A depiction of the equinox. Credit: Wikipedia

Tomorrow At 17:32 UTC (13:32 EDT) the tilt of the Earth on its axis is such that it is not noticeably tilted north or south.  This means folks at a given latitude in both the northern and southern hemisphere will get the same amount of daylight.

For those of us in more northerly latitudes it also marks the beginning of spring — YAY!

More importantly, tomorrow you will be able to balance an egg on its large end!!  Ok so you can also do that any other day of the year.  For some reason that equinox myth makes the rounds this time of year, sorry, there is nothing special about eggs and equinoxes.

You might think the equinox means equal amounts of day and night, but this is usually not the case.  The term for either of the two days in a year of equal 12 hr days and nights (or as close as it is possible to get) is an equilux.  Typically they are labeled the Vernal or Autumnal Equilux.

Want to check the date of your equilux?  Click here.  Mine is March 18, 2010.

So there you go, oh and if you are disappointed to find out there is nothing special about eggs on the equinox, here’s a tip that might save you some embarrassment in a couple weeks on April Fools Day:  You can tell if an egg is hard boiled or not by simply spinning it.  A hard boiled egg will spin nicely and a raw egg will not.  Try it.

Over at The Planetary Society Blog, Emily has posted this bizarre image of the International Space Station, taken by another satellite in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum. If you want the whole story, then click it and see what she wrote!

It’s become one of our favorite rituals: Researchers come out with a paper pushing the science of invisibility cloaks a little further, inspiring everyone to go giddy with visions of Harry Potter and Romulan Warbirds. This week’s study in Science is another small step, but it’s a crucial one. Scientists in Germany have created the first rudimentary “invisibility cloak” in 3D.

Invisibility cloak mania started in 2006, when a Duke University team created the technology to bend light waves around an object; since the tiny object neither absorbed nor reflected the experiment’s microwaves, it was essentially “cloaked.” (The researchers used microwaves instead of visible light because microwaves have longer wavelengths, and are therefore easier to control.) The invisibility excitement struck again two years later when researchers refined their technique to hide a nanoscale object from visible light waves.

Now, researchers have created a cloak that not only works in infrared light wavelengths that are close to humans’ visual range, but also in 3D, too. Previous devices have been able to hide objects from light travelling in only one direction; viewed from any other angle, the object would remain visible [BBC News].

The team from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology didn’t exactly make the Statue of Liberty disappear. The “bump” made invisible is a spot in a layer of gold that’s 0.00004 inches high by 0.00005 inches wide. That hasn’t dampened lead researcher Tolga Ergin’s excitement, though. “In principle, the cloak design is completely scalable; there is no limit to it,” Ergin said. Developing the fabrication technology so that the crystals were smaller could “lead to much larger cloaks” [The Independent].

The sci-fi kind of cloaking will be harder to achieve, since visible wavelengths of light are shorter than infrared and thus harder to control. But Ergin’s 3D cloak is another step toward humanity’s ultimate dream: not being bothered by other humans.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: How to Build an Invisibility Cloak
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Image: Science/AAAS

Geeks across the galaxy, rejoice! Soon you’ll be able to release your inner Jedi and vanquish evil forces with your iPhone–or rather with the new “Star Wars: Lightsaber Duel” app, due to be released next month.

The new dueling app builds on an existing iPhone app, “Lightsaber Unleashed,” which was a one-person game that turned your screen into a glowing lightsaber, and made an official-sounding “whoosh” as you brandished your phone. But the new app is a two-geek affair that promises to enhance your lightsaber experience.

If you and a friend both have the app, you’ll be able to use Bluetooth to duel with one another–although it isn’t yet clear how the app declares a victor. Advertisements for the new app also declare that it will feature 11 new characters from the Star Wars series, which presumably means that you can decide whose lightsaber you want to wield, and whether you swear allegiance to the Rebel Alliance or the Dark Side.

Plus, for the many people who think lightsaber duels are pointless without dramatic accompanying music, here’s some news. The app has thoughtfully provided a selection of music to pick from as you duke it out.

THQ Wireless, the makers of Lightsaber Duel have also ramped up the graphics and animations and hope to have the product ready by April. There’s still no word yet on how much it would cost to download. The previous app was free.

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Image: THQ Wireless

On Monday, we reported that the United States and the European Union were spearheading an effort to ban the international trade of bluefin tuna at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Now that the week is ending, so are the hopes for the proposal that could have protected the vanishing fish. It failed by a wide margin, thanks largely to the diplomatic efforts of Japan.

Japan consumes around three-quarters of the globe’s bluefin tuna catch, with almost all of it served raw as sushi and sashimi, of which it is the most sought-after variety [Christian Science Monitor]. It can be an expensive delicacy there. In addition, the transformation of sushi from a luxury dish to a cheap food available at the corner store seems to be one of the factors that has led to quickly diminishing tuna stocks. The Japanese government, while acknowledging that the species is in danger, pledged to defeat the proposal or else opt out of complying with it.

