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Other stars show tails that trail behind them like a comet's tail.  Stars shown are: LLOrionis, BZ Cam, and Mira.



A speeding comet has a tail.  Scientists have thought that the solar system also has a tail, but they just observed it for the first time. 

NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, is a satellite that peers out toward the edge of the solar system.  It allowed scientists to actually map out the tail of the heliosphere, that region of space that is influenced by the Sun.

Eric Christian, an IBEX mission scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said scientists have seen tails around other stars.

"We know that the Sun is moving relative to interstellar gas, and so we presumed there was a tail, but this is actually the first real data that we have that gives us the shape of the tail," he said.

Scientists say the tail resembles a four-leaf clover, shaped by solar wind, the material that speeds away from the sun. Solar wind travels faster when it comes from the sun's poles, and slower when it comes from the equator, and scientists attribute the tail's shape to the combination of slow and fast moving particles.       

David McComas, an assistant vice president for space science and engineering at the Southwest Research Institute in Texas, is the IBEX principal investigator.

"The length of the tail is one of the things we don't measure particularly well," he said, noting that the measurements are taken from inside the heliosphere looking out.

But McComas says scientists can make calculations based on the particles they observe, and they think the heliotail trails off and evaporates over a distance of possibly 160 billion kilometers.

The findings about the solar system's tail were published in the July 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal. 

NASA's IBEX spacecraft was launched in 2008, and the small satellite is roughly the size of a bus tire.  It has instruments similar to telescopes that are pointed toward the edge of the solar system.  These instruments collect particles that travel toward Earth from out beyond Pluto. 

Scientists analyze details about the particles' mass and energy, as well as the area they came from and the time they were collected, and they use these details to map the boundary of the solar system.


Republicans reject massive bill
on immigration from Senate


Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives are rejecting the sweeping immigration reform bill passed in the Senate.  Leaders of the Republican majority say they plan to take a step-by-step approach aimed at slowing momentum toward reform that would provide legal status for the estimated 11 million people now living in the United States illegally. 

Members of the majority Republican conference in the House of Representatives met with their leaders late Wednesday to discuss how to react to comprehensive immigration reform passed last month in the Senate.  Republican leaders in the House agree with Democrats that the U.S. immigration system is broken, but they said in a statement that they reject a single, massive Obamacare-like bill.  Republican House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte told reporters the House plans to "take a step-by-step, careful approach, holding hearings and examining and marking up individual bills so that we do not make the same mistakes made in 1986."

In 1986, then-president Ronald Reagan, a Republican, signed a bill granting amnesty to 3 million people.  Chairman Goodlatte said Republican lawmakers are concerned the same thing could happen with the Senate bill, and they want to see border security and internal regulations enforced before any action is taken on legalizing immigrants already here without documents.  Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann strongly rejected Democratic demands for a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

"The only thing we are supporting right now is to actually build the fence," said Ms. Bachmann.

Earlier in the day, about 500 young immigrants and their parents gathered outside the U.S. Capitol to hold a mock citizenship ceremony to declare they are ready to be recognized as Americans.  Democratic Rep. Luis Gutierrez called on House Republicans to seize the moment.  He said that with the help of Democratic votes, the House could easily get the 218 votes needed to pass immigration reform.

"And we say to the Republican-controlled House of Representatives let the people's will be heard.  You know and I know that 218 votes exist for comprehensive immigration reform, and all we ask you is for five minutes on the floor of the House," said Gutierrez.

Lorella Praeli, who now lives in Washington and comes from Peru, said Hispanic voters are watching closely to see what Republicans do on the issue.

"So I think that they have an opportunity here to decide whether or not they want to be a party of the future or a party of the past," said Ms. Praeli.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney lost in 2012 to Democratic President Barack Obama by a margin of 27 to 71 percent among Hispanics.  But analysts say many House members come from solidly, mostly white Republican districts, and are more concerned about holding their own seats rather than the next presidential election.


Biden issues warning to China
on cyber security and theft


U.S. Vice President Joe Biden says Chinese cyber-theft of U.S. intellectual property must stop.
 
Speaking Wednesday at the State Department during annual high-level talks between the world's two largest economies, Biden said both the United States and China will benefit from an open, secure and reliable Internet.
 
Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang said the two countries need to increase their trust through dialogue, but added China will never accept views that will hinder its development.
 
Wang added Sino-U.S. cooperation goes beyond bilateral relations to have a global impact. 
 
The annual talks, now in their fifth year, involve senior officials including U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and Chinese State Councilor Yang Jiechi.
 
Kerry said the talks allow the two countries to speak candidly about their differences to constructively manage them and increase understanding.
 
He said this year's discussions have created working groups to investigate issues including cyber security and climate change.
 
Chinese state media reported Wednesday the first working group on U.S.-China cyber security went well, with both sides candidly discussing the matter and agreeing to expand cooperation.
 
U.S. officials say they raised the issue of economic-related hacking during the session.  They also said the two sides discussed international norms for cyber space.
 
Washington and Beijing have recently traded accusations of cyber-hacking attacks.  The issue has threatened to become a major irritant in bilateral relations.
 
Before the talks, rights groups and lawmakers called for the United States to prominently raise concerns about China's human-rights record, a particularly sensitive topic for Beijing.
 
A bipartisan group of top U.S. lawmakers also called for the United States to press China on a wide range of economic issues, including protecting intellectual property and ensuring China opens its markets to more foreign competition.


U.S. seems to have blown
$34 million in Afghanistan


A U.S. congressional body overseeing government-funded projects in Afghanistan says the U.S. military has spent $34 million to build a new complex in the country's south, but is not likely to ever use it.

The Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said Wednesday it believes the U.S. facility in the southern Afghan province of Helmand is a potentially troubling example of waste.

The body created by Congress to detect waste in Afghanistan raised that concern in a letter sent to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and senior military leaders on Monday. It released the letter to the media Wednesday.

The U.S. military hired British firm AMEC Earth and Environment to start building the facility in 2011, and intended to use it as a regional command headquarters. But Special Inspector General John Sopko said military officials recently told him it will not be occupied. He also said some U.S. commanders in Helmand objected to plans for the building in 2010, saying there was no need for it.

Sopko said he is deeply troubled that the military may have spent taxpayer funds on a project that should have been stopped. He asked Defense Secretary Hagel to respond to several questions about it by July 25. Defense Department spokesman George Little said Wednesday that Sopko's letter is under review.

The 6,000-square-meter complex is located at Camp Leatherneck, a major U.S. military base in Afghanistan's desolate south. It consists mostly of a large windowless building with spacious offices and expensive heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems for up to 1,500 staff members.

Construction mostly finished in 2012, but various improvements were made early this year.

The special inspector general cited a senior military official as saying the site may become unprotected as Camp Leatherneck's perimeter shrinks with the gradual withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in the coming year.

Sopko said that leaves the U.S. military with two main options, demolishing the building or handing it over to the Afghan government.

Washington-based senior writer for the Marine Corps Times Dan Lamothe said he saw the building last October, while spending 10 weeks on assignment in Helmand. He said he doubts the Afghan government has the capacity to manage the costly facility, whose electricity system runs on U.S. rather than Afghan voltage. 

Lamothe said he witnessed another example of U.S. government "waste" while embedded with an Afghan border police unit in the Taghaz region of southern Helmand. He said the United States built a $1 million police building for the Afghans with a kitchen and modern toilets, but its septic tank filled up because no one emptied it.


A second of time getting
more precise with strontium


The second, as we know it, may soon be a thing of the past as a measurement of time.

French physicists have successfully tested two optical lattice clocks, which would lose just one second every 300 million years. The clocks are so accurate, they could lead to a new definition of a second.

Optical lattice clocks, which have been around for about a decade, could one day replace the atomic clocks, which have been the standard for decades. Atomic clocks work by measuring the vibration of cesium atoms exposed to microwaves.

Since 1967, the second has been defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the microwave radiation absorbed or emitted when a cesium atom jumps between two particular energy states. Atomic clocks are accurate to one second every 100 million years.

The two new optical lattice clocks are being tested at the Paris Observatory. The Observatory’s Jerome Lodewyck says the new clocks use the element strontium instead of cesium and laser beams instead of microwaves.

