Technology helps blind kids 'see' stars

ARTURO PELAYO: "It proves that, regardless of where you are and who you are, you can be enabled by technology to make your life experience better."

An innovative Kiwi is about to teach astronomy to blind students with the help of 3D printer technology. It will be a first for New Zealand's education system with a pilot programme set to launch next year.

Designer and entrepreneur Arturo Pelayo is the brains behind Tactile Astronomy, a programme that aims to use technology to help teach blind students.

He says there is potential to improve the quality of what can be achieved from 3D printing.

At the moment things such as toys and hearing aids are printed using the technology.

But, as costs decrease and printers become more accessible, there are greater options for serving those at a disadvantage when it comes to learning.

The pilot programme will be carried out at the Blind and Low Vision Education Network New Zealand (BLENNZ) Homai Campus in south Auckland.

The project has backing from the Blind Foundation and Auckland-based 3D printing business Vivenda.

Pelayo says Tactile Astronomy will give teachers and students a new way of learning. "It's about equality as much as possibility . . . It proves that, regardless of where you are and who you are, you can be enabled by technology to make your life experience better."

The technology is already being used in places like museums to print replicas of fragile and precious exhibits and there is further opportunity for 3D printing to be used in the education system, he says.

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Technology helps blind kids 'see' stars

AirAsia Airbus Missing Over Java Sea

An Indonesia AirAsia Airbus A320-200, with 162 onboard, lost contact with air traffic control over the Java Sea early Sunday morning local time, Indonesian officials report. Flight QZ8501, en route from Surabaya, Indonesia to Singapore, had requested a flight deviation to avoid foul weather, say officials.

The plane was flying at a normal cruising altitude of 32,000 ft and roughly between the Indonesian port of Tanjung Pandan and the town of Pontianak, in West Kalimantan on Borneo when it went missing, Reuters reports. According to a statement released by AirAsia, the aircraft was on its submitted flight plan and about an hour from its scheduled landing at 8.30 AM when contact was lost at 7:24 AM local time, while still under Indonesian Air Traffic Control.

AirAsia also noted in a statement that search and rescue operations are being conducted under the guidance of the Indonesian Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and that the airline is fully cooperating with and assisting the investigation in every possible way. The single-aisle Airbus aircraft had undergone its last scheduled maintenance in mid-November of this year and the Associated Press reports that the airline, a dominant regional low-cost carrier, had heretofore never lost a plane.

An AirAsia Airbus A320. Credit: Wikipedia

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AirAsia Airbus Missing Over Java Sea

Pink Floyd LIVE ~ Fillmore EAST 1970 ~ Astronomy Domine ~ New York ! – Video


Pink Floyd LIVE ~ Fillmore EAST 1970 ~ Astronomy Domine ~ New York !
Amazing rare live version of this Pink Floyd Piper At The Gates Of Dawn classic performed at the Fillmore EAST in New York back in 1970. If it sounds like the band is having trouble hearing...

By: flipper barrett

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Pink Floyd LIVE ~ Fillmore EAST 1970 ~ Astronomy Domine ~ New York ! - Video

Teach Me About Astronomy – Jalen Sayles, Brenden Willis feat. Joseph Amos, De’Angelo Lewis HD – Video


Teach Me About Astronomy - Jalen Sayles, Brenden Willis feat. Joseph Amos, De #39;Angelo Lewis HD
Also featuring Eric Parks, Xavier Leasau, and Javon Nutter This is the full music video for our Chemistry project about Astronomy.

By: Brenden Willis

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Teach Me About Astronomy - Jalen Sayles, Brenden Willis feat. Joseph Amos, De'Angelo Lewis HD - Video

Astronomy CAN explain the biblical Star of Bethlehem

According to the New Testament,King Herod, asked the wise men when the star had appeared, because he was unaware of any such star Astronomers have also been baffled by how King Herod didn't know of such a bright star, and how a star 'in the east' could guide men south But 'in the east' is a literal translation of the Greek phrase en te anatole Thisdescribeswhen a planet that would rise above the eastern horizon just beforethe sun would appear, and then disappear in the morning sky If this was the case, however, the wise men would have been guided by Jupiter wouldn't have arrived until Jesus was eight months old

By Professor David Weintraub For The Conversation

Published: 09:15 EST, 24 December 2014 | Updated: 10:03 EST, 24 December 2014

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Bright stars top Christmas trees in Christian homes around much of the world.

The faithful sing about the Star of Wonder that guided the wise men to a manger in the little town of Bethlehem, where Jesus was born.

They're commemorating the Star of Bethlehem described by the Evangelist Matthew in the New Testament.But is the star's biblical description a pious fiction or does it contain some astronomical truth?

