Happenings

Is There Life on Maaaars?

cevans — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 18:53:12 +0000

Is There Life on Maaaars?

You certainly didn't hear it here first: today NASA, at a press briefing, announced that minerals analyzed by the Curiosity rover indicate that life might, in the galactic past, have survived on Mars. The rover's been poking around an ancient network of stream channels descending from the rim of Gale crater since September of last year; now, after drilling into the sedimentary bedrock nearby, it's hit on a treasure trove of life-supporting minerals: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, and nitrogen. These mineral findings are really just icing on the cake, as the geological clues–fine-grained mudstone streaked with nodules and veins, the telltale drifting forms of a past sometimes wet–already spoke volumes.

To answer your question, David Bowie, no, this doesn't mean that Curiosity scientists found life on Mars–only conditions suitable for it to exist. This is only the discovery of a setting, the stage for a primeval drama. But it's still impressive. Mars is a huge planet and the Curiosity rover is a small, plodding thing, which cuts an unassuming profile as it diligently sifts through the dust. It moves gingerly across the landscape. It is a laborious little laboratory, and Mars is a huge jarring vista of red under a harsh, dark sky.

These discoveries, although tantalizingly vague, are testament to the power of properly applied technology: against all odds, on a distant planet we can only dream of visiting ourselves, Curiosity's fiercely economical little corral of tools, leveraged in just the right manner, can reveal magnitudes. Pretty cool.

John Grotzinger, Mars Science Laboratory project scientist from the California Institute of Technology, celebrates the discovery of an ancient environment so benign that "probably if this water was around and you had been there, you would have been able to drink it." It's a satisfying mental image: instead of a souped-up golf cart preciously vaporizing pellets of rock, imagine scooping handfuls of Martian water from streams long since run dry. Your thirst slaked, you brush the red dust from your knees and stand to see the Earth, a significant blue dot on the horizon.

cevans Tue, 03/12/2013 - 14:53

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Geology

Happenings

News

Planets

Bullet Proof Shocking Photo Evidence for Life On Mars...
My channel on u-tube..eagleman725
Thank You
Antony

"I'M SIGNIFICANT!"

screamed the speck.

Can we determine life in other planets or moon by send some organic materials there? If organic materials undergo decay process, can we conclude that there are bacteria or some organism that carry out the decomposition? For example, can we crack an egg and observe what happens after a period of time?

My New Book: High Frontiers!

cevans — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 09:00:03 +0000

My New Book: High Frontiers!

Writing for the Internet is like yelling into the void: freeing, probably more than a little cathartic, but ultimately lonely. That's not to say that I haven't made profound connections out here, but like most writers I long for a little thing with my name on it that fits in the hand, that can be passed around and earmarked, tossed away and re-discovered.

Which is why I'm so pleased to announce the existence of precisely such a little thing: my brand-new collection of essays and arcana, High Frontiers, fresh from the presses of Publication Studio:

High Frontiers brings together disparate pieces of my writing from all over the web, newly polished, lined up in a row, and illustrated: things that made their debut here on Universe, science fiction criticism and reviews from my sister blog, Space Canon, and articles originally penned for the World Science Foundation, Motherboard, SEED Magazine, and Rhizome.org. Subjects covered range from submersibles to mycology, surrealism, cyborgs, machine learning, love, and art on the moon; it includes interviews with Dr. Oliver Sacks, Trevor Paglen, and Ursula K. LeGuin, and a couple of weird poems, to be safe.

From the introduction:

Art, science, poetry, technology: these all create models for reality, chance forecasts for the future, incant their vision to the public, and ultimately inform complex nesting sets of shared truth. Science fiction is shockingly predictive, while science itself often demands broad suspension of disbelief. Those who seek to understand the ultimate nature of the universe are not only creating testable, theoretical models; increasingly, it's the questions themselves which unite us. Where do we come from? How can something come from nothing?

Publication Studio is a press based in Portland, Oregon, with outposts all over North America. They print and bind beautiful books on demand, as well as maintain a digital commons where anyone can read and annotate books for free. I'm a big fan of what they do: Publication Studio is really a laboratory for publication in its fullest sense. As they say, they're into "not just the production of books, but the production of a public." High Frontiers is available for sale on their website, in physical and DRM-free eBook versions. The physical edition designed was laid out entirely by yours truly, with a cover design by Jona Bechtolt, and it's a really delightful little object, a handsome addition to any self-respecting polymath's home library.

