Tag: efforts (page 3 of 9)

Poll Reveals Public Skepticism of Government and Private Human Spaceflight

SpaceShipTwo powered test flight
A poll found 58 percent of people said private companies like Virgin Galactic should be allowed to send people to space, which it plans to do via its suborbital SpaceShipTwo vehicle (shown during a powered test flight). Credit: Virgin Galactic


Excerpt from spacenews.com

WASHINGTON — The American public is skeptical that private ventures will be able to launch “ordinary people” into space in the coming decades, and is split about spending money on government-led human space exploration, a new poll indicates. 

 The Monmouth University Poll results, released Feb. 16, showed that a majority of Americans believe private companies should be permitted to launch people into space, but also that they did not believe it likely those companies would be able to do so in next 20 to 30 years.  In the poll, 58 percent of people said private companies should be allowed to launch people in space, versus 37 percent who said that human spaceflight should be left to governments alone. 

However, 55 percent thought it was not likely that “ordinary people will be able to travel regularly” into space in the next 20 to 30 years, while 44 percent said such travel would be somewhat or very likely.  Most people also said they were unwilling to fly in space themselves: 69 percent said they would decline a free trip into space, while 28 percent said they would accept it. The poll did not specify what kind of trip — suborbital or orbital — was offered.  The poll revealed a sharp difference in gender, with men more willing than women to believe private ventures should be allowed to fly people in space. Men supported private over government-only human spaceflight by a margin of 71 to 26 percent. 

Women, though were, more evenly split, with 44 percent backing private human spaceflight and 49 percent supporting government-only efforts. MoonFifty percent of those polled said the U.S. government should not spend “billions of dollars to send astronauts to places like the moon, Mars, and asteroids.” 

The public is also divided about spending money on government human space exploration. Asked if the U.S. government should spend “billions of dollars to send astronauts to places like the moon, Mars, and asteroids,” 50 percent said no, while 42 percent said yes.  As with private spaceflight, there was a strong gender split, with 50 percent of men, but only 36 percent of women, supporting spending on human space exploration. There was, by contrast, little difference by party affiliation.  

The poll showed greater support for government spending on space in general. Asked if increased spending on the space program in general would be “a good investment for the country,” 51 percent agreed and 43 percent disagreed.  The poll is based on a telephone survey of 1,008 people in December, and has an overall margin of error of 3.1 percent.
WASHINGTON — The American public is skeptical that private ventures will be able to launch “ordinary people” into space in the coming decades, and is split about spending money on government-led human space exploration, a new poll indicates.
The Monmouth University Poll results, released Feb. 16, showed that a majority of Americans believe private companies should be permitted to launch people into space, but also that they did not believe it likely those companies would be able to do so in next 20 to 30 years.
In the poll, 58 percent of people said private companies should be allowed to launch people in space, versus 37 percent who said that human spaceflight should be left to governments alone. However, 55 percent thought it was not likely that “ordinary people will be able to travel regularly” into space in the next 20 to 30 years, while 44 percent said such travel would be somewhat or very likely.
Most people also said they were unwilling to fly in space themselves: 69 percent said they would decline a free trip into space, while 28 percent said they would accept it. The poll did not specify what kind of trip — suborbital or orbital — was offered.
The poll revealed a sharp difference in gender, with men more willing than women to believe private ventures should be allowed to fly people in space. Men supported private over government-only human spaceflight by a margin of 71 to 26 percent. Women, though were, more evenly split, with 44 percent backing private human spaceflight and 49 percent supporting government-only efforts.
Moon
Fifty percent of those polled said the U.S. government should not spend “billions of dollars to send astronauts to places like the moon, Mars, and asteroids.” Credit: NASA
The public is also divided about spending money on government human space exploration. Asked if the U.S. government should spend “billions of dollars to send astronauts to places like the moon, Mars, and asteroids,” 50 percent said no, while 42 percent said yes.
As with private spaceflight, there was a strong gender split, with 50 percent of men, but only 36 percent of women, supporting spending on human space exploration. There was, by contrast, little difference by party affiliation.
The poll showed greater support for government spending on space in general. Asked if increased spending on the space program in general would be “a good investment for the country,” 51 percent agreed and 43 percent disagreed.
The poll is based on a telephone survey of 1,008 people in December, and has an overall margin of error of 3.1 percent.
- See more at: http://spacenews.com/poll-reveals-public-skepticism-of-government-and-private-human-spaceflight/#sthash.6PxcrjTQ.dpuf

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Earth To Aliens: Scientists Want To Send Messages To Extraterrestrial Intelligence Possibly Living On Exoplanets

Excerpt from techtimes.comExtraterrestrial research experts have said that now is the time to contact intelligent life on alien worlds.Leading figures behind the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti), which has been using radio telescop...

