November 2008 - Posts
NASA |
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Astronaut Greg Chamitoff brought a chessboard to the international space station.
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NASA's orbiting chess player is getting ready for the biggest move since his epic "Earth vs. space" match began: the move back down to Earth.
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I'll be taking the Thanksgiving weekend off, and that means I'll be cutting back on postings to the Log over the next few days. In the meantime, check out our nonfattening seven-course meal on Thanksgiving science - and chew over these Web links:
WowWee via MarketWire |
It's hard to know what to buy for a science geek - so hard that we're offering geeky prizes for the best holiday gift idea.
Here's the drill: Submit your gift suggestions or reviews as comments at the bottom of this item.
I'll select a list of finalists next Tuesday, and leave the winning gift choice for you to decide in a future blog posting.
The winner as of 3 p.m. ET Dec. 8 will receive his or her choice from a grab bag of goodies. Simple, right?
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137 Films |
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Theoretical physicist Marcela Carena is one of the scientists appearing in "The
Atom Smashers," a behind-the-scenes look at Fermilab's hunt for the Higgs boson.
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Can the movies turn real-life physicists into stars? "The Atom Smashers," airing Tuesday on PBS, packs a lot of real life into its saga about the world's biggest subatomic quest - plus a bit of movie magic.
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Nightly News |
Click for video: Barack Obama
may have to give up his BlackBerry
phone, but his administration will have other high-tech tools at its disposal. Watch Savannah Guthrie's report for "NBC Nightly News."
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After a historic presidential election, the tech-savvy campaigners who helped put Barack Obama in the White House say the nation is in for an equally historic four years of tech-savvy governance.
The way the Obama campaign used blogs, texting, social networking and other Web 2.0 tools to win this month's election is just "the tip of the iceberg," said Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the political advocacy group NDN.
Those tools are quickly being adapted for the transition to the Obama administration: A new Web site for the president-elect, Change.gov, made its debut on the day after the election, offering supporters an outlet for their suggestions and stories as well as their resumes. In the two weeks since then, the transition team says more than 200,000 job applications have flooded in.
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A. Aloisi / STScI / ESA / NASA / AURA |
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The galaxy NGC 1569 sparkles with the light from millions of newborn stars in an
image from the Hubble Space Telescope. Click on the image for larger versions.
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Long ago, astronomers spotted a galaxy far away and wondered why it was giving birth to so many stars. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, they have finally figured out the answer to the puzzle: The starburst galaxy turns out to be farther away than they thought.
Rather than being all by its lonesome, just 7 million light-years away, the starburst galaxy NGC 1569 is stuck in the middle of crowded galactic cluster nearly 11 million light-years away. The resulting gravitational interactions are probably squeezing the galaxy's gas so much that it's been forming stars at a rate more than 100 times faster than our own Milky Way ... for the past 100 million years or so.
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After more than a decade of tinkering, NASA has successfully conducted the first deep-space test of a communication protocol that could serve as the foundation of an interplanetary Internet.
To mark the occasion, NASA team leader Adrian Hooke provided an e-mail reply to a message I wrote him back in 1999, asking when the interplanetary Internet would be deployed. He wrote, "I think that we just made it .... ;-)"
The fact that Hooke saved my nine-year-old e-mail message hints at how doggedly he and his colleagues have pursued the goal of creating a networking system suitable for deep-space missions.
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Providence Pictures |
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Biblical archaeologist Ron Tappy examines the Tel Zayit abecedary, a 2,900-
year-old alphabet stone that suggests King Solomon was a real historical figure.
Tappy's findings figure in "The Bible's Buried Secrets," a PBS documentary.
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"The Bible's Buried Secrets," premiering tonight on PBS, presents archaeological findings that will annoy believers as well as skeptics - which suggests the TV documentary just might be on the right track.
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Ali Jarekji / Reuters file |
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Remember the Leonids? Seven years ago, the November meteor shower was one of the year's biggest skywatching events. This morning's sky show, in contrast, was hardly heralded at all - but maybe it should have been.
If you were in just the right place (say, Europe or the Middle East) at just the right time (before dawn), you could have seen what one observer called a "fantastic outburst."
Even if you missed the fireworks this time around, don't worry: There will be more opportunities to enjoy the night sky's delights over the next month.
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TODAY / NGC / JAXA |
Click for video: Learn
more about NASA's moon plans and National
Geographic's "Direct From
the Moon" documentary.
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Even as NASA works to put the finishing touches on the international space station, it's laying the groundwork for the next giant leap. But is that leap heading in the right direction? Some prominent space advocates are calling for NASA to reduce its emphasis on returning to the moon. Other countries, however, have the moon clearly in their sights.
