A couple of weeks ago, astronomers spotted a star exploding in the nearby face-on spiral M101. They quickly determined it was a Type Ia, the kind used to calibrate the cosmic distance scale, and therefore a star of exceeding importance: we don’t see them close by (well, if 20+ million light years is "close", which [...]

I was interviewed by WGN radio host Mike McConnell this morning about the new Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter pictures of the Apollo landing sites that were released yesterday. The interview is online, or you can grab the file directly. We talked about why Hubble can’t see the landing site hardware, how the astronauts walked on the [...]

Giant pixels pasted onto tanks can now sense the general pattern of infrared energy, or heat, distributed around a bucolic mountain meadow or windy desert and camouflage the vehicle accordingly, so heat-spying eyes will be none the wiser. Such adaptive cloaking has been on the wishlist of world governments for decades, but most attempts so [...]

[Last year, on September 13, 2010, I posted an essay about how I had spent my time a couple of days earlier. I rarely repost older articles, but my feelings haven't changed and I don't have anything to add to it (though I made some minor edits for clarity). A lot of people are posting [...]

UARS Satellite. Credit: NASA

Around and around it goes and where it lands nobody knows.  I am talking about NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS).  The satellite was put into orbit by the space shuttle Discovery in 1991 and in this case the satellite is in a decaying orbit.

Decaying orbit, sounds bad and well, it is kind of, it means every time the object, goes around the Earth it gets a little closer.  Normally we would expect things like this to burn up in the atmosphere, but UARS weighs in at six-tons and not all of it will burn up. There are according to a UARS Casualty Risk Assessment done in 2002 a total of 26 potentially hazardous objects expected to survive with a total mass of 532 kg.

The estimated human casualty risk?  1 in 3200.  Please understand this doesn’t mean you in particular, merely the chance for someone somewhere. 

Where is it expected to come in?  Somewhere between 57 degrees North and South latitude and right now it can’t be pinned down any closer so it’s anybodies guess.  A lot of times there is fuel aboard to steer the satellite into a safe deorbit, but in this case the fuel ran out in 2005.  Now there is a LOT of land and water that could be impacted with no consequence, but hey, 1 in 3200.

So, stay tuned as they used to say.  Impact time is expected in late September to early October.  The satellite is being monitored and we should have a pretty good idea where and when re-entry will be hopefully before it happens.

Now about the riddle.  Beats the stuffing out of me.  I’ve not heard a peep from Marian and I just hope all is well.  I wasn’t ready to put one together so well there you go.

Top picks Patrick Keeling teaches his students to make their own DIY microscopes. Anne Casselman describes it *beautifully* It’s worth reading this piece on John Hunstman by Tom Chivers just for the brilliant football/evolution analogy Jawless fish, an epic primer on the birth of vertebrates. When Doctors Become Patients: moving story of a doctor who [...]

This morning at 13:08:53 UT (09:08:53 Eastern US time) NASA successfully launched GRAIL, its latest mission to the Moon! This was the third launch attempt, after high winds scrubbed the first try, and the second was postponed to check out some system issues. GRAIL is actually two spacecraft which will fly in tandem around the [...]

Yesterday I went out for my first real bike ride in a couple of weeks (Dragon*Con took up a lot of time!) and had a wonderful excursion. Besides seeing the Mork and Mindy house (which I’ve biked and driven past a million times but never stopped to look at), I saw this cute couple by [...]

Magnified view of part of Tisdale 2 rock. Click for larger. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/USGS

First, about the image:
The Mars Rover Opportunity took this picture of the texture on part of a rock called “Tisdale 2″ located on the Martian crater Endveavor.  The portion of the rock pictured here is only about 1.2 inches (3 cm) across.

The texture is called brecciated with broken rock fragments called clasts fused together and embedded in the rocks.

Second, no riddle tomorrow.  Time for a Saturday off from riddledom.  Kind of works out well since it is a holiday weekend here in the states.  Don’t worry Marian will be back riddling up a storm pretty soon.

Posting this week has been almost automated due to the worry Hurricane Irene would really deal me a blow.  Turns out not so much, BUT major damage starts just eight miles south and a couple miles east of here and whew, it’s bad.

Finally, the “happenings” of a couple weeks ago turned out okay.

Cassini took this image as it closed in on the Saturn moon Hyperion. Click for larger. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Hyperion always reminds me of a sponge.

