2008: May 26th Good News (Mars Craft Makes Successful Landing, Billionaire Treats Wounded Soldiers to Vegas Weekend, more...)

Good afternoon all,

I ran out of time last night, so I'm correcting the layout this morning. The Cheju Do trip has been fun but is about to end. Our flight leaves today at 1pm...so we'll just get some breakfast and maybe look for souvenirs. Yesterday we hike Halla Mountain, which is the most famous mountain on Cheju Do,as it is the dead volcano that once created this island.

Anyway, let me introduce you to a couple interesting articles. First, today was the successful landing on Mars! Yea! The mission has already sent back pictures. :) Second, there was a woman who miraculously returned to life, after starting rigormortis, and being pronounced dead by doctors. They said she was dead more that 10 minutes when she awoke, just before the doctors were about to operate. The first thing she asked for was her son. Interesting!

I hope you enjoy today's articles. I'll be back tomorrow with more! :)


Today's Top 5:
1. Mars Craft Makes Successful Landing, Sends Images (The Arizona Republic)
2. Billionaire Treats Wounded Soldiers to Vegas Weekend (Las Vegas Sun)
3. Birds Instinctively Pick Healthy Fruits (Indian Info)
4. The Mother Who Came Back from the Dead -- Ten Minutes after her Life Support Machine was Turned Off (Daily Mail UK)
5. How Green is the College? Time the Showers. (New York Times)




Honorable Mentions:
1. Rare Camel Fossil Unearthed in Southeast Gilbert Arizona (MSNBC)
2. Star Watch - Archaeologists Discover a "Cosmic Clock" (Tenerife News)




Today's Top 5:

1.Mars Craft Makes Successful Landing, Sends Back Images
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0526mars0526.html
Anne Ryman
The Arizona Republic
May. 26, 2008 12:00 AM

TUCSON - The Phoenix Mars Mission spacecraft has survived its fiery ride
through the atmosphere of the Red Planet and transmitted a signal back to Earth, the first indication the spacecraft made a successful landing. Scientists who had been nervously awaiting the end of the 10-month journey erupted in cheers and applause as the signal of a safe landing
came in around 5 p.m. Sunday.

"We are on the surface of Mars," said Chris Shinohara, science operations center manager at the University of Arizona, where the mission is headquartered. Several hundred scientists, their family and friends gathered at the operations center to hear a live feed from NASA as the
craft touched down.

A second wave of cheering followed less than two hours later, when the first images from the spacecraft showed that both of its solar panels had deployed. These are critical to recharging the craft's batteries.

The $420 million mission is the first to land in the northern polar region of Mars, where orbiting cameras have detected evidence of subsurface ice. Scientists want to study the history of water on the planet and find out whether the habitat could have supported life.

Loaded with 130 pounds of scientific equipment, the spacecraft has a nearly 8-foot robotic arm capable of scraping through soil into ice. The arm is designed to scoop up samples and transfer them to an onboard chemistry lab for analysis.

Phoenix covered 422 million miles on its journey to Mars. On Sunday afternoon around 4:45 p.m., the spacecraft dived into the planet's atmosphere at 12,600 mph and relied on a parachute and thrusters to slow itself to 5 mph. Three shock-absorber legs on the craft's bottom helped
cushion the landing.

NASA officials were nervous about the landing, and for good reason. More than half of the 13 international attempts to land on Mars have been unsuccessful. NASA's last try at a powered landing in 1999 ended with the

Mars Polar Lander entering the atmosphere and never being heard from again. After that failure, NASA identified and fixed more than two dozen potential problems that could have plagued the Phoenix landing.

Diana Blaney, a scientist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, clasped her hands together before the landing and tried to keep from biting her nails. She had spent the day before the landing going to a spa and getting a massage in an attempt to keep her nerves at bay.

"It's kind of out of my control," she said as she waited in Tucson for word that Phoenix had landed.

Blaney has seen great success and disappointment. She is a deputy project manager for the Mars rovers, which still operate on the surface more than four years after landing. She also was part of the failed Mars Polar Lander in 1999.

She clapped and smiled when the touchdown signal came back from NASA. "It's a huge relief," she said.

Then she prepared to work. She planned to spend Sunday evening analyzing the first pictures that come in from Phoenix. The images will give scientists clues about where to dig into the soil and ice.

Lead scientist Peter Smith expects Phoenix to take thousands of photos. One camera on the robotic arm is designed for close-up pictures; another, for panoramic views.

Scientists also can track the weather thanks to a $37 million meteorological station from the Canadian Space Agency. They can monitor temperatures, gauge wind speed and measure cloud cover.

