The Most Unforgettable Space Shuttle Pictures

When the space shuttle Atlantis lands on Thursday, it will wrap up STS-135, the final shuttle mission in the U.S. program's 30-year history.

Even with the tragic losses of Challenger and Columbia, the space shuttle has become an icon among U.S. science and technology achievements. During the past three decades, shuttles carried the first U.S. woman and the first African American into space, deployed famous satellites such as the Hubble Space Telescope, and delivered valuable parts and supplies to the International Space Station (ISS).

"The space shuttle has been with us at the heart and soul of the human spaceflight program for about 30 years, and it's a little sad to see it go away," STS-135 mission commander Christopher Ferguson recently told reporters in a televised interview from the ISS.

"It's going to be an emotional moment for a lot of people that dedicated their lives to the shuttle program for 30 years. But we're going to try to keep it upbeat ... We're going to try to make it a celebration of the tremendous crowning achievements that have occurred."

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Sitting on a rolling platform, the space shuttle Challenger emerges from the mist at Kennedy Space Center in Florida as it heads toward the launch pad, just visible in the distance, in November 1982. Challenger lifted off on its maiden voyage in
April 1983 for the sixth shuttle mission.

Astronaut Sally Ride floats in front of the control panels for the space shuttle Challenger on June 25, 1983, while serving as a mission specialist for STS-7. Ride became the first U.S. woman in space during this mission.

Astronauts John M. Grunsfeld (right) and Richard M. Linnehan stand next to the Hubble Space Telescope, which was brought into the space shuttle Columbia's payload bay for repairs during STS-109, as seen on March 8, 2002.

The space shuttle Endeavour—payload bay doors ajar —rushes past Earth while docked to the International Space Station on May 28, 2011.

Suspended above the planet, the space shuttle Endeavour is silhouetted against the layers of Earth's atmosphere in a picture taken by an ISS crew member on February 9, 2010. The shot shows the shuttle shortly before it docked with the space station during STS-130.

Seen outside the space shuttle Discovery during STS-51-A, astronaut Dale Gardner enjoys a moment of levity as he completes a spacewalk to recover two broken communications satellites from orbit on November 14, 1984. Astronaut Joseph P. Allen IV is seen reflected in Gardner's helmet visor.

The space shuttle Columbia sits on a launch pad at Kennedy Space Center on March 5, 1981. Columbia launched on the first shuttle flight, STS-1, on April 12, 1981.  Following the first two launches, NASA calculated that they could safely shave 600 pounds (272 kilograms) from a shuttle's overall launch weight by not painting the large external fuel tank white and instead leaving its orange insulating foam exposed.

A softly glowing plume is all that remains visible of the space shuttle Endeavour after a nighttime launch from Florida's Kennedy Space Center on March 11, 2008.

Originally slated to bear the name Constitution, the first space shuttle to be built was dubbed Enterprise following a write-in campaign from Star Trek fans. Above, cast members from the science- fiction show attend the shuttle's rollout ceremony in Palmdale, California, on September 17, 1976. From left to right: Leonard Nimoy, who portrayed Vulcan science officer Spock; George Takei, who was helmsman Hikaru Sulu; DeForest Kelly, who was chief medical officer Leonard "Bones" McCoy; and James Doohan, who was chief engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott.

Spectators gather in the late-morning heat to watch the space shuttle Atlantis lift off for STS-135, the final shuttle mission, on July 8, 2011.

A cloud of debris spreads in the sky over coastal Florida as the space shuttle Challenger breaks apart on January 28, 1986. The orbiter disintegrated 74 seconds after launch during STS- 61-C, killing all seven crew members.

Earth seems ready for loading into the space shuttle Endeavour's open payload bay in a picture taken in December 1998 using an onboard IMAX camera. The large-format camera was sent into space during STS-88 in part to film the installation of the Unity Node, the first U.S. module for the International Space Station.

Technicians work on a test firing of a space shuttle main engine at the National Space Technology Laboratories in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, before the first flight of Columbia in 1981.

The crew of STS-102 works on the flight deck of the space shuttle Discovery to dock the shuttle with the International Space Station on March 10, 2001.

A technician inspects one of the nylon parachutes used to slow the descent of a space shuttle's solid rocket boosters before STS-1 in 1981. The 80-ton rockets detached shortly after launch and splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, where they were recovered for reuse.

Riding piggyback on a Boeing 747, the test shuttle Enterprise glides over the New York City skyline in June 1983. Unable to fly like airplanes under their own power, shuttle orbiters had to be transported long distances atop of other aircraft.

