Things I have thought about today, in no particular order:

Gamma-ray bursts

Lightning

A heretofore undetected but potentially densely-populated class of objects in the solar system

Laundry

Why my phone sometimes rings audibly and other times chooses not to

The electron column density in a magnetic bubble after a nuclear detonation in the upper atmosphere

Ice cream sandwiches

Mars

Social networking and astronomy

Temporarily misplacing my wallet last night

Suborbital rockets and their potential for astronomy and tourism

My cat

Feel free to do with this information as you wish.

We’re a week into the Vancouver Olympics, and if you haven’t had your fill of world-class athletes frolicking on the ice in frilly clothing, playing ice shuffleboard with 4o-plus-pound stones, or hurtling downhill at terrifying speed, don’t worry: There’s more than a week left to go. And there will be feats of dizzying daring and velocity, since Olympians don’t settle for just terrifying speed when there’s a chance to attain ridiculous speed, or even ludicrous speed. Thankfully, the Olympics are a bastion of technology, not just sport.

Take bobsledding. Team USA has been working with the Exa Corporation to develop the most aerodynamic sled possible, by computationally mapping fluid dynamics of air rushing past the sled. Says Exa’s Brad Duncan, “We’ve heard that some other countries are using more traditional processes where they do testing in wind tunnels…. That’s where the U.S. team was able to leapfrog the competition, was to do digital testing” [LiveScience]. The sleds could reach up to 95 miles an hour in the race, and designer Bob Cuneo says the sled design is a huge factor. Ultimately, Cuneo estimates that about a third of the team’s success in Vancouver comes down to engineering [Popular Mechanics].

Then there’s curling. Every time the winter Olympics roll around the game attracts weird curiosity and lame participatory journalism (and this time even a Simpsons episode). Scientists have started investigating the science behind guiding the stone down the ice to its target, the house, through the player’s vigorous sweeping. According to exercise physiologist John Bradley, sweepers can get their heart rates up to 170 to 200 beats per minute. Still, curlers’ physiques usually draw some chuckles. “Since most of the curlers in the world are in colder climates, you’re not going to see bronzed, beach physiques curling very often,” said Jonathan Reeser, a sports injury epidemiologist, [Fox News] who engages in curling himself.

The reason curling sweepers do all that sweeping is to change the temperature of the ice in front of the stone, and Bradley’s research helped to show the ideal way to do it. When the stone is traveling faster it is more effective to sweep faster because it enables sweepers to cover the same spot of ice more than once and raise its temperature higher. “And if the stone’s traveling slower then you can begin to put more downward pressure into the ice” [Fox News], he says.

One could go on and on, as all the Olympic sports are intertwined with technology. But there are a mountain of other tech stories, because even putting on the Olympics is a huge technological achievement (as one sees when things go wrong, like the glitches that began during the opening ceremony and that have continued to plague the games). CNET reports that it will take more than 40,000 Ethernet ports and 7,000 two-way radios to keep the games going. In addition, this year’s Games make a significant change in the technology setup. In past years, organizers set up separate data and voice networks, but this year all the video, data, and voice will traverse one massive Internet Protocol network set up by Atos Origin, Bell Canada, Avaya, and others [CNET].

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Image: flickr / Bensonkua

Anyone who uses Facebook or Twitter is probably familiar with Bit.ly or TinyURL.com–Web services that shortens lengthy Web addresses to fit within limited character counts. These truncated URLs don’t make it clear what page the link redirects to, but most people have gotten used to that fact; users happily click a shortened URL without worrying that it might actually send you to a site that starts a computer virus download.

Now, a new website called ShadyURL.com is generating a few laughs for its service that claims to “make your Twitter followers a little more uneasy.” The web service shortens web addresses into “suspicious and frightening” links that would anyone think hard before clicking on.

For example:
Facebook.com became http://5z8.info/56-DEPLOY-TROJAN-287.mw9—-_i6f3e__init_download
Twitter.com turned into http://5z8.info/trojan_j7r7z_inject_worm

When we typed in DiscoverMagazine.com, here’s what we got:
http://5z8.info/friendster-of-sex_m8×9r_-OPEN-WEBCAM—START-RECORD–

Rest assured, these URLs don’t actually send you to sites where trojan horses will be deployed, worms will be injected, and webcams will start recording. Then again, we wonder how long it will be before someone puts an actual virus in a ShadyURL that looks obviously shady but that people will assume is a safe URL cloaked in false shadiness.

