March 2009 - Posts
LLNL |
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Technicians check a positioner inside the target chamber at the National Ignition
Facility in California. A tiny capsule containing fusion fuel would be placed at the
very end of the pencil-shaped positioner, then blasted by 192 laser beams.
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All of a sudden, nuclear fusion is becoming an energy buzzword instead of an energy joke: One route to fusion is being hailed as having the potential to become a "holy cow game-changer," another mainstream method is getting a multimillion-dollar boost, and a dark-horse candidate is stealthily moving forward as well. Heck, even cold fusion is back in the game.
So what's behind the seemingly sudden interest?
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William A. Cotton / Colorado State University |
Click for video: Alpha cribs containing colonies of algae grow
under artificial lights at Colorado State University's Engines and Energy
Conversion Laboratory. Click on the image to watch an archived video
about algae-based biofuels from NBC Nightly News.
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In the past, Venetians have looked upon algae as their scumbag enemy, but now they're hoping to tame the plants to satisfy the historic Italian seaport's energy needs. Will algae provide the ultimate in green power, or is the scheme merely a green pipe dream?
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NASA |
Click for video: Backdropped by the thin line of Earth's atmosphere, the
international space station shines in a view captured from the shuttle Discovery.
Click on the image to watch a sped-up video of Discovery's March 25 flyaround.
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Is one picture worth a hundred billion dollars? That’s the mostly-in-jest price tag that was put on this week’s portrait of the virtually complete international space station. Pictures may not be the most practical payoff from space exploration, but they’re definitely the biggest crowd-pleasers, as demonstrated by the latest batch of “Month in Space” pictures.
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Paragon Space Development |
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Flowering plants would be enclosed in a mini-greenhouse placed on Odyssey
Moon's lunar lander, as shown in this artist's conception.
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A company that has built mini-biospheres for orbiting space stations says it's ready for the next giant leap: growing flowers on the moon.
"It's all very aggressive," Taber MacCallum, chief executive officer of Arizona-based Paragon Space Development Corp., said of his company's plan to send a miniature greenhouse to the lunar surface. "But it isn't fun if it isn't aggressive."
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What's behind the continuing stream of species discoveries? Conservation groups are spending millions of dollars to document and preserve the final frontiers of biodiversity, helped along by better technology and savvier scientists.
The latest additions to the list are contained in today's announcement from Conservation International, focusing on the discovery of more than 50 previously undocumented species in a remote region of Papua New Guinea. Less than a week ago, the same group took the wraps off what appear to be four new species discovered in Peru's White Mountain Range. And last month, the headlines heralded 10 new amphibian species in Colombia as well as a dozen more found in India.
There's a whole list of cases in which species are being found by the bunch ...
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NASA / JPL |
Click for video: A short but fierce "gullywasher" of methane rain falls on the
mountains surrounding Titan's Hotei Arcus in this artist's view, based on mapping
data from the Cassini spacecraft. Click on the image to see a virtual flyover.
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Pictures from the Cassini orbiter have been processed to provide a psychedelic flyover of Titan, Saturn's largest and most mysterious moon. But wait ... there's more: You also can watch moon shadows dance over Saturn's rings, a phenomenon that occurs during a season that comes only once every 15 years.
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NASA / JPL-Caltech |
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The Mars Science Laboratory, shown in this artist's conception, will be taking on a
new name before its launch, now scheduled for 2011.
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Will we be watching Adventure touch down on Mars in 2012? Or will it be Amelia instead? Or something else equally wonderful? Here's your chance to decide what NASA's next Mars rover will be named - and send your own name along for the ride. P.S.: Stephen Colbert doesn't get a write-in vote on this one.
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Photo by B. Janine Morison |
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"Battlestar Galactica" scientific adviser Kevin Grazier takes a seat in a Viper fighter
during a visit to the series' Vancouver set. The series finale airs tonight.
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How does a naked singularity work? What happens when a spacecraft gets stressed-out? Answering such questions is all in a day's work for Kevin Grazier, the scientific adviser for the critically acclaimed TV series "Battlestar Galactica."
Over the course of five years, the planetary scientist has figured out how to juggle his day job on the Cassini science team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as well as his duties for "Battlestar Galactica" and other sci-fi projects. But even though Galactica is gearing up for its last ride tonight, Grazier still hasn't completely figured out how the spaceship manages to travel faster than light.
"If I knew exactly how it worked, I'd be going to Stockholm for my Nobel," Grazier joked.
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Summit Entertainment |
Click for video: In this scene from the movie
"Knowing," Nicolas Cage explains how a list of
numbers predicts future disasters.
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"Knowing," the Nicolas Cage movie opening Friday, is the latest Hollywood tale to play off the idea that our future is already determined by the numbers, if only we knew how to interpret them. Does the universe really work that way? The answer is no ... yes ... maybe.
If you think you can predict the dates of future disasters by checking numbers on a piece of paper, as Cage's character does in the movie, you might want to consider seeing a therapist. But if you think you're seeing the same plot twist happening over and over again, it's not all in your head.
