science

Picture of the Day - 7 April 2009 [The Questionable Authority] Yesterday, Phil posted a lego version of this scene, so I thought it would be a good time to post the real thing. Atlantis on Launch Complex 39-A 6 April 2009 This picture is obviously looking at the back side of the vehicle, but the orbiter would not have been visible even if I had a view from the opposite side of the pad - the Rotating Service Structure is in place and covers the orbiter. Read the comments on this post...
Post Date:04/07/2009 10:07:30
scienceblogs.com

What Hubble Brings Us or, Patience is a Virtue The Hubble space telescope, now active for nearly 20 years, continues to send back images that amaze and astound scientists. And it's not only the newest pictures being sent that are providing all of the "ooh" moments these days. Scientists studying land-based telescope views discovered a gassy planet orbiting a nearby star (HR 8799), and then went back to images from Hubble that are at least ten years old to see if they could get a closer look. By using computer technology to "clean" the image, they were able to get a closer look at the gassy planet, which may not be as gassy as once thought. It might actually be water and land-filled, refueling the speculation that other planets can hold life as well. As in, "we are not alone." I've always been fascinated by Hubble's images, and when images can be used to further develop scientific theories and expand on unkowns in our astronomical world, that is all that much better. It still bothers me to think that Hubble will be retired so
Post Date:04/07/2009 09:05:33
www.geeknewscentral.com

Danger! Thin Ice! I was sent this article about the thinning Arctic ice from the Jet Propulsion Lab. The press release states that in addition to the continuing decade-long trend of diminishing sea-ice cover, new satellite data shows that the Arctic Ice Cap is thinning as well. Thin seasonal ice, which is ice that melts and re-freezes every year, makes up about 70 percent of the Arctic sea ice in wintertime, up from 40 to 50 percent in the 1980s and 1990s. Thicker ice, which survives two or more years, now comprises just 10 percent of wintertime ice cover, down from 30 to 40 percent, according to researchers from the University of Colorado. Seasonal sea ice averages about 6 feet in thickness, while ice that has lasted through more than one summer averages 9 feet in thickness. "Ice extent is an important measure of the health of the Arctic, but it only gives us a two-dimensional view of the ice cover," said Walter Meier, research scientist at the center and the University of Colorado, Boulder. "Thic
Post Date:04/07/2009 08:00:04
global-warming.accuweather.com

Six mind-blowing ideas NASA / JPL / SSI An infrared view from the Cassini orbiter reveals the Saturnian moon Titan's surface. Could Titan harbor life as we don't know it? Is "life as we don't know it" closer than we think? Are microbes behind the world's biggest extinctions? Is most of our morality bound up in hidden "dark morals"? Blow your mind with six flights of scientific fancy from the Origins Symposium, presented by Arizona State University....(read more)
Post Date:04/06/2009 08:06:00
cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com

How Much Water Do You Use? As we become more and more aware that we may be using water at an unsustainable pace, the idea of water footprints - the amount of water an individual uses -is becoming more common. Water footprints can be hard to calculate, depending on how far up the chain of production you go, since everything you eat and buy used some water to produce.Here are some examples of how much water is used in some of your daily activities, so that you can begin calculate your footprint and try to reduce your gallons.(via Neatorama) The Presurfer
Post Date:04/05/2009 22:46:00
presurfer.blogspot.com

Ben Stein's Money Just recently saw Ben Stein's "Expelled." Not a bad flick -- but not a great one either. It gets a little ranty here and there. It was quoted that an inorganic device would need 250 proteins to create the most basic of basic cells. It was also quoted that the odds of this occurring in nature would take trillions and trillions of attempts before occurring correctly. Let's play the odds game for a little while. What are the odds that 250 proteins might randomly assemble, given all the possibilities? That's easy: it's 4^250, or about 3.2 * 10^150. That's an unbelievably large number. We have no point of references for what 10^150 looks like. The rough estimates for the number of atoms in the observable universe pan out around 10^80.Ben Stein wants a "break in the wall" where Intelligent Designers and Darwinists can discuss creation on a level playing field. We went through a similar ordeal in Carl Sagan's days where the scientific community was split between whether or not life could e
Post Date:04/05/2009 16:16:00
kristopher.us

Crunching Out Natural Laws? This seems almost too good to be true. ScienceDaily (Apr. 3, 2009) ? If Isaac Newton had access to a supercomputer, he'd have had it watch apples fall ? and let it figure out the physical matters. But the computer would have needed to run an algorithm, just developed by Cornell researchers, which can derive natural laws from observed data.
Post Date:04/04/2009 18:01:38
telicthoughts.com

Spintronics? Sounds Like An Aerobics Regimen Spintronics Advance Reveals New Conservation Law In Fundamental Physics I am frankly clueless as to what this might be all about, but it sounds like a big deal.
Post Date:04/04/2009 09:15:20
dailypundit.com

Trick childhood memories with falsified childhood images
Post Date:04/03/2009 22:22:30
moneydick.com

Big questions, short answers AFP - Getty Images file British physicist Stephen Hawking is to make a "virtual appearance" at the Origins Symposium, presented by Arizona State University. How did the universe begin? How did life arise? How did evolution make us the way we are today? How would you answer these big questions. Oh, and by the way, keep your answers shorter than 140 characters. That's the kind of experiment I'll be conducting this weekend at the Origins Symposium, presented by Arizona State University's brand-new Origins Initiative....(read more)
Post Date:04/03/2009 11:10:00
cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com

