July 2008 - Posts
Exploratorium, San Francisco
Robyn Higdon, a producer from the Exploratorium in San Francisco, looks up from
the broadcast site in Yiwu, China, during preparations for Friday's live coverage of a
total solar eclipse. Check the Exploratorium's Flickr site for more images.
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There's nothing like seeing a total solar eclipse with your own eyes - but if you just couldn't make it to Friday's remote totality zone, you have at least three chances to catch the event online in real time. And if you'd rather sleep in, you can still catch up on what you missed. It's the next best thing to being there.
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Virgin Galactic |
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An artist's conception shows passengers in the SpaceShipTwo rocket plane.
Millions could afford to take such flights by 2020, the craft's designer says.
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Leaders of the "Old Space" effort and the "New Space" effort laid out separate visions for the next 15 years on the final frontier at the world's biggest experimental air show this week. But it turns out that their visions are not all that separate - and that the current space frontiers are not anywhere near that final.
The bottom line? If you think space is cool now, just wait.
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Rocket Racing League |
Click for video: An XCOR-powered rocket plane fires up its engine Tuesday
during a Rocket Racing League exhibition flight at the EAA AirVenture show.
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After three years of press releases and hush-hush rocket testing, the Rocket Racing League finally presented its first public demonstration of a NASCAR-style racing plane, powered by a on-and-off blaze of orange flame.
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One of the classic dreams of aviation is to rise into the air with a flying machine strapped to your back. The jetpack dream is so iconic that it has shown up in movies ranging from "Thunderball" to "The Rocketeer" - and so elusive that it has spawned a book about high-tech failures titled "Where's My Jetpack?"
Over the years, several ventures have tried to realize the jetpack dream - and now a New Zealand inventor is taking the wraps off a secret decade-long effort that he hopes will bring the dream to a sky near you.
Today's unveiling of the Martin Jetpack is one of the marquee events at the Experimental Aircraft Association's AirVenture, a weeklong air show that is drawing hundreds of thousands of people - and about 10,000 airplanes - to Oshkosh, Wis.
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MSNBC |
Click for video:
Moonwalker Edgar Mitchell
speaks out on UFOs.
MSNBC's Alex Witt reports.
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It sounds like a publicity stunt for the "X-Files" sequel: A real-life moonwalker, Apollo 14's Edgar Mitchell, says he was told that powerful alien beings have been among us for 60 years and that government officials have been carefully covering up that fact.
Mitchell's claims have caused a huge stir in the week since they were aired on a British radio show. But upon closer inspection, what the retired astronaut said was not all that earth-shattering - or even all that new.
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DKNY |
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The Bridenstine Rocket Racing Team will fly DKNY's colors, as seen in this artwork.
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Do rocket planes and men's fashions ever mix? The Rocket Racing League and DKNY certainly hope so: They've struck a sponsorship deal that will give ample exposure to DKNY's fashion brand on the league's flight suits and one of the rocket racers.
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I'm taking a few days of vacation, then heading out to the Experimental Aircraft Association's AirVenture show in Oshkosh, Wis. Among the headliners will be the Rocket Racing League as well as aerospace designer Burt Rutan and Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson, fresh from their rollout of SpaceShipTwo's mothership, the White Knight Two.
For the rest of this week, the posting schedule will be as light as I can make it. Dispatches from the Big Sky Tour will begin on Monday.
Pat Rawlings / NASA file |
Click for video: Get a look at
the future, as seen by advocates
of the space elevator concept.
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If space elevators work out the way the idea's advocates hope, sending payloads into orbit would become as routine as, say, sending a shipment on a freight train - except that the train would travel straight up for hundreds or thousands of miles, powered by laser beams.
But will such a "railroad to the sky" ever be built? That's the big question hanging over the 2008 Space Elevator Conference, taking place this weekend on Microsoft's Seattle-area campus. And considering that this is an event primarily attended by elevator enthusiasts, you may find some of the answers surprising.
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NASA / ESA / NMSU / JPL |
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These pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope show the passage of Red Spot Jr.
and Baby Red Spot in a band of clouds below the Great Red Spot. Junior (the two-
toned spot at the very bottom) survived unscathed, but Baby (indicated by the
arrow at far right) wasn't so lucky. Click on the image for a larger version.
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Back in May, the scientists behind the Hubble Space Telescope announced the birth of a bouncing Baby Red Spot in Jupiter’s turbulent clouds. Unfortunately, some creatures eat their young: The latest Hubble imagery reveals that the Baby Red Spot is being gobbled up by the planet’s larger and older Great Red Spot.
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Warner Bros. Pictures |
Batman (Christian Bale) gets the
cool gadgets in "The Dark Knight."
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The Joker may be the scene-stealer in "The Dark Knight," but it's still Batman who has the cool gadgets. As the movie saga continues, some of the Caped Crusader's once-outlandish technologies are looking more and more realistic.
Batman has always been one of the more down-to-earth superheroes in the comic-book universe: He is supposed to have no special advantages, other than his brains, brawn and whatever can be bought or built with the aid of a billion-dollar bank account.
"We'd all like to think that if our parents were gunned down when we were young and left us a billion dollars, we'd go out and dress up like Dracula and fight crime," joked University of Minnesota physics professor James Kakalios, author of "The Physics of Superheroes."
So are the feats that Batman performs in the movies physically possible?
