More than 6,300 individuals applied to be a part of NASA’s next astronaut class. That is twice as many as NASA typically receives and the second highest number of applications ever received by the agency.

Late last year, NASA sent out a call for a new astronaut class. These new candidates will live and work aboard the International Space Station, help build the Orion spacecraft for exploration beyond low earth orbit and continue NASA’s partnership with companies that will supply commercial transportation services to the ISS.

“The Flight Crew Operations Directorate is very happy with the large number of applicants for the astronaut program,” said Janet Kavandi, Director of Flight Crew Operations. “NASA feels strongly that an appropriate mix of skills, education, and background provide the office with a greater ability to successfully work a wide array of operational situations.”

Applications were accepted for two months with the deadline expiring on January 27, 2012. This year the response to the announcement was tremendous with NASA receiving 6,372 applications. This is the largest number of applications since 1978 which had more than 8,000 submissions.

“Historically, we’ve received between 2,500 and 3,500 applications for each class,” said Duane Ross, who leads NASA’s Astronaut Selection Office. “We were a bit surprised, but very pleased by the overwhelming response to our recent Astronaut Candidate vacancy announcement. To me, this demonstrates the fact that the public remains genuinely interested in continuing the exploration of space. As for my office, we will be busy for a while.”

During the next couple of months, Astronaut Selection Office staff will sort through the applications to compare them to a list of basic qualifications. Those applications that meet these qualifications will then be reviewed by a selection committee to identify “highly qualified” applicants. The panel will determine which remaining applicants will be invited for an interview and medical evaluations.

The interview process will be a two-step process. Initial interviews will be conducted by the Astronaut Selection Board beginning in August and will continue through October. Then, starting in November and running through January 2013, final interviews will be held along with medical evaluations of each applicant.

The Astronaut Selection Board is expected to make its final decision in the spring of 2013 with the new Astronauts Candidates reporting for training that summer. The new candidates will undergo two years of training before being eligible for mission assignments.

• Josh Halliday and Charles Arthur
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 3 February 2012 12.37 EST
• Anonymous's release of Met and FBI call puts hacker group back centre stage
• Activist collective's leak of 18-minute discussion embarrasses authorities and raises questions over how security was breached

 The hacking collective Anonymous has struck deep into the heart of one of its sworn enemies – the police – with the release of the recording of a conference call between the Metropolitan police and the FBI. In it, they discuss ongoing investigations and court cases against alleged British hackers; and now, courtesy of Anonymous, the world can listen in too.

For Anonymous, the posting on YouTube of the 18-minute audio from the call was a particular triumph, indicating that it can worm its way even into the most powerful organisations in the land. "The FBI might be curious how we're able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now," said one account controlled by the group on Twitter.

The call reveals British police and the FBI discussing the delay of court proceedings against two alleged members of the LulzSec hacking group, which attacked a number of sites in 2011 including the US Congress and UK Serious Organised Crime Agency.

It's worrying for anyone to discover that their email has been hacked – but when it happens to the police in not one but two countries, and to the two most sensitive arms of those forces, dealing with hackers, it becomes a source for deep concern.

For Anonymous, though, it is a return to prominence after it burst into worldwide attention with its attacks on PayPal and Visa in January 2011 after those sites stopped allowing payments to WikiLeaks. Anonymous has no leaders and no clear membership, and forms decisions collectively. Its general ethos is to defend what members see as the "free" internet from repression and restriction of freedom of speech.

After a series of arrests in spring 2011, and a number of arrests relating to other hacking attacks through the year, the group seemed to have lost direction. But the rise of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, and now its attacks on far-right and authority figures, appears to have revitalised it.

The police call, recorded on 17 January ahead of arraignment hearings for two Britons accused of a number of offences related to hacking, includes two British and two FBI police officers discussing the members of the groups and another British hacker who they describe as a "wannabe", and who is alleged to have leaked details of 32,000 users of the online game platform Steam.

"He's doing it for attention," one of the Met officers says. "He got arrested for DDOSing [knocking out the computers at] his school and then he hacked a credit union in Jamaica." The hacker, whose identity is known to the Guardian, denies having been arrested, and says he attended a police interview voluntarily.

For Anonymous, though, it is the latest in a run of triumphs over those it sees as its enemies. Early in January, the group targeted the leader of Gemany's far-right NPD party. Then they hit websites belonging to the US Department of Justice, Universal Music and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) as part of a protest over the closure on criminal charges of the MegaUpload filesharing site.

The latest embarrassment for the authorities was recorded after someone hacked the email of at least one of the 44 recipients on an email headed "Anon-Lulz International Coordination Call" sent on 13 January by Timothy Lauster of the FBI. It detailed the conference call number and dial-in code to "discuss the on-going [sic] investigation related to Anonymous, LulzSec, Antisec and other associated splinter groups".

