Because there’s no point in building a nanoscopic car that couldn’t crush other nanoscopic cars in a race, Rice University scientists have rolled out their best and baddest “nanodragster” ever. The car, 1/25,000th the size of a human hair, not only has a freely moving chassis but also can turn when one of its wheels is up in the air.

James Tour and his team previously made tiny cars that used carbon-60 molecules called “buckyballs” as wheels, but those wheels could turn on only hot surfaces, about 200 degrees Celsius. No longer. From Futurity.org:

The key to making nanodragsters, Tour says, was putting p-carborane wheels in the front and buckyballs in the back, getting the advantages of both. The front wheels roll easier, while the buckyballs grip the gold roadway well enough to be imaged by Kevin Kelly, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. And the vehicle operates at a much lower temperature than previous nanovehicles.

“The trick to making these nanocars was to attach the smaller wheels first, then deactivate their reactive ends through carbon group attachments that we called ’scythes,’ much like blades on the centers of classical chariot wheels,” Tour says. “Then we could affix the larger C60 wheels to the rear axle.”

No word yet whether any potential nano-races will allow dragsters to gouge each other with those scythes, a la Ben-Hur.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Got Too Many Plastic Bags? Recycle Them Into Carbon Nanotubes
Discoblog: Protect Your Phone with Shock-Absorbing Nanotubes
80beats: Nanoscale Origami: A Box—with Lock & Key—Made Entirely of DNA

Image: Rice University

If you go outside around midnight tonight and look to the south (north for you standing-on-your-head southern hemispherites), it’ll be hard to miss Orion standing tall over the horizon. If you look at the star at the upper left, marking his right arm, you might note that it glows a ruddy orange-red. That star is the famous Betelgeuse, one of the brightest in the night sky.

But your view of it probably isn’t as good as that of some French astronomers who got this awesome shot of Betelgeuse:

Cooool. Literally. Betelegeuse is a red supergiant, a massive star nearing the end of its life; in a few millennia (or a few hundred) it’ll explode as a supernova. But for now it’s a swollen monster, cooler than the Sun, but intrinsically a lot more luminous because, simply, there’s so much of it.

Even with our most powerful telescopes, most normal stars would be an unresolved dot at a distance of 640 light years. But because Betelgeuse is so frakkin’ big, we can resolve using a technique called interferometry. This uses several different telescopes to collect light and adds them together in a way such that extremely small objects — well, apparently small, that is — can be resolved.

At its mind-numbing distance of nearly 4 quadrillion kilometers (2.4 quadrillion miles), mighty Betelegeuse is diminished to a mere 0.045 arcseconds across. To give you an idea of how small this is, the full Moon is about 1800 arcseconds across in the sky. An arcsecond is 1/3600th of a degree, and Betelgeuse is a tiny fraction of even that. Hubble’s resolution is about 0.1 arcseconds, so Betelgeuse is unresolved even using that famous ’scope (though using some fancy tricks some features on the star can be seen using Hubble).

Obviously, interferometry is a powerful method for looking at big stars! Using it, the astronomers were able to see two large, bright features on the surface of Betelgeuse, most likely convection spots, where hot gas is bubbling up from the star’s interior. The bigger of the two spots is about 500 K hotter than the rest of the 3600 K surface, and accounts for about 8.5% of all the light the star emits! The other is smaller and unresolved, and contributes about 5% of the light.

Mind you, the bigger of the two hot spots really is ginormous: it’s bigger than the distance of the Earth from the Sun!

Did I mention Betelegeuse is frakkin’ huge?

Techniques like this reveal a huge amount of information on objects that are otherwise far too small in apparent size to measure. We already knew Betelgeuse is a dynamic star — it changes its brightness over time, for example — but this particular image shows us the scale of the changes on the star’s surface, which can lead to models of how its interior behaves, which in turn will help us understand how supergiant stars live out their lives and eventually explode. At 640 light years away, Betelgeuse can’t hurt us when it goes supernova, but it’ll be an amazing light show… and the more we know about it, the better.

Once, most of exoplanets that astronomers spotted were giants, but now they’re seeing more and more new planets with masses not far off from the Earth’s. One of those newly found Earth-like exoplanets, however, may not have always been so similar to our own world: An astronomer made the case last week that the small, sweltering planet was once a mighty gas giant that shrank.

