September 2009 - Posts
NOAA / USGS |
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This color-coded map models how high waves rose in the wake of the Samoa
Islands earthquake. The color key is calibrated in centimeters above sea level.
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Five years after a catastrophic Indian Ocean quake pointed up serious shortcomings in the world's tsunami warning network, a beefed-up monitoring system worked quickly to sound the alarm about this week's undersea shocks in the Pacific, seismologists say.
The tsunami alarm may not have gotten out quickly enough to avoid the loss of life in Samoa, and there are still gaps in the system. Nevertheless, this week's response demonstrated how much things have changed since 2004.
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Congratulations to the winners of this year's National Academies Communication Awards, announced today. The awards are given annually to recognize excellence in reporting and communicating science, engineering and medicine to the general public, and I'm proud to be a past recipient. This year's honorees will receive their $20,000 prizes during a Nov. 20 ceremony in Irvine, Calif.
One of the best parts of the awards exercise is that it provides a great opportunity to see great science writing (and broadcasting) you may have missed the first time around. Here are links to the winners' Web sites:
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Noah Berger / AP file |
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The Rocky Mountain Institute's Amory Lovins has been called a
"techno-optimist" on energy issues.
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If someone told you America's long-term energy needs could be met without oil or nuclear power, would you think he was crazy? The craziest thing about Amory Lovins is that he says the financial numbers prove it.
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NASA |
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Astronaut Drew Feustel looms large as he moves a corrective-optics package from
the Hubble Space Telescope to a stowage position during May's final servicing
mission. This view was captured by the Imax 3-D camera in Atlantis' cargo bay.
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"Hubble 3D," due to premiere next March in super-screen Imax theaters, is shaping up as a fitting sendoff for the world's best-known telescope as well as the most complicated flying machine ever built.
Atlantis' trip to the Hubble Space Telescope in May may have marked not only the last time that astronauts put their hands on the crown jewels of NASA's astronomical assets, but also the last opportunity for filming a Hollywood-style production aboard a space shuttle.
"It made me sentimental," admitted Toni Myers, the film's producer, director and editor.
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NASA |
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An artist's conception from 1978 shows a processing plant for lunar soil.
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Is this week's revelation that water ice is more prevalent on the moon than scientists expected a "game-changer" for future spaceflight, as some experts think? Actually, the rules of the game for going beyond Earth orbit haven't changed - but the latest findings could bring new attention to options in the old playbooks.
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Hu Dongyu / University of Bristol |
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This artwork shows how a birdlike dinosaur known as Anchiornis huxleyi
might have looked in life, more than 150 million years ago.
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A recently discovered fossil has led Chinese researchers to conclude that a previously identified dino-bird species was an honest-to-goodness dinosaur. The new findings, laid out in the journal Nature, lend further support to the view that birds really did descend directly from dinosaurs.
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NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Ariz. |
Water ice surrounds a 26-foot-wide meteorite impact crater on Mars in this HiRISE picture, taken in November 2008.
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Researchers have caught Martian water ice in the midst of a triply amazing disappearing act. Why triply amazing? The ice was spotted amazingly close to the Red Planet's surface, and amazingly far away from the north pole. The third amazing thing about the observations, made using NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and reported in Friday's issue of the journal Science, is that the researchers knew it was 99 percent pure water ice because of how slowly it disappeared.
The findings should cheer up astrobiologists, who have said even a little trickle of liquid water might sustain life beneath Mars' forbidding surface. It should also cheer up would-be space explorers, who are already over the moon because of this week's reports that lunar ice deposits are more prevalent than previously thought.
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Touchstone Pictures |
Click for video: A lifelike face is installed on a robot in a scene from
"Surrogates." Click on the image to watch a video about the trends behind the film.
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Bruce Willis' latest action movie takes place in a world where humans mostly stay behind closed doors and interact using lifelike cyber-substitutes. These robotic "surrogates" pass along all their sensations - during work, play and even sex - via virtual reality. In this wired-up world, you can be anybody you want to be through your surrogate: a healthier, younger version of yourself, or a super-athlete, or a super-model. (Will that be male or female?)