With the message having gone to police forces in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Sweden and the US, tracking down the hacked account – or accounts – will be a serious headache. Security experts said the interception is unlikely to have required a highly complex operation.

"Clearly looks like someone on that list has had their email compromised. It's very serious," a security expert, Graham Cluley, told the Guardian. "It is one thing taking down a website but to actually be listening in on the conference call where police are discussing charges ... there must be a lot of questions being asked right now."

Cluley said it was unlikely that the hacker collective had interfered with the systems of the company that hosted the conference call. The FBI said that its computer systems were not breached as part of the incident.

The solicitor for Ryan Cleary, who is charged with five offences of hacking websites, told the Guardian that the recording raises concerns that US authorities are seeking to extradite the Essex teenager. "My concern is whether the co-operation between officers [in the US and UK] was to assist them in an extradition request," said Karen Todner, the managing director of solicitors' firm Kaim Todner.

She warned that future breaches of security on this scale have the potential to "blow apart" criminal charges against those arrested in connection with previous hacks. "This is the FBI and the Met's e-crime unit [that have been breached] and the Crown Prosecution Service are in April about to go completely digital and the whole cases could be blown apart on it."

In the call the detectives can be heard discussing various members of the LulzSec group, and the progress of cases against Ryan Cleary, who has been charged with five offences relating to hacking websites, and Jake Davis, who has been charged over the hacking of the Soca website. Two people who are alleged to be members of LulzSec, who have previously been arrested and bailed by UK police, are also discussed in the call. Their names have been bleeped out by the person who uploaded the call to YouTube.

An international team of scientists that includes University of Hawaii at Manoa astronomer Nader Haghighipour has discovered a potentially habitable super-Earth planet orbiting a nearby star. This discovery demonstrates that habitable planets could form in a greater variety of environments than previously believed.

"This planet is the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it," team leader Guillem Anglada-Escude said.

Super-Earth planets are two to ten times more massive than Earth.

The team used the planet-finding technique that involves measuring the small wobbles in a star's orbit in response to a planet's gravity. An M-class dwarf star called GJ 667C, which is 22 light-years away from Earth, had previously been observed to have a super-Earth (called GJ 667Cb) that orbited the star in only 7.2 days, making it too close to the star, and thus too hot, to support life.

The study started with the aim of learning more about the orbit of GJ 667Cb. But the research team found a clear signal of a new planet (GJ 667Cc) with an orbital period of 28.15 days and a minimum mass of 4.5 times that of Earth.

The new planet receives 90 percent of the light that Earth receives. However, because most of its incoming light is heat (infrared light), a higher percentage of this incoming energy should be absorbed by the planet. When both these effects are taken into account, GJ 667Cc should absorb about the same amount of energy from its star that Earth absorbs from the Sun. This would allow surface temperatures similar to Earth and perhaps liquid water, but this cannot be confirmed without further information on the planet's atmosphere.

"The detection of this planet is strong evidence that our strategy in choosing M stars as potential hosts for habitable planet is correct and has been successful," said Haghighipour, who works at UH Manoa's Institute for Astronomy and is a member of the UH NASA Astrobiology Institute. M stars are smaller than our Sun.

The team used public data from the European Southern Observatory and analyzed it with a novel data analysis method. They also incorporated new measurements from the Keck Observatory's High Resolution Echelle Spectrograph in Hawaii and the new Carnegie Planet Finder Spectrograph at the Magellan II Telescope in Chile.

GJ 667C is a member of a triple-star system and has less metallic elements (those heavier than hydrogen and helium) than our Sun. The other two stars in the triple system (GJ 667AB) also have a small concentration of heavy elements. Since such elements are the building blocks of terrestrial planets like Earth, the team thought it was unusual for a metal-depleted star system to have an abundance of low-mass planets.

The work on this project will be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The current version of the manuscript will be posted at http://arxiv.org/archive/astro-ph

Anglada-Escude was with Carnegie Institution for Science when he conducted the research, but has since moved on to the University of Gottingen. The co-authors in addition to Haghighipour are Carnegie's Paul Butler, Jeffrey D. Crane, Stephen A. Shectman, and Ian B. Thompson; Pamela Arriagada and Dante Minniti of Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile; Steve Vogt and Eugenio J. Rivera of University of California's Lick Observatory; Brad D. Carter of University of Southern Queensland; C. G. Tinney, Robert A. Wittenmyer, and Jeremy A. Bailey of the University of New South Wales; Simon J. O'Toole of the Australian Astronomical Observatory; Hugh R. A. Jones of the University of Hertfordshire; and James S. Jenkins of the Universidad de Chile, Camino El Observatorio.

