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Tuesday, 17 January 2012

Globes: Comedy vies with drama this awards season

In this Thursday, Jan. 12, 2012 photo, a man walks near the Golden Globe in the ballroom at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif., as workers prepare for the 69th Annual Golden Globe Awards on Sunday. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) ? The Golden Globes have equally good comedy and drama masks this year.

Alongside heavyweight dramas, the category for best musical or comedy at the Globes usually is more of a lark, with nominees rarely emerging with best-picture prospects for Hollywood's top prize, the Academy Awards.

Yet Sunday's musical or comedy contenders make up a strong bunch that could give their best-drama cousins at the Globes a run for their money come Oscar time.

Leading the Globes, to be carried live on NBC from 8-11 p.m. EST from the Beverly Hilton Hotel, is the silent film "The Artist," with six nominations. Among them are best musical or comedy, directing and writing honors for Michel Havanavicius, and acting slots for Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo.

Tied for second with five nominations each are the Deep South tale "The Help" and George Clooney's Hawaiian family story "The Descendants," both of them among best-drama contenders.

With the Oscars choosing up to 10 best-picture contenders when nominations come out Jan. 24, "The Artist" could have some other lighter fare as company there. Globe musical or comedy nominees "Midnight in Paris" and "Bridesmaids" have solid Oscar nomination prospects, along with the weighty dramas academy voters historically prefer.

Most years, the musical or comedy category is filled with nominees that have little or no chance at the Oscars, such as last year's Globe nominees "The Tourist" and "Burlesque." The last time a musical or comedy Globe winner earned the best-picture Oscar was nine years ago, when "Chicago" triumphed at both shows.

This time, the dual categories at the Globes could create an Oscar showdown between the dramatic and musical-comedy winners.

Along with "The Artist," Kristen Wiig's wedding romp "Bridesmaids" and Woody Allen's romantic fantasy "Midnight in Paris," Globe nominees for best musical or comedy are Joseph Gordon-Levitt's cancer tale "50/50" and Michelle Williams' Marilyn Monroe story "My Week with Marilyn."

Besides "The Descendants" and "The Help," best-drama contenders are Martin Scorsese's Paris adventure "Hugo," Clooney's political thriller "The Ides of March," Brad Pitt's sports tale "Moneyball" and Steven Spielberg's World War I epic "War Horse."

Presented by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a group of 89 entertainment reporters for overseas outlets, the Globes used to have a strong record predicting the films that would go on to win best-picture at the Oscars. But lately, a best-picture win at the Globes has not translated into victory on Oscar night.

Over the last seven years, only one Globe best-picture winner ? 2008's "Slumdog Millionaire" ? has gone on to claim the top Oscar trophy. Before that stretch, the Globes had been on an eight-year streak in which one of its two best-picture recipients also won the main prize at the Academy Awards.

Last year, "The Social Network" won best-drama at the Globes and looked like the early Oscar favorite. But momentum later swung to eventual Oscar best-picture winner "The King's Speech." The year before, "Avatar" was named best drama at the Globes, while "The Hurt Locker" took best picture at the Oscars.

The Globes have a better track record predicting who will win Oscars for acting. A year ago, all four actors who won Oscars earned Globes first ? lead players Colin Firth for "The King's Speech" and Natalie Portman for "Black Swan" and "The Fighter" supporting stars Christian Bale and Melissa Leo.

This time, "The Help" leads the acting categories with three nominations, for Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Jessica Chastain. Along with Clooney, Pitt and Williams, other nominees include Meryl Streep for the Margaret Thatcher story "The Iron Lady," Leonardo DiCaprio for the J. Edgar Hoover biography "J. Edgar," Christopher Plummer for the father-son tale "Beginners" and Glenn Close and Janet McTeer for the Irish drama "Albert Nobbs."

Ryan Gosling has two nominations, as dramatic actor for "The Ides of March" and actor in a musical or comedy for the romance "Crazy, Stupid, Love."

Morgan Freeman will receive the Globes' Cecil B. DeMille award for lifetime achievement.

Ricky Gervais, who ruffled feathers with sharp wisecracks aimed at celebrities as well as the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, returns as host of the Globes for the third-straight time.

If the caustic comedian decides to again bite the hand that feeds him, a case working its way through federal court might provide some material: the HFPA is fighting for the right to dump longtime Globes broadcaster NBC if it can get a better deal with another network.

