Today's Asteroid Flyby a Wakeup Call, Scientists Say

Today's super-close asteroid flyby should be a wakeup call, spurring humanity to keep better track of the millions of space rocks whizzing through Earth's neighborhood, some scientists say.

There's no chance the 150-foot-wide (45 meters) asteroid 2012 DA14?will hit Earth on its closest approach today (Feb. 15) at 2:24 p.m. EST (1924 GMT). But it will cruise within 17,200 miles (27,000 kilometers) of our planet, marking the closest encounter with such a large space rock that researchers have ever known about in advance.

Some scientists hope the flyby serves as a warning shot, reminding folks that Earth sits in a cosmic shooting gallery and that it's just a matter of time before we suffer a major impact ? unless we take action.

"This close approach could just as easily have been an impact," Dan Durda, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., wrote in a blog post?Wednesday (Feb. 13).

"With many tens of thousands of undiscovered objects this size roaming our neighborhood, it?s only a matter of time before one of them booms through our atmosphere rather than skating through our planet-circling constellation of satellites," added Durda, who also serves on the board of directors of the B612 Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to predicting and preventing devastating asteroid strikes. [Asteroid 2012 DA14's Flyby: Complete Coverage]

Durda's point was rammed home early Friday morning when a brilliant fireball exploded?in the skies over Russia's Chelyabinsk region, which is about 930 miles (1,500 km) east of Moscow. The blast damaged hundreds of buildings and wounded perhaps 1,000 people, according to media reports.

Scientists think the Russian fireball was caused by an object weighing about 10 tons. For comparison, 2012 DA14 tips the scales at about 140,000 tons.

Millions of space rocks

Earth has been pummeled by asteroids throughout its 4.5-billion-year history. Perhaps the most famous impact came 65 million years ago, when a 6-mile-wide (10 km) behemoth smashed into our planet and wiped out the dinosaurs.

The good news is that another such catastrophic impact does not appear to be in the offing anytime soon. NASA researchers have mapped out the paths of more than 90 percent of the near-Earth asteroids at least 0.6 miles (1 km) across, which could threaten human civilization if they hit us. Not one is on a collision course with our planet in the foreseeable future.

But the numbers get worse from there. Observations by NASA's WISE space telescope suggest that about 4,700 asteroidsat least 330 feet (100 m) wide come uncomfortably close to our planet at some point in their orbits.

So far, astronomers have spotted less than 30 percent of these large space rocks, which could destroy an area the size of a state if they slammed into Earth. And they've identified just 1 percent of the objects that are about the size of 2012 DA14 or bigger, B612 officials have said.

Such asteroids are capable of inflicting serious damage on a local scale, as the "Tunguska Event" illustrates. In 1908, a 130-foot-wide (40 m) asteroid exploded over the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia, flattening about 825 square miles (2,137 square km) of forest.

Astronomers think, all together 1 million or more near-Earth asteroids are out there, cruising silently through the dark depths of space. About 9,600 have been discovered to date.

"It is actually difficult to look for these things," said Paul Dimotakis of Caltech in Pasadena, who is part of a team studying the feasibility of capturing and retrieving a near-Earth asteroid for future study and potential use.

Dimotakis notes that it's tough to spot asteroids between Earth and the sun, because the star's glare drowns out the relatively tiny objects from our perspective here on Earth. So researchers often point their instruments in the other direction, spotting more-distant space rocks that generally pose less of a threat. The ones that likely hold more potential risk are left in the dark of sorts.

"It's like the man who lost the keys and is looking where there is light, not where the keys were lost," Dimotakis told SPACE.com. [The 7 Strangest Asteroids in the Solar System]

New space telescope needed

Dimotakis says humanity should place an asteroid-hunting telescope near the orbit of Venus, where it could look outward and scan Earth's neighborhood without having to fight the sun's overwhelming glare.

The B612 Foundation agrees and is working to make it happen. The organization is developing a space telescope called Sentinel, which is slated to launch in 2017 or 2018 and eventually settle into a Venus-like orbit around the sun.