Media Contact:
Ms. Louise Good
+1 808-956-9403
good@ifa.hawaii.edu

Science Contact:
Dr. Nader Haghighipour
+1 808-956-6098
nader@ifa.hawaii.edu

Founded in 1967, the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa conducts research into galaxies, cosmology, stars, planets, and the Sun. Its faculty and staff are also involved in astronomy education, deep space missions, and in the development and management of the observatories on Haleakala and Mauna Kea. 

This month, the Hong Kong Census and Statistics Departmentreported that China imported 102,779 kilograms of gold from Hong Kong in November, an increase from October’s 86,299 kilograms.  Beijing does not release gold trade figures, so for this and other reasons the Hong Kong numbers are considered the best indication of China’s gold imports.

Analysts believe China bought as much as 490 tons of gold in 2011, double the estimated 245 tons in 2010.  “The thing that’s caught people’s minds is the massive increase in Chinese buying,” remarked Ross Norman of Sharps Pixley, a London gold brokerage, this month.

So who in China is buying all this gold?

The People’s Bank of China, the central bank, has been hinting that it is purchasing.  “No asset is safe now,” said the PBOC’s Zhang Jianhua at the end of last month.  “The only choice to hedge risks is to hold hard currency—gold.”  He also said it was smart strategy to buy on market dips.  Analysts naturally jumped on his comment as proof that China, the world’s fifth-largest holder of the metal, is in the market for more.

There are a few problems with this conclusion.  First, the Chinese government rarely benefits others—and hurts itself—by telegraphing its short-term investment strategies.

Second, the central bank has less purchasing power these days.  China’s foreign reserves declined in Q4 2011, falling $20.6 billion from Q3.  The first quarterly outflow since 1998 was not large, but the trend was troubling.  The reserves declined a stunning $92.7 billion in November and December.

Third, the purchase of gold would be especially risky for the central bank, which is already insolvent from a balance sheet point of view.  The PBOC needs income-producing assets in order to meet its obligations on the debt incurred to buy foreign exchange, so the holding of gold only complicates its funding operations.  This is not to say the bank never buys gold—it obviously does—but there are real constraints on its ability to purchase assets that do not provide current income.

Apart from China’s central bank, there is not much demand from the country’s institutional investors for gold.  There are industrial users, of course, but their demand is filled from domestic production—China is the world’s largest gold producer.  Most of China’s gold demand from foreign sources, therefore, is from individuals.

So why are individuals now buying gold?  The easy answer is that the demand is only seasonal, as Jeff Wright of Global Hunter Securities believes.  The Chinese traditionally buy gold presents in the run-up to the Lunar New Year, which started a week ago.  Yet gift-giving does not begin to explain the surge in gold purchases that started as far back as July.  November was the fifth-consecutive month of China’s record gold purchases from Hong Kong.

A better explanation for the gold-buying binge of Chinese citizens is that they are using the shiny commodity as an inflation hedge, as the Financial Timesrecently suggested.  Yet the buying of gold has increased while inflation has eased.  And that means there must be another explanation.  The best explanation is that individuals in China are using gold as a substitute for capital flight.

Although indicators showed the Chinese economy faltered only at the end of September, there had been a growing sense of pessimism inside the country for months before then.  Beijing, after all, could build only so many “ghost cities” before citizens began to notice.  As Joseph Sternberg of the Wall Street Journal Asia said on the John Batchelor Show last Wednesday, “people inside China seem to be losing faith in the Chinese growth story that we’ve been hearing so much about for the past few years.”  Estimates of capital flight are sketchy, but it appears there was $34 billion of it in the third quarter of last year and a $100 billion in the fourth.

Not every Chinese citizen is in the position to export cash, so the next best tactic for the nervous is to buy gold, a refuge from plunging property prices and declining stock markets as well as an anticipated depreciation of their currency.  “Within China,” notesMichael Pettis of Peking University, “many are going to argue that the rapid decline in the trade surplus, coupled with unmistakable evidence of flight capital, means that the PBOC should devalue the RMB.”  And the fact that China’s leaders in public are talking about the adverse impact of the European crisis on China weighs heavily on sentiment.

The worst thing about capital flight and gold purchases is that they drain liquidity out of the Chinese economy just when it is needed most.  Beijing can continue to work its magic as long as strict capital controls keep money inside the country.  Once they fail to do so, however, all bets are off.  The purchasing of gold, of course, results in the exporting of cash.

Chinese asset values have not yet crashed across the board, but the buying of gold—a leading indicator of panic—is an especially troubling sign that they will.  Therefore, it is not surprising that gold purchases by Chinese citizens and investors are frightening Beijing’s technocrats.  At the end of last month, they shut all of the countries gold exchanges other than two of them in Shanghai.

Facebook has filed for IPO. It will likely be the largest IPO in Internet history.

