Disney's next animated feature, 'Moana,' slated for 2016 release

By Kate Stanton
Oct. 20, 2014

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 20 (UPI) -- Disney Animation Studios announced Monday that its 56th animated feature film, Moana, would hit theaters in late 2016, two years earlier than expected.

Along with the new release date, Disney shared concept art from the film, which will tell the story of a Polynesian princess who "sets sail in search of a fabled island."

Here's the plot synopsis (via IGN):

    In the ancient South Pacific world of Oceania, Moana, a born navigator, sets sail in search of a fabled island. During her incredible journey, she teams up with her hero, the legendary demi-god Maui, to traverse the open ocean on an action-packed voyage, encountering enormous sea creatures, breathtaking underworlds and ancient folklore.

Moana will be directed by Disney hit-makers Ron Clements and John Musker.

"John and I have partnered on so many films -- from The Little Mermaid to Aladdin to The Princess and the Frog," Clements said in a statement. "Creating Moana is one of the great thrills of our career. It's a big adventure set in this beautiful world of Oceania."

Source: United Press International (UPI).
Link: http://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/2014/10/20/Disneys-next-animated-feature-Moana-slated-for-2016-release/3641413860858/.

Israel clampdown at shrine fuels Muslim fears

November 07, 2014

JERUSALEM (AP) — Hundreds of Palestinians knelt on prayer carpets in a Jerusalem street Friday, faced by a cordon of Israeli riot police who blocked them from reaching Islam's third- holiest shrine in the nearby Old City.

The worshipers eventually dispersed peacefully, but the scene highlighted the escalating tensions over the holy site — a walled, hilltop plateau known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as the Temple Mount.

Israel argues that restricting access to the shrine, which has been common in recent weeks, is needed to clamp down on growing unrest in the contested city of 810,000 people. On Friday, Muslims under age 35 were denied entry, while restrictions were broader in preceding weeks.

Jerusalem's Muslims, who make up about a third of the population, say the security clampdown only heightens fears that their traditional control of the holy site, home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the gold-topped Dome of the Rock, is under threat from Jewish zealots.

In recent weeks, senior members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition have called for a greater Jewish presence and right to prayer on the mount, which is Judaism's holiest site, stirring Muslim worries about encroachment. Under an arrangement in place since Israel's capture of the Old City and its shrines in 1967, the sacred plateau is administered by Muslims reporting to Jordan, while Jews have a right to visit.

Any perceived attempt to change the existing prayer arrangements at the shrine is seen by local Muslims as highly provocative. They say they view it as another threat to their status and identity. Many Palestinian residents of the city complain of high taxes for poor municipal services, compared with those offered in Jewish neighborhoods, as well as severe restrictions on building permits.

Mohammed Fakhouri, a 38-year-old shopkeeper in the Old City, said the restrictions on prayer at the Al-Aqsa Mosque are the last straw, adding that he hasn't been able to attend for the past five weeks because of the age limits.

"Like the Jewish people, we pay taxes, and we don't get anything from Israel," he said. "They don't let us build houses. ... If you can't go pray, what's after this?" Muslims from the West Bank face even greater difficulties in reaching the shrine because they must have Israeli permits to enter Jerusalem. Those with permits pass through barbed-wire topped terminals in Israel's separation barrier, often enduring long waits en route to the mosque.

Earlier this week, Netanyahu reassured Jordan's King Abdullah II that Israel would not change the status quo at the holy site and that Israeli politicians expressing a different view were not speaking for the government. Jordan had recalled its ambassador in protest after a police raid over a clash at the entrance to the mosque.

On Friday, Netanyahu made no mention of those politicians, instead blaming "militant Islamic incitement" for the increasing violence in Jerusalem. This has included near-daily clashes between Palestinian stone-throwers and Israeli police in Arab neighborhoods of the city and two deadly attacks in which Palestinians drove vehicles into crowds waiting at light-rail stops in Jerusalem. In another incident, a Palestinian on a motorcycle shot and seriously wounded a prominent Jewish campaigner for more access to the Temple Mount.

The most recent attack, on Wednesday, was carried out by an activist from the Islamic militant group Hamas who drove his minivan into a train stop, killing one man and wounding 13. One of the wounded, 17-year-old Shalom Ahron Badani, died Friday of his injuries.

Hamas, the main rival of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, has been trying to harness the growing frustration among Palestinians, calling Friday for a "popular uprising" across the Palestinian territories in defense of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Abbas' security forces broke up Hamas-led protests of several hundred people in the West Bank's two largest cities, Hebron and Nablus, witnesses said. Aides have said Abbas is concerned that Hamas, which seized the Gaza Strip from him in 2007, is trying to foment unrest to weaken his grip on areas of the West Bank that are under self-rule.