___

Online:

http://www.goldenglobes.org

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2012-01-15-Golden%20Globes/id-c588e823e15c44fa8d307f23d2b78f58

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Monday, 16 January 2012

Ireland's former richest person declared bankrupt

DUBLIN (AP) ? A famed entrepreneur who was once rated Ireland's richest person was declared bankrupt Monday as a bank pursues him for debts exceeding euro2.1 billion ($2.7 billion).

Lawyers for tycoon Sean Quinn withdrew his opposition to a Republic of Ireland bankruptcy order sought by the former Anglo Irish Bank, the reckless lender at the center of Ireland's calamitous property crash.

The bankruptcy judgment will force a thorough court investigation of Quinn's finances, which the bank hopes will reveal capital and assets that it can reclaim from Quinn, his wife and five children.

Quinn, 64, didn't attend Monday's court hearing. He issued a statement accusing the bank of pursuing "a personal vendetta" and declaring that the "judgment in no way improves Anglo's prospects of recovering money for the taxpayer."

Quinn had a reported 2007 net worth of euro4.7 billion ($6 billion) but sank much of his fortune into Anglo months before the bank ? the most aggressive lender to Ireland's construction barons ? suffered crippling losses as the country's decade-long property bubble burst.

The Quinn family secretly built up to a 28 percent stake in Anglo shares using an ill-regulated financial instrument that hid the scale of their investment from other stockholders. As Anglo's share price plunged, Quinn says the bank encouraged his family to borrow hundreds of millions specifically to buy more Anglo stock, a charge the bank denies.

Ireland nationalized Anglo in 2009 to prevent its collapse, wiping out a Quinn family investment estimated at euro2.8 billion. The government last year renamed Anglo as the Irish Bank Resolution Corp., or IBRC. Its bailout is expected to cost taxpayers euro29 billion, a bill so great it overwhelmed Ireland's finances and forced the government last year to negotiate a humiliating loan pact with the European Union and International Monetary Fund.

Dublin Commercial Court Justice Elizabeth Dunne told Quinn's lawyer Gavin Simons that Quinn would have to appear in person in coming days to provide documents showing how much he's worth today.

Last week Quinn lost a Belfast legal battle to retain bankruptcy protection in the neighboring British territory of Northern Ireland. The judge there ruled that Quinn had misled a previous Belfast court that his main base of business was in Northern Ireland, rather than the Republic of Ireland.

"I never done a day's work from southern Ireland in my life," Quinn, who has lived for decades in the Republic of Ireland, insisted to reporters outside the Belfast court last week.

Dublin-based IBRC would have faced greater difficulty pursuing Quinn for debts in Northern Ireland. Quinn also could have returned to business within a year under U.K. bankruptcy law, whereas the Irish prevent bankrupts from holding company directorships for up to 12 years.

Quinn said the tougher Irish rules meant he would be too old ? 76 in the year 2024 ? to direct any new companies then.

"Anglo achieved their goal of ensuring that I will never create another job," he said of Monday's judgment.

Quinn boasts one of Ireland's most celebrated rags-to-riches stories. He grew up on a border farm in Northern Ireland's County Fermanagh, left school barely literate at 14 and started his first construction-gravel business with a 100-pound ($150) bank loan.

Within three decades Quinn had transformed his quarry into a nationwide cement company. He built and bought luxury hotels, pubs, apartment complexes and commercial properties throughout Ireland, Britain, Eastern Europe and Asia; founded Ireland's third-largest insurance company; and took interests in glassworks, packaging and radiators.

In April 2011, IBRC seized ownership of his Irish-based Quinn Group, forced him and relatives off the board, and sold a majority stake in his insurance company to U.S. insurance company Liberty Mutual. In November, shortly after Quinn had secured a surprise bankruptcy-protection order in Belfast, the bank won Dublin court judgments totaling euro2.16 billion ($2.7 billion) against Quinn.

A November affidavit from Quinn recorded he had less than euro11,000 ($15,000) in cash in three bank accounts.

But the Quinns and IBRC are locked in several legal battles stretching from the British Virgin Islands to Cyprus over control of a commercial property empire spanning Britain, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and India valued at more than euro700 million.

The bank accuses Quinn of fraudulently shifting ownership of his foreign properties, including office blocks and shopping malls, to relatives and shell companies that remain under the Quinns' surreptitious control. The Quinns deny these charges.

His five children have filed a Dublin lawsuit against IBRC seeking to have the bulk of the family's Anglo borrowing voided on the grounds that the bank should never have lent them the money in the first place. They also are seeking to have IBRC return businesses to their ownership that were seized in April 2011.

