Several views of the UARS satellite in orbit, as seen from the ground with a 14" telescope. Credit: Thierry Legault Emmanual Rietsch via Universe Today

UPDATE:  Hearing UARS is down, started over the Pacific also hearing rumors of a fireball over Edmonton Alberta, anybody up there that can confirm?

UPDATE 2: NASA is saying the satellite is likely in the Pacific but they really don’t know.  Apparently this post upset a spammer.  Well most likely a spammer even if he was using a New Jersey IP address.  Oh well I removed the comment and updated the spam filter, I figure he can let me know if the comment wasn’t really spam.

A short post today.

This (last I knew) wasn’t “for sure” but  the question can be asked: Was Einstein wrong? Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water just yet.

The doomed satellite known as UARS is on the way down. Not sure where yet though AND solar activity is no longer playing much of a role in the rate of descent which is now slowing.  What’s that mean?  It means earlier assurances the satellite will not impact in North America could be wrong, although the chances are low, the possibility cannot be dismissed.  The last prediction I heard was 20:36 GMT give or take 20 hours.

The autumnal equinox occurred this morning at 0505 EDT.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The latest word is North America is safe from the dead 6.5 ton satellite known as UARS (short for Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite) that has been spiraling its way to an uncontrolled re-entry to Earth.  The expected time of the re-entry is sometime tomorrow (September 23^rd) in the afternoon Eastern Daylight Time.

Better than 20 pieces of the satellite are expected to survive the return trip and hit the Earth, scattered over a 500 mile area..  North America is apparently safe but where?  Nobody is offering a guess yet, they will though as the satellite gets a little closer.

If you do happen by a piece of the downed satellite you are encouraged NOT to touch it and instead call your local law enforcement people.  Hey I know, who knows what they will do, but I feel obligated to put that warning in.

I particularly liked the video, not just because of the UARS but the depiction of an orbit in relation to the sine wave projection on a flat map.

You MIGHT be able to access the N2YO tracker but I’ve not been sucessful so far; but give it a try anyways who knows?

One of the dishes in the Allen Telescope Array. Credit: setiQuest

Back in April you may remember my bemoaning the shutdown of the Allen Telescope Array and the subsequent end of SETI.  The shutdown was of course due to funding.

I am VERY HAPPY to be able to say the ATA is on the way back thanks to donations of SETIStars and the USAF Space Command.

The process of bringing the array out of hibernation began a couple weeks ago.

Keep up with the latest at setiQuest.

YAY AND CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL!!!!

Interesting trio of craters on Vesta. Click for larger. Image Credit: NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ UCLA/ MPS/ DLR/ IDA

The Dawn spacecraft took this image of a trio of craters on Vesta that vaguely resembles a snowman.  There is a large version accessible on the Dawn webpage.

Given the low gravity of Vesta, probably in the range of three percent of Earth’s,  I’m trying to decide from what direction the impacting bodies hit.  I’m thinking top to bottom in the image.

Did everybody see the spectacular time-lapse video of the Earth from the ISS?  Check it out on Robs page – truly amazing!.

Another pretty for you from the ISS.  This one is a suset.

Image from NASA/ISS - As always, check out the enlargement

I cannot imagine what it would be like to see this not once, but many times each day.  What a sunset!

If you were on board the ISS, of what would YOU be taking pictures?  I couldn’t help myself; I’d have some type of telescope and would be looking at cities as we flew over.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The crew aboard a Soyuz capsule in the Soyuz returned to Earth Friday from the International Space Station.  They are safe and sound and that’s good, BUT not all went well.  An as yet to be determined problem caused the three person crew which included NASA astronaut Ron Garan along with his two Russian cosmonauts colleagues to lose communications for several minutes during the descent.

Communications was restored eventually, although we don’t know how whether it was via a back up system or something as simple as a improperly position switch, it sure does seem to add doubt to future of the ISS without the shuttle.

Ah well.

Source

MIT Technology Review has one of those articles about the exponential growth rate in the number of people who have been fully sequenced. There’s nothing too exceptional in the piece. You do have to be careful about 10 year projections, especially if they’re exponential. But this part caught my eye: ” At this exponential pace, by 2020 it may be feasible—mathematically, at least—to decode the DNA of every member of humanity in a single 12-month stretch.”