Here are some quick things I’m noticing in the company’s SEC filing:

1. Zynga accounts for 12% of Facebook’s revenue. Facebook needs Zynga just as much as Zynga needs Facebook.
2. Zuckerberg owns a WHOPPING 533,801,850 shares — that’s 28.2% of the company. And because he controls 30.6% of the voting shares via proxy, he has full control over decisions.
3. The next biggest shareholders: Accel Partners (11.4%), co-founder Dustin Moskovitz (7.6%), DST (5.4%) and Peter Thiel (2.5%).
4. Sheryl Sandberg only owns 1.9 million shares. That’s barely a blip on the radar. Peter Thiel owns 22x that amount.
5. Facebook has 2.7 BILLION likes and comments every single day. That is nearly a trillion interactions per year.
6. 845 million monthly active users, 483 million of them are daily active users. Those numbers are up 38% and 48% from the year before respectively.
7. $3.7 billion in revenue last year. In 2009, it was “just” $777 million in revenue.
8. Facebook has $3.8 billion in cash on hand. That’s a big chunk of change
9. 83% of Facebook’s revenue came from advertising. In 2010, that number was 90%
10. Zuckerberg has a salary of $500k, while COO Sheryl Sandberg and CFO David Ebersman take in $300k.

After drilling for two decades through more than two miles of antarctic ice, Russian scientists are on the verge of entering a vast, dark lake that hasn’t been touched by light for more than 20 million years.

Scientists are enormously excited about what life-forms might be found there but are equally worried about contaminating the lake with drilling fluids and bacteria, and the potentially explosive “de-gassing” of a body of water that has especially high concentrations of oxygen and nitrogen.

To prevent a sudden release of gas, the Russian team will not push the drill far into the lake but just deep enough for a limited amount of water — or the slushy ice on the lake’s surface — to flow up the borehole, where it will then freeze.

Reaching Lake Vostok would represent the first direct contact with what scientists now know is a web of more than 200 subglacial lakes in Antarctica — some of which existed when the continent was connected to Australia and was much warmer. They stay liquid because of heat from the core of the planet.

“This is a huge moment for science and exploration, breaking through to this enormous lake that we didn’t even know existed until the 1990s,” said John Priscu, a researcher at Montana State University who has long been involved in antarctic research, including a study of Vostok ice cores.

“If it goes well, a breakthrough opens up a whole new chapter in our understanding of our planet and possibly moons in our solar system and planets far beyond,” he said. “If it doesn’t go well, it casts a pall over the whole effort to explore this wet underside of Antarctica.”

Priscu said Russian scientists on the scene e-mailed him last week to say they had stopped drilling about 40 feet from the expected waterline to measure the pressure levels deep below. Priscu said he expected that they were also sending down a special “hot water” drill to make the final push, but a message from the Russian team Monday reported “no news.”

If the Russians break through as planned within the next week, it will cap more than 50 years of research in what are considered the harshest conditions in the world — where the surface temperatures drop to 100 degrees below zero. That extreme cold is likely to return within a few weeks, at the end of the antarctic summer, putting pressure on the Russians to make the final push or pull out until the next antarctic drilling season, starting in December.

The extreme cold, which limited drilling time, contributed to the long duration of the project. The Russian team also ran into delays caused by financial strains and by efforts to address international worries about their drilling operation.

Valery Lukin, who is leading the effort for the Russians, is on the ice. Last year, he told Reuters that their work is “like exploring an alien planet where no one has been before. We don’t know what we’ll find.”

The ‘crown jewel’

American and English teams are planning drilling campaigns next year into much smaller antarctic lakes as scientists work to understand the dynamics of the continent, which holds more than 70 percent of the world’s fresh water. But Vostok — where the former Soviet Union began work after the United States settled in at the South Pole more than 50 years ago — is now acknowledged to be the “crown jewel” of Antarctica from a scientific perspective.

IBEX spacecraft measures "alien" particles from outside solar system, reveals interactions in surrounding regions

For immediate release

San Antonio — January 31, 2012 — Using data from NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft, an international team of researchers has measured neutral "alien" particles entering our solar system from interstellar space. A suite of studies published in theAstrophysical Journal provide a first look at the constituents of the interstellar medium, the matter between star systems, and how they interact with our heliosphere.

The heliosphere, the "bubble" in which our Sun and planets reside, is formed by the interaction between the solar wind, flowing outward from the Sun, and the interstellar medium, which presses up against it. Electrically charged, or ionized, particles cannot penetrate the boundary between these two bodies. However, neutral particles, which make up about half the material outside the heliosphere, flow freely in through the boundary.

The only other spacecraft to directly detect these inflowing neutral particles was Ulysses, which more than a decade ago measured interstellar neutral helium. Although IBEX is designed primarily to map the interactions between the solar wind and ionized interstellar material, its low-energy energetic neutral atom camera has now also measured interstellar neutral particles not detected by Ulysses. From its location within Earth's orbit, IBEX has sampled interstellar hydrogen, oxygen, and neon in addition to neutral helium.

