ATTENTION folks, there is currently an astronaut posting to Tumblr from space. I repeat, there is a human being, that is currently in freakin’ SPACE, posting pictures (from said SPACE) to their Tumblr blog.
There are things, called words, that are failing me, about the other things, that I am feeling.
Expedition 35 Commander Chris Hadfield: You sir, are cooler than a polar bear’s toenails.
(He’s also on Twitter)
After the Pluto’s demotion from planet-status, astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson received hate mail from thousands of elementary school children. Images via PBS
Well kids, I guess you can add me to the Pluto-hatin’ club. I’ve got your back Dr. Tyson!
If Pluto landed on Earth, it would only stretch from California to Kansas. It’s smaller than our own Moon and half ice. It orbits more like a comet than a planet. It has more in common with the members of the icy and distant Kuiper belt than the larger planets. In fact, it could take the cake as Kuiper king, Emperor of dwarf planets. Don’t hate me, folks. Science is an ever-evolving tapestry, and that tapestry has 8 planets :)
Twinkle- Geminids
Kyle Hill, who writes the blog Science-Based Life, offers some thoughts on the deeply spiritual experience of staring up on a cold night, craning for the sight of a fleeting fireball. Except for Kyle, like many out there, that spiritual experience is not connected to a religion, or to God.
For the many people out there who struggle to reconcile purpose and meaning while not believing in religion, it can be a lonely, and frustrating to express these awesome experiences to others, and even to yourself. Consider this:
The common screed against the godless is that awe leaves us without a divine component, profound feelings are possible, but serve no purpose, as there is none. This is what they say. But anyone, anyone who looks up at the sky and contemplates but for a moment our place in the cosmos sees right through this fallacy. To attempt to grasp the universe in your mind’s eye is fundamentally awe-inspiring, and tonight’s meteor shower was a perfect vehicle to deliver such beauty into my night. No myths need spinning, no covenants need signing. The simplest way to unfettered wonder is, as Neil deGrasse Tyson puts it, to keep looking up.
It is not my place, nor the place of others, I think, to demand that any individual to accept or reject belief in higher spiritual powers, and where I come from personally is not important. But when one is armed with the power to grasp the true nature of the universe using observation and curiosity, the spiritual experience of knowing can be deeply satisfying.
And that view of the world, seen in day or at night, should be welcomed by all.
A little laugh to start your day.
North Korea launched an unknown object into orbit on Tuesday, according to the regime and confirmed by the U.S. military. They say it’s a weather satellite, but this GIF says otherwise. In all honesty, I believe that it’s a weather satellite as much as I believe Joan Rivers’ nose is real. It’s probably a test of a ballistic missile system, which appears to have mostly worked. Besides, isn’t the weather in North Korea whatever they say it is? And isn’t the rest of the world in a perpetual capitalist drought/hurricane?
Regardless of what the orbiting object is, friend or foe, the bad news is that it’s currently tumbling out of control, in an irregular and Kim-Jong-Unstable orbit. It could collide with another satellite, destroying it and creating a massive space debris cloud that could add to an already dangerous and garbage-laden near-Earth. Or worse, it could fall back to Earth, dropping upon an unsuspecting region of the Earth, you know, whatever weather-related cargo it’s carrying.
Space sleeve by Dan Henk
Pretty much the most intense shoulder ever.
Pretty much out of this world.
This takes the science ink cake, folks. Speaking of Science Ink, Carl Zimmer has a whole book about that.
Can I marry this person?
The first “Alien” movie was promoted with the celebrated tagline, “In space, no one can hear you scream.” But a group of students want to find out if this is really true, and they’re asking the public for help. Students from the University of Cambridge in the UK will be loading human screams onto a smartphone that will be launched into space in December 2012 on a nanosatellite. The screams will be played at maximum volume while the smartphone is in low Earth orbit, and at the same time as the phone will record the playback to test if it’s possible to capture the sound of screaming in space. They want the best screams possible, and so are inviting the public to submit their screams via video. There will also be public voting on the screams to determine which screams will go to space.
You know you’ve always wanted to do this…..
“Obviously, we’re not expecting to get much back, there may be some buzzing, but this is more about getting young people interested in satellites and acoustics, perhaps encouraging them to consider future study in science or engineering” said Edward Cunningham, a physics undergraduate at Churchill College and one of the members of the Cambridge University Space Flight group (CUSF).What is actually being tested is verifying the capabilities of a smartphone to control a satellite in space. UK space company Surrey Satellite Technology and their STRaND (Surrey Training Research and Nanosatellite Demonstration) team ran a Facebook competition to find apps to go into orbit – and CUSF’s screaming app was one of the winners. STRaND-1 project is touted as the “World’s first SmartPhone Nanosatellite.”
The phone will run on Android’s open-source operating system, and a computer, built at the Surrey Space Centre, will test the vital statistics of the phone once in space. When all the tests are complete, the plan is to switch off the micro-computer and the smartphone will be used to operate parts of the satellite. At its lowest, the phone will orbit 400km above the Earth, roughly the same as the International Space Station.“Modern smartphones are pretty amazing,” said Shaun Kenyon, the project manager at Surrey Satellite Technology. “We want to see if the phone works up there, and if it does, we want to see if the phone can control a satellite.”