In 5 1/2 years of operation, Sentinel should find about 500,000 near-Earth asteroids, including all of the remaining mountain-size space rocks that could potentially end civilization and roughly 90 percent of the asteroids big enough to wipe out an entire state, B612 officials have said.

The main goal is to spot the really dangerous asteroids decades before they may hit us, giving humanity plenty of time to mount a deflection mission? for example, to launch a gravity-tractor probe that would fly alongside the asteroid for years, nudging it off course via a tiny gravitational tug.

"Rather than playing the odds of time, wouldn?t it be far better to be able to know, with some reasonable certainty, that we?ve cataloged the entire population of potentially hazardous asteroids?" Durda wrote. "With such a catalog in hand, we'd either know we're safe from disastrous impacts for the foreseeable future or at least be able to plan ahead for any known to be on our near-term cosmic planning calendar."

Editor's note:?If you snap a photo of asteroid 2012 DA14, or any other amazing night sky object, and you'd like to share it for a possible story or image gallery, please send images and comments to managing editor Tariq Malik at?spacephotos@space.com.

Follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall?or SPACE.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook?and?Google+.?

Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/todays-asteroid-flyby-wakeup-call-scientists-175339097.html

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NBC Sports Network best bet for Big East

Or what?s left of the Big East. Besides UConn, who else remains from the once great conference?

However, there will be a Big East. And it looks as if the conference is headed for a deal with the NBC Sports Network. Money aside (and it ain?t great), the conference would do well to follow the lead of the NHL, and become the main college game in town on NBCSN. The full-court (ice?) special treatment has helped hockey, and it could do the same for the Big East.

Former Boston Globe reporter Mark Blaudschun, now writing for his own blog ajerseyguy.com, does an excellent breakdown of things broke down for the Big East and where it goes from here.

Blaudschun assigns the blame for the conference passing up a mega-deal with ESPN:

Marinatto?s moves were dictated by the Presidents, particularly those at Pittsburgh and Georgetown, who were his prime backers when he was selected to replace former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese. Both argued strongly that the ESPN offer could be and would be topped by outlets such as NBC and Fox, who were desperate for programming.

The theory was that since the Big East was the only available BCS league without a long-term television deal, it would be a seller?s market. The Big East was the only game in time. That was the argument Marinatto was using, even though his inclination was to take the ESPN deal and run and run with it.

Throw in West Virginia, Rutgers and Notre Dame as other conspirators in the move away from ESPN and you have the ring leaders. Add former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue who was a consultant also arguing that expanding to other networks and other parts of the country were better and you have the major players pulling the strings behind the curtain.

But it gets better. Consider the schools that were yelling the loudest to turn down a deal which would have given each school approximately 13 million per year, which was 10 million more per year than the current Big East football contract, which has one year remaining.

Pittsburgh, West Virginia, Rutgers and Notre Dame. All have left or leaving the Big East.

As for the future, Blaudschun writes:

So next year look for Big Monday to be on NBC cable. Look for the Big East tournament to be on NBC and NBC cable. Prime time exposure with prime time teams, a great starting point for a new network needing exposure.

In two years, when the Catholic 7 leave and Rutgers and Louisville head to the Big Ten and ACC, the football deal will kick in.

Look for NBC cable having a Big East game of the Week each Saturday. Look for prime time non-conference games such as a UConn-Michigan showing up on the main NBC network when Notre Dame is not playing at home.

Look for promotion and more promotion.

But what about the money? Or lack of it. At first, it will be very low. But it?s not a long-term deal. There will be ?look in?s? clauses every couple of years. If takes off, the deal will be re-done for more money.

This could really work..

The Catholic 7?again led by Georgetown?will take their balls and sign a long-term deal with Fox to start their own 10 or 12 team play group, beginning in the fall of 2014. Maybe they will invite Xavier, Butler, St. Louis, Dayton, Creighton, VCU or Richmond or any combination that brings the total to 12.