Damn your logical puzzles, Internet.

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Image: iStockphoto

I am an authority and I argue that Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is my favorite web comic because it is the best. Therefore it must be true and if you disagree the terrorists have won.

Tip o’ the Einstein hair to all the people who say I should stick with astronomy.

Is Apple trying to sweep sex under the rug? Online reports suggest that the tech giant is looking to purge the App Store’s shelves of sex-themed apps. Some tech sites have noticed that sexy apps like “Sexy Women” and “Exotic Positions” that were previously available are now missing from the App Store.

The case of the missing sex-apps surfaced when the developer behind adult-themed app “Wobble iBoobs,” Jon Atherton, received a notification from Apple saying his app was being removed from the App Store for being too graphic.

TechCrunch reports on the email Atherton received from Apple:

Your application, Wobble iBoobs (Premium Uncensored), contains content that we had originally believed to be suitable for distribution. However, we have recently received numerous complaints from our customers about this type of content, and have changed our guidelines appropriately.

We have decided to remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store, which includes your application.

However, TechCrunch points out that other racy apps like “Beautiful Boobs” and “Sex Strip” are still around, suggesting that the apps that have been pulled from the store may be those that Apple judged too graphic, or apps that have been the subject of consumer complaints. On the other hand, maybe Apple just hasn’t gotten around to removing apps like “Epic boobs” yet.

Apple has had a murky relationship vis-a-vis sexy apps. When the App Store was launched in 2008, the company took a hard line on risque apps, but later decided to allow some adult-themed apps so long as they weren’t explicitly pornographic. Apple has yet to comment on whether its latest move constitutes a major shift in its policy, but it seems likely that the company is swinging back in the direction of modesty and discretion.

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Image: Apple

Doctors who are torn over how aggressively to treat a cancer patient, not knowing whether a tumor has fully regressed or is coming back, might someday be able to find out just by testing the patient’s blood. In a study forthcoming his week in Science Translational Medicine, John Hopkins researchers say they have tested a way to spot the “fingerprint” of cancer–the changes to the DNA inside cells that make up cancerous tumors.

Jeffery Schloss of the National Human Genome Research Institute, who wasn’t involved in the study, likened the approach to drawing a map. Sequencing the letters of the genetic code would be akin to plotting every house in a large neighborhood. The Hopkins team was looking only for neighborhoods—in particular, neighborhoods out of place compared with where they would be in normal tissue [Wall Street Journal]. The researchers in the study looked at tissue from people with breast or bowel cancer, and found multiple DNA rearrangements in each of the samples of cancerous tissue.

In each patient, the genetic changes in the cancerous cells amount to a unique marker of the patient’s tumor, the researchers say. Using blood samples from two of the colorectal cancer patients, they found the test was sensitive enough to detect this marker or “fingerprint” DNA that had been shed by tumours into the bloodstream [BBC News].

The study’s approach could be invaluable for tracking the progress of a tumor. When a cancer is operated on or treated with radio- or chemotherapy, the levels of the fingerprint should fall, and vanish altogether if the tumour has been eradicated [The Guardian]. Indeed, in one of their patients, the study authors saw the cancer biomarker drop after surgery but then rise again, suggesting to them that the cancer wasn’t fully eradicated.

Because the technique requires sequencing a person’s whole genome, it’s not coming to a hospital near you in the immediate future, says study author Bert Vogelstein: “This is really personalized medicine. This is not something off the shelf…. This is something that has to be designed for each individual patient” [Reuters]. But with the cost of genome sequencing rapidly coming down in price, this kind of approach might not be too far away, and doctors could use it to catch a recurring cancer before it’s large enough to be visible to other methods, like CT scans.

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Image: iStockphoto

I know I just posted a volcano image from the Terra Earth-observing satellite, but another just came in and it’s so beautiful I can’t help myself. So here’s a little bit of awesome for your Friday afternoon. Behold!

See? Told you.

What we have here are two volcanoes on February 13 erupting simultaneously in Kamchatka. The northern one, Klyuchevskaya, is the tallest and most active in the region. The other one, Bezymianny, is 10 km (6 miles) to the south, and is much smaller (2900 meters/9500 feet vs. 4800 m/15,900 feet) for Klyuchevskaya). Both are spewing a plume high into the air; from the whitish color it appears to be more steam than ash, though the northern, larger volcano is reported to be sending out lava and rock fountains as well. Between the two you can see some clouds, too.