Bright stars top Christmas trees in Christian homes around much of the world (right).But is the star's biblical description a pious fiction or does it contain some astronomical truth? According to one expert, it is

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Astronomy CAN explain the biblical Star of Bethlehem

Can astronomy explain the biblical Star of Bethlehem?

6 hours ago by David A Weintraub, The Conversation What was the celestial body the three wise men followed 2,000 years ago? Credit: epSos.de, CC BY

Bright stars top Christmas trees in Christian homes around much of the world. The faithful sing about the Star of Wonder that guided the wise men to a manger in the little town of Bethlehem, where Jesus was born. They're commemorating the Star of Bethlehem described by the Evangelist Matthew in the New Testament. Is the star's biblical description a pious fiction or does it contain some astronomical truth?

Puzzles for astronomy

To understand the Star of Bethlehem, we need to think like the three wise men. Motivated by this "star in the east," they first traveled to Jerusalem and told King Herod the prophecy that a new ruler of the people of Israel would be born. We also need to think like King Herod, who asked the wise men when the star had appeared, because he and his court, apparently, were unaware of any such star in the sky.

These events present us with our first astronomy puzzle of the first Christmas: How could King Herod's own advisors have been unaware of a star so bright and obvious that it could have led the wise men to Jerusalem?

Next, in order to reach Bethlehem, the wise men had to travel directly south from Jerusalem; somehow that "star in the east" "went before them, 'til it came and stood over where the young child was." Now we have our second first-Christmas astronomy puzzle: How can a star "in the east" guide our wise men to the south? The north star guides lost hikers to the north, so shouldn't a star in the east have led the wise men to the east?

And we have yet a third first-Christmas astronomy puzzle: How does Matthew's star move "before them," like the tail lights on the snowplow you might follow during a blizzard, and then stop and stand over the manger in Bethlehem, inside of which supposedly lies the infant Jesus?

What could the 'star in the east' be?

The astronomer in me knows that no star can do these things, nor can a comet, or Jupiter, or a supernova, or a conjunction of planets or any other actual bright object in the nighttime sky. One can claim that Matthew's words describe a miracle, something beyond the laws of physics. But Matthew chose his words carefully and wrote "star in the east" twice, which suggests that these words hold a specific importance for his readers.

Can we find any other explanation, consistent with Matthew's words, that doesn't require that the laws of physics be violated and that has something to do with astronomy? The answer, amazingly, is yes.

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Can astronomy explain the biblical Star of Bethlehem?

Starry, starry night: a history of astronomy in art

No stars to see here, move along The Procession of the Magi (1459) by Gozzoli.

. Photograph: Leemage/UIG via Getty Images

This is the season for stargazing. In December and January, the winter skies are cold and sometimes clear. A cloudless night reveals a bright canopy of stars, so it is the perfect time to get out your telescope or binoculars.

It also happens to be the time when astronomy is celebrated in the Christmas story. The magi, three wise men from Persia, followed a star to Bethlehem. What star was it? A comet? A meteor? I have no idea. Instead, I have been trying to follow their star through art, with some curious results.

The star of Bethlehem rarely appears in Renaissance paintings. It does not appear to have interested 15th-century artists such as Benozzo Gozzoli and Sandro Botticelli. Even the infinitely curious Leonardo da Vinci, who was so in love with science, does not appear to include a star in his enigmatic Adoration of the Magi although its unfinished state makes it impossible to know if he might have dotted one in at the last moment. That seems unlikely, because the absence of stars in Renaissance paintings of the magi reveals a fundamental difference between how they saw the cosmos and how we do. It seems obvious now that stars are distant, gaseous bodies that appear to us as pinpricks of light, but there was no such knowledge 500 or 600 years ago. Because the sky was imagined differently it was seen differently.

The magical and strange way people during the Renaissance saw the heavens is apparent in Raphaels painting The Mond Crucifixion. It includes a moon and sun that each have human faces. Lovely, childlike stuff, but a long way from modern science. In a chapel in Florence, a dome is decorated with the constellations on a particular night; the stars were the stuff of astrological magic. Tintoretto even painted the birth of the milky way from the breast milk of the goddess Juno.

Stars do appear as golden star shapes in this painting. Silver ones also appear in Titians Bacchus and Ariadne, about a woman who was changed into a constellation. For Titian and Tintoretto, stars are magical crosses of light.

Then, at the start of the 17th century, Galileo Galilei turned a telescope on the moon and other objects in the night sky. His report The Starry Messenger showed that what we see in the sky at night are physical phenomena, not heavenly phantoms.

After Galileo, artists not only depicted the star the magi followed, but even speculated as to what it was. Murillo showed it as a comet, as did Velzquez. From utter mystery, the sky became a place with physical laws. A comet became something real.

