Juno being readied for fueling in June for next launch next week. Click for larger. Image Credit: NASA/KSC

The Juno spacecraft has been mated to the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket that will propel the craft to Jupiter, hopefully starting the voyage next week.

If the launch does not happen on August 5^th, no problem, the launch window extends to August 26^th.

Once Juno reaches Jupiter after a five-year journey it will enter a year long orbit with the following goals in mind:Determine how much water is in Jupiter’s atmosphere, which helps determine which planet formation theory is correct (or if new theories are needed)

• Look deep into Jupiter’s atmosphere to measure composition, temperature, cloud motions and other properties
• Map Jupiter’s magnetic and gravity fields, revealing the planet’s deep structure
• Explore and study Jupiter’s magnetosphere near the planet’s poles, especially the auroras – Jupiter’s northern and southern lights – providing new insights about how the planet’s enormous magnetic force field affects its atmosphere.

Once the mission is over Juno will be de-orbited into Jupiter.

Naturally there will be more info coming on the launch.

Visit the NASA Juno site for more detail about the mission.

Vesta from a distance of about 6,500 miles (10,500 kilometers) away from the protoplanet Vesta. The smallest detail visible is about 1.2 miles (2.0 km). Click for larger. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Whoa! Hardly like the speck of light I’m used to seeing.
From the Dawn website:

July 21, 2011 – PASADENA, Calif. — Dawn took this image while it was orbiting around Vesta, traveling from the day side to the night side. The large structure near the south pole that showed up so prominently in previous images is visible in the center of the illuminated surface. Compared to other images, more of the surface beneath the spacecraft is in the shadow of night. Vesta turns on its axis once very five hours and 20 minutes.

Dawn entered orbit around Vesta on July 15, 2011, and will spend a year orbiting the body. Next stop on its itinerary will be an encounter with the dwarf planet Ceres.
The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, for NASA. The University of California, Los Angeles, is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. The Dawn framing cameras have been developed and built under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, with significant contributions by DLR German Aerospace Center, 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 the Max Planck Society, DLR, and NASA/JPL.

The Black hole of NGC 3115 consuming gas. Click for larger. Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Alabama/K.Wong et al, Optical: ESO/VLT

It’s been a while since I posted a Chandra picture so here you go.    You can get larger versions of the image at the link below

From the Chandra website:

The galaxy NGC 3115 is shown here in a composite image of data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). Using the Chandra image, the flow of hot gas toward the supermassive black hole in the center of this galaxy has been imaged. This is the first time that clear evidence for such a flow has been observed in any black hole.

The Chandra data are shown in blue and the optical data from the VLT are colored gold. The point sources in the X-ray image are mostly binary stars containing gas that is being pulled from a star to a stellar-mass black hole or a neutron star. The inset features the central portion of the Chandra image, with the black hole located in the middle. No point source is seen at the position of the black hole, but instead a plateau of X-ray emission coming from both hot gas and the combined X-ray emission from unresolved binary stars is found.

To detect the black hole’s effects, astronomers subtracted the X-ray signal from binary stars from that of the hot gas in the galaxy’s center. Then, by studying the hot gas at different distances from the black hole, astronomers observed a critical threshold: where the motion of gas first becomes dominated by the supermassive black hole’s gravity and falls inwards. The distance from the black hole where this occurs is known as the “Bondi radius.”

As gas flows toward a black hole it becomes squeezed, making it hotter and brighter, a signature now confirmed by the X-ray observations. The researchers found the rise in gas temperature begins at about 700 light years from the black hole, giving the location of the Bondi radius. This suggests that the black hole in the center of NGC 3115 has a mass of about two billion times that of the Sun, supporting previous results from optical observations. This would make NGC 3115 the nearest billion-solar-mass black hole to Earth.

NGC 3115 is located about 32 million light years from Earth and is classified as a so-called lenticular galaxy because it contains a disk and a central bulge of stars, but without a detectable spiral pattern.

Did you see this?  Take a look:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s what NASA has to say about it:

WASHINGTON — Astronomers studying observations taken by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission have discovered the first known “Trojan” asteroid orbiting the sun along with Earth.

