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Spacecraft and telescopes are not built by people interested in what’s going on at home. Rockets fly in one direction: up. Telescopes point in one direction: out. Of all the cosmic bodies studied in the long history of astronomy and space travel, the one that got the least attention was the one that ought to matter most to us—Earth.

That changed when NASA created the Landsat program, a series of satellites that would perpetually orbit our planet, looking not out but down. Surveillance spacecraft had done that before, of course, but they paid attention only to military or tactical sites. Landsat was a notable exception, built not for spycraft but for public monitoring of how the human species was altering the surface of the planet. Two generations, eight satellites and millions of pictures later, the space agency, along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has accumulated a stunning catalog of images that, when riffled through and stitched together, create a high-definition slide show of our rapidly changing Earth. TIME is proud to host the public unveiling of these images from orbit, which for the first time date all the way back to 1984.

Over here is Dubai, growing from sparse desert metropolis to modern, sprawling megalopolis. Over there are the central-pivot irrigation systems turning the sands of Saudi Arabia into an agricultural breadbasket — a surreal green-on-brown polka-dot pattern in the desert. Elsewhere is the bad news: the high-speed retreat of Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska; the West Virginia Mountains decapitated by the mining industry; the denuded forests of the Amazon, cut to stubble by loggers.

It took the folks at Google to upgrade these choppy visual sequences from crude flip-book quality to true video footage. With the help of massive amounts of computer muscle, they have scrubbed away cloud cover, filled in missing pixels, digitally stitched puzzle-piece pictures together, until the growing, thriving, sometimes dying planet is revealed in all its dynamic churn. The images are striking not just because of their vast sweep of geography and time but also because of their staggering detail. Consider: a standard TV image uses about one-third of a million pixels per frame, while a high-definition image uses 2 million. The Landsat images, by contrast, weigh in at 1.8 trillion pixels per frame, the equivalent of 900,000 high-def TVs assembled into a single mosaic.

These Timelapse pictures tell the pretty and not-so-pretty story of a finite planet and how its residents are treating it — razing even as we build, destroying even as we preserve. It takes a certain amount of courage to look at the videos, but once you start, it’s impossible to look away.

by Jeffrey Kluger.

Read more @ http://world.time.com/timelapse/

An artist’s impression of Kepler 62f provided by NASA on April 18, 2013.

Every week, it seems, astronomers announce a revolutionary exoplanet discovery — two plausibly habitable worlds orbiting a single star, for example, or a single planet orbiting two stars, or a planet no bigger than our moon or an exoplanet right next door in the Alpha Centauri system. Each one is important in its own way, but scientists also know focusing exclusively on single discoveries is like looking at the individual pixels on a screen and ignoring the larger picture they’re painting. Now and again, therefore, they take a step back and consider what they can learn from everything they’ve found so far. The result can be a real eye-opener.

That kind of big-picture consideration just happened again, with the publication of two papers in Science that assess the state of current knowledge about exoplanets. The first, by the University of Hawaii’s Andrew Howard, highlights an entirely new class of planets, midway in size between Earth and Neptune, that nobody had predicted — and which turn out to be incredibly common in the Milky Way. And the second, a theoretical paper by Sara Seager at MIT, argues that our definition of what makes a world habitable may be far too restrictive. Planets that would ordinarily be dismissed as too big or too small, too near their stars or too far away to be life-friendly might be able host living organisms after all.

The abundance of the midsize planets — what some people call “Super Earths” and others call “Mini Neptunes” — has emerged from several different planet-hunting surveys, but especially from the Kepler mission. The space-based Kepler telescope has been staring at a single patch of sky for four years now, waiting for stars to wink as planets pass in front of them. The smaller the planet, the longer it takes to be sure the wink is real, not just a flicker of the star or some other glitch.

