October 2008 - Posts
Bat Conservation Int'l via AFP - Getty |
Vampire bats are the stars of Bill
Schutt's "Dark Banquet."
|
Between the "Twilight" movie and book series and HBO's "True Blood" TV series, vampires are getting a lot of exposure these days. But in biologist Bill Schutt's book, those fictional fang-wearers don't even deserve to be called vampires.
Instead, in "Dark Banquet," Schutt focuses on the true bloodsuckers of the natural world - vampire bats, leeches, bed bugs, the dreaded candiru fish and other critters that inspire tales as macabre and mysterious as any Halloween thriller.
CONTINUED >>
NASA / Odyssey Moon Ventures |
Odyssey Moon Ventures can draw upon data from
NASA's Hover Test Vehicle prototype, shown here.
|
NASA and Odyssey Moon Ventures have made a $500,000 deal for the joint development of a low-cost lunar lander for future moon missions - with the money flowing in a direction that's different from usual. Odyssey, the first team to sign up for the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, will be paying NASA for technical support.
Eventually, the commercial venture aims to provide the space agency with some of its data from private lunar missions - including its X Prize attempt.
CONTINUED >>
House Ear Institute |
|
The parasite known as Toxoplasma gondii gets its microscopic close-up.
|
Parasites may seem merely icky, but some of them have the Halloweenish capacity to take over your brain. Scientists have happened upon a number of neurological nuisances in the animal world, but the scariest of the lot is a tiny critter known as Toxoplasma gondii - which makes rodents, and perhaps even humans, go loco.
Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky provided a status report on the fabled Toxoplasma and other brain snatchers this week on the university's Palo Alto campus, as part of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing's annual New Horizons in Science seminar.
CONTINUED >>
SLAC |
|
A technician works inside SLAC's 2-mile-long linear accelerator tunnel.
|
Most atom smashers are built like racetracks, with powerful magnets bending subatomic particles into circular routes. The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, built in the heart of California's Silicon Valley, is something completely different: It's basically a 2-mile-long dragstrip that whips up electrons to shed light on the structure of matter.
SLAC's straight-shot structure hints at the shape of atom smashers to come - such as the future International Linear Collider. And it makes for one heck of a jogging trail.
CONTINUED >>
CERN |
|
A cross-section image of the Compact Muon Solenoid charts the "splash" of
particles entering the detector when the Large Hadron Collider's proton beam was
steered into a collimating component in the beam line on Sept. 10, during startup.
|
Europe's Large Hadron Collider is out of order until next year, but that doesn't mean the atom-smashing scientists and engineers behind the world's biggest atom smasher are taking the winter off. Last week, U.S. scientists involved in LHC research gathered at Fermilab, just outside Chicago, to talk about what has to be done between now and next spring - and what they expect to do once the collider is open for business again.
CONTINUED >>
Rocket Racing League |
This is an early concept
for Armadillo's
suborbital spaceship.
|
Rocket Racing Inc. and Armadillo Aerospace are taking their rocket-powered partnership to the next level, in a suborbital space tourism venture to be headquartered at New Mexico's Spaceport America.
Flight testing is due to begin next year, with passenger service scheduled to start in 2010. The promised cost of a ticket: $100,000 or less.
"The price of space is coming down to earth," Rocket Racing's co-founder and chief executive officer, Granger Whitelaw, declared.
Today's announcement came on the same day that Texas-based Armadillo won $350,000 of NASA's money in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, taking place at Las Cruces International Airport in New Mexico. Led by millionaire John Carmack, the Armadillo Aerospace team flew its rocket-powered lander prototype through a course that simulates a space mission.
CONTINUED >>
R. Garriott via ARISS / MAREX |
An image sent via
amateur radio shows a
Soyuz craft in space.
|
More than 2,000 electronic postcards have been received from the international space station during video-game millionaire Richard Garriott's weeklong visit - thanks to extraterrestrial messaging systems that were built by amateurs, for amateurs (and astronauts).
The SpaceCam1 and VC-H1 systems - developed by the MAREX ham-radio group and Amateur Radio on the International Space Station - use the space station's amateur-radio rig to scan and send TV-like images back down to Earth. They follow up on slow-scan TV experiments that go back to Russia's Mir space station, and even earlier.
