THEMIS in orbit, as pictured by NASA artist. (NASA)

THEMIS is a collaborative effort of scientists from the US, Canada and Europe that will study processes occurring in near-Earth space and elsewhere in the universe.

Mann, a THEMIS co-Investigator and Canada Research Chair in Space Physics says "with an unprecedented flotilla of five research satellites flying in formation we will discover for the first time how energy release is triggered in extreme space weather events."

Given the vulnerability of satellites to fluxes of energetic particles, the results will help scientists better understand how to protect them during near-Earth space storms. A beautiful and fascinating side benefit of this project will be discovering why the most spectacular auroral displays look the way they do.

The THEMIS mission (NASA)

Auroras are powered by solar wind - a stream of charged particles expelled by the sun. This wind blows past the earth at about 400-700 km per second and generates storms in the earth's magnetic environment. In the polar regions, these explode into spectacular auroral displays.

The eerie glow of the northern lights seems exquisite and quite harmless.

"By studying these explosions in the natural laboratory of near-Earth space, we can also learn how energy is explosively released in magnetised astrophysical objects in the universe. This also has important implications for magnetic confinement in nuclear fusion power reactors" adds Mann.

The THEMIS satellites will fly in carefully coordinated orbits, and every four days, will line up over Canada along the Earth's magnetic tail to track disturbances in near-Earth space in the magnetosphere.

Satellite data from the THEMIS mission will be compared to observations from ground stations across the Canadian Arctic.

Since most of the readily accessible land under the northern-hemisphere auroral zone is in Canada, 16 of the 20 ground-based observatories will be set up in Canada, with the other four in Alaska. The observatories will host magnetometers which will monitor the magnetic signatures of explosions in near-Earth space known as substorms, as well as automated all-sky cameras.

Magnetometer data at some of the THEMIS ground-based observatory sites will be provided by the CARISMA (Canadian Array for Real-time Investigations of Magnetic Activity) magnetometer array. Dr. Mann is the Principal Investigator of CARISMA, operated by the University of Alberta and funded by the Canadian Space Agency. A $1.3M expansion of the CARISMA array was recently funded by CFI.

Data collected from the observatories and the THEMIS satellites will be analyzed by teams of scientists at the University of Alberta working with Dr's Mann and Samson. Data from the THEMIS mission will be made available over the internet using the computing facilities at the University of Alberta in a project led by Dr. Robert Rankin in the Physics Department.

In Canada, THEMIS partners include the University of Alberta, University of Calgary and the Canadian Space Agency. The THEMIS Principal Investigator institute is the University of California, Berkeley.

University of Alberta - http://www.ualberta.ca

THEMIS Investigates Auroras, Magnetospheric Substorms

NASA News Release

January 9, 2007 - On a clear night over the far northern areas of the world, you may witness a hauntingly beautiful light display in the sky that can disrupt your satellite TV and leave you in the dark.

These are photos of the aurora before and during a substorm. The left image is the typical appearance of the aurora before a substorm. During a substorm, the single auroral ribbon may split into several ribbons (middle image) or even break into clusters that race north and south (right image). (NASA/ Jan Curtis)

The eerie glow of the northern lights seems exquisite and quite harmless. Most times, it is harmless. The display, resembling a slow-moving ribbon silently undulating in the sky, is called the aurora. It is also visible in far southern regions around the South Pole.

Occasionally, however, the aurora becomes much more dynamic. The single auroral ribbon may split into several ribbons or even break into clusters that race north and south. This dynamic light show in the polar skies is associated with what scientists call a magnetospheric substorm. Substorms are very closely related to full-blown space storms that can disable spacecraft, radio communication, GPS navigation, and power systems while supplying killer electrons to the radiation belts surrounding Earth. The purpose of NASA’s Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) mission is to understand the physical instability (trigger mechanism) for magnetospheric substorms.

A clash of forces we can’t see with the human eye causes the beauty and destruction of space storms, though the aurora provides a dramatic symptom. Earth's molten iron core generates an invisible magnetic field that surrounds our planet. This magnetic field and the electrically charged matter under its control compose the Earth’s magnetosphere.