It will be up to the Obama administration to decide what kinds of course changes might be required in America's space vision, and a member of the transition team told me today that "the process is under way."
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NASA / JPL / Univ. of Ariz. |
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Saturn's northern aurora glows bluish-green in this color-coded infrared image.
The planet's polar cloud patterns are shown in shades of red. Scientists say
that the areas of auroral activity close to the pole shouldn't be there.
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Scientists say the northern lights on Saturn are unlike anything they've ever seen, on Earth or elsewhere in the solar system. Infrared imagery from the Cassini orbiter, released today to accompany research published in the journal Nature, only adds to the mystery at the top of the ringed planet.
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Two high-school teachers have joined a first-of-its-kind scientific expedition to the ocean's depths this week - and you can follow the adventure over the Internet. And if you'd rather follow expeditions on TV, your big week is coming up.
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Microsoft Research |
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A screenshot from Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope shows Jupiter orbiting the sun.
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Just as space telescopes are getting better and better, so are the telescopes you can download onto your computer over the Internet. The software packages are becoming more and more like video games, letting you zoom out from Earth to explore a 3-D universe - while keeping the science rock-solid enough for professional astronomers to use.
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I'll be on the road for a couple of days for the National Academies Communication Awards, and postings will be dependent on my spare time, bandwidth and news developments. In the meantime, here are a few Web links for Veterans Day:
Thanks and best wishes to war veterans, today and every day.
Caltech / Palomar Observatory |
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Stars whirl over the 200-inch Hale Telescope's dome in a time-exposure photo.
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Astronomer George Ellery Hale's decades-long drive to build bigger and bigger telescopes is the stuff that operas are made of. The epic brought him in contact with the richest and smartest people of a century ago ... forced him to struggle against petty jealousies and personal demons ... and led him to grand achievements that some thought were impossible.
"The Journey to Palomar," a PBS documentary premiering tonight, touches upon all those operatic elements while keeping its focus squarely on the quest's deeper meaning: In the first half of the 20th century, telescope-building was the biggest science around.
"This was the equivalent of a moonshot in that time period," historian Kevin Starr explains during the 90-minute documentary.
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NASA / JPL |
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This 3-D image places a computer-generated rover in the midst of Spirit's
surroundings on Mars as it rolls off its platform on Jan. 15, 2004. Click on the
image for a larger version, and look through red-blue glasses for the 3-D effect.
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When he was a kid, Jim Bell loved to look at rockets and astronauts through his 3-D Viewmaster toy. He grew up to become a planetary scientist at Cornell University rather than a toymaker - but he still revels in 3-D space scenes, as the leader of the panoramic camera imaging team for NASA's Mars rover missions.
Following up on his previous picture book, "Postcards From Mars," Bell offers more than 60 of his all-time favorite stereo images from the rovers in "Mars 3-D," a weirdly wonderful volume that comes with built-in geek glasses.
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Jae C. Hong / AP file |
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Barack Obama wears safety glasses as he tours the Chrysler Stamping
Plant in Sterling Heights, Mich., during the presidential primary campaign.
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The economy and foreign policy may be higher on President-elect Barack Obama's to-do list, but science and technology issues are on the radar screen as well. Among the top tasks: taking the ideology out of scientific issues, and doing more about what Obama has called a "planet in peril."
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AP file |
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Mary Lou Matusik stacks up absentee ballots for counting at the Lake
County Government Center in Crown Point, Ind., on Election Day.
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Registering to vote online ... coping with masses of mail-in ballots ... voting during an "Election Week" rather than a single Election Day: These are all features that came into play during this year's historic balloting, and they point to the next step in the evolution of the electoral process.
On the day after Election Day, experts on voting technology were quick to explain what went right and what went wrong this time around - and whether it's possible to fix our clunky voting system.
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NASA |
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The shuttle Endeavour stands on Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center
in Florida, in preparation for its Nov. 14 launch to the international space station.
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Both of this year's presidential candidates - Barack Obama as well as John McCain - have called on NASA to look into the idea of flying the space shuttle fleet past its scheduled 2010 retirement date.
Now the space agency is providing some sobering estimates of the costs and the risks that would be involved - leading one seasoned space observer to wonder whether the shuttle program should be throttled back rather than extended.
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Kim Carney / msnbc.com / IEM |
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This chart shows rising levels for Barack Obama's stock (and falling levels for John
McCain's stock) on the Iowa Electronic Markets' winner-take-all market.
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Even though GOP presidential candidate John McCain insists he's catching up to Democratic rival Barack Obama, the gap on the political prediction markets is widening on the final day of the campaign.
McCain's shares fell to about 10 cents on the Iowa Electronic Markets, and to even lower levels on other markets. That means buying his stock now would reap a tenfold payoff ... if he wins, that is.
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