Gender inequality persists in multitasking: study

A woman pushes her pram towards an ice cream vendor on Portstewart Strand beach, Northern Ireland, May 10, 2009.

Credit: Reuters/Cathal McNaughton

By Patricia Reaney

NEW YORK | Fri Dec 2, 2011 8:07am EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Men may be helping more in the home but working women still do more multitasking in U.S. families than their partners and are finding it stressful, according to a new study.

Whether it is housework, cooking or childcare, women do about 10 hours more multitasking in the home each week -- 48.3 hours compared to 38.9 -- which researchers say constitutes an important source of gender inequality.

"When you look at men and women in similar kinds of work situations they look very similar," Barbara Schneider, a professor of sociology at Michigan State University and a co-author of the study, said in an interview.

"But when they come home it is very clear that women are shouldering much more of the responsibilities of housework and childcare."

Schneider and Shira Offer, an assistant professor at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, used data from the 500 Family Study, which looked at how families in eight U.S. urban and suburban communities balance work and family life.

Their research, which is published in the American Sociological Review journal, is based on responses from a subset of 368 mothers and 241 fathers in dual-income families, which they said reflects the most time-pressured segment of the population.

"This (the findings) suggests that working mothers are doing two activities at once more than two-fifths of the time they are awake, while working fathers are multitasking more than a third of their waking hours," Schneider said.

In addition to doing more, the jobs women perform at the same time in the home are more labor intensive, such as housework and childcare, than what men tackle.

The study showed that 52.7 percent of all multitasking for working mothers involved housework, compared to 42.2 percent for fathers, and 35.5 percent was taken up with childcare, as opposed to 27.9 percent for men.

"Fathers, by contrast, tend to engage in other types of activities when they multitask at home, such as talking to a third person or engaging in self-care. These are less burdensome experiences," Schneider explained.

The researchers said the study showed multitasking is also more stressful for women. Only women reported negative emotions when they multitasked at home or in public, while men found it a positive experience.

"We should not be under any false assumptions that things have dramatically changed," said Schneider when asked about the role of women at home and at work.

"I think there are still many issues, both in the workplace and certainly in the home, that suggest there are and continue to be gender inequalities."

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Stormy sun could knock out power grids: report

By Ethan Bilby

LONDON | Fri Dec 2, 2011 12:40pm EST

LONDON (Reuters) - An upcoming cycle of stormy solar activity risks causing damage to electrical transformers and threatening vulnerable energy infrastructure around the globe, a report by an insurance group says.

The sun follows a predictable 11 year activity cycle, with the next period of stormy activity expected to begin in 2012-13.

The report by German insurance group Allianz said a high impact solar storm, not easily predicted due to its recorded rarity, could cause blackouts and economic losses of over $1 trillion and that the worst case scenario would be even worse.

"What we're coming into at the moment is the bad (space)weather period," Jim Wild of Britain's Lancaster University, an expert in solar plasma physics, told Reuters.

A large explosion on the surface of the sun could release billions of tones of superheated magnetically charged gas at a speed of a million miles per hour, and when that gas hits the earth's magnetic field, it can trigger a big solar storm.

The severity of a potential disruption has made experts at insurance and national security institutions take notice.

"When you start to imagine not having electricity in a sizeable fraction of a country or a continent for weeks or even months ... it's serious business," Wild said.

SMALL LEAD TIME

The difficulty lies in predicting how often serious solar type events occur.

The small lead time given by satellites is also a problem for preventing solar storm damage, as currently no satellite is close enough to the sun to give more than an hour's warning, Wild said.

Updating the satellites to give the earth more preparation time would cost around $1 billion, he added.

Space weather is a relatively new area of study, with sophisticated observations going back only 50 years and lacking an international coordinated tracking system such as that found with normal meteorological weather.

"We have very little on a solar time scale," Wild said.

The most damaging storm in recent memory was a 1989 outage in Quebec, Canada, which affected six million people.

The first scientific recording of a large solar storm was made in 1859 by English astronomer Richard Carrington, who observed a white light explosion on the surface of the sun.

Wild said: "what they didn't know back then was why about two or three days later you could see the northern lights over Cuba and all of the telegraph system was disrupted by geomagnetic activity."

According to the Allianz report, an event on the same scale today would cause extensive damage to electrical infrastructure.

(Editing by Henning Gloystein and James Jukwey)

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Apollo 13 notebook fetches $388,375 at auction

By Marice Richter

DALLAS | Wed Nov 30, 2011 7:25pm EST

DALLAS (Reuters) - Shortly after Apollo 13 astronauts reported, "Houston, we have had a problem," Commander James Lovell jotted down handwritten calculations in hopes of guiding his crew safely home.

The notebook with those calculations from the aborted 1970 NASA mission to the moon fetched $388,375 at auction on Wednesday in Dallas when it was sold to an American collector who was not identified.

The notebook, the main attraction of a space memorabilia auction, was part of retired NASA commander Lovell's personal collection of artifacts. Lovell, 83, said he had forgotten about the notebook until recently.