The mission is expected to last three months, although it's possible Phoenix could function into mid-November or even December or January. Eventually, the sinking winter sun will deprive Phoenix of enough light to recharge its batteries.

Scientists said there's a slight possibility that Phoenix could come back to life after winter ends, but that's unlikely. The thick ice expected to envelope the spacecraft may damage its solar panels.

Phoenix joins two other ground missions already on Mars. NASA operates two golf-cart-size rovers near the equator that crawl at turtle speed. Both show signs of wear, even though they continue to take pictures and make discoveries. Dust coats their solar panels, and one of the rovers drags a broken wheel.

In addition to the land missions, NASA has two orbiters equipped with cameras and is a partner in a third orbiter operated by the European Space Agency.

The next NASA Mars mission, a rover project called Mars Science Laboratory, is planned for 2009. If Phoenix failed, it may have been difficult for NASA to justify more Mars missions, Smith said. Eventually, NASA would like to send a spacecraft to Mars that could return with a soil sample.

Reach the reporter at anne .ryman@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8072.




2. Billionaire Treats Wounded Soldiers to Vegas Weekend
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/may/26/billionaire-treats-wounded-soldiers-to-vegas-weeke/
The Associated Press

Mon, May 26, 2008 (4:07 a.m.)

All too familiar with the gambles of war, Jimmy Kinsey, Kyle Riley and a few dozen fellow soldiers landed in the desert. But for these guys this Memorial Day, the most at stake is a few bucks.

The soldiers-turned-high rollers took a private jet to Las Vegas over the weekend for an all-expenses-paid getaway with all the perks normally saved for casinos' richest regulars.

They were greeted at the airport by Wayne Newton, chilled backstage with the guys from Blue Man Group and hobnobbed with Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino mogul who runs Las Vegas Sands Corp. and paid for the trip.

The trip, organized by the Armed Forces Foundation, brought 40 wounded soldiers from Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Md., to the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino on the Las Vegas Strip.

"I'm gonna be bragging about this for a long while," said Kinsey, 23, while hanging out in his penthouse overlooking the nearby Wynn Golf Course. Each of the soldiers, mostly in their 20s, stayed in a penthouse, and several who came alone got one to themselves.

Kinsey, a Marine corporal from Foley, Ala., who lost part of his left leg to an improvised explosive device in Iraq in 2006, said he hadn't spent too much time gambling _ just a few slots.

"On a scale from one to 10 I gave this trip a 15 when I got on the plane," he said.

Riley, a 21-year-old from Catlett, Va., who also lost part of his left leg to an IED in Iraq, was so overwhelmed by the trip he decided with his fiancee, Alyssa Mergler, to make it their wedding weekend. They planned to wed Monday on a gold and white gondola, courtesy of Adelson, whom Mergler said insisted on having his staff handle the plans.

Mergler, 21, said a wedding coordinator showed up at their suite with a thick book of flower choices.

"I don't have the money to do that," said Riley, who asked Kinsey to be his best man.

Armed Forces Foundation officials said the trip was a dream distraction from the everyday life at the hospitals, where the soldiers lived while recovering from their injuries.

Armed Forces Foundation spokesman Doug Stone said the trip would be the first of many, and said Adelson wanted to eventually extend the all-expenses-paid offer to every veteran who had been admitted to the two hospitals.

A spokesman for Adelson said the executive was not available for comment because he was traveling.

On the Net:
Armed Forced Foundation: http://www.armedforcesfoundation.org
Venetian: http://www.venetian.com






3. Birds Instinctively Pick Healthy Fruits
http://lifestyle.indiainfo.com/2008/05/26/0805261347_birds_instinctively_pick_healthy_fruits.html
May 26, 2008

Hamburg (Germany): Birds instinctively choose the fruit which is healthy and shun less health-giving food options, German researchers have found.

Given a choice, birds flock to fruits with the highest levels of antioxidants known as flavonoids, which boost the immune system.

The German researchers offered a group of blackcaps, a common European summertime bird, a choice of two foods containing different amounts of flavonoids.

They found that the birds deliberately selected the food with added antioxidants.

Birds fed modest amounts of flavonoids over a period of four weeks developed stronger immune systems.

Carlo Catoni, from the University of Freiburg, who led the study, said: "We fed the birds an amount of flavonoids that they would obtain by eating one to two blackberries, bilberries or elderberries a day.

"We used this modest intake of flavonoids because high quantities are only available during the limited time of maximum berry abundance.

