space
cmooney | January 27, 2009You can watch it here. Tons of funny stuff in Colbert's segment on science, which starts roughly at 6:15 and runs to roughly 10:45. I was on for about three minutes, and was instructed: "No monkey business. No evolution."
Of course, even though Colbert plays a rightwinger who thinks with his gut rather than his head and doesn't trust book learning, the truth is that his show features a ton of science content and, indeed, is doing vastly more than most other parts of the media to improve the role of science in our culture.
I was thrilled to be on.
cmooney | January 17, 2009You can watch here, and here's the embedded video:
Topics discussed:
Chris's optimism vs. Carl's skepticism on Obama's science policy
Weighing the costs of environmental regulation
Stop the presses! Did NASA just discover life on Mars?
The Sanjay Gupta controversy
Carl predicts artificial life in 2009
The future for science writing
Again, the whole thing is here.
cevans | January 14, 2009
A few months ago, I wrote a piece for GOOD Magazine highlighting some of the lesser-known successes of everyone's favorite bloated space agency. Although I intended to write about basic research, good science, and interesting pipeline projects, I ended up stuck in a vortex of awesome open-source software development and interactive art programs.
Doing my research, I came into contact with some incredibly forward-thinking people at NASA who gave me great hope for a post-Bush space administration. One of these people was Nicholas Skytland, founder of openNASA.com, an incredibly earnest,…
cmooney | January 12, 2009Kenneth Chang continues the Pluto blogging by asking readers to select a preference among the following planetary options:
The Current Answer: Eight. The current situation dictated by the I.A.U. where Pluto is a dwarf planet, not a planet.
The "No Planet Left Behind" Option: 13. If a planet were any round object in orbit around the Sun, that would include not only Pluto, but also the asteroid Ceres and three Kuiper Belt objects, Eris, Haumea and Makemake. The number of planets would continue to increase in the coming years.
The Historical Precedent Choice: 10. If Pluto were set as an…
aardvarchaeology | January 4, 2009Dear Reader, remember the remote-controlled Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity? How long is it since the last time you thought of them? Spirit landed on Mars five Earth years ago today, Opportunity on 25 January -- and both are still going strong! These machines were originally meant to work for three months, yet they continue to trundle around that cold, distant planet, taking pictures and analysing rocks. Check out the project's web site for news!
[More blog entries about astronomy, space, mars, nasa; astronomi, rymden, mars, nasa.]
sheril | December 27, 2008
About 50,000 light-years across and 28 million light-years away, M104 is one of the largest galaxies at the southern edge of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster
Dark shapes with bright edges winging their way through dusty NGC 6188 are tens of light-years long. The emission nebula is found near the edge of an otherwise dark large molecular cloud in the southern constellation Ara, about 4,000 light-years away.
See all 50 images at the Hindi News Channel. [Thanks Kevin]
sheril | December 22, 2008Forty years ago* on December 24, 1968, Earthrise was captured by astronaut William Anders during Apollo 8--the first manned voyage to the orbit of the Moon. It is a photograph that forever changed the way many humans perceive our place in the universe.
As we celebrate the new year, take a moment to consider our impact on this pale blue dot in the short span of time since then... and just imagine what we may yet accomplish and discover by 2048.
*posted a day early given many readers will be away from the blogosphere tomorrow
sheril | December 13, 2008It's time. The December Geminid Meteor Shower is upon us--the most satisfying of all the annual meteor displays (yes, even the Perseids). For the best viewing, watch when the constellation Gemini will be rising above the east-northeast horizon.
Last night's full moon may dim this year's display, but even so, try Sunday evening during the interval between twilight and the rise of the waning gibbous moon. (Find the best time at your location here.) You might even catch an 'earthgrazer'--the long, bright 'shooting stars' that streak overhead from just below the horizon and follow a path…
zooillogix | November 30, 2008Two weeks ago the University of Colorado College of Engineering sent two orb weaving spiders up in the space shuttle. The spiders' web building behavior was observed and streamed back to earth, serving as a classroom tool for teaching fifth though ninth graders about the effects of zero gravity. Great idea. Except when scientists opened up the second spider's box, they found it had escaped. Thus began the plot to a perfect B- Sci-Fi/Horror flick. Unfortunately for all of us safely earthbound observers, the other spider turned up in its buddy's box shortly thereafter, having succeeded only in…
cevans | November 10, 2008
For over six months, Veronica McGregor has been Twittering from Mars.
Of course, she's not living among the wind storms and dirt of the red planet herself, but she is the voice of MarsPhoenix, the strangely compelling, first-person, lonely robot Twitter feed that somehow became the official mouthpiece of NASA's Phoenix mission and has catalyzed an entirely new kind of public involvement in science.