I don’t suppose too many folks live near these two monsters, which is a good thing. I can’t imagine what it must look like to be, say, 10 kilometers east of the two and see them both blasting out plumes reaching up 6 kilometers (3.5 miles) high. But one day I’d love to witness something like that! Maybe from farther away, though. Wow.

Image credit: by Jesse Allen, using data provided courtesy of NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

This is the sixth in a series of guest posts by Joel Barkan, a previous contributor to “The Intersection” and a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The renowned Scripps marine biologist Jeremy Jackson is teaching his famed “Marine Science, Economics, and Policy” course for what may be the last time this year (along with Jennifer Jacquet), and Joel will be reporting each week on the contents of the course.

It seems simple enough: we should manage our marine resources to protect the whole ecosystem, not just a single species. That’s the basic premise of ecosystem-based management (EBM), the topic of this week’s class at Scripps (Read a previous post on EBM by Sheril here). EBM is all about interactions: between predator and prey, parasite and host, nutrients and phytoplankton, humans and our environment. The need for EBM comes from too many cases of a single-species management practice resulting in unintended impacts on the surrounding environment.

Take the Atlantic cod, for example, a fish that supported America’s most lucrative fishery in the 19th and most of the 20th century. Atlantic cod was overfished so heavily that its stocks are now virtually commercially extinct. We’ve all eaten cod, but you might not know what it looks like: it’s a voracious predator with an impressive set of teeth. Its jaws are powerful enough to easily crack the shell of all but the biggest, feistiest Maine lobsters. When cod stocks were depleted, the lobster populations boomed, free from the threat of one of their only predators. Now the North Atlantic lobster fishery thrives, while the cod fishery lays dormant. Lobsters are lured into traps by dead, smelly fish, which means millions of tons of Atlantic herring are caught every year and sold to lobstermen as bait. My personal research has indicated that increased herring fishing effort may have driven humpback and fin whales away from their traditional feeding grounds in the Gulf of Maine in search of a different food source.

Did you follow that? We went from cod to lobster to herring to humpbacks. To be fair, even the most fervent supporter of EBM would have struggled to predict that exploiting cod might eventually affect whales. But if the theory of EBM had been around during the heyday of the North Atlantic cod fishery (EBM has only entered the mainstream consciousness within the past two decades), someone likely would have at least raised a red flag. At its core, EBM is about taking a precautionary approach to management. Marine resource managers have historically thrown caution to the wind, even in the face of scientific uncertainty. This reckless style may become a thing of the past—NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco is one of EBM’s most prominent supporters.

EBM is a great idea in theory, but the practice is difficult to implement and even define. I just spent a three hour class learning and talking about it, but before writing this, I still had to brush up on the topic with NOAA’s 1998 Report to Congress on EBM. We can attribute the haziness of EBM to its relative infancy as a concept. As more scientists and policymakers continue to embrace EBM, we may see it transition from merely a good idea to a realistic strategy.

Here’s a neat dolphin trick that doesn’t involve jumping through hoops. While dolphins sleep overnight (with half their brains and one eye at a time), they begin to show signs of the kind of insulin resistance that marks type 2 diabetes in humans. But when they wake up and have their breakfast, they switch back to their normal state. A research team led by Stephanie Venn-Watson announced the findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Diego, and said that dolphins’ apparent ability to switch insulin resistance on and off could lead to better understanding of the disease in humans.

Insulin helps people control their levels of blood sugar, and the resistance to it inherent in type 2 diabetes means those levels can get way too high. The dolphins, though, switch on this temporary insulin resistance to their advantage, boosting blood sugar levels overnight. “Bottlenose dolphins have large brains that need sugar,” Dr Venn-Watson explained. Since their diet is very low in sugar, “it works to their advantage to have a condition that keeps blood sugar in the body… to keep the brain well fed” [BBC News].

However, while dolphins can turn this resistance off once they start their day and revert to a normal state, they can have metabolic problems similar to diabetes, too. For 21 weeks, Venn-Watson and her colleagues measured insulin levels in six dolphins two hours after the animals ate. One dolphin that had especially high insulin levels compared to others, also had a 10-year history of iron overload, or hemochromatosis. Iron overload is associated with type 2 diabetes in people, Venn-Watson noted [Science News].