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NASA / JPL-Caltech |
The Peony nebula star was found in the crowded, dusty center of our Milky Way
galaxy, seen here in a false-color infrared view from NASA's Spitzer Space
Telescope. Click here for higher-resolution imagery from the Spitzer team.
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Scientists using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have uncovered a star that could be a contender for our galaxy's brightest light - and they say there might be even brighter bulbs out there, shrouded in cosmic dust.
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NASA |
This plaque, placed on
NASA probes in 1972 and 1973, depicts humans
and Earth's location.
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We've been listening for the signs of extraterrestrial civilizations for nearly 50 years - and if E.T.s are out there, they just might have picked up on the radio signals that we've been transmitting for even longer. More recently, some broadcasters have been sending intentional shout-outs to the aliens.
Is that so wrong?
Yes, in the opinion of physicist-novelist David Brin and other scientists who say such transmissions could bring unwelcome consequences.
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NASA / JPL / UA /TAMU / James Canvin |
This is just one small part of a panorama showing Phoenix Mars Lander's
surroundings, produced by weather researcher and former astronomer James
Canvin. Click on the image for a zoomable HD View version (free plug-in required).
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It's prime time for the Mars probes: NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander is at the halfway point of its 90-day primary mission, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is sending back a flood of images from orbit. The pictures contain an incredible amount of detail - as the latest jaw-dropping panoramas illustrate.
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One year after a famous man-vs.-machine poker tournament, the machine finally won out over a team of living, breathing poker professionals. The University of Alberta's Polaris poker-playing software came from behind for the victory in a six-round match held July 3-6 at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
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L. Bedin / STScI / NASA / ESA |
Click for video: Two background galaxies are visible amid a glittering array of
stars in this detail from a Hubble image showing the open star cluster
NGC 6791. Click on the image to watch a video that zooms in on the cluster.
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The time is out of joint in the open star cluster NGC 6791: Three different types of stars show three different ages for the cluster, and that poses a puzzle for the scientists who use stars as celestial timepieces. Fortunately, new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope - combined with some scientific sleuthing - go at least halfway toward setting things right in the cosmic clockwork.
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Jacob Vinther / Yale |
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These images compare structures in a striped fossil feather (left side) and a
woodpecker feather (right side). Under the scanning electron microscope there are
melanosomes in the dark but not the light areas of the fossil (far left arrows). The
corresponding areas are shown at far right. Click on the image for a close-up.
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If dinosaurs had feathers, what did their plumage look like? Some artists have gone wild with their palette, decking out their dinos with parakeet pigments. But now there might actually be a way to figure out a dinosaur's true colors, thanks to a new technique for analyzing fossilized feathers.
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AFP - Getty Images file
Atlantis, shown here during a 2006 landing, is due for retirement in 2010.
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NASA has set the dates for the space shuttle fleet's final missions, ending with a shipment of spare parts for the space station on May 31, 2010. That schedule isn’t set in stone, however – particularly if Congress has anything to do with it.
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AFP - Getty Images |
A foot-wide stone tablet is said to bear Jewish
messianic messages from the first century B.C.
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Scriptural scholars are abuzz over a stone tablet that is said to bear previously unknown prophecies about a Jewish messiah who would rise from the dead in three days. But there are far more questions than answers about the tablet, which some have suggested could represent "a new Dead Sea Scroll in stone."
Do the tablet and the inked text really date back to the first century B.C., as claimed? Where did the artifact come from? Can the gaps in the text be filled in to make sense? Is the seeming reference to a coming resurrection correct, and to whom does that passage refer? Finally, what impact would a pre-Christian reference to suffering, death and resurrection have on Christian scholarship?
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NASA / ESA / STScI / JHU |
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A twisting ribbon of glowing gas marks the point where the expanding blast wave
from a stellar explosion known as SN 1006 is sweeping through.
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Two of NASA's Great Observatories present a red-white-and-blue example of cosmic stars and stripes, just in time for the Fourth of July.
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Science Debate 2008 couldn't quite pull off a political debate on science and technology issues during the presidential primary season, but the big contest is still ahead of us. This week, the effort's organizers laid out a list of 14 questions to focus the discussion for the next four months. The questions make clear that the sci-tech debate isn't just the province of lab-coated geeks, but touches upon society's most important issues.
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Have yourselves a fantastic Fourth of July. I'll be taking the day off, and I'm aiming to resume regular postings on Monday. Here are a few links to get you through the long weekend:
CERN |
A simulation shows the pattern of
particles that scientists think could
be produced by a micro black hole.
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What good is a microscopic black hole, and why would you make one on Earth? Can a black hole ever really be safe, even if it's the size of a quark?
Michelangelo Mangano is a theoretical physicist at Europe's CERN particle-physics lab, where black holes could conceivably be created as early as next year, and such questions have taken up his time for many months.
In an exclusive Q&A, he provides answers on a cosmic scale.
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N. Moeller / Tell Edfu Project
This view of the excavation at Tell Edfu shows superimposed
settlement layers. Some of the grain silos from Egypt's 17th Dynasty
were covered by a thick layer of ash. At a later date, several storage
compartments were built on top of the covered silos.
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Egypt's best-known excavations usually focus on the glittering mummies and grand monuments of the pharaohs, but for something completely different, travel up the Nile to Tell Edfu: The archaeologists digging there have uncovered ruins that shed light on the administrative and agricultural foundations of ancient Egypt's riches.
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