It’s hard to believe that the Cassini mission arrived at Saturn and its moons in July 2004. It’s even harder to imagine that this remarkably successful machine explorer now has less than a year of life ahead of it.
Around September 15th, 2017 the 2,000 kilogram orbiter will plunge into Saturn’s upper atmosphere – a destructive end that will yield new data, but also ensure that our visit to this system runs little risk of contaminating pristine environments like that of icy moon Enceladus.
But before that, Cassini is performing a magnificent last waltz with Saturn. Starting with a series of 20 pole-crossing orbits that also dive through the space just outside Saturn’s main rings (the so-called F-ring orbits) Cassini will later shift to a set of 22 orbits that bring its closest approach nearer and nearer to the gas giant – actually within the rings. This animation shows the two orbital families in green and blue respectively.
At this time Cassini is in the midst of its 2nd ring-grazing orbit (green orbit). Already this trajectory has enabled the mission to capture some of the most detailed images of Saturn’s north pole that we’ve ever seen. These show the great hexagonal shape in the upper atmosphere – a possible consequence of turbulent flow between gas masses circulating at very different speeds.
Our understanding of this structure is still incomplete, but the hexagon has persisted since at least the time of the Voyager flyby in the early 1980s. Each side of the hexagon is about the size of the Earth.
These polar shots are also quite reminiscent of Juno’s recent imagery of Jupiter’s poles. The great bands of circulating atmosphere that many of us associate with gas giant planets, devolve into a peppering of small structures that look cyclonic in nature.
Different wavebands of light reveal just how strong a feature the polar hexagon is. In the images below (left to right) are Cassini data in violet (420 nanometers), red, near infrared (728 nanometers), and the infrared. These probe different depths and compounds in the atmosphere.
It’s a great start to a grand finale. Expect to see much more over the coming months.
El Rancho de las Golondrinas “The Ranch of the Swallows” is located near I25 and is closer to Santa Fe than Albuquerque. It dates from the early 1700s and was an important stopping place along the famous Camino Real, the Royal Road, that went from Mexico City, Mexico to Santa Fe, New Mexico.
This historic ranch, opened in 1972, serves as a living history museum which is dedicated to the history, heritage, and culture of 18th and 19th Century New Mexico. The museum is part of the vision of the Curtin-Paloheimo family. In 1932 the ranch was purchased by Leonora Curtin and her mother. Ms Curtin is also known for founding the Santa Fe Native Market to save and reestablish traditional craft forms and techniques, and to provide a local artists a source of income during the Great Depression. After marrying her Finnish husband Yrjo Alfred (YA) Paloheimo in 1946, they shared the vision for the outdoor living history museum.
Both Leonora and Y.A. devoted themselves to transforming the property into a place where visitors could physically engage with the rich culture of the region and become immersed in the history of New Mexico. Existing historic buildings were restored, period structures were erected and historic buildings were brought in from other sites around New Mexico. Today,the museum has grown into New Mexico’s premier living history museum. It promotes and preserves the Hispano heritage of Northern New Mexico, while at the same time building a better understanding of the lasting influence of Hispanos in the Southwest and the rest of the country.
A local weaver at the ranch – photo by Richard Boysen
Each year, the ranch hosts festivals. You can view the festival calendar on the ranch’s website (El Rancho de Las Golondrinas.com).
Dogs remember things, as any dog owner can tell you. Whether it’s knowing that the sound of food hitting the bowl means mealtime or recalling that the jingle of the leash means walk time, man’s best friend consistently illustrates his ability to recount the meaning of specific cues. Now, new research shows that canines could also have a more complex form of memory that few nonhuman animals have been shown to possess—one that could even point to a sense of self-awareness.
There are two forms of “explicit memory,” which is the kind of memory you use when intentionally recalling a piece of information. The first is semantic memory, which you use to recall information you’ve consciously learned or memorized. The second is episodic memory, which you use to remember everyday experiences and events that your mind encodes without conscious memorization. While you might use semantic memory to recount vocabulary words for a Spanish test, you’d use episodic memory when your friend asks you how your trip to the grocery store went yesterday.
