Cosmos
gregladen | April 23, 2008Despite the fact that the producers of Expelled! have the most nefarious of motives in mind, and that we can expect more from them (we are waiting for the other shoe to drop), it is interesting to note how many conversations this documentary about Intelligent Design Creationism has sparked. Ultimately, the intended purpose of Expelled! is to silence real scientists and set back scientific research that is on the verge of filling one of the most important "gaps" in which the Christian God of the theistic evolutionist currently lives. In the long run, conversations that arise from movies like…
gregladen | April 18, 2008Good question ... what IS in the air?
The simple answer is that the air ... the Earth's atmosphere ... is about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, with a tiny amount of some other gases including water vapor. Then, there's dirt. I want to talk a little about the oxygen, one of the other gases (carbon dioxide to be exact), the water vapor, and the dirt.
Oxygen
The oxygen is one of the most important parts to us because we (and all the other animals) need it to breath. To me, what is most interesting about the oxygen is that in the old days ... before any animals or plants evolved but life…
gregladen | April 18, 2008When I was a fairly precocious young man I became thoroughly impressed with the futility of the hopes and strivings that chase most men restlessly through life. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is the case today. By the mere existence of his stomach everyone was condemned to participate in that chase. The stomach might well be satisfied by such participation, but not man insofar as he is a thinking and feeling being.
As the first way out there was religion, which is implanted…
gregladen | April 16, 2008Several thousand intelligent beings have surrounded two funny looking blue trees. On some planet. Elsewhere. [Image source] Back in the old days, when Carl Sagan was alive and at Harvard, there was an annual (or at least frequent) debate between Sagan and my adviser, Irv DeVore. The debate was about the possibility of intelligent life having evolved on other planets.
You already know Sagan's argument: There are billions and billions of Galaxies, each with billions and billions of stars, so there are billions and billions and billions and billions of stars. Even if the probability of…
gregladen | April 16, 2008There are so many lessons in this story it is hard to know where to start. First, don't throw away data. Second, scientists do question their own dogma and in fact get rather excited about it. Third, Click and Clack (Car Talk) glossed their answer to a question the other day (sort of) ... it turns out that running the heater in your convertible does affect the entire planet. A little.
Pioneer 10 and 11 left the the main part of our solar system a long time ago. As they headed on their journey to other worlds, they seemed to slow down in comparison to predictions of their actual rate of…
gregladen | April 15, 2008QUEST visits the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, where scientists will soon aim the world's largest laser at a target the size of a pencil eraser. The goal? Nuclear fusion -- and, they say, the answer to the world's clean energy needs.
gregladen | April 15, 2008John Wheeler may have been one of the few living individuals who actually worked with Einstein, until his death at the age of 96 two days ago. He is famous for his work on the Unified Field Theory (which did not come to fruition), the Harrison-Wheeler equation which has to do with high-density nuclear matter inside of very dense (neutron) stars, and for coining the term "black hole."
Well, he did not really coin the term. It is said that he was giving a talk on the phenomenon, and during the talk a student called out "black hole" as a suggested name for the phenomenon, and it stuck.
The…
gregladen | April 13, 2008
The Open Source content management system PLONE runs the newly released NASA Science web site.
The site has something for everyone (researchers, educators, kids, and "citizen scientists"). The Plone seems to be working quite nicely.
Some of it is still a little rough. The Space Calendar link seems to be broken, and the email to the "responsible government official" for the site (who, by the way, is Greg Williams) gets you an email to "noone@nasa.gov" ...
There appears to be a number of distinctly different ways to navigate on this site, including a main in-your-face graphical…
gregladen | April 13, 2008Filmmaker David Hoffman shares footage from his feature-length documentary Sputnik Mania, which shows how the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957 led to both the space race and the arms race -- and jump-started science and math education around the world.
gregladen | April 12, 2008Simon LeVay, who is the guy who first identified the relationship between sexualy dimorphic hypothalamic nuclei in mammals (in the medial preoptic or anterior areas) and homosexuality in human males, has come out with a new book ... When Science Goes Wrong.