Neon and oxygen reside throughout the galaxy, but researchers are unsure of their distribution. Using IBEX data, the first direct measurements of these elements in the local interstellar medium, researchers can determine how much oxygen is in the local part of the galaxy, which materials are present in what amounts and more.

"Answering these questions is important for understanding the variability of the galactic soup — the material from which stars, planets and life all form," says Dr. David J. McComas, IBEX principal investigator and an assistant vice president at Southwest Research Institute.

For example, the presence of less oxygen in the local interstellar medium compared to the Sun and galactic average could indicate the Sun formed in a region with less oxygen than exists in its current location. Another possibility is that the oxygen could be preferentially tied up or "hidden" in other galactic materials, such as dust grains and ices.

IBEX data reveal that interstellar neutrals enter the heliosphere at a speed of about 52,000 mph, roughly, 7,000 mph slower than inferred from Ulysses observations, and that they enter from a somewhat different direction. Magnetic forces play a major role in the interactions of the charged particles at the heliosphere's boundaries. As the overall particle speeds drop, however, the magnetic forces play an even more dominant role.

"With this lower speed, the external magnetic forces cause the heliosphere to become more squished and misshapen," says McComas. "Rather than being shaped like a bullet moving through the air, the heliosphere becomes flattened, more like a beach ball being squeezed when someone sits on it."

Based on the older Ulysses data, researchers had theorized that the heliosphere was leaving the local galactic cloud and transitioning into a new region of space. However, while the boundary is very close, IBEX results show the heliosphere remains fully in the local cloud, at least for the moment.

"Sometime in the next hundred to few thousand years, the blink of an eye on the timescales of the galaxy, our heliosphere should leave the local interstellar cloud and encounter a much different galactic environment," McComas says.

Researchers will be able to add measurements about the charged particles outside the heliosphere to the neutral particle measurements provided by IBEX as the two Voyager spacecraft leave our solar system and cross the heliopause, possibly within the next few years.

"That will give us an even more complete picture of what's happening in the regions surrounding our home in the solar system," says McComas.

The six papers detailing the new IBEX results and an editorial written by McComas were published today in a Special Supplements issue of the Astrophysical Journal called "Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX): Direct Sampling of the Interstellar Medium." The authors represent an international team of researchers from Southwest Research Institute, the University of Bern, Switzerland, the Polish Academy of Sciences Space Research Centre, the University of New Hampshire, the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

IBEX is the latest in NASA's series of low-cost, rapidly developed Small Explorer space missions. Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio leads and developed the mission with a team of national and international partners. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the Explorers Program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

Editors: Graphics to accompany this story are available at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ibex/multimedia/013112-briefing-materials.html.

For more information, contact Maria Martinez, (210) 522-3305, Communications Department, Southwest Research Institute, PO Drawer 28510, San Antonio, TX 78228-0510.

• Source: Marshall Space Flight Center
• Posted Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Synopsis - Jan 25, 2012

General Information

Solicitation Number: SLS-AD-00-NNM12ZPS002N
Posted Date: Jan 25, 2012
FedBizOpps Posted Date: Jan 25, 2012
Recovery and Reinvestment Act Action: No
Original Response Date: Mar 01, 2012
Current Response Date: Mar 01, 2012
Classification Code: A -- Research and Development
NAICS Code: 541712
Set-Aside Code:

Contracting Office Address

NASA/George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, Procurement Office, Marshall Space Flight Center, AL 35812

Description

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) intends to issue a Draft NASA Research Announcement (NRA) on or about February 1, 2012, entitled "Space Launch System (SLS) Advanced Development" for comment by industry and academia through March 1, 2012. The NRA will be in support of the SLS Program and will solicit proposals from both industry and academia for innovative development concepts in key technology areas. These concepts should improve SLS affordability, reliability or performance within a constrained fiscal schedule. In addition to soliciting innovative proposals from industry, this NRA is also seeking focused proposals from academia. Including academia provides an added benefit of improving science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education.

NASA is seeking innovative proposals in both broad and focused areas of interest or topics. The topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

* Advanced Development for Block Upgrades, Concept Development, and the Integrated Vehicle
* Advanced Development in Propulsion
* Advanced Development in Manufacturing, Structures, and Materials
* Advanced Development in Avionics and Software

Multiple awards are anticipated considering the merits of the submitted proposals in relationship to the evaluation criteria and available funds.

The total funding anticipated being available and split among industry awards and academic awards made against this NRA is $40,000,000. Of this total amount, the total funding anticipated is $20,000,000 for the base year and $10,000,000 per year for up to two 1 year options. Of this total yearly amount, the total funding anticipated being available and split among academic awards made against this NRA is $1,500,000 per year. Individual academic awards are expected to be $250,000 or less per year.