To submit your scream, create a YouTube video and send it in at www.screaminspace.com.
Each video must be at most ten seconds long, and there will be ten winning screams which can be voted for by the public on the project’s website. Screams must be entered before midnight (UTC) on Sunday November 4, 2012. The winning videos will be announced later and loaded onto the phone for launch, which is scheduled before the end of this year.Other winners in the STRaND-1 project were iTesa, which will record the magnitude of the magnetic field around the phone during orbit, a STRAND Data app will show satellite telemetry on the smartphone’s display which can be imaged by an additional camera on-board, and Postcards from Space and 360, a joint effort with an app that will take images using the smartphone’s camera and use the technology onboard the spacecraft to establish STRaND-1′s position.
Earth-like Planet detected in our Neighbourhood
Alpha Centauri system is made up of three stars: a red dwarf named Proxima, and two stars very much like our own sun, imaginatively named Alpha Centauri A and B. It’s already famed in sci-fi, but just recently astronomers have discovered something that will make any space-lover swoon: a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B. This exoplanet is 1.13 times the mass of Earth, but that’s where the similarities end: while Earth orbits at a distance of 150 million kilometres from its sun, “Alpha Centauri Bb” orbits in a scorching hot zone just six million kilometres from its star—its surface could even be covered with molten rock. The planet is definitely not in the Goldilock’s Zone, so it does not contain liquid water and therefore is unlikely to harbour life as we know it. Still, it’s an amazing discovery for several reasons. The method with which the planet was detected is groundbreaking: planets don’t orbit a stationary star, but in fact the planet and star orbit a common centre of gravity, which means the star moves in miniscule amounts. Alpha Centauri B constantly wobbles as the planet orbits around it and exerts a gravitational tug, but this wobble is tiny—no more than 1.8 k/ph—so for us to detect it is phenomenal. More than 450 observations were made over four years in order to be sure, and the discovery marks the highest precision ever achieved using this method of detection. Even more exciting is the fact that Alpha Centauri Bb it’s the closest known exoplanet to Earth, at only 4.3 lightyears away. In cosmic terms, that’s just next door. Statistically, low-mass planets are formed in multi-planetary systems, so its mere existence suggests that Alpha Centauri holds even more undiscovered planets—and perhaps some formed in habitable zones.
Like A Falling Apple
Formulated in 1687, Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation was a turning point in physic. While the legend of the apple falling on his head is an exaggeration of the truth, Newton did have a brilliant insight: that every object in the universe attracts every other object. The force of attraction between two objects depends on only two things: the mass of the objects, and the distance between them. So, more massive objects exert a stronger force, while more distant objects exert a weaker force. Newton was able to formulate a simple equation to describe this, pictured above: force is equal to Newton’s gravitational constant, multiplied by masses of the objects, then divided by the square of the distance between the objects. What’s remarkable is that the law truly is universal—not only can it predict how things move here on Earth, but it can also the movements of the moon, planets, stars and even galaxies millions of lightyears away. Newton believed that the movement of every object in our universe could be predicted, but we know now that while his theory generally holds true, it is not precise. Einstein’s theory of general relativity had to step in to fill the holes.
(Image Credit: The Wonders Collection)
Foucault Pendulum
Last year when scientists mounted a pendulum above the South Pole and watched it swing, they were replicating a celebrated demonstration performed in Paris in 1851. Using a steel wire 220 feet long, the French scientist Jean-Bernard-Léon Foucault suspended a 62-pound iron ball from the dome of the Panthéon and set it in motion, rocking back and forth. To mark its progress he attached a stylus to the ball and placed a ring of damp sand on the floor below.
The audience watched in awe as the pendulum inexplicably appeared to rotate, leaving a slightly different trace with each swing. Actually it was the floor of the Panthéon that was slowly moving, and Foucault had shown, more convincingly than ever, that the earth revolves on its axis. At the latitude of Paris, the pendulum’s path would complete a full clockwise rotation every 30 hours; on the Southern Hemisphere it would rotate counterclockwise, and on the Equator it wouldn’t revolve at all. At the South Pole, as the modern-day scientists confirmed, the period of rotation is 24 hours.
Bog Bodies
For centuries, the peat-cutting of bogs in northwestern Europe has turned up strangely preserved human remains, but it wasn’t until the 19th century that we realised these bodies actually date back to ancient times. Most date back to the Iron Age, around 800 BC to 200 AD, but some are from as recent as 1000 AD—and despite their age, the bodies retain their skin, internal organs, and even their clothes. This natural mummification is a result of the highly acidic chemistry of peat bogs, creating remarkable conditions for preservation. The acidic, low-temperature, oxygen-poor environment effectively immobilises bacteria activity and hinders decomposition—the pH level of the water is similar to vinegar, so it almost pickles the bodies. The process of preservation has been described as “slow-cooking”, as it severely tans the bodies to dark brown. However, when they’re exposed to normal atmosphere, they rapidly begin to decompose—many specimens have been lost this way. Some of these bodies may have ended up in the bogs by unluckily losing their way and falling in, but most show signs of trauma and torture, supporting the idea that they were execution victims or ritual human sacrifices who suffered violent deaths.
(Image Credit: Robert Clark)
I’ve seen these before and they’re awesome. There’s a ton in Ireland.