Both atomic and optical lattice clocks can be compared to a grandfather clock, which uses the swing of a pendulum to measure intervals of time. The swing of an atomic clock’s cesium pendulum occurs trillions of times every second. An optical lattice clock strontium oscillations are 40,000 times faster.

That allows the division of intervals into smaller, more precise units, giving the optical lattice clock an accuracy of one second every 300 million years.

While losing a second every 300 million years might not seem important in daily life, many technologies such as telecommunications, satellite navigation and stock markets depend on incredibly accurate timekeeping.

Highly precise timekeeping has been integral to the development of the Global Positioning System because of the high degree of synchronization required for satellites to triangulate a receiver’s location.

The new super-accurate clock could have implications for theoretical physics in that it could allow physicists to see if nature’s constants do really do remain constant over time. Also, Earth-observation satellites could be improved because they would allow more accurate tracking of sea-level rise.

But despite the new optical lattice clocks’ accuracy, they may not be the final answer. The U.S. National Institutes of Standards and Technology in Colorado has developed an ion clock that is believed accurate to within one second every 3.7 billion years, but it is not yet considered stable enough to use and requires more testing.


San Francisco plane crash
prompts call to up standards


U.S. lawmakers are pressing for the swift adoption of new pilot training standards in the United States and across the globe. The push for uniform standards follows Saturday’s Asiana jetliner crash in San Francisco and a 2009 commuter plane disaster in Buffalo, New York.

Sen. Charles Schumer says recent air tragedies, including the Asiana crash, have illuminated a disturbing trend.

“From what we have seen, there is a pattern here: pilot error and inadequate response to stalling caused by loss of air speed," he said.

Schumer represents New York, where a commuter plane crashed in 2009, killing all 49 people on board.  An investigation of the disaster concluded that the pilot improperly responded to stall warnings, making a dire situation worse.  Congress responded by passing the Airline Safety Act, which revamped pilot training standards.

Wednesday, the Federal Aviation Administration announced implementation of a portion of those standards relating to mandatory flight time requirements for pilot certification.  Schumer and other New York lawmakers urged swift adoption of all other standards.

“The new rules would set minimum standards on pilot fatigue and certification, crew member training, safety management and flight simulation training.  The new rules would beef up training requirements for the exact type of situations we are talking about: aerodynamic stalls," he said.

But the senator noted that the FAA has no authority outside the United States.

“There is no reason that American passengers should be put at risk by poorly trained pilots in other countries.  So we are asking the FAA to push to make these rules a global standard if American passengers are involved," he said. "In other words, for international carriers departing from or arriving to the United States, we expect those airlines to meet the same safety standards we expect from our domestic carriers."

The U.N.’s International Civil Aviation Authority is to hold an assembly of its 191 member states in September.


As ocean bounty diminishes
farm fish may become veggies


The search is on for a cost-effective alternative to traditional commercial feed pellets given to farmed fish.

Wild-caught fish are a key ingredient in these commercial feeds but that presents a problem because the amount of ocean-caught fish has plateaued while the global aquaculture industry continues to grow.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working with fish farmers and university researchers to develop a fishless feed that carnivores, such as salmon, rainbow trout and tuna, will actually eat.

That's what brings dozens of taste test volunteers to Washington State University's School of Food Science's test kitchen.

They are presented with three samples of trout, plain, poached pieces of fish that are all alike, except for how they were raised. One was fed fish meal, another ate animal proteins and the third ingested a mostly vegetarian diet.

Some testers report a little bit of grassy flavor from what turned out to be the vegetarian-fed trout fillet. The trout raised on traditional fish meal had slightly more fishy flavor and aroma. The trout that ate chicken byproducts did not taste like chicken.

The definition of success in this aquaculture experiment would be for the non-fish alternative diets to yield fish that taste more or less the same as those raised on the current fish-based feed.

"I think they are getting close," said Carolyn Ross, who has been conducting these taste tests since 2008. "Certainly, there are differences between samples, but whether that is a game changer or not is a different question. So yes, I can tell one has a more fishy aroma. I can tell one is firmer. But if you're sitting down at home having a BBQ, it's not going to make a big difference."

