Latest news with #Rockcliffe
BBC News
11-05-2025
- General
- BBC News
How scarves could help to save a rare Scots sheep breed
Rebecca McLellan is trying to safeguard the future of a rare breed of sheep one scarf at a fell in love with the Castlemilk Moorit and now has her own flock of 18 on the farm where she and her husband live in Rockcliffe on the Solway was keen to look at ways to help ensure the long-term survival of the sheep, which are on the Rare Breeds Survival Trust (RBST) "at risk" was when she hit on the idea of learning to weave to try to encourage other potential breeders to follow her lead. She was born in Kenya and worked in London before moving to Scotland to a house which had been in her husband's family for about a century."With that came the responsibility and the stewardship for that land," she said."The reality was it had always been grazed by sheep, so we took a look at it and thought, well, there we go, that's the answer - we've got to get some sheep."After that they had to narrow it down to what type."Some native breeds in Scotland are becoming ever rarer, and I'm mad about my conservation," she said."We started to look for rare breed of sheep that were native specifically to this corner of Scotland and settled on the Castlemilk Moorit." The brown-coated, curly-horned sheep were originally bred in the 1920s by Sir John Buchanan-Jardine for his Castlemilk estate in are on the "at risk" list, with an estimated breeding population of between 900 and 1, said they were originally bred as a "park sheep"."They are an elegant-looking breed of sheep," she explained."They've got sweeping back horns, they've got neat legs and a sort of gazelle or deer-like head."So they grace the field - but they also have this practical side with the fleece."It is a soft fleece - I blend it to make it go further - but it's a soft mocha colour, it is cream at the tip down to chocolate at the base."She describes the sheep as "quite flighty" but also "quite curious"."If you do anything in the field or anywhere near them within a blink of an eye, they're all standing around in a circle, watching," she said. Rebecca turns their fleeces into tapestries, knitwear and upholstery and hopes her work can help save the breed by showing the value they can offer."We've got breeds that have developed and evolved in Scotland particularly - but across the UK - which suit the geographical nature of our landscape," she said."So you're not trying to raise a breed of sheep that isn't suited to where you are from."There's a reality that these are breeds that need to be helped to survive and not sort of forgotten in the rush to have ever more economical sheep which are good for raising just for meat." Rebecca is throwing open the doors to her workshop as part of the Spring Fling open studios event across Dumfries and Galloway between 24 and 26 will get a chance to see what she produces, how she does it and meet the rare breed the process, she hopes it might convince a few more people that the Castlemilk Moorit deserves to flourish in the years to come.
Yahoo
01-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
From interstellar dust to life beyond Earth: Why scientists can't wait NASA's new SPHEREx space telescope
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A modest NASA space telescope with grand ambitions is scheduled to soon launch into an orbit around Earth. The megaphone-shaped spacecraft, called SPHEREx — short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer — is scheduled to share a ride atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Tuesday (March 4) from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. "I'm the most jazzed about the all-sky nature of the observatory — SPHEREx will be looking at the entire sky!" Keighley Rockcliffe, a postdoc at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County who's studying exoplanet atmospheres at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told The space telescope is designed to do so with unmatched clarity, gathering a big-picture view that will help scientists tackle questions about the origin of the universe itself, the galaxies within and life's essential ingredients wafting in our home galaxy, the Milky Way. A key science goal for the SPHEREx mission is to pinpoint the locations of life's basic ingredients nestled within vast regions of gas and dust known as molecular clouds, where stars and planets form. To accomplish this, the telescope is equipped with a prism-like spectrophotometer to "see" in wavelengths invisible to the human eye, which will allow it to illuminate millions of stars and galaxies for scientists in more than a hundred infrared colors. "This is key to the mission's search for water and other life-associated molecules and compounds," Rockcliffe said. While scientists have previously detected lots of complex organic molecules in the interstellar medium and protoplanetary disks, "we still do not know a lot about the actual abundances of useful building blocks," astrobiologist Manasvi Lingam of the Florida Institute of Technology told That means scientists don't have strong constraints about how efficiently frozen water molecules are transferred from interstellar clouds to protoplanetary disks, where they would eventually be incorporated into newborn planets, he said. "This mission can improve the data, and help make better forecasts about the probability of the origin of life on those worlds." By mapping the entire sky, the $488 million mission may also reveal the distribution and chemistry of interstellar dust, which is not very well understood despite being ubiquitous in nearly every astronomical observation ever taken, according to Rockcliffe. "Many astronomers think about interstellar dust as a nuisance, it 'gets in the way' of us observing more objects or objects in more detail," she said. "SPHEREx will prove that there are interesting things hiding in between our stars that we should care about." Another key science goal for SPHEREx is to help scientists narrow down the elusive physics that propelled the nearly instantaneous ballooning of space in the first billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang — a phenomenon called cosmic inflation. "We don't understand the physics simply because it involved energy scales which way beyond anything we can probe on Earth," Olivier Dore, the project scientist for the SPHEREx mission, told SPHEREx will put together a 3D map of distributions of more than 450 million galaxies, which will reveal very subtle signatures — ripples amplified during inflation and imprinted into the large-scale structure of the universe — that can be traced directly to the very first moments of the universe, Dore said. Related Stories: — NASA launching its SPHEREx and PUNCH space missions on March 2 after delay: How to watch live — 2 NASA missions will carpool on a SpaceX rocket this Friday to help map the cosmos — NASA's launching a new sun mission this month: 'PUNCH is going to see a total solar eclipse' Moreover, because the SPHEREx telescope will be mapping the entire sky four times over the next two years, it will also observe pockets of the universe scientists have never looked at before, Dore added. "That's going to be visually striking and very powerful."
