November 12, 2009
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all.
Fry: Oh. What's it called now?
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Urrectum. Here, let me locate it for you.
Fry: No, no, I, I think I'll just smell around a bit over here.
Too bad…
November 11, 2009
Though the Sun is gone, I have a light. -Kurt Cobain
Last time we visited dark energy, we discussed its initial discovery. This came about from the fact that supernovae observed with a certain redshift (i.e., moving away from us) appear to be systematically fainter than we were able to explain.…
November 10, 2009
Yesterday, I talked about why we should look for a history of life on Mars, and had an article for SEED magazine to that effect. After all, we've made some recent geological finds that are surefire indicators of past liquid water on Mars, and possible indicators of past life.
While most of the…
November 9, 2009
The Mars Polar Lander cost the average American the price of half a cheeseburger. A human lander would cost the average American more -- perhaps even ten cheeseburgers! So be it. That is no great sacrifice.
-JONAH GOLDBERG, National Review Online, May 3, 2000
This week, Seed Magazine is doing a…
November 7, 2009
We've got an interesting contrast this weekend between the music and the fun stuff. I'm listening to Ray Lamontagne, a wonderful acoustic guitarist and singer/songwriter. The first song I heard by him was his version of Gnarls Barkley's Crazy, and I was instantly hooked. But the heartbreak of…
November 6, 2009
It's hard to believe that until 1929, we were pretty sure that the Universe consisted entirely of our galaxy, and everything else was inside of us.
Hard to believe that you can look at something like this and not think it was another galaxy like our own, isn't it?
Yet when you look in the visible…
November 5, 2009
Last time, we talked about the discovery of dark energy. How did it happen? Well, there are certain kinds of Supernovae, type Ia supernovae, that are practically identical to one another all across the Universe. In fact, we had one happen in our own galaxy in 1572; it outshone everything besides…
November 4, 2009
Once you can accept the Universe as being something expanding into an infinite nothing which is something, wearing stripes with plaid is easy. -A. Einstein
But accepting the expansion of the Universe is easy compared to accepting the existence of dark energy. Why -- and how -- is there some…
November 2, 2009
My heroes had the heart to lose their lives out on a limb,
And all I remember is thinking, "I want to be like them!" --Gnarls Barkley
And here's a new discovery (to me): the Violent Femmes version to help you through your post-Halloween Monday:
The Ares I-X rocket has been all over the news…
November 1, 2009
Here is your king's scepter, and here is your kingdom, with the scorpion, the cobra, and the lizard for subjects. Free them if you will. Leave the slaves to me. --Ramses, in The Ten Commandments
This year, I went as Pharaoh Ramses II, as played by Yul Brynner (above and below).
Well, this is my…
October 30, 2009
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space... --Lord Byron, Darkness
Or, in other words, boo!
Halloween, believe it or not, is an astronomical holiday! The two solstices and two equinoxes are obvious…
October 29, 2009
The farther backwards you can look, the farther forwards you are likely to see. -- Winston Churchill
Sometimes, we point our most powerful telescopes at the sky, peering as deeply as we possibly can, hoping to shed some light on what the Universe was like oh-so-long ago, as close to the big bang as…
October 28, 2009
In 1908, a huge fireball streaked across the sky and exploded a few kilometers above the Earth's surface, downing trees for miles and miles around but leaving no impact crater on the ground. This mystery was known as the Tunguska event.
But how did this happen? The amount of energy released was…
October 26, 2009
Perhaps you've been following my ongoing series on dark matter. Perhaps, like many, you're still skeptical. After all, it's not like we've gone and made it in a lab or discovered it in an experiment. 15 years after David Weinberg composed the Dark Matter Rap, we still don't know exactly what dark…
October 26, 2009
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. --Isaac Newton…
October 24, 2009
Most of the time, I like to showcase some new music to you, or at least music that's new to me. But this week, I heard an old favorite for the first time in a long time. You're probably familiar with the Violent Femmes, but you may not have heard anything other than Blister in the Sun from them…
October 23, 2009
Seed Magazine (which I've written for) has just put out a space slideshow: Traveling Through Time and Stars.