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How Would the World Change If We Found Alien Life?







Excerpt from space.com
By by Elizabeth Howell

In 1938, Orson Welles narrated a radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds" as a series of simulated radio bulletins of what was happening in real time as Martians arrived on our home planet. The broadcast is widely remembered for creating public panic, although to what extent is hotly debated today.

Still, the incident serves as an illustration of what could happen when the first life beyond Earth is discovered. While scientists might be excited by the prospect, introducing the public, politicians and interest groups to the idea could take some time.

How extraterrestrial life would change our world view is a research interest of Steven Dick, who just completed a term as the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair of Astrobiology. The chair is jointly sponsored by the NASA Astrobiology Program and the John W. Kluge Center, at the Library of Congress. 


Dick is a former astronomer and historian at the United States Naval Observatory, a past chief historian for NASA, and has published several books concerning the discovery of life beyond Earth. To Dick, even the discovery of microbes would be a profound shift for science.

"If we found microbes, it would have an effect on science, especially biology, by universalizing biology," he said. "We only have one case of biology on Earth. It's all related. It's all DNA-based. If we found an independent example on Mars or Europa, we have a chance of forming a universal biology."

Dick points out that even the possibilities of extraterrestrial fossils could change our viewpoints, such as the ongoing discussion of ALH84001, a Martian meteorite found in Antarctica that erupted into public consciousness in 1996 after a Science article said structures inside of it could be linked to biological activity. The conclusion, which is still debated today, led to congressional hearings.

"I've done a book about discovery in astronomy, and it's an extended process," Dick pointed out. "It's not like you point your telescope and say, 'Oh, I made a discovery.' It's always an extended process: You have to detect something, you have to interpret it, and it takes a long time to understand it. As for extraterrestrial life, the Mars rock showed it could take an extended period of years to understand it."


ALH84001 Meteorite
The ALH84001 meteorite, which in a 1996 Science publication was speculated to be host to what could be ancient Martian fossils. That finding is still under dispute today.

Mayan decipherments

In his year at the Library of Congress, Dick spent time searching for historical examples (as well as historical analogies) of how humanity might deal with first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. History shows that contact with new cultures can go in vastly different directions.

Hernan Cortes' treatment of the Aztecs is often cited as an example of how wrong first contact can go. But there were other efforts that were a little more mutually beneficial, although the outcomes were never perfect. Fur traders in Canada in the 1800s worked closely with Native Americans, for example, and the Chinese treasure fleet of the 15th Century successfully brought its home culture far beyond its borders, perhaps even to East Africa.

Even when both sides were trying hard to make communication work, there were barriers, noted Dick.

"The Jesuits had contact with Native Americans," he pointed out. "Certain concepts were difficult, like when they tried to get across the ideas of the soul and immortality."



A second look by the Mars Global Surveyor at the so-called Viking “Face on Mars” in Cydonia revealed a more ordinary-looking hill, showing that science is an extended process of discovery.


Indirect contact by way of radio communications through the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), also illustrates the challenges of transmitting information across cultures. There is historical precedence for this, such as when Greek knowledge passed west through Arab translators in the 12th Century. This shows that it is possible for ideas to be revived, even from dead cultures, he said.

It's also quite possible that the language we receive across these indirect communications would be foreign to us. Even though mathematics is often cited as a universal language, Dick said there are actually two schools of thought. One theory is that there is, indeed, one kind of mathematics that is based on a Platonic idea, and the other theory is that mathematics is a construction of the culture that you are in. 

"There will be a decipherment process. It might be more like the Mayan decipherments," Dick said.


The ethics of contact

As Dick came to a greater understanding about the potential c impact of extraterrestrial intelligence, he invited other scholars to present their findings along with him. Dick chaired a two-day NASA/Library of Congress Astrobiology Symposium called "Preparing for Discovery," which was intended to address the impact of finding any kind of life beyond Earth, whether microbial or some kind of intelligent, multicellular life form.

The symposium participants discussed how to move beyond human-centered views of defining life, how to understand the philosophical and theological problems a discovery would bring, and how to help the public understand the implications of a discovery.