So "Surrogates" is meant as pure science fiction, right? Wrong. The filmmakers and futurists behind the movie say they're aiming for an only slightly enhanced version of present-day trends.
"In the near future, robots are going to start to look like humans," said James Canton, founder of the San Francisco-based Institute for Global Futures. "I think within 10 years you're going to have the world of the surrogates."
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Daryl Pederson |
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Daryl Pederson says he captured this shot of an "albino rainbow" while he was out
on his sailboat, making his way through the fog in Alaska's Prince William Sound.
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Now that fall has arrived in the Northern Hemisphere, we can look forward to more of those misty, foggy, even icy mornings and evenings. And that's prime time for atmospheric curiosities such as sundogs and halos, sun pillars, moon rings and fogbows.
Fogbows, otherwise known as seadogs or "albino rainbows," are particularly easy to see at this time of year, as evidenced by the selection offered up at SpaceWeather.com.
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NASA / JPL / SSI |
Click for slideshow: Saturn's rings have darkened almost to invisibility in this
portrait captured by the Cassini orbiter on Aug. 12, just after equinox. This view
highlights the start of spring for Saturn's northern hemisphere. Click on the image
to see a slideshow featuring pictures from the ringed planet and its moons.
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The Cassini orbiter has sent back a spectacular set of pictures taken during Saturn’s equinox, including a moody portrait of the giant planet's rings at their darkest. Taken together, the pictures reveal that Saturn’s rings are bumpier, more active and more complex than previously thought.
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Mafic Studios |
Click for gallery: Get a step-by-step look at how a space-based solar power system might work.
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Power-beaming systems are moving from drawing boards and computer slideshow presentations to actual demonstrations on tabletops and in exhibit halls. But what will it take to turn power beams into profitable outer-space ventures?
Strangely enough, the challenge of constructing a sheet of thin-film solar cells that unfolds to a width of 1,000 feet (300 meters) in orbit is not the issue uppermost in the mind of William Maness, chief executive officer of Everett, Wash.-based PowerSat Corp. The problems that lead his list have more to do with earthly affairs - such as getting investors, utilities and regulators to buy into the idea.
Maness told a small gathering at a National Space Society meeting in Seattle this week that the pitch for space solar power has been directed too often at space enthusiasts who don't have a financial stake in the issue, rather than energy utility executives who do.
"This is one of the reasons why this concept has taken so long to start to catch on," he said.
Maness favors a more market-centered approach to the issue, and there are signs that the approach is taking hold. But other signs show why the challenge facing Maness and his colleagues in the space-power business is so daunting.
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Mike Hettwer |
Click for video: University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno adds the
toe claw to a well-preserved skeleton of the tyrannosauroid known as Raptorex
kriegsteini. Click on the image to hear Sereno discuss the find.
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Who would have thought Tyrannosaurus rex had such a murderous "mini-me" in its family tree?
Not Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History. "This was completely unexpected," he said.
And not University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno, who along with Brusatte and other colleagues figured out that the tiny tyrannosauroid had virtually all the lethal weapons brandished tens of millions of years later by a behemoth 90 times more massive.
"From the teeth to the enlarged olfactory bulbs, the enlarged jaw muscles, the enlarged head, the small forelimbs, the lanky, running, long hindlimbs with thick-pressed foot for hunting prey - we see this all, to our great surprise, in an animal that is basically the body weight of a human," he told reporters.
The 125 million-year-old fossil dinosaur, unearthed in China and dubbed Raptorex kriegsteini, is "as close to the proverbial missing link on a lineage as we might ever get for tyrannosaurs," Sereno said.
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NASA / msnbc.com |
What factors go into a planet's "habitability index"?
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Astrobiologists are trying to work out a mathematical equation to quantify how suitable other planets are for life, similar to the famous Drake Equation for judging the chances of contacting extraterrestrial civilizations.
The exercise could help future generations figure out where to look for aliens - or where to settle down. But coming up with a new "habitability index" isn't just a matter of arithmetic.