Astronomers discovered Corot-7b in September. Its diameter is roughly 1.7 times that of Earth. Based on its size and mass, its density is similar to Earth’s, indicating that it is a rocky Earth-like orb [ABC News]. But the comparisons end there. While it’s rocky like Earth, this fiery hellhole is no place for life. It orbits its star at a distance of only 1.6 million miles (we’re presently at a much more comfortable 93 million miles from our sun) and completes a revolution in only 20 hours’ time. And, NASA’s Brian Jackson argued at last week’s American Astronomical Society meeting, Corot-7b is probably just a shell of its former self, and once was a type of gas giant called a “hot Jupiter.”

Given the planet’s proximity to its star, Jackson says it would be subject to a constant blast of heat that robs it of its mass. Rock vaporized by the extreme temperatures could escape the atmosphere of Corot-7b, and the planet would’ve steadily lost mass as it moved closer to its star. It could be shedding half an Earth mass every billion years. Extrapolating backward in time, Jackson concludes that the planet may have started as a gas-giant world more akin to Jupiter or Saturn, and that its light elements were driven off [Sky & Telescope]. The gas giant case isn’t clinched; one could also argue that the planet was always rock, and just slowly lost mass over the years. Either way “this planet is disappearing before our eyes,” Dr. Jackson said in a statement [ABC News].

Elsewhere at the AAS meeting, astronomers announced a new find: the second-smallest exoplanet ever, given a mouthful of a moniker in HD156668b. The team of astronomers who discovered HD156668b used one of two Keck telescopes at the 4,145-meter (13,600-foot) summit of Mount Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The astronomers used the so-called wobble method, which measures the gravitational effects of a planet on its star [AFP]. This new world is some 80 light-years away in the Hercules constellation. It’s only four times more massive than Earth.

With the exoplanet tally now well past 400, and the planet-hunting Kepler telescope starting to spot its first distant orbs, expect the announcements to keep coming. Maybe soon we’ll even find an Earth-like world that isn’t unbelievably sizzling hot.

Related Content:
80beats: Rock Solid Evidence of a Rocky, Earth-Like Planet
80beats: Study: Strange Planet Has Atmosphere of Gaseous Rock—and It Rains Pebbles
80beats: Kepler Telescope Spies Its First 5 Exoplanets, Including “Styrofoam” World
80beats: Meet the New Neighbors: Earth-Like Worlds Orbiting Nearby Stars
DISCOVER: How Long Until We Find a Second Earth?
DISCOVER: Big Picture: The Inspiring Boom in “Super-Earths”

Image: ESO. Artist’s impression of COROT-7b.

As promised, we’re going to have a book club to talk about From Eternity to Here. Roughly speaking, every Tuesday I’ll post about another chapter, and we’ll talk about it. Easy enough, right? (Chapters 4 and 5, about relativity, are pretty short and will be combined into one week.)

For the most part I won’t be summarizing each chapter — because you’ll all have read the book, so that would be boring. Instead, I want to give some behind-the-scenes insight about what was going through my mind when I put each chapter together — a little exclusive for readers of the blog. Of course, in the comments I hope we can discuss the substance of the chapters in as much detail as we like. I’m going to try to participate actively in all the discussions, so I hope to answer questions when I can — and certainly expect to learn something myself along the way.

The book is divided into four parts: an overview, spacetime and relativity, entropy and the Second Law, and a discussion of how it all fits into cosmology. You can find a more detailed table of contents here, and here is the prologue to get you in the mood. Part Three is definitely the high point of the book, so be sure to stick around for that.

So see you next Tuesday! Get reading!

Part One: Overview

• January 19: Chapter One (What is time?)
• January 26: Chapter Two (Entropy and the Second Law)
• February 2: Chapter Three (The expanding universe)

Part Two: Relativity

• February 9: Chapters Four and Five (Special and general relativity)
• February 16: Chapter Six (Time travel)

Part Three: Entropy and the Arrow of Time

• February 23: Chapter Seven (Determinism and reversibility)
• March 2: Chapter Eight (Entropy according to Boltzmann)
• March 9: Chapter Nine (Information, memory, life…)
• March 16: Chapter Ten (Recurrence and Boltzmann brains)
• March 23: Chapter Eleven (Quantum mechanics)

Part Four: Time and the Universe

• March 30: Chapter Twelve (Black holes)
• April 6: Chapter Thirteen (Evolution of the universe)
• April 13: Chapter Fourteen (Inflation)
• April 20: Chapter Fifteen and Epilogue (Explaining the arrow of time)

Joe Romm has an important post about the folks down in Texas who are constantly trying to bring the textbooks into line with ideology. This is something we usually think of as affecting the evolution issue, but no–climate change is also a topic that is being watched closely by the watchers of educational content.

