February 2009 - Posts
Galaxy Zoo 2 |
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The Galaxy Zoo 2 Web site asks Internet users to put galaxies in a series of
categories. For example, which of these galaxies are disks seen edge-on? If you
picked the ones at upper left, upper middle and lower middle, you're correct.
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Over the past couple of years, more than 200,000 Internet users have been transformed into galaxy zookeepers. They've been pushing spirals and ellipticals into their separate cages, and occasionally stumbling upon cosmic critters odd enough to generate headlines as well as scientific papers.
Now the researchers behind the Galaxy Zoo are asking their citizen's army to take on an even trickier task - a grand roundup that they hope will produce a "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxies." And you can join in as well, after just a few minutes of online training.
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Ironbound Films |
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Linguist Gregory Anderson, left, discusses counting systems with Oranchu
Gomongo, who speaks India's endangered Sora language.
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The Indiana Jones movies make it look as if the archaeologists have all the fun - but if you really want to see lost worlds and uncover cultural riches, you should think about becoming a linguist. At least that's the message I got from "The Linguists," a documentary that makes the leap from the film-festival circuit to the airwaves on PBS tonight.
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Jim Watson / AFP - Getty Images file |
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President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden inspect a solar array on the roof
of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science during a Feb. 17 appearance.
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When a politician starts talking about renewable energy and carbon caps, pollster Stan Greenberg usually sees what he calls a "glazing-over" moment - as in voters' eyes glazing over with disinterest. But when President Obama talked about how America had to take back the lead in energy innovation, that moment didn't come.
Instead, Democrats as well as Republicans picked up on Obama's call for energy independence, and revved up the debate on the morning after.
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NASA |
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An artist's conception shows the Orbiting Carbon Observatory in flight.
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A failed launch is never good news, but today's loss of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory is particularly bad news for a space agency in transition.
The $280 million mission, which apparently went awry due to an equipment malfunction, would have been the perfect showcase for NASA's changing priorities under the Obama administration. The satellite would have provided fresh insights into how carbon is taken out of the atmosphere - and could have led to better climate forecasts as well as new strategies for easing climate shifts.
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Hulton Archive / Getty Images file |
A black airman gazes skyward
in a World War II poster.
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The rich and the famous will be lining up for rides when suborbital space tourism finally kicks into gear. But what about the people who made it all possible? XCOR Aerospace's "Legacy Flight" program will send some of those unsung heroes to the final frontier ... for free. Over the weekend, XCOR awarded the program's first ticket to an 89-year-old Tuskegee Airman.
And that won't be the last ticket issued: XCOR Aerospace spokesman Doug Graham said the California-based company plans to give away as many as three Legacy Flight tickets a year - to be redeemed when its Lynx rocket plane takes to the air, a year or two from now.
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Dean Coppola / Contra Costa Times |
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Astronomer Stephen Pompea peers through the low-cost Galileoscope at the
University of California at Berkeley. The $15 telescope kit is now on sale.
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Astronomers have launched a commercial venture aimed at putting low-cost telescopes in the hands of a million people around the world. The Galileoscope Web site, one of the cornerstone projects for the International Year of Astronomy, began taking orders for the simple yet powerful scopes Thursday night.
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ESA |
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An artist's conception shows a planet crossing the disk of an alien star. Planet-
hunting satellites watch for the dimming of starlight caused by such crossings.
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NASA is gearing up for a space race that's expected to point to the first truly Earthlike worlds beyond our solar system - and, like the race to put the first human on the moon, this marathon will take several years to run.
The roots of the race go back more than a decade, as astrophysicist Alan Boss explains in his new book, "The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets." That's when pioneers in the planet-hunting field started detecting worlds around suns beyond our own.
The techniques used back then couldn't find other Earths in planetary systems like our own. The first method, pioneered by Polish astronomer Alexander Wolszczan at the Arecibo Observatory in 1991, could detect Earth-scale planets (and perhaps even the first known extrasolar dwarf planet) around radio pulsars - but those planets were thought to be burned-out cinders and not Earthlike at all.
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I'm out of the office this week, but here's a sample pack of Web snacks to tide you over:
Nicolle Rager Fuller / NSF |
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Scientific and religious leaders are sharing their thoughts on the influence of
Charles Darwin's ideas, 150 years after the publication of "The Origin of Species."
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Charles Darwin's 200th birthday may now be history, but the story behind the origins of species continues to be told. In fact, you might be hearing more about "The Origin of Species" at church this weekend, right after the scriptural readings: More than 1,000 religious congregations around the world have signed up to give sermons on the theme of reeligion and science as part of the fourth annual Evolution Weekend.
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ACT |
Recent advances in stem cell research - including the technique for reprogramming ordinary skin cells to behave like embryonic stem cells - could put human evolution on a pace that's much faster and wilder than we can handle, according to a pioneer in the field.
Advanced Cell Technology's Robert Lanza, who was one of the first researchers to work on human cloning, thinks someone better be ready to put on the brakes before the breakthroughs spin out of control.
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Hulton Archive / Getty Images file |
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An engraving shows the HMS Beagle being greeted by Fuegian natives as it sails
through the Strait of Magellan in 1834 with naturalist Charles Darwin aboard.
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Evolutionary biology isn't just something you do in the lab or the library: Over the past two centuries, scientific pioneers have had to weather seasickness, survive shipwrecks and watch out for polar bears while they ferreted out the facts.
In his latest book, "Remarkable Creatures," molecular biologist Sean B. Carroll recounts the rip-roaring adventure tales behind the great advances in the theory of evolution.
