowing extinctions. Read full article at: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Environment/2013/Feb-17/206786-reformed-un-formula-for-making-planet-greener-to-get-first-test.ashx

SCIENCE: Cosmos May Be 'Inherently Unstable' By Jonathan Amos

ENVIRONMENT: Reformed U.N. Formula for Making Planet Greener to Get First Test By Alister Doyle

Photo by Jussi Mononen flickr user). Under Creative Commons License.

Photo by Mahdi Abdulrazak (flickr user). Under Creative Commons License.

Astronomers have catalogued 84 million stars at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy using an enor-mous cosmic photo snapped by a telescope in Chile, a view that is billed as the largest survey ever of the stars in our galaxy's core. The staggering 9-gigapixel picture was created with data gathered by the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), an instrument at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in northern Chile. The zoomable image is so large that it would measure 30 feet long by 23 feet tall (9 by 7 meters) if printed with the resolution of a typical book, researchers said. The catalogue derived from the new image contains 10 times more stars than previous studies have provided. It should help astronomers better understand the structure and evolution of our home galaxy, researchers said. "By observing in detail the myriads of stars surrounding the center of the Milky Way we can learn a lot more about the formation and evolution of not only our galaxy, but also spiral galaxies in general," study lead author Roberto Saito, of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Universidad de Valparaíso and The Milky Way Millennium Nucleus, said in a statement. [Stunning Photos of Our Milky Way Galaxy]

The huge new picture probes the Milky Way's central bulge, a concentration of ancient stars found near the core of most spiral galaxies. Getting good looks at this region is not an easy task. "Observations of the bulge of the Milky Way are very hard because it is obscured by dust," said co-author Dante Minniti, also of Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. "To peer into the heart of the galaxy, we need to observe in infrared light, which is less affected by the dust." VISTA was able to do just that, snapping thousands of infrared images that were combined to generate a monumental color mosaic measuring 108,200 by 81,500 pixels. It's one of the biggest astronomical images ever produced, researchers said. Read full article at: http://www.space.com/18193-milky-way-photo-84-millions-stars.html

Do birds change their tune in response to urban noise? It depends on the bird species, according to Dr. Alejandro Ariel Ríos-Chelén from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and colleagues. Their work shows that while some birds do adapt their songs in noisy conditions by means of frequency changes, others like the vermilion flycatchers adapt their song by means of changes in song lengths. The work is published online in Springer's journal, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. Birds use their songs during social interactions to attract females and repel intruders. Factors affecting acoustic communication, such as urban noise, may therefore impair breeding success. Research to date has shown that several songbird (or oscine) species like robins, nightingales and blackbirds, adapt their song in response to noise. This is done in order to improve acoustic communi-cation in noisy conditions. However, little work has been done on the more tropical sister group of the oscines, the sub-oscines, which includes the vermilion flycatcher. Rios-Chelén and team investigated whether male vermilion flycatchers adapted their song under noisy conditions in the same way as their less tropical sister group. They recorded the songs of 29 territorial vermilion flycatcher males in different parks and urban areas of Mexico City. They registered noise levels at different moments of both the pre-dawn and dawn chorus, measured song length, and counted the total number of elements in the birds' song to assess song versatility. They found that males occupying territories with relatively high noise levels produced longer songs, whereas males in quieter places sang both long and short songs. Males also showed song plasticity as they sang less versatile songs later in the morning when noise level was higher, but time of day seemed to play a more important role in driving this shift than did noise levels. The authors conclude, "While these results show that time of day has an effect on individual song versatility, we cannot discard an influence of noise... this study supports the idea that sub-oscine adaptation to noise is different in de-gree and mode to that taking place among oscines, suggesting heterogeneity in the capacity of bird species to colonize and survive in the urban environment." Read more at: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121120121906.htm

CHILE: Amazing Photo Captures 84 Million Stars in Our Milky Way Galaxy

Photo by Darren Kirby (flickr user). Under Creative Commons License.