At CITES, Japan rallied developing nations and fishing industry nations against the ban, and Libya called a committee vote that quashed the proposal before it even reached a vote in the full session. Privately, European diplomats expressed frustration that Japan, which consumes 80 per cent of the bluefin tuna caught, was able to cement opposition to the ban while the EU’s 27 member states were thrashing out their internal disputes [Financial Times]. The Christian Science Monitor, however, interviewed Japanese residents who say the fact that the bluefin is getting more attention than other troubled fish is partly because of building anti-Japan sentiment, pointing to the Toyota public shaming and the controversy connected to the documentary The Cove, which shone the spotlight on an annual dolphin hunt.

CITES meets every two or three years. Before this year’s meeting is out, the organization must vote on the proposal by Tanzania and Zambia to open up trade in elephant ivory. A ban on polar bear trade that the United States proposed already went down in flames. Finally, a proposal that simply called for more research into the illegal shark trade, in which fins are harvested for shark fin soup while the rest of the animal is left to rot, was also defeated.

Related Content:
80beats: Is Ivory Season Starting, Just As Tuna Season’s Ending?
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Image: Wikimedia Commons

In the first part of this post, Researching at the edge of space, I talked about the scientific frontier about to be opened up by suborbital flights up to 100 km (62 miles) above the Earth’s surface. The possibilities for science are exciting… but at the meeting I attended about these rockets, there was something else going on. And as interesting as the science involved with this will be, there was something bigger on everyone’s mind. At the meeting, the electricity about it was palpable, and it was obvious what it was.

We are at the very threshold of easy, inexpensive access for humans to space.

At $200,000, a flight to the edge of space is cheap. That’s well within the budget for a lot of people on this planet. Not me personally (dagnappit) but I know people who can afford that. And hundreds of human beings across the world have signed up.

This isn’t make believe. No, this is quite real. So real, in fact, that Alan Stern and Dan Durda, both friends of mine, both astronomers, and both men with their eyes firmly planted on the skies, created this video. You really, really need to see this.

They also have a followup video about the training of the first class of citizen astronauts as well.

Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic will probably be the first company to launch private citizens into space. They have already sold 300 seats and have deposited $39 million in advance sales! At the meeting, Steven Attenborough with VG said that they expect Space Ship 2 to do a "drop test" (literally be hoisted up to 50,000 feet and dropped by an airplane for a test landing) in the fall of 2010, and undergo its first power tests by the end of the year.

Humans will then be loaded up and sent into space in 2011. That’s next year.

People always lament that we’re past the year 2000 and we still don’t have flying cars. Personally, I don’t trust 95% of the people driving on the ground, let alone in the air. But it doesn’t matter, because the future is here. It’s now. Next year, people will be flying into space. Into space.

This is beyond cool. This is fantastic!

No, scratch that. The base root of that word is fantasy, and this is as real as it gets. While a lot of people have been whining about how the future never comes, my friends and a lot of others will soon be strapping themselves into rockets and making the dreams of Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, and millions of others come true.

Per ardua ad astra. Hodie.

In leafcutter ants and honeybees, it’s survival of the fittest sperm. Biologist Boris Baer, for a study out this week in Science, investigated these two species because of their peculiar sexual practices: In one day, the queen acquires all the sperm she’ll need to fertilize her eggs over the course of her lifetime. But in the race to be the top genetics-spreader, the males have evolved a dirty trick. Their seminal fluids actually do battle within the female’s reproductive tract.

To test out the idea, Baer and colleagues exposed the sperm of the bee and ant males to their own seminal fluid, and also to that of other males of the same species. The seminal fluid killed more than 50 per cent of the rival sperm within 15 minutes. “The males seemed to use the seminal fluid to harm the sperm,” says Baer [New Scientist]. When the team studied other organisms whose lifestyle didn’t depend on this kind of polyandry, they didn’t see the same effect.

However, in an interesting twist, it turns out that the queen is onto these devious males. In her sperm storage area, the spermatheca, the queen has a fluid she can deploy at the time of her choosing to put a stop to the seminal competition. “We basically show that there are two wars going on at the same time,” says Dr Baer. “The male would actually like to kill sperm from other males, but the female has other ideas” [Australian Broadcasting Corporation]. Baer suspects that she lets the competition run on long enough to eliminate the weakest candidates, then halts it before too much has been destroyed.

Given that we humans aren’t the most faithful lot, is it possible that we evolved something similar? Unlikely. “To my knowledge women do not copulate with 90 mates in half an hour, so whether there is much room that this has evolved in humans as well, I have my doubts,” says Baer [New Scientist].

And if you haven’t had your fill of sperm news, fear not—there’s more. Baer’s team studied semen warfare in the lab, but in a separate Science study, researchers show that they could observe it happening inside the insect, thanks to glowing sperm. While scientists first created such a thing a decade ago, now Scott Pitnick says his team has found a way to track them in real time. “It turns out that they [the sperm] are constantly on the move within the female’s specialised sperm-storage organs and exhibit surprisingly complex behaviour,” Prof Pitnick said. “It far exceeds our expectations, in that we can essentially track the fate of every sperm the female receives” [BBC News].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: The Most Incredible Things Ants Can Do (photo gallery)
DISCOVER: Sperm Cells Demonstrate Some Brotherly Solidarity
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Discoblog: In Competitive Sex, Male Butterflies Employ “Dipstick Method”

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Christian R. Linder