In 2013, we may be on the tail end of print book-making in its traditional forms, and that's a longer conversation. For the time being, I'm happy just make satisfying objects, and to find a marketplace in which to share them with people. Like Universe, this book is a labor of love, and your purchases support me (and Publication Studio) directly.

cevans Mon, 02/18/2013 - 04:00

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Let's All Hallucinate With Oliver Sacks

cevans — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 12:50:22 +0000

Let's All Hallucinate With Oliver Sacks

I probably don't need to introduce Oliver Sacks to you. You've undoubtedly already delighted over his wobbly affectation and tales of neurological strangeness on RadioLab or NPR. You might have read his lovely first-person account, in the New Yorker, of his early experiments with hallucinogens of all stripes, from the "pharmacological launch pad" of amphetamines and LSD, to the synthetic belladonna-like drug, artane. You may even have read one of his bestselling books of clinical studies, like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat or Awakenings.

I interviewed Dr. Sacks in 2007, on the subject of his fantastic book about music and the brain, Musicophilia. I found him to be every bit the disarmingly candid, loopy boffin of his public persona, and was genuinely thrilled to hear about his approach to science as a form of storytelling. To wit, from our 2007 interview:

Universe: The New York Times famously called you the ”poet laureate of medicine.” Are your books science or literature?

Oliver Sacks: For me, an interest in science is inseparable from an interest in the lives of scientists, and the lives of ideas, as well as in storytelling. In medicine, of course, narratives are essential: the patient tells you what’s going on, and you try to match this with stories heard from other patients. I love to give personal accounts, to try and enter people’s experiences and describe them, and I don’t think there should be a space between literature and the sciences. I think that the sciences should be literate, and that their function is not only exposition, but storytelling. Certainly for myself, science has to be combined with stories–but also stories have to be combined with science. Although I may tell a story of someone who has musical hallucinations, or cannot tell one tune from another, I also want to know what goes on in their brain, and why this is the case. In a way, these are somewhat like detective stories.

Oliver Sacks' new book of neurological detective stories, Hallucinations, purports to tackle the uncanny boundaries of human perception, those strange neurological ghosts we sometimes encounter on the edge of sleep, under the influence, or when systems in our brain go wonky. To celebrate the occasion, my friends at the World Science Festival are bringing us Sacks in conversation with journalist John Hockenberry. They'll discuss the cultural history (and contemporary science) of the hallucinatory experience, as well as how Sacks' forays into psychedelia turned him on to a lifetime of puzzling out the mysteries of the human mind.

Since we can't all be there in person, the Festival has set me up with a high-tech live stream of the event, which I've embedded below. I'll be watching it live this Friday (tomorrow) at 8:00PM eastern time, and I recommend you come join me in tuning in, turning on, and dropping out!

Ed: Now that the event has passed, please enjoy this instant replay!

cevans Thu, 11/08/2012 - 07:50

Tags

World Science Festival

neuroscience

awww... "Removed by Partner Request"! ...

8-(

A replay is coming soon!

The Best Science Writing Online 2012

cevans — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 21:31:45 +0000

The Best Science Writing Online 2012

I've been practicing little idiosyncratic rituals on this corner of the web for years: learn something new, obsessively research, get lost in the idea, scribble, converse endlessly, then write. This blog, Universe, has never been about garnering hits or materializing an audience because, for me, thinking and writing about science is a personal tic. I can't help but yell into the void; I understand science as a poetic language for explaining reality, and when I see changes in that language all I want to do is unfasten myself into them.

I definitely don't seek any form of recognition for what I do here. In my estimation, it's niche--probably even archaic--to maintain and expect long-form discourse about peripheral science weirdness on a blog in 2012. I've made friends, gotten some work, told stories, and cross-pollinated, but it feels dorky, sometimes, to even have a blog. Mostly this is a quiet space, one where I can habitually articulate my own starry-eyed fascination with all those ideas bigger than my living room. If the Internet is a storm of ideas, then Universe is a little lean-to, a place to hunker and watch hurricane winds suck mallard ducks of out the city pond and howl, "is anyone else getting this"?