Here’s the Cassini caption:

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured new views of Saturn’s oddly shaped moon Hyperion during its encounter with this cratered body on Thursday, Aug. 25. Raw images were acquired as the spacecraft flew past the moon at a distance of about 15,500 miles (25,000 kilometers), making this the second closest encounter.

Hyperion is a small moon — just 168 miles (270 kilometers) across. It has an irregular shape and surface appearance, and it rotates chaotically as it tumbles along in orbit. This odd rotation prevented scientists from predicting exactly what terrain the spacecraft’s cameras would image during this flyby.
However, this flyby’s closeness has likely allowed Cassini’s cameras to map new territory. At the very least, it will help scientists improve color measurements of the moon. It will also help them determine how the moon’s brightness changes as lighting and viewing conditions change, which can provide insight into the texture of the surface. The color measurements provide additional information about different materials on the moon’s deeply pitted surface.
The latest raw images of Hyperion are online at: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/photos/raw/.
Cassini’s closest encounter with Hyperion was on September 26, 2005, when the spacecraft flew approximately 310 miles (500 kilometers) above the moon’s surface.
Closeup view of Hyperion taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Cassini’s next flyby of Hyperion will be on Sept. 16, 2011, when it passes the tumbling moon at a distance of about 36,000 miles (58,000 kilometers).

Clicking the image will take you to Hubblesite and a larger version. Credit: NASA, ESA, and N. Lehner and C. Howk (University of Notre Dame)

From Hubblesite:

The long-term forecast for the Milky Way is cloudy with gaseous rain. A study by Nicolas Lehner and Christopher Howk of the University of Notre Dame concludes that massive clouds of ionized gas are raining down from our galaxy’s halo and intergalactic space and will continue to provide fuel for the Milky Way to keep forming stars. Using the Hubble Space Telescope’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph they measured for the first time the distances to huge, fast-moving clouds of ionized gas previously seen covering a large fraction of the sky.

Check out this sunrise from the ISS.  Can you imagine seeing this every day?  Not just once, but sixteen times a day?  I got this in my mail from NASA, and momentarily forgot to breathe.   Here’s what NASA says about it:

A 3D look at the equatorial region of Vesta from the Dawn spacecraft. Click for a larger version. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Get those 3D glasses out and have a look. Don’t have 3D glasses, you need to make some, red and blue cellophane. Put the red on the right, don’t know if it makes a difference but my glasses are that way.

NASA’s Caption (click here to go to the original page with larger versions of the image):

This anaglyph image of Vesta’s equator was put together from two clear filter images, taken on July 24, 2011 by the framing camera instrument aboard NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. The anaglyph image shows hills, troughs, ridges and steep craters. The framing camera has a resolution of about 524 yards (480 meters) per pixel. Use red-green (or red-blue) glasses to view in 3-D (left eye: red; right eye: green [or blue]).

The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. It is a project of the Discovery Program managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., designed and built the Dawn spacecraft.

The framing cameras were developed and built under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, with significant contributions by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering, Braunschweig. The framing camera project is funded by NASA, the Max Planck Society and DLR. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena. More information about Dawn is online at http://www.nasa.gov/dawn and http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov .

Figure 1: Image editing procedure: the nude woman's detailed face (1) was morphed with the portrait picture of the participant (2). The morphing software produces two output images, a shape-only morph (3a) and a combined shape-colour morph (3b). In a second step, the shape-colour morph is used as a semi-transparent layer on top of the shape-only morph. All artefacts of the morphing procedure are eliminated. The resulting image (4) was photo-mounted on the woman's body in a last step (5). The resulting image was used as a stimulus (the image was not masked in the experiment).

“Although humans usually prefer mates that resemble themselves, mating preferences can vary with context. Stress has been shown to alter mating preferences in animals, but the effects of stress on human mating preferences are unknown. Here, we investigated whether stress alters men’s preference for self-resembling mates. Participants first underwent a cold-pressor test (stress induction) or a control procedure. Then, participants viewed either neutral pictures or pictures of erotic female nudes whose facial characteristics were computer-modified to resemble either the participant or another participant, or were not modified, while startle eyeblink responses were elicited by ...

These spiral generators scavenge power when the beetle beats its wings.

What’s the News: Building tiny fly-like robots—for spying, search and rescue, and so on—has a long history in robotics. But some researchers, citing the challenge of building agile, dynamic machines at that scale, have turned to Mother Nature instead and made living beetles into cyborgs, controlling their flight via neural implants.

Finding a power source that’s light enough for these beetles to port around has been difficult, but now, a team of roboticists have found that harvesting power from their beating wings could be a way to make these ‘borgs go battery-less.

