May 2008 - Posts
Twitter.com |
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MarsPhoenix's Twitterings sound as if they're coming direct from the Red Planet.
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You've been put on notice, Stephen Colbert! NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander is hot on your heels in the online celebrity race. Just a few days after Sunday's touchdown in the Red Planet's north polar region, NASA's MarsPhoenix has attracted almost 10,000 Twitter fans, rivaling the Web-savvy comedian's legions on Twitterholic's leader board.
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EIROforum / CERN |
A hardhat worker is dwarfed by the inner workings of the Large Hadron
Collider's ATLAS detector. Click on the image for a larger version.
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Could an atom-smasher really create Armageddon? You can delve into the subject with some summer reading as well as a real-life court case.
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NASA / JPL-Caltech |
Scientists spot a ring
around the magnetar.
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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope bears witness this week to two stellar hauntings - bizarre and beautiful phenomena sparked by dead giant stars.
First, Spitzer trained its infrared eye on the pulsing, undead corpse of a strongly magnetic star called SGR 1900+14 - revealing a bizarre ring of dusty material that couldn't be seen in visible wavelengths. Then, just today, Spitzer's scientists reported on the ghostly echoes of light emanating from Cassiopeia A, a supernova that blew up 300 years ago.
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The World Science Festival had its maiden launch today in New York, with a grand sendoff from Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The kickoff also featured the announcement of the first Kavli Prizes for nanoscience, neuroscience and astrophysics - adding an extra dash of million-dollar pizazz.
Columbia University physicist Brian Greene, the event's co-founder, discusses the festival and its future in an exclusive Q&A.
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NASA / JPL-Caltech / UA / Lockheed Martin |
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Put on your red-blue glasses and take a look at this artist's conception of
Phoenix Mars Lander to get a 3-D effect. Click on the image for a larger view.
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Time to whip out those red-blue glasses: Phoenix Mars Lander, which touched down on the Red Planet, is already sending back black-and-white images in stereo. If you're set up with 3-D specs - and who isn't? - it's the next best thing to being there.
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Junying Yu / Univ. of Wisc. |
Skin cells can be modified to create
cells that seem as versatile as
embryonic stem cells.
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Someday, researchers will be able to order up living human cells afflicted with the genetic flaw they need to study. Gene-splicers will be able to correct the flawed code that causes diseases. And if you're struggling with one of those diseases yourself, your doctor just might be able to fix you, using semi-tailor-made cells ordered from a biobank. The whole process would be almost as easy as drawing blood from a blood banks today.
Such are the breakthroughs that could spring from future efforts to create stockpiles of reprogrammed human cells.
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Memorial Day weekend is a time to remember the sacrifices of fighting men and women. For many Americans, it's also a time to remember where the barbecue grill was put last fall. But for space science fans, this is the big weekend for Phoenix Mars Lander and Red Planet exploration.
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Sebastian Scheiner / AP
American tourists and students with the Philadelphia Biblical University
work at an archaeological dig near Beit Guvrin in central Israel. Tourists
pay $25 to spend the day digging and sifting through the ruins. Their
fees underwrite the more difficult parts of archaeological work:
washing pottery shards, logging finds and writing up the research.
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If Harrison Ford can play an archaeologist in the "Indiana Jones" movies, why can't you? You probably won't snag a starring role in a Hollywood blockbuster. But you can always find an archaeological dig looking for some help, particularly if you're willing to pay for helping.
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Alain Herzog / EPFL |
Click for video: Watch
how a micro-robot copies
a grasshopper's flight.
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Swiss researchers have unveiled a grasshopper-sized robot capable of jumping more than 4 feet (1.4 meters) high - marking a new record for robo-hoppers. The 2-inch-tall (5-centimeter-tall) contraption could blaze a trail for future rescue robots or swarms of interplanetary explorers, according to its developers.