Their lawsuit argues that Anglo misled them about the company's imminent danger of collapse and spurred them to commit market fraud by manipulating Anglo's share price. IBRC insists Anglo's loans to the Quinns were for much wider business reasons.

___

Online:

Irish Bank Resolution Corp., http://www.ibrc.ie/

Quinn's empire, http://www.quinn-group.com/

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2012-01-16-EU-Ireland-Bankrupt-Tycoon/id-f1ee71d97397497f816df3cb6cd884ff

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Brady leads prolific Patriots to AFC title game

By HOWARD ULMAN

updated 5:50 p.m. ET Jan. 15, 2012

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. - Next up to try and stop the seemingly unstoppable Tom Brady and the New England Patriots' offense: the Baltimore Ravens.

Good luck.

How do you cover powerful Rob Gronkowski and versatile Aaron Hernandez and still have a defender left to deal with Wes Welker, the NFL's leading receiver?

Can you generate enough of a pass rush to foil Brady's quick release? If you don't, the master of analyzing defenses and firing precise passes can stand comfortably in the pocket, calmly searching for his best option and the quickest route to the end zone.

And don't forget the ground game while you're focused on all those aerial stars.

Get ready, Ray Lewis and Terrell Suggs. Your dominant defense is about to get its toughest test.

Baltimore's reward for beating the Houston Texans 20-13 on Sunday is a date with the prolific Patriots, who got there with a 45-10 win Saturday night over the Denver Broncos that turned Tebowmania into a passing phenomenon while its central character, Tim Tebow, kept passing poorly.

The Ravens play at Foxborough on Sunday with a defense much better than the one the overwhelmed Broncos displayed. Baltimore's unit is the third-stingiest in the NFL, but it has never seen anything like this. Not with Brady at the top of his game after his decade of greatness.

"The team revolves around him," Hernandez said. "When he comes to play, which he mostly does every game, then we're going to be on fire, and when he's ready, we're all ready."

Brady's performance rivals ?and surpasses in some ways ? his 2007 MVP season when he set an NFL record with 50 touchdown passes and established a team mark of 4,806 yards passing. This season, he beat that by more than 400 with 5,235, second-most in NFL history to Drew Brees' 5,476.

The Patriots went 18-0 in 2007, then lost the Super Bowl 17-14 to the New York Giants on a last-minute touchdown. Now they're 14-3.

One more win gets them to the championship game thanks to Brady's six scoring passes against Denver, tying the NFL record held by Daryle Lamonica and Steve Young. By halftime, Brady already had thrown for five touchdowns while Tebow had just three completions.

The victory helped ease the lingering pain of three straight playoffs losses ? 33-14 to Baltimore and 28-21 to the New York Jets after the Super Bowl disappointment.

"You lose a few playoff games and it's a very bitter way to end the season and it sits on your mind for quite a long time," Brady said. "For us to come out and play the way we did, have a very solid performance in the most important game of the year is very gratifying.

"From this point on, everyone will be focused on what we need to do to be better next week and, hopefully, come out and play for another championship."

Brady has been brilliant all season, starting with a total of 940 yards passing and seven touchdown throws in his first two games. And in his last nine ? all wins ? he's thrown for 25 scores and just three interceptions.

"We never look at the individual. We all try and do our job," defensive tackle Vince Wilfork said. "If (Brady) plays well, everyone else plays well. When he has an off day, we try to rally around him as a team to help Tom and the offense. We aren't going to get 20-30 points all the time."

Of course not. There was that one game, back on Oct. 30, when they scored only 17.

Brady's six scoring passes Saturday matched his career high. He completed 26 of 34 passes for 363 yards, a team record for a postseason game. He wasn't sacked, hardly even pressured, all game.

"That's Tom, week-in-and-week-out," running back BenJarvus Green-Ellis said, "so I don't think anyone else in this locker room or in this country would expect anything else from him."

It wasn't always that promising.

The Patriots were just 5-3 and had lost two consecutive games for just the third time in nine seasons. Their defense, last in the league at the time, was getting pushed around.

It was time for Brady's bunch to turn things around.

They beat the Jets in New York 37-16 to start the nine-game winning streak. In three of the last four games, they've scored more than 41 points. The only other time that happened since Brady arrived in 2000 was in 2007 when they did it in three consecutive games and four of five.

