October 2009 - Posts
Matt York / AP file |
Tourists hear the history behind the Pluto Discovery
Telescope at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz.
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The first thing you notice about the Lowell Observatory, the place where Pluto was discovered, is that the little guy gets top billing.
The road rises quickly from the city streets of Flagstaff, Ariz., up Mars Hill and on to the entrance to the 115-year-old observatory's grounds. A pillar marks each side of the entryway. One pillar reads "Lowell Observatory," and the other pillar displays a column of nine runes that could have come from a chapter of Dan Brown's latest thriller, "The Lost Symbol."
These symbols stand for the solar system's worlds, and the symbol right on top is a combination of the letter P and L. That stands for Pluto, arguably the most controversial world in the solar system. It also stands for Percival Lowell, the observatory's founder - who was perhaps as controversial in his day as Pluto is today.
If any place on Earth should serve as a shrine to Percival Lowell and Pluto, it would be the 740 acres of forested grounds beyond the pillars. This is the place Lowell selected for his study of the "canals" he thought he saw on Mars. This is where he started the search for a "Planet X" that he was sure existed beyond the orbit of Neptune. This is where young astronomer Clyde Tombaugh followed up on Percival Lowell's predictions by poring through stacks of photographic plates. And this is where Tombaugh's painstaking effort paid off in 1930 with the discovery of Pluto.
It turns out, however, that the Lowell Observatory is about much more than the best-known dwarf planet.
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NASA / ESA / IAA |
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The Hubble Space Telescope's closeup view of the "Jewel Box" star cluster NGC
4755 reveals sapphire blue supergiant stars, one ruby-red supergiant and other
stellar gems. Click on the picture for larger views from the European Hubble team.
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An antique "Jewel Box" in the night sky takes on a new shine in imagery from three of the best telescopes in the world and in space.
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Alan Boyle / msnbc.com |
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Steve Landeene, the New Mexico Spaceport Authority's executive director, points
toward Spaceport America's vertical launch site from a simulated lunar lander pad.
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Is Spaceport America ready to become New Mexico's newest tourist attraction? Mmm, not quite yet. But there's lots of wide open space, lots of potential and lots of hope that the spaceport will spark a domino effect of development and tourist activity.
If the plans succeed, Spaceport America and its surroundings could become a multibillion-dollar center for tourism as well as spaceflight - something akin to Florida's Space Coast with a Wild West twist. If the plans totally flop, the locale could wind up as a $198 million ghost town.
It's up to Steve Landeene, the New Mexico Spaceport Authority's executive director, to make sure those plans don't flop. "You've got to have a lot of vision here," he said.
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Team BonNova |
BonNova's Lauryad rocket blasts off during a test
in January. The team dropped out on Sunday.
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Five days from now, a bunch of no-longer-amateur rocketeers are going to be at least $1.15 million richer, thanks to a NASA-backed contest for lunar lander prototypes. But the identity of the winners is still up in the air.
You need a scorecard to keep track of what's happening in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, which ends this year's launch season on Saturday. Here's a roundup that touches upon the four - oops, make that three - teams in the competition:
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NASA |
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Artwork shows NASA's Ares I rocket lofting an Orion crew vehicle toward orbit.
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For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction: That law applies to rocket science, and apparently to an independent review panel's report on NASA's rocket options as well.
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For decades, the cost of doing space science has been astronomically high, but all that will change when suborbital spacecraft start flying. Off-the-cuff calculations suggest doing low-cost research on commercial rocket ships could easily add up to $100 million a year.
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NASA |
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An artist's conception shows SpaceX's Dragon cargo craft approaching
the International Space Station for a delivery.
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Private-sector spaceflight is going public ... or is public-sector spaceflight going private? Space industry executives and space agency officials made clear at a conference today that "Old Space" and "New Space" are converging. In fact, NASA is already gearing up to fly scientific experiments on suborbital spacecraft while they're being tested.
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Sam Gosling / UT-Austin |
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These two dorm rooms reveal strikingly different personalities. "You could look at
either and be horrified," University of Texas psychologist Sam Gosling jokes.