"There is also the question of what I call astro-ethics," Dick said. "How do you treat alien life? How do you treat it differently, ranging from microbes to intelligence? So we had a philosopher at our symposium talking about the moral status of non-human organisms, talking in relation to animals on Earth and what their status is in relation to us."

Dick plans to collect the lectures in a book for publication next year, but he also spent his time at the library gathering materials for a second book about how discovering life beyond Earth will revolutionize our thinking.

"It's very farsighted for NASA to fund a position like this," Dick added. "They have all their programs in astrobiology, they fund the scientists, but here they fund somebody to think about what the implications might be. It's a good idea to do this, to foresee what might happen before it occurs."

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Archaeologists Uncovering Legendary Lost City of Poseidon

A view of the excavations at Helike. Drekis, Wikimedia CommonsExcerpt from popular-archaeology.com A team of scholars and students will return to explore and investigate the site now thought to be the remains of the lost city of Helike, the lege...

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New internet neutrality: FCC chairman proposes strong new rules

Excerpt from mercurynews.comThe federal government's top communications regulator on Wednesday called for strong new rules to bar Internet and wireless providers from blocking, slowing or discriminating against consumers' access to particular websi...

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How Obama wants to spend Americans’ money next year: an agency-by-agency look


PHOTO: President Barack Obama's new $4 trillion budget plan is distributed by the Senate Budget Committee as it arrives on Capitol Hill in Washington, early Monday, Feb. 02, 2015. The fiscal blueprint for the budget year that begins Oct. 1, seeks to raise taxes on wealthier Americans and corporations and use the extra income to lift the fortunes of families who have felt squeezed during tough economic times. Republicans, who now hold the power in Congress, are accusing the president of seeking to revert to tax-and-spend policies that will harm the economy while failing to do anything about soaring spending on government benefit programs. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
President Barack Obama's new $4 trillion budget plan is distributed by the Senate Budget Committee as it arrives on Capitol Hill in Washington, early Monday, Feb. 02, 2015. The fiscal blueprint for the budget year that begins Oct. 1, seeks to raise taxes on wealthier Americans and corporations and use the extra income to lift the fortunes of families who have felt squeezed during tough economic times. Republicans, who now hold the power in Congress, are accusing the president of seeking to revert to tax-and-spend policies that will harm the economy while failing to do anything about soaring spending on government benefit programs. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)


Excerpt from therepublic.com 

WASHINGTON — Sure, $4 trillion sounds like a lot. But it goes fast when your budget stretches from aging highways to medical care to space travel and more.

Here's an agency-by-agency look at how President Barack Obama would spend Americans' money in the 2016 budget year beginning Oct. 1:


HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
Up or down? Up 4.3 percent
What's new? Medicare could negotiate prices for cutting-edge drugs.
Highlights:
— The president's proposed health care budget asks Congress to authorize Medicare to negotiate what it pays for high-cost prescription drugs and for biologics, including advanced medications for diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. Currently, private insurers bargain on behalf of Medicare beneficiaries. Drug makers have beaten back prior proposals to give Medicare direct pricing power. But the introduction of a $1,000-a-pill hepatitis-C drug last year may have shifted the debate.
— Tobacco taxes would nearly double, to extend health insurance for low-income children. The federal cigarette tax would rise from just under $1.01 per pack to about $1.95 per pack. Taxes on other tobacco products also would go up. That would provide financing to pay for the Children's Health Insurance Program through 2019. The federal-state program serves about 8 million children, and funding technically expires Sept. 30. The tobacco tax hike would take effect in 2016.
— Starting in 2019, the proposal increases Medicare premiums for high-income beneficiaries and adds charges for new enrollees. The charges for new enrollees include a home health copayment, changes to the Part B deductible, and a premium surcharge for seniors who've also purchased a kind of supplemental insurance whose generous benefits are seen as encouraging overuse of Medicare services.
— There's full funding for ongoing implementation of Obama's health care law.
—The plan would end the budget sequester's 2 percent cut in Medicare payments to service providers and repeal another budget formula that otherwise will result in sharply lower payments for doctors. But what one hand gives, the other hand takes away. The budget also calls for Medicare cuts to hospitals, insurers, drug companies and other service providers.
The numbers:
Total spending: $1.1 trillion, including about $1 trillion on benefit programs including Medicare and Medicaid, already required by law.
Spending that needs Congress' annual approval: $80 billion.

