tweet of the day
Trees cocooned in spider webs after flooding in Sindh, Pakistan
(Via @josephpearson)
The first image of Mercury
This image is the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit about the Solar System’s innermost planet.
headline of the day
Chavez says capitalism may have ended life on Mars
headline of the day
Pluto-Bound Probe Sprints Across Uranus’ Orbital Path
quote out of context
Not all experts are comfortable with the idea that a strange force is mysteriously tugging the universe apart.
You are listening to Los Angeles
Okay. My 24/7 soundtrack. Ambient music and live LAPD police radio.
(Thank you, Mr. Ledgerwood.)
life on meteorites
Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, studied meteorites in remote areas over a period of ten years and concluded they show significant evidence of extraterrestrial bacterial life.
In what he calls “a very simple process,” Dr. Hoover fractured the meteorite stones under a sterile environment before examining the freshly broken surface with the standard tools of the scientist: a scanning-electron microscope and a field emission electron-scanning microscope, which allowed him to search the stone’s surface for evidence of fossilized remains.
He found the fossilized remains of micro-organisms not so different from ordinary ones found underfoot — here on earth, that is.
“The exciting thing is that they are in many cases recognizable and can be associated very closely with the generic species here on earth,” Hoover told FoxNews.com. But not all of them. “There are some that are just very strange and don’t look like anything that I’ve been able to identify, and I’ve shown them to many other experts that have also come up stumped.”
Cat-Library™
This would solve all my problems. All of them.
(Via Dylan, who got it from Charlie)
Shuttle Launch from Cruising Altitude
I’m usually stuck in the aisle row, but I bet this was a magical experience.
Cats and pigeons, but not both at the same time.
A video demonstrating the effects of weightlessness on cats and pigeons.
from the comments
I will fix your links, and I will fix them permanently, gouging and etching that coding so far into the fabric of time and space that God himself couldn’t redirect shit if He laid hands on it and cried out to the baby Jesus.
learning to speak with dolphins
Herzing found the study sessions were most successful when, before playing, the humans and dolphins swam together slowly and in synchrony, mimicked each other and made eye contact. These are signs of good etiquette among dolphins. Humans also signal their interest in someone with eye contact and similar body language. Perhaps these are universal — and extraterrestrial — signs of good manners.
I wanted more from this article, but the ideas — language, intelligence, the search for extra-terrestrial life, inter-species communication — are interesting nonetheless.
Tyche, the new ninth planet
John Matese and Daniel Whitmire, astrophysicists from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, think data gathered from NASA’s Wise telescope will reveal a ninth planet orbiting in the Oort cloud, captured from another solar system by the sun’s gravity.
Whether it would become the new ninth planet would be decided by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). The main argument against is that Tyche probably formed around another star and was later captured by the Sun’s gravitational field. The IAU may choose to create a whole new category for Tyche, Professor Matese said.
Tyche will almost certainly be made up mostly of hydrogen and helium and will probably have an atmosphere much like Jupiter’s, with colourful spots and bands and clouds, Professor Whitmire said. “You’d also expect it to have moons. All the outer planets have them,” he added.
For the first time in human history, we have a view of the entire sun
On Feb. 6th, NASA’s twin STEREO probes moved into position on opposite sides of the sun, and they are now beaming back uninterrupted images of the entire star — front and back.
“For the first time ever, we can watch solar activity in its full 3-dimensional glory,” says Angelos Vourlidas, a member of the STEREO science team at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC.
And, So, Somewhere, There Is This, Also
Thanks, El-tee.
Ken Grimes, Untitled, Soccer Pool, acrylic on masonite, 2001
A few years after Ken Grimes had his first psychotic break, he started putting some of his ideas about extraterrestrials on canvas.
Kepler 10-b
The planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope has spotted its first rocky exoplanet, astronomers announced today at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
“This is the first unquestionably rocky planet orbiting a star outside our solar system,” said astronomer Natalie Batalha of San Jose State University, a member of the Kepler team. “It’s an important milestone for our team, and I think it’s an important milestone for humanity.”
The new planet, called Kepler 10-b, orbits a sun-like star 560 light-years away.
Awesome Headline of the Day
NASA’s Fermi Catches Thunderstorms Hurling Antimatter into Space
Lunar Eclipse Tonight
The total phase of the upcoming event will be visible across all of North and South America, as well as the northern and western part of Europe, and a small part of northeast Asia, including Korea and much of Japan. Totality will also be visible in its entirety from the North Island of New Zealand and Hawaii — a potential viewing audience of about 1.5 billion people.
an alternate method of creating amino acids in space
Scientists found amino acids on a meteorite where they were surprised they had been able to survive.
“This meteorite formed when two asteroids collided,” said Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “The shock of the collision heated it to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough that all complex organic molecules like amino acids should have been destroyed, but we found them anyway.”
How to Find a Wormhole
If wormholes big enough to fit a human or a spaceship exist, telescopes should be able to detect any wavering starlight the space-time shortcuts cause while moving in front of a distant star.
Wormholes are yet-to-be-observed warpings of space and time so extreme that they connect one point to another through a tunnel-like throat. Such connections may be able to transport something — a photon of light or a spaceship — to another galaxy, the edge of the universe, another universe entirely or possibly backward or forward in time.
Alien technology advanced enough to collect negative energy and create a wormhole is a more likely than a natural scenario, said Cramer and Visser, but not much can be ruled out because our knowledge is purely theoretical.
“If the wormhole exists, it shows some possibility of a traveling or time machine. But practically, using them in this way is almost impossible because they’re likely very distant from Earth, probably at least 10,000 light-years,” Abe said. “It may not make sense to go through a wormhole because it would take such a long time to travel to one.”
headline of the day, IV
A Non-scientist’s Conjecture about Anomalous Decay Rates
I’m sure one of our scientist readers can put this to rest quickly, but here’s the deal. I made a post back in August about this article that was circulating then, concerning observed changes in radioactive decay rates that were definitely not supposed to ever change:
When probing the deepest reaches of the Cosmos or magnifying our understanding of the quantum world, a whole host of mysteries present themselves. This is to be expected when pushing our knowledge of the Universe to the limit.
But what if a well-known — and apparently constant — characteristic of matter starts behaving mysteriously?
This is exactly what has been noticed in recent years; the decay rates of radioactive elements are changing. This is especially mysterious as we are talking about elements with “constant” decay rates — these values aren’t supposed to change. School textbooks teach us this from an early age.
This is the conclusion that researchers from Stanford and Purdue University have arrived at, but the only explanation they have is even weirder than the phenomenon itself: The sun might be emitting a previously unknown particle that is meddling with the decay rates of matter. Or, at the very least, we are seeing some new physics.
Last night I was wondering if the particle explanation might not be right: perhaps what is being measured is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves. We have been trying to detect them in various ways for some time now, but with no success. My thought is that perhaps the decay rates are remaining constant–and spacetime is being stretched by a gravitational wave in a way that we aren’t aware of because our perception remains constant (as it would within time dilation effects–in this case applied to a whole region of space). But–I don’t really have the math to work on or fully understand such things, and I may be just talking like a person who believes he has invented a perpetual motion machine.
“Then I see his penis out!”
This is a lady I respect.
(via)