CONTINUED >>
ORNL / ITER |
This rendering shows the proposed ITER fusion
reactor. Click on the image for a larger version.
|
The current round of financial uncertainty is coming at just the wrong time for America's largest and smallest fusion research programs.
In its simplest form, nuclear fusion involves combining the nuclei of hydrogen atoms to produce helium atoms, plus a smidgen of energy. It's the energy reaction that powers the sun as well as hydrogen bombs. For decades, scientists have been trying to tame the process to produce what could be an abundant, high-yield power source that is less environmentally problematic than nuclear fission.
Federal funding currently backs three strategies for fusion power:
CONTINUED >>
Pat Rawlings / NASA |
|
In the novel "Mars Life," explorers like the ones shown in this speculative artwork
find evidence of long-gone intelligent life in the Red Planet's Tithonium Chasma.
|
Over the course of more than 45 years, and through more than 115 books, Ben Bova has been chronicling space exploration as fiction and fact. But in his latest novel, "Mars Life," Bova uses facts about the Red Planet - plus facts about the blue planet we live on - to weave a tale of interplanetary politics as well as scientific discovery.
CONTINUED >>
NASA |
|
Engineers man their stations at the Space Telescope Operations Control Center as commands are transmitted to Hubble's command and data-handling system.
|
The revival of the Hubble Space Telescope started out going "exactly as we hoped," a NASA spokesman said, but engineers had to put a hold on the operation after they saw two anomalies in electronic systems onboard the telescope.
CONTINUED >>
The Takeaway / WNYC |
|
An online tracker offered by "The Takeaway" radio show's Web site aggregates
electoral-vote projections from 15 media outlets. Click on the image to learn more.
|
Remember the good old days, way back in 2000, when NBC's Tim Russert showed how important "Florida! Florida! Florida!" was by scribbling on a whiteboard with a marker pen? That whiteboard is now sitting in a museum - the Smithsonian, in fact - and computer wizards are serving up a whole new set of tools for visualizing politics.
CONTINUED >>
"Space Shuttle Disaster," a documentary premiering on public TV stations tonight, traces the bad decisions that led to the shuttle Columbia's fatal breakup in 2003. But this isn't just about a five-year-old tragedy: The show also demonstrates why the 27-year-old space shuttle program has turned into a dead end - and why investigators say NASA must resist the temptation to keep the space planes flying for any longer than absolutely necessary.
"Extending the shuttle is taking unnecessary risks that could doom the whole program if there were another shuttle accident," said John Logsdon, a space historian at the National Air and Space Museum who served on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. "Even though the shuttle has been improved since its return to flight, it's still a risky vehicle."
If the shuttle is so risky, why was it built that way? Didn't NASA realize how risky it was? Such questions get a prime-time spotlight in "Space Shuttle Disaster," airing on PBS as part of the "Nova" documentary series.
CONTINUED >>
Mike D'Angelo / Rocket Racing League ® |
Click for video: Watch the Armadillo-powered
rocket plane take off for a test flight in Oklahoma.
|
After mere months of development time, the Rocket Racing League's Armadillo-powered racing plane has gotten the Federal Aviation Administration's go-ahead to show its stuff in 20 places around the country.
Don't expect to see a rocket showdown in a sky near you just yet, however: The league won't start its "exhibition season" until next year, and honest-to-goodness races are slated to begin in 2010.
CONTINUED >>
G. Wanger / JCVI / G. Southam / UWO |
The rod-shaped bacterium known as Desulforudis
audaxviator was recovered from water collected deep
in the Mponeng Mine in South Africa.
|
A strange breed of bacteria that has been found living alone, nearly two miles underground, is just the kind of creature suited to survive far beneath the surface of Mars, scientists say.
The rod-shaped microbe, dubbed Desulforudis audaxviator, can survive in complete darkness, without oxygen, in temperatures around 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius) - as long as it has a trickle of water flowing through radioactive rocks. It was found living under such conditions in a 1.75-mile-deep (2.8-kilometer-deep) gold mine in South Africa.