NASA
Up or down? Up 2.9 percent
What's new? Not much. Just more money for planned missions.
Highlights:
—The exploration budget — which includes NASA's plans to grab either an asteroid or a chunk of an asteroid and haul it closer to Earth for exploration by astronauts — gets a slight bump in funding. But the details within the overall exploration proposal are key. The Obama plan would put more money into cutting-edge non-rocket space technology; give a 54 percent spending jump to money sent to private firms to develop ships to taxi astronauts to the International Space Station; and cut by nearly 12 percent spending to build the next government big rocket and capsule to carry astronauts. Congress in the past has cut the president's proposed spending on the private firms and technology and boosted the spending on the government big rocket and capsule.
—The president's 0.8 percent proposed increase in NASA science spending is his first proposed jump in that category in four years. It's also the first proposed jump in years in exploring other planets. It includes extra money for a 2020 unmanned Martian rover and continued funding for an eventual robotic mission to Jupiter's moon Europa. But the biggest extra science spending goes to study Earth.
— Obama's budget would cut aeronautics research 12 percent from current spending and slash NASA's educational spending by 25 percent. It also slightly trims the annual spending to build the over-budget multi-billion dollar James Webb Space Telescope, which will eventually replace the Hubble Space Telescope and is scheduled to launch in 2018.
The numbers:
Total spending: $18.5 billion
Spending that needs Congress' annual approval: $18.5 billion

TRANSPORTATION
Up or down? Up 31 percent
What's new? A plan to tackle an estimated $2 trillion in deferred maintenance for the nation's aging infrastructure by boosting highway and transit spending to $478 billion over six years.
Highlights:
— The six-year highway and transit plan would get a one-time $238 billion infusion from the general treasury. Some of the money would be offset by taxing the profits of U.S. companies that haven't been paying taxes on income made overseas. That infusion comes on top of the $35 billion a year that normally comes from gasoline and diesel taxes and other transportation fees.
— The proposal also includes tax incentives to encourage private investment in infrastructure, and an infrastructure investment bank to help finance major transportation projects.
— The new infrastructure investment would be front-loaded. The budget proposes to spend the money over six years and pay for the programs over 10 years.
— The proposal also includes a new Interagency Infrastructure Permitting Improvement Center to coordinate efforts across nearly 20 federal agencies and bureaus to speed up the permitting process. For example, the Coast Guard, Corps of Engineers and Transportation Department are trying to synchronize their reviews of projects such as bridges that cross navigation channels.
The numbers:
Total spending: $94.5 billion, including more than $80 billion already required by law, mostly for highway and transit aid to states and improvement grants to airports.
Spending that needs Congress' annual approval: $14.3 billion.

Associated Press writers Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Seth Borenstein, Joan Lowy and Connie Cass contributed to this report.

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With innovators from around the globe digging in, public moon travel may be only 20 years away



moon
Image Credit: hkeita/Shutterstock


Excerpt from  venturebeat.com
By Vivek Wadhwa

Five teams competing for the $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE have just been awarded a combined $5.25 million for meeting significant milestones in developing a robot that can safely land on the surface of the moon, travel 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send mooncasts back to the Earth. A tiny startup from India, Team Indus, with no experience in robotics or space flight just won $1 million of this prize. It stood head to head with companies that had been funded by billionaires, had received the assistance of NASA, and had the support of leading universities.
The good news is that governments no longer have a monopoly on space exploration. In two or three decades, we will have entrepreneurs taking us on private spaceflights to the moon. That is what has become possible.

What has changed since the days of the Apollo moon landings is that the cost of building technologies has dropped exponentially. What cost billions of dollars then costs millions now, and sometimes even less. Our smartphones have computers that are more powerful than the Cray supercomputers of yesteryear — which had strict export controls and cost tens of millions of dollars. We carry high-definition cameras in our pockets that are more powerful than those on NASA spacecraft. The cameras in the Mars Curiosity Rover, for example, have a resolution of 2 megapixels with 8GB of flash memory, the same as our clunky first-generation iPhones. The Apollo Guidance Computer, which took humans to the moon in 1966, had a 2.048 MHz processor — slower than those you find in calculators and musical greeting cards.