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Masten Space via X Prize Foundation |
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Masten Space Systems' Xombie rocket prototype fires its engine on Sunday to
hover above a test pad while tethered to a safety crane, partly visible on the left.
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Masten Space Systems' Xombie rocket got halfway through a round-trip flight in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge but apparently sprung an engine leak. As a result, the Masten team called off today's initial bid to win a $150,000 prize from NASA.
This morning's 93-second flight began auspiciously: Xombie rose from its pad in California's Mojave Desert, made its way over to a second pad and landed just a few inches (17.5 centimeters) off the target point. (Here's a YouTube video showing a rocket-cam view of Xombie's rise and its surroundings.)
However, during the post-landing inspection, Masten team members noticed a leak in Xombie's engine chamber. They decided to end the attempt without making the required return trip to the starting point.
"Not worth the risk to vehicle to fly again," organizers of the contest reported in a Twitter update.
Later, team leader Dave Masten said "we know the prob[lem] and will try again." Masten still has a few weeks to qualify for the $150,000 second prize in the Lunar Lander Challenge's Level 1 contest. (Armadillo Aerospace took the $350,000 first prize in Level 1 a year ago and is currently in the lead for a $1 million Level 2 prize.) The next attempt is currently scheduled for Oct. 7-8.
Even if Masten succeeds, the team won't know whether it gets the money until a competitor, Unreasonable Rocket, takes its turn at the end of October.
Keep up with the action by doing a Twitter search for #NGLLC - and read on for further background about Masten's quest:
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CIA / Kryptos © 1988 James Sanborn |
The Kryptos sculpture at CIA Headquarters was featured during the buildup to publication of "The Lost Symbol," Dan Brown's latest thriller.
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Mystery sleuth Greg Taylor knew years ago what "Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown would be talking about in the follow-up thriller now known as "The Lost Symbol," which is due for release on Tuesday. So he rounded up a whole book's worth of found symbols with puzzling histories, all having to do with Washington, the Founding Fathers and Freemasonry.
You don't have to read "The Lost Symbol" to get hooked on the historical puzzles lying in and around the nation's capital - including a puzzle that even super-symbologist Robert Langdon would be hard-pressed to solve.
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William Pomerantz / X Prize Foundation |
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Armadillo Aerospace's Scorpius rocket fires its engine above a mock lunar landing
pad on Saturday while a ground crew member looks on from a distance.
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Armadillo Aerospace qualified to win a million dollars of NASA's money today by accomplishing a rocket-powered round trip modeled after a moon landing. The team's remote-controlled Scorpius rocket (formerly known as the Super Mod) blasted off from its Texas launch pad, rose into the sky and floated over to set down on a mock moon landing pad. After refueling, Scorpius blasted off again for what one observer called a "perfect flight" back to the original launch pad.
The judges confirmed that Armadillo satisfied all the contest requirements. Scorpius made pinpoint landings within a meter of each landing pad's center target, according to William Pomerantz, the director of space prizes for the X Prize Foundation.
That means the million-dollar top prize in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge will definitely be given away this year. But Armadillo's rocketeers will still have to wait another month and a half to find out if they won, while other entrants in the competition try to do the same feat better.
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Gustave Dore via Art Passions |
In this illustration for Dante's "Paradiso," the poet beholds heaven's highest realm.
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What if God is a microbe, and we're just the hosts for the creatures made in Its image? A neuroscientist and self-described "possibilian" offers 40 thought-provoking possibilities for the afterlife in a slim book called "Sum."
The questions that David Eagleman deals with at his day job at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston are already pretty far-out: How do our brains construct reality? Why does our perception of time's flow change? Why do some people "see" music or associate numbers with colors?
But even at work, some of Eagleman's ideas are so far-out they have to be put aside ... until he goes home and writes about them.
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Amanda Gevens / UW-Madison |
These two potatoes are infected with late blight disease.
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Scientists have unraveled the genome of the parasite that sparked the Irish potato famine of the 1840s - revealing why it was such a killer back then and why it's still a scourge today.