However, as it turns out, someone else is getting it.

I present to you The Best Science Writing Online 2012, an anthology of essays compiled by Bora Zivkovic and Jennifer Ouelette of Cocktail Party Physics. My essay, Moon Arts: Fallen Astronaut, originally posted here last May and part of my larger series about art on the Moon, is included.

I haven't much else to say other than it's an honor to have been nominated, chosen, and included in this formidable anthology. The book is like a fantastic cocktail party full of strange fungi, quantum clones, extinct creatures and Aspies all giving toasts, telling fascinating stories, and generally carrying on. Honestly, it's a great read, and I'm all the more inspired to carry forward, having read it. The Best Science Writing Online 2012 is out now on Scientific American Books, a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. You can buy it on Amazon here, or wherever you want to throw your money.

Oh, and it's not too late to submit any of my articles for the 2013 Anthology, either. ;)

cevans Thu, 09/20/2012 - 17:31

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The Best Science Writing Online 2012

I gifted this to Mikey for his library, but haven't had a chance to read it yet. Exciting!

Beautiful Evidence: Science Cinema

cevans — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 09:10:04 +0000

Beautiful Evidence: Science Cinema

To scientists, "experimental" is a technical word, one with a precise meaning: that which relates to a procedure of methodical trial and error, to a systematic test for determining the nature of reality. I got in trouble on this blog once, with commenters, for using the word "experimental" too flippantly.

But artists experiment too, of course. Their method of inquiry is different, free from the rigidity that characterizes the scientific method. Artistic experiments are designed to be singular; they aren't supposed to be repeated. They have no control variables. Often, even the hypothesis itself is left undefined. It might seem that when artists use the word "experiment," they're missing the point entirely. And yet, the underlying spirit is the same. An experiment is learning by doing. Seeing what happens. Trying something new, in the hope that from within the noise will arise a form, idea, or emotion that might in itself be repeatable.

The uncanny thing about art in its experiments is that the same results can be achieved through different means. We can be moved by an inexhaustible list of things, depending on how and where we look. The results can't be analyzed systematically. Instead they slowly unfold, although rarely with grace, within each individual.

Science, like art, is a process by which we study the behavior of the physical world through observation and experimentation. There are no strictures in this definition that absolve science from needing to be creative, or playful; in fact a creative approach to science often breeds important results unachievable through strictly empirical means. At the same time, artistic practice often benefits from a systematic process borrowed from the scientific method; many artists create constraints for themselves, with the aim of circling around an idea until its essence is reached.

Search, discovery, wonder, creativity, trial, error, none are reserved solely for either art or science. Simply, the "Eureka!" moment happens to everyone.

It's in this spirit of open-ended discovery that I curated Beautiful Evidence, a one-night experimental science cinema at the historic Hollywood Theatre in Portland, Oregon. The films of Beautiful Evidence range from the baroque black-and-white deep sea documentaries of French surrealist Jean Painlevé (who lived by the credo "science is fiction") to time-lapse light experiments by Al Jarnow and a journey into the insect kingdom by Stan Brackhage, with a healthy dose of dreamlike space vistas in between.

The term "Beautiful Evidence" is borrowed from the statistician Edward Tufte, whose book of the same name explores how science and art both practice a form of focused "seeing" that generates empirical information. All the films demonstrate precisely this kind of seeing-which-turns-into-showing, in which artists mold the raw visual information of the world, employing film as a method of inquiry, performing a rogue, kinetic science of their own design. Ultimately, these efforts reveal fragments of fundamental truth.