No other animal has symptoms relating to diabetes so similar to humans, and the connection between the two species is probably our big, glucose-demanding brains. So, Venn-Watson says, studying them could help researchers figure out how to confront insulin resistance in humans: “There is no desire to make a dolphin a lab animal, but what we can do is compare their genes with human genes and look for evidence of a genetic switch” [The Guardian].

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Image: flickr / Ken Lund

WISE image of Comet Siding Spring. Click for a larger version. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

The WISE spacecraft has released the first of a group of handpicked images it has taken since it really got going in mid-January.

The particular image I have here is of Comet Siding Spring or more formally C/2007 Q3 was discovered in 2007 by observers at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia.

The color might not be what you would normally expect, but this is actually very familiar to devotees of infrared images. The best way to explain it is to let NASA do it for me from the press release.

In this view, longer wavelengths of infrared light are red and shorter wavelengths are blue. The comet appears red because it is more than ten times colder than the surrounding stars, for example, the bright blue star in the foreground. Colder objects give off more of their light at longer wavelengths. An ice cube, for example, pours out a larger fraction of its light at longer infrared wavelengths than a cup of hot tea emits.

In this image, 3.4-micron light is colored blue; 4.6-micron light is green; 12-micron light is orange; and 22-micron light is red. It was taken on Jan. 10, 2010.

This particular comet is heading away from us at the moment after coming about 1.2 AU from Earth (1 AU = the average Sun to Earth distance), The tail of the comet is estimated at 10 million miles long.

There are other images available which you can see here.

I’ve already been asked why NASA isn’t releasing the images very quickly. I think probably the reason is out of necessity. If NASA were to release every image, for one thing they would be spending all their time doing it and for another you’d be pretty disappointed with most of them because they just wouldn’t show very much. I think the spacecraft can take an image about every 11 seconds and it will do this for six months and then start all over again. So to get any images for now is quite good and you can see why they have to pick and choose.

Stay tuned because this mission is going to get very exciting.  If you want to see the image above in its original context and with the full caption click here.

After more than six years of exploring the Red Planet, the Mars rover Spirit will rove no more. The robotic adventurer is mired in a sand bed, and NASA has officially given up on trying to extricate it.

While it will continue to operate as a “stationary research platform” for the time being, there’s no denying that the rover’s swashbuckling days are over. No longer will Spirit spot an interesting landmark in the distance and gamely trek towards it, with the possibility of a fresh scientific discovery around every corner and under every rock. This photo gallery is a well-deserved eulogy for Spirit, in which we’ll survey its travels and achievements.

In 2003, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory launched Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, on a three-month mission to investigate Martian terrain and atmosphere on opposite sides of the planet. The solar-powered rovers surpassed NASA’s wildest dreams, extending their missions by nearly 25 times their anticipated lengths.

Since landing on Mars in January 2004, Spirit has snapped more than 127,000 pictures. The robot probed beneath the worn surface of Mars, analyzing the microstructure of rocks and soil with a sophisticated array of instruments: spectrometers, microscopic imagers, and other tools. Spirit has also gathered strong evidence that water once flowed on the Martian surface, which could have created a hospitable environment for microbial life.

Spirit and its twin rover (which is still traveling on) will be replaced by more advanced machines that will roll onto the Martian soil in the coming decades. But Spirit will be remembered long after its operating system flickers off for good. Like a robotic Neil Armstrong, the rover has earned its place in the space explorers’ hall of heroes.

All text by Aline Reynolds. Image: NASA/JPL/Cornell

Every now and again I think I’ve pretty much seen it all when it comes to astronomical images, and I’m getting jaded.

And then I see a picture like this:

Yeah, I still get a thrill from seeing things like this! Click to massively embiggen.

The image shows what’s called the Hickson Compact Group 31, a small collection of galaxies. It’s a combination of images from Hubble (visible light, shown in red, green, and blue), Spitzer (infrared, shown as orange), and the Galaxy Explorer or GALEX (ultraviolet, seen here as purple).

If I saw this picture with no caption, I’d know I was seeing dwarf galaxies colliding; the shape and the glow from newly-forming stars is a dead giveaway. But I’d also guess that the galaxies were young; old galaxies tend not to have much gas in them, and there’s clearly plenty of that in those galaxies! But in fact the galaxies here are very old; there are globular clusters (spherical collections of perhaps a million stars each that tend to orbit outside of galaxies) in the group that can be dated to being 10 or so billion years old. That means these are old objects, reinvigorated by their collision.

