March 2007 - Posts
The multimillion-dollar Automotive X Prize is finally rolling up to the starting line after more than a year of tinkering. Draft rules for the competition, aimed at encouraging the development of “production-capable” cars that get the energy equivalent of 100 miles per gallon, will be unveiled next week at the New York Auto Show. The X Prize Foundation is targeting a race between the prize finalists in 2009.
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Sometimes all you have to do is point to a couple of items, then stand back and wait for the messages to roll in. I'm hoping that will be the case with these items.
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We're running
this Associated Press story about the worries that NASA officials and members of Congress have about the "spaceflight gap" - the period between 2010 and 2015 when the space shuttle fleet is retired and the next-generation Orion spaceship is not yet ready for launch. The worry is that NASA might have to rely on (gasp!) the private sector or other countries to provide space services. To be sure, the United States should have its own spacefaring capability, but I'm betting that some people might say the best thing for NASA to do is to
leave the spaceship-building business to the private sector. Others might say that the government has to take the leading role in such a risky business. What do you say?
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I was struck by this
comment from John in Kansas: "I want to thank you for the occasional postings of amateur astronomy tools - if you could do more of that, I might be more prepared for next year, when I take my kids out to rural Kansas for the first time to look at the moon, planets and stars. So if an astronomy expert has some sound advice on the best (affordable ... which is subjective, I know) available tools and gadgets for seeing craters on the moon, keep 'em coming!" Now if that's not an invitation for feedback, I don't know what is. Do you have any suggestions for John? Leave them below - and if I think of anything, I'll do the same.
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Archaeology: Pyramid in New England |
Bigfoot shocker!! •
Gizmodo: U.S. military considers UFOs; Cylons next? •
Duke: Feeling red-faced and foolish? That's a good sign•
Wired: April Fool's pranks for nerds
Celebrities from TV's classic "Star Trek" and America's space program are due to take a posthumous trip to the final frontier – and back – on April 28, when an UP Aerospace suborbital rocket carries the cremated remains of "Star Trek" actor James "Scotty" Doohan, NASA astronaut Gordon "Gordo" Cooper and more than 200 others on a memorial spaceflight.
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This week's story about the bungling of a plea agreement in a multimillion-dollar tax evasion case put a spotlight on defendant Walter Anderson's seemingly opulent lifestyle - and even his taste for airport hamburgers. But there wasn't much emphasis placed on the one-time telecommunication tycoon's space connection, and that's how I knew him best.
Anderson was the principal financial backer of MirCorp, the company that kept Russia's Mir space station in orbit for an extra year and once had aspirations of building private-sector space stations. In that, he anticipated the work currently being carried out by billionaire Robert Bigelow. Anderson also backed other space ventures ranging from the Space Frontier Foundation to Rotary Rocket and Orbital Recovery Corp.
As I've mentioned before, the last thing I heard from Anderson was that he was done with his "15 minutes of fame" - but that was before he had his current bout with infamy.
• Tech Review: Robo-amoebas developed for search and rescue
• New Scientist: 'Inspector Gadget' stars in space tether test
• ESO: Telescopes gang up on a double asteroid
• Science @ NASA: First steps to Mars
The millionaire behind the maverick SpaceX rocket venture, Elon Musk, says the verdict on last week's partly successful Falcon 1 rocket launch is "looking increasingly positive" now that his team is getting a close look at the data. Before its second-stage engine cut off prematurely, the Falcon flew to a height of 180 miles (289 kilometers) - a performance not quite good enough to reach orbit, but good enough for Musk to declare the end of the rocket's test phase and the beginning of its operational phase.
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• Scientific American: The science of lasting happiness
• The Guardian: Darwin was delayed by huge workload
• Improbable Research: Chemistry not enough sexy?
• The Onion: Milestones in private spaceflight
What's the deepest cosmic puzzle for the next 20 years? After a Seattle talk that touched upon multiverses, branes and 10-dimensional physics, string theorist Brian Greene says his candidate would be figuring out exactly what the underlying fabric of space and time is really made of. In a couple of weeks, Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking will get his own shot at the question from the same Seattle stage. In the meantime, what's your candidate for the deepest question? CONTINUED >>
• Way cool Space Access video from Armadillo Aerospace
• N.Y. Times (reg. req.): Robots that slink and squirm
• Gizmodo: Make coffee with a laser (via GeekPress)
• Univ. of Washington: 'Smart' sunglasses change color
New Mexico officials today revealed the details of a pact with the Virgin Galactic suborbital space venture as they geared up for a crucial spaceport tax vote next month. The memorandum of agreement calls for Virgin Galactic to pay about $27.5 million over 20 years to lease facilities at Spaceport America in southern New Mexico.