The sun constantly blows an invisible stream of electrically charged gas, called the solar wind, into space. The solar wind flows at very high speed past the Earth and its magnetosphere. In order to visualize what happens when the solar wind buffets the Earth’s magnetosphere, imagine a windsock in a gale force wind. The Earth's magnetosphere captures and stores small fractions of the colliding solar wind energy and particles on magnetic field lines that stretch like rubber bands.

During substorms, the solar wind overloads the magnetosphere with too much energy and the stretched magnetic field lines snap back like an enormous slingshot, energizing and flinging electrically charged particles towards Earth. Electrons, the particles that carry electric currents in everything from TVs to cell phones, stream down invisible lines of magnetic force into the upper atmosphere over the polar regions. This stream of electrons hits atoms and molecules in the upper atmosphere, energizing them and causing them to glow with the light we know as the aurora.

The same electrons sometimes charge spacecraft surfaces, resulting in unexpected and unwanted electrical discharges. And those electrons that enter the radiation belts can ultimately find their energies boosted to levels millions of times more energetic than the photons that comprise the light we can see. Electrons with these energies can damage sensitive electronics on spacecraft and rip through molecules in living cells, potentially causing cancer in unshielded astronauts. Rapidly varying magnetic fields associated with magnetospheric substorms also induce electric currents in power lines that can cause blackouts by overloading equipment or causing short circuits.

Although the consequences of substorms are well-known, it is not clear exactly what finally snaps in the overloaded magnetosphere to trigger a substorm.

THEMIS All-sky Imager (NASA)

Understanding what happens during substorms is important. "The worst space storms, the ones that knock-out spacecraft and endanger astronauts, could be just a series of substorms, one after the other," said David Sibeck of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., project scientist for the THEMIS mission. "Substorms could be the building block of severe space storms."

Just like meteorologists who study tornadoes to understand the most severe thunderstorms, space physicists study substorms for insight into the most severe space storms. “Substorm processes are fundamental to our understanding of space weather and how it affects satellites and humans in the magnetosphere,” said Vassilis Angelopoulos, THEMIS principal investigator at the University of California's Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, in Berkeley, Calif. Scientists propose two possible triggers for substorms, but until now, there has been no way to distinguish between the two models.

FAST Electrostatic analyzer (NASA)

Discerning between the two proposed substorm trigger mechanisms is difficult because the magnetosphere is so large. Over Earth's night (solar wind down-stream) side, the solar wind stretches the magnetosphere far past the moon's orbit, to form the geomagnetic tail. Substorms start from a small region in space inside the geomagnetic tail, but within minutes cover a vast region of the magnetosphere. However, the two proposed trigger mechanisms predict substorm onset in distinctly different locations within the geomagnetic tail, so the key to solving this mystery lies in identifying the substorm point of origin.

Previous single-spacecraft studies of the Earth’s magnetosphere have been unable to pinpoint where and when substorms begin, leading to extensive scientific debate on the topic. However, NASA's THEMIS mission will solve this mystery with coordinated measurements from a fleet of five identical satellites, strategically placed in key positions in the magnetosphere, in order to isolate the point of substorm origin. The mission, named for Themis, the blindfolded Greek Goddess of Order and Justice, will resolve this debate like a fair, impartial judge.

THEMIS is scheduled for launch in February. When the five probes align over the North American continent, scientists will collect coordinated measurements down-stream of Earth, along the sun-Earth line, allowing the first comprehensive look at the onset of substorms and how they trigger auroral eruptions. Over the mission's two-year lifetime, the probes should be able to observe some 30 substorms.

Down-stream alignments have been carefully planned to occur over North America once every four days. For about 15 hours surrounding the alignments, 20 ground stations in Canada and Alaska with automated all-sky cameras will document the aurora from Earth. The combined spacecraft and ground observations will give scientists the first comprehensive look at the phenomena from Earth's upper atmosphere to far into space, enabling researchers to pinpoint where and when substorm initiation begins.

THEMIS Mission - http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/themis/main/index.html

(Clay Bennett)

January 10, 2007 - A University of Calgary professor in the Haskayne School of Business has recently published his magnum opus on the subject of procrastination – and it's only taken him 10 years.