In fact, star clusters inside the galaxies can be dated as well, and appear to be only a few million years old. Oddly, the gas content of the galaxies is very high, with about five times as much as the Milky Way has. That’s pretty weird; it should’ve been used up a long time ago. Apparently, these galaxies have lived very sedate lives until very recently. I’ll note that they are relatively close to us, about 166 million light years away. Usually, colliding dwarf galaxies like this are seen billions of light years away, so we really are seeing them as they appeared recently.

Apparently, the lower-case g-shaped object on the left is the result of two galaxies smashing into each other, and the longer galaxy above them is separate. The spiral to the right is part of this as well and may be involved in the gravitational dance; you can see a splotchy arm of material pointing right at it from the collision on the left. Typically in collisions the gravity of one galaxy draws matter out of the other, and that can collapse to form stars. The red glow is from gas excited by newly born stars, and the blue glow is from these stars themselves. The galaxies are pouring out ultraviolet light (the purple glow) which is another dead giveaway of vigorous star formation.

The background galaxies are gorgeous, too. There’s a phenomenal distant open spiral on the bottom, to the left of center, and what looks like yet another pair of interacting galaxies at the bottom left, obviously much farther away than the Hickson group. Take a minute to look around the high-res version to see what else you might find!

Yup. I guess you can teach old galaxies new tricks… and even sometimes jaded astronomers, too.

Here’s a product for anyone who has ever huffed and puffed on the treadmill, while wishing they had done a better job of keeping fit. A new device called Oxyfit claims to make the workout experience a little easier by pumping oxygen-rich air directly into your breathing space. (Air out in the wild contains about 20 percent oxygen.) The increase in oxygen flow, claim the makers, will maximize your workout.

Japan Trend Shop sells the product, and extolls the merits of Oxyfit:

Not only can this help with fatigue and other symptoms of low oxygen, but it can actually boost brainpower and metabolism as well. More oxygen lets you run farther, work longer, and even lose weight! An increased supply of oxygen speeds up your body’s metabolic engine, burning more calories and stimulating fat loss. Finally, the improved circulation from increased oxygen levels can produce nootropic (brain-stimulating) and anti-aging effects (through increased moisturization of the skin).

Oxyfit doesn’t come cheap. It’s a whopping $2,681 plus $49 in shipping. For that money, marketers says you get an advanced electronic oxygen generation pack, a lithium-ion battery that provides 1.5 hours of run-time, a charger, and an oxygen tube. But the effectiveness of this expensive gadget is is up for debate.

For years, athletes like biker Lance Armstrong have trained at high altitudes because the thin air causes the body to create more red blood cells that carry oxygen. This meant that when Armstrong competed at normal altitudes, his body was able to flood oxygen to his muscles. With an artificial oxygen unit, some argue, the body soaks in the available fresh oxygen from the kit, but as a result the body isn’t prompted to produce more red blood cells. So a better alternative might be to forget the gadgets, and go for a jog in the mountains instead.

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Image: Oxyfit

The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute.

“OBJECTIVES: To determine the overall rate of loss of workplace teaspoons and whether attrition and displacement are correlated with the relative value of the teaspoons or type of tearoom. DESIGN: Longitudinal cohort study. SETTING: Research institute employing about 140 people. SUBJECTS: 70 discreetly numbered teaspoons placed in tearooms around the institute and observed weekly over five months. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Incidence of teaspoon loss per 100 teaspoon years and teaspoon half life. RESULTS: 56 (80%) of the 70 teaspoons disappeared during the study. The half life of the teaspoons was 81 days. The half life of teaspoons in communal tearooms (42 days) was significantly shorter than for those in rooms associated with particular research groups (77 days). The rate of loss was not influenced by the teaspoons’ value. The incidence of teaspoon loss over the period of observation was 360.62 per 100 teaspoon years. At this rate, an estimated 250 teaspoons would need to be purchased annually to maintain a practical institute-wide population of 70 teaspoons. CONCLUSIONS: The loss of workplace teaspoons was rapid, showing that their availability, and hence office culture in general, is constantly threatened.”

Read the full article here.

Thanks to Ralph, Ed, and Audun for today’s ROFL!