That team had Randy Moss, the deep threat who caught an NFL-record 23 touchdowns.

This one has Gronkowski and Hernandez, the short, middle and deep targets who combined for 24 in the regular season and, in just one playoff game, another four.

"These two are changing the game," guard Brian Waters said. "If you decide to take away one, that opens things up for the other. You add the fact that we have receiving threats and some good guys at the running back position. It limits the things you can do defensively as far as trying to take one person out of the game. That's something that we are able to take advantage of."

The danger doesn't end when they get their hands on the ball. Often, it's just starting.

On the Patriots third play against the Broncos, Gronkowski caught a 7-yard pass and ran for another nine. On the fourth, Hernandez tricked the defense by lining up at running back and rambling 43 yards. And on the next play, Brady found Welker for a 7-yard touchdown pass.

Three plays, three ballhandlers, one impressive drive against a befuddled defense.

"Everybody makes big plays on this team," Hernandez said. "That's why our offense is real dangerous. We've got so many weapons they don't know who to cover."

The Ravens have a week to figure that out.

"I think that we are just coming together as a team and realizing that this is our time and we need to really play well," Welker said. "With all of our weapons and the guys that we have, we should always be able to move the ball."

More news

NY pulls off one giant upset

Eli Manning threw three touchdown passes and the Giants shocked the Packers 37-20 in an NFC divisional playoff game Sunday. Manning threw for 330 yards, sending the Giants to San Francisco for the NFC championship game next Sunday night.

Jamie Squire / Getty Images

PFT: Why the Packers lost

??PFT: Bad tackling, too many turnovers and missed chances added up to Green Bay being dumped from the playoffs so easily by the Giants.

Source: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/46005690/ns/sports-nfl/

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The microbiome and disease: Gut bacteria influence the severity of heart attacks in rats

Friday, January 13, 2012

New research published online in the FASEB Journal suggests that the types and levels of bacteria in the intestines may be used to predict a person's likelihood of having a heart attack, and that manipulating these organisms may help reduce heart attack risk. This discovery may lead to new diagnostic tests and therapies that physicians use to prevent and treat heart attacks. In addition, this research suggests that probiotics may be able to protect the heart in patients undergoing heart surgery and angioplasty.

"Our discovery is a revolutionary milestone in the prevention and treatment of heart attacks," said John E. Baker, Ph.D., study author from the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. "The biochemical link between intestinal bacteria, their metabolites, and injury to the heart will reduce the risk of death from a heart attack and, coupled with the use of probiotics, will ultimately be able to improve the overall cardiovascular health of the human population."

To make this discovery, Baker and colleagues conducted experiments involving three groups of rats. The first group was fed a standard diet. The second group was treated orally with the antibiotic vancomycin in the drinking water. The third group was fed a probiotic supplement that contains Lactobacillus plantarum, a bacterium that suppresses the production of leptin.

The group treated with the antibiotic had decreased levels of leptin (a protein hormone that plays a key role in appetite and metabolism), which resulted in smaller heart attacks, and improved recovery of mechanical function as compared to the group fed a standard diet. The antibiotic reduced total bacterial numbers in the intestines and altered the abundance of specific types of bacteria and fungi that live in the gut. Treating these rats with leptin was shown to offset the protection produced by the antibiotic treatment. The third group was fed a probiotic that also altered the numbers and types of bacteria and fungi living in the gut. Like those fed the antibiotic, these rats also had decreased leptin levels, resulting in smaller heart attacks and greater recovery of mechanical function as compared to the first group. Treating these rats with leptin also was shown to offset the protection produced by the probiotic.

"We may not be ready to prescribe yogurt to prevent heart attacks, but this research does gives us a much better understanding of how the microbiome affects our response to injury," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of the FASEB Journal. "Just as physicians use cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and overall body composition as measures of heart disease risk, we may soon evaluate our body's susceptibility to disease by looking at the microbes that inhabit the gut."