Israeli forces, meanwhile, clamped down on protests in two areas under their control, the Shuafat refugee camp in Jerusalem and the Qalandiya checkpoint on the outskirts of the city. At Qalandiya, police fired tear gas at Palestinian stone-throwers.

Ahead of noon prayers Friday at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, about 1,300 police were deployed in and around the Old City. They manned metal barricades, checking identity papers and directing pedestrians. At one checkpoint in the Wadi Joz area, just outside the Old City, some 500 young Palestinians who were denied entry to the mosque compound because of their age performed prayers on a street, kneeling on carpets spread on the asphalt. They were faced by a row of riot police in black uniforms and helmets, as well as several officers on horseback.

"We are steadfast here," said one of the worshippers, who gave only his first name, Raed, for fear of Israeli repercussions. "We pray here despite the Israeli restraints." Police spokeswoman Luba Samri denied that police were favoring one religion over another and rejected Palestinian claims that the heavy police presence near the shrine was contributing to tensions.

"We don't operate according to what the Palestinians would like," she said. "We operate according to what we feel we need to do, based on intelligence reports and our analysis of the situation, to maintain law and order in the area."

The recent escalation in Jerusalem also set off an intense debate in Israel. Center-left politicians have accused ultra-nationalists of recklessly provoking Muslims with talk of changing the status quo, and warned that violence in Jerusalem could quickly spin out of control. In the past, confrontations at the holy site have triggered major rounds of fighting.

Rabbinical opinion is also divided. Many ultra-Orthodox rabbis oppose prayer by Jews at the site under the current conditions on religious grounds. Some nationalist clerics have been encouraging attempts to pray there.

On Friday, Israel's chief Sephardic rabbi called right-wing encouragement for Israelis to pray at the Temple Mount "incitement" and said it had to stop. "I issue a call that it is prohibited for Jews to go to the Temple Mount," Yitzhak Yosef said at the funeral of the 17-year-old who was killed in Wednesday's minivan attack. "I issue a call to end this so that the blood of the people of Israel will flow no more."

3 astronauts land safely in Kazakhstan steppe

November 10, 2014

MOSCOW (AP) — A Russian Soyuz space capsule carrying three astronauts from the International Space Station has landed safely in the frozen Kazakhstan steppe.

The trio of NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman, Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency and Maxim Suraev of Russia landed as scheduled at 9:58 a.m. local time Monday (0358 GMT Monday, 10:58 p.m. EST Sunday). They had spent more than five months in orbit, doing research and helping maintain the space outpost orbiting the Earth.

A key research focus during their mission was human health management for long-duration space travel. NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos are preparing to have two crew members spend one full year aboard the space station beginning in 2015.

NASA's Barry Wilmore and Russian cosmonauts Alexander Samokutyaev and Elena Serova remained on the space station.

Scientists gear up to land 1st spacecraft on comet

November 07, 2014

BERLIN (AP) — The European Space Agency is making final preparations to land the first unmanned spacecraft on a comet next week, and scientists are hoping that technology designed a quarter century ago will perform as planned.

Europe's Rosetta space probe was launched in 2004 with the aim of studying comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and learning more about the origins of the universe. After successfully getting Rosetta to rendezvous with the comet in August, scientists intend to release a small landing craft called Philae onto its icy surface.

The drop — scheduled for 0835 GMT (3:35 a.m. EST) Wednesday — requires a series of complex orbital maneuvers over the coming days. Since signals take over 28 minutes to travel the 500 million kilometers (311 million miles) from Earth to Rosetta, scientists have programmed the probe to perform the separation sequence itself when the moment is right.

They will rely on what, in digital terms, is ancient technology. "The design and building started some 20 years ago," mission manager Fred Jansen told reporters Friday. "Effectively you're looking at technology, computing-wise, of the end of the 1980s."

The 100-kilogram (220-pound) lander should touch down on the surface of the comet about seven hours later, with confirmation reaching Earth at about 1603 GMT (11:03 a.m. EST). "There is no doubt that we'll hit the comet," said spacecraft operations manager Andrea Accomazzo. "Whether we hit it safely is another matter."

The European Space Agency, which relies for funding on its member states, has sought to drum up public interest in the mission with a series of high-profile campaigns over the past year. These include an online vote on what to name the landing site — Agilkia, after an island on the Nile River, was chosen — and the release of a sci-fi short film called "Ambition" starring "Game of Thrones" actor Aidan Gillen.

The landing event will be streamed on the space agency's website.

