January 2009 - Posts
NOAO / STScI / DSS / NED |
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The options on the "You Decide" ballot for Hubble observations include (top row,
from left) NGC 6634, NGC 6072 and NGC 40, as well as (bottom row) Arp 274, NGC 4289 and NGC 5172. The Hubble team will conduct online voting through March 1.
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Pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope are usually the biggest crowd-pleasers in our monthly roundups of outer-space imagery, and now you can help pick out which cosmic curiosity will get the star treatment from Hubble's team.
An online vote, with six choices on the ballot, is being conducted through March 1 - and the winner's picture will be splashed all over the Internet a little more than a month later. Think of it as the cosmic version of "American Idol," without the bickering judges. CONTINUED >>
ESO |
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This composite image of Centaurus A shows lobes and jets emanating from the
galaxy's central black hole. The image combines data from the APEX radio
telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope.
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Radio observations are filling out an impressive picture of huge jets blasting out from a galactic black hole. The latest findings support the view that Centaurus A is a giant particle accelerator, powered by the active galaxy's matter-sucking monster.
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San Diego Union Tribune via Zuma Press |
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Joe Bartolomei and Lee Sterling of Solartistry Inc. install solar panels on the roof
of a home in Encinitas, Calif. The economic stimulus plan is expected to give a
boost to energy efficiency as well as renewable-energy technologies.
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A hefty portion of President Obama's $825 billion stimulus plan is aimed at generating a triple play for employment, energy and the environment: The House version of the bill, for example, would put more than $68 billion toward boosting America's green-tech sector, which could in turn reduce the average household's energy bill as well as our costly hunger for fossil fuels.
But will the triple play pay off? Some folks on the sidelines worry that billions of dollars could be wasted on technological dead ends, while others complain that all this spending is just a greener shade of pork.
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Young et al. / SwRI / NASA |
To be or not to be ... a planet? That's not really the big question anymore, no matter how you feel about Pluto's so-called demotion.
The truly big question, addressed in two books that look at Pluto's present position from completely different perspectives, has to do with what kinds of planets are out there. That applies to our own solar system as well as the hundreds of other worlds being detected in the universe beyond.
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Paul Sakuma / AP file |
Click for video: Some of the monsters from the film "Monsters
vs. Aliens" are seen through 3-D glasses during a demonstration at the
Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Click on the image to watch a
report from KNTV's Scott Budman about DreamWorks' 3-D ambitions.
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The big game itself will still be in ho-hum 2-D, but the commercial break at the end of the Super Bowl's second quarter will show off some new technologies for 3-D moviegoing and TV watching. The biggest challenge just might be keeping all the different goggles straight.
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NASA / JPL / Corby Waste |
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Hey, kids: Here's your last chance to name NASA's Mars Science Laboratory.
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OK, kids: You have only one more weekend to come up with a name for NASA's next Mars rover. I've got some ideas, but it's up to you to write the essay and take this opportunity to make your mark on another planet. Although the contest is for kids only, even grown-ups can play a part in naming the Mars Science Laboratory - and you don't have to be a kid to enjoy the latest goodies from NASA's 5-year-old Red Planet rovers.
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Univ. of Maryland |
This graphic shows the apparatus set up for the
quantum teleportation experiment.
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Researchers have successfully teleported information from one trapped atom to another one sealed up in a container sitting 3.3 feet (1 meter) away. That's one small step for teleportation, and one quantum leap for code-makers and code-breakers.
But if you're waiting for the kind of teleporter that can beam Captain Kirk down from the Starship Enterprise ... well, don't hold your breath.
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David A. Aguilar / CfA |
This artwork shows the "super-Neptune" planet.
Normally blue in color, its
red hue is caused by the
illumination from the
nearby dwarf star.
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A network of small telescopes has bagged its smallest prize yet - and that's great news for astronomers.