How the Heck:

The researchers mounted piezolectric generators, which produce power when they’re bent or compressed, on the thoraxes of green june beetles near where the wings attach.
Trying out two different shapes, spiral and beam-like, with two different designs each, they were able to harvest about 45 µW of power from each beetle, and demonstrated that the closer they got to the base of the beetles’ wings, the more they could scavenge. Right near the base, they could increase their power output to 115 µW.
They estimate that if the generator can be hooked ...

Just some quick notes, to fill my quota give you some interesting reading:

1) Scientific American has a great article online about why it’s important to vaccinate, and how to talk to parents about it. [via George Valenzuela]

2) Speaking of which, the Autism Science Foundation — a non-profit that supports real research into autism, instead of trying to link it to vaccines despite all the evidence — was chosen as the number 1 startup charity in the "Disabilities" category by Philanthropedia/Guidestar. Congrats to them! [via Dawn Crawford]

3) The Discovery Institute isn’t completely honest? Unpossible!

4) Bill Nye helps create a sundial at Cornell University that glows when the Sun reaches its daily peak in the sky. [via Beth Quittman (my agent!)]

5) Frying pans that look like planets. Seriously. Very cool.

New York Times R&D Lab: Retail and the “magic mirror” from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

You weren’t thinking tablets and smart phones would stay cool forever, were you? They’ll go the way of the Apple Newton and the Commodore soon enough, and the New York Times will be prepared, reports Neiman Labs. The ol’ Gray Lady is preparing for the next great revolution: bathroom mirrors.

In this video taken at the paper’s R&D labs, Megan Graber of Neiman watches NYT Creative Technologist Brian House put the bathroom mirror 2.0 (codenamed “the magic mirror”) through its paces, showing how the device can respond to voice commands and even take note of RFID-tagged medicine bottles resting nearby, pulling up coupons from manufacturers and prescription information a la Internet of Things. Like the giant-iPad-style table top they’re also working on at the lab, the mirror can show you the Times front page, the latest videos, and so on while you’re brushing your teeth or having breakfast.

Some newshounds will no doubt thrill at having the latest info right there in the bathroom. Myself, I’m not sure about the wisdom of seeing the morning’s civil wars, famines, and ...

Get yer streetwalking permit here!

From 8:15 pm to 6:00 am each day, prostitution is legal in Germany, where working call girls staff brothels, sauna clubs, and other such establishments. In the city of Bonn, which, uh, “boasts” around 200 prostitutes, an average of 20 freelancers go cruising each night, picking up clients on the street and heading to garage-like structures called “consummation areas” the city put up especially for that purpose. They’ve thought of everything, those Germans!

Girls in the various brothel-like establishments have always been subject to a prostitution tax, but streetwalkers, apparently, haven’t being paying. Now, though, the city has a way to make things fair for everyone: a parking meter for prostitutes.

The meter looks just like the sidewalk ticket-dispensers you’ve probably used in numerous cities to park your car, but for about $8.70, this one dispenses a pass allowing the holder to cruise for johns all night. When the city emptied one after the first night, it yielded a haul of $375, prompting various media outlets to comment on how honorable the city’s prostitutes must be. But one has to wonder how many people just bought a ticket for the novelty and ...

I was going to make an empassioned plea about how science does really make a lot of stuff better, but then decided that this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip was too funny to try to add any snark to it.

I’m just glad Zach didn’t draw the science advisor to look like me.

Related posts:

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Think you’re a survivor? You’ve got nothing on the cane toad, former native of Central and South America, now scourge of Australia. To snuff out their competition for resources, cane toad tadpoles will actually cannibalize nearby cane toad eggs. And all those eggs the tadpoles are too full to gobble up? Well, researchers recently learned that the hardy amphibians have that covered, too: cane toad tadpoles release chemicals into the water that stunt the growth of developing embryos.

Scientists already knew that cane toads communicate with pheromones and use these chemical signals to locate tasty eggs. They also wondered if the pheromones have another, more insidious, purpose. Biologists at the University of Sydney set up a simple experiment to find out. They placed cane toad eggs in 20 containers filled partially with water; in 10 of those containers, they added tadpoles and separated them from the eggs with mesh screens.

The result: five days after hatching, the amphibians that developed with drooling tadpoles next door were 24 percent shorter and weighed 41 percent less than the isolated groups. Moreover, 40 percent fewer exposed tadpoles survived beyond 20 days, ...