Alternative Earths Team To Join NASA Astrobiology Institute

Riverside CA (SPX)
Oct 14, 2014

If we're looking at Mars, or planets in solar systems far, far away, how can we tell whether they support life? Researchers at the University of California, Riverside will share a $50 million grant from the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) to help answer that question by studying ancient rocks on Earth to determine how oxygen developed in our atmosphere billions of years ago.

Specifically, UC Riverside's team will spend five years trying to map the different states of life on Earth from 3.2 billion years ago-when bacteria may have first begun oxygen-producing photosynthesis-to about 700 million years ago, about the time animals came on the scene, said UCR Distinguished Professor of Biogeochemistry Timothy Lyons, leader of the "Alternative Earths" team.

"The rate of discovery of exoplanets-planets from other solar systems-has been exponential, but we are a long way from the technology required to visit those planets, so the question is, what can we learn from early Earth to inform our exploration of life in the universe?" Lyons said.

"Earth is the only planet we know of that has life, so why look for life all over the universe if you don't, at the same time, explore how life evolved on our planet, and the signatures of that early life? It seems obvious, but it hasn't always been an easy sell to spend millions of dollars to look at 3-billion-year-old rocks from around the world to understand what might be on Mars or an exoplanet light years away."

UCR's team is one of only seven interdisciplinary teams selected to become members of the NAI, which is headquartered at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. According to NASA, "average funding for each team will be approximately $8 million."

The other six teams chosen to join the NAI are from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA's Ames Research Center, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the SETI Institute, the University of Colorado in Boulder, and the University of Montana in Missoula.

The idea behind the UCR-led study is to imagine what you could see if you were observing Earth remotely 3 billion years ago, Lyons said. What kind of evidence would confirm that our planet was habitable, and in fact teeming with life?

Liquid water and temperatures in the "Goldilocks Zone"-neither too hot nor too cold to sustain life-are already known to be important markers for habitability. The presence of oxygen can also be an indicator of complex life (such as animals that require oxygen), Lyons said. It isn't necessary for all life, but oxygen is a product, and therefore a signature, of life, he said, whether produced by plants or, as it was initially, by bacteria.

In fact, in its first 2 billion years or so, Earth didn't have any oxygen in its oceans or atmosphere.

The planet was constantly changing during its early history; it was hot, it was cold; it was mostly water and then it had land, continents which formed, grew and collided through plate tectonics.

Yet life existed through all those changes, Lyons said. People and other animals couldn't have lived on Earth 3 billion years ago, but there was life nonetheless-simple organisms like photosynthetic bacteria that ultimately caused oxygen to accumulate in our atmosphere about 2.4 billion years ago.

So if you were looking at Earth from afar, trying to determine whether there was life, what would you see in those early years? That's what Lyons' team will be trying to recreate, using clues from very ancient rocks collected by drilling or by sampling outcrops exposed at the surface.

Many of the rocks have already been collected from parts of Australia, Brazil, Canada, Russia and multiple spots on the African continent, including Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia, Gabon and Angola.

"South Africa and Australia, for example, have wonderful exposures of some very ancient rocks that are not heavily altered by time," Lyons said. "We also have some money to explore new areas with high potential for new perspectives, but we already have one of the best collections of materials ever assembled for a project of this sort.

"The kinds of rocks we look at are in layers, with the oldest at the bottom, and each of the layers is a page in the history of the ever-changing biology and chemistry of the oceans, land surfaces and the atmosphere on early Earth. We're trying to read that book, and if we find fossils in the rocks, great, but fossils are rare in rocks that old, so we'll be looking more at the chemical fingerprints left by the processes of life, as a way of telling us what was happening then on Earth."

These fingerprints, Lyons said, "are exactly those NASA is searching for on Mars and will use in its exploration beyond our solar system."

The Alternative Earths project will also study tectonic movement as a driver of large-scale environmental change and how that impacted the evolution of oxygen and life on Earth.

The UCR-led project will involve 19 scientists from 11 academic institutions, including Yale University (Lyons's alma mater), Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), Arizona State University, J. Craig Venter Institute, Oregon Health and Science University, Pennsylvania State University and Rice University, two universities in Denmark and one in Belgium.

The two working group leaders are both former UCR graduate students who studied with Lyons-Noah Planavsky, assistant professor geochemistry at Yale, and Chris Reinhard, assistant professor at Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

They will work most closely with Lyons to coordinate the efforts of the widely dispersed team. UCR professors involved in the project are Andrey Bekker, Mary Droser and Gordon Love, all members of the Earth Sciences Department.

"This award is large by any standard, and with it comes terrific opportunity and responsibility," Lyons said.