"I would guess that an organism like this would be ideally suited for the Martian subsurface," said Princeton University microbiologist T.C. Onstott, one of the microbe's discoverers.
CONTINUED >>
NASA / JPL / SSI |
The Cassini orbiter took this picture of the Saturnian moon Enceladus taken during Thursday's flyby.
|
The Cassini orbiter came through its closest-ever encounter with a Saturnian moon with flying colors - and with a fresh crop of cool black-and-white pictures of Enceladus. The most precious products of Thursday's 16-mile-high pass weren't the pictures, but the samplings of the mysterious stuff welling up from the cracks in Enceladus' icy surface.
"One of the key goals of this flyby seems to have been successful," Cassini project scientist Robert Pappalardo told me today.
CONTINUED >>
First it was on, then it was in limbo, and now it's on again: The Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, a $2 million NASA-backed competition for rocket-powered lander prototypes, is now due to take place Oct. 24 and 25 at Las Cruces International Airport in New Mexico.
CONTINUED >>
NASA |
|
The Hubble Space Telescope gleams after a servicing mission in 2002.
|
The Hubble Space Telescope's handlers are weighing a plan to turn on a never-used backup system to restore communications as early as next week. If it works, the world's favorite orbiting observatory could be back in business just a couple of days later. If it doesn't, Hubble could conceivably be worse off than it was before.
CONTINUED >>
Adler Planetarium
The Adler Planetarium's Zeiss Mark VI projector was installed in 1970.
|
As if scientists weren't having enough problems due to federal budget freezes, now they're facing flak from Republican presidential candidate John McCain because of a $3 million planetarium projector. Which was never funded.
McCain has repeatedly taken his presidential rival (and Senate colleague) Barack Obama to task for seeking the $3 million earmark for Chicago's Adler Planetarium. The 40-year-old projector currently being used by the world-class planetarium is failing, and it's so obsolete that spare parts aren't available anymore. Obama and other members of the Illinois congressional delegation sought federal funds for a replacement.
That request fell by the wayside, and the funds never came through. But McCain is still trying to beat Obama over the head with the non-existent earmark, complaining about the "overhead projector" during Tuesday night's debate.
Anyone who's been to a planetarium knows that a planetarium projector is an incredibly complex and expensive device, and not your garden-variety overhead projector. Two years ago, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Griffith Observatory's new projector cost more than $3 million. Total cost of the Griffith's renovation: $93 million.
In response to McCain's comments, the Adler Planetarium issued a truth-squad statement today. Adler President Paul Knappenberger noted that the Griffith Observatory as well as New York's Hayden Planetarium received federal funding to replace their projection systems, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Legions of science fans are leaping to Adler's defense. Here's a selection, mostly cribbed from Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog. I'll be glad to add more if you send them along as a comment:
As I noted on Tuesday (and this morning), McCain's shares are hitting new lows on the political prediction markets. Maybe his planetarium problem was a factor.
Update for 12:50 p.m. ET Oct. 9: Tracey from Atlanta makes a good point in the comments below: All the publicity about this should help the Adler Planetarium raise the $3 million without the federal earmark. In fact, I'll be doing my part. I'm sending the planetarium a check for $140 today. This is in lieu of the political contributions that I never give because I'm a journalist. If everyone who has clicked onto this Web page so far sent in that amount as an average contribution, the planetarium would have more than $3 million in new money for their capital fund campaign. I'm going to write on my check that this is for "planetarium earmark avoidance," and you're free to do the same.
Update for 3:30 p.m. ET Oct. 9: After talking with the planetarium folks, I found that the best way to mark the check is to say it's for "Sky Theater renovation." (I'm adding the "earmark avoidance" part as well, just for fun.)
NASA / JPL-Caltech / XMM / NTT / MPIA |
This painterly portrait of a star-forming cloud called
NGC 346 combines imagery from several telescopes.
Click on the picture to see a bigger version.
|
NASA's "Great Observatories" have teamed up with other telescopes on Earth and in space to produce a trio of glorious pictures showing how stars are born.