A tornado forms a dark column near the launch pad, where the space shuttle Columbia waits to launch on STS-93, as seen on July 20, 1999. The shuttle lifted off July 23, carrying NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory into orbit.

Staff at the Mission Control Center of Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, monitor the landing of the space shuttle Columbia on April 14, 1981, after the first ever shuttle mission to reach orbit.

Curling like bizarre sigils in the sky, plume remnants from the June 8, 2007, launch of the space shuttle Atlantis glow with the light of the setting sun. The so-called night-shining clouds created by the launch are seen over the Vehicle Assembly Building, or VAB.

Seen from the space shuttle's payload bay, astronaut Mark Lee goes for an untethered spacewalk outside Discovery in September 1994

A huge crowd—many driving recreational vehicles— gathers to watch the space shuttle Columbia land on July 4, 1982, at Edwards Air Force Base in California at the end of STS-4.

A charred astronaut helmet lying in the grass near Norwood, Texas, was among the debris found after the space shuttle Columbia broke apart during reentry on February 1, 2003. The orbiter had completed STS-107 and was returning for landing, but damaged heat shielding caused the craft to disintegrate, killing all seven crew members.

In preparation for STS-135, the space shuttle Atlantis is lifted high inside the Vehicle Assembly Building on May 18, 2011, so it can be attached to the "stack"—the combination of the large external fuel tank and twin solid rocket boosters.

The gentle green glow of the aurora australis—or southern lights—curls over Earth in a picture taken by an astronaut aboard the space shuttle Discovery on August 6, 2005.

Like a delicate water ballet, astronauts practice for a shuttle mission on December 10, 1997, in the Sonny Carter Training Facility—a giant swimming pool filled with life-size replicas of space hardware—at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

Cocoa Beach surfers watch from the water as the space shuttle Atlantis lifts off from nearby Kennedy Space Center in Florida on September 8, 2000.

Scientists found new molecule that may lead to better drug for TB

Transitmycin was extracted from marine microorganism isolated from soil sample

Scientists at the Tuberculosis Research Centre (TRC) here have hit upon a new molecule with anti-bacterial and anti-viral properties that could potentially lead to a better drug for the treatment of TB and common HIV sub-types.

The team at TRC extracted the molecule, Transitmycin, from the marine microorganism Streptomyces sp. isolated from a soil sample off the Rameswaram coral reef.

The brominated and pigmented (yellow) antibiotic was found effective during in vitro tests against dormant and active forms of Mycobacterium tuberculosis — the pathogen that triggers one of the leading infectious diseases worldwide.

Another capability

The Transitmycin molecule also exhibited promising inhibiting capability against certain common HIV sub types such as clade B and C (HIV clade C is the most common HIV strain in India) and pathogens such as E. Coli and Staphylococcus aureus.

“The significance of the discovery of this molecule is that it comes at a time when there is very little to offer to patients developing multi-drug resistance to otherwise effective drugs in the regimen like Rifampicin and isoniazid,” said Vanaja Kumar, Head of Bacteriology at TRC, Chennai.

The combined resistance to Rifampicin and isoniazid has an adverse impact on the TB control programme. Compounding matters is the emergence of extensively drug resistant tuberculosis (XDR) involving resistance to fluoroquinolone and one of the three second-line injectibles (capreomycin, kanamycin or amikacin).

Simultaneous treatment

“Equally significantly, the molecule's dual anti-bacterial and anti-viral action could lead to a drug that could simultaneously treat patients co-infected with TB-HIV,” she said. Conventionally, Rifampicin (TB) and Nevirapine (HIV) cannot be used simultaneously.

“Given the antibiotic efficiency of the basic molecule, further refinement of the compound could improve potency by 10 to 20 times,” said Mukesh Doble, Professor, Department of Biotechnology, IIT-Madras.

Along with IIT-M, Periyar University, Salem also collaborated in the Rs.20-lakh project funded by the Department of Science and Technology.

Simple structure

Among all the compounds under testing, Transitmycin proved to be the best by virtue of its simple structure, status as a polar and water-soluble compound and minimal cyto toxicity, said Luke Elizabeth Hanna, TRC scientist.

However, despite all the promise at the laboratory-level, a Transitmycin drug could be far away — at least ten years — when it is put through the acid tests of animal trials and clinical trials. The project would also require funds to the tune of around Rs.300 crore from here on.

After filing for a patent in February, the scientists have also sent a 64-page proposal to the ICMR to push the case for funded research to take the project forward.

Animal trials

R. Balagurunathan, co-investigator and head of Microbiology, Periyar University, hoped that animal trials could soon be launched as the Indian Council of Medical Research had agreed to provide linkages with ICMR institutions with animal houses.