If you're in the Portland area, I encourage you to come and behold these strange, non-experimental experiments. Local performers Jeffrey Jerusalem and Golden Retriever will be performing live scores along with the films, which will be sure to lend a dreamy, aleatoric cast to the evening. The show begins at eight p.m. this Saturday, July 28th, and is part of the Hollywood Theatre's excellent Sound & Vision series.

cevans Fri, 07/27/2012 - 05:10

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Science Communication, Balloons, and Carl Sagan

cevans — Fri, 27 May 2011 08:40:00 +0000

Science Communication, Balloons, and Carl Sagan

Ed: This is an essay I wrote for my friends at the World Science Festival, riffing on the central themes of this years' event. If you prefer, you can also read this piece on the World Science Festival site. And, if you're in New York between the first and fifth of June, you could do much worse than popping into the Festival and getting a load of panel discussions like The Dark Side of the Universe, or Science & Story: The Art of Communicating Science Across All Media.

Science communication is difficult.

It can be crippled by the complexity of its own subject matter. It can be steeped in jargon, too dense for its readership, or, conversely, too simplistic to satisfy its critics in the scientific community. It can lack warmth, or be too paranoid about its empirical rigor to engage in the metaphoric flights -- the quick shifts from microcosm to macrocosm -- that cue readers to an emotional engagement in any subject. The problem may lie in an inescapable tautology: to fully understand a scientific, taxonomic, objective conception of the natural world is to be so steeped in scientific idiom that poetics become impossible.

And yet, there are those who are capable of communicating the invisible phenomena of science to the public. These people are essentially bilingual. The Sagans, the deGrasse Tysons, the E.O Wilsons; Angier, Attenborough, Carson and Greene; the radio producers, writers, filmmakers, documentarians, and public speakers; these are our human bridges, our storytellers, fluent in both big and small. It's a specific skill, to be a gifted science communicator -- that rare person who can straddle two divergent worlds without slipping into the void between the so-called "Two Cultures," someone with hard facts in their mind and literary gems in their rhetoric. They must accomplish the humanization of abstract ideas without pandering, make science poetry without kitsch. Even at their best, they can be silly -- think of Carl Sagan, in his burgundy turtleneck, proclaiming, "in order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." It may seem absurd to draw such a huge subject down to Earth in such a literal way, but what Sagan taps into is the necessity of these seemingly silly flourishes.

See, science is big. It's driven by the desire to understand everything!

The immensity of such a project necessitates that science be undertaken not by one group of men and women in one time, but all men and women for all time. The final goal always eludes us: to understand this, we must first understand this, but to understand that, we must understand this, ad infinitum. Scientific knowledge is won by climbing the shoulders of giants; but these giants are a never-ending stack of babushka dolls. In fact, the very notion of there being a final point in science has become so abstract as to be almost irrelevant; the more we know, the more we know that we do not know, and the end of the game is nowhere to be seen. And, perhaps, there is no end game.

To a scientist, this endless narrative satisfies. The balance of properties and theories that define the natural world, the physical Universe, or the underpinnings of mathematical reality are elegant and stirring; knowledge, and the search for more of it, is a raison d'Ãªtre. For those of us not wired the same way, the greater narrative of science can be overwhelming, if not inscrutable. We need stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. We need things to relate to, objects to hold onto, characters to laugh and cry with. We need to synthesize abstract ideas through allegories, metaphors, and images.

Popular science communication is defined by such literary gestures. For years, students of astronomy struggled with the concept of an expanding universe without a center (a notion which violently bucks against reason). Cosmologists, however, came up with an image -- a metaphor -- which lightens the load: imagine that the universe is an expanding balloon, and the stars and objects in space are dots drawn on the surface of this balloon. From any one star's vantage point, all the other objects in space are moving away from it, but without any perceivable pattern. The more distant points would appear to be moving faster. Apart from being a devastatingly simple image that conveys more information that entire astronomy textbooks, it's also an elegant metaphor. It accomplishes the same things as the most successful of literary metaphors: a world of feeling and information, the very chaos of physical reality, in one image. It translates profound abstraction (the universe) into something we can imagine holding in our hands (a balloon).

Good science communication molds complex ideas into human-scale stories. It turns a discussion of the cosmos' impossible scale into inflating balloons. Or into Sagan, sitting at his dinner table like a medieval king in corduroy, a steaming apple pie at the ready.

cevans Fri, 05/27/2011 - 04:40

Tags

science communication

World Science Festival

WSF

My name is LI Daguang. I am a professor of science communication at the Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. I am the translator of " the Demon Haunted World"by Carl Sagan. I would like to keep in touch with you to talk about science communication and others.

