Any Star Trek fan worth his salt will tell you that instant video communication is the only way to go. In a step to make this science fiction tool a reality NASA has launched a new laser communication system in its latest lunar mission. LADEE or Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, carried with it a new technology called LLCD or Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration.

This two way laser communication technology may one day be able to support the kind of 3D videos that were common place in the old sci-fi series. It has been developed by MIT or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at its Lincoln Laboratory. Communications in space began with Radio Frequency when NASA first moved into space and now they have moved up to laser technology with LLCD.

This is likely to transfer six times as much data with a 25% decrease in energy and a faster return time. All in all this science project seems to have no drawbacks, except the fact that it has never been tested in outer space before. Hopefully with the LADEE using this technology it will no longer be an unproven maverick but something viable that all future missions can use.

NASA has admitted that while Curiosity has been a well received science experiment, the rover in effect does not have a brain of its own. In fact the instructions passed to it from the mission control established on Earth take forty minutes to get to it. In order to overcome this drawback future rovers will be smarter in design.

Now if Curiosity meets a stone en route it will take a photograph and send it back to the handler sitting on Earth, who will then instruct it on how to proceed. In an updated version of the space rover it will be able to ascertain what the rock it sees is using comparative date and then decide on its own if it needs to be further investigated or not.

The micro management that takes place in the case of the Mars Rover Curiosity will be highly limited in future, more advanced rovers built for new missions says NASA. Unlike how each day’s schedule is uploaded for Curiosity from the mission control center, the future rovers will be able to fix their own agenda based on how and where they are located.

Of course some degree of control will still be maintained over the science projects from Earth. They are even working on over ruling a certain task that the rover might fix for itself on a given day and replace it with something the scientists want done that day. It will be an exciting new world for the rovers of the next mission.

The Earth tends to wobble just a little when it spins on its axis rather like how a toy top wobbles on its axis. This action has been linked to nitrogen fixation in organisms in the ocean by researchers. Scientific teams from the Princeton University and the Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich have reported that nitrogen fixation pattern was closely matched by the changing orientation of Earth’s axis of rotation, or axial precession.

Data proves that the axial precession occurs approximately every 26,000 years. This in turn leads to an upwelling of deep water in the equatorial Atlantic Ocean at this time that brings nitrogen deficient water to the top. Blue green algae on the surface now converts this into nitrogen rich water which can be used by other biological agents.

This pattern of nitrogen fixation was studied based on data collected over several years and led to the hypothesis that it matched the historical record of axial precession which led to the ocean water upwelling. This allows the Earth to survive severe ecological disturbances as well as balances the nitrogen cycle as per the researchers.

So in a manner of speaking every 26,000 years the Earth acts as a chef to fix nitrogen rich water for its ocean dwelling consumers. Interesting science project to read about.

If you are suspended in the air with your eyes closed and asked to point to the ground, in most cases you will be accurately able to do so. This is because human beings have miniscule crystalline stones in our ear cavities. They float here when we are suspended in the air and sink in when they sense gravity.

This allows us to know what side is up and down based on how the crystalline stones sink into the ear cavities. Plants can also sense gravity and always plant their roots in the direction of the gravitational pull they experience. Given the fact that they do not have ears or crystalline stones in those ears, how do they sense gravity?

This is what botanists at Miami University in Ohio led by John Kiss are trying to figure out. Plant roots have dense, ball like cells at the tip of their roots which are called statoliths. That is Greek for stationary stone. Professor Kiss feels that the statoliths are gravity receptors of the plants.

His idea was supported when they hit upon using a few plants on the international space station to check if the claim was valid. Sure enough with nearly zero gravity on the International Space Station the cells could not figure out which way was down and the roots just tend to float around in the air. Now that’s a science experiment that gives an interesting visual result.

No matter how deep you bury the seed, the little seeding will always grow with its shoot up and roots headed down. Not only that, if you took a bunch of little seedlings and buried them with their shoots in the ground and the roots in the air, they would sense that they were upside down.The seedlings would then take a double U turn to make sure that they were again positioned with the shoot up and root down.

Thomas Andrew Knight of the British Royal Society, was certain that plants could sense gravity and would always send out their roots towards the gravitational pull. This was the hypothesis to be tested nearly 200 years ago by Thomas in a crazy experiment involving spinning plates. He planted some seedlings on a disk and then has a water wheel move the disk at a speed of 150 revolutions per minute for a period of several days.

In such a situation, if you know you basic physics principles, the centrifugal force pushes the gravity outwards. So Thomas felt that the plants would also point their roots to the outside of the spinning disc if they were influenced by gravity. This is precisely what did happen. So now you know thanks to this old science experiment that the reason why plants don’t get confused about up and down is due to gravity.