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Alvin Retamar, Chief Science Research Specialist and Project Leader of Philippine Earth Data Resource and Observation Center (PEDRO) said some institutions they have been helping are even calling for higher level training in the space sciences.

“In some areas where we are providing support they are already keen on developing aerospace engineering degree programs,” Retamar said.


Original post from ABS-CBN News

MANILA — The Philippines has enough brainpower to staff a proposed space agency, officials from the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) said Wednesday.

A new study shows that Mars may very well be volcanically active. Nobody’s seen direct evidence of volcanism; no eruptions or magma or anything like that. Rather, the proof is in the water.

In the past, Mars was a much warmer and wetter place. Now, Mars is still home to lots of water, mostly as vapor and ice. But in August 2018, a study published in Science showed a 20-km-wide (12-mile-wide) lake of liquid water underneath solid ice at the Martian South Pole.

The authors of that study suggested that the water was probably kept in liquid state by the pressure from above, and by dissolved salt content.

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Earth is getting a special celestial visitor this week in the shape of comet C/2018 Y1 Iwamoto — this sparkling, green-hued hunk of ice and minerals is already visible in the night sky through telescopes and even binoculars.

It’s the first binocular comet of 2019 – which means a comet that’s visible from Earth through binoculars, as you might have guessed from the name; we only get a few of them each year.

This particular comet was only discovered a couple of months ago – credit due to amateur astronomer Masayuki Iwamoto – and the icy rock is calculated to take 1,371 years to orbit the Sun on a stretched out, elliptical path.

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In a 2018 Science paper, co-authored with Jacob Bellmund, Christian Doeller, and Edvard Moser—neuroscientists from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig and the Kavli Institute in Trondheim—Gärdenfors, of the University of Lund, buttressed his idea with recent advances in brain science. He argued that the brain represents concepts in the same way that it represents space and your location, by using the same neural circuitry for the brain’s “inner GPS.”

“Cognitive spaces are a way of thinking about how our brain might organize our knowledge of the world,” Bellmund said. It’s an approach that concerns not only geographical data, but also relationships between objects and experience. “We were intrigued by evidence from many different groups that suggested that the principles of spatial coding in the hippocampus seem to be relevant beyond the realms of just spatial navigation,” Bellmund said. The hippocampus’ place and grid cells, in other words, map not only physical space but conceptual space. It appears that our representation of objects and concepts is very tightly linked with our representation of space.

Gärdenfors’ theory highlights a fruitful path, not only for cognitive scientists, but for neurologists and machine-learning researchers.

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