(MORE: Supernova: The Most Distant and Important One Yet)

By now, however, Kepler’s unblinking eye has found nearly 3,000 candidate planets, and when you chart them by size, they get more and more numerous as you go down the scale. They then hit a plateau at this new, unexpected size. “For me,” says Howard, “it’s kind of amazing that we keep expecting to find planetary systems like our own, and they keep turning out to be different.”

It’s not just the blink method that has helped reveal all the new, medium worlds. Also put to work has been the so-called “radial velocity” method, which looks for the wobbles an orbiting planet’s gravity induces in its star. When a star winks, you can gauge a planet’s physical size; when it wobbles, you can measure its mass. And when you spot the same planet with both techniques, you can combine those measurements to calculate density.

(PHOTOS: Window on Infinity: Pictures from Space)

That leads to another surprise: planets of about the same size come in significantly different masses, which means their composition is different — like a softball made of either lead or snow.

Efforts must be made to ensure that a strong and resilient scientific culture not only grows but also endures in the Malaysian society in general and the Muslim community in particular.

PETROSAINS, with the cooperation of several agencies and organisations including Ikim, is currently holding the “Sultans of Science – Islamic Science Redisco­vered” exhibition at Suria KLCC.

Taking centrestage for six months, beginning last December and running until June this year, the exhibition showcases inventions and scientific breakthroughs achieved by Muslim scholars during the peak of the Islamic civilisation.

This, however, was not the first time such an exhibition had been organised.

In the first half of 2007, the Science, Technology and Innovation Ministry held the “Scientific Excellence in Islamic Civilisation” exhibition.

In fact, compared with what can be found nearly 30 to 40 decades ago, the literature, both popular and academic, on the subject of the Muslim contributions to science and technology has increased substantially.

It is indeed true that proper recourse to intellectual and civilisational history plays an important role in reviving a society’s interest in science and technology.

Yet, this alone will not produce sufficient positive results on a much larger scale.

Other necessary and vital factors need to be included and should play complementary roles in ensuring that a strong and resilient scientific culture not only grows but also endures in the Malaysian society in general and the Muslim community in particular.

Among them is a high level of curiosity among a sufficient number of the country’s population.

It is this strong desire in a person to know and learn that drives him or her to explore and discover despite circumstances which may not always be in favour of one’s scientific interest.

However, a strong desire to know and learn alone will not guarantee the development of a scientific culture.

It has to be coupled with a disciplined mind so that what we have at the end is disciplined curiosity, a factor that is crucial for the development of such a culture.

People should be encouraged to increase their knowledge not only by focusing on pertinent problems but also by raising relevant questions.

It is in this light that, as related by ibn Abd al-Barr (d. 463H) in his Jami Bayan al-Ilm wa Fadlihi, both Wahb b. Munabbih and Sulayman b. Yasar declared: “Right question or problem is half of knowledge.”

A question does not really arise in a vacuum.

More often than not, it arises in our minds together with a set, or a series, of other related questions.

There is in fact a logical system inherent in any set or series of questions, involving a certain pattern of logical priority and posteriority.

A really scientific manner of dealing with questions and problems demands that one pay due attention to such a system and order.

As a matter of fact, this is one of the subject-matters extensively discussed by past Muslim logicians, scientists and scholars in their logico-scientific works, especially in those sections or chapters dealing with questions and problems being the major constituent of a scientific quest.

KIM Views

Read more @ http://thestar.com.my/columnists/story.asp?col=ikimviews&file=/2013/3/5/columnists/ikimviews/12788034&sec=IKIM%20Views

CURRENTLY an impressive exhibition called “Sultans of Science” is being held at the Petrosains in Kuala Lumpur.

It showcases the achievements of science and technology in Islamic civilisation during the 8th to 15th centuries, manifested in the centres of knowledge of the Middle Ages in Cordoba, Baghdad and Samarkand among others.

To those interested in the debate concerning Islamic Science or potentially a science that does not separate knowledge about nature and the ethical values that attend the application of such knowledge, the exhibition beckons us to examine once again the current concerns voiced by leaders and scientists about the crisis of unsustainability most obvious and immediate in the environmental and economic context.

