The Starshine Satellite: From Concept to Delivery in Four Months

Engineers at the Naval Research Laboratory\u27s Naval Center for Space Technology (NCST) designed, built, and tested the Starshine satellite to meet Space Shuttle Hitchhiker Payload specifications. In a period of only four months after being provided the project requirements from the Starshine project director, Starshine was ready for delivery to the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) for STS 96. GSFC integrated the satellite with its Hitchhiker canister and installed it in the cargo bay of Space Shuttle Orbiter Discovery at the Kennedy Space Center. On May 27, 1999, Star shine went into orbit with Orbiter Discovery. On June 5, 1999, Starshine was deployed from the Hitchhiker canister into low Earth orbit. This paper describes the features of the design, analysis, and testing of the Starshine satellite that permitted its delivery in such a short time. The paper also describes the design and production of the spacecraft\u27s 878 mirrors and the polishing of those mirrors by 25,030 students in 18 countries, as well as the post-polishing protective coating of the finished mirrors. It will also describe the deployment of the satellite and early results of the tracking observations

An Overview of NASA TROPICS Applications and Early Adopter Activities

No abstract availabl

Scaling Up Mental Health Services in Zambia: Challenges and Opportunities Reported in an Education Project.

yesThe need to increase the capacity of developing countries to meet the mental health needs of their populations is widely acknowledged. This article examines some of the challenges associated with a British Council DelPHE project aimed at strengthening the capacity of mental health educators to prepare the mental health workforce in Zambia for a shift from an institutional to a community-based model of care. The analysis draws on data from two focus groups in which the participants were drawn from college educators who had taken part in workshops intended to enhance curriculum alignment to ensure that the education and training provided for clinical officers (psychiatry) and mental health nurses was "fit for purpose." In particular, the article highlights their perspectives on some of the tensions in focusing on mental health as opposed to broader health care and in ensuring appropriate opportunities for practice or field placements. The continuing impact of stigma and limited resources available for mental ill-health is acknowledged within the wider context of inequities in mental health care. Findings of this evaluation may be applicable to other sub-Saharan contexts, but should be understood only within the Zambian context

Applications of NASA TROPICS Data for Tropical Cyclone Analysis, Nowcasting, and Impacts

No abstract availabl

Not a Second Time? John Lennon’s Aeolian Cadence Reconsidered

In 1963 William Mann coined the term “aeolian cadence” to describe a harmonic progression in the song “Not a Second Time” by the Beatles. This term has caused confusion ever since. In this article, I discuss why Mann might have used this confusing phrase and how it relates to this song by John Lennon. I will argue that, in the debate that ensued from Mann’s observations, his commentators were primarily preoccupied with terminology and definitions but forgot to listen to Lennon. More specifically, I argue that, if the interplay between the music and lyrics is considered, the famous cadence in “Not a Second Time” can best be interpreted as “deceptive.

The astrobiology primer: An outline of general knowledge - Version 1, 2006

Peer reviewe

Triangle network motifs predict complexes by complementing high-error interactomes with structural information

BackgroundA lot of high-throughput studies produce protein-protein interaction networks (PPINs) with many errors and missing information. Even for genome-wide approaches, there is often a low overlap between PPINs produced by different studies. Second-level neighbors separated by two protein-protein interactions (PPIs) were previously used for predicting protein function and finding complexes in high-error PPINs. We retrieve second level neighbors in PPINs, and complement these with structural domain-domain interactions (SDDIs) representing binding evidence on proteins, forming PPI-SDDI-PPI triangles.ResultsWe find low overlap between PPINs, SDDIs and known complexes, all well below 10%. We evaluate the overlap of PPI-SDDI-PPI triangles with known complexes from Munich Information center for Protein Sequences (MIPS). PPI-SDDI-PPI triangles have ~20 times higher overlap with MIPS complexes than using second-level neighbors in PPINs without SDDIs. The biological interpretation for triangles is that a SDDI causes two proteins to be observed with common interaction partners in high-throughput experiments. The relatively few SDDIs overlapping with PPINs are part of highly connected SDDI components, and are more likely to be detected in experimental studies. We demonstrate the utility of PPI-SDDI-PPI triangles by reconstructing myosin-actin processes in the nucleus, cytoplasm, and cytoskeleton, which were not obvious in the original PPIN. Using other complementary datatypes in place of SDDIs to form triangles, such as PubMed co-occurrences or threading information, results in a similar ability to find protein complexes.ConclusionGiven high-error PPINs with missing information, triangles of mixed datatypes are a promising direction for finding protein complexes. Integrating PPINs with SDDIs improves finding complexes. Structural SDDIs partially explain the high functional similarity of second-level neighbors in PPINs. We estimate that relatively little structural information would be sufficient for finding complexes involving most of the proteins and interactions in a typical PPIN