Month: May 2014

LONDON (TIP): Unbeknown to most of us here on Earth, a huge asteroid the size of a double-decker bus hurtled past our planet over the weekend. Days after it was spotted by astronomers, the space rock passed within 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometres) of Earth, Space.com reported. And although it may sound like a large distance, the asteroid travelled within the Moon’s orbit, which on average takes the satellite 238, 855 miles (384,399 kilometres) away from Earth.

The asteroid, known a HL 129, was about 7.6 metres (25 feet) wide and made its closest approach to Earth at 4.13am EDT (8.13am GMT) on Saturday. Astronomers from the Mount Lemmon Survey team first spotted the rock on Wednesday, according to an alert by Minor Plant Center, which is part of the International Astronomical Union. Nasa scientists and researchers across the world keep a constant look-out for potentially dangerous asteroids that could crash into Earth – with deadly consequences.

Former astronaut Ed Lu said earlier this year that it was only “blind luck” that the planet had not suffered a catastrophic hit from an asteroid. He told Wired.co.uk: “While most large asteroids with the potential to destroy an entire country or continent have been detected, less than 10,000 of the more than a million dangerous asteroids with the potential to destroy an entire major metropolitan area have been found by all existing space or terrestriallyoperated observatories.

“Because we don’t know where or when the next major impact will occur, the only thing preventing a catastrophe from a ‘city-killer’ sized asteroid has been blind luck.” In 2013 over 1,000 people were injured after an asteroid exploded above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk.

WASHINGTON (TIP): Researchers at Nasa’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Californa, has successfully reproduced the processes that occur in the atmosphere of a red giant star and lead to the formation of planet-forming interstellar dust. Using a specialized facility, called the Cosmic Simulation Chamber (COSmIC) designed and built at Ames, scientists now are able to recreate and study in the laboratory dust grains similar to the grains that form in the outer layers of dying stars.

Dust grains that form around dying stars and are ejected into the interstellar medium lead, after a life cycle spanning millions of years, to the formation of planets and are a key component of the universe’s evolution. Scientists have found the materials that make up the building blocks of the universe are much more complicated than originally anticipated.

Farid Salama, project leader and a space science researcher at Ames, said that the harsh conditions of space are extremely difficult to reproduce in the laboratory, and have long hindered efforts to interpret and analyze observations from space. He said that using the COSmIC simulator they can now discover clues to questions about the composition and the evolution of the universe, both major objectives of Nasa’s space research program.

The team started with small hydrocarbon molecules that it expanded in the cold jet spray in COSmIC and exposed to high energy in an electric discharge. They detected and characterized the large molecules that are formed in the gas phase from these precursor molecules with highly sensitive detectors, then collected the individual solid grains formed from these complex molecules and imaged them using Ames’ Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM).

Ella Sciamma-O’Brien, of the BAER Institute and a research fellow at Ames, said during COSmIC experiments, we are able to form and detect nanoparticles on the order of 10nm size, grains ranging from 100-500 nanometers and aggregates of grains up to 1.5 micrometers in diameter, about a tenth the width of a human hair, and observe their structure with SEM, thus sampling a large size distribution of the grains produced.

MELBOURNE (TIP): A daily ‘super pill’ could save millions of lives by preventing heart attacks and strokes, suggests a new study which used data from several countries including India. The largest ever analysis on the use of a polypill in cardiovascular disease shows potential for improvements in patient care, researchers said.

Almost 1 in 4 patients adhered better to treatment; significant improvements in blood pressure and cholesterol, they said. New data presented for the first time at the World Heart Federation’s World Congress of Cardiology 2014 shows a significant improvement in both patient adherence and risk factor control when patients at high risk of heart attack or stroke receive a polypill, compared to usual care.

A polypill is a fixed dose combination of commonly used blood pressure and cholesterol lowering medications, along with aspirin, which helps prevent cardiovascular disease (CVD). The Single Pill to Avert Cardiovascular Events project, led by researchers from The George Institute for Global Health, analysed data from 3,140 patients with established CVD or at high risk of CVD in Europe, India and Australasia.

The results showed a 43% increase in patient adherence to medication at 12 months with the polypill, in addition to corresponding improvements in systolic blood pressure and LDL-cholesterol that were highly statistically significant. The largest benefits were seen among patients not receiving all recommended medications at baseline, which corresponds to most cardiovascular disease patients globally.

“These results are an important step forward in the polypill journey and management of cardiovascular disease,” said Ruth Webster of the George Institute for Global Health. “An important finding from our analyses is that the greatest benefits from a polypill were for currently untreated individuals,” said Webster. CVD is the number one cause of death globally, killing 17.3 million people each year and it is expected to remain the world’s leading cause of death in the near future, researchers said.

“These results emphasize the importance of the polypill as a foundation for a global strategy on cardiovascular disease prevention,” professor Salim Yusuf, President-elect of the World Heart Federation said. “It will improve patient access to essential medications at an affordable cost and wide use of the polypill can avoid several millions of premature CVD events,” he said.

LONDON (TIP): Coffee lovers can now get their caffeine fix on the go, thanks to the world’s first disposable coffee machine! The Grower’s Cup system, developed by a Danish designer, works just like a tea bag for coffee and is described as a hybrid between a filter coffee brewer and a French Press.

The system works by simply pouring hot water into the bag offering a pretty neat solution for drinking coffee indoors, The ‘Huffington Post’ reported. “Our coffee bag is to coffee what the wine bottle is to wine,” claim the makers of the system. To prepare coffee with the machine, ground beans are held in a special filter through which the water pours. Once the bottom of the bag is filled, water is held over the beans.

The longer you leave it, the stronger the coffee. “It all started one morning when I went to make myself a cup of coffee and realized I had run out of filters for my machine,” said designer Ulrik Rasmussen. “As I slammed the kitchen draw shut I noticed some tea bags and I started thinking about why there wasn’t a similar product for coffee.

“I cut up a few tea bags and put coffee grounds inside them and found there was some potential for a similar product so I started doing research into it,” said Rasmussen. The disposable bags come in five different types of bean and each bag makes two cups of coffee when using 300ml of water.