Word: spotting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Think you could stare at a single spot without blinking for 3½ years? Then be glad you're not NASA's Kepler telescope, which is set to blast into space from Cape Canaveral, Fla., this Friday night. Kepler's job may sound boring to you, but what the spacecraft accomplishes could be extraordinary: the discovery of the first Earth-like planets orbiting sun-like stars. Those kinds of places might well be brewing Earth-like forms of life...
...Kepler is smaller because it carries just one main piece of scientific hardware: a light imager known as a charged couple device that detects fluctuations in light so tiny they're measured by counting the electrons they produce on a silicon surface. This will allow Kepler to spot planets by the previously invisible change in luminosity they cause as their orbit carries them around the facing side of their parent star. (See pictures of women in space...
...lights on a lot of porches. With perhaps 70 sextillion stars in the universe (that's 7 followed by 22 zeros), the spacecraft can't possibly survey them all. Instead, it will sample about 100,000 in a region of our solar system known as Cygnus-Lyra. That spot was chosen both because it's rich in stars and because it lies above our own orbital plane. Kepler - which will be launched into not an Earth orbit but a solar orbit - can thus simply train its gaze up and never have to worry about any bodies in the home solar...
...good thing about a census like this one is that even a few sightings can tell you a lot. Spot a handful of Earth-like planets among 100,000 stars, then factor up to 70 sextillion, and you've got whole lot of warm, cozy worlds potentially cooking up a whole lot of life. On one of those worlds, someone may even be looking back as our own planet passes in front of the porch light...
...discovered that the astrocytes in the mouse model for Alzheimer’s fired spontaneously more often than in a normal mouse and had increased levels of resting calcium. “The astrocytes are connected over time and space and can send waves of calcium signals from one spot to the other,” said Bacskai, who added that these results were independent of neuronal activity. Kuchibhotla said the researchers think that the plaque deposition may be seen as a traumatic event that is causing these intercellular calcium waves, providing a new line for Alzheimer?...