Semantic memory is fairly common in the animal kingdom; chimpanzees can use it to memorize words and dogs can use it to associate commands with the actions they need to perform. But until recently, episodic memory has been considered “uniquely human.” Endel Tulving, the University of Toronto psychologist who first defined semantic and episodic memory in 1972, believed that episodic memory evolved only recently and only in humans. However, new research in the past few years has suggested that a few non-human animals such as chimpanzees, orangutans and bottlenose dolphins may also possess this form of memory.
Episodic memory has been associated with self-awareness: The theory is that, to recall these kinds of memories, you have to be able to imagine yourself in past events. “Many animals—mammals such as mice, squirrels, dogs, elephants, and chimpanzees, as well as most if not all birds—have excellent ‘semantic’ memory,” Tulving writes on his faculty webpage. “That is, they are capable of conscious learning of facts about the world. However, there exists no evidence that they can mentally travel in time in the same was as humans do, to remember the past and to plan for the future.”
When it comes to humans, testing for episodic memory is relatively straightforward; just ask them to recall something they didn’t expect to be asked about. For animals, a little more creativity is required, says Etövös Loránd University animal psychologist Claudia Fugazza. Fugazza is the lead author of the first study of its kind on episodic memory in dogs, published last week in the journal Current Biology, which suggests that our canine companions may have more advanced memories than we thought
To get around the fact that a dog can’t tell you about its memories, Fugazza and her team decided to use distraction as a way of forcing dogs to rely on their episodic memory by making them recall an unexpected command. For the study, the researchers guided 17 dog owners as they trained their dogs to imitate them while they performed six different actions involving three different objects: a bucket, umbrella and chair. These “Do As I Do” commands were designed to create an expectation for the dogs: After their owners demonstrated an action, they were expected to follow suit.
The owners then distracted the dogs from that expectation by training them instead to simply lie down on a blue carpet after their owners demonstrated any of the same actions involving the same objects. Now, the dogs wouldn’t need to remember which action their owners did; they just needed to lie down afterwards. Then came the key test of the dogs’ episodic memory: While the dogs stood on the blue carpet that had been used during the lie down training, their owners demonstrated an action and waited for their dogs to lie down as they expected. They then suddenly gave the command to imitate them.
Could the dogs remember the action to imitate even while they were expected to just lie down after doing it?
Immediately after the demonstration, researchers found, most of the dogs were able to correctly remember which action to imitate. Even after an hour delay from the demonstration, several dogs could still remember which action to imitate.
For Fugazza, these results showed the unexpected potential for dogs to have a more complex memory than previously thought. But the study also suggests that dogs might make good subjects for future studies in animal psychology, in addition to more traditional lab animals like apes, rats and birds, she says. “We think that dogs are a very good model for studying [animal cognition],” Fugazza says. She points to “their advantage of living and having evolved in a human environment,” which means they are easier to train and work with than other study subjects.
However, that familiarity could also cause problems, warns Victoria Templer, a neuroscientist at Providence College in Rhode Island who wasn’t involved in this study. Because dogs have evolved to respond so well to humans, she said, scientists would have to work hard to avoid the so-called “Clever Hans effect,” in which humans can unknowingly prompt animals for an answer in experiments. For this reason, Templer said she likely would never work with dogs.
Nevertheless, she says she considers the design and results of Fugazza’s study to be well-done, and she hopes to see more work like it in this field. “It’s one brick in the wall—we need other bricks in the wall to be able to say [for certain] that dogs have episodic memory,” says Templer. So maybe don’t ask Fido how his trip to the grocery store went just yet.
I would feel this way regardless of who won. If Donald Trump is serious about draining the swamp, he should let the people vote on a constitutional amendment placing term limits on senators and congressmen.
