The Christmas Day airplane bombing attempt has renewed the debate over full body scanners at airports. The Transportation Security Administration in recent years has tried out a series of “whole-body imagers” to look for threats that typical metal detectors can’t find. These systems are the only way that smuggled explosives, like the one officials say was brought on the Christmas flight, can be reliably found [Wired.com].

Privacy advocates are calling the full body scanners a “digital strip search” (take a look at this TSA image of a full body scan and you’ll get the idea). But some security advocates say that either patting down every passenger or taking full body scans are the only options to ensure certain dangerous items are kept off airplanes.

Right now there are 40 full body scanners in 19 different U.S. airports. Only 6 airports use them for primary screening, the rest are used for follow-up searches. These scanners use millimeter-wave sensors that emit radio frequencies. By measuring the differences in the radiated energy, the scanner produces detailed 3-D images that resembles photo negatives. TSA has also ordered 150 similar scanners, at about $170,000 each, that use backscatter X-ray technology, after the completion of a successful pilot project.

TSA says privacy concerns are unwarranted since facial features (and other body parts?) are blurred out before the screening officer, who is in a separate room, sees the images. A senior U.S. air security source acknowledged the ongoing controversy over using the high-resolution body scanners that can show breast enhancements, body piercings and genitals. Full-body scanners currently in use in the U.S. have been set on a “politically correct” lower resolution that prevented screeners from seeing the outlines of genitals, the source said [New York Daily News]. Supposedly, the images will be permanently deleted immediately after screening.

Last June, the House of Representative voted 310 to 118 to oppose the use of full body scanners as a primary means of screening passengers. This doesn’t mean the issue is dead however, as President Obama has ordered a system-wide review on all screening procedures.

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Image: TSA

A blue moon! See it on New Year's Eve!

Unless you are as unlucky as I am (heh, I know Trudy is in the same boat) you will be treated to a blue moon on New Years eve!  Ok the moon won’t really be blue, but it will be full and also the second full moon in one month and that my friends, is a blue moon.  Gosh it’s been a while since the last one, May of 2007 I think.

The last blue moon on New Years was in 1990 and the next one won’t be until 2028 so while you are ringing in the new year, please take a moment and go outside and look up at the moon.  Hey go out early and take the kids.  It will be a long time before you can do it again and your kids will be adults by then!

Now why am I lamenting my  and as it happens Trudy’s bad luck?  Because even though we are not located all that close together we aren’t so far apart we both will escape the New Years storm heading our way.

After three-plus decades of exploring the gas giants, passing the orbit of Pluto, and reaching points beyond, Voyager 2 has found something interesting near the edge of the solar system: surprisingly magnetic fluff. Researchers document their findings in this week’s Nature.

Of course, this fluff isn’t made from the dust bunnies you find under your bed, the ‘Local Fluff’ (a nickname for the Local Interstellar Cloud) is a vast, wispy cloud of hot hydrogen and helium stretching 30 light-years across [Discovery News]. Astronomers already knew this fluff was out there near the boundary area between our solar system and interstellar space. What surprised them is that the fluff is much more magnetized than they’d expected.

Voyager 2 isn’t actually in the fluff yet, but it can measure the area’s magnetism by observing how its magnetic field deforms the shape of the heliosphere, that balloon of space created by the solar wind pushing outward from our sun. The magnetic field is not only stronger than anticipated—3.7 to 5.5 microgauss—it’s also tilted off the galactic plane of the Milky Way by about 30 degrees, NASA investigator Merav Opher says. “The tilted field probably is a result from turbulence in the interstellar medium outside our solar system or results from collisions of clouds in the solar system neighborhood,” Opher says [USA Today].

Magnetism could answer the question of why the “Local Fluff” continues to exist at all. Though it formed from supernova remnants 10 million years ago, exhaust from other supernovae should have destroyed it by now. It would be like expecting a wisp of cigarette smoke to retain its structure in the middle of a tornado; some kind of force would need to be surrounding (or intertwined through) the smoke helping it resist being dispersed. In the case of the wispy Local Fluff, a magnetic field may be helping [Discovery News].

Next stop for Voyager 2: interstellar space, beyond the influence of the solar wind. By NASA’s calculations, the two voyagers have until about 2025 to keep exploring before their instruments operate no longer.

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Image: NASA