NASA anticipates multiple awards to both industry and academia, but reserves the right to make no award if no acceptable proposals are received. The period of performance for contracts or grants awarded from this NRA is anticipated from October 2012 through March 2013, with 2 one- year options.

Participation in this program is open to all categories of U.S. organizations, including educational institutions, industry, and nonprofit institutions. Other Government agencies, Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs), and NASA Centers or their employees may not propose to this NRA unless functioning as permissible as a supplier, consultant, or subcontractor through separate agreement mechanisms such as Space Act Agreements. NASA employees are not permitted to be key personnel on these proposals.

For purposes of this NRA, participation by non-U.S. organizations and Foreign Governments is limited to the direct purchase of supplies and/or services, which do not constitute research except as allowed by NASA FAR Supplement 1852.235-72. A foreign national may receive payment through a NASA award for the conduct of research while employed either full or part time by a U.S. organization.

Offerors are hereby informed that technical investigation in the fields covered by this NRA may require access to technical data, the export of which is controlled under the Export Control Act, Title 50, United States Code App. 2401-20, the Arms Export Control Act, Title 22, United States Code 2751 - 2794 or both. No award will be made to any Offeror unless the NASA Contracting Officer is satisfied that performance of the awarded effort will not involve an illegal export of technical data under either statute. All presentations, charts, publications, journals, or other data which may fall under the Export Control Act or limited exclusive rights of data, shall be submitted to the MSFC Intellectual Property Officer or Contracting Officer Representative (COR) for subsequent approval.

This NRA will not include goals for small business; however, subcontracting plans will be required for Offerors selected for award that submit a proposal totaling $650,000 or greater.

Industry and academia are encouraged to submit questions on the draft NRA as they are formulated and not to hold submittal of questions until March 1, 2012. Questions received during this time period will not be answered individually but will be addressed within the issuance of the final NRA release.

Release of the final NRA is tentatively planned for the mid to late March 2012.

In addition, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) will be holding an Industry day at the MSFC for the SLS Advanced Development activity. The industry day will be held at MSFC's Morris Auditorium, February 14, 2012, 9:30 a.m. until 11:00 a.m. with registration from 7:30 a.m. through 9:15 a.m.

Participation for the Industry Day is limited to four individuals, respectively, per interested party. For access to MSFC, interested parties should provide the following information for each participant via email to Ms. Monica Heidelberg at monica.d.heidelberg@nasa.gov NLT Tuesday, February 7, 2012. Please note there is a one month clearance time required for security screening of foreign nationals for access to the MSFC.

MSFC Access Information

1) Full name as shown on Drivers License 2) State 3) Primary Citizenship 4) Organization Visiting MSFC

Point of Contact

Name: Monica D Heidelberg
Title: Contracting Officer
Phone: 256-544-2168
Fax: 256-544-4400
Email: monica.d.heidelberg@nasa.gov

Name: Jennifer B. McCaghren
Title: Contracting Officer
Phone: 256-544-5189
Fax: 256-544-4400
Email: jennifer.b.mccaghren@nasa.gov

The findings of this and an earlier study question the idea that pluripotency (the ability to become virtually any other cell in the body, a key characteristic of stem cells) is a necessary stage in the conversion of one cell type to another.

In the earlier study, the same team transformed mouse and human skin cells directly into functional neurons. But this study is a substantial advance on the earlier one for two reasons.

First, neural precursor cells can not only differentiate into neurons, they can also become either of the two other main types of cell in the nervous system: astrocytes and oligodendrocytes.

Astrocytes are star-shaped glia cells that hold neurons in place, get nutrients to them, and digest parts of dead neurons. Oligodendrocytes make the myelin that insulates nerve fibers that connect neurons to one another and allows them to transmit signals.

And secondly, neural precursor cells are a more useful and versatile end-product for the lab, where they can be cultivated in large numbers for transplantation or drug screening.

Together, the two studies raise the possibility that embryonic stem cell research and induced pluripotency could be replaced by a more direct way of making specific cell types for treatments and research.

The problem with embryonic stem cells, although they are considered the "gold standard" in generating new types of cell, is the ethical question of where they come from, and also because they don't come from the patient's own body, the patient has to take drugs to stop their immune system rejecting the new tissue.

Induced pluripotency, where the patient's own cells are reprogrammed into stem cells, appears to overcome the ethical and immune rejection problems of embryonic stem cells, except they introduce the risk of switching on genes that cause cancer. Although this risk can be reduced by screening out unwanted pluripotent cells, it introduces a cost.

The senior author of the new study is Dr Marius Wernig, assistant professor of pathology and a member of Stanford's Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. He told the press he and his colleagues were "thrilled" about the medical potential of their findings.

"We've shown the cells can integrate into a mouse brain and produce a missing protein important for the conduction of electrical signal by the neurons. This is important because the mouse model we used mimics that of a human genetic brain disease," said Wernig.

