November 2006 - Posts
Getty Images file |
British billionaire Richard Branson says he's sending over a medical officer to talk with physicist Stephen Hawking about getting him into space. That's how the founder of Virgin Galactic responded to Hawking's comment that "maybe Richard Branson will help" him achieve his long-held goal of reaching the final frontier, even though he's a quadriplegic who needs a blink-controlled computer to communicate.
Branson and other Virgin executives indicated today that if there's any way on earth to accommodate the good doctor-with-a-disability, they'll do it. And for practice, Hawking could conceivably experience weightlessness aboard a Zero Gravity Corp. plane as early as next year.
It would be one giant leap for the world's best-known physicist - and a powerful signal of support for other people with disabilities.
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• Wired.com visits subatomic inferno (and physicists' paradise)
• Scientific American: 20 gadgets we love
• LiveScience: Scientists say dino die-off took just one asteroid
• Science @ NASA: A new paradigm for lunar orbits
The real-life spy thriller surrounding the poisoning of Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko makes the apparent poison, radioactive polonium-210, sound like a supersecret killer ingredient. It's rare to find it in lethal concentrations, to be sure - but actually not so rare to find it in everyday life.
In minute quantities, polonium-210 has been used over the years to spark up spark plugs and banish static cling. Polonium is one of the carcinogens in tobacco smoke, and you can buy a smidgen of it over the Internet at $69 a pop, as more than one news report has noted. Heck, there's even radioactive polonium in plain old dirt.
"It's present in all of us, in trace amounts - say, in nanocuries," said Keith Eckerman, a senior research scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
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• National Geographic: Saturn the beautiful stranger
• Nature: Does everyone smell different?
• Champagne cork injuries and other lowlights from Mini-AIR
• The Onion: Kansas outlaws practice of evolution
Blue Origin, the secretive rocket venture backed by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos, has set aside time between this Thursday and Dec. 2 for another test launch from its ranchland spaceport in West Texas. The first test was conducted earlier this month, with Blue Origin calling it a success.
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• New Scientist: Europe joins hunt for missing Mars probe
• Aviation Week: White Knight flies on to new missions
• Defense Tech: The 'Deadlies' ... awards for the world's worst weapons
• N.Y. Times: A different kind of string theory
ESA |
Two groups of European researchers are going ga-ga over gamma-ray blasts from different sources, both thought to be black holes acting up.
One gamma-ray source, known as IGR J717497-2821 (let's call it IGR for short), appears to be a newborn black hole. The other, LS 5039, is an unusual high-energy modulator that researchers call the first-ever "gamma-ray clock."
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What part did Albert Einstein's first wife play in the origins of E=mc2 and all that? First we had the allusion to the years-long debate over mathematician Mileva Maric's role ... then we had the argument against Maric's involvement from physicist/author Allen Esterson ... then we had the other side of the argument from Senta Troemel-Ploetz, speaking up for Maric ... and now we have a closing rebuttal from Esterson:
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• Sydney Morning Herald: Inca language enters digital age
• Science News: Supernovae serve up Cosmic Pops in stereo
• Sun-Sentinel: 'Dead zone' scrambles car locks (via Daily Grail)
• Hindustan Times: India plans Mars odyssey in 2012
• Mars Society tries out a new look for Web site
Moviegoers received a double dose of time-travel fiction this week, with the present-day(s) thriller "Deja Vu" on one hand and "The Fountain," a time-trippy love story, on the other. As we discussed earlier this week, "Deja Vu" reflects a bit more of the current scientific thinking about what time travel into the past, a.k.a. retro-causality, might look like if it were possible. But if you ask the physicists to list their favorite time-travel tales, the ones they mention are golden oldies going back to the days of classic "Star Trek."
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• New Scientist: Boulders dash hopes for Mars landing site
• N.Y. Times (reg. req.): A smarter computer to pick stocks
• Space Daily: Can Russia build a better Hubble? (via Daily Grail)
• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Dogs and More Dogs'
• The Economist: Don't misunderestimate yourself
The military command in charge of defending North America from aerial threats is beefing up its volunteer corps to keep an eye out for Santa Claus this year – and they’re expecting to get a billion Internet hits from wee ones around the world.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command, better known as NORAD, is offering a its traditional Santa-tracking Web site with lots of extra goodies. You can also check out NASA's Santa site, which takes advantage of the same software that helps you watch orbiting probes such as the Hubble Space Telescope as well as the international space station and shuttle.
