Missouri Botanical Garden signs exchange agreement with 3 botanical institutions in China

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Missouri Botanical Garden signs exchange agreement with 3 botanical institutions in China Posted: 18 Nov 2011 05:00 AM PST ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) ST. LOUIS -- The Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, Mo. USA has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with three of China's botanical institutions in an effort to promote conservation, education and awareness about plant diversity. The mutually beneficial agreement between the Missouri Botanical Garden and the Nanjing Botanical Garden, Lushan Botanical Garden and Guangxi Institute of Botany calls for the exchange of herbarium specimens, plant materials, publications, data, scientific materials and personnel (staff and students), for the purpose of sharing experiences. The Memorandum of Understanding was signed on October 28, 2011 at the Missouri Botanical Garden. Agreements such as these are frequently undertaken to explore a mutual, shared scientific challenge. In this case, each of our institutions are keenly aware of the current threats to our respective floras, and through these agreements we seek to work jointly in documenting the plants found in our areas of interest, study the effects of climate variation on the ecosystems and promote our respective scientific efforts through collaborations, said Dr. Peter Wyse Jackson, president of the Missouri Botanical Garden. The exchange of staff, literature and ideas can only enhance our botanical, horticultural and conservation research and promote our efforts to mediate the common threats to biodiversity. The cooperative agreement calls for the Missouri Botanical Garden, Nanjing Botanical Garden, Lushan Botanical Garden and Guangxi Institute of Botany to pinpoint the relevant program opportunities and research needs at each of their institutions and identify staff and scientists to participate in the exchange. Administrators will propose, coordinate and supervise all exchange programs and projects, and each institution will provide appropriate assistance to visiting staff and research scientists. The exchange of plant materials and herbarium specimens supports the... http://www.rxpgnews.com

VLBA observations key to 'complete description' of black hole Posted: 17 Nov 2011 05:00 AM PST ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) For the first time, astronomers have produced a complete description of a black hole, a concentration of mass so dense that not even light can escape its powerful gravitational pull. Their precise measurements have allowed them to reconstruct the history of the object from its birth some six million years ago. Using several telescopes, both ground-based and in orbit, the scientists unravelled longstanding mysteries about the object called Cygnus X-1, a famous binary-star system discovered to be strongly emitting X-rays nearly a half-century ago. The system consists of a black hole and a companion star from which the black hole is drawing material. The scientists' efforts yielded the most accurate measurements ever of the black hole's mass and spin rate. Because no other information can escape from a black hole, knowing its mass, spin, and electrical charge gives a complete description of it, said Mark Reid, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). The charge of this black hole is nearly zero, so measuring its mass and spin make our description complete, he added. Though Cygnus X-1 has been studied intensely since its discovery, previous attempts to measure its mass and spin suffered from lack of a precise measurement of its distance from Earth. Reid led a team that used the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline (VLBA), a continent-wide radio-telescope system, to make a direct trigonometric measurement of the distance. Their VLBA observations provided a distance of 6070 light-years, while previous estimates had ranged from 5800-7800 light-years. Armed with the new, precise distance measurement, scientists using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer, the Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics, and visible-light observations made over more than two decades, calculated that the black hole in Cygnus X-1 is nearly 15 times more massive than our Sun and is spinning more... http://www.rxpgnews.com

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