The same technologies as are available in the United States and Europe are available worldwide. Innovation has globalized.
I met Team Indus while I was in Mumbai to speak at INK last November. When they told me they were competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE. I didn’t take them seriously because I had seen their counterpart in Silicon Valley, Moon Express, which has the support of tech moguls such as Naveen Jain. How could a scrawny little startup in Bangalore take on Naveen Jain, former NASA engineer Bob Richards, and NASA itself, I thought. The Moon Express team is a force of nature, has the advantage of being on the NASA Ames Research campus, and has been given R&D worth billions of dollars by NASA.

Team Indus was also up against Astrobotic, which is a spinoff from the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, and Israel-based SpaceIL, which has the backing of the country’s top research institutes.

The company’s win blew my mind. Even though the subject of my INK talk was how Indian entrepreneurs could help change the world, I didn’t think it was already happening.

(See my Jan. 1 story on the Indian tech scene and watch this talk to learn more: Why India shouldn’t be succeeding but is.)

The Bangalore-based startup was founded by former I.T. executive Rahul Narayan and four of his friends: an Air Force pilot, a marketing executive, an investment banker, and an aerospace engineer. None of the team had experience in building spacecraft or robots, yet they were able to build technology that could navigate to the moon.

Narayan says he expects completion of his space mission to cost around $30 million. Moon Express chief executive Bob Richards estimates $50 million. These numbers are higher than the $20 million prize that they hope to win. But both see far greater opportunities: They hope to be pioneers in what could be a trillion-dollar industry. Richards is looking to mine the moon for minerals and bring them back to Earth. Each payload could be worth billions.

The Google Lunar XPRIZE has 26 teams competing from around the world. Collectively, they will spend in the hundreds of millions of dollars on their efforts. For them, it is not all about winning the contest; many of the losers will still commercialize their space technologies or put their knowledge to use in other fields. This is the power of such competitions. They lead entrants to spend multiples of the offered purse on innovative solutions. And they motivate people outside the industry, such as Narayan, to enter it with out-of-the-box thinking.

Innovation prizes are not new. In fact, a number of celebrated historical feats were made possible, in part, by the desire to win these prizes. In the 1920s, New York hotel owner Raymond Orteig offered a $25,000 prize to the first person to fly non-stop between New York and Paris. Several unsuccessful attempts were made before an American airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh won the competition in 1927 with his plane, The Spirit of St. Louis
Lindbergh’s achievement made him a national hero and a global celebrity. And it sparked the interest and investment that led to the modern aviation industry.

That is what I expect will come of the Lunar XPRIZE. And that is why I am looking forward to booking my round-trip ticket to the moon one summer in the 2030s.

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130,000 Air Force UFO Files Land on Internet

130,000 Air Force UFO Files Land on Internet

Excerpt from cnn.com It's enough to make Mulder and Scully seethe with envy.Nearly 130,000 pages of declassified Air Force files on UFO investigations and sightings are now available in one place online.Declassified government records about UFOs ...

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Theoretical physics: The origins of space and time


Excerpt from nature.com
By Zeeya Merali


Many researchers believe that physics will not be complete until it can explain not just the behaviour of space and time, but where these entities come from.

“Imagine waking up one day and realizing that you actually live inside a computer game,” says Mark Van Raamsdonk, describing what sounds like a pitch for a science-fiction film. But for Van Raamsdonk, a physicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, this scenario is a way to think about reality. If it is true, he says, “everything around us — the whole three-dimensional physical world — is an illusion born from information encoded elsewhere, on a two-dimensional chip”. That would make our Universe, with its three spatial dimensions, a kind of hologram, projected from a substrate that exists only in lower dimensions.

This 'holographic principle' is strange even by the usual standards of theoretical physics. But Van Raamsdonk is one of a small band of researchers who think that the usual ideas are not yet strange enough. If nothing else, they say, neither of the two great pillars of modern physics — general relativity, which describes gravity as a curvature of space and time, and quantum mechanics, which governs the atomic realm — gives any account for the existence of space and time. Neither does string theory, which describes elementary threads of energy.

Free podcast

Zeeya Merali discusses some of the theories that are trying to explain the origins of space and time.


Van Raamsdonk and his colleagues are convinced that physics will not be complete until it can explain how space and time emerge from something more fundamental — a project that will require concepts at least as audacious as holography. They argue that such a radical reconceptualization of reality is the only way to explain what happens when the infinitely dense 'singularity' at the core of a black hole distorts the fabric of space-time beyond all recognition, or how researchers can unify atomic-level quantum theory and planet-level general relativity — a project that has resisted theorists' efforts for generations.

