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  • Rose McGowan Says Being ‘Tired of Being Sexualized’ Led Her to Directing

    Rose McGowan says she turned to directing after she grew of “tired of being sexualized,” noting a photo shoot for Rolling Stone in 2007 as the impetus for a change of heart about her career.

    The Charmed alum said in an interview with Flatt magazine that she reached a point where she’d had enough of being used as a sex object.

    “There was a moment, I was on the cover of Rolling Stone, with a fake tan and gun belt around me and breasts, they gave me some big bouffant hair and glossy lips, and I just was like, I’ve had it, I have just had it,” said McGowan.

    After her revelation, McGowan said she “checked out” for a while, taking time to just enjoy herself and determine what she wanted in her career. She decided to pursue directing.

    “It was not that I wasn’t meant to be an actress, it was just that I was meant to be in film, and I just was literally cast in the wrong role in life,” she said.

    “I’m an artist, but I never felt like I was an artist as an actor,” she said. “Not because of how I was treated, because that’s not how artists are treated, or should be treated, or people should be treated.”

    The 41-year-old actress, and now director, said it’s a good time for a woman in the the traditionally male-dominated director’s world.

    “I think it’s a great time for women filmmakers,” said McGowan. “Women are being afforded greater roles in their destiny, or roles in art, or roles as directors, but why should women be “afforded” anything? I shouldn’t just be allowed to have something – it is my right. It is my right to create as much as it’s another human being’s right, and I think that comes first. Somebody asked if I thought a man would have made Dawn, and I don’t know if they could have. I don’t know if it would have occurred to them.”

    McGowan shared her directorial debut of the short film Dawn at the premiere at the Grand Hotel in Los Angeles.

  • Giant Asteroid “Speckles” Analyzed by NASA’s Dawn

    New images released by NASA have provided scientists their best view yet of the black spots seen on the surface of the giant asteroid Vesta. The new research suggests that the protoplanet may have received the carbon-rich material through large impacts with other objects.

    The new study, published in the journal Icarus, is the most complete analysis of the material yet. Researchers observed that the dark material appears around the edges of giant impact basins on the asteroid’s southern hemisphere, suggesting that the material was deposited by the impact that created the older of the two basins.

    “First, we created a map showing the distribution of dark material on Vesta using the framing camera data and found something remarkable,” said Lucille Le Corre, co-author of the study at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research.

    The map showed that the material had been spread by a slow impacting asteroid that created the Veneneia basin some 2 to 3 billion years ago. The material was then covered by a subsequent impact that created the younger basin.

    The images were taken by NASA’s Dawn mission, which completed its investigations of Vesta in September 2012 and is currently on-route to the dwarf planet Ceres. In the past few months, research based on Dawn mission data has uncovered strange gullies along the walls of Vesta craters and the fact that Vesta’s surface is constantly “stirring” and presenting a young sppearance.

    “The aim of our efforts was not only to reconstruct Vesta’s history, but also to understand the conditions in the early solar system,” said Holger Sierks, co-investigator on the Dawn mission at the Max Planck Institute.

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

  • NASA Finds Mysterious Gullies on Asteroid Vesta’s Surface

    NASA’s Dawn mission has returned images from the giant asteroid Vesta that scientists say include long, narrow gullies along the walls of relatively young craters.

    The discovery has revealed a mystery that scientists are now trying to solve. The images from Dawn show two different types of gullies. Some are straight chutes, while others wind about and end in what NASA is calling “lobe-shaped” deposits.

    “The straight gullies we see on Vesta are textbook examples of flows of dry material, like sand, that we’ve seen on Earth’s moon and we expected to see on Vesta,” said Jennifer Scully, a Dawn team member at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But these sinuous gullies are an exciting, unexpected find that we are still trying to understand.”

    The “sinuous” gullies are longer, narrower, and curvier than the others. The also begin from V-shaped, collapsed regions researchers have described as “alcoves.” The current hypothesis is that two different processes formed the different gullies.

    “On Earth, similar features – seen at places like Meteor Crater in Arizona – are carved by liquid water,” said Christopher Russell, Dawn’s principal investigator at UCLA. “On Mars, there is still a debate about what has caused them. We need to analyze the Vesta gullies very carefully before definitively specifying their source.”

    Researchers are looking to Earth and Mars for clues about Vesta’s gullies, but mystery still remains. Scientists have been debating the explanation for Mars’ gullies for years. Some possible causes include liquid water and carbon-dioxide frost that causes fresh flows of Martian sand.

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

  • NASA’s Dawn Discovers ‘Young’ Surface on Asteroid

    NASA announced today that data from its Dawn probe show the giant asteroid Vesta is constantly “stirring” its surface, presenting a “young” appearance. The type of weathering that occurs on airless bodies, such as the moon, does not alter Vesta’s surface in the same way.

    Specifically, objects such as asteroids and the moon accumulate tiny metallic particles containing iron, which dulls their “fluffy” outer layer. Researchers using data from Dawn’s visible and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIR) found no accumulation of the particles on Vesta.

    “Getting up close and familiar with Vesta has reset our thinking about the character of the uppermost soils of airless bodies,” said Carle Pieters, lead author of one of two Vesta studies published today in the journal Nature and a Dawn team member at Brown University. “Vesta ‘dirt’ is very clean, well mixed and highly mobile.”

    When Vesta was first photographed, researchers were puzzled by its light and dark splotches. The brightness range on the asteroid is among the largest observed on rocky bodies in the solar system.

    NASA stated that “bright rays” of young features on Vesta degrade rapidly into the background soil, mixed by continual small impacts. Also, Vesta’s unusually steep topography means landslides mix the surface as well.

    The dark spots, which were originally thought to be the result of volcanic activity or high-speed impacts, have now been shown to be carbon-rich material from meteoroids. Researchers estimate, based on the amount of darkening, that around 300 asteroids with diameters between 0.6 to 6 miles likely hit Vesta in the past 3.5 billion years.

    “This perpetual contamination of Vesta with material native to elsewhere in the solar system is a dramatic example of an apparently common process that changes many solar system objects,” said Tom McCord, lead author of the other study and a Dawn team member at Bear Fight Institute. “Earth likely got the ingredients for life – organics and water – this way.”

    NASA’s Dawn probe was launched in September 2007 and entered orbit around Vesta in July 2011. Dawn left its orbit around Vesta last month and is currently on course for the dwarf planet Ceres.