Trojans are asteroids that share an orbit with a planet near stable points in front of or behind the planet. Because they constantly lead or follow in the same orbit as the planet, they never can collide with it. In our solar system, Trojans also share orbits with Neptune, Mars and Jupiter. Two of Saturn’s moons share orbits with Trojans.

Scientists had predicted Earth should have Trojans, but they have been difficult to find because they are relatively small and appear near the sun from Earth’s point of view.

“These asteroids dwell mostly in the daylight, making them very hard to see,” said Martin Connors of Athabasca University in Canada, lead author of a new paper on the discovery in the July 28 issue of the journal Nature. “But we finally found one, because the object has an unusual orbit that takes it farther away from the sun than what is typical for Trojans. WISE was a game-changer, giving us a point of view difficult to have at Earth’s surface.”

The WISE telescope scanned the entire sky in infrared light from January 2010 to February 2011. Connors and his team began their search for an Earth Trojan using data from NEOWISE, an addition to the WISE mission that focused in part on near-Earth objects, or NEOs, such as asteroids and comets. NEOs are bodies that pass within 28 million miles (45 million kilometers) of Earth’s path around the sun. The NEOWISE project observed more than 155,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and more than 500 NEOs, discovering 132 that were previously unknown.

The team’s hunt resulted in two Trojan candidates. One called 2010 TK7 was confirmed as an Earth Trojan after follow-up observations with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

The asteroid is roughly 1,000 feet (300 meters) in diameter. It has an unusual orbit that traces a complex motion near a stable point in the plane of Earth’s orbit, although the asteroid also moves above and below the plane. The object is about 50 million miles (80 million kilometers) from Earth. The asteroid’s orbit is well-defined and for at least the next 100 years, it will not come closer to Earth than 15 million miles (24 million kilometers).

Check this out from Rasmussen College.

Or do you know anybody who does?  Looking for the User guide by George Lovi.  Pop me an email if you can help.

What is life?

If you ask me that question professionally, I’ll tell you that “life” is a state of being.  Ask me personally, and I’ll tell you it’s the inevitable result of the mechanics of the universe.  We are all star stuff (as Sagan pointed out).  Life is present in almost all environments on Earth, and we may find that it’s present in almost all environments in the cosmos.  And the cosmos is a big, big place.

The Hubble Space Telescope showed us just how big the cosmos really is

There are many theories for the origin of life on Earth.  We know it wasn’t always here; as far as we can tell, for a long time after the Earth formed it was sterile.  It started out molten, remember, and molten lava is one environment where we have not yet found life.  Then, almost as soon as the Earth becomes capable of supporting life, there it is.  Within a very short time (all things considered), the fossil record explodes with diverse life forms.  There are mass extinctions, but life holds on… and then comes surging back with greater diversity.  It’s incredible, tenacious, and magnificent.

As people interested in the strange wonder of the universe, I know you give more than a passing thought to the ‘question’ of life.  Where did it come from?  Was the young Earth seeded with bacteria from asteroid impacts?  That’s a very promising hypothesis, by the way.  Did it develop in a primordial soup of amino acids?  Experiments with that idea have also shown some promising results lately.

critters

Before I go on, lets none of us get cocky or condescending about bacterial life.  You look at a critter under a nice, strong microscope and you’ll see yourself in miniature.  They have everything we have, only we call them “organelles” instead of “organs”.  Remember, there IS a microbiologist present, and we do love our critters.

I would be very interested in hearing your opinions.  How do you think life started on Earth?  Do you think life was planned and placed by a creator?  Do you think it just happened in the primordial ooze?  Was it seeded here from space?  Maybe a combination of all three?  Whatever you think, tell me why you believe it.  Scientifically.  For instance, if you believe the universe was created by design, tell me why scientifically.  The Bible is not a science source, so don’t use that as your reference.

Plato says, "Do not argue science with philosophy."

This is a completely open field.  We are at the point where nobody knows what happened, but we have some great ideas.  I believe that Tom and I have the best readers on the net, and I respect your opinions.  I’d like to hear them.