Those who may not be too familiar with the debate should be informed of the misunderstanding between the proponents of “Islamis science and those for whom the term “Islamic Science” is deemed oxymoronic.

While proponents of this find numerous recent scientific theories and technological inventions in the Quran, the opponents reduce the 800 years of Islamic scientific tradition/achievement to a mere depot that kept Greek Science intact until it was recovered by its rightful European heir.

Whatever their differences, both sides of the debate might be happy to note that it is now accepted universally (and this has already happened as shown by the success of exhibitions such as the Sultans of Science by Petroscience which by the way has travelled through several non-Islamic countries before coming to Malaysia).

That great men and women of the past – mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, physicians, architects, economists, sociologists, artists, artisans and educators did express their religiosity through beneficial contributions to society and humanity during the “Golden Age of Islam”.

The record shows that they did so positively, constructively and with open mindedness alongside Muslims and non-Muslims.

Similar exhibitions in Britain such as “The 1001 inventions: Muslim Heritage in Our World” under the auspices of the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation (FSTC) Britain, have received praise from the popular and specialist media, the public, the education community and academe as it has spurred thousands to re-evaluate their perception and understanding of the so called “Dark Ages” in the West and the role of Muslim Civilisation in laying the foundations of modern science and technology.

In Britain, there are some who even ask why the material is not in the British national curriculum.

Sir Roland Jackson, chief executive of the British Association for the Advancement of Science believes that such demonstrations as the 1001 Inventions Exhibition is a welcome and much needed reminder that Muslims had made many important and far reaching contributions to the development of our shared scientific knowledge and technologies.

Coming back to the here and now, even if there once existed a scientific tradition that can be described as Islamic, what is urgently needed is proof and demonstration (Burhan and Muzaharah) of its applicability and relevance in the contemporary situation.

by Azizan Baharuddin.

Read more @ http://thestar.com.my/columnists/story.asp?col=ikimviews&file=/2013/2/12/columnists/ikimviews/12680363&sec=IKIM%20Views

KUALA LUMPUR: Asteroid 2012 DA14, which is the size of an Olympic swimming pool, will be passing Earth starting midnight today.

It will be passing the planet at the closest range ever recorded for any asteroid.

Asteroid 2012 DA14 will be passing Earth at a closer distance than our own orbiting weather and communication satellites, such as Measat.

Measuring 50m in diameter and weighing an estimated 130,000 tonnes, Asteroid 2012 DA14 is considered a small asteroid by scientists.

Passing at a distance of 28,000km from Earth, a statement from the National Space Agency said the asteroid is on a different orbit and unlikely to impact our planet.

The pass will last for a good six hours starting from midnight until dawn tomorrow and will approach from the southern sky and move towards the north.

Local astronomy enthusiasts will be able to monitor the asteroid’s movement, but they would need a good telescope as it is a relatively small asteroid.

“The best thing to do would be to use a computerised version telescope as it would enable the viewer to download and track its movement.

“The asteroid will appear very small and faint.

“It will brighten up just a little bit to approximately 7.2 magnitude at its closest approach and then dim again.

“So, it’s important for those who are tracking the asteroid to know where it is in the sky because it will be moving very fast, at a speed of 7.8km/s.

“Choose a place where the sky is pristine and far from light pollution and clouds to see it clearly.”

Hear me rap: McFadden’s catchy music and lyrics have enabled his students to foster an interest in Science.

Tom McFadden has a hip way of teaching students. He raps!

FOR people like Tom McFadden, the Sciences and the Arts may not be mutually exclusive.

During his time at Stanford University as a Human Biology course associate, McFadden wrote and performed raps about Science which he uploaded to YouTube.

With catchy music and rhythmic lyrics, he says that this method provides an interesting way for students to memorise required facts.

“People hate glycolysis (process for breaking down glucose in the body) because they have to remember a lot of facts,” he says, adding that writing a rap which incorporated the steps of the process would make it easier for students to remember.