Numbers with cosmic significance have played a big role in movies such as "Pi" (which is a take-off on the Bible Code fad) and "The Number 23" (actually, my personal favorite is the number 42). Numerological voodoo is a theme in the "Lost" TV show (see? 42!). And sometimes that voodoo translates into real-life worries: For example, the bogus doomsday claims about 2012 stem from the numbers behind the ancient Maya calendar.
There's some powerful psychology behind numerology, in fiction as well as real life. And when it comes to physics, numbers are real life.
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Microsoft Research |
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This screenshot from the Web-based version of WorldWide Telescope shows Venus'
surface, mapped by the Magellan probe and enhanced with other imagery.
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A year after making its debut as a downloadable software program, Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope is going public on the World Wide Web. It's the latest move aimed at widening the "market" for free online exploration of the cosmos.
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NASA / JPL-Caltech / STScI / ESA |
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This image of a pair of colliding galaxies called NGC 6240 shows them in a
rare, short-lived phase of their evolution just before they merge into a
single, larger galaxy. Click on the image for a larger version.
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Nothing draws a crowd like a spectacular crash - whether it's a NASCAR auto race or a galactic collision. Over the past month, Internet users voted for a cosmic smash-up as their favorite target for a future close-up from the Hubble Space Telescope, and this week you can feast your eyes on two fantastic images of galaxies in gridlock.
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Inside Science News Service / Ivanhoe |
Click on image for video: Mathematician Mike Breen says "March
Madness" basketball brackets can generate quintillions of outcomes.
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As you puzzle over the "March Madness" basketball bracket for your office pool, you can go with pure luck - and hope you hit a 9,000,000,000,000,000,000-to-1 long shot. Or you can play it safe and just go with the higher-rated team for every game. But how scientific is that? A growing number of online tools promise to give you an analytical edge over your officemates.
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USGS via Google Earth |
This view from Google Earth's
virtual Mars highlights the Red
Planet's north polar ice cap.
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Google has upgraded its Red Planet browser to reveal fresh as well as long-faded views of Mars, marking the latest advance in a visualization revolution.
Today's add-ons for Google Earth 5.0 include a "Live From Mars" layer that incorporates the latest available imagery from NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft, as well as historical maps of the planet's "canali" as seen by 19th-century astronomers and guided tours that are narrated by NPR's Ira Flatow and Bill Nye the Science Guy.
It seems as if there's a new dose of astronomical gee-whizzery available every couple of weeks. Google unveiled its 3-D virtual Mars just last month, as part of a package that also included deep-ocean views and historical imagery.
A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft showed off a new interface for its WorldWide Telescope that lets you use your hands to zoom through the universe as if you were in a scene from "The Minority Report." (Microsoft is a partner in the msnbc.com joint venture.) And just this week, NASA unveiled a cool new Web site that brings climate data to life and even gives you a 3-D satellite tracker to play with.
All these online visualizations are designed to do more than just give you pretty pictures - although the pictures are pretty great. They also aim to convey a better understanding of the science behind the pictures, served up on an easy-to-use, easy-to-adapt platform.
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You win some, you lose some: That truism goes for planets as well as presidents. Pluto may have lost an election at the International Astronomical Union's general assembly almost three years ago, but it won the backing of the Illinois Senate last month.
Lawmakers approved a resolution that re-establishes Pluto's full planetary status as it "passes overhead through Illinois' night skies." The resolution sets today aside as "Pluto Day" in Illinois. March 13 is singled out because it's the 79th anniversary of the announcement that Pluto had been discovered.
Pluto's discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh, was born in Streator, Ill., which explains why Illinois' state senators felt a special need to mark the occasion. In his later years, Tombaugh lived in New Mexico, where March 13 was similarly designated "Pluto Planet Day" in 2007.
The debate over the status of Pluto and the solar system's other smaller planets continues to this day. Illinois' resolution may be nonbinding - but come to think of it, so was the IAU's. So if you're looking for something to celebrate, raise a glass to Pluto today. Then, have a nice piece of pi tomorrow. (And while you're in a festive mood, sing "Happy Birthday, Dear Albert" as well.)
Update for noon ET: I've come across two more reasons to celebrate. First, the NASA probe that's bound for Pluto in 2015, known as New Horizons, has started sending back pictures of Neptune's moon, Triton. That's particularly interesting for the New Horizons team because Triton is Neptune's largest moon, spinning in a direction that's completely different from that of its adoptive parent planet. The current thinking is that Triton is a bigger cousin of Pluto's that broke out of the icy Kuiper Belt and was somehow captured in Neptunian orbit. Thus, studying Triton can yield insights into what Pluto is like as well.
This month also marks the 20th anniversary of the conception of the World Wide Web. Back in March 1989, CERN researcher Tim Berners-Lee, submitted a little paper called "Information Management: A Proposal" to Mike Sendall, his manager. Sendall was intrigued enough to write a note on the document's cover - "Vague, but exciting" - and gave Berners-Lee the go-ahead to follow up on the research. As a result, the first baby Web was born in 1990.