###

Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology: http://www.faseb.org

Thanks to Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/116720/The_microbiome_and_disease__Gut_bacteria_influence_the_severity_of_heart_attacks_in_rats

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Sunday, 15 January 2012

Source Code Marketplace Binpress Adds Github Integration

Source code marketplace Binpress is now offering integration with the popular file repository?Github. According to Binpress CEO Adam Benayoun, this move will allow developers to import their open-source projects and add a commercial layer on top of them.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/7lb2cjijQ8o/

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Utah man gets lost class ring back 45 years later

A 1966 Bonneville High School class ring that had been lost for 45 years is shown Jan. 13, 2012 in Salt Lake City. Owner Brent Aguirre assumed the ring was at the bottom of Pineview Reservoir, not far from the Great Salt Lake, and wrote it off when he left to fight in Vietnam. It wasn't until this fall that Aguirre received a Facebook message from a couple in nearby Sandy, saying they wanted to get in touch with him and that they had the ring. Aguirre met up with the couple just after Christmas. (AP Photo/Deseret News, Jen Pilgreen)

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) ? A Utah man who lost his class ring six months after he bought it is getting the keepsake back 45 years later, thanks to some Facebook detective work.

Brent Aguirre said his mother was disappointed when the 1966 Bonneville High School graduate lost the ring, which is gold toned with a deep blue stone.

"It's a beautiful ring," he told KSL-TV (http://bit.ly/zT8f9o). "I remember mom and dad forked out pretty good money for it."

He assumed the ring was at the bottom of Pineview Reservoir, not far from the Great Salt Lake, and wrote it off when he left to fight in Vietnam.

The military service turned into an Air Force career that led him through nine different moves across the world and finally back to his hometown of Ogden. It wasn't until the fall that Aguirre received a Facebook message from a couple in nearby Sandy, saying they wanted to get in touch with him.

He brushed it off, but they contacted him again, telling him they'd found a ring with his name inscribed in cursive script.

The couple still isn't sure where the ring came from. The husband said he can't remember where he originally found it, and the wife said the keepsake turned up when she was cleaning out a desk drawer.

"It was unbelievable," Aguirre said. "I had written it off, and it was hard to believe they actually had my ring."

Aguirre met up with the couple just after Christmas. More than four decades older, the ring no longer fits on his ring finger, but Aguirre said he's happy to have it on his pinky.

He said he only has one regret: That his mother, once upset that her teenage son lost the valuable so quickly, was not around to see that he'd found it at last.

___

Information from: KSL-TV, http://www.ksl.com/

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/aa9398e6757a46fa93ed5dea7bd3729e/Article_2012-01-13-Long%20Lost%20Ring%20Found/id-47710b0bd5c34f85abd6851270353d81

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Saturday, 14 January 2012

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's LAMP reveals lunar surface features

Public release date: 13-Jan-2012
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Contact: Maria Martinez
mmartinez@swri.org
210-522-3305
Southwest Research Institute

New maps produced by the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal features at the Moon's northern and southern poles in regions that lie in perpetual darkness. LAMP, developed by Southwest Research Institute, uses a novel method to peer into these so-called permanently shadowed regions (PSRs), making visible the invisible. LAMP's principal investigator is Dr. Alan Stern, associate vice president of the SwRI Space Science and Engineering Division.

The LAMP maps show that many PSRs are darker at far-ultraviolet wavelengths and redder than nearby surface areas that receive sunlight. The darker regions are consistent with large surface porosities indicating "fluffy" soils while the reddening is consistent with the presence of water frost on the surface.

"Our results suggest there could be as much as 1 to 2 percent water frost in some permanently shadowed soils," says author Dr. Randy Gladstone, an Institute scientist in the SwRI Space Science and Engineering Division. "This is unexpected because naturally occurring interplanetary Lyman-alpha was thought to destroy any water frost before it could accumulate."

The LAMP team estimates that the loss of water frost is about 16 times slower than previously believed. In addition, the accumulation of water frost is also likely to be highly dependent on local conditions, such as temperature, thermal cycling and even geologically recent "impact gardening" in which micrometeoroid impacts redistribute the location and depth of volatile compounds.

Finding water frost at these new locations adds to a rapidly improving understanding of the Moon's water and related species, as discovered by three other space missions through near-infrared emissions observations and found buried within the Cabeus crater by the LCROSS impactor roughly two years ago. During LRO's nominal exploration mission, LAMP added to the LCROSS results by measuring hydrogen, mercury and other volatile gases ejected along with the water from the permanently shaded soils of the Moon's Cabeus crater.

"An even more unexpected finding is that LAMP's technique for measuring the lunar Lyman-alpha albedo indicates higher surface porosities within PSRs, and supports the long-postulated presence of tenuous 'fairy-castle' like arrangements of surface grains in the PSR soils," says co-author Dr. Kurt Retherford, a senior research scientist also in SwRI's Space Science and Engineering Division.