The current Big East will emerge as a 10 team football league without a true dominant Top 10 contender on a consistent basis. It will be part of the non-BCS pack.

But it will have potential to get bigger and better. And it will have NBC promoting and cross promoting.

Source: http://www.shermanreport.com/nbc-sports-network-best-bet-for-big-east/

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Rep. Adam Smith of Washington Reintroduces Military Spouses Equal Treatment Act....

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Source: http://www.facebook.com/humanrightscampaign/posts/269064063224681

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Finance Committee Increases Tax Load for Working Families, Cuts ...

This morning, the House Finance Committee voted to reduce the state Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) provided to low-income working families across the state. More than 883,000 North Carolinians claimed the credit in 2010, which provides working families with dollars to spend in their local communities. Each year the state updates its tax code to address changes made to the federal tax code during the previous year, as North Carolina?s tax code is linked to the federal tax code.

Improvements to the federal EITC were extended as part of the fiscal cliff deal, including eliminating the marriage penalty and extending the credit to larger family sizes. In decoupling the state credit from the federal credit, the Finance Committee voted to reduce the state EITC from 5% to 4.5% of the federal credit for tax year 2013. The result is a cut of $11 million to the state credit.

The EITC helps boost the wages of low-income families and helps them pay for basic necessities. Cutting the tax credit will further challenge the ability of these families to make ends meet and minimize its ability to address the upside down nature of our state and local tax system. The House finance committee also voted to cut the Work Opportunity tax credit. However, the committee did vote to increase the amount of itemized deductions that individuals can claim, which would largely benefit high-income individuals.

This entry was posted in NC Budget and Tax Center and tagged budget, economy, federal budget, jobs, poverty, taxes. Bookmark the permalink.

Source: http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2013/02/13/finance-committee-increases-tax-load-for-working-families-cuts-eitc/

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How to Build Your Own Quantum Entanglement Experiment, Part 2 (of 2)

In my last post, I scrounged the parts for a very crude, but very cool, experiment you can do in your basement to demonstrate quantum entanglement. To my knowledge, it?s the cheapest and simplest such experiment ever done. It doesn?t give publishable results, but, to appropriate a line from Samuel Johnson, a homebrew entanglement experiment is ?like a dog?s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.?

As a warm-up exercise, I sandwich my source of entangled photons?a disk of radioactive sodium-22?between my two Geiger counters (see diagram and photo below) and leave the system to run overnight, measuring how often the Geigers click at the same time. If gamma-ray photons are indeed emerging two by two in opposite directions, the coincidence rate should vary strongly when I change the alignment of the two Geigers. And that is what I see.

When the Geigers are pointing straight at each other, each clicks about 900 times per minute and both do so in unison about 4 times per minute. This is about 40% greater than the expected rate of accidental coincidences. There are various subtleties in separating accidental and genuine coincidence rates and in estimating statistical errors, but the signal I observe is something like 10 standard deviations above the noise. When I rotate one of the Geigers out of alignment, the coincidence rate drops precipitously. For a 25? angle, it only about 15% greater than the accidental rate, which is still statistically significant, if barely. For 45? and 90?, it is equal to the expected accidental rate. So I can tentatively conclude I?m seeing pairs of gammas?one or two of them per minute! This is no mean accomplishment given how crude the equipment is.

Just because the gammas emerge in pairs doesn?t mean they are entangled, though. To check for entanglement, I measure the photons? polarization with a technique called Compton polarimetry. A pair of aluminum cubes bought at OnlineMetals.com serve as gamma-ray prisms, scattering photons in directions that depend on their polarization. The two gammas produced by the annihilation of an antielectron and electron are linearly polarized at right angles to each other, so they should scatter off the aluminum in perpendicular directions.

Here?s where the physics gets spooky. Each individual photon scatters in a random direction, yet the random direction one photon takes is related to the random direction its partner does. The gammas act in synchrony. How can they do that, if they?re truly random? Einstein concluded that the photons either are not truly random or are acting on each other at a distance.