MarsPhoenix is followed by over 37,000 people online, and provides daily updates on Martian weather conditions, scientific discoveries, as well as pithy observations about our role in the…
razib | October 10, 2008Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
I rarely post anything on space because I really don't know much more than the average reader of this weblog; no value-add from me. But yesterday I ran across an article which reported the financial overruns in the Mars Science Laboratory project. Today NASA said that the project will launch on schedule. It seems that to make this work they'll have to ax some other missions, though they're putting a happy-face on their claims today (as if the money will magically appear in these strained financial times!).
I'm very happy that the is all-go. Space exploration…
aardvarchaeology | October 6, 2008Two of my favourite song writers have revealed themselves as astronomy nerds in love songs.
Frank Black in "Sir Rockaby" (1994):
How many stars girl
Can you both count
And then classify?
I'm standing here in this big swirl
Singing this lullaby
Robert Schneider of the Apples in Stereo in "7 Stars" (2007):
Seven stars in the sky
You're feeling sociable
Silver stars in your eyes
You feel emotional
And you don't even know my name
And I know every constellation
cevans | September 26, 2008
Maybe it's the upcoming election and the potential change that it portends. Or perhaps it's the Large Hadron Collider, bogged down with electric failures, that has ceded the science-news space to other subjects. In any case, the last week has seen a slew of exciting, weird, and prescient science news too exciting to ignore, and too varied to all discuss in depth.
For one, the impersonal blackness of space welcomed a new nation as the Chinese launched their much-anticipated Shenzhou VII spacecraft, manned with three "taikonauts" trained for the country's first spacewalk. Technologically…
purepedantry | September 17, 2008It is speculation time. My roommate and I were watching a story this morning on CNN by Sanjay Gupta about how astronauts lose bone mass while in space. One of the limitations with space travel is that because of the absence of gravity, your bones steadily deteriorate. Load bearing exercise is required for bone maintenance.
To compensate for this, the people at NASA have all manner of contrivances to let the astronauts do load bearing exercise. Read the story. There is even a vertically oriented treadmill.
Anyway, this story stimulated a discussion between my roommate and me about how…
aardvarchaeology | August 11, 2008
Jeff Medkeff's friend, co-blogging under the pen-name Iatros Polygenos ("mongrel doctor" if my Greek serves me), offers a detailed account of our friend's last days. Turns out that Jeff died during a trip to England where he was having a blast, visiting Darwin's home, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich and other great sites! I'm very grateful to learn that Jeff died swiftly in the middle of having fun, not after weeks of wasting away in bed.
aardvarchaeology | August 5, 2008
To how many technological civilisations is our galaxy home at this moment? It would be nice to know, so we could estimate our chances of ever coming into contact with somebody out there. In 1961, astronomer Francis Drake suggested a number of parameters relevant to this issue, and summarised them in an equation that bears his name to this day. One of the parameters is the mean life-span of a technological civilisation.
In issue 2008:2 of Skeptic Magazine that reached me today, Michael Shermer has an interesting paper where he states that of Drake's parameters, the mean life-span is actually…
razib | July 7, 2008Flyby of Mercury Answers Some Old Questions:
Mercury, the smallest planet, bakes in the heat of the Sun, but it has water in some form. It has volcanoes. It appears to have an active magnetic field generated by a molten iron core. And it has shrunk more than scientists thought.
cevans | July 6, 2008
Dear readership,
As far as I know, I have never used this website as a political platform. I have weakly festered under the steely gaze of a particularly anti-science American administration without uttering much of a peep, but this, however, I cannot let stand.
The Arecibo telescope is the world's largest radio telescope and currently the source of all the data processed and used by various (and already much-maligned) SETI projects, particularly SETI@home. Currently, it's facing massive budget cuts that will effectively end its ability to continue the search for life beyond Earth. The…
cevans | July 2, 2008
Earlier this year, I attended a "Star Party" at the MacDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, a venerable institution perched on a hill in the far west Texas desert. The skies out there are, understandably, crushingly big and so teeming with stars that the astronomers guiding the public stargazing events need to aim high-powered laser pointers at the sky in order for anyone to tell one star from another. On the evening of my attendance, our guide was giddy with the news that the International Space Station, formerly an invisible blip in the night sky, had recently been expanded to the point that…
aardvarchaeology | June 7, 2008Here's an ace animated film clip showing how the Phoenix Lander manoeuvered its camera/digger arm to take a picture of the surface under its own belly a few days ago. Gives you a good sense of how the thing looks way out there...
More recent clips here.