"I was cleaning out some old stuff on a bookcase and found it," said Lovell, who now has homes in Horseshoe Bay, Texas, and the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest. "My kids took all they wanted and I donated a lot of my collection to museums."

"I decided to put this up for auction so that someone who is really interested in this piece of history can enjoy it," he told Reuters.

People around the world watched as Lovell and astronauts Jack Swigert and Fred Haise aborted their mission to the moon and maneuvered quickly in space to survive after encountering a critical operating problem aboard the spacecraft's command module. They had to shift to the lunar module to return home.

Lovell's calculations in the notebook were critical to identifying the crew's position in space.

"We didn't have the technology back then that we have now," Lovell said. "I didn't even have a calculator to do the arithmetic. I had to ask the people in Houston to double-check my numbers."

If the calculations had not been correct, the result could have been different, said Michael Riley, a senior historian at Heritage Auctions.

"That's why this is a very, very important piece of space memorabilia and American history," Riley said.

The drama of that moment in history was captured in Ron Howard's 1995 film "Apollo 13," starring Tom Hanks as Lovell.

Also sold at auction on Wednesday was an American flag from the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, which was bought for $33,460. The overall training jacket with tags and patches worn by retired astronaut John Young sold for $17,925.

(Editing by Corrie MacLaggan and Cynthia Johnston)

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Medvedev suggests prosecution for Russia space failure

Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev speaks to a group of Russian regional journalists in the Gorki residence outside Moscow, November 26, 2011.

Credit: Reuters/Mikhail Klimentyev/Ria Novosti/Kremlin (

MOSCOW | Sat Nov 26, 2011 10:19am EST

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev raised the prospect of criminal prosecution for space mishaps on Saturday following a series of failed launches that have embarrassed Russia.

Earlier this month, a probe designed to bring back soil samples from the Mars moon Phobos got stuck in Earth's orbit, leaving Russia's first interplanetary mission in years with almost no chance of success.

The probe failure came less than three months after a cargo ship carrying food and fuel to the International Space Station burned up in the atmosphere shortly after launch.

"Recent failures are a strong blow to our competitiveness. It does not mean that something fatal has happened, it means that we need to carry out a detailed review and punish those guilty," Medvedev told reporters in televised comments.

"I am not suggesting putting them up against the wall like under Josef Vissarionovich (Stalin), but seriously punish either financially or, if the fault is obvious, it could be a disciplinary or even criminal punishment," he said.

Medvedev has recently made similar calls for strict punishment after disasters blamed on carelessness, corruption and problems with Russia's rusty infrastructure, such as a riverboat sinking in July that killed 122.

(Reporting by Maria Kiselyova; Editing by Steve Gutterman and Sophie Hares)

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Elan to create research centre with Cambridge University

DUBLIN | Sun Nov 27, 2011 4:14am EST

DUBLIN (Reuters) - Elan Corp Plc has signed an agreement with Britain's Cambridge University to create a research center focused on therapies for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, the Dublin-headquartered biotech group said on Sunday.

Elan, whose main research facility is in San Francisco, will spend $10 million over the next five years on the research center and has an option to extend the deal for another five years.

Researchers from Cambridge and Elan want to discover ways of altering the behavior of proteins that can spread neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

"This agreement is a natural next step in the existing working relationship between our scientists in South San Francisco and scientists at the University of Cambridge," Dale Schenk, chief scientific officer at Elan, said in a statement.

"This collaborative effort complements our portfolio of programmes in neuroscience and supports the process of discovery which we believe may lead to a class of therapeutics that no one has thought possible before."

(Reporting by Carmel Crimmins; Editing by David Holmes)

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NASA's Dawn Spacecraft Discovers Mountain on Asteroid Vesta 'Higher Than Mount Everest' (ContributorNetwork)

NASA's Dawn space craft has taken an image of a mountain on the asteroid Vesta that is higher than Mount Everest, according to the U.K. Daily Mail. It is the latest in spectacular pictures taken by the probe now orbiting the asteroid.

* The mountain, as yet unnamed, is 13 miles high and is surrounded by features that scientists believe were caused by landslides. By contrast Mount Everest is about 5 1/2 miles high.

* Dawn has also imaged a mysterious dark spot on Vesta's equator, about 60 miles wide.

* Dawn was launched from Earth on Sept 27, 2007. It used Mars for a gravity assist in February 2009. It arrived at Vesta in July. It will depart from orbit around Vesta in July 2012 and arrive at Ceres, the largest asteroid in the solar system, in February 2015.

* Dawn used an ion propulsion system to fly to Vesta, a voyage that took nearly four years.

* Dawn's instruments include a framing camera, a visible and infrared spectrometer, and a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer.

* Dawn's primary objective is to gain a better understanding of the origins of the solar system by studying Vesta and then Ceres at close range.

* Dawn is orbiting Vesta at a height of 420 miles, circling the asteroid every 12.3 hours.

* Dawn has completed a series of orbits designed to image Vesta's features straight down. It will now image those same features at an angle. This will aid in the creation of topographical maps of the asteroid as whereas stereo images of individual features. The images are being taken in both visible and infrared light.