The robot was shown off today at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Pasadena, Calif., by researchers from the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. It's the latest breed of machines based on biomimetics - the technological strategy of building mechanical systems that mimic what animals do.
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Salvatore Di Nolfi / EPA |
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A visitor snaps a picture of the Large Hadron Collider's underground
beamline during April's open house, which was the last opportunity
for the public to see the facility before the scheduled start of operations.
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The schedule is taking shape for the startup of the world's biggest particle-smasher — and for the lawsuit seeking to shut it down.
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Intel ISEF |
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Sana Raoof, Yi-Han Su and Natalie Saranga Omattage received top
honors at the 2008 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.
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This is the season when students really shine — and in this spring's science and engineering competitions, women are continuing to close the gender gap.
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The folks behind NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have put out pictures of the area where the Mars Polar Lander disappeared nine years ago - and are inviting people to see if they can find it.
Back in 2005, the pros thought they saw signs of the lander in lower-resolution imagery, but they retracted the claim months later. So far, MRO has not turned up a smoking gun, or a smoking crater. Nevertheless, it's continuing the search.
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Now that the presidential primary season is winding down, the effort to organize a national candidates' forum on issues relating to science and technology is shifting to the post-convention phase of the campaign. A survey conducted for ScienceDebate 2008 and Research!America indicates that most Americans are hungry for such a debate, with health care leading the list of topics. Despite that, the debate never came together during the primaries.
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Prediction markets have been known to outdo the pollsters when it comes to handicapping political campaigns, and they can also be used to predict how bad the next flu epidemic can get, how well the next product will sell - or even how long the latest celebrity marriage will last. (Are you listening, Mariah Carey?)
But are these markets legit? That’s what researchers and regulators want to find out.
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GWAP.com / CMU |
The Squigl game involves having two players outline
the same object in an online picture. Points are
awarded based on how close their outlines match.
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Researchers are enlisting Internet users to try out a new set of games that will help them develop smarter search engines and sharper-eyed machines. It’s kind of like playing "Hot or Not" … for a scientific cause.
Games With a Purpose, or GWAP, is the brainchild of computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University - including Luis von Ahn, one of the creators of the CAPTCHA filter to distinguish between real humans and machines. As part of their plan to elevate machines to the next level of human-style intelligence, von Ahn and his colleagues hope to capitalize on the all-too-human desire to get to a multiplayer game's next level.
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msnbc.com |
Click for video: Msnbc.com's Dara Brown reports
on the beta release of the WorldWide Telescope.
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After years of thinking and months of internal testing (and occasional tears), Microsoft Research is releasing its WorldWide Telescope software for the public to download and play with. The program requires more computer firepower than other free online astronomy guides, such as Google Sky or Stellarium. But the payoff for the eyes, ears and mind is high enough to make me think about upgrading my hardware.
The last time I caught upgrade fever, the motivation was to watch online video without the computer going into a stall. This time, I'll need to get more memory for my home computer so I don't miss out on the audio and text as I take a tour of the final frontier.
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Today marks the sixth anniversary of Cosmic Log's founding. In the past year, we've set new records for visitors and comments, thanks in part to those darn glowing cats and other scientific weirdness. In honor of the birthday, I'll point you to the same old quiz I've run over the past few years. How well do you know your Cosmic Log lore? Take the quiz and find out. Then check out these links to some of my favorite subjects:
You can't always judge a quake by its numbers. Two of the magnitude-7-plus quakes recorded in the past six months illustrate the complexities behind scientific statistics. As terrible as it was, last November's magnitude-7.7 quake in Chile ended up killing two people. In contrast, the estimated death toll from today's magnitude-7.9 quake in China, which doesn't sound as if it should be that much stronger, is at 8,500 and rapidly rising.
Although magnitude figures are an easy way to quantify the power of a quake in a headline, it takes something more to tell the whole story of an earthquake's strength.
