What happens when NASA partners with Google? A quantum computer

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Solving some of the most complicated technological problems on or off this planet is what NASA and Google do best. Now, together, they are creating machines to exceed normal computing ability by 100 million times.
Google and D-Wave, a quantum-computing firm, are developing a new computer that that are next to impossible to solve on conventional computers at the NASA Ames campus in Mountain View, Calif., Bloomberg reported.
"We have already encountered problems we would like to solve that are unfeasible with conventional computers,” John Giannandrea, an engineering vice president at Google, said at a press conference Tuesday. “We want to understand the future that may lie ahead of us in non-conventional computing."

Samantha Cristoforetti: Six things to do when bored in space

Three astronauts from the International Space Station (ISS) have returned to Earth.

One of the astronauts, Samantha Cristoforetti from Italy, has even set a world record.
She has spent the longest time in space than any other woman on a single mission.
Here's a list of six things Samantha has been doing during her extraordinary time in space

Samantha has been on the ISS with her crewmates, Anton Shkaplerov and Terry Virts, the commander of Expedition 43.
The ISS offers three state-of-the-art laboratories where research and experiments can be done without gravity.
Samantha's work in space is devoted to science and maintaining the weightless research centre.
It's definitely not the worst job in the universe!

NASA Spacecraft Reactivated to Hunt for Asteroids

 PASADENA, Calif. -- A NASA spacecraft that discovered and characterized tens of thousands of asteroids throughout the solar system before being placed in hibernation will return to service for three more years starting in September, assisting the agency in its effort to identify the population of potentially hazardous near-Earth objects, as well as those suitable for asteroid exploration missions.

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) will be revived next month with the goal of discovering and characterizing near-Earth objects (NEOs), space rocks that can be found orbiting within 28 million miles (45 million kilometers) from Earth's path around the sun. NASA anticipates WISE will use its 16-inch (40-centimeter) telescope and infrared cameras to discover about 150 previously unknown NEOs and characterize the size, albedo and thermal properties of about 2,000 others -- including some which could be candidates for the agency's recently announced asteroid initiative.

"The WISE mission achieved its mission's goals and as NEOWISE extended the science even further in its survey of asteroids. NASA is now extending that record of success, which will enhance our ability to find potentially hazardous asteroids, and support the new asteroid initiative," said John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science in Washington. "Reactivating WISE is an excellent example of how we are leveraging existing capabilities across the agency to achieve our goal."

NASA's asteroid initiative will be the first mission to identify, capture and relocate an asteroid. It represents an unprecedented technological feat that will lead to new scientific discoveries and technological capabilities that will help protect our home planet. The asteroid initiative brings together the best of NASA's science, technology and human exploration efforts to achieve President Obama's goal of sending humans to an asteroid by 2025.

Launched in December 2009 to look for the glow of celestial heat sources from asteroids, stars and galaxies, WISE made about 7,500 images every day during its primary mission, from January 2010 to February 2011. As part of a project called NEOWISE, the spacecraft made the most accurate survey to date of NEOs. NASA turned most of WISE's electronics off when it completed its primary mission.

"The data collected by NEOWISE two years ago have proven to be a gold mine for the discovery and characterization of the NEO population," said Lindley Johnson, NASA's NEOWISE program executive in Washington. "It is important that we accumulate as much of this type of data as possible while the WISE spacecraft remains a viable asset."

Because asteroids reflect but do not emit visible light, infrared sensors are a powerful tool for discovering, cataloging and understanding the asteroid population. Depending on an object's reflectivity, or albedo, a small, light-colored space rock can look the same as a big, dark one. As a result, data collected with optical telescopes using visible light can be deceiving.

During 2010, NEOWISE observed about 158,000 rocky bodies out of approximately 600,000 known objects. Discoveries included 21 comets, more than 34,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and 135 near-Earth objects.

St. Patrick's Day Google Doodle Features Animated Dancers

Google is celebrating St. Patrick's Day with an animated homepage doodle that features six Irish dancers.
The dancers are outfitted in traditional Irish step dance costumes, each of which feature one letter from the Google logo. They are dancing in unison, including a high-flying jump.

Last year's St. Patrick's Day doodle channeled the Book of Kells, a 9th-century gospel manuscript. The Book of Kells, currently housed in the Old Library at Dublin's Trinity College, is believed to have been created around the year 800 in the monastery at Kells, County Meath after a Viking raid forced the Columban monks to abandon a monastery on the island of Iona, just off the west coast of Scotland.

Today's holiday, meanwhile, celebrates St. Patrick, who lived during the fifth century and is the patron saint and national apostle of Ireland. As noted by History.com, he is known for bringing Christianity to the people of Ireland, and his legend has taken on mythic proportions.

"Perhaps the most well known legend is that he explained the Holy Trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) using the three leaves of a native Irish clover, the shamrock," History.com said.

Interestingly, however, the first St. Patrick's Day parade was actually held in the U.S. in 1762 in New York City, a tradition that continues today. This year's parade was held on Saturday, and featured Grand Marshal John E. Smith, the great-grandson of Al Smith, former New York governor

Higgs boson find may spell doom for universe

A subatomic particle discovered last year that may be the long-sought Higgs boson might doom our universe to an unfortunate end, researchers say.

The mass of the particle, which was uncovered at the world's largest particle accelerator — the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva — is a key ingredient in a calculation that portends the future of space and time.

"This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there'll be a catastrophe," Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., said Monday, Feb. 18, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
"It may be the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out," added Lykken, a collaborator on one of the LHC's experiments.

The Higgs boson particle is a manifestation of an energy field pervading the universe called the Higgs field, which is thought to explain why particles have mass. After searching for decades for proof that this field and particle existed, physicists at the LHC announced in July 2012 that they'd discovered a new particle whose properties strongly suggest it is the Higgs boson.

To confirm the particle's identity for sure, more data are needed. But many scientists say they're betting it's the Higgs.

"This discovery to me was personally astounding," said I. Joseph Kroll, a University of Pennsylvania physicist who also works at the LHC. "To me, the Higgs was sort of, it might be there, it might not. The fact that it's there is really a tremendous accomplishment.



And finding the Higgs, if it's truly been found, not only confirms the theory about how particles get mass, but it allows scientists to make new calculations that weren't possible before the particle's properties were known.

For example, the mass of the new particle is about 126 billion electron volts, or about 126 times the mass of the proton. If that particle really is the Higgs, its mass turns out to be just about what's needed to make the universe fundamentally unstable, in a way that would cause it to end catastrophically in the far future.
That's because the Higgs field is thought to be everywhere, so it affects the vacuum of empty space-time in the universe.

"The mass of the Higgs is related to how stable the vacuum is," explained Christopher Hill, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. "It's right along the critical line. That could either be a cosmic coincidence, or it could be that there's some physics that's causing that. That's something new, which we didn't know before."