What does that mean? Taking the U.N. estimate for the world’s population in 2020, and I get the following numbers:

- 874,087 genomes per hour
- 14,568 genomes per minute
- 243 genomes per second

Of course much of the sequencing would be done concurrently, so it wouldn’t be a constant rate of production. But still this would be awesome. I think being much more conservative there’ll be at least hundreds of thousands of people who are fully sequenced, if not millions. I don’t know if this is valid personally, but there’s a paper on data compression which claims it might be feasible to reduce the size of the raw sequence output to ~4 MB. That might be helpful, since even at that size you’d still have 30 million terabytes of information to store (I assume that any given genome will be replicated thousands of times in various data centers).

The Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies has updated their predicted re-entry time for NASA’s UARS satellite. It is now 9/24 (tonight!) at 05:10 UTC (01:10 Eastern US time), which puts it over the southern Indian ocean:

See Related posts below for information and background. Note the uncertainty is once again smaller, at +/- 2 hours!

The goofballs at Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe decided it would be a good idea to have a marathon 24-hour video/audio podcast, live, with special guests surrounded by dynamic conversations and covered with a creamy coating of skeptical goodness.

Crazy, right? And guess who they roped into it for the hour starting at 11:00 Eastern (US) time? Yeah, me.

The whole thing starts at 8:00 Eastern time (midnight UTC) TONIGHT, and you can get the details on the SGU 24 page. They even have their own skype chat room ("theskepticsguide") and Twitter hashtag: #sgu24. Kids these days.

Sorry. I meant, #kidsthesedays

Now, if only there were some sciencey things in the news for us to talk about…

Probably not. But maybe! Or in other words: science as usual.

For the three of you reading this who haven’t yet heard about it, the OPERA experiment in Italy recently announced a genuinely surprising result. They create a beam of muon neutrinos at CERN in Geneva, point them under the Alps (through which they zip largely unimpeded, because that’s what neutrinos do), and then detect a few of them in the Gran Sasso underground laboratory 732 kilometers away. The whole thing is timed by stopwatch (or the modern high-tech version thereof, using GPS-synchronized clocks), and you solve for the velocity by dividing distance by time. And the answer they get is: just a teensy bit faster than the speed of light, by about a factor of 10^-5. Here’s the technical paper, which already lists 20 links to blogs and news reports.

The things you need to know about this result are:

• It’s enormously interesting if it’s right.
• It’s probably not right.

By the latter point I don’t mean to impugn the abilities or honesty of the experimenters, who are by all accounts top-notch people trying to do something very difficult. It’s just a very difficult experiment, and given that the result is so completely contrary to our expectations, it’s much easier at this point to believe there is a hidden glitch than to take it at face value. All that would instantly change, of course, if it were independently verified by another experiment; at that point the gleeful jumping up and down will justifiably commence.

This isn’t one of those annoying “three-sigma” results that sits at the tantalizing boundary of statistical significance. The OPERA folks are claiming a six-sigma deviation from the speed of light. But that doesn’t mean it’s overwhelmingly likely that the result is real; it just means it’s overwhelmingly unlikely that the result is simply a statistical fluctuation. There is another looming source of possible error: a “systematic effect,” i.e. some unknown miscalibration somewhere in the experiment or analysis pipeline. (If you are measuring something incorrectly, it doesn’t matter that you measure it very carefully.) In particular, the mismatch between the expected and observed timing amounts to tens of nanoseconds; but any individual “event” takes the form of a pulse that is spread out over thousands of nanoseconds. Extracting the signal is a matter of using statistics over many such events — a tricky business.

The experimenters and their colleagues at other experiments know this perfectly well, of course. As Adrian Cho reports in Science, OPERA’s spokesperson Antonio Ereditato is quick to deny that they have overturned Einstein. “I would never say that… We are forced to say something. We could not sweep it under the carpet because that would be dishonest.” Now there’s a careful and honest scientist for you, I wish we were all so precise and candid. Cho also quotes Chang Kee Jung, a physicist not on the experiment, as saying, “I wouldn’t bet my wife and kids [that the result will go away] because they’d get mad. But I’d bet my house.” A careful and honest husband and father.

