If you were wondering what was going on with the bright new supernova in the spiral galaxy M101, it’s now getting very difficult to observe due to its proximity to the Sun in the sky. But happily my friend, the accomplished astronomer Travis Rector, got a shot of it using the Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. I would venture to say it’s one of the prettiest ones I’ve seen so far:

[Click to Chandrasekharenate.]

This was taken on September 18th, and the supernova is the bright blue star above and to the right of the center of the picture (to the left of the fuzzy red nebula). Pictures like this are important in pinning down the exact location of the supernova in the galaxy, so that after it fades the potential prescursor star can be found (though in this case, we already have pretty decent Hubble images of the field). Also, of course, big telescopes with sensitive detectors can give very accurate brightness measurements, which are absolutely critical in understanding how these objects change with time. This particular flavor of supernova is key to our understanding the size and scale of the Universe itself, so the more data — and the more accurate the data — we have, the better.

Image credit: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage), H. Schweiker & S. Pakzad NOAO/AURA/NSF

UPDATE:  Solved by Hugo at 3:34 CDT

Did I say I was “back”?  I have to admit, I seriously miscalculated with that statement, and Karma got me.  Let’s try this one more time:  I’m here today, with a nice little riddle for you, and I’m very pleased to be able to welcome in October with you.  Fall is my favorite season.  You rarely smell wood smoke or burning leaves anymore, but those two smells have a strong psychological impact to most people of my generation.

Being a Pacific NorthWesterner by birth, a Coloradoan by choice and by love, and a Texan by default, I’ve known some interesting Autumns and Winters.  I’ve come to respect the Texas storms.  Let me tell you, when Texas decides to cut loose with a storm, it knows how to do it correctly.  For waking up and finding yourself snowed-in, Colorado gets my vote… although I have to admit to being snowed-in in western Washington (oh no, it NEVER snows in Whatcom County).  You won’t often find yourself surrounded by deep snow in Texas, well, okay, MOST of Texas, but you will find yourself iced-in.  It’s like being in a deep freeze, and nobody is going anywhere.  Nobody.

It’s riddle time now, but let me know your favorite season, and why you like it.  Now, let me turn the music up and see if I can lead you down the wrong path.  Don’t trip over a red herring, okay?

Earth at night. This image was shamelessly stolen from the Dark Sky project, Globe at Night.

This is the 11th.

If it had been around, our ancestors would have seen it.

When it’s done, it won’t be done.

As a proud member of the scientific community, I use this image on some of my scarier memos. Salud.

We study this intensely.

We’ve been studying it for almost 11 years.

Through this, we’ve found we probably shouldn’t try to send a manned mission to Mars yet.

Think “dawn”; think “star”.

This isn’t as large as we thought it would be.

This is NOT a vehicle, so get your minds off spaceships.

*heavy sigh* it's a SLIDE RULE!!

There you have it.  Not a terribly difficult riddle (Tom and save those for the bonus riddles), but maybe enough to make you pause on your daily round and direct your mind to the massive infinity hanging over your head.  Look up.

Top picks

The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice: “A website dedicated to the horrors of pre-anesthetic surgery.” And a wonderful one at that.

Happy anniversary to Jennifer Ouellette and Sean Carroll: read her lovely tribute to falling in love with a physicist.

Emma Marris on cloning extinct animals. I for one would love to see a sabre-tooth cat devour a ground sloth.

David Robson chronicles a brief history of the brain from the first neurons to humans.

NobelPrizeWatch – a new blog by Simon Frantz about the prizes and coverage of the prizes. This should be good, especially since Simon used to work for the Nobel Foundation.

What? Huh? Wait.. how did.. UH? What happens when a slinky falls? This apparently.

“What good’s a toolkit if you don’t use it to build something?” Jack Horner’s quest to reverse-engineer a dinosaur

Paper-based diagnostic tests that are as small as a stamp and weigh less than a penny

Gauging an area’s biodiversity strictly through the DNA in its dirt.

Greg Dunn creates Japanese-style paintings from human brain cell photos

Halfway down: a superb list of tips for avoiding crap he-said-she-said journalism

A very good write-up of that study about reconstructing what people see from their brain activity. Meanwhile, David Bradley asks some searching questions to the researchers and gets some good answers.

Popular Science published a detailed and comprehensive profile of Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the scientist behind last year’s arsenic-life controversy. David Dobbs and Carl Zimmer voiced my concerns much better than I could have. They argue respectively that the piece neglects its journalistic duty by leaving out key details, and in some places, airbrushing history entirely.

The 2011 IgNobel Prizes, as covered by SciCurious, with Real Time Storify!!

“The only way to do it is to bypass the cannibalistic phase.” Baby sharks birthed in artificial uterus:

The innovative word of animal prosthetics by Emily Anthes, with a follow-up on her blog.

The Dinosaur Baron of Transylvania

Rat cyborg gets digital cerebellum. Absolutely incredible story from Linda Geddes.