Science Poem Manifesto

cevans — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:21:50 +0000

Science Poem Manifesto

Earlier this year, I received a charming email from a pair of Helsinki-based artists and designers who work under the name of OK DO. OK DO is a socially-minded design think tank and online publication; they dug Universe and wanted to know if I'd contribute to a new publication and exhibition project they were working on. The project, Science Poems, was perfectly up my alley: a variety of articles and work loosely structured around the "poetry and multi-sensorial aesthetics of natural sciences rather than their functionality and logic."

For the occasion, I wrote a short piece about the aesthetics of Science Fiction: The Science Poem Manifesto. Banged out in a lucid forty-five minutes, it was my most effortless piece of writing in recent memory, presumably because the themes had been banging around in my head, unexpressed, for a decade.

As Stanislaw Lem wrote, science fiction "comes from a whorehouse but...wants to break into the palace where the most sublime thoughts of human history are stored." Within the shadowy, grimacing frame of its own poetics, it does. Because the sublime thoughts of human history have always been projected outwards, to the vastness outside of our minds. Science fiction is a movement outwards, not inwards: "up, up, and away."

Science fiction knows, like the science poets do, that the sky begins at our feet.

The science poets look at our sky and they see three moons, or a ringed planet in sultry sunset; they hear a voice whispering across the void, hear the malice in its tone, but still find how to forgive it. Science poets see a tentacle and know its embrace. Science fiction is the grief of tomorrow and the horror of today. Science poetry makes no illusions.

The finished Science Poems book is an honest-to-goodness marvel, marrying interviews with chemists, astronomers, curators, and fashion designers with short fiction, photography, and aesthetic references to everything from John Cage to electromagnetism. It features discussions with Marc-Olivier Wahler, curator of Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Cosmic Wonder, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, and Paola Antonelli, senior curator of Art and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. I am proud to have been involved.

Read the entire Science Poem Manifesto here.

As far as I know, the Science Poems book itself is only available for sale online via Napa Books in Helsinki. If you live in Europe, a list of available booksellers can be found here. Also, a lot of the content -- all exceptional -- is available for free online. Lastly, as note to our continental readership: OK DO will be having a book party for Science Poems next Thursday, August 5th at Berlin's Do You Read Me?! bookshop.

[Reposted from SPACE CANON]

cevans Thu, 07/29/2010 - 14:21

Tags

Science Poem Manifesto

Science Poems

Two Cultures

design

Hi Claire,
I just came across your Science Poem Manifesto at OK DO and loved it!
It captures so much of science fiction that is often ignored (and all of science fiction as it should be). Beautifully written, too. Thanks.

Thanks, Kerstin!

awesome!

ENTROPIC HOPE
-- James Ph. Kotsybar

Dr. Smart, with sweeping dioramics,
summarized theory accepted today:
âThe first few laws of thermodynamics:
You canât win, break even or get away.

âNo matter speed of acceleration,
the universe runs down since the Big Bang.
The fate of order is dissipation.
The spring, once sprung, canât be re-sprung. It sprang.

âA system needs energy to survive
or itâs unable to do work, of course.
On galactic scales or like us, alive,
complexity is the result of force.

âAnd though the second law says we canât win,
itâs only âlawâ to a statistician.â

SUPERLUMINELLE
-- James Ph. Kotsybar

The Universe is expanding,
Faster than the limit of light,
Beyond common understanding.

Cosmology is demanding.
Its study is by no means slight.
The Universe is expanding.

Physicsâ heroes, quite outstanding,
Have applied their full mental might
Beyond common understanding.

Thereâs no point in reprimanding,
As we gaze out into the night,
The Universe is expanding.

The truth of fact is commanding.
Whatever is has to be right,
Beyond common understanding.

Einsteinâs physics notwithstanding,
Much quicker than what we call bright,
The Universe is expanding
Beyond common understanding.