Scientists do difficult experiments all the time, of course, and yet we believe their results. That’s simply because it’s proper to be extra skeptical when the results fly in the face of our expectations: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as someone once paraphrased Bayes’s Theorem. When the supernova results in 1998 suggested that the universe is accelerating, most cosmologists hopped on board fairly quickly, both because we had a simple theoretical model in hand (the cosmological constant) and because the result helped explain several other nagging observational problems (such as the age of the universe). Here that’s not quite true, although we should at least mention that Fermilab’s MINOS experiment also saw evidence for faster-than-light neutrinos, albeit at a woefully insignificant level. More relevant is the fact that we have completely independent indications that neutrinos do travel at the speed of light, from Supernova 1987A. If the OPERA results are naively taken at face value, the SN 87A should have arrived a couple of years before we saw the explosion using good old-fashioned photons. But perhaps we should resist being naive; the SN 87A events were electron neutrinos, not muon neutrinos, and they were at substantially lower energies. If neutrinos do violate the light barrier, it’s completely consistent to imagine that they do so in an energy-dependent way, so the comparison is subtle.

Which brings up a crucial point: if this result is true (which is always a possibility), it is much more surprising than the acceleration of the universe, but it’s not as if we don’t already have ways to explain it. The most straightforward idea is to violate Lorentz invariance, a strategy of which I’m quite personally fond (although I’ve never applied the idea to neutrino physics). Lorentz invariance says that everyone measures the speed of light to be the same; if you violate it, it’s easy enough to imagine that someone (like, say, a neutrino) measures something different. Once you buy into that idea, neutrinos are an interesting place to apply the idea, since our constraints on their properties are relatively weak. It’s an interesting enough topic that there are review articles, and even a Wikipedia page on the idea.

And there are more way-out possibilities. Graininess in spacetime from quantum gravity might affect the propagation of nearly-massless particles; extra dimensions might provide a shortcut through space. This experimental result will probably give a boost to theorists thinking about these kinds of things, as well it should — there’s nothing disreputable about trying to come up with models that fit new data. But it’s still a long shot at this time. I hate to keep saying it over and over in this era of tantalizing-but-not-yet-definitive experimental results, but: stay tuned.

A few of the countless good blog posts on this topic:

• Matt Strassler (two, three)
• Philip Gibbs
• Ben Still
• Aidan Randle-Conde liveblogs the OPERA seminar at CERN

[UPDATE to the update (22:00 UTC): a new prediction just came out: tonight, September 23/24, at 04:04 UTC (midnight Eastern US time). The uncertainty is down to +/- 3 hours, and the location is the middle of the Pacific. Clicking the links below to CORDS or the image itself will take you to the most current prediction.]

The Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies has updated their predicted re-entry time for NASA’s UARS satellite. It is now 9/24 (tonight!) at 03:16 UTC, which puts it over the Sahara:

Note that again this is later than the last estimate. As the satellite has gotten lower, aerodynamic drag — the wind blowing on it, tenuous as it is — has changed its orientation, creating less drag, slowing the descent.

Please note that the time is still uncertain, though now it’s only +/- 5 hours. Still, that’s a wide swath of Earth in that range, so we’re still not sure where it’ll burn up.

Check the Related posts links below for more info on the satellite, why it’s coming down, and how to read that map. Again, the danger from this is pretty minimal. You may note that the three predictions we’ve had have put re-entry over the ocean or otherwise largely uninhabited areas, and that’s not a coincidence: most of the Earth is like that! That’s why the odds of someone getting hit are so low.

I’m sure we’ll get another update or two in the next few hours, so stay tuned. You can also check the CORDS site for updates, and the NASA page as well.

And I’m British. Excuse me while I do an evil laugh.

My piece on sushi-digesting genes that hitched a ride from ocean bacteria to Japanese guts has been included in this year’s anthology.

I’m honoured for several reasons. The anthology was edited by the incredible father-and-daughter team of Floyd and Rebecca Skloot, she who wrote one of the best science books of last year. It features writing from some of the best in the business like Carl Zimmer and Deborah Blum. And I’m proud to represent the fine world of science blogging in an anthology that’s traditionally dominated by mainstream publications; this is actually the first time a blog has been included. Represent!

The book will be released on 27th September in the US and 20 October in the UK. Thanks to the Skloots for including me and congrats to my fellow nominees.

My only regret is that my attempt to sneak “favourite” into an American book was foiled by an eagle-eyed editor.