The first science rap that he wrote and posted to YouTube was called Regulatin’ Genes.

“How do you tell a cell it should be in the spleen? Or your lung? Or your tongue? Yo, you regulate its genes,” he raps.

And just like that, he sums up the purpose of gene regulation.

The rap goes on to describe the process of gene regulation, including scientific jargon like “transcription factors” (a protein that binds to specific sequences of DNA) and “Hox” (a group of genes required for producing Hox proteins which are transcription factors).

Later, as part of his Master of Science Communication thesis, he went on a tour to schools around New Zealand to promote a Science music competition called Science Idol, which required students to write lyrics on scientific topics.

by Jeannette Gom.

Read more @ http://thestar.com.my/education/story.asp?file=/2013/1/27/education/12495916&sec=education

BALANCED: Blossoms’ virtual lessons, blended with hands-on skills, will keep students engaged, write Zaini Ujang and Richard Larson.

LEARNING should be enjoyable and interesting, especially to young people, and schoolchildren at all levels. Since learning can be regarded as a multi-dimensional experience, the learning of Science and Mathematics could be made more exciting and exhilarating.

However, in Malaysia, and even in many parts of developed nations, learning Science and Mathematics has been perceived as “difficult” and “hard to study”, resulting in declining interest in the subject.

This has now become a global phenomenon, despite many attempts to improve the teaching and learning of Science and Mathematics in schools such as engaging better teachers and adopting current and sophisticated tools in educational technology.

However, addressing the issue in meaningful and effective ways is necessary, and this is the main catalyst behind the inception of a Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT)-initiated programme, known as “Blossoms” (Blended Learning Open Source Science or Mathematics Studies) five years ago.

Blossoms is a series of free interactive lessons presented in an accessible video format. Blossoms’ video modules supplement the standard curriculum with virtual lessons.

These engaging videos will be co-taught by the video teacher and the classroom teacher in a pedagogy called “Teaching Duet,” which has several aims:

TO enhance students’ critical thinking skills;

TO instil interest among students about Science and Mathematics careers;

TO show the relevance of Science and Mathematics in everyday life;

TO introduce teachers to shared lesson plans via the Internet; and,

TO enable students to learn from people in different cultures, thereby developing inter-cultural awareness and appreciation.

A teacher and her pupils looking at a display at the National Science Centre in Bukit Kiara. Schools can better prepare young people for their future by adopting an efficient ecosystem in teaching Science and Mathematics.

by Zaini Ujang and Richard Larson.

Read more @: A richer Science, Maths experience – Columnist – New Straits Times http://www.nst.com.my/opinion/columnist/a-richer-science-maths-experience-1.202820#ixzz2IHIpG6dT

Ignorance helps polio kill children.

UP to at least a decade ago, Malaysian students, particularly those who went abroad to further their studies, fit the stereotype of the “typical” Asian student — annoyingly good at Mathematics and Science; the product of a school system that set a high standard for both subjects. This standard helped set the country on the way to having a reasonable percentage of engineers, doctors and scientists that it needed to be a progressive, developed nation. However, the same cannot be said for today, with findings from the 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS) showing a marked decline in Science between 2003 and last year. Set against international benchmarks, Malaysian students measured  low,  with only one per cent having an advanced understanding of the subject compared with top-ranked Singapore’s 40 per cent.

National pride aside, what does this decline on the nerd scale mean? For a country intent on achieving developed nation status by 2020, a drop in the standard of Science studies can have grave consequences. It could mean not having as many geo-engineers that we need to monitor our slopes and make sure they don’t collapse on us; mechanical engineers to ensure our dream of bringing the Internet superhighway to every village is realised; doctors and scientists to man the soon-to-be-set-up National Cancer Centre; chemists and forensic experts to help solve sophisticated crimes; or meteorologists to make sense of changing weather patterns. Science can help us advance and give us a better quality of life — one that, without imagination and knowledge, we might not even envisage being possible.