Joking aside, Dr. Piers Steel is probably the world's foremost expert on the subject of putting off until tomorrow what should be done today. His comprehensive analysis of procrastination research, published in the recent edition of the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin, presents some surprising conclusions on the subject, such as:

Most people's New Year's resolutions are doomed to failure

Most self-help books have it completely wrong when they say perfectionism is at the root of procrastination, and

Procrastination can be explained by a single mathematical equation

"Essentially, procrastinators have less confidence in themselves, less expectancy that they can actually complete a task," Steel says. "Perfectionism is not the culprit. In fact, perfectionists actually procrastinate less, but they worry about it more."

Other predictors of procrastination include: task aversiveness, impulsiveness, distractibility, and how much a person is motivated to achieve. Not all delays can be considered procrastination; the key is that a person must believe it would be better to start working on given tasks immediately, but still not start.

It's estimated that about 15-20 per cent of the general population are procrastinators. And the costs of procrastinating can add up well beyond poor work performance, especially for those who delay filing their taxes or planning their retirement.

Steel says motivational failures such as difficulty in sticking to diets and exercise regimes – frequently the focus of New Year's resolutions – are related to procrastination because impulsiveness is often at the root of the failure.

"Temptations that are close at hand are difficult to resist. Addicts often relapse after returning from treatment facilities because drugs and alcohol become easily available and daily habits reassert themselves. Or we load up on bread in the restaurant before the meal is served. Or we check our email 10 times an hour instead of completing a project."

The good news is that willpower has an unusual capacity. "The old saying is true: 'Whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're probably right'," Steel says. "And as you get better at self control, your expectancy about whether you can resist goes up and thus improves your ability to resist."

Steel has also come up with the E=MC2 of procrastination, a formula he's dubbed Temporal Motivational Theory, which takes into account factors such as the expectancy a person has of succeeding with a given task (E), the value of completing the task (V), the desirability of the task (Utility), its immediacy or availability (Ã) and the person's sensitivity to delay (D).

It looks like this and uses the Greek letter Ã: Utility = E x V/ÃD

It's still unclear why some people may be more prone to developing procrastination behaviour, but some evidence suggests it may be genetic. Steel concludes: "Continued research into procrastination should not be delayed, especially because its prevalence seems to be growing."

The title of the paper is "The Nature of Procrastination: A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review of Quintessential Self-Regulatory Failure." The American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin is arguably the top academic journal for the social sciences. Steel's research on the subject is referred to as a meta-analysis, in which he distills and synthesizes the evidence on procrastination from 691 other research sources.

University of Calgary - http://www.ucalgary.ca

The beaver is an ally in conserving valuable wetland habitat for declining amphibian populations.

Pitfall traps on beaver ponds captured 5.7 times more newly metamorphosed wood frogs, 29 times more western toads and 24 times more boreal chorus frogs than on nearby free-flowing streams.

The study identifies beaver as a valuable 'surrogate species', said University of Alberta researchers Dr. Cam Stevens (lead author) and Dr. Cindy Paszkowski. The work is published in the January 2007 issue of Biological Conservation. Surrogate species can be indicators of changes to the environment caused directly or indirectly by human activities, population changes in other species, or they can act as 'umbrellas' protecting a large number of naturally co-occurring species.

"The concept of surrogate species in conservation planning offers simple, ecologically-based solutions to help conserve and manage ecosystems," said Paszkowski, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

The beaver pond seems to provide suitable breeding habitats because of its warm, well-oxygenated water, which enhances development and growth rates of frog and toad larvae. As well, the ponds may be less hospitable to predatory fish because the dams are often located on small streams where winterkill conditions are common, the study suggests.

Leave it to beaver!

The findings could benefit amphibian conservation efforts for forestry and energy industries, by making room for beaver dams in their landscape-use plans, the researchers said.

"The challenge will be to promote modest levels of beaver activity even where conflicts with human interests might occur, such as areas designated for tree harvesting and landscapes with high road densities," Stevens noted.

Beaver may prove useful as a surrogate species in helping conserve frogs and toads in other remote parts of Canada's boreal forest and western North America.

The study was supported in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

University of Alberta - http://www.ualberta.ca

Christie Williams, a Purdue University adjunct assistant professor and USDA- Agricultural Research Service scientist, is studying ways to increase wheat plant resistance to the insect. (Purdue/ Tom Campbell)

The gene's role in creating resistance to Hessian flies was a surprise.