Beginning of Arctic Melt Season Confirmed The annual maximum Arctic sea ice extent was confirmed a few days ago by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). The official date of the maximum was February 28th. This season's maximum extent was 720,000 km below the 1979-2000 average, making it the 5th lowest maximum extent in the satellite record, which began in 1979. Here is the updated sea ice extent chart for the Arctic, which is compared to the record low extent season of 2006-2007 and the 1979-2000 average. A note from the NSIDC: Near-real-time sea ice data updates are again available from Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis. We have switched to the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) sensor on the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) F13 satellite following the sensor drift problem described in our February 18 post. The temporary error in the near-real-time data does not change the conclusion that Arctic sea ice extent has been declining for the past three decades. This conclusion is based on peer revi
Post Date:04/03/2009 08:59:00
global-warming.accuweather.com

Open minded video A
Post Date:04/02/2009 16:34:14
princeofpithy.wordpress.com

North America Warming cannot be Blamed on Humans Alone, says NOAA Recent warming in parts of North America cannot be blamed on human population alone, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). A partially dried up lake bed. According to NOAA, natural shifts in ocean currents have caused much of the warming in recent decades, and almost all of the droughts. It also stresses that we don't understand climate as well as we like to think, because scientists only have good data from about 1948 onward, according to the Montreal Gazette article. Additional excerpts from the Gazette story.............. "Most of the warming (worldwide) is the consequence of human influences," said Martin Hoerling, a NOAA climate scientist. But, "All regions are not participating (in warming) at the same rate as the global temperature is changing," Hoerling said. Some in the West are warming rapidly, and some not at all (the southeastern United States and Atlantic Canada). Some of the changes in North America's warming trend of the past ha
Post Date:04/02/2009 07:43:29
global-warming.accuweather.com

3000th Post! And Gratzel Cells? Wow…. this is the 3000th post that I’ve made to my blog since it’s inception. Huzzah. I really need to get a hobby. In any case, Bill Meara over at the Soldersmoke blog mentioned this video about constructing solar cells from donuts and tea. It sounds like a joke, but it’s not. It turns out that powdered donuts aren’t just white because they have powdered sugar on them, but because they also contain titanium dioxide. Who knew? You can read about them on Wikipedia.
Post Date:04/01/2009 22:59:10
brainwagon.org

The Science Creative Quarterly guest post by Burstein! To a geek like me, The Science Creative Quarterly is everything I have ever wanted out of brain candy. It is whimsical, intelligent, educational at times, and just silly in others. I am going to highlight some of the content, but I urge you all to just make this a regular read ? or an internet happyspot for when you are feeling down (like this one of mine). Here is a post on Mario?s acceleration due to gravity across the different iterations of Super Mario Bros. Here is the memorandum from the Department of Interior that removes the The American Scientist (Homo Scientius Americanus) from the endangered species list. And finally, The Textbook. Just like 16th and Mission, this is where you will find the crack. image via The Science Creative Quarterly This is a blog post from Laughing Squid. For more content like this, subscribe to the RSS feed, Twitter & FriendFeed. The Science Creative Quarterly Related posts:-
Post Date:04/01/2009 15:51:04
feeds.laughingsquid.com

Foolery goes high-tech Google, Reed Saxon/AP, Kodak A panda-loving AI program ... a Mars research station named after Stephen Colbert ... a camera for your eye. Which of these could be for real? Answers below. High tech and high jinks are simply made to go together. Why else do you think the kids at MIT and Caltech spend so much time pranking each other? And what do you think happens to those kids when they graduate? Sure, they're creating the world of the future - but they're also creating increasingly complex spoofs, as evidenced by this year's crop of April Fools' gizmos....(read more)
Post Date:04/01/2009 13:55:00
cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com

Guiyu oneiros [Pharyngula] A fish is a fish, right? They're just a blur of aquatic beasties that most people distinguish by flavor, rather than morphology or descent. But fish are incredibly diverse, far more diverse than terrestrial vertebrates, and there are significant divisions within the group. Most people know of one big distinction, between the Chondrichthyes (fish with cartilaginous skeletons, like sharks and rays) and the Osteichthyes (fish with bony skeletons), but there's another particularly interesting split within the Osteichthyes: the distinction between Sarcopterygians (the word means "fleshy fins", and we call them lobe-finned fishes colloquially) and the Actinopterygians, the ray-finned fishes. The lobe-finned fishes most distinctive feature is the muscular and bony central core of their fins — extant forms are the coelacanth and lungfish. It is this lineage that led to us terrestrial tetrapods, but other than that successful invasion of the land, the sarcops were something of an aquati
Post Date:04/01/2009 11:40:32
scienceblogs.com

Ant slaves' murderous rebellions From last month's journal Evolution, a fascinating tale of slave rebellion among ants kidnapped by other ant species and forced to work for the rival colony: When these youngsters mature, they take on the odour of their abductors and become the servants of the enslaving queen. They take over the jobs of maintaining the colony and caring for its larvae even though they are from another species; they even take part in raids themselves. But like all slave-traders, P.americanus faces rebellions. Some of its victims (ants from the genus Temnothorax) strike back with murderous larvae. Alexandra Achenbach and Susanne Foitzik from Ludwig Maximillians Universty in Munich found that some of the kidnapped workers don't bow to the whims of their new queen. Once they have matured, they start killing the pupae of their captors, destroying as many as two-thirds of the colony's brood... Two-thirds of pupae died before they hatched. The mortality rate was even higher (83%) for pupae containing que
Post Date:04/01/2009 07:18:33
feeds.boingboing.net

How to Make a Synthetic Diamond My 10-year Wedding Anniversary is coming up so I thought I'd make my wife something special. A few months back I'd seen a show on TV where they demonstrated how companies were now making "cultured" diamonds in the lab. There are a few different methods, but the simplest is something called... By: mrcrumley
Post Date:03/31/2009 22:29:05
www.instructables.com

Fusion catches fire LLNL 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. 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?...(read more)
Post Date:03/31/2009 16:46:00
cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com