“Two theories of sexual risk taking (disinhibition and alcohol myopia) were tested using genital measures of sexual response and computer measures of sexual risk propensity. A total of 44 men and women completed two sessions comparing responses to erotic films while consuming alcohol (breath alcohol doses were .025 g/kg and .08 g/kg) or juice alone. After consuming alcohol, more sexual arousal was reported in response to neutral films and at a breath alcohol level of .08 g/kg as compared to no alcohol. Genital responses for men and women increased during sexual films, but men did not respond as strongly when breath alcohol level was .08 g/kg. Intentions to have intercourse with a new partner at baseline predicted the level of sexual arousal reported. As self-reported sexual arousal increased in response to sexual films and higher alcohol dose, the intent to engage in intercourse with a new partner increased. Alcohol dose was not related to later sexual intercourse intentions. With no direct relationship of alcohol and intercourse intentions, results appear more consistent with a disinhibition model of sexual arousal.”

Photo: flickr/ albany_tim

Related ...

1) Post from the past: Why does race matter for women?

2) Weird search query of the week: “hustler buyuk memeli.”

3) Comment of the week, in response to “Smart educated men less likely to think cheating always wrong”:

BTW – the most interesting bit in that chart is the difference between atheists and agnostics. It makes sense when I think about it. To say one is an atheist rather than an agnostic requires a level of certainty towards ones beliefs. If there was a way to tease out relativism I’d lay good odds more agnostics are relativists than atheists are.

4) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:

A National Academy of Sciences panel, chaired by Helen Quinn, has released a new report that seeks to identify “the key scientific practices, concepts and ideas that all students should learn by the time they complete high school.” An ambitious undertaking, but a sensible one. At the very least, efforts like this serve to focus attention on what’s important across a wide variety of K-12 curricula, and at best it could help prod schools (or states, really) across the country into teaching more coherent and useful science to kids. Here’s the web page for the report, a summary (pdf), and the report itself (pdf, free after you register).

So what are the core ideas of science? They are all listed in the summary report, and divided into three categories. The first category is “Scientific and Engineering Practices,” and includes such laudable concepts as ” Analyzing and interpreting data.” The second category is “Crosscutting Concepts That Have Common Application Across Fields,” by which they mean things like “Scale, proportion, and quantity” or ” Stability and change.” It’s great that the organizational scheme emphasizes ideas that stretch across disciplinary boundaries, but there is definitely a danger that the resulting items come off as a bit vague. The secret to success here will be how they can be implemented, with concrete examples.

The third category is the nitty-gritty, “Core Ideas in Four Disciplinary Areas,” namely “Physical Sciences,” “Life Sciences,” “Earth and Space Sciences,” and “Engineering, Technology, and the Applications of Science.” (Math is not within the report’s purview.) And here are the actual core ideas proposed for the physical sciences:

• PS 1: Matter and its interactions
• PS 2: Motion and stability: Forces and interactions
• PS 3: Energy
• PS 4: Waves and their applications in technologies for information transfer

These mostly seem like good choices. If you’re wondering where the universe and solar system fit it, remember that “Earth and Space Sciences” is a separate category. The crucial fact that matter is made of atoms appears in PS 1, and the forces of nature appear in PS 2. Personally I think that it would be nice to have something more explicit about the relationship between the idealized physics-teacher’s world and the messy real world — entropy, friction, dissipation, complexity, etc. But you can’t keep everyone happy.

Having “waves” in there is a great idea. This was an addition to the other points, all three of which were spelled out in related previous reports. From a strictly conceptual point of view (although perhaps not from a pedagogical one), I would love to see “waves” replaced by “fields” — a field is an entity which takes a value at every point in some space, while a wave is simply a ripple in a field. There is a very fundamental duality between particles/objects and fields/waves, which would be nice to make clear at an early stage. (Mathematically speaking, the worldline of a particle is a map from the real line to spacetime, while a simple field is a map from spacetime to the real line. But you don’t have to go that deep.) Fields are not intrinsically an advanced concept; temperature is a field, as is the velocity or any other feature of the air, as is the altitude of a topographical map, or of course the height of ocean waves. Not to mention gravity, electricity, and magnetism. Someday maybe this will be seventh-grade stuff.

