August 2009 - Posts
Gary Meek / Georgia Tech |
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Georgia Tech Professor Kostas Konstantinidis displays Shewanella
microbes that have the ability to “inhale” certain metals and compounds
and convert them to an altered state, which is typically much less toxic.
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Using genetic analysis, scientists discover that a type of germ used for cleaning up toxic sites is actually many types of germs that gobble up different kinds of crud. This suggests that a smorgasbord of microbes could be customized for different applications – ranging from cleaning nuclear dump sites to powering future fuel cells.
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Hector Mata / AP |
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Smoke sweeps over Southern California's Mount Wilson Observatory.
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Wildfires in California are always a cause for alarm, but the raging Station Fire is particularly alarming for researchers and science fans because it has endangered some of Southern California's astronomical crown jewels, including historic Mount Wilson Observatory and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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I'm taking Friday off as part of a long end-of-summer weekend, while keeping one eye on NASA's third (or is that fourth?) countdown to the shuttle Discovery's launch. In the meantime, here are a few Web links aimed at calming down your apocalyptic fears and/or firing up your imagination:
IBM Research - Zurich |
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Click for video: This graphic shows how scientists
used a carbon monoxide molecule on the end of a
metal tip to map a pentacene molecule. Click on the
image to watch a video from NBC's "Nightly News."
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Scientists have traced the structure of a complete molecule in all its glory, using the sharpest pen ever devised: an atomic force microscope tipped with a single molecule of carbon monoxide.
The experiment, detailed in Friday's issue of the journal Science, could help open up a new frontier for molecular-scale circuitry and construction.
Researchers have been imaging molecules and their constituent atoms in crystals for decades, but the trick is to get a fine-resolution fix on the structure and behavior of an entire, self-contained molecule as it sits on a surface.
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ESO |
The Trifid Nebula reveals three faces in this ESO view. Click on the image for a larger version.
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The latest view of the Trifid Nebula serves as fresh evidence that good things definitely come in threes: This star-illuminated cloud of gas and dust gets its name from its three-lobed appearance (via the Latin word "trifidus"), and the European Southern Observatory's crowd-pleasing picture puts the "three faces" of the nebula on full display.
The Trifid Nebula, which lies thousands of light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius, was first observed by French astronomer Charles Messier in 1764 - who listed it as No. 20 in his famous catalog of interesting sky objects. It was English astronomer John Herschel who gave it the "Trifid" tag 60 years later.
In the centuries since then, the nebula has been imaged thousands of times, by the Hubble Space Telescope and other telescopes great and small. Today the ESO showed off its own view of the nebula, captured by the Wide-Field Imager attached to the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.
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NASA |
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NASA astronaut Sunita Williams uses a "lab-on-a-chip" on the international space
station in 2007. The device has been compared to the tricorder on "Star Trek."
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NASA says the shuttle Discovery's mission marks the start of the international space station's transition from a construction site to a full-fledged orbital lab. But space station science is still more promise than payoff.
The folks in charge of the station's scientific program say they're just now getting a chance to make good on the scientific promise. "The STS-128 flight is going to complete the final outfitting of the station with its major research facilities," Mark Uhran, NASA's assistant associate administrator for space station, told reporters during a weekend briefing.
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NASA |
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Physiologists and spotters put NASA's COLBERT treadmill to the test during a
zero-gravity flight aboard the space agency's C-9B jet aircraft.
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The Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (a.k.a. COLBERT) won't be the first piece of exercise equipment in space, but it could be the most famous orbital workout device, thanks to its celebrity acronym.
"I am 'go' to launch me," talk-show host Stephen Colbert declared today in a pre-recorded send-off for NASA's COLBERT treadmill. "Let's light this candle!"
The twists and turns in the tale of the treadmill - which is flying up to the international space station aboard the space shuttle Discovery - would be worth at least two or three gags on "The Colbert Report."
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NASA |
NASA scientists work on an experiment flown on a zero-G airplane flight. Suborbital craft could open up a new frontier.
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The killer app for private spaceflight, at least once the millionaires and celebrities have had their turn, may well be scientific research.
"You spark this industry with tourists, but I predict in the next decade the research market is going to be bigger than the tourist market," says Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Colorado-based Southwest Research Institute who is heading up a committee to link up researchers with future suborbital spaceflights.
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USGS |
Gas hydrates are
deposits of ice that
contain natural gas.
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Energy experts say vast undersea reserves of natural gas hydrates may be more accessible than previously thought, potentially offering an important stopgap in the coming energy transition.
But unless the transition is handled adroitly, gas hydrates could set off a vicious circle of global warming - and there are already signs that the situation is heating up.
The promise of gas hydrates is highlighted this week in the journal Science: Ray Boswell, a researcher at the National Energy Technology Laboratory, recaps a string of pilot projects aimed at assessing what it would take to harvest undersea gas hydrates.
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N.C. Wyeth / Christina Bisulca / Univ. of Delaware |
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This 1919 illustration was covered over with another painting in the 1920s by artist
N.C. Wyeth, but the color scheme was reconstructed through X-ray imaging.
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Eighty-five years ago, American illustrator N.C. Wyeth painted one work of art over another, hiding a dramatic fistfight beneath a placid family portrait. Now X-ray vision has brought the long-hidden colors of that fight scene back to life - without disturbing the brush strokes layered on top.
The experiment, described today at the American Chemical Society's national meeting in Washington, is just the latest example showing how science can reveal secrets concealed beneath the surface of paintings and manuscripts.
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NASA / JPL-Caltech |
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Rover team members Matt Van Kirk, Julie Townsend and Tam Nguyen set up a test
rover and sandbox at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to rehearse maneuvers
aimed at extracting a Mars rover from a similar sand trap on the Red Planet.