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I'll be taking the holiday off for a little rest and relaxation (and a little Riesling), but here are a few links to get you through Thanksgiving:
• NASA: What to see in Thanksgiving skies
• Discovery.com: Surprising twists to T-day foods
• Wired.com: The Thanksgiving menu of the gods
• Minneapolis Star Tribune: The myth of tryptophan
George Wang / UW |
A depiction of present-day Earth overlaid with simulated atmospheric oxygen of the
early Triassic period. Because oxygen was low even at sea level, animals would
have been restricted to very low altitudes, green or light-shaded areas.
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What was the murder weapon for our planet’s biggest die-off? The Permian-Triassic extinction is the ultimate cold case, transpiring 250 million years ago. But some scientific sleuths have sketched out a scenario worthy of the trickiest mystery novel - involving a chain of volcanic eruptions, greenhouse-gas emissions, oxygen-deficient oceans, sulfur-loving bacteria and poisonous hydrogen sulfide, the compound that smells like rotten eggs. There are even those who would throw in an asteroid for good measure. The rotten-extinction theory gets a prime-time airing tonight on PBS’ “Nova ScienceNow.”
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• Detroit Free Press: Teen does nuclear fusion in parents' basement
• Discover Magazine: 25 greatest science books of all time
• The New Yorker: Calls of the wild turkey
• N.Y. Times: A free-for-all on science and religion
We've gone back and forth over the role that Albert Einstein's first wife, Mileva Maric, may have played in the development of the special theory of relativity. Did she help her husband with the concepts or mathematics behind the theory? Or was Albert simply being generous when he referred to "our work"? We've heard from Allen Esterson, a physicist and historical author who's skeptical that Maric had much of an impact, and now I've gotten the other side of the story from Senta Troemel-Ploetz, a German linguist and author who has championed Maric's role:
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• Neverworld: The picture of the century
• Science News: Dashing rogues
• New Scientist: Everyday wisdom behind Jedi tricks
• Metro: Is this the face of Jack the Ripper?
• LiveScience Blog: Leonid meteor shower was a stinker
Efforts to link the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls with an ancient toilet site became the butt of a joke or two this week – and have touched off another round of debate over scroll history. Were the scrolls actually written by an eccentric sect based in Qumran near the Dead Sea? Does the ancient latrine really prove anything? The University of Chicago historian Norman Golb, a tenacious scroll skeptic, thinks not.
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• The Economist: Tilting at windmills
• Technology Review: Facing the dangers of nanotech
• SmartMoney: Fly me to the moon
• Salt Lake Tribune: Rocket motor test gives ATK a boost
• The New Yorker: What was Descartes thinking?
• Cosmic Log in Spanish: Los evangelios de la cienca
It might seem obvious that dwelling on money (or lack thereof) makes people focus more on themselves and less on others – after all, even the Bible says the love of money is the root of all evil. But is that the square root or the cube root? Experiments detailed in this week’s issue of Science quantify how thinking about money, even subliminally, affects our behavior for good or for evil.
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Blue Origin, the secretive rocket venture backed by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos, says this week's first test launch in West Texas was a success - but details are still hard to come by. Over the next four years, Bezos' venture plans to offer passenger rides to the edge of outer space, 62 miles (100 kilometers) up and back, but this first test was an unmanned flight that reportedly went no higher than 1,000 feet (300 meters).
“We’re excited to see this successful first flight as we experiment with engine and vehicle designs,” Rob Meyerson, Blue Origin's program manager, is quoted as saying in the local newspaper, the Van Horn Advocate.
Blue Origin is based in Kent, Wash., near Bezos' Seattle home base, but about 250 employees and family members converged on the launch site near Van Horn, Texas, to take in the maiden test launch at 7:30 a.m. CT Monday, the Advocate says
"Van Horn was very friendly and welcoming to our staff and their families. The town made us feel very much at home — it made the trip highly enjoyable for everyone,” Meyerson told the newspaper.
• JHU: Exotic relatives of protons and neutrons discovered
• Scientific American: Cancer clues from pet dogs
• Seattle P-I: Going for a blast into the real past
• The Guardian: We will not be alone in 2056
NASA / JPL-Caltech |
The Opportunity rover captured this stereo image of Mars' Victoria Crater on Oct. 5.
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To mark the Opportunity rover’s 1,000th Martian day of operation, NASA has released a panorama of the crater that the robot is currently exploring – and you’ve got to see this 8-meg bad boy in 3-D. So dig out the red-blue glasses and take a virtual field trip to Mars.