Comparisons with future LAMP maps created using data gathered from the Moon's day side will prove helpful for revealing more about the presence of water frost, as well as the surface porosities of the darker surface features observed. The LAMP team is also eager to apply the Lyman-alpha technique elsewhere on the Moon and on other solar system objects such as Mercury.

LRO's findings are expected to be valuable to the future consideration of a permanent Moon base. The permanently shadowed regions of the Moon are revealing themselves to be some of the most exotic places in the solar system, well worthy of future exploration, says Retherford. Any discovery of water frost and other resources in the area also could reduce the need to transport resources from Earth to a base at the pole.

The paper, "Far-Ultraviolet Reflectance Properties of the Moon's Permanently Shadowed Regions," by G.R. Gladstone, K.D. Retherford, A.F. Egan, D.E. Kaufmann, P.F. Miles, et al., was published in the Jan. 7 issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., developed and manages the LRO mission. LRO's current Science Mission is implemented for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate sponsored LRO's initial one-year Exploration Mission that concluded in September 2010.

###

Editors: Images to accompany this story are available at http://www.swri.org/press/2012/lamp.htm.

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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's LAMP reveals lunar surface features Public release date: 13-Jan-2012
[ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Maria Martinez
mmartinez@swri.org
210-522-3305
Southwest Research Institute

New maps produced by the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal features at the Moon's northern and southern poles in regions that lie in perpetual darkness. LAMP, developed by Southwest Research Institute, uses a novel method to peer into these so-called permanently shadowed regions (PSRs), making visible the invisible. LAMP's principal investigator is Dr. Alan Stern, associate vice president of the SwRI Space Science and Engineering Division.

The LAMP maps show that many PSRs are darker at far-ultraviolet wavelengths and redder than nearby surface areas that receive sunlight. The darker regions are consistent with large surface porosities indicating "fluffy" soils while the reddening is consistent with the presence of water frost on the surface.

"Our results suggest there could be as much as 1 to 2 percent water frost in some permanently shadowed soils," says author Dr. Randy Gladstone, an Institute scientist in the SwRI Space Science and Engineering Division. "This is unexpected because naturally occurring interplanetary Lyman-alpha was thought to destroy any water frost before it could accumulate."

The LAMP team estimates that the loss of water frost is about 16 times slower than previously believed. In addition, the accumulation of water frost is also likely to be highly dependent on local conditions, such as temperature, thermal cycling and even geologically recent "impact gardening" in which micrometeoroid impacts redistribute the location and depth of volatile compounds.

Finding water frost at these new locations adds to a rapidly improving understanding of the Moon's water and related species, as discovered by three other space missions through near-infrared emissions observations and found buried within the Cabeus crater by the LCROSS impactor roughly two years ago. During LRO's nominal exploration mission, LAMP added to the LCROSS results by measuring hydrogen, mercury and other volatile gases ejected along with the water from the permanently shaded soils of the Moon's Cabeus crater.

"An even more unexpected finding is that LAMP's technique for measuring the lunar Lyman-alpha albedo indicates higher surface porosities within PSRs, and supports the long-postulated presence of tenuous 'fairy-castle' like arrangements of surface grains in the PSR soils," says co-author Dr. Kurt Retherford, a senior research scientist also in SwRI's Space Science and Engineering Division.

Comparisons with future LAMP maps created using data gathered from the Moon's day side will prove helpful for revealing more about the presence of water frost, as well as the surface porosities of the darker surface features observed. The LAMP team is also eager to apply the Lyman-alpha technique elsewhere on the Moon and on other solar system objects such as Mercury.

LRO's findings are expected to be valuable to the future consideration of a permanent Moon base. The permanently shadowed regions of the Moon are revealing themselves to be some of the most exotic places in the solar system, well worthy of future exploration, says Retherford. Any discovery of water frost and other resources in the area also could reduce the need to transport resources from Earth to a base at the pole.

The paper, "Far-Ultraviolet Reflectance Properties of the Moon's Permanently Shadowed Regions," by G.R. Gladstone, K.D. Retherford, A.F. Egan, D.E. Kaufmann, P.F. Miles, et al., was published in the Jan. 7 issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., developed and manages the LRO mission. LRO's current Science Mission is implemented for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate sponsored LRO's initial one-year Exploration Mission that concluded in September 2010.

###

Editors: Images to accompany this story are available at http://www.swri.org/press/2012/lamp.htm.

[ | E-mail | Share ]
?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-01/sri-lro011312.php
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