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NASA / ESA / CXC / SSC / STScI |
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The spiral galaxy Messier 101 is shown in multiple wavelengths from the Spitzer
Space Telescope (red for infrared), the Hubble Space Telescope (yellow for visible
light) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue for X rays). Click on the image for
a larger version from the Space Telescope Science Institute.
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If anyone doubts that three telescopes are better than one, the latest image from NASA's Great Observatories should change that view with a single glance.
Poster-size prints of the dazzling Pinwheel Galaxy - as seen by the Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra space telescopes - are being distributed to more than 100 starstruck locales to celebrate Galileo Galilei's birthday on Feb. 15 as well as the 400th birthday of his telescope.
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Donald Johanson |
It’s been 35 years since anthropologist Don Johanson found the fossilized skeleton of Lucy, the world’s best-known ancestor of modern humans, but Johanson says his 3.2 million-year-old “girlfriend” from Ethiopia still has lessons to teach.
"I never thought, when I found her on that November day, that she would turn out to be such an icon in human evolution," Johanson said last week during a visit to the "Lucy's Legacy" exhibit at Seattle's Pacific Science Center.
Lucy has become an icon, of course. In part, that's because Johanson and his colleagues recovered an incredible 40 percent of the complete skeleton, which is laid out in Seattle like a gem collection in a jewel case. The biggest reason, however, is that Lucy came from an era when our ancestors were just becoming human (as Johanson explains on this marvelous Web site).
"Lucy has gone a long way in introducing people not just to the idea of evolutionary change, but particularly to the fact that humans have evolved," he said.
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In recent years, one day in February has been set aside to wish a happy birthday to British naturalist Charles Darwin, whose theories on the origin of species can still start an argument. This year, however, is a big one: 2009 marks not only the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth but also the 150th anniversary of the publication of "On the Origin of Species," his masterwork. To mark the occasion, we'll be rolling out a number of reports reflecting on the man and his scientific legacy - supplementing a special report on the "Future of Evolution" that we put out four years ago. Here are just a few Web links to get the ball rolling:
Stay tuned for more as the week evolves.
CERN |
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Workers prepare to lower a magnet into the Large Hadron Collider's tunnel.
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The restart of the world's biggest particle-smasher is being postponed until late September at the earliest, to allow for the installation of a safety system that would have reduced the amount of damage done during last year's electrical breakdown.
In today's announcement of the additional delay, Europe's CERN physics research center said the Large Hadron Collider should produce its first proton collisions in late October and its first science results next year.
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Ana Carolina Carnaval / UC-Berkeley |
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The frog Hypsiboas semilineatus is found in Brazil's Atlantic rainforest.
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This has been a fantastic week for frogs, and the scientists who love them.
First, there was a report that as many as 10 new species of amphibians have been discovered in the jungles of Colombia. Then, a frog-finding duo said they found a dozen new species in the forests of India. Finally, researchers published promising results from an experiment that used DNA from nearly 200 Brazilian tree frogs to help identify the hottest biodiversity hot spots.
The week's findings demonstrated that there's still lots to learn about the world's amphibian species - and that even tiny frogs can make a big contribution to global environmental awareness.
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K. Cook / LLNL / NASA / ESA |
Haunted by NGC 4921?
Click on the image for
a zoomable version.
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The Hubble Space Telescope's latest stunner is a pale ghost of a galaxy, floating amid its kindred spirits in the Coma Cluster. But wait ... there's more: If you take a closer look at the picture, you'll find thousands of other galaxies going far back into the depths of the universe.
This galaxy, known as NGC 4921, is part of a well-known cluster in the constellation Coma Berenices, 320 million light-years from Earth. More than a thousand galaxies huddle together, and most of them have been crunched together into elliptical shapes. NGC 4921 is one of the rare spirals still surviving - and in today's image advisory, the European Space Agency's Hubble team says it's a "rather unusual one."
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CERN |
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A worker prepares a replacement magnet for the Large Hadron Collider's ring.
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The federal lawsuit against the world's largest particle-smasher may have been thrown out of court last year, but the plaintiffs have since filed an appeal, arguing that the judge was wrong when she said the U.S. legal system had no jurisdiction over the European science experiment.
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NASA / JPL-Caltech |
Spirit surveys its tracks, with a rock
stuck near its right wheel. Click on
the image for a larger version.
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The Spirit is moving again on the Red Planet, now that mission managers think they know what ailed the mixed-up Mars rover last month. Spirit has had to cope with more mundane snags as well, such as a rock that got in its way this week.
Meanwhile, Spirit's twin, Opportunity, is continuing its march on the other side of the planet - and both rovers are sending back 3-D snapshots.
Back on Earth, engineers are working on a next-generation rover that works more like a yo-yo. Read on for the latest rover update ...
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CNES |
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Astronomers can detect an extrasolar planet by watching for the characteristic
dimming of a star as the planet's disk passes over, as shown in this graphic.
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European astronomers say they have found a "super-Earth" that's less than twice as wide as our planet, but up to 11 times more massive and hellishly hot. It might turn out to be the smallest Earthlike planet yet discovered beyond our solar system - depending on how you define "smallest" and "Earthlike."
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Yoshikazu Tsuno / AFP - Getty Images |
Click for video: This Samsung 56-inch 3-D HD plasma panel is designed to be
used with LCD glasses. Tonight's episode of "Chuck," in contrast, is encoded
for 3-D viewing with the ColorCode glasses distributed before the Super Bowl. If you
have those glasses, click on this image to watch a scene from "Chuck" in 3-D.
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This week's experiments in 21st-century 3-D television viewing are just the start for a technology that some filmmakers hope will soon be right up there with HD and Blu-Ray on the coolness scale.
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