* Vesta was discovered by German astronomer and physician Wilhelm Olbers on March 29, 1807.

* Vesta is named after the ancient Roman goddess of the hearth.

* Vesta's orbit around the sun takes 3.63 years.

* Vesta is an irregularly shaped body with an approximant diameter of 530 kilometers.

* Vesta rotates every 5.342 hours.

* Vesta's surface is silicate rock with a nickel-iron core. It is thought not to have accreted a lot of water or may have lost most of its water in the distant past.

* Scientists believe that Vesta suffered a major impact from another body almost its side, creating a crater that reaches deep within its mantle, exposing the material within. This gives Dawn an opportunity to examine that material remotely and perhaps gain some insights into the mantles of other celestial bodies, such as Earth or Mars.

Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker. He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the L.A. Times and The Weekly Standard.

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Space Shuttle Pink Slip in Hand, LA Plans 'Mother of All Parades' for Endeavour (SPACE.com)

LOS ANGELES — Space shuttle Endeavour's transfer from NASA to the California Science Center for its public display was signed and sealed Tuesday (Oct. 11). Now all that remains for the retired orbiter is for it to be delivered — a feat local leaders promise will be as large a spectacle as it is a challenge.

"This is going to be a big, big event and a big, big object, and it is going to be a lot of work to get it but we couldn't be prouder," Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said at the title transfer ceremony held at the science center.

Using, appropriately enough, pressurized space pens to sign oversized title certificates, NASA's deputy associate administrator Richard Keegan and the California Science Center's (CSC) president Jeffrey Rudolph signed over and accepted the orbiter. [NASA's Space Shuttle Program In Pictures: A Tribute]

"The transfer of Endeavour, now done, from NASA to the California Science Center doesn't commemorate the end of Endeavour's work but the start of its next mission," Rudolph said. "We're committed to be excellent stewards for Endeavour and making sure it is successful on its new mission of advancing science learning and encouraging a passion for exploration as it was on its missions."

First signed, last to ship

Endeavour's delivery from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the west coast is not expected until next fall. In the interim, the space agency will continue preparing the spacecraft to be safe for public display while retaining its three main engines and other hardware for possible use with future launch vehicles.

The CSC, meanwhile, will use the time to construct a new temporary building to house Endeavour and raise the $200 million it needs to build a new Air and Space Center where the shuttle will stand, vertically, as its centerpiece.

Endeavour is the first of NASA's three retired space-flown orbiters to have its ownership transferred since the space shuttle program ended in August. Shuttle Discovery's title will be signed over to the Smithsonian after its arrival in Virginia, planned for next April. Atlantis will remain NASA property at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.

Shuttle Enterprise, which didn't fly in space but was used for atmospheric test flights, is similarly set to be given to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York City next year.

Mother of all parades

Just as it did when it landed in California after seven of its 25 space missions, only in reverse, Endeavour will make its final cross country trip from Kennedy Space Center to Los Angeles atop a modified Boeing 747 airliner.

Once on the ground at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), the shuttle will hit the road for the science center.

"It is going to circle [flying above] the L.A. area three times and then we're going to have a parade. The mother of all parades!" Villaraigosa announced. "People will be lining up the street from LAX through the great city of Inglewood, down Martin Luther King Boulevard — it is going to be a sight to be seen."

At 122 feet (38 meters) long and with a wingspan of 78 feet (24 meters), the shuttle is a much wider load than usual Los Angeles traffic. The city and neighboring Inglewood will need to remove and replace street signs, traffic lights, trees and other obstacles along Endeavour's way. Even then, the 13 miles between the airport and CSC will still be a slow roll using a NASA-furnished "overland transporter" — a wheeled-trailer — for the road trip.

"It is going to be amazing watching this space shuttle inch its way through the streets, going instead of 17,500 miles an hour [like when it was in orbit], maybe 1 mile per hour," Mike Fincke, an astronaut on Endeavour's STS-134 final flight crew, told collectSPACE during a press conference at the science center. "It's going to be a really motivating day, I think, for all us to watch the space shuttle inch its way here."

"It's going to be like the Pied Piper leading the kids," Fincke added. "There are going to be so many people coming and getting inspired. I'm really enthused about it. I think the team here has done a lot of homework. They've got a lot of work to go but I think they are going to pull it off brilliantly."

Temporary home

When Endeavour finally rolls up to the science center, a display building will be ready to house it. Construction on the new exhibit hall is set to begin soon.

"We've picked pretty much the design of what we're going to do in the location," CSC Vice President William Harris told collectSPACE. "Fortunately we have a space where it fits. The flow will be through the science center because it has to be an environmentally enclosed space that is also secure. We can provide that."

But that display, which will exhibit Endeavour horizontally as if it just landed back from space, is intended to be only temporary. For its permanent exhibit, the CSC is planning something much taller.

Continue reading at collectSPACE.com about the California Science Center’s planned vertical shuttle display and how you can join Team Endeavour by sponsoring a space shuttle tile.

Follow collectSPACE on Facebook and Twitter @collectSPACE and editor Robert Pearlman @robertpearlman. Copyright 2011 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.

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