They’re selling postcards of the hanging, they’re painting
the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors, the circus is in
Here comes the blind commissioner, they’ve got him in a
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker, the other is in
And the riot squad they’re restless, they need somewhere to
As Lady and I look out tonight, from Desolation Row
Cinderella, she seems so easy, “It takes one to know one,”
And puts her hands in her back pockets Bette Davis style
And in comes Romeo, he’s moaning. “You Belong to Me I
And someone says, “You’re in the wrong place, my friend, you
And the only sound that’s left after the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up on Desolation Row
Now the moon is almost hidden, the stars are beginning to
The fortune telling lady has even taken all her things
All except for Cain and Abel and the hunchback of Notre Dame
Everybody is making love or else expecting rain
And the Good Samaritan, he’s dressing, he’s getting ready
for the show
He’s going to the carnival tonight on Desolation Row
Now Ophelia, she’s ‘neath the window for her I feel so
On her twenty-second birthday she already is an old maid
To her, death is quite romantic she wears an iron vest
Her profession’s her religion, her sin is her lifelessness
And though her eyes are fixed upon Noah’s great rainbow
She spends her time peeking into Desolation Row
Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood with his memories in a
Passed this way an hour ago with his friend, a jealous monk
He looked so immaculately frightful as he bummed a cigarette
As he when off sniffing drainpipes and reciting the alphabet
Now you would not think to look at him, but he was famous
For playing the electric violin on Desolation Row
Dr. Filth, he keeps his world inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients, they’re trying to blow it up
Now his nurse, some local loser, she’s in charge of the
And she also keeps the cards that read, “Have Mercy on His
They all play on the penny whistles, you can hear them blow
If you lean your head out far enough from Desolation Row
Across the street they’ve nailed the curtains, they’re
getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera a perfect image of a priest
They’re spoon feeding Casanova to get him to feel more
Then they’ll kill him with self-confidence after poisoning
him with words
And the Phantom’s shouting to skinny girls, “Get Outa Here
If You Don’t Know
Casanova is just being punished for going to Desolation Row”
Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory where the heart-attack
Is strapped across their shoulders and then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles by insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping to Desolation Row
Praise be to Nero’s Neptune the Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting, “Which Side Are You On?”
And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s
While calypso singers laugh at them and fishermen hold
Between the windows of the sea where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much about Desolation row
Yes, I received your letter yesterday (About the time the
When you asked me how I was doing, was that some kind of
All these people that you mention, yes, I know them, they’re
I had to rearrange their faces and give them all another
Right now, I can’t read too good, don’t send me no more
Not unless you mail them from Desolation Row
Leonard Cohen died at age 82. I was introduced to his work in the early 1970s by a friend and colleague named Perry Youngblood. In his biography, and at other times, Cohen wrote that he was first and foremost a poet, but turned to song because he could not make a living just writing and publishing poetry. His poetry became beautiful songs, sometimes dark and sultry and sometimes spiritual and sexy.
Before his muse Marianne Ihlen died in July, Leonard Cohen penned her a final letter: ‘Well Marianne, it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon.”
Donald Trump claims to want to make America Great. What has he done during his life to make America Great? Wish he would tell us how bilking investors and students at Trump University has made America Great.
PHILADELPHIA ― The father of a Muslim American war hero addressed the Democratic National Convention on Thursday, delivering a brutal takedown of Donald Trump and his inflammatory anti-Muslim rhetoric.
Khizr Khan spoke about the heroism of his son, Army Capt. Humayun S.M. Khan, who was killed in action in Iraq by an advancing vehicle loaded with hundreds of pounds of explosives. The 27-year-old soldier, who was born in the UAE, ordered his unit to halt while he walked toward the vehicle, saving the lives of his fellow soldiers.
With his wife standing beside him, Khan brought Democratic delegates to their feet by denouncing Trump and his proposed ban on Muslims.
“Hillary Clinton was right when she called my son the best of America. If it was up to Donald Trump, he never would have been in America,” he said. “Donald Trump consistently smears the character of Muslims. He disrespects other minorities, women, judges, and even his own party leadership. Donald Trump loves to build walls and ban us from this country.”
Khan then addressed the Republican nominee directly.
“Let me ask you, have you even read the U.S. Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy,” he said, pulling a copy of the document from his pocket.
“Look for the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equal protection of law.’ Have you ever been to Arlington National Cemetery? Go look at the graves of the brave patriots who died defending this country,” he said.
“You have sacrificed nothing,” he said, to roars from the crowd. “We cannot solve our problems by building walls. We are stronger together. We will keep getting stronger when Hillary Clinton becomes our president.”
Khan’s speech even impressed some Republicans. John Noonan, a former national security adviser to Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, tweeted:
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.
THE HUFFINGTON POST IS TRACKING ISLAMOPHOBIC INCIDENTS ACROSS THE U.S., BECAUSE THE ONLY WAY TO STOP HATE IS TO CONFRONT IT.