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• Science News: Ticket to ride ... to the moon?
• Los Angeles Times: One giant heap for mankind
• The New Yorker: Einstein, the valiant Swabian
• Thumbs down from historian on '300' | Thumbs up from geeks
SpaceX |
Rumblings from online and offline grapevines are filling in the gaps in three sagas of space ventures: The usually secretive Blue Origin conducted what's said to be a successful test of its vertical-launch rocket system. ... The usually wide-open SpaceX is providing further details about its own almost successful orbital test launch. ... And Rocketplane Kistler has provided some additional hints about Bigelow Aerospace's not-yet-public plan for setting up an orbital tourist destination by 2012. Read on for the details.
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• Discovery Channel: 'Planet Earth'
• 'Nova' on PBS: 'The Perfect Pearl'
• National Geographic Channel: 'Galapagos'
• History Channel: 'The Dark Ages'
The longest-running online market for political prognostication is up and running - and there are already a couple of front-runners. Clinton and McCain? Nope. For now, it's Obama and Giuliani. By the way, if you're the speculative type, you could have made a profit on John Edwards by buying low and selling high.
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• Times of London: Species survives 100 million years without sex
• New Scientist: Futuristic NASA think tank to be shut down
• The Economist: Part playboy, part space cowboy at SpaceX
• Explore the Maps of Science
Former astronaut Rusty Schweickart is to asteroids what Al Gore is to global warming, and Schweickart is none too pleased with NASA’s latest strategy for coping with potential threats from the sky.
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• Discovery.com: Pyramid's secret doors to be opened
• Bad Astronomy Q&BA: A galaxy by any other name
• Amazing Things: Amusing physics (via GeekPress)
• Improbable.com: Calculating the value of prostitution
NASA / ESA / Univ. of Ariz. |
These images from the Hubble Space Telescope, showing Titan and its shadow
passing over Saturn's disk, were taken in 1995 and processed to produce a movie.
Click on the image to watch three videos narrated by MSNBC's Alan Boyle.
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The Hubble Space Telescope isn’t exactly a movie camera - but just add a little special-effects software, and you can turn Hubble’s still images of Saturn into some pretty cool mini-documentaries. Three movie clips released today show Saturnian moons zipping around the ringed planet in scenes that rival the chariot race from “Ben-Hur.”
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Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos,
has gotten clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration for another test launch in Texas sometime between Thursday and next Tuesday. (Thanks to Clark Lindsey's
RLV and Space Transport News for the pointer.) The venture's first up-and-down test of the Goddard prototype rocketship made a
huge splash back in November, but the second test opportunity apparently ended up
going nowhere. In the past, Blue Origin has revealed the results of its tests on its own timetable, so we may not hear much about how this upcoming test turns out. But we'll keep our ear to the ground anyway - and feel free to pass along anything you hear.
• Wall Street Journal: New horizons for the intrepid venture capitalist
• N.Y. Times: Scientist sees roots of morality in primate behavior
• Business Week: Ethanol's growing list of enemies
• Gizmag: The air car nears completion (via Slashdot)
NASA / ASU / USGS |
This series of pictures shows seven proposed cave skylights. Clockwise
from upper left are Dena, Chloe, Wendy, Annie, Abbey and Nikki, and
Jeanne. Arrows signify direction of solar illumination (I) and north (N).
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Researchers say pictures from a Mars orbiter show holes the size of football fields that may be the entrances to subterranean caverns. If the claims prove to be true, such caves would be prime targets in the search for extraterrestrial life and prime real estate for future human settlements.
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• Science News: Mystery squid scrutinized ... it's a girl!
• Scientific American: The promise of plasmonics
• Prescott Daily Courier: Second thoughts on Phoenix Lights
• CBC: Inuit seek answers to sun quirks (via Daily Grail)
Getty Images |
It’s been more than five years since I took a DNA test to look for my Irish cousins, and the bad news that I’m still looking. But the good news is that my genetic quest has linked up people around the world who didn’t know they were related.
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Insiders say California-based SpaceX is gearing up once again for a Falcon 1 rocket launch from its Pacific island pad, in the wake of a static-fire test on Thursday. The Pentagon-funded test mission could go up as early as Monday. However, SpaceX's millionaire founder, Elon Musk, has never been shy about calling off a launch if something doesn't look right - and the company says it's still reviewing a minor issue that turned up during the test.