"Our study shows for the first time that flavonoids are beneficial compounds that can boost the immune system in a living organism. We also found that wild birds actively select food containing flavonoids.

"Our results have important implications for the study of ecology and immunity in birds, and for the evolution of the relationship between plants and the birds and animals they rely on to disperse their seeds," Catoni said.

Dark fruits such as blackberries tend to contain higher levels of flavonoids. As they did in nature, the compounds made the foods used in the study darker.

Catoni, whose research is reported in the British Ecological Society journal Functional Ecology, said: "We are confident that our results are due to a learned selection for flavonoid content and not due to innate selection of darker food per se."

Flavonoids, found in high concentrations in fruits and vegetables, are among the commonest antioxidants in nature.

Scientists believe antioxidants may protect against heart disease and cancer by mopping up destructive molecules called free radicals.




4. The Mother Who Came Back from the Dead - Ten Minutes after Her Life Support Machine Was Turned Off
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1021818/The-mother-came-dead--minutes-life-support-machine-turned-OFF.html
By Paul Thompson
Last updated at 11:11 PM on 25th May 2008

A mother of two has stunned doctors by apparently coming back from the dead.
Velma Thomas's heart stopped beating three times and she was clinically brain dead for 17 hours. Her son had left the hospital to make funeral arrangements, having been told she would not survive.
But ten minutes after her life support system was shut down and doctors were preparing to take her organs for donation, the 59-year-old woke up.
Heart specialist Kevin Eggleston said: 'There are things that as physicians and nurses we can't always explain. I think this is one of those cases.'
He said Mrs Thomas had no pulse, no heartbeat or brain activity after her admission to hospital. She had been found unconscious after suffering a heart attack at her home in West Virginia.
While at the Charleston Area Medical Centre she suffered two further heart attacks and was placed on a life support system.
About 25 family members and friends gathered inside the hospital waiting room. 'We just prayed and prayed and prayed,' said her son Tim, 36. 'And I came to the conclusion she wasn't going to make it.
'I was given confirmation from God to take her off the ventilator and my pastor said the same thing. I felt a sense of peace that I made the right decision. Her skin had already started hardening, her hands and toes were curling up. There was no life there.'
He said after he left the hospital he was called and told she had shown signs of life.
By the time he got to her hospital room, Mrs Thomas was alert and talking. 'She had already asked, "Where's my son?",' he said.
Dr Eggleston added: 'It's a miracle.'



5. How Green is the College? Time the Showers
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/education/26green.html?hp
Published: May 26, 2008

OBERLIN, Ohio — Lucas Brown, a junior at Oberlin College here, was still wet from the shower the other morning as he entered his score on the neon green message board next to the bathroom sink: Three minutes, according to the plastic hourglass timer inside the shower. Two minutes faster than the morning before. One minute faster than two of his housemates.

Students in the Oberlin house, including Lucas Brown, left, and Kathleen Keating, on sofa.
Mr. Brown, a 21-year-old economics major, recalled the marathon runner who lived in the house last semester, saying: “He came out of the shower one morning and yelled out: ‘Two minutes 18 seconds. Beat that, Lucas!’ ”

Another of Mr. Brown’s seven housemates, Becky Bob-Waksberg, racked up the morning’s longest shower: Eight minutes. The house cuts Ms. Bob-Waksberg slack, Mr. Brown said, because of her thick, curly hair, which takes longer to shampoo.

So it goes at Oberlin’s new sustainability house — SEED, for Student Experiment in Ecological Design — a microcosm of a growing sustainability movement on campuses nationwide, from small liberal arts colleges like Oberlin and Middlebury, in Vermont, to Lansing Community College in Michigan, to Morehouse in Atlanta, to public universities like the University of New Hampshire.

While previous generations focused on recycling and cleaning up rivers, these students want to combat global warming by figuring out ways to reduce carbon emissions in their own lives, starting with their own colleges. They also view the environment as broadly connected with social and economic issues, and their concerns include the displacement of low-income families after Hurricane Katrina and the creation of “green collar” jobs in places like the South Bronx.

The mission is serious and yet, like life at the Oberlin house, it blends idealism, hands-on practicality, laid-back community and fun.

“It’s not about telling people, ‘You have to do this, you have to do that,’ ” Mr. Brown said. “It’s about fitting sustainability into our own lives.” And hoping, he added, “that a friend will come over, recognize that it’s fun, start doing it, and then a friend of theirs will start doing it.”