Scientists pointed out that while actinomycetes are the most valuable microorganisms capable of producing chemically diverse metabolites with wide-ranging biological applications, the rate of discovering new compounds from terrestrial actinomycetes has decreased in the recent past.

Transitmycin belongs to the family of marine actinomycetes that are becoming the promising source for secondary metabolites. And, if it paves the way for a drug, Transitmycin holds the advantage of having its coral reef origins sterilised from human interference — this extends the time cycle of humans developing resistance to a drug derived from this molecule.

‘The right people are there, now it’s a matter of time’

Q&A

‘The right people are there, now it’s a matter of time’

Anthony James Leggett, professor of physics at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, US, won the Nobel prize for physics in 2003 for his earlier work on superfluidity. Of late, he has done pioneering work in the exciting new field of quantum computing and cryptography exploring the boundary between the strange, counter-intuitive world of elementary particles and the ‘classical’ world that we perceive with our senses. He spoke to Subodh Varma recently in Kolkata where he was attending a conference on quantum entanglement organised by the S N Bose Institute for Basic Sciences:


What is your family background? 
Well, on my father’s side, my forebears were cobblers in a village in Hampshire, UK. But my paternal grandfather opted to become a greengrocer. My maternal grandmother, who was Irish, worked as a domestic servant since a young age. Both my father and my mother were the first in their families to get a university education. In fact they met at university. They became schoolteachers in London. I studied in the local school and then got a scholarship to Oxford. I was interested in academics but not in science. I took my first degree in arts from Balliol College, and then later a second degree in physics at Merton College. I taught in Sussex for some time and then shifted to the US semi-permanently in 1983. I have been at Champaign-Urbana since then.
What is the connection between superfluidity for which you got the Nobel and quantum entanglement?
It’s a rather marginal connection really. In some superconductors and in Fermi superfluids like Helium-3, for instance, a Bose-Einstein condensate is formed between an entangled pair of particles. I developed an interest in quantum mechanics, especially entanglement in parallel.
What are you working on currently? 
I’m trying to understand low temperature superconductivity as well as quantum computing and topological insulators, although i haven’t contributed much to the latter field. There’s another project of mine with an Indian collaborator from IIT, Kharagpur. It is concerned with low-temperature properties of glass, which is a neglected subject, but it is very important.
Is it correct that a new quantum age is beginning? 
Certainly. There are a number of tasks that were earlier impossible to perform using classical means but they are possible now using quantum entanglement. Certain kinds of quantum cryptography are an example. Completely secure cryptography is now possible using quantum entanglement. Admittedly, there are other quantum mechanical schemes that don’t involve entanglement but its use is particularly elegant. Even ideas like ‘pseudotelepathy’ and ‘teleportation’ are now beginning to take shape in reality, in the sense that people have done experiments and shown that these ideas work. And certainly quantum cryptography works in real life. People have used it to send election results and i would guess that it is being used quite seriously by the military.
What is your impression of India’s role in this field? 
There are individuals in India who have made substantial contributions to quantum mechanics in general and quantum entanglement in particular. Many Indians are working in the field, some on the theoretical front, like Prof Arvind of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali, and others on the experimental front, like Prof Anil Kumar of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. It is not the kind of field that requires huge resources for experimental equipment. My impression is that the Indian educational system is not that bad in selecting good people and giving them appropriate training. So, we can look forward to more contributions in the future. The right people are there, now it’s a matter of time.

science fair!!!

this was on gawker.com so you may have already seen it, but i am posting it anyway because i think it's the best. top 10 science fair photos! and guess what! i won my science fair in 7th grade at school, and at the state competition! i'm a huge nerd!
"code of the meniscus"

"juicy beans"

"crystal meth; friend or foe?"

"animal magnetism"

science fair!!!

this was on gawker.com so you may have already seen it, but i am posting it anyway because i think it's the best. top 10 science fair photos! and guess what! i won my science fair in 7th grade at school, and at the state competition! i'm a huge nerd!
"code of the meniscus"

"juicy beans"

"crystal meth; friend or foe?"

"animal magnetism"

debwa loves...

mystery science theater 3000! (the movie)
since unicorn jones didn't have a childhood and was only recently introduced to MST3K and never saw any of the tv episodes, she can only love the movie. it's premise is this mad scientist dude puts this guy in outer space (in a dog bone shaped spaceship) and makes him watch old bad sci-fi movies until he goes crazy. but the dude invents a couple robots to keep him company, so instead of going crazy when he watches the movies, he and the robots just make v. funny comments.


the set-up is you are actually watching the old sci-fi movie, but at the bottom of the screen you see the silhouette of the human and the two robots and hear their comments over the movie.