Astronomers believe the first generations of stars were crushed into existence as cosmic gas congealed into galaxies, and that's the focus of a clever study that draws upon the Hubble Space Telescope's view of a bizarre "Cosmic Eye." More recently, blasts of radiation and supernova winds are hammering out stars from clouds of gas and dust, as seen in a pair of pictures that incorporate data from the Spitzer Space Telescope.
Here's a quick guide to the latest fireworks displays from Hubble, Spitzer and NASA's third Great Observatory, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory:
CONTINUED >>
IEM |
This chart shows a year's
worth of trading on the
Iowa Electronic Market,
with a steep fall in GOP
fortunes (shown in red).
|
As the political season reaches its peak, economists are seeing evidence that the fortunes of presidential candidates are not immune from bounces, crashes and even market manipulation.
The evidence shows up in the latest readings from political prediction markets - which have been more accurate indicators of an election's outcome than traditional opinion polls, based on a scientific analysis of the past 20 years of presidential campaigns.
The trades can be made with play money (as is the case for NewsFutures or Inkling), or with real money through offshore betting sites (like InTrade or BetFair). America's only officially sanctioned real-money operation is the Iowa Electronic Markets, a business research project at the University of Iowa.
CONTINUED >>
Space Adventures |
|
Esther Dyson plays with water blobs during a zero-gravity airplane ride.
|
For more than a decade, high-tech investor Esther Dyson has been a believer in business ventures that draw upon Russia's intellectual resources. And as the daughter of physicist and spaceship designer Freeman Dyson, she has had a special interest in ventures on the space frontier. Now she's putting more of her money where her convictions are, by paying $3 million to go through cosmonaut training in Russia as a backup for billionaire spaceflier Charles Simonyi.
CONTINUED >>
Dave Einsel / Getty Images file |
|
A sculptor's rendering, part of an exhibit focusing on the 3.2-million-
year-old hominid called Lucy, shows how she might have looked in life.
|
The world’s best-known skeleton of a human ancestor - whose name, "Lucy," came from a Beatles song - now lies splayed out in Seattle's Pacific Science Center like ornaments in a glass jewelry case. Or, more aptly, like 3.2-million-year-old pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
Anthropologists are still working on the puzzles about human origins that have been posed by Lucy and other fossils, including a major find that was made just a couple of miles away from the place where Lucy was found 34 years ago.
The long-running mystery surrounding the "First Family" - a grouping of fossil bones representing up to 17 of Lucy's kin from Ethiopia's Afar region - is just one of the many unresolved plot threads in the scientific story about our long-ago ancestors.
CONTINUED >>
NASA |
|
Moonwalker Buzz Aldrin poses for a picture taken by Neil Armstrong during 1969's
Apollo 11 mission. In current dollars, the Apollo program cost around $100 billion.
|
How much will $700 billion get you? Roughly speaking, the widely publicized cost of the financial bailout … er, rescue package … is equal to seven Apollo programs, or 70 state-of-the-art atom-smashers. The magnitude of the figures being thrown around is so much easier to understand when you use our currency conversion chart for mega-projects.
CONTINUED >>
>
N. Smith / UCB / NASA / ESA / Hubble Heritage |
|
An image released to mark the 10th anniversary of the Hubble Heritage Project
highights a cosmic landscape in the star-forming region known as NGC 3324. Click
on the picture to see larger versions from the Space Telescope Science Institute.
|
A star-studded celestial landscape is on display in an image celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Hubble Heritage Project, which finds new wonders in old data from the world's best-loved space telescope.
CONTINUED >>
The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, an annual celebration of silly (but serious) science, will be broadcast live on the Web from Harvard University at 7:30 p.m. ET tonight - just before yet another highly anticipated event that might make you laugh, and then make you think.
CONTINUED >>
SpaceX |
|
SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket rises Sunday from its Pacific island launch pad.
|
Fifty years ago, NASA and the Soviets were the only players in the spaceflight game - but those days are gone forever. On its 50th birthday, America's government-funded space agency finds itself surrounded by upstarts - some who will no doubt be selling rides to the government in the years to come.
The latest upstart to join the orbital club is California-based SpaceX, the company founded six years ago by dot-com millionaire Elon Musk.
CONTINUED >>