"It's the culmination of the 10 years I've spent at UCR, and the wonderful students, postdocs and colleagues I have worked with. It feels like a crowning achievement, because of the size of it, all the people involved, and the research foundation it builds on. I am delighted about the group we have assembled and the unique opportunities that lie ahead. It speaks to the strength of astrobiology at UCR and the legacy of that tradition. I couldn't be happier."

Source: Space Daily.
Link: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/UC_Riversides_Alternative_Earths_Team_Selected_to_Join_the_NASA_Astrobiology_Institute_999.html.

NASA Mission Finds Widespread Evidence of Young Lunar Volcanism

Washington DC (SPX)
Oct 14, 2014

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has provided researchers strong evidence the moon's volcanic activity slowed gradually instead of stopping abruptly a billion years ago.

Scores of distinctive rock deposits observed by LRO are estimated to be less than 100 million years old. This time period corresponds to Earth's Cretaceous period, the heyday of dinosaurs. Some areas may be less than 50 million years old. Details of the study are published online in Sunday's edition of Nature Geoscience.

"This finding is the kind of science that is literally going to make geologists rewrite the textbooks about the moon," said John Keller, LRO project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The deposits are scattered across the moon's dark volcanic plains and are characterized by a mixture of smooth, rounded, shallow mounds next to patches of rough, blocky terrain. Because of this combination of textures, the researchers refer to these unusual areas as irregular mare patches.

The features are too small to be seen from Earth, averaging less than a third of a mile (500 meters) across in their largest dimension. One of the largest, a well-studied area called Ina, was imaged from lunar orbit by Apollo 15 astronauts.

Ina appeared to be a one-of-a-kind feature until researchers from Arizona State University in Tempe and Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat Munster in Germany spotted many similar regions in high-resolution images taken by the two Narrow Angle Cameras that are part of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC. The team identified a total of 70 irregular mare patches on the near side of the moon.

The large number of these features and their wide distribution strongly suggest that late-stage volcanic activity was not an anomaly but an important part of the moon's geologic history.

The numbers and sizes of the craters within these areas indicate the deposits are relatively recent. Based on a technique that links such crater measurements to the ages of Apollo and Luna samples, three of the irregular mare patches are thought to be less than 100 million years old, and perhaps less than 50 million years old in the case of Ina.

The steep slopes leading down from the smooth rock layers to the rough terrain are consistent with the young age estimates.

In contrast, the volcanic plains surrounding these distinctive regions are attributed to volcanic activity that started about 3 1/2 billion years ago and ended roughly 1 billion years ago. At that point, all volcanic activity on the moon was thought to cease.

Several earlier studies suggested that Ina was quite young and might have formed due to localized volcanic activity. However, in the absence of other similar features, Ina was not considered an indication of widespread volcanism.

The findings have major implications for how warm the moon's interior is thought to be.

"The existence and age of the irregular mare patches tell us that the lunar mantle had to remain hot enough to provide magma for the small-volume eruptions that created these unusual young features," said Sarah Braden, a recent Arizona State University graduate and the lead author of the study.

The new information is hard to reconcile with what currently is thought about the temperature of the interior of the moon.

"These young volcanic features are prime targets for future exploration, both robotic and human," said Mark Robinson, LROC principal investigator at Arizona State University.

Source: Moon Daily.
Link: http://www.moondaily.com/reports/NASA_Mission_Finds_Widespread_Evidence_of_Young_Lunar_Volcanism_999.html.

Russia to take Moon exploration as core of space program

Moscow (XNA)
Oct 14, 2014

Russia will take the Moon exploration as a core of its space program for the next decade, Federal Space Agency Roscosmos said Friday.

"This year Roscosmos has prepared a long-term program of deep space exploration, with exploration of the Moon as the core," the agency's official Yuri Makarov said.

According to the Roscosmos official website, the new program is also aimed at exploring other planets in the Solar System.

The program envisages building infrastructure of the permanent lunar settlements near the Moon's south Pole, along with explorations using unmanned vehicles.

Russian space industry is capable to solve technological problems met in the ambitious program, the Interfax news agency quoted Makarov as saying.

Roscosmos forecasts the first Russian manned expedition to the Moon could be sent in late 2020s. Once conducted successfully, it would be the first manned mission to the Moon after a break of more than 40 years following the U.S. Apollo program.

Before the manned expedition, three automatic missions, namely Luna-25, -26 and -27, are expected to be fulfilled.

The last lunar mission, Luna-24, was undertaken by the Soviet Union in August 1976, which proved presence of water in samples brought back from the Moon.

Luna-24 was also the last spacecraft that landed on the moon until the arrival of the Chinese Chang'e-3 in December 2013.

Source: Moon Daily.
Link: http://www.moondaily.com/reports/Russia_to_take_Moon_exploration_as_core_of_space_program_999.html.