Twenty years later, working on the Web is still vague, but exciting. To see how far the Web has come since then, check out CERNland, the European research center's new portal site for kids.
Moises Castillo / AP
Idaho State University anthropologist Richard Hansen shows a 2,300-year-old
stucco frieze found at the El Mirador archaeological site in northern Guatemala.
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Archaeologists have unearthed a pair of monumental stucco panels in Guatemala that appear to depict one of the New World's oldest-known creation stories, going back thousands of years to what experts call "the cradle of Maya civilization." The discovery suggests that the saga, known as the Popol Vuh, was a centerpiece of Maya beliefs for well more than a millennium and stands as one of the world's enduring religious stories.
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NASA illustration |
Click for video: NBC
News' Tom Costello
reports on the space
station's close call.
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The international space station's three crew members climbed into their Soyuz lifeboat as a "precautionary measure" while a tiny piece of space junk passed by today, NASA said. The space agency said the debris from a spent satellite rocket motor zipped past, apparently without causing damage, and the crew was given the all-clear to return to the station and resume normal operations.
NASA spokesman Bill Jeffs said this sort of maneuver is not unprecedented - it's happened at least once before, although the agency is still tracking down exactly how often. Usually, NASA has enough advance warning to move the station well out of the way. In this case, however, military debris-trackers alerted NASA on Wednesday, too late to plan an avoidance maneuver.
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Donna Coveney / MIT |
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A material called lithium iron phosphate, shown here in a lab dish, could soon be
used in batteries that can be charged up in a matter of seconds rather than hours.
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How many hours does it usually take to charge up a battery pack? Researchers have tweaked a material already being used in lithium-ion batteries to cut that time down to a fraction of the usual wait. They say the technology could be used to juice up batteries in seconds rather than hours.
The tweak has the potential to change the way we use gizmos ranging from mobile phones and laptops to plug-in electric vehicles over the next couple of years. But as usual with these kinds of innovations, there's a catch or two.
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JHU Press |
"The Quantum Frontier" focuses
on the Large Hadron Collider.
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Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have barely begun their quest to unlock the smallest mysteries of the universe - but there's already a book that explains the whole story, written by a researcher who's still deeply involved in the plot.
"The Quantum Frontier," by Fermilab physicist Don Lincoln, delves into the workings of the LHC as well as the basic (and not-so-basic) outlines of the scientific frontier the $10 billion machine was built to explore.
Far beneath the French-Swiss border, the LHC had its official startup last September - and soon afterward it suffered some serious glitches that required months of repair. The latest word is that the collider won't start up again until this coming September at the earliest. Once it's back in operation, scientists could discover how it is that some particles (like protons) have mass while others (like photons) don't. They could learn the nature of dark matter, or confirm that our universe has extra dimensions, or find whole classes of weird new subatomic particles.
Or they could discover something completely different.
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Win Mcnamee / Getty Images |
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President Obama wins applause Monday after signing an
executive order on stem cell research. Among the onlookers are
two Nobel laureates: Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Harold
Varmus, who is co-chairman of Obama's science advisory council.
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President Obama made good on a campaign promise today by announcing a plan to raise the level of scientific integrity in policymaking - but the guy who is supposed to flesh out the plan is still stuck in Senate confirmation limbo.
Word about Obama's presidential memorandum on scientific integrity came as the president signed a separate executive order loosening the White House's limits on stem cell research.
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Planetary Society |
An online "trading card"
highlights the Gliese
876 planetary system.
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The planet-hunting game is shifting into high gear with the launch of NASA's $591 million Kepler mission, but how can you possibly keep track of all those alien worlds without a program? Fortunately, the Planetary Society has just the thing: a free online catalog of exoplanets that will keep up with a tally expected to escalate into the thousands.
The catalog is designed to cater to all types, ranging from avid fans who gobble up the vital stats for every newfound world to the casual spectator who may wonder what the heck an exoplanet is, said Bruce Betts, the nonprofit group's director of projects.
"We've tried to make it accessible," he told me today. And that means including an animated "trading card" for each of the 300-plus planets detected so far.
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Halton C. Arp / NED / Caltech |
Hubble's team will improve upon this
black-and-white view of the interacting
galaxies known as Arp 274.
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The people have spoken, and that means the tangled-up group of galaxies known as Arp 274 will get an exclusive photo shoot with the Hubble Space Telescope. The interacting galaxies won almost half of the 139,944 votes cast in the Hubble team's first-ever "People's Choice" ballot.
Arp 274, which appears to be a cosmic smash-up involving two (or maybe three) galaxies, has never been seen before in high resolution. It was one of six astronomical targets offered for consideration by the Hubble team over the past month in its "You Decide" contest.
When all was said and done, Arp 274 garnered 67,021 votes by Sunday's deadline. Its closest competitor was the beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 5172 (with 26,987 votes), which could well deserve the full Hubble treatment as well.
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