Wheat plants that produce few or no lectins that bind to chitin are susceptible to Hessian fly larvae attack, she said. In addition, some virulent larvae can reprogram plant development so that cells in leaves and the base of the plant where the insects feed pump out nutrients favored by the insect. If this happens then even the weak, avirulent larvae on the same leaf have a chance to survive.

The researchers discovered that Hessian fly larvae reprogramming of resistant plant cells only occurs at sites where the insects attack. The study also revealed that increased numbers of larvae on a plant caused a parallel increase in lectin. This shows that wheat plant responses to these insects are localized and take less energy than a more global resistance response.

"Figuring out some of the ways that a plant is able to respond to insects with resistance will be useful in crop breeding programs," Williams said. "We're finding compounds like this chitin-binding lectin that don't cost the plant much to produce, unlike producing poisons and stronger walls. Those inducible defenses use a lot of a plant's energy that could be used toward growth and reproduction."

The scientists currently are looking for regulatory regions in Hessian fly-susceptible wheat genes that might act as vehicles to carry lectin or a toxin into plants to halt the virulent insects, Williams said. The regulatory regions, or promoters, would be from genes that the fly larvae ordinarily manipulate so plants will produce useful nutrients for the insect. Instead, the promoter would be hooked up to a lectin or toxin gene and inserted into the cells. When larvae manipulate the promoter, they would receive gut-altering lectin instead of nutrients.

Electron micrograph photo of Hessian fly larvae. (Subhashree Subramanyam, Mary Alice Web and Christie Williams)

To advance their investigation into developing more resistant plants, the researchers are beginning work on a single microchip that would be an array of genes from both the Hessian fly and wheat. This will allow the scientists to study insect-plant interactions. Knowing the timing and location of those interactions would enable the scientists to use the promoter tactic only in the vegetative parts of the wheat plant rather than in the head or grain portions. This will protect the grain quality and the consumer.

"Once we understand which genes are active and the timing of the interactions, we can really understand what the insect says to the plant and how the plant responds," Williams said.

The Hessian fly, which German mercenaries apparently introduced into North America during the Revolutionary War, causes catastrophic losses if not controlled by resistant plants. During the 1980s the state of Georgia suffered $28 million in lost wheat in one year after the fly overcame the plants' resistance gene used in the area at the time.

The Hessian fly is particularly insidious because it actually can control the wheat plant's development.

The adult fly lays eggs on the plant leaves. After the eggs hatch, the resulting tiny, red larvae crawl down to the base of the wheat where they feed on the plant. If the plant isn't resistant to the insect, the larvae inject chemicals from their saliva into the plant that completely alter the wheat's physiology and growth.

The other researchers on this study were USDA postdoctoral students Kurt Saltzmann and David Puthoff, Purdue graduate students Marcelo Giovanini and Martin Gonzalo, and Purdue professor of agronomy Herbert Ohm.

The USDA Agricultural Research Service Crop Production and Pest Control Research Unit and the Ministry of Education of Brazil CAPES Programme provided support for the study.

The area surrounding the light echo at the Galactic Center, including Sagittarius A* (or Sgr A*, for short), the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Center. The light echo is produced when X-rays from the Milky Way's giant black hole bounce off surrounding gas clouds. The light echo is found approximately 50 light years away from Sgr A*. (NASA/ CXC/ Caltech/ M.Muno)

The faint, star-like object in the center represents the typical, quiet behavior, when the black hole does not have much material to consume. When the black hole's feeding rate increases dramatically, the material around Sgr A* brightens. Although the black hole outburst stops, the light from the outburst continues to travel outwards and then reflects, or echoes, off three clouds of gas in its path. (NASA/ CXC /M.Weiss)

During the outburst, the area close to the black hole would have been about 100,000 times brighter than it is currently. If such an outburst had occurred more recently, it likely would have been detected by an X-ray instrument, or would have produced similar features in other nearby clouds.

"Our data show it has been 50 years or so since the black hole had its last decent meal," said Muno. "This is nothing like the feasting that black holes in other galaxies sometimes enjoy, but it gives unique knowledge about the feeding habits of our closest supermassive black hole."