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Your personality is on display in all the stuff you leave behind, but sometimes it takes a skilled "snoopologist" to know what to look for.
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UW-Madison |
Anthropologist John Hawks makes a study of skulls.
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Our skulls and our genes show that we're still evolving, but not always in the ways you might expect.
For example, the typical human head has actually been getting smaller over the past few thousand years, reversing the earlier evolutionary trend. Meanwhile, East Asians are becoming lighter-skinned - and appear to have more sensitive hearing than their ancestors did 10,000 years ago.
John Hawks, an anthropologist and blogger at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, points to such trends as evidence that "recent evolution is real."
Hawks delved into a few of his favorite scientific tales over the weekend in Austin, Texas, at the annual CASW New Horizons in Science meeting.
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Maximilien Brice / CERN |
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A worker is dwarfed by components of the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS detector
during construction in an underground chamber beneath the French-Swiss border.
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Is the future trying to save us from ourselves? A series of scientific papers that have been kicking around for a couple of years suggest that if the Large Hadron Collider ever were to find something that shattered the cosmos, the future universe might protect itself by sending a backward-causality wave to break the LHC, or at least warn us.
Sure enough, the LHC is broken - leading The New York Times' Dennis Overbye to wonder half-jokingly whether there was something to the claim after all.
Does that sound spooky? What if I told you that the idea of going back in time to derail out a world-ending particle collider goes back even farther, to a novel written about the fate of the long-canceled Superconducting Super Collider? And that the author of that book is a physicist who has been conducting research into ... backward causality?
To quote the actor Keanu Reeves, who has appeared in a couple of time-travel sagas himself: "Whooooa!" And just in time for Halloween!
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KUSA |
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A balloon soars through Colorado skies during Thursday's drama.
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Anyone familiar with the physics of lighter-than-air lift would probably have suspected that 6-year-old Falcon Heene was not inside the balloon-lofted contraption that riveted the TV-watching population for several hours on Thursday. It's better to be safe than sorry, though - even if the false alarm is followed by a nationwide round of second-guessing.
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NASA |
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Astronaut Tim Kopra exercises in zero-G on the shuttle Discovery in September.
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NASA astronaut Tim Kopra knows full well that the space shuttle may never fly after his next mission, currently scheduled for next September. But he also knows that in the space business, you can almost never say "never."
"I think we're all planning for this to be the last flight," he told me last week. "Of course, you never know until all the decisions are made."
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Reuters |
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British biologist Richard Dawkins is the author of the new book "The
Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution."
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Biologist Richard Dawkins is turning down the atheist rhetoric as he promotes "The Greatest Show on Earth," his new book about the evidence for evolution. But don't you dare suggest that he's going soft on religion.
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A. Evans / Stony Brook U. / NASA / ESA |
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mess known as NGC 2623. Click on the image to watch a "Hubblecast" video.
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Long ago, a galaxy far away smashed into another galaxy - creating a beautiful, terrible knot of cosmic chaos. The view of that galactic collision, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, serves as a preview of what might well happen when the Andromeda Galaxy slams into our Milky Way galaxy billions of years from now.
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Frans de Waal |
Click for video: A female chimp shares a watermelon with two juveniles, one of
which is her offspring. Click on the image to watch a video from Emory University.
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Is empathy a uniquely human trait? Research released just today indicates that human culture rather than raw genetics is the prime factor behind altruism on a wide scale - that is, the sentiment that moves us to respond to tragedies involving people we don't even know.
But we're not the only species that exhibits fellow feeling. The impulse to cooperate is as much a part of evolutionary biology as the impulse to compete. You might not realize that, however, if all you know about evolution is that it's survival of the fittest.
In his latest book, "The Age of Empathy," Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal presents fresh evidence that our empathethic behavior is rooted in hard-wired habits that can be seen among chimpanzees, our closest relatives in the animal world, as well as in far-removed species such as mice.