With their professors as collaborators, and with their own technological and political savvy, students are persuading administrators to switch to fossil-free fuel on campus — Middlebury is building an $11 million wood-chip-powered plant, part of its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2016 — serve locally grown food in dining halls and make hybrid cars available for shared transportation when, say, the distance is too far to bike and there is no bus. Students are planting organic gardens and competing in dorm energy-use Olympics. At Oberlin last year, some students in the winning dorm did not shower for two weeks, officials said.

“This is a generation that is watching the world come undone,” said David Orr, a professor of environmental studies at Oberlin. Projects like the Oberlin house, he said, are “helping them understand how to stitch the world together again.”

Dr. Orr’s course in ecological design became the incubator for the house when Mr. Brown and the two other founders of SEED, Kathleen Keating and Amanda Medress, enrolled in it last spring. They had done research on sustainability houses at Middlebury, Brown and Tufts, and had persuaded the college to turn over an aging, drafty two-story house. But before they could move in, they needed to make the house energy efficient.

The class studied water and energy use, insulation, heating and cooling, and financing. Nathan Engstrom, Oberlin’s sustainability coordinator — an essential position on many campuses these days — gave advice. John Petersen, the college’s environmental studies director, checked out the house’s wiring.

The college spent $40,000 to renovate the house over the summer, bringing it up to safety code. Mr. Brown used the carpentry skills he had learned from his father to pitch in on weatherizing.

The students moved in last September. “We sat down and had a meeting — ‘O.K., what next?’ ” Mr. Brown recalled. “We didn’t know what it meant to have a sustainable house.”

That first night, amid confusion about who was home and who was out, they left the lights on. “We said, ‘Oh, no, we just had a terrible first day,’ ” Mr. Brown said. “ ‘We’re leaving lights on everywhere.’ ”

All year they studied together in the living room at night so they would not have to turn on lights in the other rooms. They mastered worm composting, lowered the thermostat — keeping it at 60 degrees for most of the winter and piling on blankets — and unplugged appliances. There is no television, but no one seems to consider that a hardship.

“You have the rest of your life to watch TV,” Ms. Keating said.

The unplugging of the refrigerator was not so easy. The house is divided in two, and each half has a kitchen. With everyone eating meals at a nearby student-run co-op, a decision was made to save energy by disconnecting the refrigerator and appliances in one kitchen. But which one?

“The fridge was kind of controversial,” Ms. Bob-Waksberg said. “We kind of had a little feud going on for a while. We talked it out.”

Now that the weather is warm, the residents of the house like to barbecue. Oberlin’s president, Marvin Krislov, dropped by with his young daughter a few weeks ago for burgers and grilled corn. Offering the ritual tour, the students demonstrated how they caught their shower and sink water in buckets and reused it to flush their low-flow toilet, a budget model improvised with a couple of salvaged bricks in the tank.

David Maxwell for the New York Times
A picture of John Edwards, whom one student said had strong global warming policies, encourages short showers.
“He was using us to chastise his daughter for leaving lights on and the water running,” Mr. Brown said.

The bathroom is the showstopper on the tour. Besides the hourglass timer — Mr. Brown pointed out that it was called a shower coach and cost $3 online — the shower’s energy-saving motivational accessories include a picture of former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina plastered to the ceiling.

That was Ms. Bob-Waksberg’s idea. No one wants to linger in the shower with someone staring down from the ceiling, she said.

“You could also look at it another way,” she said, “that John Edwards is encouraging me to take a shorter shower.”

Why Mr. Edwards? “He had the strongest global warming policies of any of the candidates,” Mr. Brown said.

Ms. Bob-Waksberg, a religion studies major from California, was one of 25 students who applied to live in the house. With the house’s three founders looking for nonenvironmental studies types for diversity, Ms. Bob-Waksberg’s major, along with her confession that her environmental work had amounted to “various weed-pulling, clean-up-the-bay projects” back in high school, made her a shoo-in.

“We kind of roped Becky into sustainability,” Mr. Brown said.

Ms. Bob-Waksberg, along with Mr. Brown and carloads of other students, went to New Orleans to help after Hurricane Katrina. She will return to the city this summer to teach.

By next fall, the house’s 24-hour energy-use monitoring system will be fully up and running. Every turn of the faucet, every switch of a light, will be recorded, room by room.

The house, with its mismatched secondhand furniture, comic book posters and bicycles parked in the living room, is a popular meeting place for environmentally conscious student groups. Ms. Bob-Waksberg’s quirky, hand-printed signs (on recycled cardboard) admonish visitors to turn off lights and unplug appliances. The sign next to Mr. Brown’s electric keyboard in the living room says: “The music was beautiful. Now go do your homework and don’t forget to unplug me.”