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• The Economist: Mind games
• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Mystery of the Megaflood'
• Slate: E-mail in space! (via GeekPress)
• New Scientist: The universe is a string-net liquid
NASA |
Scientists have long known that Mars' polar regions contain huge reservoirs of frozen water, but today's findings on the depth and purity of that ice have raised the regions' profile as a place to search for evidence of life - as well as a destination for future human missions.
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For now, Science runs on a strict time schedule, and so does Nature. Those who cover science as reported in the world's premier peer-reviewed journals know that Nature generally keeps its research under embargo until 1 p.m. ET Wednesday, and that Science releases its studies at 2 p.m. ET Thursday. Many other journals follow similar timetables scheduling discoveries like so many arriving trains.
But the times they are a-changin' - and this week, the editor-in-chief of the journal Science all but admitted that the weekly embargo is facing extinction.
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I'm back in the office after almost two weeks of blogging from the road - but I'm still working off that piece of apple pie I had on Pi Day. Here's a fresh serving of morsels from the scientific Web:
• Flight Int'l: SpaceX unveils moonworthy space capsule
• Discovery.com: Virtual actors join live actors on stage
• San Jose Mercury News: '300' vs. history
• The Space Review: Space and the end of the future
Today you can eat a slice of pizza, raise a toast with a piña colada, or just reflect for a moment on 3/14 at 1:59 p.m. to celebrate the most irrational holiday of the year: Pi Day. The observance commemorates the first few digits of one of the oldest known constants, 3.14159 ... and it also happens to coincide with Albert Einstein's birthday, which makes today a doubly cool day for science geeks. So what else can you do to celebrate?
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How is the technological frontier shaping up for the next five years? Prognosticating progress is a popular pastime among high-tech types: Back in December, IBM issued its predictions for the top five technologies leading up to 2012 – and last week, I took my turn at the Technology Association of Iowa’s annual awards banquet. Who’ll come closer to the mark? Read on, lay your bets, and list your own predictions for our high-tech future.
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• Science @ NASA: Alien volcano
• Science News: Cutting a pie is no piece of cake
• The New Yorker: Our shield against nuclear terrorism
• The Economist: Higgs may fly
If America follows through on its biofuel aspirations and creates an "OPEC of ethanol," Iowa could well become one of its most energy-rich emirates. The Hawkeye State already leads the nation in the production of ethanol (with 1.5 billion gallons last year) as well as biodiesel (with 60 million gallons) - and this is only the start. During a weeklong visit to my native state, I could see that the biofuel boom is already changing Iowa - for good and potentially for ill.
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The quest to unify all of physics into one big framework called "the theory of everything" has inspired a host of way-out ideas, with the current leading concept involving a 10- or 11-dimensional universe. Now a pioneer in the field of stem cell research has weighed in with an essay that brings biology and consciousness into the mix.
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• Oregon State U.: Sounds of the Antarctic revealed
• NASA: Map shows Antarctica in unprecedented detail
• Nature: Buried treasure lies hidden at Dome Argus
• USAF: Operation Deep Freeze ends record-setting season
Two of the darlings of the commercial space race, California-based SpaceX and Nevada-based Bigelow Aerospace, are apparently planning to conduct their second launch attempts a little later than previously advertised.
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When one of the world's most famous and frailest physicists goes on a zero-G adventure in April, it's not the weightlessness he'll have to worry about. Instead, the most trying time for British cosmologist Stephen Hawking will come after each half-minute of floating, when he'll feel as if he's sinking into the floor. And if that sounds daunting, the ordeal associated with flying to the edge of space would be much more stressful.
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I'll be out of the office for the next 13 days or so - visiting family, speaking at an event sponsored by the Technology Association of Iowa and attending a conference in Los Angeles. While I'm gone, postings to the log will be less regular than usual, and dependent on time, bandwidth and news events. To help tide you over, here's today's sampling of Web links:
• The Economist: Conservation a la carte
• Danger Room: Military cyborg menagerie
• Curing hiccups, and other emanations from Mini-AIR
• Discovery.com: Rare double mutation led to white wine
NASA / JPL SSI |
The Cassini probe provided this top-down view of Saturn and its
rings. Click on the image to view more highlights from Cassini.
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The Cassini orbiter has delivered new views of Saturn as seen from a vantage point no other spacecraft has ever had, hundreds of thousands of miles above the planet. "Finally, here are the views that we've waited years for," Cassini imaging team leader Carolyn Porco says in today's update from NASA.
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• HubbleSite: Telescope monitors Jupiter during probe's flyby
• NASA: Another iceberg from a former Antarctic giant
• ESA: Envisat marks five years of Earth imagery
• ASU: What triggered a Martian landslide?