Yahoo
01-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
From interstellar dust to life beyond Earth: Why scientists can't wait NASA's new SPHEREx space telescope
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A modest NASA space telescope with grand ambitions is scheduled to soon launch into an orbit around Earth. The megaphone-shaped spacecraft, called SPHEREx — short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer — is scheduled to share a ride atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Tuesday (March 4) from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. "I'm the most jazzed about the all-sky nature of the observatory — SPHEREx will be looking at the entire sky!" Keighley Rockcliffe, a postdoc at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County who's studying exoplanet atmospheres at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told The space telescope is designed to do so with unmatched clarity, gathering a big-picture view that will help scientists tackle questions about the origin of the universe itself, the galaxies within and life's essential ingredients wafting in our home galaxy, the Milky Way. A key science goal for the SPHEREx mission is to pinpoint the locations of life's basic ingredients nestled within vast regions of gas and dust known as molecular clouds, where stars and planets form. To accomplish this, the telescope is equipped with a prism-like spectrophotometer to "see" in wavelengths invisible to the human eye, which will allow it to illuminate millions of stars and galaxies for scientists in more than a hundred infrared colors. "This is key to the mission's search for water and other life-associated molecules and compounds," Rockcliffe said. While scientists have previously detected lots of complex organic molecules in the interstellar medium and protoplanetary disks, "we still do not know a lot about the actual abundances of useful building blocks," astrobiologist Manasvi Lingam of the Florida Institute of Technology told That means scientists don't have strong constraints about how efficiently frozen water molecules are transferred from interstellar clouds to protoplanetary disks, where they would eventually be incorporated into newborn planets, he said. "This mission can improve the data, and help make better forecasts about the probability of the origin of life on those worlds." By mapping the entire sky, the $488 million mission may also reveal the distribution and chemistry of interstellar dust, which is not very well understood despite being ubiquitous in nearly every astronomical observation ever taken, according to Rockcliffe. "Many astronomers think about interstellar dust as a nuisance, it 'gets in the way' of us observing more objects or objects in more detail," she said. "SPHEREx will prove that there are interesting things hiding in between our stars that we should care about." Another key science goal for SPHEREx is to help scientists narrow down the elusive physics that propelled the nearly instantaneous ballooning of space in the first billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang — a phenomenon called cosmic inflation. "We don't understand the physics simply because it involved energy scales which way beyond anything we can probe on Earth," Olivier Dore, the project scientist for the SPHEREx mission, told SPHEREx will put together a 3D map of distributions of more than 450 million galaxies, which will reveal very subtle signatures — ripples amplified during inflation and imprinted into the large-scale structure of the universe — that can be traced directly to the very first moments of the universe, Dore said. Related Stories: — NASA launching its SPHEREx and PUNCH space missions on March 2 after delay: How to watch live — 2 NASA missions will carpool on a SpaceX rocket this Friday to help map the cosmos — NASA's launching a new sun mission this month: 'PUNCH is going to see a total solar eclipse' Moreover, because the SPHEREx telescope will be mapping the entire sky four times over the next two years, it will also observe pockets of the universe scientists have never looked at before, Dore added. "That's going to be visually striking and very powerful."