Having many doctors in the community and a population that is educated and with at least an acquaintanceship with science might also help prevent the kind of ignorance that resulted in the death of nine healthcare workers in Pakistan last week. The six women and three men, who were commissioned by the Pakistani Health Ministry to administer polio vaccinations in a United Nations-supported programme, were killed because their murderers not only did not understand that the vaccine could save the lives of millions of Pakistani children but they were also convinced that it was a Jewish conspiracy to sterilise the children. As a result, the programme has been halted temporarily, leaving Pakistan as one of only three countries in the world that still have endemic polio. The last presented case of polio in Malaysia, thankfully, was in 1991.

Read more @ http://www.nst.com.my/opinion/editorial/the-importance-of-science-1.191885

KUALA LUMPUR: — The Education Ministry would implement 15 recommendations in the effort to increase the number of science stream students in schools, said Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin.

The 15 are part of 61 recommendations put forward by the Committee Studying the Policy of 60:40 Science/Technical: Arts Stream ratio, set up the ministry on Feb 2 and chaired by Education director-general Tan Sri Abd. Ghafar Mahmud.

Muhyiddin, who is also Education Minister, said among the recommendations to be implemented were reviewing the direction of science and technology education and its definition and increasing the teaching and learning hours for all pure science subjects from four to four periods a week.

“To ensure the students learn in a conducive environment, the government will renovate and upgrade the existing laboratories in primary and secondary schools.

“These efforts will be part of the National Education Blueprint 2013-2025 which is being fine-tuned,” he said at the launching of the Science and Technology Acculturation Awareness Campaign and launching of the Strategies to Achieve the 60:40 Science/Technical:Arts Stream Policy Report at Petrosains KLCC, here, Friday.

The report was published following several meetings, workshops and dialogues held with various groups including parents, teachers, education associations and non-governmental organisations with the report findings presented to Muhyiddin on Nov 5.

The 15 recommendations mentioned will be implemented collaboratively involving the public sector including the Education Ministry, Science, Technology and Innovation Ministry and Higher Education Ministry, and the private sector and community.

BERNAMA.

Read more @ http://education.bernama.com/index.php?sid=news_content&id=917074

Even as the latest TIMSS scores indicate a continuing drop for Malaysian students, there needs to be more in-depth analysis than just knee-jerk reaction.

IMAGINE two continents separated by water. What sort of fossils would you look for to prove that the continents were once joined?

Can you find the value of x in this equation: 9x – 6 < 4x+ 4?

If you cannot figure out the answers to these questions in about 10 minutes or so, you are not alone.

Only 5% and 3% of Malaysian Form Two students respectively answered these questions correctly in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2011.

While these were deemed as questions for above average students, it was disconcerting to note that only 67% of our 14-year-olds could identify the chemical formula for carbon dioxide.

Conducted in schools in 63 countries last year, the results of the global student assessment for Mathematics and Science was only announced on Wednesday.

With the international “intermediate” achievement set at 475 points, Malaysia’s most recent scoring of 440 in Mathematics and 426 in Science has been a source of much hand-wringing.

In comparison, the top performing countries for Mathematics based on students’ average scores were Taiwan (Chinese-Taipei), Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong and Japan.

There was not much difference in terms of who came up tops in Science other than the order; Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan.

TIMSS is a project by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), which describes itself as an independent cooperative of education research institutions and government research agencies.

First conducted in 1995, TIMSS assesses fourth (Year Four) and eighth grade (Form Two) students around the world on curriculum content shared by participating countries.

The tests contain multiple choice and structured subjective questions, and are carried out in the main language of instruction in the respective countries.

Having participated in the survey since 1999 with only Form Two cohorts, Malaysia has been generally recording a downward trend.

For 2011, a total of 5,773 students from 180 schools across Malaysia were assessed, and students were selected based on representative sampling.

by Priya Kulasagaran.

Read more @ http://thestar.com.my/education/story.asp?file=/2012/12/16/education/12462852&sec=education