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• IEEE Spectrum (reg. req.): The new search for E.T.
• Esquire: Big freakin' laser beams in space (via Slashdot)
• Nature: Sharpest cut from nanotube sword
• Space.com: Nearby stars come out of hiding
• Slate: I'm a math moron
'Tis the season for annual reports, and now the global space industry has a doozy: a full-color, 176-page book put out by the Colorado-based Space Foundation, simply titled "The Space Report." The inaugural report estimates the total size of the space economy at $180 billion in 2005, based on the foundation's reading of government budgets and industry revenues worldwide. And although space tourism accounts for less than 1 percent of that total, the foundation's president and chief executive officer says that little wedge of entrepreneurship will be "exceedingly important" in the years to come.
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The menu for this year's Science Journalism Awards, served up by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has something for everyone: light fare, such as lizard evolution for kids or the quest to build a better banana ... classics with a twist, such as a look at how climate change is changing the American West ... and heavy dishes such as the state of the search for Alzheimer's cures and a look back at San Francisco's killer earthquake of 1906. And the best thing is, all of these award-winning selections are available on the Web.
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• N.Y. Times (reg. req.): Did asteroid impact cause ancient tsunami?
• New Scientist: Could space mirrors create a haven on Mars?
• Defense Tech: Air Force wants 'Terminator' tongues
• S.F. Chronicle: Conspiracy theories buoy 'Coast to Coast AM'
The hush-hush space effort funded by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin, executed a test launch from its West Texas spaceport today, air traffic controllers confirmed. Based on the Federal Aviation Administration documents governing the test, it was a relatively low-altitude blastoff - but it comes at the beginning of a launch schedule that could lead to tourist rides to the edge of outer space by 2010.
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There's fresh evidence that dark energy - the mysterious factor that appears to be driving the accelerating expansion of the universe and accounts for 70 percent of its matter-energy content - has been present for most of the history of the cosmos. A heads-up about the latest revelations appears in a NASA media advisory, touting a teleconference at 1 p.m. ET Thursday.
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• Discovery.com: New life for old space probes
• BBC: Is this the perfect face for comedy?
• Popular Science: Best of What's New 2006
• Science News: Take a walk through Quark Park
Did you hear the one about the politician who turned into an environmental activist? How about the poet who turned into an inventor? Or the patients who turned into research fund-raisers? There's a story behind every one of the individuals and organizations on Scientific American's list of 50 leaders in science and technology. Some of them you've heard of - such as politician-activist Al Gore, or billionaire philanthropists Paul Allen, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Others are less well-known - but no less deserving.
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• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Family That Walks on All Fours'
• The Economist: Go west, old man
• WSJ: Jeff Bezos' spaceport is all the buzz in West Texas
• Wired: Election spawns new hope for tech
A veteran of the space business is taking a totally random approach to the challenge of turning the popular fascination with the stars into a profit-making venture. Jeff Manber's new venture, called Yuzoz, will take in readings from solar activity, cosmic rays and other space phenomena and convert them into rolls of the dice for decision-making, slot machines and anything else under the sun that can be randomized.
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Blue Origin, the suborbital space venture created by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos, is gearing up for a round of rocket testing at its private spaceport in West Texas over the next few days. The first tests would involve sending up a prototype rocket vehicle to about 2,000 feet (610 meters) for no more than a minute - but between now and 2010, Blue Origin plans to shoot its rocket ships up 62 miles or more, to the edge of outer space.
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• Personal Spaceflight: ATK to work with Rocketplane Kistler
• CNET: 'Doom' creator turned rocket pioneer
• Up, up and away at JP Aerospace (via RLV / Space Transport News)
• Political spins: NASA Watch ... Space Politics ... Transterrestrial Musings
NASA / JPL-Caltech |
Two of NASA's "Great Observatories" have teamed up to produce a painterly masterpiece showing our galaxy's nearest stellar nursery, the Orion Nebula.
In reality, no human eye could see this scene in such multicolored hues - because the palette reflects wavelengths in the infrared as well as the visible-light spectrum. But like most images from the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, the picture's "false color" is meant to highlight true science.
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Tuesday's election results certainly sent a powerful message to President Bush about his policy on Iraq - but on the scientific front, there was also a strong message sent in support of embryonic stem cell research. And Gail Pressberg, one of the authors of an upcoming book on the stem cell debate, says that message just might reverberate in the Oval Office as well.
"One has to wonder what his attitude will be now," Pressberg told me today.