Photo: flickr/sunshinecity

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Good idea: High school issuing laptops to its students so they can access school materials at any time. Bad idea: High school administrators using the webcams in those computers to spy on the students at home.

Ridiculous as it may sound, that’s exactly what a lawsuit (pdf) in U.S. District Court alleges a Pennsylvania school did. The parents of Blake J. Robbins sued Lower Merion School District, saying that administrators remotely accessed the webcam to spy on their son. Nowhere in any “written documentation accompanying the laptop,” or in any “documentation appearing on any Web site or handed out to students or parents concerning the use of the laptop,” was any reference made “to the fact that the school district has the ability to remotely activate the embedded webcam at any time the school district wished to intercept images from that webcam of anyone or anything appearing in front of the camera,” the complaint states [Courthouse News].

How did the family find out about this surveillance? Assistant principal Lindy Matsko tried to discipline young Blake Robbins for undisclosed bad behavior in his own home (though what exactly makes high school principals think they have the right to regulate the entire world has always escaped me). And to prove the allegations, Matsko produced a photo from the webcam of Robbins’ computer.

Before we go off a cliff in condemning Lower Merion, though, we haven’t heard their side of it yet. Things may not have played out exactly as the suit alleges. If it was a MacBook, for example, Blake may have used the built-in Photo Booth software to take a picture of himself doing something questionable while at home, which may or may not be against the school’s policy. If that photo got posted online or even synced back with the school’s admins the next day, it’s possible that Matsko was given access to the photo for disciplinary purposes [Ars Technica]. It’s no stretch to believe that a high school-aged person would do this, especially one not considering the fact that webcams can be remotely accessed.

Even if Robbins were foolish enough to photograph himself, though, the school still must account for what Robbins father says: That Matsko confirmed to him the administration has the ability to remotely access the cameras. Never mind that the school owns the computers; just having the ability to spy into private homes sets the school up for a public relations fiasco, even if they hadn’t blatantly used the ability to try to punish a student.

The school’s leaders have yet to issue its defense to these charges. They better have a good one.

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Image: flickr / racatumba

If I had a TARDIS, you know the first thing I would do is go see what a supernova looks like up close. I’ve even tossed around the idea of a little fanfic… but Megan Argo beat me to it. She’s a radio astronomer at the Curtin University of Technology in Australia, and she wrote up a cute and engaging account of The Doctor and Martha witnessing an unusual exploding star (an audio version of the tale is available too)

The cool thing is, the story she wrote is actually part of a real event: the explosion of supernova SN2007gr, the death of a massive star. 2007gr was a Type Ic supernova, which is a star much more massive than the Sun, but has lost the majority of its outer layers over time due to a super-stellar wind. The core is basically all that’s left, and when it runs out of fuel it collapses and then explodes.

2007gr was seen to have gas screaming away from it at almost half the speed of light, far faster than is typical for an exploding star. That means that the gas was focused into twin beams, probably shaped that way by the material swirling around the newly-formed black hole at its heart that formed in milliseconds after the collapse. It wasn’t strong enough to be a monumentally violent gamma-ray burst, but it instead a sort-of hybrid object, one part normal supernova and one part GRB. We’ve known for some time that there is a connection between the two objects, but the actual events are difficult to study because they’re uncommon. Supernova 2007gr is a rare opportunity to study one in detail.

But not as much detail as we could see if we had a time machine. Oh Doctor, there are some many things you could show us. But, I suppose, most of the fun is in figuring it out for ourselves.

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Image: SN: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss; TARDIS: BBC; composition: Megan Argo

Looking at Tom’s excellent post on Mimas, I can’t help but be drawn to its most prominent feature, the crater Herschel.  It’s almost unbelievable that the impact responsible for that didn’t completely destroy the moon.  Here are some other images of Herschel put up on the Cassini website:

NASA/ESA/JPL 072109

NASA/ESA/JPL 060907

If Earth were to carry a crater of equivalent scale, it would be wider than Canada.

NASA/ESA JPL Artwork by David Seal

Its appearance similarities to the Star Wars “Death Star” is completely coincidental.  The crater wasn’t discovered until several years after the movie was made.