The Atlas of the Human Ecosystem by Carl Zimmer

“Anger isn’t an issue when you start with birds you love” Robert Krulwich peers into the minds of climate deniers and wonders what it will take to make them see reason.

A neurosurgeon gives thanks to his science teacher.

Science/news/writing

The world’s most expensive drug: a steal at $409,500/yr

From the blood of wallabies, a possible new weapon against drug-resistant bacteria

“This is a genuine scientific debate… it is not a manufactured controversy.” John Butterworth on the supposedly faster-than-light neutrinos

“If your funding programme has a zero failure rate, you’re doing it wrong”

Sigh. Goats and cancer. Try not to smoke, drink, eat or have unprotected sex with goats, okay?

Watch a prostate surgical robot peel the skin off a grape. Cool. Now imagine it doing that to your prostate. NYEARGH.

Mystery illness in Australia making parrots “drunk”

Why Brain Scanners Make Your Head Spin, and what it means for MRI scanning studies

I am koala, hear me roar

How the BBC’s dark forces of political correctness threaten the Christian era, or Why the Daily Mail have once again surpassed themselves.

The Soup That Is Killing the Ocean

By 2020, it should be possible (technologically, if not practically) to sequence every human genome in a year

After decades of research, we can now accurately measure a kilogram. (It weighs 2.2 pounds, right?)

Are slave-raiding ants really slave-raiders?

Carl zimmer asks “Do skunks smell their own odor? Do they mind?” Answer seems to be yes and yes.

“The device uses sunlight to rip apart molecules of water, just like a photosynthesizing leaf. ”

A striking case of predator avoidance in fish – sharks barrelling into a shoal

Apparently, NASA had a Congressionally-mandated goal of finding > 90% of planet-killing asteroids. Which it has now met

New evidence for *functional* plant RNA in the bloodstreams of people & cows. This is such an amazing story.

Terminal buzz gives bats their hunting edge

‘Autistic’ mice created and treated. Well, not really treated. Either way, the Mouse Research Council is really getting value for its money.

“You can adopt a HeroRAT of yr own.” In Thailand, giant rats are on their way to sniffing out land mines.

“We need a more systematic approach to animal experiments”

23andMe now offers whole-exome sequencing for $999!

“The dominant way of thinking about the role of science journalists historically was to view them as translators, or transmitters, of information. Now, however, a powerful metaphor for understanding their work as science critics is to see them as cartographers and guides.”

“You need to mentally redshift the color. If it’s green, it’s actually a little more yellow.” Fossilised beetle colours preserved after millions of years.

How a Failure With Measles Helped to Eradicate Smallpox

“There’s a lot to loathe about climate change. But if adventurers sip champagne after reaching Antarctica, it’s O.K. to cheer.” No, it’s not. Slap them in their smug faces.

Porcupines and tigers and serpent eagles, oh my. 10 video camera traps in the jungle, 1 mth of footage, 5 mins of edited video.

Dawkins’ Weasels Beat Monkeys at Replicating Shakespeare.

The hunt is on for BBC’s Amateur Scientist of the year competition

The last 100,000 years in human history by Razib Khan.

Traces of a Lost Language and Number System Discovered on the North Coast of Peru

Heh/wow/huh

Hummingbird smuggler caught with his pants down

Sleeping baby pandas. That is all.

A superb warning sign for the Twitter generation

The world’s most interesting subway maps. Although I heavily dispute the idea that NYC’s map is more famous than London’s

How to peel a head of garlic in less than 10 seconds

River dolphin fetus

“Full disclosure: I’m reviewing this book because I was asked to by the publisher.. I’m glad I didn’t pay for it”

This is a building that looks like an impaled head

An amusing Slate piece about working as a fact-checker of Cosmopolitan’s sex tips.

Heh. Almost there… Al…most… there…

Neal Stephenson’s entire handwritten manuscript for the Baroque Cycle (inc pen nibs & ink bottles)

British Wildlife Photography awards 2011

“You’re a total hairy bush viper.” 30 vetebrate common names potentially useful as insults.

“They Ate What?” Some unfortunate veterinary X-rays, including a dog that ate a dinosaur

What the British mean RT @NeilWithers: @carlzimmer http://t.co/NGqEnD4q”

Long exposure photos taken from the fronts of Tokyo trains

“All of life has been utterly, profoundly changed thanks to Facebook’s new features.”

Internet/journalism/society

The world’s first iPhone 5 review. Sort of.

George Monbiot discloses his salary, asks all journos to do the same. Hmm. The amount seems completely irrelevant; it’s the source that matters.

“Authors more interested in whether he loves her than whether she loves him

What misogyny looks like. This continuing treatment of Rebecca Watson is just appalling.

“Shrapnel, Leotard, Maverick, Boycott and Cardigan and other people who became nouns

“The more journalists can do to understand, and convey, the process of science as well as the findings, the better off everyone will be.” – Andy Revkin on finding reliable source in an age of too much info.