Pressberg and Pam Solo, the authors of "Stem Cell Research: Promise and Politics," tracked 25 races where the issue played a role - ranging from Missouri's constitutional amendment on embryonic stem cell research to congressional and gubernatorial matchups across the country. The outcomes were sometimes close, but the supporters of such research had something to cheer about in at least 16 of the 25 contests.
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• Popular Mechanics: Gravity-defying pitch ready for U.S.
• UC-Irvine: Good fences do make good neighbors
• EurekAlert: Why sequels do better without the XVII
• Improbable Research: Famous dead sparrows on parade
Cornell Univ. |
There’s a new flood of books about the relationship between science and religion – and just as the various Christian gospels were aimed at different audiences, so too are these. On one hand, E.O. Wilson’s “The Creation” reaches out to believers, while on the other hand, Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” rallies the unbelievers to mount a full-scale attack on religion.
Perhaps the hardest-to-categorize gospel comes from someone who shuffled off this mortal coil 10 years ago: astronomer Carl Sagan, whose lectures on science and religion are being released this week in a book titled “The Varieties of Scientific Experience.” The talks were originally delivered in Glasgow in 1985 as part of the Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology (the same lecture series that spawned William James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience" back in 1902).
Although Sagan's observations are more than 20 years old, they deftly deal with today’s controversies over intelligent design, cosmic origins and God’s role in the universe. In fact, the words often sound as if they were written today:
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Today I'm helping out the good folks at
First Read, MSNBC's premier political Weblog, as Election Day unfolds. This isn't the first time I've strayed into political science - you might remember a little project I took on in 2004, titled
Election Ticktock. This time it's a team effort, with plenty of posts from NBC reporters and producers as well as my colleague at MSNBC.com, Al Olson (who'll be taking the late shift). Be sure to stop by and leave a comment.
• Technology Review: Learn while you sleep
• Discover Magazine: Raft to the future
• The New Yorker: The economics of global warming
• Nature: Funny gene names get the boot
ACT / AP |
Iraq will be the No. 1 topic for Election Day, but in key states, stem cells are also a big factor - and the outcome has the potential to change the course of embryonic stem cell research.
Missouri's Amendment 2 looms largest on the stem cell front: To its supporters, the measure would assure Missourians that they'll have access to the cures that embryonic stem cell research might bring, while criminalizing any attempt to create living, breathing human clones. In contrast, opponents say the measure would actually create "a constitutional right to clone."
Who's right? That all depends on what your definition of the word "clone" is.
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• Slashdot: Funding cut for Arecibo Observatory
• U. of Ariz: Could space sunshade counter global warming?
• The Space Review: Ice on the moon (via RLV/Space Transport News)
• BBC: Inside a Japanese robot menagerie
How much of a role did Albert Einstein's first wife play in the theory of relativity? In recent years, some historians have asserted that Einstein shared the credit for his research on the special theory of relativity with his spouse at the time, mathematician Mileva Maric. There's even been a PBS documentary on the subject - and Maric's case has been cited as a counterargument against those who suggest men are better than women at math and physics.
Now a physicist and historical author, Allen Esterson, is raising questions about Mrs. Einstein's math, based on his reading of the historical documentation. Check out his argument, which he laid out after reading my report on 12 top women physicists:
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• Discovery Channel: 'The Battle for Rome'
• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Wings of Madness'
• Ohio State: Yellorange, grue and other colors
• ConsortiumInfo: Wikipedia and the death of archaeology
• New Scientist: Pioneers call for new 'Web science' discipline
Red and blue will be back in fashion next Tuesday as the networks track who's winning where on Election Day. But you don't have to wait until then to find out what color your state is. Several Web sites have already color-coded the campaigns, based on traditional polls as well as online prediction markets.
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• Hindustan Times: An Indian on the moon by 2020?
• N.Y. Times (reg. req.): Evolutionary theory of right and wrong
• Slate: How gasoline becomes CO2
• Science News: Mining the Yesternet
NASA's decision to send a repair crew to the Hubble Space Telescope in 2008 is receiving seemingly universal praise. If all goes well, the world's best-known orbiting observatory should continue working until 2013, and perhaps even a few years longer than that. But then what? Hubble's ultimate fate is totally up in the air, so to speak.
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• Maps of War: 231 years of U.S. wars in 90 seconds
• SecurityFocus: Quantum attacks worry computer scientists
• Gizmag: Ground testing begins for blended-wing aircraft
• Defense Tech: Goodbye to 'gee whiz'?