I’m thrilled to have a piece of mine in this year’s edition of Best of American Science Writing. The book, edited by Rebecca Skloot and her father Floyd, is officially published on Tuesday, 9/27, but you can order it now on Amazon. My semi-skeptical take on the Singularity is in there, as is lots of excellent stuff–including fellow Discover blogger Ed Yong’s tale of sushi genes in Japanese gut bugs. If I’m not mistaken, that’s the first time a blog post has made it into this series. So congratulations to Ed Yong for giving the old blogs-versus-journalism critics another reason to pull their hair out.

On Monday, I’ll be speaking at a master’s tea at Morse College at Yale at 4 pm about outbreaks–real and fictionalized, viral and bacterial. It’s free and open to the public.

On Tuesday, I’ll be participating in Story Collider, a marvelous series of performances in which people tell stories about science. I am a bit nervous about this one for a few reasons, not the least of which is that I go on stage after Bora Zivkovic. I’ve sat in Bora’s car, listening to his stories, which he tells with one hand on the wheel and the other sweeping around in operatic gestures. I know what I’m up against.

The fun starts at 8 pm in Brooklyn. Details are here.

At 09:05 UTC (05:05 Eastern US time) this morning, the position of the center of the Sun’s disk, moving south, crossed the celestial equator on the sky. For normal people, this means it was the moment of the autumnal equinox. Some people like to call this the first day of autumn, which is fine, but the point could be argued.

There are lots of ways of describing this event. Astronomically, it’s how I wrote about it above. On Earth, it means that the length of time of day and night are almost exactly equal (they’re off by a bit due to the elliptical shape of Earth’s orbit, plus the presence of our atmosphere throwing off the time of sunrise and sunset). It also means the line marking day and night — technically called the terminator — is perpendicular to the Earth’s equator. That sounds funny, but maybe an animation is worth a thousand words:

Isn’t that awesome? The animation is composed of hundreds of images taken by a geostationary satellite, positioned in a special orbit so that it orbits at the same rate the Earth spins. This makes it seemingly hover over a single point on the Earth (though it really is in orbit). Each image in the animation was taken near 06:00 a.m. local time. You can see the day/night terminator line — in this case, marking sunrise — cutting across the Earth.

In northern hemisphere summer, the Earth’s north pole is tipped toward the Sun, and the south pole away from it. As it orbits the Sun, the Earth’s tilt remains constant, so six months later the north pole is tipped away, and it’s winter (this page may help). When the video starts, it’s the autumnal equinox (September 2010), so the shadow line is straight up and down. As the video progresses, we go into northern winter (which is southern summer) and the shadow tilts from the lower left to the upper right. Note the south pole has 24 hours of daylight!

Then we move to the vernal (spring) equinox, and the shadow is upright… and as time goes on, entering northern summer, the terminator tilts the other way, exposing the north pole to 24 hours a day of sunlight.

All of this is described in detail on the NASA Earth Observatory page, where there are images and links to higher-res versions of the video. I know things like this can be confusing — I’ve been doing this for years, and I still need to sit back sometimes and picture it all carefully in my head — but in a sense I find that in itself pretty interesting. The Universe is in many ways like a clock, with parts and gears and cogs all interacting in a rhythmic and lovely pattern, cycles upon cycles, repeating over and again. It’s beautiful, both to think about and to see.

Credit: NASA Earth Observatory

On the left, in the 1999 edition; on the right, in 2011. Click to embiggenate.

[Originally published 9/16] Greenland glaciers have had a hard time of it lately, what with all the warming and disintegrating, and in their latest edition, the folks at the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World have decided to illustrate the island’s new look: as you can see above, lots and lots less white. The warming has even created a new island off the east coast: look closely just under the “Gr” in “Greenland Sea,” and you can see the words “Uunartoq Qeqertoq (Warming I.)”

If we are looking at a radically reshaped world in the next hundred years or more, maybe atlases will have to be more like dictionaries from here on out, recording the dynamic nature of their subject matter.

[Update 9/19: Scientists at the UK's Scott Polar Institute have written a letter to the Times saying that the image above is inaccurate; less ice has melted in the last 15 years than the atlas's image shows. The atlas's publishers, HarperCollins, respond that they created the image using data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, and that it represents not only changes due to warming but also "much more accurate data and in-depth research" than had previously been available.  Regardless of the causes, however, the image doesn't resemble current satellite images, the Scott Polar group says. Check out a comparison of the images here. What do you think?]