In the same era, Guercino painted Endymion asleep with a telescope on his lap, for the sky was no longer a place of signs and wonders. It was a new frontier for science to explore. Eventually, that quest would make the magi just a story, their star a festive decoration.

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Starry, starry night: a history of astronomy in art

The Biggest Astronomy Stories of 2014

The year 2014 was a packed one for astronomical science.

Over the last 12 months, scientists made historic progress in the study of Mars, had two close encounters with comets, and may have found hints of dark matter and signals from the Big Bang. It's enough to make us eager for 2015 to see what new discoveries await.

But there are some stories that stand out from the crowd that was space science in 2014. Here is our list of the biggest astronomy stories of the year:

Tantalizing new information about the Red Planet, along with new clues about the possibility that it once supported life, was revealed this year. 2014 also happens to be the 50-year launch anniversary of the first probe ever sent to Mars.

In December, scientists working on the Mars rover Curiosity announced that the Red Planet hosts organic chemicals (those that contain carbon and are the building blocks of life on Earth). The chemicals chlorobenzene, dichloroethane, dichloropropane and dichlorobutane were discovered inside a rock that Curiosity drilled into in May 2013. Researchers stressed that their findings do not indicate that life exists or ever existed on Mars but it does open the door of possibility.

In addition, scientists confirmed in December that the rover had detected methane on Mars, despite not finding any trace of methane last year. Living organisms on Earth are known to produce high levels of methane, so its presence on the Red Planet is another possible sign of life.

NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft arrived at the Red Planet on Sept. 21, just in time to observe the flyby of Comet Siding Spring. The $671 million mission will focus on uncovering the events that changed the planet from a world with lakes and rivers, to a complete desert.

Just two days after MAVEN, India's Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) arrived at the fourth planet from the sun. The $74 million mission is India's first probe to reach Mars. MOM is carrying a camera (and has already snapped some stunning photos), and four scientific instruments that will study the planet's surface and atmosphere.

The swarm of activity around Mars came during the 50-year anniversary of the launch of the Mariner 4 spacecraft in 1964. Mariner 4 was the first probe to ever fly by Mars and the first mission to take up-close images of another planet from deep space. In celebration of the anniversary, the space-funding company Uwingu used radio telescopes to beam nearly 90,000 messages straight at the Red Planet.

The BICEP2 collaboration grabbed headlines in March when it claimed to have found evidence that our universe rapidly expanded after the Big Bang, causing ripples in the fabric of the universe. By September, outside evaluation had thrown serious doubt on the findings.

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The Biggest Astronomy Stories of 2014

Why Care About Astronomy?

The Milky Way seen above the European Southern Observatorys Paranal Observatory. Image Credit: Babak Tafreshi / ESO

I need to get something off my chest. A month or so ago I was sitting in a classroom surrounded by 10 peers. For the first time this semester we had the opportunity to spend the entire day discussing astronomy. And I was thrilled to dive into that brilliant subject, which I have adored for most of my 26 years.

But it didnt take long before the day turned sour. Most of my classmates touched on one common theme: why should we care about astronomy when it has no practical applications? Its a concern I have seen time and time again from students, museum guests, and readers alike.

So dear world, here is why you should care.

Its true that astronomy has few practical applications and yet somehow its advances benefit millions of people across the world.

Just as astronomy struggles to see increasingly faint objects, medicine struggles to see things obscured within the human body. So astronomy has developed technology used in CAT scanners and MRIs. It has also developed technology now used by FedEx to track packages, GPS satellites to determine your location, apple to develop a camera for your iPhone, to name a few.

But all of these are mere second thoughts, benefits that have occurred without the primary intention of the maker. And that is what makes astronomy beautiful. To study something not because were looking to gain anything in particular, but out of sheer curiosity is what makes us human.

Doing things for their own sake creates room for mindfulness and joy. Aristotle makes this point in his Nicomachean Ethics. He says: the work is the maker in actuality; so he loves his work, because he loves his existence too. And this is a fact of nature; for what he is in potentiality, the work shows in actuality.

Work itself is inherently valuable and it is somehow connected to our very existence. It stands alone and not as a path toward a paycheck or a practical application. Countless studies show just this. In one famous example, psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, both from the University of Rochester, asked two groups of college students to work on various puzzles. One group was paid for each puzzle it solved. The other group wasnt.

Deci and Ryan found that the group that was paid to solve puzzles quit the second the experiment was over. The other group, however, found the puzzles intrinsically fascinating, and continued to solve the puzzles well after finishing the experiment. The second group found joy in the puzzles even when and perhaps because there was no monetary value to gain. Theres mindfulness in the act of work itself.

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Why Care About Astronomy?