space
purepedantry | September 29, 2006Oh my God, best article ever:
Having sex in the weightlessness of outer space is the stuff of urban legends and romantic fantasy -- but experts say that there would be definite downsides as well.
Spacesickness, for instance. And the difficulty of choreographing intimacy. And the potential for sweat and other bodily fluids to, um, get in the way.
"The fantasy might be vastly superior to the reality," NASA physician Jim Logan said here Sunday at the Space Frontier Foundation's NewSpace 2006 conference. Nevertheless, Logan and others say the study of sex and other biological basics in outer…
purepedantry | September 28, 2006I love YouTube -- so many ways to waste time at work.
Check out this video of a popped balloon in zero gravity.
purepedantry | September 27, 2006Have you ever seen a cyst fly?
A team of French doctors planned to slice a cyst off a man's arm Wednesday in the world's first zero-gravity surgery, operating aboard an airplane soaring and diving in and out of weightlessness.
The experiment is part of a broader effort to develop robots for surgeries from a distance, in space or on Earth, the doctors said. The surgeons will be strapped to the walls of the Airbus 300 Zero-G for the three-hour operation.
The plane was scheduled to take off Wednesday midmorning from the Institute for Aeronautic Maintenance in Merignac, adjacent to Bordeaux in…
cevans | August 20, 2006
A lot of people, sweetly, have been asking for the Universe(TM) perspective on this "new planets" issue. I've written about itonce before, of course, around the time that the latest new planet discovery really brought the question out into the astronomical limelight. This is, however, a long-standing issue.
For those of you who aren't abreast on this development: the increasingly frequent discovery of astronomical objects larger than Pluto (most of which reside in a belt of icy rocks outside Neptune called the Kuiper Belt) has put into serious question the status of Pluto as a planet. The…
purepedantry | July 19, 2006Nifty:
Astronauts travelling beyond the Earth's orbit would be at risk of cancer and other illnesses due to their long term exposure to cosmic rays. Some of these energetic particles are spewed forth during outbursts from the Sun. Others come from outside our solar system and are more mysterious in origin.
Slough says the problem could be solved with just a few grams of hydrogen in the form of a plasma surrounding the spacecraft. NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) recently awarded Slough's team $75,000 to explore the feasibility of the idea.
The details still need to be worked out…
cevans | July 12, 2006The second in a two-part distillation of a cover story about NASA, politics, and the new power generation that I just finished for the LA Alternative. To get up to speed, see the previous entry.
The CEV -- Ares, or whatever -- is not the first attempt NASA has made to replace its Shuttle fleet with something more appealing to an electorate weaned on the Star Wars movies. The last ten years have seen a lot of blustery attempts at making a "Single Stage to Orbit" craft, that is to say, one which could be completely reusable and would not need expensive and heavy external fuel tanks. An SSTO,…
cevans | July 10, 2006The following is the first in a two-part distillation of a cover story about NASA, politics, and the new power generation that I just finished for the LA Alternative.
From this surreal atmosphere, as close to the belt of the equator as we can get in this country, we send people into outer space.
Few Americans think of Cape Canaveral in their day-to-day. They are consumed, not wrongly, by the machineries of life: raising gas prices, magazine subscriptions, college tuition, first dates, dinner plans. Outer space is already an abstract enough concept for humanity to grasp; couple that with a…
cevans | June 19, 2006
The NASA logo dates from 1959 and is commonly referred to as the "meatball" logo. The sphere represents a planet, the stars represent space, the red chevron is a wing representing "aeronautics," which was the latest design craze at the time of the logo's invention. The orbiting spacecraft going around the wing represents orbiting spacecraft. Iconic and simple: the opposite of NASA's bureaucracy!
When the insignia is used in conjunction with other text (as in letterheads, business cars, or for agency or center identification), the font used is always Helvetica Medium or Light, upper and…
razib | June 15, 2006I too defend space cadets, what is mankind without a dream? I remember back in the late 1980s a speech by Joseph P. Kennedy II as he stood on the floor of the house of representatives and asked his fellow members if people here at home should eat less so that vessels could fly above them in the cosmos. Should we be forced to make this choice? (shall I point out that many Americans should eat a bit less!)