However, he cautioned that more work is needed before they can show a similar conversion from human skin cells is not only possible and effective, but also safe.

For the study, Wernig and colleages infected embryonic mouse skin cells (a cell line commonly used in labs) with a virus carrying three transcription factors (Brn2, Sox2 and FoxG1) known to be present at a high level in neural precursor cells. In just over three weeks, one in ten of the skin cells had started to look and act like neural precursor cells.

In the earlier study, they had used a different set of three transcription factors (Brn2, Ascl1 and Myt1l).

They confirmed the presence of neural precursor cells in two ways: in the lab and in animals (in vitro and in vivo).

In the lab, they confirmed the transformed cells were expressing the appropriate genes and had the same shape and function as naturally derived neural precursor cells.

And to confirm them in animals, they injected the new cells into the brains of newborn mice bred to lack to ability to make the myelin sheath that surrounds nerve fibers. After ten weeks, the new cells had differentiated into oligodendroytes and had begun to coat the mice's nerve fibers with myelin.

The team is now hoping to repeat their success with skin cells from adult mice and humans.

Funds from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the New York Stem Cell Foundation, the Ellison Medical Foundation, the Stinehart-Reed Foundation and the National Institutes of Health helped pay for the study.

Written by Catharine Paddock PhD
Copyright: Medical News Today
Not to be reproduced without permission of Medical News Today

Google technicians test hard drives at their data center in Moncks Corner, South Carolina

Consider the tech it takes to back the search box on Google's home page: behind the algorithms, the cached search terms, and the other features that spring to life as you type in a query sits a data store that essentially contains a full-text snapshot of most of the Web. While you and thousands of other people are simultaneously submitting searches, that snapshot is constantly being updated with a firehose of changes. At the same time, the data is being processed by thousands of individual server processes, each doing everything from figuring out which contextual ads you will be served to determining in what order to cough up search results.

The storage system backing Google's search engine has to be able to serve millions of data reads and writes daily from thousands of individual processes running on thousands of servers, can almost never be down for a backup or maintenance, and has to perpetually grow to accommodate the ever-expanding number of pages added by Google's Web-crawling robots. In total, Google processes over 20 petabytes of data per day.

That's not something that Google could pull off with an off-the-shelf storage architecture. And the same goes for other Web and cloud computing giants running hyper-scale data centers, such as Amazon and Facebook. While most data centers have addressed scaling up storage by adding more disk capacity on a storage area network, more storage servers, and often more database servers, these approaches fail to scale because of performance constraints in a cloud environment. In the cloud, there can be potentially thousands of active users of data at any moment, and the data being read and written at any given moment reaches into the thousands of terabytes.

The problem isn't simply an issue of disk read and write speeds. With data flows at these volumes, the main problem is storage network throughput; even with the best of switches and storage servers, traditional SAN architectures can become a performance bottleneck for data processing.

Then there's the cost of scaling up storage conventionally. Given the rate that hyper-scale web companies add capacity (Amazon, for example, adds as much capacity to its data centers each day as the whole company ran on in 2001, according to Amazon Vice President James Hamilton), the cost required to properly roll out needed storage in the same way most data centers do would be huge in terms of required management, hardware, and software costs. That cost goes up even higher when relational databases are added to the mix, depending on how an organization approaches segmenting and replicating them.

The need for this kind of perpetually scalable, durable storage has driven the giants of the Web—Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and others—to adopt a different sort of storage solution: distributed file systems based on object-based storage. These systems were at least in part inspired by other distributed and clustered filesystems such as Red Hat's Global File System and IBM's General Parallel Filesystem.

The architecture of the cloud giants' distributed file systems separates the metadata (the data about the content) from the stored data itself. That allows for high volumes of parallel reading and writing of data across multiple replicas, and the tossing of concepts like "file locking" out the window.

The impact of these distributed file systems extends far beyond the walls of the hyper-scale data centers they were built for— they have a direct impact on how those who use public cloud services such as Amazon's EC2, Google's AppEngine, and Microsoft's Azure develop and deploy applications. And companies, universities, and government agencies looking for a way to rapidly store and provide access to huge volumes of data are increasingly turning to a whole new class of data storage systems inspired by the systems built by cloud giants. So it's worth understanding the history of their development, and the engineering compromises that were made in the process.

Google File System

Google was among the first of the major Web players to face the storage scalability problem head-on. And the answer arrived at by Google's engineers in 2003 was to build a distributed file system custom-fit to Google's data center strategy—Google File System (GFS).

GFS is the basis for nearly all of the company's cloud services. It handles data storage, including the company's BigTable database and the data store for Google's AppEngine platform-as-a-service, and it provides the data feed for Google's search engine and other applications. The design decisions Google made in creating GFS have driven much of the software engineering behind its cloud architecture, and vice-versa. Google tends to store data for applications in enormous files, and it uses files as "producer-consumer queues," where hundreds of machines collecting data may all be writing to the same file. That file might be processed by another application that merges or analyzes the data—perhaps even while the data is still being written.