Reading the Daily Mail is nauseating, but what’s it like to write for them?

“Copy. You’re being hit with a green laser.” Wow, it’s really not a good idea to point a laser pointer at the sky

Tips on becoming a better writer

Megan Garber: Google News is treating news orgs’ willingness to credit others as a vector of trust

A network infrastructure for journalists online, by Paul Bradshaw

Data journalism, 1821 style.

“If This Then That” – a tool that lets you automate the internet.

“From religion to trend and from trend to infrastructure.” On open accessand the Internet as a disruptor.

How do scientists view fact-checking by science writers? With a related piece by Ananyo Bhattacharya and another related post from Al Dove, with a long discussion in which I have chipped.

Yesterday I wrote about the arsenic life saga, prompted by a long retrospective feature by Tom Clynes in Popular Science. While I recommend the piece, I expressed reservations because it passed along the “scientists besieged by bloggers” spin on the events, when the actual history doesn’t support that.

Clynes (whom I’ve never met) emailed me in the evening with this comments, which he allowed me to share:

Carl,

Thanks for your comment on my Popular Science feature on Felisa Wolfe-Simon’s arsenic-life saga. In some ways, I think you’re on target, though I would like to provide a bit of clarification: Throughout the story, when I convey an argument made by someone who’s on one side of the issue or another, it doesn’t mean that I necessarily buy into that argument.

To that end, I’d like to add a bit of context to a paragraph that you quote, regarding the storm of criticism and the paper’s authors going “underground.” You follow the excerpt with your comment that “Clynes has us believe that this barrage of extraordinary, brutal criticism (or perhaps questions from journalists) forced Wolf-Simon and her colleagues to go into witness protection.”

Actually, I don’t believe that, nor would I have my readers believe it. I think it would have been useful to your readers for you to have included my next paragraph, which makes it clear that I am in fact spotlighting both sides of a polarized dialogue regarding this particular point:

Microbiologist Jonathan Eisen of the University of California at Davis called the lack of response “absurd” and told Carl Zimmer from Slate, “They carried out science by press release and press conference. They are now hypocritical if they say that the only response should be in the scientific literature.”

Though I didn’t state my opinion in the story (better for readers to decide for themselves), I will here: I think that Eisen is on the money here.

Some other opinions: Do I think that the arsenic-life paper was flawed? Yes. Do I think it that some of its conclusions will be dissolved by further investigation? Yes. Do I believe that NASA’s hyped-up approach to publicizing what was actually a rather understated paper was ham-handed, and damaging to everyone involved? Big time.

Do I think the paper never should have been published? No. In a profession where young scientists are advised to avoid controversy as they build their careers, Wolfe-Simon pushed against a paradigm and sought answers to some very big questions. She passed through the same peer-review hoops (imperfect as they may be) at Science as other scientists must. Yes, her research was imperfect and yes, she likely overreached—but plenty of scientific papers are flawed, and many young researchers go too far. If scientists aren’t willing to subject themselves to the possibility of failure, science can’t possibly progress.

Critically, there’s nothing to indicate that Wolfe-Simon did anything unethical, which might have justified the shrill tone and sweeping proportions of the response—and the fact that she was singled out among the paper’s 11 authors. True, she was the lead author, and it was her hypothesis. But it’s surprising that Ron Oremland, the lab director and principal investigator, is rarely mentioned in the criticisms.

If my story has a bottom line, it’s in this quote by the University of Colorado’s Alan Townsend: “Absent major ethical violations, no junior scientist full of passion for an idea deserves crucifixion for a professional failure or two. If a paper is flawed, it should be dismissed. The scientist should not.”

I know this cat is unhappy, and I know it was probably really really upset, and I know I shouldn’t laugh at this.

But I did. A lot.

I’m a terrible person.

Tip o’ the hairball to my pal Chris Pirillo. Follow him on Google+.

Israeli and German scientists recently took the plunge into the murky, salty Dead Sea, making what they say is the first scientific diving expedition there. Scouring the seafloor, they saw small freshwater springs—with mats of salt-loving, never-before-seen microorganisms coating the surface of nearby craters. In these waters—too salty for large animals, too rich in magnesium for many bacteria—seeing so much life was a surprise.

While floating in the Dead Sea is a popular tourist pastime, scuba-ing into its depths is a difficult and dangerous endeavor. Since the salty water is so buoyant, the divers had to carry 90 pounds each to weigh them down. Swallowing some of the salty water—a not-implausible occurrence during a dive—would make the larynx swell up, leading the diver to suffocate. If that weren’t enough, getting the water in your eyes would be painful at best, and potentially blinding. The scientists wore full face masks during their dive, and apparently weren’t scared off; they’re headed back down for a follow-up study in October.

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!.

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!!!!

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?

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.

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

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!

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 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.

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.

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.

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