My friend Eran Segev, an Aussie skeptic and all-around good guy, submitted a podcast to 365 Days of Astronomy dealing with the venerable Parkes radio dish and its support of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. It’s a good story — it was fictionalized in the very cute movie "The Dish" — and he interviews a couple of the men who were there during the whole thing. And if you listen to the whole thing, they mention a familiar name, too…

Thermal images from ESO's ground based telescope on top, taken May 18, 2008, and the Hubble optical on bottom, taken on May 15, 2008. Click for a larger version. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/ESO and NASA/ESA/GSFC

A team of astronomers recently took a look at the  Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and the local area around it using a collection of the best telescopes in the world to make a thermal map.  The images show: the Great Red Spot and two smaller storms nicknamed Oval BA and Little Red Spot.

The thermal image was taken in the infrared wavelength range of 10.8 microns, which is sensitive to Jupiter’s atmospheric temperatures in the 300 to 600 millibar pressure range in order to coincide with the altitude of the white, red and brown aerosols seen in the visible-light image on the bottom.

Pretty fascinating stuff.

Here’s the press release and it tells the story:

New thermal images from powerful ground-based telescopes show swirls of warmer air and cooler regions never seen before within Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, enabling scientists to make the first detailed interior weather map of the giant storm system.

The observations reveal that the reddest color of the Great Red Spot corresponds to a warm core within the otherwise cold storm system, and images show dark lanes at the edge of the storm where gases are descending into the deeper regions of the planet. These types of data, detailed in a paper appearing in the journal Icarus, give scientists a sense of the circulation patterns within the solar system’s best-known storm system.

“This is our first detailed look inside the biggest storm of the solar system,” said Glenn Orton, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who was one of the authors of the paper. “We once thought the Great Red Spot was a plain old oval without much structure, but these new results show that it is, in fact, extremely complicated.”

Sky gazers have been observing the Great Red Spot in one form or another for hundreds of years, with continuous observations of its current shape dating back to the 19th century. The spot, which is a cold region averaging about 110 Kelvin (minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit) is so wide about three Earths could fit inside its boundaries.

The thermal images obtained by giant 8-meter (26-foot) telescopes used for this study — the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, the Gemini Observatory telescope in Chile and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan’s Subaru telescope in Hawaii — have provided an unprecedented level of resolution and extended the coverage provided by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s. Together with observations of the deep cloud structure by the 3-meter (10-foot) NASA Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii, the level of thermal detail observed from these giant observatories is comparable to visible-light images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope for the first time.

One of the most intriguing findings shows the most intense orange-red central part of the spot is about 3 to 4 Kelvin (5 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the environment around it, said Leigh Fletcher, the lead author of the paper, who completed much of the research as a postdoctoral fellow at JPL and is currently a fellow at the University of Oxford in England. This temperature differential might not seem like a lot, but it is enough to allow the storm circulation, usually counter-clockwise, to shift to a weak clockwise circulation in the very middle of the storm. Not only that, but on other parts of Jupiter, the temperature change is enough to alter wind velocities and affect cloud patterns in the belts and zones.

“This is the first time we can say that there’s an intimate link between environmental conditions — temperature, winds, pressure and composition – and the actual color of the Great Red Spot,” Fletcher said. “Although we can speculate, we still don’t know for sure which chemicals or processes are causing that deep red color, but we do know now that it is related to changes in the environmental conditions right in the heart of the storm.”

Unlocking the secrets of Jupiter’s giant storm systems will be one of the targets for infrared spacecraft observations from future missions including NASA’s Juno mission.

At some point in evolutionary history dogs diverged from wolves thanks to domestication by humans. But just where did dogs first become man’s best friend? Robert Wayne and his team have many years invested in answering the question, and their newest findings, published this week in Nature, suggest that the answer is the Middle East.

Researchers looked at gene segments from 912 dogs, from 85 breeds, and samples of 225 grey wolves, dog’s close cousins who they evolved from in prehistory, from 11 regions [USA Today]. Dogs and wolves that come from the Middle East, Wayne says, show the most genetic similarity. The researchers propose that dogs were first domesticated there, and then spread outward.

Dogs and wolves are closely related enough that they have interbred at various times, complicating the problem of unraveling dogs’ origin. Wayne’s team suggests that after the domestication of dogs in the Middle East, they interbred with wolves when they reached East Asia, which is how dogs and wolves there came to share some of their genetics.

Indeed, previous research had suggested East Asia as the origin of dog domestication, as breeds from there showed the most genetic diversity. But Wayne says those papers focused on a small subset of DNA called mitochondrial DNA, instead of looking across all 2.4 billion letters that make up the dog genome [NPR]. But Peter Savolainen, one of the scientists arguing for East Asia, says he wasn’t moved by Wayne’s new study. Savolainen says it did not sample dogs in East Asia from south of the Yangtze, the region where the diversity of mitochondrial DNA is highest. Also archaeologists in China have been less interested in distinguishing dog and wolf remains, he said [The New York Times].

So this study won’t be the final word. But what’s not in doubt is the importance of dogs to early human civilization (that is, once the domesticators selected for small body size and other characteristics you’d want to make best friend that doesn’t eat you). Dogs could have been the sentries that let hunter gatherers settle without fear of surprise attack. They may also have been the first major item of inherited wealth, preceding cattle, and so could have laid the foundations for the gradations of wealth and social hierarchy that differentiated settled groups from the egalitarianism of their hunter-gatherer predecessors [The New York Times].

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Image: flickr / mikebaird

At Discoblog, we do our best to keep the party going. So, even as we lurch back into existence after St. Paddy’s celebrations, we are looking forward to our next big party–which just might be the iPad launch party next month. So, here’s an idea for Apple-themed party food, courtesy Chef Ken at The Cooks Den.