Whether or not these concepts and the grander conceptual scheme actually turn out to be useful will depend much more on implementation than on this original formulation. The easy part is over, in other words. The four ideas above seem vague at first glance, but they are spelled out in detail in the full report, with many examples and very specific benchmarks. (“By the end of grade 8. All substances are made from some 100 different types of atoms, which combine with one another in various ways.”) Sadly, the U.S. is burdened by a laughably inefficient system of local control of public schools, so any form of large-scale change is extremely difficult. But it will never happen if we don’t try.

Chris Mooney pointed me to a report on a study which finds that white males are the most sanguine in relation to climate change. Unfortunately there wasn’t a link to the full report that I could see. But no worries, the GSS added a variable, TEMPGEN1, which asks: “In general, do you think that a rise in the world’s temperature caused by climate change is….”

1 – Extremely dangerous for the environment
2 – Very dangerous
3 – Somewhat dangerous
4 – Not very dangerous, or
5 – Not dangerous at all for the environment?

Below is a bar plot which illustrates the result by demographic:

Scientists may soon give your braking leg a break. In a recent study in the Journal of Neural Engineering, researchers at the Berlin Institute of Technology monitored the brain signals of drivers and found that they could detect the study participants’ intent to stop before they actually stomped on the brakes. The findings could someday lead to automated braking technologies that help avoid devastating car crashes.

In the study, the researchers had 18 participants drive along virtual roads in a racing simulator that includes winding streets and oncoming traffic—the drivers had to maintain a certain distance behind the computer-controlled cars in front of them, which braked at random intervals. While the participants drove, the researchers tracked their brain signals using caps fitted with EEG sensors.

With the EEG data, the researchers saw when the drivers were going to brake a whole 13 hundredths of a second (or 130 milliseconds) before they did it. At 65 mph, this tiny difference in reaction time can reduce braking distance by 12 feet. “While this may not seem [like] much, it may be enough to prevent accidents,” computer scientist and co-author Stefan Haufe told ABC News. The researchers are now planning ...

Is that an alpha or a beta?

Sometimes you need a little help from your friends. Taking a leaf from reCaptcha‘s book, archaeologists from the Egypt Exploration Society and Oxford University have taken a voluminous store of ancient Egyptian papyri online in a bid to have web users transcribe the fragments, which come from a lost city known to its inhabitants as the City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish.

The papyri were discovered in the early 20th century, and among them have been a lost version of the gospel, in which Christ exorcises demons, and literary works by Euripides and others. But other texts in the cache, which dates from an era three centuries after the birth of Christ when Egypt was ruled by Greeks, appear to consist of household notes, records of contracts, and other mundanities (including a loan taken out by a sausage maker), prompting the team to call their project Ancient Lives. Want to find out what else was going on in 300 AD Egypt? Just zoom in on a scrap, type out the Greek letters, and click save—once they are transcribed, translators can get to work. Join in here.

(via Wired)

I received a few emails, tweets, and comments on the blog yesterday asking about an Op/Ed article in Forbes magazine that claims that new NASA data will "blow [a] gaping hole in global warming alarmism".

Except, as it turns out, not so much. The article is just so much hot air (see what I did there?) and climate scientists say the paper on which it’s based is fundamentally flawed and flat-out wrong.

It’s clear after reading just a few words that this article is hugely biased. The use of the word "alarmist" and its variants appeared no fewer than 14 times, 16 if you include the picture caption and the headline. The word "alarmist" is pretty clearly slanted against the overwhelming consensus among climate scientists that the Earth is warming up, and that humans are the reason*.

Still, what is the article actually saying?

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less ...

Someone had to say this eventually, and now, someone has.

It has been apparent for a while (at least anecdotally) that conservative white men (CWM) in the U.S. are more prone than the average bear towards climate change denial. Now, based on new research by social scientists Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap, we have the figures to back that up, including the following:

— 14% of the general public doesn’t worry about climate change at all, but among CWMs the percentage jumps to 39%.

— 32% of adults deny there is a scientific consensus on climate change, but 59% of CWMs deny what the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists have said.