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As NASA's Spirit rover marks its 2,000th workday on Mars, team members back on Earth are conducting the final rehearsals for a long-range operation they hope will free the plucky robot from its Red Planet sand trap.
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Pat Rawling / NASA |
An artist's concept shows a space elevator stretching down from orbit.
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Like almost everyone else in the space vision business, the enthusiasts who foresee a "railway to space" are adjusting their high-flying dreams to fit down-to-earth realities.
"We don't have all the questions, let alone all the answers," Michael Laine, head of the LiftPort Group, told an audience of about 50 people on Saturday during the 2009 Space Elevator Conference on Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Wash. (Microsoft is a partner in the msnbc.com joint venture.)
Laine probably knows as well as anyone how few answers are available.
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Denis Balibouse / Reuters |
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A meteor streaks past stars in the night sky at the Mont-Tendre near Montricher in
the Jura Mountains, north of Geneva, late Tuesday during the Perseid shower. This
view was captured with a fisheye lens. Click on the image for a larger version.
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Long after summer vacations are over, the experience lives on in slideshows, photo albums and computerized file folders filled with exotic snapshots. My weeklong vacation in Quebec produced some personal favorites - but the real action was in the skies above, highlighted by the annual Perseid meteor shower. Stunning images also came down from Mars, Saturn and frontiers beyond the solar system. Here's a rundown of the week's visual highlights:
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Duane Hoffmann / msnbc.com |
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Where do missing socks go? Would you believe they drop into a mini-black hole?
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Now let us consider cosmic mysteries of a completely different sort ... for instance, why do socks disappear in the laundry?
Many hypotheses have been put forward: The eminent thinker Jerry Seinfeld once proposed that socks carefully plan their escape. Another researcher invokes quantum mechanics. Some crackpots even suggest looking under your washer's agitator or in your closet. Can you believe that?
Last weekend, an eminent panel of theorists (including myself) gathered to reflect upon "cannibalistic socks" and other riddles at the SpoCon science-fiction and fantasy convention in Spokane, Wash. I think we may have made as much headway as the Solvay Conference did back in Einstein's day. Here's the rundown on our results:
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H. Dietz / TUM |
This schematic shows some of the
nanoscale shapes made from DNA.
Click on the image for larger view.
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Scientists are improving their technique for bending DNA into origami shapes. The latest twist uses custom-made chemicals to turn bunches of molecules into smoothly curving circlets and gears - a trick that eventually could set the stage for practical nanomachines.
DNA origami is a technique for folding the double helixes into programmed patterns. Some of the experiments have produced whimsical demonstrations such as a microscopic "happy face" or a map of the Americas. But the purpose behind all this is not mere child's play.
"Instead of just programming abstract software, we're programming matter," Harvard biochemist William Shih, one of the researchers behind the latest yoga tricks, told me today.
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NASA plans to award $50 million in stimulus funds in November to support private-sector development of new spaceships capable of carrying crew members to the international space station. Details about the program, known as Commercial Crew Development or CCDev, came out on Tuesday via the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.
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IAU |
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Dancers perform during opening ceremonies for the International Astronomical
Union's General Assembly in Rio de Janeiro Tuesday. Pictures of Pluto and other
dwarf planets are displayed on the screen above the stage, in the most visible
reference to the controversy that raged during the IAU's last assembly in 2006.
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Pluto and its pals loomed over the stage when the International Astronomical Union kicked off its general assembly this week in Rio de Janeiro, three years after its controversial decision to reclassify the icy world as a dwarf-planet non-planet. But that's as close as the issue will get to the spotlight this time around.
Neither the pro-Pluto nor the anti-Pluto adherents have any interest in reviving the debate over planethood in Rio - and it'll likely be a long time before the IAU gets back into planetary politics.
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Maximilien Brice / CERN |
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A worker closes off an interconnection between magnets in the Large Hadron
Collider's underground tunnel. Some of the interconnections may need fixing later.
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Europe's Large Hadron Collider was built to re-create the energies present in the universe just after the big bang, but now it looks as if the bangs at the $10 billion machine won't get as big as quickly as physicists had hoped.
That's a sore point for some of the researchers who have been waiting more than a decade to delve into a host of cosmic questions: Why do some subatomic particles have mass while others don't? What is mysterious dark matter made of? Are there exotic particles and dimensions we can't see? How did the universe work at its birth?
For example, Nima Arkani-Hamed, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., expects experiments at the Large Hadron Collider to help solve puzzles that involve hidden dimensions and the nature of gravity.
"I've waited 15 years," he told The New York Times in a report about the LHC's problems published today. "I want it to get up running. We can't tolerate another disaster. It has to run smoothly from now."
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I. de Pater (Berkeley) / H. Hammel (SSI) / T. Rector (U. of AK-Anchorage) / Gemini Obs. |
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This mid-infrared image of the impact site on Jupiter was captured by the Gemini
North telescope in Hawaii. The yellow arrow points to the color-coded "bruise."
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Astronomers are continuing to watch the Great Black Spot on Jupiter to figure out how it was made and what the aftermath tells us about Jupiter's makeup. Over the next month, you can expect big telescopes to gather data on the chemical composition of the spot. Those observations may tell scientists whether the "black eye" was caused by a comet like Shoemaker-Levy 9, which bruised Jupiter 15 years ago, or an asteroid, or perhaps some weird internal process.
In the meantime, experts are working out the implications of Jupiter's smackdown for our own planet. Former Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart says last month's event could help re-energize his international campaign to keep a closer watch on potential cosmic threats.
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