HATNet's discovery of an extrasolar world only slightly bigger than Neptune helps prepare the way for an even more capable planet-hunter that could find alien Earths.
To date, more than 300 planets have been found orbiting other stars. Most of them were detected by measuring the gravitational wobble that the planet induces in its parent star. That method works great for huge planets, but not as well for smaller worlds.
The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics' HATNet uses a different method: Six automated 4.3-inch telescopes in Hawaii and Arizona work together to watch for the ever-so-slight dimming of a star's light as a planet crosses in front of it.
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Warner Independent Pictures |
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"Slumdog Millionaire," a film that focuses on the young winner of an
Indian "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" contest, is the priciest pick on
the Hollywood Stock Exchange's best-picture nomination market.
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Prediction markets have been spot-on when it comes to picking presidents, but the record is less stellar when it comes to movie stars. This year, the best-known Oscar prediction market largely follows the conventional wisdom on Oscar nominations. How close will the Hollywood Stock Exchange come to the actual picks? Tune in tomorrow.
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Chuck Burton / AP
Amanda Raflo watches the inauguration of President Obama on her laptop while
studying at a coffee shop in Charlotte, N.C., on Tuesday.
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President Obama's inauguration sparked significant traffic jams - not only on Washington's streets but in cyberspace as well, according to Web performance monitors. They reported slowdowns at the Web sites run by the White House and the U.S. Senate as well as at several online news outlets.
The fact that the raw numbers of Web users didn't rise to the levels seen on Election Night suggests the problem wasn't the number of people who were online, but the amount of bandwidth each of those people was using.
"It's safe to say that streaming video was a significant contributor to these slowdowns," said Shawn White, director of external operations at Keynote Systems Inc. Another likely factor is the rapid rise of bandwidth-heavy sharing sites such as Flickr and YouTube, he said.
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Whitehouse.gov |
The White House Web site gets a makeover.
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Even before President Obama took the public oath of office, power quietly switched over from the Bush administration at the stroke of noon, as called for in the Constitution. And so it was on the Web: The Bush White House's Web site disappeared into the ether, replaced by an online portal jazzed up with blog posts, slideshows and front-page video.
Change.gov, the ground-breaking Web site for the White House transition, faded away as well.
All those bytes could contain crucial bits of information chronicling the past eight years. Fortunately, they aren't totally lost. If the only other online presidential transition is any guide, the vanished content will eventually resurface on the HTML-coded pages of Web history.
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AP file
Click for video: Million Hundessa, lead team technician for Sprint,
left, and Ken Deatrick, a radio frequency technician for Sprint, add
capacity to a cell site in Washington in preparation for the inauguration.
Click on the picture to watch Brian Williams' report for "NBC Nightly News."
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A cell-phone-generated blizzard of voice calls, text messages and pictures swept through the nation's capital as President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration neared - sparking scattered reports of delays and blocked calls. Wireless service operators said the problems weren't any worse than they expected, and they repeated their advice for keeping the voice and data traffic running smoothly.
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JHU-APL / NASA |
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An artist's conception shows NASA's New Horizons probe passing over Pluto in 2015.
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Three years ago today, NASA's New Horizons probe set off on a mission for Pluto and other little worlds on the edge of the solar system. On the same day, little Hana and Nora Fennell set off on a mission of their own.
The twin daughters of Alan Fennell and Risha Raven were born on this day in 2006. Since then, New Horizons' managers at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory have enlisted Hana and Nora - along with four other kids who mark Jan. 19 as their birthday - as "Pluto Pals."
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I'll be taking a few days off to help out with a family medical matter, but during the break, take a look at Renew America Together, a Web site set up by President-elect Barack Obama's team to match you up with service opportunities in your neighborhood.
For many people, Martin Luther King Jr. Day (which will be observed next Monday) has become not just a day off from work, but a day set aside for community service. Here's hoping you find a worthwhile opportunity to serve - whether it's through Renew America Together, also known as USAService.org, or through any other outlet you choose.