VISIONARY
-- James Ph. Kotsybar

He looked into the lens-system and saw
an unimaginably small world grow.
Now does this image in history draw
from van Leeuwenhoek or Galileo?
Through lenses both passed to another realm
of being, since their broadened reference frame
allowed them visions that could overwhelm.
Then for everyone nothing stayed the same.
The vaster oneâs view the clearer things get,
of cosmic, subatomic, even time,
and, while the masses may first be upset,
brought to some summit that they didnât climb,
itâs crucial so all the ingenious might
be informed of the remarkable sight.

OBSERVING OBSERVERS
-- James Ph. Kotsybar

Per perceiving predilections effect,
researchers search precautions to assure
that their constructed theories wonât be wrecked
by accredited critics who abjure
results from lax experimentation
which funnels too few affecting factors.
Scientistâs psyches lack isolation --
all audiences are also actors.
Objectivity varies with the minds
involved whose realities rarely budge;
what one expects to see is what one finds.
One must watch âblindâ to impartially judge --
so dataâs distinct from observations
which bind to beliefâs anticipations.

Dear Claire,
I've got enough to manifest a book myself, but I'll leave you this one more to fill you with the Holiday Spirit.
-- Jim

QUANTUM MELODY
-- James Ph. Kotsybar

Below subatomic, the particles
slip through Heisenbergâs uncertainty nets.
They cannot even be called articles;
theyâre just mathematical epithets.
Though we may say they have up or down spins
(we may even find them charming or strange),
like angels that dance on the heads of pins,
it takes metaphysics to find their range.
They have no shape we can define, except
as bleary fields of energy. Until
we measure them, thereâs no place where theyâre kept;
their locus is totally vibratile.
They pluck at space like an instrument string,
at this scale. Quark! The hadron angels sing!

Meeting an Astronaut

cevans — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Meeting an Astronaut

Last week, fresh off the fourth-to-last Shuttle mission, STS-131, NASA astronaut Jim Dutton came to speak at OMSI, my local science museum. When I got the email about this event, I RSVPed immediately -- after all, an astronaut in my town? How urbane. Surely the intelligentsia of Oregon would come in droves to discuss the boggling phenomenological experience of spaceflight and the uncertain future of NASA with one of our nation's "right stuff." As usual, I was wrong; the only adult in the museum unaccompanied by a least one small child, I felt somehow like a pervert, as though the harried parents in the diaper-smelling conference room thought me maladjusted for harboring an adult interest in space. A tiny blond boy, boogers cresting the threshold of his button nose, repeatedly poked my friend in the arm. I waited in line to meet NASA astronaut Jim Dutton between gaggles of grade-schoolers, all rendered desperately antsy by the fluorescent overhead lighting. Do I regret this embarrassment?

No way. First of all, the above image is now in my possession, one more piece of Universe ephemera for the archives. Second of all, Dutton was an excellent speaker: with the clipped, professional vocabulary of an ex-military man and the warmth of a young dad, he narrated a video of his mission, explaining its objectives (to install a Multi-Purpose Logistics Module nicknamed "Leonardo" on the International Space Station) and dropping conceptual aesthetic bombs about things like the smell of space (a "metallic odor, almost like something burnt") and the beautiful pink and yellow glow of the plasma as it lights up around the Shuttle in re-entry. Basically, Dutton divulged all manner of the kinds of sincere insidery things I love learning about being an astronaut. He spoke with fondness about spending hours in the International Space Station's new cupola module, gazing down at the Earth, and made a point of saying that while space itself is impressive, it just doesn't hold a candle to the view of our planet. He confided that the interior of the famous Astrovan used to ferry astronauts from the Operations and Checkout Building to the launch pad is "not very exciting," adding that he was "a little disappointed." He said he felt enormously pleased to stick the STS-131 mission sticker on a wall of the Space Station before heading back down to Earth, a little ritual not many people know about. He also showed footage of the first ever sushi dinner in space, with his crewmates Japanese JAXA astronauts Naoko Yamazaki and Soichi Noguchi preparing handrolls for the Space Station crew, as well as some insane videos of Naoko doing a Japanese fan dance in zero-gravity, playing a miniature koto in full kimono, and tossing bits of dried ume plum into floating water droplets, images which I will herewith seek desperately to find.