“My keyboard,” Mr. Brown said, “is one of my indulgences.”

He confessed to another one. Sometimes, he said, “on a Friday after a long week of finals, I have to have a bath and a beer.”

What about the shower timer? He laughed, sheepishly.

“I hide it on the floor,” he said.



Honorable Mentions:

1. Rare Camel Fossil Unearthed in Southeast Gilbert Arizona
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24811307/
updated 2:31 p.m. ET May 25, 2008

Mesa, Arizona - When paleontologist Robert McCord comes to Gilbert, he knows he'll probably dig up something interesting. As chief curator of natural history at the Arizona Museum of Natural History in Mesa, McCord has been called in at least twice to excavate prehistoric fossils
unearthed at Gilbert constructions sites.

"It seems like there should be more," McCord said. Since the late 1990s, researchers have found four fossilized bone fragments in Gilbert. Two of those finds have been identified as Columbian mammoths - less hairy, larger relatives of woolly mammoths.

But to scientists, a fossilized bone fragment discovered at the site of a future water treatment facility in southeast Gilbert in March may be the most significant find in the area.

The bone fragment is now believed to come from the left distal humerus - upper arm bone - of the ancient Camelops, an extinct species of camels. "It probably looked a heck of a lot like a modern camel," McCord said. "A really big modern camel though."

The camel grew to about 7 feet tall at its shoulders and appeared in the late Pliocene epoch, which extended from about 5 million years ago to nearly 2 million years ago. It survived until about 10,000 years ago, during the Earth's last ice age.

For comparison, dinosaurs typically depicted in cartoons and movies became extinct about 65 million years ago.

"People probably saw these (camels)," McCord said. The bone was found about a mile and a half from where construction crews found "Tuskers," a fossilized mammoth discovered about two years ago that became a virtual town mascot. Town officials held a contest to name the fossilized animal and eventually settled on Tuskers.

The town later named Discovery Park to commemorate Tuskers' nearby final resting place.
"That's why we named it Discovery Park," Councilman Les Presmyk said.

"Though that wasn't the exact site the mammoth discovery was made, but it was close enough."

That case was also the first time Gilbert tested its "Mammoth Law," an ordinance passed in 1997 that said construction work must stop in areas where "features of archeological, paleontological or historical interest are encountered or unearthed," to allow for excavation and study.

Without the stipulation, paleontological remains found on private property belong to the property owner, who isn't required to report or donate them for study.

Mort Moosavy, an inspector with Carollo Engineers assigned to the project, didn't know about the law when he noticed the whitish bone fragments that contrasted with the surrounding reddish soil.

But he did exactly what the ordinance calls for by contacting area researchers, who eventually connected him with McCord at the Arizona Museum of Natural History.

Moosavy at first thought the pieces looked like examples of ancient pottery lying toward the bottom of a 15-foot-deep trench - until he took a closer look.

"Immediately I knew it was a fossilized bone," Moosavy said.





2. Star watch - Archaeologists Discover a “Cosmic Clock”
http://www.tenerifenews.com/cms/front_content.php?client=1&lang=1&idcat=8&idart=8078
25 May 2008

Overcrowded in their lower reaches they might be, but the Canary Islands still possess some solitary mountain wilder-nesses, places little visited thanks to their rugged inaccessibility, and which have hardly changed since they were frequented by the pre-colonial aboriginal islanders.

And traces of their presence are still turning up, often in the form of petroglyphs, enigmatic scratched marks on rocks and boulders which held some special significance about which we can only guess today.

The latest find is, say archaeologists, one of the most exciting. They are calling it a cosmic clock, a description guaranteed to get the imagination of any sci-fi fans racing.

But there are no flashing lights and strange dials. The reality, a piece of stone 44 centimetres high and 34 wide, would certainly disappoint them, but the experts are hailing the Summer Stone as a major discovery.

Found on the rarified heights of Cabeceras de Izcagua in La Palma, at an altitude of 2,140metres, on a site inhabited by the Awaras (as the original inhabitants of that island were called), it is thought that the stone was instrumental in calculations to mark the equinoxes. The stone
has symbols of the sun facing north-east scratched upon it.

The system used depended upon the alignment of three piles of stones with a facing mountain, from behind which the spring and autumn equinoctial sun rose – and still does.

Strangely enough that mountain is still associated with sky-watching. The Roque de Los Muchachos is the site of a world famous observatory which houses one of the world’s largest telescopes.

An odd case of back to the future.