— 3 adults in 10 don’t believe recent global temperature increases are primarily caused by human activity. Twice that many – 6 CWMs out of every ten – feel that way

Such are the data, but what are the underlying reasons? I’m going to say more about this on Monday–speaking from my unique white male perspective–but for now, just check out the study.

I don’t get a chance very often to combine two previous posts, but I was thinking recently about planetary nebulae — winds of gas blown off by dying stars — and remembered my very favorite one in the whole sky, Abell 39:

[Click to ennebulenate.]

Isn’t that awesome? It’s like it’s right out of Star Trek. I’ve written about the giant haloes surrounding some planetary nebulae before, and also about why some objects look like smoke rings. In a (nut)shell, as a star like the Sun begins its long, slow path to dying, it expands into a red giant and blows off a thick wind of matter. This material expands spherically in most cases, streaming off in all directions into space and forming what’s called a giant outer halo.

In most planetaries (like the famous Cat’s Eye nebula, and the less famous but also cool NGC 6826) the outer halo slams into material floating in interstellar space, causing it to get all clumpy or form a bright rim as the surrounding matter gets plowed up. But the ...

The sequencing of the complete Neanderthals genome was one of the highlights of last year, not just because of the technical achievement involved, but because it confirmed something extraordinary about our own ancestry. It showed that everyone outside of Africa can trace around 1-4% of their genes to Neanderthals. Our ancestors must have bred with Neanderthals on their way out of Africa.

Then, later in the year, the same team revealed another ancient genome. This one belonged to a group of people called Denisovans, known only from a single finger bone and a tooth. They too had left genetic heirlooms in modern people. Around 5-7% of the genes of Melanesians (people from Papua New Guinea, Fiji and other Pacific islands) came from the Denisovans.

In this week’s issue of New Scientist, I’ve got a feature that explores our patchwork origins. I looked at what these ancient genomes mean for our understanding of human evolution. I also considered some intriguing questions like whether other Denisovan fossils have already been found, whether this human pattern is applicable to other animal species, how much you can tell from modern genomes alone, and whether we’ll ever ...

What’s the News: An international team of researchers, led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has learned that large magnetic waves are partly to blame for the Sun’s immensely hot corona. The study, published in the journal Nature, also suggests that the waves could be the driving force behind the solar wind.

What’s the Context:

The corona is the outer atmosphere of the Sun, which is only visible by the naked eye during a solar eclipse. It has fascinated solar physicists for decades because it’s over 20 times hotter than the surface of the sun—you’d expect that the further away you get from a heat source, the cooler it gets.
One possible explanation for the corona’s extreme temperature has been Alfvén waves, first proposed by Nobel Prize-winner Hannes Alfvén. Alfvén waves are high-speed magnetic oscillations thought to travel along the Sun’s magnetic field lines, transporting large amounts of energy (in the ...

Our cells are packed with various protein-stuffed sacs, each dedicated to carrying out essential tasks. One kind of organelle is peculiar, though. Mitochondria are jellybean-shaped structures whose jobs include making the fuel that our cells use to power everything they do. What makes mitochondria strange is that they carry their own DNA. It’s not a lot of DNA–just 37 genes–but mitochondria can make extra copies of it as they grow and divide. In other words, they act an awful lot like bacteria.

About a century ago, Russian biologists proposed that mitochondria actually started out as bacteria, which set up house in our single-celled ancestors. In the 1960s, University of Massachusetts biologist Lynn Margulis resurrected the idea, pointing to certain features in mitochondria, like their double membrane, found in bacteria but not in other organelles. In the 1970s, biologists began to invent the tools that allowed them to look at the DNA in mitochondria. As predicted, that DNA matched DNA from bacteria, not from animals.

Acquiring mitochondria over 2 billion years ago was a pivotal moment in our evolution. We are eukaryotes, as are trees, mushrooms, and amoebae. We all carry mitochondria (or ...

If you or someone you know is a student at Yale, check out the class I’m teaching this fall. It’s called Writing about Science and the Environment (cross-listed as EVST 215 and ENGL 459). You can find out about it on the Yale Online Course Information site, where I’ve just posted the syllabus.