Above all, Dutton seemed genuinely hopeful about NASA's future, despite the fact that his first shuttle mission was also his last; when asked about a post-Shuttle world, he explained to the kids and adults alike that many commercial firms are now building vehicles to replace the old bird, and that "exciting, real progress" is being made. "We're all waiting anxiously to find out" what happens, he said. Maybe this was PR, but it was nice to hear -- just as it was nice to hear an astronaut, with sincerity, repeatedly emphasize that while the Space Shuttle was special, the International Space Station, "as a nation, and as a world, is something to be very proud of." Ad astra indeed!

Below, Dutton answers a fourth-grader's question about "how come you don't burn up in the atmosphere when you come back to Earth?" Charming.

cevans Thu, 06/17/2010 - 21:00

Tags

What a lovely story, a really genuinely nice space hero, and very polite Portland kid at the end. Cutest video I have seen in a long time. Thank You!

Very cool, I've had that same sort of experience with different elements of an interest in science. Meaning, I'd think everybody and their brother(sister?)would be interested. Only to find out most folks were alot like the old joke: "You're suggesting I'm ignorant and apathetic? WELL, as to science I just don't know and I don't really care!" The nice part about being interested in current space exploration is that it combines applied knowledge with an adventure. Sadly, to many people it simply has all been done before. I'm glad you had a good time. Personally, keeping the attitude of a child, and always being interested in learning has always seemed to me to be a good way to stay young for a really long time. Just remember, that doesn't mean you keep eating the same sand you did when you were four...or making mud pies for that matter...

good-----morning---------astronauts-----nasa----team------------------from----name-------montra-----trimek-----pig-----thailand--------------thankyou

send---name------montra---trimek----pig----thailand---------go---to---spacestation--------

It's very sad that this kind of event wasn't more attended by an older audience. Very sad that superheroes of science end up just being childhood entertainers...

Send Your Face to Space

cevans — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 11:29:51 +0000

Send Your Face to Space

If it has always been your fantasy to send your physical likeness out into the cosmos, now is your time! To commemorate the final two Shuttle missions, NASA has created a bonkers "Face in Space" initiative, which allows you to upload a picture of yourself to send to the International Space Station. What this actually entails, I imagine, is a burned data DVD in an astronaut's backpack -- nominal space travel if I've ever heard of it.

It's fun, and my face is already destined to launch on September 16th on STS-133; but, seriously, what is this about? Rousing public interest in the space program has been an upward battle in the post-Apollo era; admittedly, it's hard to justify billions of tax dollars towards the ineffable and uncertain goals of space exploration. This isn't the first time NASA has sent messages from Earth into space: to mention just a few, the Phoenix lander brought personal messages to the North Pole of Mars, Cassini sent some 616,400 signatures to Saturn, and the Shuttles have ferried 5.6 million schoolkids' signatures back and forth over the years. And, while the signatures always seemed strangely formal to me, this face thing...is the public so disinterested at this point that the only way to engender its interest is to offer to send peoples' faces out there? The implied assumption here is that people will care about the last two Shuttle missions if they're personally invested in them in some fundamentally narcissistic way: "you know, this program has been a bust up until now, but wait till you see how my face changes things!" Or, "the aliens haven't made contact with us yet because they didn't know how good looking we all are!" By exploiting our colonial, self-important, human-chauvinistic impulses in the name of PR, isn't NASA encouraging the exact wrong reasons to be interested in space?

What do I know? I'm guilty too; I practically scrambled to my laptop when I heard the call. Vain space enthusiasts, upload your face here, and after launch day, you can print out a "flight certificate" signed by the mission commander.

cevans Thu, 06/10/2010 - 07:29

Tags

interesting idea :) i want send my face to aliens :)

Hi, space fans! I am a lone woman aerospace engineer that worked on the first stage of the Saturn V. There is another but can't find her. We were the ONLY ones.