LeVay's book looks interesting, at least according to the Publisheres Weekly Overview on the Amazon site (see link above):
Experimental brain surgery goes horribly awry; a dam fails catastrophically; a geologist leads an ill-equipped party to its doom in the mouth of an active volcano: these are the amazing and sometimes horrific stories…
gregladen | April 11, 2008
It is said that scientists involved in the Manhattan Project to engineer and implement the first nuclear bombs seriously considered the possibility that such a bomb could initiate a chain reaction that would destroy the Earth. Now it is being claimed that the production of miniature black holes by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland could do the same. The LHC is scheduled to go on line in June.
This thought occurred to me the first time I heard that the LHC might be able to produce tiny black holes.
Apparently someone else had the same thought. Walter Wagner and Luis…
gregladen | April 8, 2008Planets are formed when a disk of dust orbiting a newly minted star condenses into blobs. The beginning and end of this process has been observed, but the intermediate steps have only been modeled. However, a team of astronomers now reports observations of this process in the intermediate stages. The conditions under which this observation is made are unusual, which is apparently the reason that the observation was possible.
Dust-sized material can be detected around distant stars because it gets warmed up by the star's light and emits infrared light,...Large planets ... have enough…
gregladen | April 7, 2008
Astronomers have discovered a planetary system orbiting a distant star which looks much like our own.
They found two planets that were close matches for Jupiter and Saturn orbiting a star about half the size of our Sun.
Martin Dominik, from St Andrews University in the UK, said the finding suggested systems like our own could be much more common than we thought.
story here
gregladen | April 7, 2008In keeping with the theme of TED2008, professor Stephen Hawking asks some Big Questions about our universe -- How did the universe begin? How did life begin? Are we alone? -- and discusses how we might go about answering them.
Stephen Hawking's scientific investigations have shed light on the origins of the cosmos, the nature of time and the ultimate fate of universe. His bestselling books for a general audience have given an appreciation of physics to millions.
gregladen | April 7, 2008I have a theory that cinema and other forms of fiction often arise not from pure creativity, but from prescience. It is not the case, when this happens, that "life imitates art" but rather, that art predicts life. It is only a matter of figuring out which so-called 'creative' manifestations are predictive of reality in order to understand the deep secrets of nature.
After much analysis, the details of which I shall provide later, I have been able to determine that The Force ... yes, I'm talking about The Force as in Star Wars, is real, and is the determining element for evolution and for…
gregladen | April 1, 2008
This image shows a large outcrop of layered rock in Aureum Chaos, an area that has apparently collapsed, leaving a region of irregular knobs and hills. Unlike many of the knobs, the light outcrop shows distinct, nearly horizontal layers. This may indicate that it was deposited after the collapse of the Chaos.
... this is what my back hard looks like right about now.... Click the photo for more info.
gregladen | April 1, 2008
This is kinda like what my front yard looks like right now. Click the picture to see and learn more.
gregladen | March 31, 2008Jennifer Gooch's mission was to create a simple Web site where people could go to find their lost gloves. Even if no happy reunions ever took place, she was just content to spread a little goodwill.
But just a month since http://www.onecoldhand.com went live, the Carnegie Mellon University art student is busier than ever. She's reunited four gloves with their owners, is working on similar sites for cities around the globe, and is planning a book to showcase her found gloves.
Four. Wow, that is impressive, I would have thought zero.
Why do I think that? No, not because I think the dog…
gregladen | March 27, 2008
NASA astronomers were blown away last week by what was far and away the strongest gamma-ray burst (GRB) ever observed. GRB 080319B, shown here in x-ray [left] and optical/ultraviolet [right] views captured by the Swift satellite, burned so brightly that its afterglow was briefly visible to the naked eye from its origin 7.5 billion light-years (or half a universe) away. If placed side-by-side with the brightest supernova ever seen, the burst would still outshine it by a factor of 2.5 million, researchers calculated. GRBs typically occur when the explosion of a dying star gets channeled into…
gregladen | March 26, 2008A new NOVA is on the way. "Voyage to the Mystery Moon" is about Titan and the planet it goes around, Saturn.
Chronicling a bold voyage of discovery--the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn and its enigmatic moon Titan--"Voyage to the Mystery Moon" delivers striking images of these fascinating planetary bodies nearly a billion miles from Earth. Saturn's broad rings hold myriad mysteries, and Titan, whose soupy atmosphere is similar to the one that enshrouded our planet billions of years ago, may hold clues to the origins of life. In hopes of answering some long-standing astrophysical…