The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency on Tuesday said it has applied the Guinness World Records to recognise one of its spacecraft’s first-ever trip to an asteroid and its long duration of flight as world records.
The agency commonly known as JAXA said it has asked Guinness to recognise the Japanese space probe Hayabusa’s flight to and from the asteroid Itokawa as world records.
Hayabusa completed its seven-year voyage on Sunday after releasing a small capsule which may contain asteroid surface samples. JAXA said it filed the application on Monday with Guinness in response to an instruction from education, culture, sports, science and technology minister Tatsuo Kawabata.
Mr Kawabata urged JAXA to publicise the results of the space probe to the Japanese people in an easy-to-understand manner, agency officials said. Hayabusa, which was launched in May 2003, landed on the asteroid Itokawa, about 300 million km from the earth, in November 2005. It left the asteroid in April 2007 for earth. The capsule released by Hayabusa was picked up in a desert near Woomera, south Australia.
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Humans have distorted model of own bodies
AGE CORRESPONDENT
LONDON
British researchers have revealed that humans have a highly distorted image of their own bodies in their brain. The study by University College London scientists found that people believe that they are wider, shorter and fatter than they actually are.
The research, which focused on the brain’s representation of the hand, indicated that the brain’s distorted model of body shape result is due to the way the brain represents different parts of the skin.
Participants in the study, which has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were asked to put their left hands palm down under a board and judge the location of the covered hand’s knuckles and fingertips by pointing to where they perceived each of these landmarks to be.