Monday, June 1, 2015

Choline is one of the newest nutrients to be added to the list of human vitamins.  It was only added to the list of required nutrients by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1998.  While the NAS does not officially recognize choline as a vitamin specifically belonging to the B-complex family of vitamins, it is officially recognized as a required nutrient that you need in your everyday meal plan.  Shrimp, scallops and eggs are rich in choline.  
Find information from the George Mateljan Foundation at http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=nutrient&dbid=50

Does the Hubble telescope show us what the universe really looks like?  Yes and no, according to NASA.  When Hubble beams down images, astronomers have to make many adjustments, such as adding color and patching multiple photos together, to that raw data before the space observatory's images are released to the public.  These photos are an enhanced version, since most celestial objects, such as nebulas, emit colors that are too faint for human eyes to make out.  It takes a telescope, letting light build up in its CCD over time, to see the rich hues in Hubble photos.  And for other Hubble images, scientists assign colors to the filters that don't correspond to what that light would look like to human eyes.  They do this when using light from infrared and ultraviolet filters, since those wavelength ranges have no natural colors, or when combining light from slightly different shades of the same color.  "Creating color images out of the original black-and-white exposures is equal parts art and science," NASA said.  For example, Hubble photographed the Cat's Eye Nebula through three narrow wavelengths of red light that correspond to radiation from hydrogen atoms, oxygen atoms, and nitrogen ions (nitrogen atoms with one electron removed).  In that case, they assigned red, blue and green colors to the filters and combined them to highlight the subtle differences.  In real life, those wavelengths of light would be hard to distinguish for humans.  The Hubble Space Telescope launched in April 1990 and has been visited by NASA astronauts multiple times for vital repairs, maintenance and upgrades.  Clara Moskowitz 

John Hoyer Updike (1932–2009) was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic.  Updike's most famous work is his "Rabbit" series (the novels Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest; and the novella Rabbit Remembered), which chronicles the life of the middle-class everyman Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to death.  Both Rabbit Is Rich (1982) and Rabbit at Rest (1990) were recognized with the Pulitzer Prize.  Updike is one of only three authors (the others were Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner) to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once.  He published more than twenty novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children's books.  Updike's highly distinctive prose style features a rich, unusual, sometimes arcane vocabulary as conveyed through the eyes of "a wry, intelligent authorial voice" that extravagantly describes the physical world, while remaining squarely in the realist tradition.  He described his style as an attempt "to give the mundane its beautiful due."  Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, the only child of Linda Grace (née Hoyer) and Wesley Russell Updike, and was raised in the nearby small town of Shillington.  His mother's attempts to become a published writer impressed the young Updike.  "One of my earliest memories", he later recalled, "is of seeing her at her desk... I admired the writer's equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper.  And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in—and come back in."  These early years in Berks County, Pennsylvania, would influence the environment of the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, as well as many of his early novels and short stories.  Updike graduated from Shillington High School as co-valedictorian and class president in 1950 and attended Harvard with a full scholarship.  At Harvard, he soon became well known among his classmates as a talented and prolific contributor to the Harvard Lampoon, of which he served as president. He graduated summa cum laude in 1954 with a degree in English.  Upon graduation, Updike attended The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford with the ambition of becoming a cartoonist.  After returning to the United States, Updike and his family moved to New York, where he became a regular contributor to The New Yorker.  This was the beginning of his professional writing career.  Find cultural references and bibliography at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Updike

Twenty-five of the top robotics organizations in the world will gather to compete for $3.5 million in prizes as they attempt a simulated disaster-response course.  The event is free to attend and open to the public.  It takes place June 5-6, 2015 at Fairplex (home of the LA County Fair) in Pomona, California, just east of downtown Los Angeles.  The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) is a competition of robot systems and software teams vying to develop robots capable of assisting humans in responding to natural and man-made disasters.  Participating teams, representing some of the most advanced robotics research and development organizations in the world, are collaborating and innovating on a very short timeline to develop the hardware, software, sensors, and human-machine control interfaces that will enable their robots to complete a series of challenge tasks selected by DARPA for their relevance to disaster response.  The DRC Finals will require robots to attempt a circuit of consecutive physical tasks, with degraded communications between the robots and their operators; the winning team will receive a $2 million grand prize; DARPA plans to award $1 million to the runner-up and $500,000 to the third-place team.  http://www.theroboticschallenge.org/  Thank you, Muse reader! 

In 1973, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a research program to investigate techniques and technologies for interlinking packet networks of various kinds.  The objective was to develop communication protocols which would allow networked computers to communicate transparently across multiple, linked packet networks.  This was called the Internetting project and the system of networks which emerged from the research was known as the "Internet."  The system of protocols which was developed over the course of this research effort became known as the TCP/IP Protocol Suite, after the two initial protocols developed:  Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP).  http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet-related-networks  

May 27, 2015  CLEAN WATER RULE   About 117 million Americans--one in three people--get drinking water from streams that lacked clear protection before the Clean Water Rule.  In developing the rule, the agencies held more than 400 meetings with stakeholders across the country, reviewed over one million public comments, and listened carefully to perspectives from all sides.  EPA and the Army also utilized the latest science, including a report summarizing more than 1,200 peer-reviewed, published scientific studies which showed that small streams and wetlands play an integral role in the health of larger downstream water bodies.  The Clean Water Rule will be effective 60 days after publication in the Federal Register.  
More information:  www.epa.gov/cleanwaterrule and http://www.army.mil/asacw  See also

Quotes about the same book   No two persons ever read the same book.  Edmund Wilson, U.S. literary critic (1875-1972)  You can never step into the same book twice, because you are different each time you read it.  John Barton  Canadian poet  (b. 1957)

"Cats don't have friends.  They have co-conspirators."  
Get Fuzzy comic strip  May 31, 2015


http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1304  June 1, 2015  On this date in 1660, Mary Dyer was hanged for defying a law banning Quakers from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  On this date in 1653, Georg Muffat, French organist and composer was born.

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