Yes I dropped the ball on this one, not paying enough attention to the goings on of the Planetary Society.  Shame on me because they ROCK!  GO SOLAR SAIL 2!!

The mark of Buzz on the Moon on July 20, 1969. Click for larger. Credit: NASA

There’s Still Time to Sign Buzz’s Birthday Card (click either of the links below)
Join Thousands to wish Apollo 11 Astronaut Buzz Aldrin Happy Birthday!

Buzz Aldrin has walked on the Moon, rapped about the Rocket Experience, and served as a tireless advocate for exploring the high frontier. Next week, the Apollo 11 astronaut turns 80 on January 20, 2010, and well-wishers worldwide can join The Planetary Society in saying Happy Birthday.

“A man and a milestone in the history of human exploration. Thank you, Buzz, for your willpower and determination… Happy Birthday!!”

To honor the man who has contributed so much to space exploration and the world, The Planetary Society is collecting birthday greetings. The Society will present a giant birthday card to Buzz, that conveys the good wishes and thanks of thousands of people, who have been inspired by his achievements and lifetime of space advocacy.
“Many have promised the Moon. You delivered it.”

To date, The Planetary Society has gathered over 6,000 messages from well-wishers in 85 countries. One parent sent a message from his sons, aged 3 and 5, named Armstrong and Aldrin. Others recounted their joy in meeting Buzz at one of his many public appearances through the years.

“Happy Birthday from an 11-year old fan! You signed my book in Pasadena, CA and I will always keep it! You are my hero!”

Many recalled the moment they watched the first humans step foot on another world.

“When I was 8, our teacher allowed us to watch the Apollo 11 moon landing on a B&W TV in the grade school cafeteria. We all clapped and shouted when the lunar module touched down. In 2010, we’re all still clapping and shouting! Happy 80th Birthday!”
But perhaps the most poignant was the simple question from a man in Indonesia:
“When will you go again?”
There is still time for people to send their birthday greetings to Buzz. Messages will be collected until Thursday, January 21, 2010.

Buzz is a hero no doubt about it!  Happy Birthday Buzz!!

The one-man stealth plane of the future is on the horizon–and it’s named after a conspicuously cute bird. NASA scientists will officially unveil their design for a hover-capable, electric-powered aircraft, nicknamed “the Puffin,” on Wednesday at an American Helicopter Society meeting in San Francisco.

On the ground, the Puffin is designed to stand on its tail, which splits into four legs to help serve as landing gear. As it prepares to take off, flaps on the wings would tilt to deflect air from the 2.3-meter-wide propeller rotors upward, keeping the plane on the ground until it was ready to fly and preventing errant gusts from tipping it over. The Puffin would rise, hover and then lean over to fly horizontally, with the pilot lying prone as if in a [hang] glider [Scientific American].

The Puffin stands 12 feet high and has a wingspan of 13.5 feet. In theory it can cruise at 150 miles per hour and sprint at more like 300 miles per hour [Gizmodo]. The craft is electrically propelled and runs on rechargeable lithium phosphate batteries, which would theoretically allow it to soar as high as 30,000 feet before its batteries would begin to run low and it would be forced to descend. But scientists are confident that the Puffin’s range could be increased as batteries improve over the coming years.

The Puffin has the potential to revolutionize the way we transport ourselves from place to place. With its small engines, light weight, and battery power, it could provide a way for us to take to the skies as the streets get more clogged with cars. And this electric aircraft also has military applications. The Puffin is 10 times quieter than current low-noise helicopters, making it suitable for covert military operations. The electric motors are not just quiet and efficient, they also generate less heat–making them less likely to show up on thermal sensors and also requiring significantly less cooling air flowing over them. This reduced aerodynamic drag gives the Puffin a speed boost that aircraft with internal combustion engines don’t get.

Researchers plan on finishing a one third-size, hover-capable Puffin demonstrator by March. But Brien Seeley, president of an independent flight test agency that hosts the annual Electric Aircraft Symposium, says the designers still have work to do. Said Seeley: “In my opinion, a mass-marketable version will need conventional seating, cup holders and a short runway for glide-in, view-ahead landings—but opening up people’s imagination is the first essential step” [Scientific American].

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Video: NASA

Manoj Nair of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has devised a new possible method of detecting a deadly tsuami long before the wave crests to dangerous heights. And, in a bit of good news, much of it is already in place.

In a new study in next month’s Earth, Planets, and Space, Nair modeled the massive 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean and found that a tsunami picking up steam as it moves across the ocean emits a tiny electromagnetic signature of of about 500 millivolts. That’s enough to have an effect on the communication cables that stretch across the ocean floor, carrying internet messages and phone calls. The electromagnetic signal “is very small compared to a 9-volt battery, but still large enough to be distinguished from background noise on a magnetically quiet day,” said Nair [Daily Camera].

Nair says this kind of system could be a lower-cost alternative to the bottom pressure arrays that directly measure large movements of water. “What we argue is that this is such a simple system to set up and start measuring,” Nair says. “We have a system of submarine cables already existing. The only thing we probably need is a voltmeter, in theory” [Wired.com].

Oleg Godin, one of Nair’s research partners, said any small improvement could make a huge difference. “If you detect tsunamis in the deep ocean — and that’s what we’re working on — meaning far from shore, you have hours, certainly tens of minutes, to warn people,” he said. “If people are well educated, a 15-minute warning is enough to save everybody” [Daily Camera].