The critter is known as "late blight," and although it's often called a fungus, it's more correctly classified as a type of water mold. More than 150 years ago, Irish farmers didn't know what it was; they only knew that something was killing off their potatoes just when they were getting close to harvest.
The repeated failure of potato crops led to the great Irish migration of the late 1840s and early 1850s - and one of those emigrants, my great-grandfather, ended up in Iowa. He was much luckier than the estimated 1 million Irish who died as a result of "the Great Hunger."
The blight is not merely a historical tragedy, however. Experts estimate that the late blight organism, which carries the scientific name Phytophtora infestans, costs farmers around the world $6.7 billion every year.
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D. Lovley, K. Nevin, B. Barnhart / UMass |
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A toy truck draws electrical power from a set of soil-microbe batteries
developed at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
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Did you hear the one about the microbes that send out electricity through their hair? Or the one about the germs that actually clean up toxic algae-ridden water? How about the bacteria that build up artificial bones or manufacture medicine?
They may sound as outlandish as the stupid pet tricks you see on late-night talk shows, but the tricks that microbes do could end up improving lives and saving energy.
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I'll be out of the office on Monday for Labor Day, but here's a double dose of Web links to see you through the weekend. A couple of this week's research findings ... on magnetic monopoles and the "Bose Nova" ... sparked flashbacks to the federal lawsuit that sought to shut down the Large Hadron Collider last year. To refresh your memory, that legal challenge was brushed aside and is now hanging around in appellate-court limbo:
NASA / ASU |
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This image from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the Apollo 12 landing
site (with the Intrepid descent stage) as well as the Surveyor 3 lander, the ALSEP
experiment package and tracks leading to other surrounding points of interest.
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Broader views of the universe are among the richest payoffs to result from space exploration, as demonstrated by the latest installment of "Month in Space Pictures." But those views becomes even richer when you see them from a completely different perspective. Some of the latest gems from space do just that, energizing scientific sleuths and confounding conspiracy theorists in the process.
Here's a quick sampling of completely different perspectives to peruse during the long Labor Day weekend:
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European Parliament |
Researchers have identified three genes that appear to have been activated in humans alone, adapted from DNA that serves no function in other species.
But are these the genes that make us human?
That's not likely. At best, they're just part of our genetic story.
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Scientists are planning a "Woodstock moment" for suborbital research in February ... millions of dollars are going toward a deep-ocean observatory project ... and the race to find the Higgs boson is heating up. Those are just some of the developments on the radar screen this week. Read on for the details:
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One Drop Foundation |
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Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte practices for his space mission at Russia's
Star City cosmonaut training complex.
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Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte's multimillion-dollar trip to the international space station will feature a two-hour global extravaganza highlighting water conservation on Oct. 9, with personalities ranging from Al Gore to U2 putting in guest appearances from 14 cities on Earth.
During today's webcast previewing the gala, the Canadian billionaire slated to become "the first clown in space" joked that he won't be allowed to do fire-eating tricks in orbit. He does plan to wear his trademark red clown nose, however.
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Bryce Richter / UW-Madison |
Cotton-top tamarin monkeys grew calmer after they heard music based on their
own calm, friendly calls. But the monkeys became more agitated when researchers
played music that contained elements of their own threatening or fearful calls.
Listen to arousing monkey music and calming music (Copyright David Teie).
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Music may have charms to "soothe the savage breast," but that doesn't mean the same music that soothes humans will charm other species. Monkeys, for example, aren't much affected by human music.
To find out whether any kind of music could affect a monkey's mood, a musician and a primatologist created tunes tailor-made for cotton-top tamarins. They report that the experiment worked - but the melodies are unlike anything you've ever heard.
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Mind Research Institute |
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This graphic shows areas of the brain that functioned more efficiently after three
months of video-game practice (blue) as well as areas where the cortex became
thicker (red). The left and right views show the left and right brain hemispheres.
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The effects of video-game playing on your brain have been studied for a quarter-century, but the latest research reveals that there are deep puzzles yet to be solved.
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