SCIENCE: Urban Noise Makes Flycatchers Change Length of Their Songs

Photo by blmiers2 (flickr user). Under Creative Commons License.

Air Fuel Synthesis is pioneering revolutionary renewable fuels to provide secure, stable, and sustainable alternatives to global uncertainty about the future of fossil fuels and fossil oil based products. Air Fuel Synthesis uses renewable energy to do what nature does with photosynthe-sis and time, converting carbon dioxide into oil. Put simply, Air Fuel Synthesis converts carbon dioxide and water into synthetic hydrocarbon liquids from which sustainable fuels or other oil based products can be made. Oil is basically made from carbon and hydrogen. Carbon is in the air in the form of carbon diox-ide and hydrogen can be found in water. By means of this process and integrating various tech-nologies, carbon dioxide and hydrogen in water turn into a sustainable fuel. Air Fuel Synthesis is developing sustainable fuel operational expertise through its high-tech

demonstrator facility. This facility produces a range of renewable fuels as a precursor to commercial scale applications and pro-jects. However, there are many skeptics scientists and they question how much energy is would require to extract CO2 from air. Also, the full impact on environment has to be analyzed. For example: toxic by-products during production of various components or their disposal. All these should be analyzed by cost to see if this technology is really possible. Read more about this topic at: http://www.airfuelsynthesis.com/ http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/10/23/company-says-it-can-make-fuel-out-of-thin-air/

Cancer Research UK and Institute of Astronomy scientists have honed techniques originally developed to spot distant galaxies and used them to identify biomarkers that signal a cancer’s aggressiveness among some 2,000 breast tumours. The findings mean that the age-old practice of pathologists looking down the microscope to spot key differences in the staining of tumour samples could one day become a thing of the past. To develop this new automated approach the researchers adapted techniques used by astronomers to automatically pick out indis-tinct objects in the night sky. They applied these to immunohistochemistry (IHC), which relies on pathologists being able to distinguish subtle differences in the staining of tumour cells down the microscope, depending on the specific proteins they express. To road test the new approach they used it to measure the levels of three different proteins linked to more aggressive cancers, across tumour samples from more than 2,000 breast cancer patients. They compared the accuracy of manually scoring these results, by ob-serving the staining of the tumour samples down the microscope, versus relying on a computer to do this automatically. This showed that the new automated system was at least as accurate as the manual one, whilst at the same time being many times faster. Study lead author Dr Raza Ali, a pathology fellow from Cancer Research UK’s Cambridge Institute at the University of Cambridge, said: “We’ve exploited the natural overlap between the techniques astronomers use to analyse deep sky images from the largest tele-scopes and the need to pinpoint subtle differences in the staining of tumour samples down the microscope. “The results have been even better than we’d hoped, with our new automated ap-proach performing with accuracy comparable to the time-consuming task of scoring images manually, after only relatively minor adjustments to the formula. We’re now planning a larger international study involving samples from more than 20,000 breast cancer patients to further refine our strategy.” Senior author Professor Carlos Caldas,also from Cancer Research UK’s Cambridge Institute at the University of Cambridge, added: “Modern techniques are giving us some of the first insights into the key genes and proteins important in predicting the success or failure of different cancer treatments. But before these can be applied in the clinic, their usefulness needs to be verified in hundreds or sometimes thousands of tumour samples. Already this new automated approach means we can now analyse up to 4,000 images a day, helping streamline the process of translat-ing these discoveries into the clinic. Read more at: http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/content/astronomers.and.cancer.researchers.team.beat.cancer

ENERGY: Company Says It Can Make Fuel Out of Thin Air

Early Project Mercury food tube and dry bite-sized snacks with gelatin coating.

Photo by Ed Uthman (flickr user). Under Creative Commons License.

HEALTH: Astronomers And Cancer Researchers Team Up to Beat Cancer