Google keeps most technical details of GFS to itself, for obvious reasons. But as described by Google research fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, principal engineer Howard Gobioff, and senior staff engineer Shun-Tak Leung in a paper first published in 2003, GFS was designed with some very specific priorities in mind: Google wanted to turn large numbers of cheap servers and hard drives into a reliable data store for hundreds of terabytes of data that could manage itself around failures and errors. And it needed to be designed for Google's way of gathering and reading data, allowing multiple applications to append data to the system simultaneously in large volumes and to access it at high speeds.

Much in the way that a RAID 5 storage array "stripes" data across multiple disks to gain protection from failures, GFS distributes files in fixed-size chunks which are replicated across a cluster of servers. Because they're cheap computers using cheap hard drives, some of those servers are bound to fail at one point or another—so GFS is designed to be tolerant of that without losing (too much) data.

But the similarities between RAID and GFS end there, because those servers can be distributed across the network—either within a single physical data center or spread over different data centers, depending on the purpose of the data. GFS is designed primarily for bulk processing of lots of data. Reading data at high speed is what's important, not the speed of access to a particular section of a file, or the speed at which data is written to the file system. GFS provides that high output at the expense of more fine-grained reads and writes to files and more rapid writing of data to disk. As Ghemawat and company put it in their paper, "small writes at arbitrary positions in a file are supported, but do not have to be efficient."

This distributed nature, along with the sheer volume of data GFS handles—millions of files, most of them larger than 100 megabytes and generally ranging into gigabytes—requires some trade-offs that make GFS very much unlike the sort of file system you'd normally mount on a single server. Because hundreds of individual processes might be writing to or reading from a file simultaneously, GFS needs to supports "atomicity" of data—rolling back writes that fail without impacting other applications. And it needs to maintain data integrity with a very low synchronization overhead to avoid dragging down performance.

GFS consists of three layers: a GFS client, which handles requests for data from applications; a master, which uses an in-memory index to track the names of data files and the location of their chunks; and the "chunk servers" themselves. Originally, for the sake of simplicity, GFS used a single master for each cluster, so the system was designed to get the master out of the way of data access as much as possible. Google has since developed a distributed master system that can handle hundreds of masters, each of which can handle about 100 million files.

When the GFS client gets a request for a specific data file, it requests the location of the data from the master server. The master server provides the location of one of the replicas, and the client then communicates directly with that chunk server for reads and writes during the rest of that particular session. The master doesn't get involved again unless there's a failure.

To ensure that the data firehose is highly available, GFS trades off some other things—like consistency across replicas. GFS does enforce data's atomicity—it will return an error if a write fails, then rolls the write back in metadata and promotes a replica of the old data, for example. But the master's lack of involvement in data writes means that as data gets written to the system, it doesn't immediately get replicated across the whole GFS cluster. The system follows what Google calls a "relaxed consistency model" out of the necessities of dealing with simultaneous access to data and the limits of the network.

This means that GFS is entirely okay with serving up stale data from an old replica if that's what's the most available at the moment—so long as the data eventually gets updated. The master tracks changes, or "mutations," of data within chunks using version numbers to indicate when the changes happened. As some of the replicas get left behind (or grow "stale"), the GFS master makes sure those chunks aren't served up to clients until they're first brought up-to-date.

But that doesn't necessarily happen with sessions already connected to those chunks. The metadata about changes doesn't become visible until the master has processed changes and reflected them in its metadata. That metadata also needs to be replicated in multiple locations in case the master fails—because otherwise the whole file system is lost. And if there's a failure at the master in the middle of a write, the changes are effectively lost as well. This isn't a big problem because of the way that Google deals with data: the vast majority of data used by its applications rarely changes, and when it does data is usually appended rather than modified in place.

While GFS was designed for the apps Google ran in 2003, it wasn't long before Google started running into scalability issues. Even before the company bought YouTube, GFS was starting to hit the wall—largely because the new applications Google was adding didn't work well with the ideal 64-megabyte file size. To get around that, Google turned to Bigtable, a table-based data store that vaguely resembles a database and sits atop GFS. Like GFS below it, Bigtable is mostly write-once, so changes are stored as appends to the table—which Google uses in applications like Google Docs to handle versioning, for example.

The foregoing is mostly academic if you don't work at Google (though it may help users of AppEngine, Google Cloud Storage and other Google services to understand what's going on under the hood a bit better). While Google Cloud Storage provides a public way to store and access objects stored in GFS through a Web interface, the exact interfaces and tools used to drive GFS within Google haven't been made public. But the paper describing GFS led to the development of a more widely used distributed file system that behaves a lot like it: the Hadoop Distributed File System.