The details of how Sagittarius A* feeds remain unclear. For example, one possibility is that the black hole grows by pulling in matter from the winds of nearby young stars. Also, if there is a disk of material swirling around Sagittarius A*, it might be unstable in such a way that material migrates toward the black hole's edge in clumps, emitting X-rays before disappearing from the universe forever. The theoretical work is still being developed.

Studying this light echo is also important because it illuminates and probes the poorly understood molecular clouds near the center of the galaxy. In particular, it gives information about the dense cores of these clouds where new stars may be forming.

Variability in the X-ray emission between three Chandra observations in 2002, 2004 and 2005 argues against an alternate source for the light echo, which is that it came from a neutron star or black hole pulling matter away from a binary companion. This explanation is not favored because the data show the outburst would have been unusually long and bright for such a binary.

These results were presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, Wash., and will appear in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for the agency's Science Mission Directorate. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center, Cambridge, Mass.

Chandra X-ray Center - http://chandra.harvard.edu

US Senator John Kerry making a snap decision.

With only a tiny fraction of a second for scrutinizing the target, subjects performed with 95 per cent accuracy. With over a second to scrutinize the image, subjects were only 70 per cent accurate. With more than four seconds, accuracy was recovered.

In this test, the instinctive decisions were more likely to be correct because the subconscious brain recognises a rotated version of the same object as different from the original, whereas the conscious brain sees the two objects as identical. For the conscious brain, an apple is still an apple whether rotated or not. So while the lower-level cognitive process spots the rotated image as the odd one out, the higher-level function overrides that decision and dismisses the rotated object because it is the same as all the other symbols. When subjects were given the time to engage their higher-level functions, their decisions were therefore more likely to be wrong.

Dr Zhaoping said: "If our higher-level and lower-level cognitive processes are leading us to the same conclusions, there is no issue. Often though, our instincts and higher-level functions are in conflict and in this case our instincts are often silenced by our reasoning conscious mind. Participants would have improved their performance if they had been able to switch off their higher-level cognition by, for example, acting quickly."

Tracking participants' eye movements, the team controlled the time allotted to each individual's search for their target. The visual display screen was switched off at various time intervals either before or after the subjects' eyes landed on the target. When the on-screen image was hidden immediately after the subjects' eyes had landed on the target, the subjects often believed they were just guessing where the odd one out was. They were unaware that their gazes had shifted to the target just before the image was hidden and their answers weren't guesswork at all.

Dr Zhaoping said: "Our eye movements are often involuntary. What seems like a random darting of the eye is often an essential subconscious scanning technique that allows us to pick out unique and distinctive features in a crowd – such as color or orientation. Soon after our eyes have fixed on a target, the conscious or top-down part of cognition engages and examines whether the candidate really is the target or not. If the target is not distinctive enough in the 'eyes' of the conscious, failure of identification can occur."

University College London - http://www.ucl.ac.uk

Davis-Besse reactor vessel head taken during the April 2000 refueling and maintenance outage just prior to allowing the reactor restart for its operational run to the February 16, 2002 shutdown. Photo clearly indicates extensive corrosion occurring on vessel head.

"By working harder on the waste form before you started trying to engineer the repository or choose the site, you could make billions of dollars worth of savings and improve the overall safety," Farnan said.

"At the moment, we have very few methods of understanding how materials behave over the extremely long timescales we are talking about. Our new research is a step towards that.

"We would suggest that substantive efforts should be made to produce a waste form which is tougher and has a durability we are confident of, in a quantitative sense, before it is stored underground, and before anyone tried to engineer around it. This would have substantial benefits, particularly from a financial point of view."

PNNL senior scientist and nuclear magnetic resonance expert Herman Cho, who co-wrote the report, said: "When the samples were made in the 1980s, NMR was not in the thinking. NMR has enabled us to quantify and look at changes in the crystal structure as the radiation damage progresses.

"This method adds a valuable new perspective to research on radioactive waste forms. It has also raised the question: 'How adequate is our understanding of the long-term behavior of these materials?' Studies of other waste forms, such as glass, could benefit from this technique."

DOE/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory - http://www.pnl.gov