“All our experiences tell us we shouldn't have two dramatically different conceptions of reality — there must be one huge overarching theory,” says Abhay Ashtekar, a physicist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park.

Finding that one huge theory is a daunting challenge. Here, Nature explores some promising lines of attack — as well as some of the emerging ideas about how to test these concepts...

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Is AI a threat to humanity?

Excerpt from cnn.comImagine you're the kind of person who worries about a future when robots become smart enough to threaten the very existence of the human race. For years, you've been dismissed as a crackpot, consigned to the same category of peop...

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The Mystery of Empty Space

Molecular "Black Cloud" B68 toward the constellation Ophiuchus sillouetted against a region very rich in stars. VLT ANTU/FORS1. Credits: ESO Get ready to re-think your ideas of reality. Join UCSD physicist Kim Griest as he takes you on a fascin...

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Volunteers Sought for Christmas Bird Count





Excerpt from
yourdailyjournal.com 


ROCKINGHAM — The National Audubon Society is inviting Richmond County birdwatchers to participate in the longest-running citizen science survey in the world, the annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count.

Beginning Sunday, hundreds of birders and nature enthusiasts across North Carolina will take part in this long-standing tradition where data collected has helped to shape influential conservation efforts nationwide.

As North Carolina’s landscape continues to evolve with changes... the data collected during the annual Christmas Bird Count is crucial to understanding the health of native and migrating bird populations throughout North Carolina. During the 2013 CBC, five snowy owls were spotted from Asheville to Wilmington, and local citizen scientists were on hand to detail the rare event.

North Carolina’s birding circles are some of the top performing in the country, and last year, a record 51 counts across the state reported 1,113,012 individual birds from 225 species.

“In a state where inspiring conservation action is vital to the health of birds facing the damaging effects of climate change, Audubon North Carolina is excited to be a leader in statewide conservation efforts,” Executive Director Heather Hahn said in a release. “As climate change continues to affect populations of the brown-headed nuthatch, American oystercatcher, wood thrush and many more iconic species, the data collected during this annual event becomes even more important to ongoing efforts to protect our birds.”

Each year, the Audubon Christmas Bird Count mobilizes more than 70,000 volunteer bird counters in more than 2,400 locations across the Western Hemisphere. The Audubon Christmas Bird Count utilizes the power of volunteers to track the health of bird populations at a scale that professional scientists could never accomplish alone. Data compiled across North Carolina will record every individual bird and bird species seen in a specified area, contributing to a vast citizen science network that continues a tradition stretching back more than 100 years.

Birders of all ages are welcome to contribute to this fun winter tradition and nationwide citizen science project, which provides ornithologists with a crucial snapshot of native bird populations during the winter months. Each individual count is performed in a count circle with a diameter of 15 miles.

At least 10 volunteers, including a compiler to coordinate the process, count in each circle. The volunteers break up into small parties and follow assigned routes, which change little from year to year, counting every bird they see. In most count circles, some people also watch feeders instead of following routes.

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Welcoming the Era of In-Space Manufacturing


Mike Snyder (right) and Jason Dunn of Made In Space get the company's 3D printer ready for its September 2014 launch toward the International Space Station. The machine printed its first part in orbit on Nov. 24, 2014.
Mike Snyder (right) and Jason Dunn of Made In Space get the company's 3D printer ready for its September 2014 launch toward the International Space Station. The machine pri

Excerpt from space.com

Mike Snyder, lead engineer for the company Made In Space, which designed and built the 3D printer currently aboard the International Space Station, contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Human spaceflight reached an important milestone this week. An additive manufacturing device or 3D printer, was turned on, and initiated the first official 3D print on the International Space Station (ISS). 

The print took slightly more than an hour, and once it finished, the world changed. At the Made In Space Operations Center in Moffett Field, California, the rest of the team and I had the ability to command the printer and see inside it as the machine received and executed our commands. For the first time, humans demonstrated the ability to manufacture while in space. At this moment, if the space station absolutely needs a part that the 3D printer can build, I can start producing the part onboard the ISS within minutes — from my chair in California. 


The ability to deliver components on demand without the need of a launch vehicle can redefine how space-mission strategies work. Before last week, every object that humans have ever put in space was launched there and not made in space. Of course, many experiments and efforts have been able to form items such as crystalline structures and latex spheres, as well as assembly-type construction. 3D printing is completely different. This capability does more than just build predetermined articles that were designed months or years before launch. The 3D printer can build files that are created after launch and sent to orbit when needed.

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