[Update 9/20: HarperCollins now says that the number it quoted--15% of Greenland's ice had melted--is inaccurate, but says that the map is still correct. The polar scientists, however, are saying that portions of Greenland shown as ice-free in the map show up as ice-covered in satellite pictures. Read more here.]

[Update 9/21: Nature News has an explanation of where a miscommunication may have come from:

Researchers speculated on the Cryolist that the error came from a misinterpretation of a 1999 map of the Greenland Ice Sheet; cartographers might have defined the edge of the glacier using a contour line that in fact showed where the thickness of the ice fell below 500 metres. That would leave out significant portions of remaining ice.]

[Update 9/23: ScienceNOW has the latest: it sounds like the source of the error may have been tracked down by researchers, and HarperCollins will add inserts to the already-printed atlas with a new map and explanation. "NSIDC and other researchers managed to track down which of their data sets and maps the cartographers used: it showed the thickness of the central core of the largest, central glacier, not the peripheral glaciers or extent of the ice cover," writes Sara Reardon at ScienceNOW. HarperCollins then released this statement:

On reflection and in discussion with the scientific community, the current map does not make the explanation of this topic as clear as it should be. We are now urgently reviewing the depiction of ice in the Atlas against all the current research and data available, and will work with the scientific community to produce a map of Greenland which reflects all the latest data.]

Image courtesy of The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, 13th edition, published by Times Books UK, and distributed in the U.S. by Trafalgar Square Publishing

I’ve devoted a few posts (here and here and here) to the saga of a disputed link between chronic fatigue syndrome and a virus called XMRV. This week marks the next chapter in the story, with more evidence that the original results were at least partly due to contamination and a partial retraction of the original paper. Two great writers at Science, Martin Enserink and Jon Cohen, have put together an epic telling of this affair, from the first reports two years ago to the latest developments. The magazine has wisely put the piece out in front of their paywall. Do read it.

As Enserink and Cohen note, this is not the final word. That will probably come early next year, when a larger study led by Ian Lipkin of Columbia. We’ll see then if the link is buried at last, or lives to see another day.

I have a hard time thinking that my readers need to be reminded to read the web comic xkcd, but just in case, Randall Munroe chimes in on the faster-than-light neutrino controversy. Go read the comic now, since I spoil it below…

In fact, I agree with his idea, and said as much on Google+ yesterday:

So yeah, I’m skeptical. The fact that you’re reading this on a computer shows we understand a lot of physics pretty well, so the best thing to do here is to calm down and see what comes out of this. But I’d bet against it.

… and I’d win that bet either way. If I’m right, I make money. If I’m wrong, warp speed! Woohoo!

Scientist Brian Cox has an interview online where he describes why this is important, too.

We should have more news about all this soon, since the scientists involved are giving a talk in Zurich, and I’ll write up a review once I understand what’s what.

That time of the year for a certain type of nerd, the Singularity Summit. Here’s a a preview:

This Singularity Summit line-up this year features a mix of 25 speakers from numerous fields, with a central focus on robotics and artificial intelligence, in particular the victory of the IBM computer Watson in Jeopardy! this February. Inventor and award-winning author Ray Kurzweil will give the opening keynote on “From Eliza to Watson to Passing the Turing Test”. Registration for the Summit, which runs on October 15-16 at the 92Y in New York, is open to the public now.

The theme of the Summit this year is the Watson victory and future Watson applications, such as in medicine. Dan Cerutti, IBM’s VP of Commercialization for Watson, will give a talk on medical applications for Watson, and the closing keynote will be by Ken Jennings, who won 74 consecutiveJeopardy! matches only to lose to Watson in February. Watson won $1,000,000 in the contest and Jennings won $300,000, coming in second place. Jennings’ talk will be “The Human Brain in Jeopardy: Computers That “Think”.

I won’t be able to make it because I’m very busy right now, but that’s too bad. Ken Jennings is a great headliner, but do look at all the speakers. Tyler Cowen and Sonia Arrison will be there. I had lunch with some of the practitioners of Masonomics a few years back, but Tyler and Bryan Caplan were both out of town. No doubt the day will come. Just not this day. I haven’t had time to review 100 Plus (alas, the neglect of the Razib Khan on Books website), but it’s an excellent take on the possible implications of greater longevity (no, I don’t think longevity research is crazy as such, though I’m probably not as optimistic as many in the community).