Aquaculture is a huge industry worldwide, especially in Asia, where the production of farmed fish, eels and shrimp dwarfs the production on all other continents combined. The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization reports that farming of fish that eat pond plants or bottomfeed like carp, catfish and tilapia is expanding slower than production of carnivorous species, such as salmon, rainbow trout and tuna. That makes the search for a cost-effective alternative to fish-based feed more urgent.

It's the industry’s number one priority, according to longtime fish farmer Leo Ray of Idaho, the leading trout producing state in the United States. Ray says fish meal that cost $300 per ton about 15 years ago, now runs close to $2,000.

"We knew this was coming," Ray said. "There is a limit on the amount of fish meal the ocean can produce, and we've hit that limit."

Ray says the suppliers he buys from have already reduced the wild fish content in commercial feeds somewhat. He and his competitors in southern Idaho have gladly tested all sorts of alternative diets. They've fed their fish poultry byproducts, corn and soybean protein, coconut oil, and ground up insect larvae.

"Salmon are harder to wean off fish meal," Ray said, pointing out that other farmed species, like tilapia, could fairly easily be converted to a plant-based diet. But he doubts going completely vegetarian is the answer.

"We have healthier fish if we put a little bit of fish meal in the diet. I think what we will end up with is a diet that instead of using 20 or 30 percent fish meal, we'll be using 5 percent fish meal."

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says the effort extends to other aquaculture species as well. Parallel studies are testing alternative feeds for farmed Atlantic salmon and several species of warm water fish. Separate studies by university researchers in Texas and Alabama have investigated plant-based diets for farmed shrimp.


Resistant TB increases need
for new research and drugs


Tuberculosis, or TB, is spread when an infected person coughs or sneezes, dispersing the germ, mycobacterium TB, into the air. The World Health Organization says there were an estimated 8.7 million new cases of TB in 2011. Nearly all TB cases are found in low and middle income countries. People infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, are especially vulnerable because of their weakened immune systems.

TB is a difficult disease to treat because some strains of the bacterium have developed a resistance to drugs. But Peter Small, of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is impressed by recent research developments.
 
“There were probably 40 years in which there was very little, arguably no, progress because there was no effort,” he explained. “What we’ve seen in the last decade is an acceleration. And it’s really changed what was a vicious cycle of neglect and despondency into one in which we’re starting to see exciting new products. We have now, for the first time, the capacity for untrained healthcare workers to definitively diagnose TB within two hours and know if it’s drug resistant. More than two and a half million of those tests run in the world.”
 
Small is the Gates Foundation’s senior program officer for TB. He has researched the genetic variability of the disease and has seen the effects of TB firsthand while living in India.
 
He says it’s important to determine which drug combinations provide the best treatment. Small says streamlining approval of effective drug regimens allows those who are infected to receive treatment sooner. But drugs are not the ultimate solution when addressing TB.
 
“I think the Holy Grail remains a vaccine,” Small said. “We do need a vaccine to finish the job. The great thing is that we’ve completed a phase three trial. We’ve shown that we can get definitive answers and unfortunately that trial was ineffective. But I think that the vaccine pipeline is now something which we know we can test. The good news is, in the last 15 years there have been massive improvements in understanding immunology.”
 
As the world awaits a vaccine, research continues on new drugs that could be effective against multi-drug-resistant and extensively drug-resistant types of TB.
 
Drug-resistant strains of TB develop through the improper use of medication. If the drugs are taken incorrectly, such as missing doses, they become ineffective because the bacterium develops resistance.
 
Multi-drug-resistant TB is on the rise, particularly in children. But finding the children who need treatment is not easy.
 
“It’s actually very difficult to diagnose TB in children because we generally think of TB as pneumonia,” Small said. “And we get pneumonia samples by having people cough and spit. And you can’t get 5 year olds and below to cough and spit. Because we can’t diagnose it, the world has tended to assume it doesn’t exist.  And because they assume it doesn’t exist, then they don’t feel the need to invest in diagnosing it. When you can diagnose TB with a blood sample, it’ll be a lot easier to diagnose TB in kids.”
 
Treating the millions of children and adults infected with TB may seem daunting. However, the fact that the TB mortality rate has decreased 41% since 1990 gives hope for future progress and elimination of the disease.