Oliver Morton The Music of Science
What does the Pacific have that the Atlantic doesn’t? Earthquakes. Why? Plate tectonics
THERE IS NOTHING peaceable about the Atlantic, as my father, who went back and forth across it in wartime convoys, could attest. Its inexhaustible palette of moods includes all manner of awfulness. There is, though, something happily pacific, and distinctly un-Pacific, about the shores on to which its tempests blow. The edges of the Pacific are endlessly subject to earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis. The edges of the Atlantic, by contrast, are startlingly stable.
Yes, there was the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed tens of thousands. But that is remembered precisely because it was so exceptional, and had profound effects. The levelling of Lisbon changed not just Portugal’s history but Europe’s ways of thinking about good and evil. In Japan you can expect such things in every lifetime. And until about 50 years ago, this global asymmetry was both inexplicable and more or less unquestioned.
In the 1960s, a few geologists from both sides of the Atlantic worked out how the ocean that separated them – and all the other ocean basins – had come to be. Their plate-tectonic revolution, like all scientific revolutions, did more than just answer outstanding questions. It realigned them, turning apparently separate questions into aspects of the same problem.
At the heart of plate tectonics was the idea that the Earth’s crust is forever being created and destroyed. It is created at the ridges that run through all of the oceans. It is destroyed in subduction zones at the edges of oceans, where it plunges back down into the depths. Both ridges and subduction zones, the revolutionaries told the world, were boundaries between things no one had previously imagined called tectonic plates, the former being where plates pull away from one another, the latter where they converge.
Plate tectonics thus explained a range of things which had seemed to have nothing in common. In the 1950s measurements of the magnetic fields in rocks had shown that the continents had once been at different latitudes; this was explained by the continental drift brought about by the plates. Half a century of seismology had shown that small earthquakes clustered along ocean ridges and big ones at some ocean margins; this was explained by the stresses the crust underwent as it was stretched and compressed.
The most ancient of the puzzles solved was the way the east coast of the Americas echoes the west coast of Europe and Africa. It had been the subject of speculation in the 18th century by the natural historian Alexander Humboldt, who saw the Atlantic as something like a winding river valley, and it had even been noted in the 16th by the philosopher Francis Bacon. Plate tectonics showed it to be the result of the sundering of an ancient supercontinent.
In 1964 the Cambridge geophysicist Teddy Bullard put these observations on a firmer footing. Using computers and spherical geometry, he showed exactly how the zigs of the east and the zags of the west could nestle against each other if the ocean were removed from the scene and the continents snuggled up together.
Since then the history of the break-up has been mapped with some precision. About 200m years ago, what is now Mauritania and what is now the eastern seaboard of the United States began to pull apart; as they did so, new crust formed at the nascent mid-Atlantic ridge between them. The process has continued, albeit with fits and starts, ever since, widening the Atlantic a few centimetres a year – roughly the pace at which fingernails grow. And because crust is being made at the ridge, not destroyed at the edges, the basin has little earthquakes at its heart but none on its rim.
This is not a sustainable arrangement. Even at fingernail speed, the Atlantic cannot grow for ever on a finite planet. There are, though, two different ways it could end. Either the Atlantic keeps on widening, the Pacific shrinking, until America pushes up against Asia, or the Atlantic starts to develop subduction zones of its own, which eat up old ocean floors faster than the central ridge can produce new ones; the ocean narrows and eventually collapses. The process may already have begun: the fault that produced the Lisbon quake could be the start of a subduction zone.
Like all the best scientific revolutions, plate tectonics did not only answer old questions, but posed new ones. It does not promise to resolve them – I doubt anyone will ever be able to say with certainty whether the Atlantic will keep opening or start closing. But whichever course it takes matters not a whit in human terms. Just as there are some questions that no one bothers to answer, so there are others which no one needs to answer.
Some questions fascinate because they can be answered, others because they can’t be. Knowing how the Atlantic arose falls into the first category; an origin that can, in principle, be unearthed or explained is exciting, one that is for some reason necessarily obscure or unobtainable is by and large not. Questions about where things are headed tend to fall into the second. Clear answers about future events may have practical value, but they have little else to recommend them. The undecidable future, though? That never palls, any more than a seascape can exhaust itself.
OLIVER MORTONis briefings editor at The Economist and the author of “Eating the Sun”