And if you're looking to consider subjects even more cosmic during my days off, here's a magazine rack of Web links:
Regular postings will resume next week.
Lemelson-MIT Program |
MIT's Timothy Lu won the $30,000
Lemelson-MIT Student Prize in
2008 for inventing processes that
could combat bacterial infections.
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When it comes to the next generation of innovation, the good news is that more teens are interested in pursuing careers in science and technology. The bad news is that they don't know where to turn. The Lemelson-MIT Program has put its finger on the problem - and is pointing toward a potential solution.
First, the good news: Eighty-five percent of the teens surveyed for this year's Lemelson-MIT Invention Index expressed interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, which are known as the STEM fields of study.
That's a huge jump from last year's figure of 64 percent, according to the nonprofit program.
What's more, most of the teens said making money wasn't the primary reason for their interest.
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Janet Iwasa / Harvard Med. School and Mass. Gen. Hospital |
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This cutaway view shows a model protocell about 100 nanometers in diameter. The
protocell's fatty acid membrane allows nutrients and DNA building blocks to enter
the cell and create copies of the cell's DNA. The new DNA strands remain inside.
Scientists suggest this is how the first living cells began to evolve eons ago.
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Where did the theory of evolution come from? And where's it going? Essayists and scientists are rallying to answer such questions during the countdown to Charles Darwin's 200th birthday.
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Nightly News |
Click for video: The broken wind turbine at right, coupled with sightings of lights
in the night sky, prompted a flurry of UFO claims in the British press this week.
Click on the image to watch a report from Jenny Wivell for Britain's Channel 4 News.
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What do you get when you take one wrecked wind turbine, and then add an ample serving of eyewitness reports about mysterious lights in the sky? Those ingredients were blended this week in Britain to whip up a rip-roaring UFO sensation.
The Sun newspaper splashed the story today under the headline "UFO HITS WIND TURBINE." It was just one of the many reports appearing in the British press about Sunday's incident in North Lincolnshire.
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David Potter / Oxford University Press |
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A purple-gloved lab worker handles a clump of still-green marijuana found in the
2,700-year-old grave of a man in the Gobi Desert — part of an ancient stash.
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Ancient civilizations may not have perfected frat-party technology, but the weirdest stories of the past year demonstrate that they could get just as high - and indulge in humor just as low - as your typical contemporary college crowd.
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Mark Witton / U. of Portsmouth via JHU |
Giant pterosaurs were about the
size of a modern-day giraffe.
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How did a giant flying reptile get off the ground? It's not a simple question: A computerized analysis of pterosaur fossils and modern-day bird bones shows that the biggest pterosaurs couldn't simply lift off into the air like a bird, because their hind legs were too weak.
The researcher behind the analysis says the forelimbs were much stronger - so much stronger, in fact, that the creatures must have used their "arms" as well as their legs to propel their leap into flight. But will that claim fly with other experts? That remains to be seen.
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Babak A. Tafreshi / 100HoursOfAstronomy.org |
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Iranian stargazers observe the moon and the Pleiades star cluster.
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The organizers of the International Year of Astronomy are using an instrument that's bigger than the twin Keck Telescopes to focus on the sky in 2009: the World Wide Web.
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NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell / NMMNHS |
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This portion of a 360-degree mosaic known as the "Bonestell Panorama" shows
McCool Hill, named after one of the astronauts lost in the Columbia tragedy, and
some of the Spirit rover's tracks on the Martian surface.
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NASA's Mars rovers were designed to last for at least 90 days on the Red Planet, and from the start, mission scientists hoped that they'd keep working well after their "warranty" expired. But few dared to predict that both Spirit and Opportunity would still be on the move five Earth years after they bounced to the surface.
To celebrate Spirit's five-year anniversary, mission managers have released a sweeping new panorama of the rover's winter refuge in Gusev Crater.
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