There’s nothing like a cheese plate to make an occasion feel festive. For this recipe, you will need:

* 1 Steve Jobs Cheese Head
* Assorted gourmet cheeses such as brie, camembert or stilton
* Crackers
* Fruit

Oh! You’re not familiar with the culinary marvel known as the Steve Jobs Cheese Head? Forgive us. Chef Ken created this perfectly crafted head of the Apple CEO from a block of mozzarella; the chef thinks mozzarella works best, since the color of the cheese matches His Steveness’s pasty white pallor. It’s pretty simple to create this cheesy replica of a Jobs head. For step-by-step instructions, go here.

Once your Steve Jobs Cheese Head has been lovingly crafted, place it on fancy plate, arrange crackers, pieces of fruit, and assorted cheeses, and serve to your guests. Chef Ken also suggests serving Jobs’s head as part of a nacho concoction or in a fusion dish he calls iPad Thai. Hey, the Steve Jobs Cheese Head goes with anything.

But if by some weird chance the Steve Jobs Cheese Head does not grab your interest, you might also consider serving cheese made from breast milk.

This all-natural creation was pumped to existence when chef Daniel Angerer’s wife realized she had a lot of extra breast milk lying around in packets, cluttering the freezer.

But instead of throwing the excess milk out and wasting “gold,” as Angerer terms it, he turned it to cheese, much to the delight of other moms who are now asking for more breast milk recipes.

They want to use their extra milk to make ice-cream, milk shakes, and other stuff that can be fed to fussy eaters.

We aren’t really sure what sort of party would call for the serving of breast milk cheese–but Angerer has helpfully provided detailed instructions from his “Mommy’s milk cheese making experiment” for anyone who wants to follow his example.

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Images: The Cooks Den, Daniel Angerer

Not happy with only dominating the Internet, software giant Google is looking to expand into the television business, too. It won’t be producing content, but Google will be creating software in partnership with Sony and Intel that will help bring the Internet to TVs and set-top boxes all over the land.

With the just-announced Google TV, people will be able to access web features like downloadable games, Facebook, and streaming video on their TV as easily as if they were flipping channels. Some existing televisions and set-top boxes [already] offer access to Web content, but the choice of sites is limited. Google intends to open its TV platform, which is based on its Android operating system for smartphones, to software developers. The company hopes the move will spur the same outpouring of creativity that consumers have seen in applications for cellphones [The New York Times]. Google expects that products based on its software may be ready as soon as this summer.

Google’s TV platform will use Intel’s Atom chips and may also give Sony a leg up in a highly competitive hardware market, as Sony hopes to bring out the first appliances and maybe even TVs that encorporate the software. The project will use a version of Google’s Chrome Web browser to create an interface where people can use the TV not just to poke around the Internet, but also to play videos from Hulu or YouTube. The company has reportedly already built a prototype set-top box, but the technology may be incorporated directly into TVs or other devices [The New York Times].

However, Google TV will face stiff competition from Roku and Boxee–two existing devices that allow users to stream video from Netflix and a selection of other sites, while Yahoo has also come out with a TV platform that allows users to access certain Web sites. Those competitors, unsurprisingly, say their products are superior to what Google has planned; Roku CEO Anthony Wood argues that the expensive chip inside a Google TV box would raise the device’s cost to about $200, far higher than Roku’s $80 device. But as Google hasn’t officially acknowledged the project yet, price estimates for Google TV devices are pure speculation.

Experts see Google’s project as a pre-emptive move to get a foothold in the living room as more consumers start exploring ways to bring Web content to their television sets. Google wants to aggressively ensure that its services, in particular its search and advertising systems, play a central role. “Google wants to be everywhere the Internet is so they can put ads there,” one insider says [The New York Times].

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Image: iStockphoto

Only the tiny bits of matter, atoms and molecules, have even been observed in a quantum state—until now. In a study in this week’s Nature, physicists report that they’ve put the largest object ever into that state where the weird rules of quantum mechanics apply, and things can be in two places at once. Research leader Andrew Cleland says: “There is this question of where the dividing line is between the quantum world and the classical world we know. We know perfectly well that things are not in two places at the same time in our everyday experience, but this fundamental theory of physics says that they can be” [BBC News].

The researchers’ “quantum resonator,” seen here, is a vibrating device that measures only in micrometers, but that’s large enough for us to see it with a little help from a scanning electron microscope. To see quantum mechanics in action, scientists try to put an object into its ground state, the point when no more energy can be removed from the system. Then they add a quantum of energy back in, which can oscillate between locations. Although only one quantum of energy is put in, any measurements will show either zero or one quanta; strictly, the atom has both [BBC News].

Doing this, however, requires ultra-low temperatures near absolute zero. Unfortunately, the ground state temperature is related to the vibrational frequency. To reach it, you either need to reach temperatures below those possible with current refrigeration methods, or have something that can vibrate incredibly quickly [Ars Technica]. Unable to reach the 50 billionths of a degree Kelvin they thought would be necessary, the researchers went the other way. They crafted this device to vibrate at 6 billion times per second, which meant they could get by with slightly warmer temperature.

Once the system reached ground state, the team created a phonon, a minuscule unit of vibrating energy. And in aluminum nitride layered between two aluminum electrodes, the team observed quantum behavior—the system was in a superpostion of states, simultaneously having both zero and one quanta of energy.

Cleland’s find could be another step toward quantum computing. But for those more interested in mind puzzles than practicality, this line of research could test predictions about “Schrödinger cat” states — named for a hypothetical feline simultaneously alive and dead — in which a system exists in a mix of states known as a superposition. Cleland’s team showed, somewhat indirectly, that a form of superposition existed inside their resonator [Science News].

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Image: Andrew Cleland

You never know where you’ll find it.