In a first attempt to observe this effect, I sandwich the sodium-22 disk in between the two cubes and put a Geiger on one face of each cube (see photo below). I start by pointing the Geigers in the same direction and letting them sit overnight to count the coincidences. In the morning, I move one Geiger to a different face of its cube, so that the two detectors are now perpendicular to the other, and leave the system to run all day. I continue cycling through different ways to align the detectors either parallel or perpendicular to each other. Entanglement should betray itself as an asymmetry in the coincidence rate.

And indeed that?s what I see. About one coincidence occurs per minute on average, and the rate is consistently greater when the Geigers are perpendicular. It looks like entanglement in action!

A wise graduate student would hesitate to show this result to his or her faculty advisor, though. The perpendicular rate stands a couple of standard deviations above the expected accidental-coincidence rate, but the parallel rate swims in the noise. So the asymmetry might well be a fluke of statistics or a subtle bias in the setup.

To improve on the experiment, I need to beat down the accidental rate?in particular, the rate caused by gammas traveling straight from the sodium to the Geiger counter rather than scattering off the aluminum. I enclose the radioactive sodium in a so-called collimator: a lead storage canister in which I drilled a 1/2-inch hole at either end. A couple of hundred gammas per minute leak out through each hole, forming a pair of gamma-ray beams. The lead squelches off-axis radiation by a factor of about four.

With the collimator, the coincidence rate drops by a factor of 10, but now exceeds the predicted accidental rate for both orientations. The perpendicular rate is the higher of the two, again as the Compton-polarimetry theory predicts for entangled photons.

This still isn?t anything to call the Nobel committee about. At best, it implies the detection of one entangled pair of photons every 20 minutes, and with such a meager trickle, who knows what subtle bias might be operating. What was iffy for the pioneering Bleuler and Bradt experiment can only be more so for my apparatus. Then again, all I?m seeking is a suggestive demonstration, not a research-grade system.

A possible next step would be to special-order a stronger sodium-22 source, which would bring the particle rates in my experiment up to the level of Bleuler and Bradt?s, at the price of posing a greater radiation hazard. Another idea would be to try scatterers besides aluminum cubes. Beyond that, however, I think you exhaust the el-cheapo options and have to dig deeper into your wallet, starting with replacing the Geigers counters with scintillation counters, as Wu and Shaknov used. These are more efficient at picking up radiation; create shorter electrical pulses for each particle they detect, which reduces the probability of accidental coincidences; and measure particle energy, which would help to sift out annihilation-produced photons. But such instruments are pricier and fussier.

A useful guide to further refinements is Leonard Kaskay?s Ph.D. dissertation from 1972. A student of Wu, Kasday systematically went through the possible sources of error: multiple scattering, geometric misalignment, unwanted photons, and more. He was able to achieve enough precision to show that the gammas violated a mathematical inequality derived by theorist John S. Bell, confirming that he was seeing spooky action at a distance rather than some mundane effect.

These kinds of experiments are notoriously tricky, so please share your thoughts and advice?not to mention your attempts to reproduce! Wait till your friends hear that you?re an amateur quantum physicist in your spare time.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=2be677b0372e5b96c52355fa82b474b2

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Facebook Unveils The ?Facebook Card,? A Reusable Gift Card That Holds Multiple Balances From Different Stores

Facebook Gifts were one of the lower points of Facebook's earnings yesterday, but that doesn't mean the company isn't continuing to innovate on the gifting front. Today, Facebook announced?the "Facebook Card," which is a new way for people to give their friends gifts to places like?Jamba Juice, Olive Garden, Sephora, and Target, all on one reusable gift card purchased from Facebook.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/GYV6CW5rqV0/

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Source: http://www.workoninternet.com/business/home-business-small-business/224025-sonic-interactive-an-ultimate-website-design-australia.html

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