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Perimeter Institute |
During a presentation on big-bang physics, cosmologist Neil Turok stands in front
of a slide showing Raphael's painting of ancient thinkers, "The School of Athens."
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A theoretical physics institute must be a bit like a science-fiction starship, in that you actually have to take concepts like extradimensional wormholes and inflationary multiverses seriously. If that's the case, then give a "Star Trek" salute to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics' new captain: cosmologist Neil Turok.
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Univ. of Mich. |
Click for video: An
artist's conception shows
a dust devil on Mars. Click
on the image to watch
time-lapse imagery of
a dust devil from 2007.
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Images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are providing an advance peek at what the Phoenix Mars Lander will be running up against when it lands near the planet's north pole later this month: The spacecraft will be coming down in the middle of a spring thaw, and based on the pictures released this week, there just might be some Martian mini-tornadoes swirling through the scene.
Two of the twisters, known as dust devils, show up on an April 20 image of Phoenix's projected landing area, taken by MRO's Context Camera. The Martian whirlwinds are similar to the desert mini-twisters often seen on Earth - and have previously been caught on camera by the Mars Pathfinder lander as well as NASA's Spirit rover. You can watch a dust devil spin through Spirit's line of sight in this year-old video clip.
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NBC News' Tim Russert isn't the only one selling Hillary Clinton short today: In the wake of the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, her shares on the Iowa Electronic Markets have fallen to the lowest point ever. The market lets online investors put real money down on the candidates’ prospects, as a science experiment on the "wisdom of crowds." The shares are worth $1 each if the investor's candidate wins the nomination, but they're worthless if the candidate loses.
Today, Clinton’s shares for the Democratic nomination were trading at less than 10 cents on the IEM - and the situation was pretty much the same at the InTrade prediction market.
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The catastrophic cyclone that hit Myanmar hints at the shape of things to come in a warming world — but probably not for the reason you think. Chris Mooney, the author of "Storm World," argues that the tragedy says more about the sad state of infrastructure in the developing world than it does about the raw impact of climate change. However, shifts in climate will likely accentuate that global rich-vs.-poor split.
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Courtesy of Cal Orey |
Cal Orey says her Brittany spaniels, Simon
and Seth, help her predict seismic events.
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Tiny earthquakes have been swarming near Reno for weeks, and seismic experts are trying to gauge whether things are settling down or heading toward a bigger rumble. All this is making some of the region's residents jittery - including Cal Orey, who lives near Lake Tahoe and issues earthquake predictions based on such things as headaches, pet behavior and moon phases.
Orey made headlines when she called the current wave of shakers in advance - and now she thinks a stronger quake could hit by the end of this month. To be specific, she's predicting a 70 percent chance of a magnitude-5 to magnitude-6 quake in the Reno/Tahoe/Sierra region by the end of May.
"I'm not saying 100 percent," she told me today. "But it's likely."
Seismologists don't tend to put stock in such predictions, as I explained in a report about quake forecasting a couple of years ago. However, the practical effect of what the experts are saying is pretty much the same: Be prepared for a Bigger One.
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UW-Madison |
Ions glow inside an electrostatic fusion reactor at the University of Wisconsin.
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One of the nation's top fusion researchers is worried that America is already falling behind in an energy race that won't start for 30 or 40 years.
"We're losing our lead to other countries in the world," Gerald Kulcinski, director of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me in his office last week.
How can that be, when most of the world's top technological powers are working together on a $13 billion nuclear fusion research project that hasn't even started construction yet? Kulcinski's answer demonstrates why an "Apollo-scale" effort to solve America's energy woes just might require more thought and time than the original Apollo moon effort.
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NASA |
Put your name on NASA's
next lunar probe.
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Now's the time to send your name on a trip to the moon ... or find the bright star in the sky known as the international space station ... or catch a meteor shower ... or tune in to the past and the future of space exploration on your computer.
All of these opportunities are available over the next few days, and any one would serve as a fitting celebration of Space Day.
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