Michael Benson gives an account -- in words and pictures -- of a journey outwards, from nearby stars to nebulae to other galaxies to clusters of galaxies. The pictures alone are worth…
October 22, 2009
Yesterday, I showed you a video of an amazing incidence of magnetic levitation. There's another video, courtesy of Matthew Sullivan and his students, that demonstrates this equally as well:
What do you need to do to make this happen, and how does it work?
First off, you need to design a stable…
October 21, 2009
I don't understand French nearly well enough to understand the explanation in this video, but I was amazed at what the physical world can do when I saw this video.
(Video courtesy of Wimp.com.) What's going on here? Well, you've got:
a series of bar magnets on the bottom,
a ceramic cylinder,
an…
October 20, 2009
Ever see a picture of a Solar Prominence before? If you have, you'll recognize these loop-like features leaving the Sun's surface and ending up in the Sun's corona:
Well two spacecraft designed to monitor the Sun, Stereo A (which stands for "Ahead" of Earth) and Stereo B (which stands for "Behind…
October 19, 2009
If people around you aren't going anywhere, if their dreams are no bigger than hanging out on the corner, or if they're dragging you down, get rid of them. Negative people can sap your energy so fast, and they can take your dreams from you, too.--Earvin "Magic" Johnson
As far as science goes, we…
October 18, 2009
Music. Dance. Theatre. Take your pick, ranging from something classical like the symphony or the ballet to something modern like musical theatre or fusion dance, there's a world of sights and sounds for you to enjoy.
For an example of a new twist on an old favorite, have a listen to Yo-Yo Ma (on…
October 16, 2009
...we spend paltry sums for population planning, even though its spontaneous growth is an urgent threat to life on our planet.
There is no human circumstance more tragic than the persisting existence of a harmful condition for which a remedy is readily available. Family planning, to relate…
October 15, 2009
All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again. --Peter Pan
Much like any new venture where the outcome is uncertain, there are a lot of fears surrounding the LHC. And I know, because it occasionally shows up in my comment threads, in my inbox, or in my office.
Could it form a…
October 14, 2009
It's only natural to wonder why things are the ways that they are. Take a look at our Solar System, for example.
A central bulge with planets, moons, and whatnot moving in a disc around it. Is this the way things have to be? My friend Rich, a chemist, asks:
It seems that all the objects in our…
October 13, 2009
Barney: Next they're gonna show my movie.Bart: You made a movie ?Barney: I made a movie? I wonder why there was a picture of me on the cover of Entertainment Weekly.
Earlier this year, a documentary film challenge was issued internationally. The goal was to make a movie about one of this year's…
October 12, 2009
My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles.
--Children everywhere, up until very recently
Taking a look at the new ring discovered around Saturn made me realize something. Most of us don't realize how full of crap our Solar System is.
I don't mean planets, or moons, or comets or asteroids…
October 10, 2009
There's nothing quite like a Bob Dylan song performed to perfection by someone other than Bob Dylan. All Along the Watchtower and Knockin' on Heaven's Door are the most common ones, but a little further off the beaten path is Girl from the North Country, which is knocked out-of-the-park here by Sam…
October 9, 2009
One ring to rule them all,
one ring to find them.
One ring to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them. --J.R.R. Tolkien
Of course we're all familiar with the planet Saturn. Gas giant, many moons, and, of course, its prominent rings:
Note that word, rings. Sure, at a distance, it may just look…
October 8, 2009
Earlier this week, I wrote about an article that appeared in Nature, New Scientist and other places. The article -- and especially the popular writeups -- talked about a problem with dark matter and how MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics) solves those problems.
And I'm livid about it. Another…