I'm not going to defend the details of Hawking's argument, I think the time scale is a little compressed (I'm being generous). But, I am going to defend the dream, because to venture into…
cevans | June 15, 2006There are, as far as the layman is concerned, two kinds of scientific truth. At one end of the spectrum -- the gamma ray end, if we use the electromagnetic spectrum as a model -- there are the kinds of concepts we associate with science's grand design, the truths which permeate the dark depths of the unknown universe. These are the terrifying, metaphysical truths: unifying cosmic theories, the afterlife, quantum mechanics. Entire disciplines orbit these, while the average person has only a nebulous idea of what they even represent. On the short-wave radio end, there are those forces governing…
cevans | May 9, 2006Re: Video programs Inbox
UNARIUS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE to me
Dear Claire:
We would be most happy to meet with you at the Unarius Center
when you have the opportunity to make the trip from Los Angeles.
We are open from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM Monday through Saturday.
As you may have discovered on our web site
http://www.unarius.org/, we have classes on Wednesday and
Sunday evenings from 7:00 PM until 9:00 PM
May we suggest that you participate with us online for Sunday
evenings past-life therapy classes that are being audio-streamed
live from about 7 to 9 PM PDT. To listen, go to the Unarius Web…
cevans | April 7, 2006
In the lucid 1960's, the futurist Stewart Brand began a public campaign for NASA to release a satellite image of the whole Earth taken from space, an image which was at the time only rumored to exist. Brand, forever the "big-picture" thinker, noted that "this little blue, white, green and brown jewel-like icon amongst a quite featureless black vacuum," would serve both as a potent symbol for humanity and as a firm kick-start for a legitimate environmentalism movement.
With the rapid progress of the Apollo program, NASA eventually did release such an image -- though whether this was due to…
cevans | March 7, 2006
So you think the scientific world is one of cold, hard, facts and impassive objectivity, incapable of bringing tenderness and twee sentimentalism forth into the world? You think that NASA, that behemoth of a governmental organization, spends all its time censoring evolutionary scientists and fucking up stuff on the Hubble telescope? Well, you're right, for the most part!
Right now, however, you are wrong, because NASA has just extracted from the comet particle-embedded aerogel collected by Stardust spacecraft A HEART-SHAPED COMET GEM. The particle is made up of the silicate mineral…
cevans | February 19, 2006I've been having a lot of good ideas recently. Some of them are for art installations I'll never be able to do without the assistance of a gallerist, some of them are cool advertising tag-lines like "The Internet: A Window to Someone Else's Computer(tm)," and some of them, like this one, are nebulous concepts that will dance around my brain in a haze until someone literally asks me point-blank, "Hey, Claire, what do you think is the key figurative parallel between science and literature?"
Which is why blogs exist, I guess.
Science writing is difficult, as difficult as literary writing. At…
cevans | February 14, 2006There are a great deal of things in this civilized world of ours which we accept as truth primarily out of laziness or convenience; in fact, it would not be radical to say that our fragile social universe is built upon such precepts. The structure of language, for example, is pretty much arbitrary. So is the practice of putting books vertically on bookshelves, which people did not really invent until two centuries after the arrival of printed matter. The necessity of eating meat? These things are cultural concepts -- they standardize us, and give us a sense of order in a deeply irrational…
cevans | January 28, 2006The following is the second in a series of essays about the pragmatism of modern physics. It may be the last, because I am tripping out super-hard about this stuff and kind of want to start thinking about the ocean again. Did you see that scientists just discovered the world's smallest fish?
Anyways, there has been quite a debate recently about String Theory. According to many, the assumptions upon which it is founded are unreliable. I couldn't even tell you what the exact conversation is, but it has something to do with the "alternate universe" aspects of the theory, and how the vast…
razib | January 25, 2006Since Chad Orzel hasn't posted on it, I figured I'd link to this story about a Nature letter which announces the discovery of a planet 5.5 times as massive as our own! This is pretty cool, I was a big fan of astronomy when I was a kid, and it certainly is the science with tickles my "shock & awe"-o-meter. But combined with the possibility of sub-thousand dollar genomes in the next 5 years, it really does make me feel like we are at the End of Times and soon we shall be as gods. OK, that was a hyperbole, but I can dimly grok the difficulty of a extrasolar detection feat like this....…
cevans | January 19, 2006The following blather is the first part in a continuing series of essays addressing the inherent pragmatism of modern physics. Let's call this a "Primer" on String Theory.
So, string theory is in trouble.
For those readers who haven't watched the excellent NOVA special "The Elegant Universe" in the form of streaming Quicktime movies on the PBS website, and hence do not know what is meant by the phrase "string theory:" more power to you. You are exactly in the same place as me on this plane of understanding, and I've spent the last week and a half pushing my glasses up the bridge of my nose,…