Ultimate Urbex: Abandoned Soviet-era Particle Accelerator

The UNK Proton Accelerator. Image Source: English Russia via Dvice.

Caption for the above photo: Once upon a time in a Soviet Union far, far away, Russia set out to build the world's largest particle accelerator under a small town called Protvino. Already plagued by setbacks, the work on the accelerator ceased after the fall of the Soviet Union and it's been abandoned since.

Dvice is reporting on a set of incredible Urbex photos of an abandoned Soviet particle accelerator. It's amazing to see one of the foremost symbols of futuristic science of our current era reduced to an Urbex ruin.  Will this be how future peoples see the wreckage of our research and our civilization?  All photo sources are from the first cited sites for the image above.  Also below is an excerpt from an article about an accident that took place at this site, in which a scientist was exposed to the accelerator while it was in full operation.  This is the only such case in human history.

End of an Era: Discovery's Last Launch Today

NASA Tribute to Discovery with the insignia of all her missions.  Image Source: Wiki.

A spacecraft that has been vitally important to the history of human exploration is about to be retired.  Up to the last minute, it wasn't clear if the Space Shuttle Discovery would make her launch today.  First flown in 1984, this will be her 39th and final mission.  The Shuttle retires amid discussion that NASA's space program is giving way to private space firms, such as Elon Musk's SpaceX.  According to The Space Review, other companies in the running for significant commercial participation in the American space program are Boeing, Orbital Sciences Corporation, Sierra Nevada Corporation, and United Launch Alliance (ULA).

Thank You

My blog just passed the 100,000 hits mark tonight.  Thank you very much to everyone who stops in to read my posts.  Time is precious and I appreciate your spending some of it here.

Time Lapses: How Small We Are

Image Source: I09.

I09 recently carried some amazing time lapse videos of Chilean telescopes watching the night skies; the site is "the largest astronomical project in human history."  I've rarely seen star-gazing videos that make our place in the Milky Way Galaxy so clear.  See the videos below the jump.

Google Planning an Interplanetary Internet System

Image Source: The Mars Millennium Project.

Popsci is reporting that Google is developing an Internet system that can be used between spacecraft (Hat tip: @swadeshine).  Popsci is picking up on an original interview with Google’s 'Chief Internet Evangelist,' Vint Cerf at Network World about the development of an extraterrestrial Internet:

Google wants to install “InterPlanetary internet protocols” (IP IP?) on spacecraft, using them as an interwoven network of new space-based communication nodes. ... Google realized as far back as 1998 that space-based Internet has problems that don’t face the traditional Internet design — speed-of-light communications are instant on Earth, but at interplanetary distances, that’s slow, and can cause problems. An interplantary network could help overcome these problems.

The approach uses delay-tolerant networking, or Bundle Protocol, as distinct from Internet Protocol. The International Space Station uses Bundle Protocol, which defines blocks of data as a bundle, each of which contains enough information to avoid processing interruptions even in a delay.

This year, Google wants to standardize the interplanetary protocols and make them available to all the space-faring countries. ... “Potentially every spacecraft launched from that time on will be interwoven from a communications point of view. But perhaps more important, when the spacecraft have finished their primary missions, if they are still functionally operable — they have power, computer, communications — they can become nodes in an interplanetary backbone.”

The concept of Interplanetary Internet is about a year old.  The Website of the Delay-Tolerant Networking Research Group (DTNRG), an open research group on this question, is here.

A Tale of Two Internets: Democratic Online Revolutions and Not-So-Democratic Internet Hoaxes

Respond to business proposals

Manage relationships

Match your personal style

Image Sources: Gmail Autopilot.

There's a tongue-in-cheek report at Red Gage (here) that Google is experimenting with artificial intelligence technology to help Gmail users field the avalanche of messages in their inboxes with auto-responses (Hat Tip: @Altaire).  This is the kind of funny little Internet story people talk about over the water cooler at work.  But it has huge implications.

Retro-Futurism 8: Another Great Web Comic - Tozo - The Public Servant

Tozo (10 August 2008). © By David O'Connell.

I09 has just reviewed a great Web comic that has been running since 2007: Tozo - The Public Servant.  The comic is an excellent example of Retro-Futurism. 

Biologists Wipe Out Spatial Memory in Mice

Image: Ars Technica.

Ars Technica is reporting on published research from the University of Aberdeen that scientists investigating schizophrenia have inadvertently wiped out the working spatial memory of their lab mice:

Working memory is the place we hold temporary information that we're using to handle ongoing tasks, like dialing a phone number or following a set of directions. We often forget these after we're done—unless it's going to be your daily commute, you don't need to permanently recall that you make a left at the third traffic light—but working memory plays an essential role in many processes, and a person's working memory capacity seems to correlate with their performance on a variety of tests. So, what happens if you wipe a bit of working memory out?

Scientists have now found out what happens in mice, although it probably wasn't what they intended to do. A team at the University of Aberdeen were focusing on a specific type of neuron that's damaged in people with schizophrenia, as well as those who abuse ketamine and PCP. (These neurons express a protein called parvalbumin.) They bred mice in which they could selectively stop these neurons by injecting a virus into specific areas of the brain. The virus would only be active in the cells of interest, and ensure the production of a tetanus toxin, which prevents the nerves from firing signals to their neighbors.

They found that they could use the virus to paralyze over 80 percent of the parvalbumin-positive neurons in a specific area of the brain, the CA1 region of the hippocampus, a brain structure associated with memory. The mice were then subjected to a battery of tests where, for the most part, they were surprisingly normal, with no signs of problems with locomotion or anxiety. They also learned to navigate a maze just as well as their unaltered peers, showing that spatial reference memory was intact.

But they couldn't navigate their way very smoothly. ... [I]t appears that the mice that lacked working spatial memory knew where they were trying to go, but didn't quite manage to figure out how to get there, since they couldn't keep track of where they'd been. There are a number of working memory systems beyond spatial memory, though—humans have dedicated systems for images and words, for example—but it will be tough to use mice to determine whether these neurons are a general feature of working memory.

Research Article Reference: Nature Neuroscience, 2011. DOI: 10.1038/nn.2751