NASA/ESA JPL 080505

Amazing…

NASA/ESA JPL 122308 Mimas Against Saturn

Even as California sinks under a massive budget crisis, the $8.7 million the state used to research the use of marijuana for medical purposes now seems money well spent. The state-funded Center for Medical Cannabis Research at the University of California, San Diego has confirmed that pot is effective in reducing muscle spasms associated with multiple sclerosis and pain caused by certain neurological injuries or illnesses, according to a report issued Wednesday [The New York Times].

In four clinical trials, participants suffering from multiple sclerosis, AIDS or diabetes, along with healthy volunteers injected with a chili pepper substance to induce pain, were randomly assigned to receive cigarettes filled with marijuana [The New York Times]. The researchers reported that not everybody who smoked marijuana felt better–but a substantial percentage of those who were in pain said they felt better, and the figure was comparable to the percentage of people who experienced relief after taking other pain medications. “I think that clearly cannabis has benefits,” said Dr. Donald I. Abrams, a San Francisco oncologist who led that study. “This substance has been a medicine for 2,700 years; it only hasn’t been a medicine for 70″ [Los Angeles Times].

The federal government currently views marijuana as an illegal substance with no medical value–but this unusual set of studies sanctioned by California could cause lawmakers to question that categorization. Said State Senator Mark Leno: “This is the first step in approaching the (U.S. Food and Drug Administration), which has invested absolutely nothing in providing scientific data to resolve the debate” [San Francisco Chronicle]. The state’s voters approved medical marijuana in 1996 (13 other states have since passed similar laws), and California has fairly open rules for who is eligible for medical marijuana. Anyone who can get a doctor to write a recommendation, based on just about any medical condition, can buy marijuana in California [Wall Street Journal].

Doctors who conducted the study, however, noted that people who smoke pot must be mindful of what they are inhaling. They pointed out that inhaling any smoke brings potential cardiovascular risks, and also mentioned that their patients reported some mild side effects, including dizziness.

The results of the study come at a time when further funding for the program seems unlikely because of California’s budget crisis. But a California ballot measure that would attempt to legalize the drug’s use by adults 21 and older is likely to come to a vote later this year [Wall Street Journal].

Related Content:
80beats: A Toke a Day Might Keep Alzheimer’s Away
DISCOVER: Pot Helps an Imbalanced Mind
Discoblog: Forget About Pot’s Surprising Memory Boost

Image: Flickr/ Neeta Lind

On the Carribean island of Montserrat is the Soufrière Hills volcano. This is the very same one that erupted in 1997 and did so much damage to the small island (and killed 19 people).

On February 11, just a few days ago, the growing lave dome on the volcano partially collapsed, sending a plume 15,000 meters (more than 8 miles!) into the air. A few hours later, the plume was caught by NASA’s Aqua satellite:

Holy, well, Haleakala! Click to Envesuvianate (and to see the full frame picture).

The plume is obvious, as is its shadow to the northeast. Two smaller, lower plumes can be seen rocketing out over the sea to the north and south, and the wind is carrying ash in beautiful eddies to the east, too.

From this view, high above the Earth, it’s eerily beautiful. I imagine seeing the pyroclastic flows from this event would have been underpants-soilingly terrifying from the ground, however. I’m not seeing much news about this, even though it happened days ago, and I haven’t heard of any deaths resulting from it.

When I see images like this, I have to lean back and revel at the forbidding power and terrible beauty of volcanic eruptions like this one. I’m fascinated by them, and hope one day to see an active volcano (though from a safe distance). It’s a good reminder that as much as we rail and froth, we are hardly the lords and masters of this planet. We live on its thin skin by the graces of geology and the whims of random events, and that can be taken away just as easily.

The good news is, by studying events like these, and learning all we can about the natural world around us, we can understand what makes these dangerous giants tick. I mentioned that when Soufrière Hills blew in 1997, nineteen people died. That’s on an island with a population of over 4000… so why were so few killed? Because volcanologists — scientists — knew the warning signs and were able to get most of the people out of harm’s way.

Science. It’s cool, and it makes our lives better. It sometimes even saves them outright.

Image credit: NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC.

A few thoughtful readers have emailed optical illusions since I posted Tsang Cheung Shing’s incredible coffee kiss last week. This my favorite so far (and I have a hunch the lovely Dr. Isis will approve!). Reader ‘Sue’ explains:

“this Christian Louboutin heel was painted on a woman’s bare foot by John Maurad and Jenai Chin when New York Magazine featured an article entitled, You Walk Wrong.“