High blood pressure

The first thing to note is that changes in blood pressure constantlyoccur as a response to changes in our environment and/or in ouractivity. This is a normal compensating response of the body, to keepthings functioning properly. The problems start when a continuallyhigh blood pressure is maintained, since this will eventually resultin damage to the blood vessels and heart.A number of different mechanisms can be responsible for raising bloodpressure and these will be affected to various degrees by thedifferent causative agents.

SKorea to join Asian space race: science ministry

SEOUL (AFP) — South Korea on Tuesday announced an ambitious plan to join Asia's space race by launching a lunar orbiter by 2020 and sending a probe to the moon five years after that.

The science ministry unveiled the project one month after China launched its first lunar orbiter and two months after Japan did.

Its "road map" requires the nation to complete developing its own 300-tonne rocket at a cost of 3.6 trillion won (3.9 billion dollars) within 10 years.

"South Korea will send a probe into lunar orbit by 2020 and another to the surface of the moon by 2025 under the road map," a ministry spokesman said.

A rocket called the KSLV-II (Korea Space Launch Vehicle) and weighing some 300 tonnes will be ready by 2017 to fulfil the mission, he said, adding that a smaller 170-tonne KSLV-I will be launched late next year.

South Korea also plans to launch a large satellite weighing about 100 kilograms (220 pounds) every three or four years, and at least two smaller satellites every year.

South Korea is scheduled to open the Naro Space Centre, the country's first, on the southern tip of the peninsula next year.

The first South Korean astronaut is scheduled to board Russia's Soyuz craft next April and stay in space for up to eight days aboard the International Space Station.

In the past decade Seoul has spent about 1.7 trillion won on its space programme.

Japan sent its Kaguya probe into lunar orbit in September in a key step towards putting a man on the moon by 2020.

Japan's space agency says the 55-billion-yen (478-million-dollar) lunar probe is on the most extensive mission to investigate the moon since the US Apollo programme in the 1960s and 1970s.

China launched its first lunar orbiter, Chang'e 1, in October. It put astronaut Yang Liwei into orbit in 2003 -- becoming the world's third country after the Soviet Union and the United States to do so.

Its third manned space flight is scheduled for late 2008, on a mission that will include three astronauts and China's first ever spacewalk.

Bursts of gas make earthquakes fizz

When a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck the Kobe region of Japan in 1995, killing 6400 people, nearby springs filled with carbon dioxide immediately afterwards. This often happens after large quakes but no one knew why.
Now a team of geophysicists think they have solved the puzzle. High temperatures generated by friction along a fault line are known to melt rock during a quake, and the team's chemical analysis of melts from the Kobe region now shows that this process forced rock to release large amounts of CO2.
Vincent Famin of the University of Réunion in Saint Denis, France, and colleagues calculated that rock melted during the Kobe earthquake could have released as much as 3400 tonnes of CO2 in just a few seconds. That could be hugely significant for understanding what drives earthquakes, the team says, because the sudden discharge of the gas would lubricate the rock, increasing the violence of

A new window on the universe

Using new tools to look at the universe, says Patrick Brady, often has led to discoveries that change the course of science. History is full of examples. Just such an opportunity exists today with a unique observatory that is scanning the skies, searching for one of Einstein?s greatest predictions ? gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are produced when massive objects in space move violently. The waves carry the imprint of the events that cause them. Scientists already have indirect evidence that gravitational waves exist, but have not directly detected them. UWM researchers, backed by considerable funding from the National Science Foundation, are taking a leadership role in the quest. It is an epic undertaking involving about 500 scientists worldwide, including Brady and other members of UWM?s Center for Cosmology and Gravitation: associate professors Alan Wiseman and Jolien Creighton, and assistant professor Xavier Siemens. Two UWM adjunct physicists, who work at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, also are involved ? former UWM professor Bruce Allen and scientist Maria Alessandra Papa. ?It?s an unimaginable opportunity to be on the forefront of scientific discovery,? says Creighton. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, consists of detectors at two U.S. sites managed by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). UWM?s physicists are analyzing the data generated by the LIGO facilities. The project is supported with a sizable investment of grant money from both federal and UWM sources. Last year, UWM?s LIGO group brought in $3 million in grant funding. Since 1999, UWM has received more than $9 million for the project, with much of it going toward a supercomputer called Nemo that operates unobtrusively on the second floor of the Physics Building. Stretching and squeezing The LIGO observatories use lasers to accurately monitor the distance between a central station and mirrors suspended three miles away along perpendicular arms. When a gravitational wave, a traveling ripple in space-time, passes by, the mirror in one arm will move closer to the central station, while the other mirror will move away. The change in distance caused by stretching and squeezing is what LIGO is designed to measure, says Wiseman. Those changes will be inconceivably tiny. LIGO can record distortions at a scale so small, it is comparable in distance to a thousandth of the size of an atomic nucleus. LIGO records a series of numbers ? lots of them ? and feeds them to several supercomputer clusters around the country, including UWM?s Nemo cluster. Think of a modern hard disk on a desktop computer, which stores about 100 gigabytes. LIGO fills up about 10 of those at Nemo in a single day, says Brady. The computer?s job is to sort out the numerical patterns representing gravitational waves buried in ambient noise produced by lots of other vibrations ? from internal vibrations of the equipment itself, to magnetic fluctuations from lightning storms, to seismic vibrations from trains rolling along the tracks a few miles from the observatory, or from earthquakes on the other side of the world. ?There are thousands or even millions of different signals that could be emitted from space,? says Wiseman. ?So you have to take each segment of data individually. That turns out to be a formidable computational problem.? Nemo performs many billions of calculations per second in its search for these signals.