For decades, de Waal has conducted eye-opening research into how monkeys and apes find ways to share their food, share affection and mirror each other's behavior. His studies of chimps have pointed to the origins of our language and our moral code as well. When it comes to getting along with each other, de Waal makes it clear we could learn a thing or two from the chimps.
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Hrvoje Polan / AFP - Getty Images |
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The moon and Jupiter have a close encounter in the skies
above Zagreb in Croatia in December 2008. This month
provides another peak opportunity for observing Jupiter.
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Even if today's big moon crash wasn't the kind of spectacular you were expecting, there are plenty of other space extravaganzas in the works over the next few weeks. Read on for more reasons to keep watching the skies.
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Science / AAAS |
Click for video: The left view is a computer model of Pallas' surface, based on
the Hubble imagery at right. The circle indicates a large crater that is likely deeper
than shown in the model. Click on the image to watch a 3-D animation.
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Images from the Hubble Space Telescope suggest that the asteroid Pallas should be grouped along with two other big space rocks as protoplanets - "planetary embryos" that were big enough to stay pretty much as they were during the formation of the solar system, but too small to progress to the next stage of development.
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X Prize Foundation via AP |
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Masten Space Systems' Xombie rocket rises from its pad at California's Mojave Air
and Space Port during Wednesday's Lunar Lander Challenge flight.
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Masten Space Systems' Xombie rocket has prevailed in its second attempt to qualify for a $150,000 rocket prize from NASA. The first attempt, back on Sept. 16, ended at the halfway point of the required round trip due to an engine leak, but today the rocket went the full distance.
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Chris Reardon / NGT |
Henry Ian Cusick portrays Charles Darwin in "Darwin's Darkest Hour."
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This year serves as a double anniversary for Charles Darwin: It's been 200 years since the birth of the naturalist, as was noted widely back in February.
Now there's a second wave of books and broadcasts that serve to mark the 150th anniversary of Darwin's masterwork, "On the Origin of Species."
The tangled genesis of that work is the focus of "Darwin's Darkest Hour," a two-hour docudrama premiering tonight on PBS.
The show features a little more star power and a little less laboratory time than you usually see in a science documentary on public TV, and that's because the "Nova" / National Geographic production team went with a scripted approach that's reminiscent of a Jane Austen adaptation.
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British National Space Centre |
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Most digital cameras and spacecraft carry a chip known as a
charge-coupled device that resulted from Nobel-winning research.
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Nobel-winning science sometimes touches on subjects as remote as the big bang and the weird world of quantum physics, but this year's Nobel Prize for physics celebrates breakthroughs that are as close as your cellphone and computer keyboard.
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NASA |
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A NASA graphic depicts planets and other solar-system objects (not drawn to scale).
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How many planets do you want with your Happy Meal? At McDonald's restaurants in Britain, they're serving up a solar system with nine planets - which has thrown some hot sauce (plus a dash of hilarity) on a cosmic conundrum.
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Laura Rauch / AP file |
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Five-year flashback to Oct. 4, 2004: Astronaut Brian Binnie unfurls the American
flag atop SpaceShipOne after the flight that won the $10 million Ansari X Prize.
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Five years after the first privately funded space plane won the $10 million Ansari X Prize, the spirit behind the contest has spread far beyond spaceflight. Have realities kept pace with the expectations sparked back in 2004? What are the next multimillion-dollar feats on the horizon?
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Columbia Pictures |
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An airplane flies into a scene of devastation in the movie "2012."
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Marketers are escalating the media blitz for the "2012" disaster movie to Defcon 2 tonight with a TV teaser that touts the coming apocalypse. If you watch the two-minute scene, here are two words of advice:
DON'T PANIC!
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Next week's Nobels? Bah! The real action comes at 7:15 p.m. ET tonight at Harvard - when this year's Ig Nobel Prize ceremony pays tribute to science that makes you laugh, and then makes you think. Catch the webcast via Improbable.com, and thrill to prize-winners who are following in the footsteps of the geniuses behind the flame-throwing automobile and the LOX-equipped barbecue grill. And if you still can't figure out what the Ig Nobels are all about, listen to this podcast.
Here are more examples of scientific silliness on the Web:
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