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Image: flickr / epugachev

As you may know, Haiti got hit with a magnitude 6+ aftershock today, so the bad news there continues. If you want to give money to help, here are some good charities:

Non-believers Giving Aid

Doctors Without Borders

International Red Cross

International Medical Corps

I’m sure there are many more, but these are good places to give your money. We’ve seen a lot of truly awful groups using tragedies to do useless things, so please make sure the money you send goes directly to help the Haitians by assisting them with medical supplies and doctors.

When your kid isn’t in class, he/she is probably listening to an iPod, flipping TV channels, or switching between tabs on their computer, which means they may be juggling between Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube–in other words, kids today are staying hyperconnected and wired through their waking hours. That reality is confirmed by a new study done by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which reveals that if your kids are awake, they’re probably online [The New York Times].

In the third of a series of large-scale national surveys, the Kaiser Foundation study found that kids between the ages of 8-18 years now spend an average of 7 hours, 38 minutes per day using entertainment media. That adds up to more than 53 hours of entertainment consumption in a week. And this does not include the time kids spending texting or talking on their cell phones.

Unsurprisingly, the report says that all this media consumption could be a factor in kids getting lower grades or having behavioral problems. The report notes: “About half (47 percent) of heavy media users say they usually get fair or poor grades (mostly Cs or lower), compared to about a quarter (23 percent) of light users.” Heavy users are the children and teens who devour more than 16 hours of media per day, while light users are those who take in less than 3 hours per day.

The study [also] found that young people’s media consumption grew far more in the last five years than from 1999 to 2004, as sophisticated mobile technology like iPods and smart phones brought media access into teenagers’ pockets and beds [The New York Times]. Blacks and Hispanics, said the study, were the highest consumers of media. When it comes to TV watching, black children spend nearly 6 hours, Hispanics just under 5 1/2 hours, and white youths 3 1/2 hours watching TV each day. According to the report: “The racial disparity in media use has grown substantially over the past five years: for example, the gap between White and Black youth was just over two hours (2:12) in 2004, and has grown to more than four hours today (4:23).”

The report lists the top online activities as social networking, playing games, and visiting video sites such as YouTube. It also revealed that 74 percent of all 7th-12th graders say they have a profile on a social networking site. But if you are a parent, there is no need to despair; your child can still be compelled to go play outside. Kaiser executive Victoria Rideout says that rules can be a game-changer. “I don’t think parents should feel totally disempowered,” she said. “They can still make rules, and it still makes a difference” [The New York Times].

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Image Credit: iStockphoto

I like a lot of web comics, but it’s sometimes hard to find good ones. I was recently twigged on to Calamities of Nature, which commonly has themes dealing with science and critical thinking. I particularly like this one, excerpted in the picture here. The last panel is awesome.

In the character guide, the artist describes the mole (the white guy with earmuffs) as a cynic, but I don’t think so. A cynic is in many ways a pessimist, but a skeptic can see the good in things while still asking for evidence of claims. I think Aaron is a skeptic.

Tip o’ the virtual ink to Carl Spackler.

If you have a few million lying around, and you qualify, you might want to add a Space Shuttle to your collection: NASA is selling off historic artifacts, and the Orbiters are among the lots:

NASA is inviting eligible education institutions, museums and other organizations to examine and request space program artifacts online. The items represent significant human space flight technologies, processes and accomplishments from NASA’s past and present space exploration programs.

This makes perfect sense to me. The Orbiters are large, and expensive to maintain. If NASA keeps them they’d have to find a place to house them, keep them clean, and so on. That would be a huge waste of money! By selling them to a museum or some other institution NASA gets some cash, and a museum gets just about the coolest exhibit ever. I would pay an admission fee to tour through an actual Orbiter! So this is a great idea. If you qualify, go to this page and sign up.

The NASA announcement also mentions Hubble artifacts; I suspect they mean cameras and other equipment removed from the observatory when it was serviced. The Faint Object Spectrograph already sits in the National Air and Space Museum, but several others (WFPC2, GHRS, FOC, COSTAR) may be on the auction block.

I’ll note I already own a piece of Hubble: when I worked on the camera called STIS, all the team members were given a piece of mylar insulation blanket that was removed in a 1999 servicing mission as a souvenir. The snippet is encased in plastic, but it flew on Hubble for nearly ten years.

I wonder if it’s legal for NASA to sell them? That would be a nice fundraiser too.

“Be a bunny!” That was the essence of the message coming from the South Korean Department of Health this week.

Faced with an incredibly low birth rate–lower even than that of Japan–the government has now stepped in to force its employees to make more babies. They hope to do it with a flick of the switch.

The BBC reports:

At 1900 on Wednesday, officials at the Ministry of Health will turn off all the lights in the building. They want to encourage staff to go home to their families and, well, make bigger ones. They plan to repeat the experiment every month.

South Korea’s birth rate (the average number of babies born during a woman’s lifetime) is one of the world’s lowest. In 2008 the rate was 1.19, raising fears that the population will begin shrinking within a decade.

The Ministry of Health, says the BBC, is now sometimes referred to as the Ministry of Matchmaking as it arranges social gatherings to encourage people to find love and potential partners. The government also doles out gift vouchers to encourage people to have more babies–a priority for the country as its society rapidly ages and health care costs spiral upward.

As the government scrambles to get its citizens into their bedrooms, critics say unless childcare and education costs come down, young families won’t be encouraged to have babies. The naysayers argue that it will take more than just turning off the lights to get people to act like bunnies.

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Image Credit: iStockphoto