Sara Howard, Author of âSomething Funny Happened on the Way to the Moonâ and âThe Greatest Explosions in the Universe.â
available on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com

It's not a casual Saturday morning when you fill up a form to send your face in to the space, and also get the whole date and mission details... now wheres my fresh pot -_-

good-----morning-----------i----name------montra---trimek----pig------thailand-----------i----want--------send----name------go---to-----spacestation---------and----citizen-------world------------thankyou-----nasa------

we----love-------spacestation-------and-------galaxy--------------from---name----montra---trimek----pig----thailand-------------good--luck----------good---bye----

Terrifying Science News Roundup

cevans — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 08:27:18 +0000

Terrifying Science News Roundup

A large part of my affection for science comes from the thrill of terror I get when a particularly insane piece of science news hits the presses. When an article begins with a sentence like, "there is something strange in the cosmic neighborhood," or "all the black holes found so far in our universe may be doorways into alternate realities," my pulse quickens and a dormant paranoia is roused from deep within my breast: a sensation of joyful panic. I used to call this the "fourth-grade nightmare fantasy." This might be because as a long-time science fiction adept, I tend to read science news stories like they're the premise for a tale of intergalactic war, or the first inkling of a technological dystopia we can't yet see coming.

The last few weeks of science news, in this regard, does not disappoint. Conspiracy theorists, avert your eyes!

1. Mysterious Radio Waves Emitted from Nearby Galaxy

Highlight of Horror:

It seem[s] to be moving - and fast: its apparent sideways velocity is four times the speed of light. Such apparent "superluminal" motion has been seen before in high-speed jets of material squirted out by some black holes. The stuff in these jets is moving towards us at a slight angle and travelling at a fair fraction of the speed of light, and the effects of relativity produce a kind of optical illusion that makes the motion appear superluminal.

I think my fellow SciBling Greg Laden said it best: "I, for one, welcome our Overlords from Galaxy M82."

2. Every Black Hole Contains Another Universe?

Highlight of Horror:

According to the new equations, the matter black holes absorb and seemingly destroy is actually expelled and becomes the building blocks for galaxies, stars, and planets in another reality.

This is really a science fiction story waiting to be written; even the physicist who came up with the theory is quoted as saying "It's kind of a crazy idea, but who knows?" One baffling theoretical implication of this Black Hole-as-Wormhole theory is the potential that gamma ray bursts are actually just discharges of matter from alternate universes, spewing material into our universe through supermassive black holes (wormholes) in distant galaxies. Speaking of gamma ray bursts....

3. Gamma-Ray Burst Caused Mass Extinction?

Highlight of Horror:

A brilliant burst of gamma rays may have caused a mass extinction event on Earth 440 million years ago--and a similar celestial catastrophe could happen again, according to a new study. Such a disaster may have been responsible for the mass die-off of 70 percent of the marine creatures that thrived during the Ordovician period (488 to 443 million years ago), suggests study leader Brian Thomas, an astrophysicist at Washburn University in Kansas.

The simulation also shows that a significant gamma-ray burst is likely to go off within range of Earth every billion years or so, although the stream of radiation would have to be lined up just right to affect the planet.

Great. Like I'm not already paranoid enough about the "Big One."

4. Why NASA is Sending a Robot Into Space That Looks Like You

"I'm a very strong believer in human-robotic interaction. You can build up a synergy to accomplish what neither humans nor robots could accomplish on their own," Hoffman said. "That's the inspiration behind Robonaut."

Synergy! Why do these robots have to look like people? And why do they have to be holding what look like laser guns in the above picture? Imagine being an astronaut, trying to sleep in your little suspended cubby in the cramped quarters of the International Space Station, peering over the edge of your sleeping bag at a dormant humanoid robot, with its blinking lights and quiet machine hum. Oh God, did it just move?

cevans Thu, 04/15/2010 - 04:27

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#3 reminds me of this series written by Arthur C. Clarke called A Time Odyssey where the "Firstborn" attempt to bring about the extinction of humans by creating an intense solar flare (different than a burst of gamma rays, but similar). The firstborn's motives are to slow the Universe's death by optimizing the usage of available energy.

Great stuff. You can also use emerging technology to demonstrate that at some point people are the same, or that technology has made us lazy. For instance, a story in which at some point engineers and scientists develop working androids, but the humans around them lose their ability to do basic math because of an over reliance on the technological wonder...or lose their will to actually go to distant planets/galaxies opting instead to send robots and drones...

Why go to space for Terrifying Science News when the planet is being shut down by the EyjafjallajÃ¶kull volcanic eruption in Iceland ?

Space always provides!