Romm himself is linking a Washington Monthly piece called “Revisionaries,” which reports the following:

A similar scenario played out during the battle over science standards, which reached a crescendo in early 2009. Despite the overwhelming consensus among scientists that climate change exists, the group rammed through a last-minute amendment requiring students to “analyze and evaluate different views on the existence of global warming.” This, in essence, mandates the teaching of climate-change denial. What’s more, they scrubbed the standards of any reference to the fact that the universe is roughly fourteen billion years old, because this timeline conflicts with biblical accounts of creation.

The strategy is identical, isn’t it? “Critically analyze” evolution, “critically analyze” climate change…and smuggle bad science into the classroom to sow doubt and confuse the kids. Frankly, I am wondering these days if climate denial may not be growing into an even more massive phenomenon than evolution denial in the US. I doubt it has the potential to be as long-lived. But the intensity of it, which I feel every day now, simply dwarfs what’s going on in the evolution fight….

If you thought George Clooney’s character in “Up in the Air” racked up a lot of frequent flyer miles, you should meet his avian rival, which flies the equivalent of three round trips to the moon and back during its lifespan. For a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers tracked the arduous migration of the tiny Arctic tern and found that it flies an average of 44,000 miles every year on its trip from Greenland to Antarctica and back. That’s a new world record.

Scientists suspected that this tern could best the previous world record of 39,000-mile migrations by the sooty shearwater, though they previously lacked tracking devices small enough for the bird to carry. But the team used a tiny tracker developed by the British Antarctic Survey, which weighs just a twentieth of an ounce (1.4 grams)—light enough for an Arctic tern to carry on a band around its leg [National Geographic]. This device reported the birds’ position twice daily.

The locating devices reported back a few surprises. It turns out that the birds did not immediately travel south, but spent almost a month at sea in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean. The researchers believe the birds use this lengthy stop-over as a chance to “fuel-up” with food before continuing on to less fruitful waters farther south [LiveScience]. In addition, the birds don’t fly a direct path from Greenland to Antarctica and back, but zigzag across the Atlantic Ocean—the map’s yellow lines show the terns jogging between Africa and South America on their northward journey in the spring.

These diversions took advantage of prevailing global wind systems to help the birds preserve energy, according to Carsten Egevang, from the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources [The Independent]. They also roughly double the distance that terns must fly, earning them this new record.

Not all tern migrations are created equal: The shortest in the study measured about 36,000 miles, the longest about 50,000. All in all, it adds up to a well-traveled lifetime. Terns can live on the long side of 30 years, and flying 44,000 miles every year for that length of time can add up to about 1.5 million miles, or about three lunar round trips.

Related Content:
80beats: Tiny Bird Backpacks Reveal the Secrets of Songbird Migration
80beats: The Birds’ Sixth Sense: How They See Magnetic Fields
80beats: The Intimate Mating Migration of the European Eel
80beats: Monarch Butterflies Navigate with Sun-Sensing Antennae
DISCOVER: Works in Progress: How do migrating birds know where to go?

Image: Carsten Egevang

Speaking of ice on Mars, the folks with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter made a cool video talking about new low-latitude craters exposing water ice beneath the Martian surface:

You can watch more HiRISE videos at the MRO video gallery. Lots of cool stuff there!

Related posts:
Mars is Sublime
Water on the Moon…? Yup. It’s real.

Tip o’ the dry ice crater to the HiRISE Twitter feed.

Please allow us to introduce ourselves…

We’re two PhD students in Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley. Back in March of aught-nine, we started a little blog called “NCBI ROFL” in which we posted real scientific articles with funny subjects from the PubMed database (which is housed by the National Center for Biotechnology information, aka NCBI).

Initially, our fans were mostly grad students. But over time, our following grew, and now we are happy to be joining the Discoblog family. If you’re not familiar with us, here are a few of our most-loved posts:

Accidental condom inhalation.

Does garlic protect against vampires? An experimental study.

Finding the frequency of Fido’s farts.

Harry Potter and the curse of headache.

A woman’s history of vaginal orgasm is discernible from her walk.

Hungry for more? Explore our post archives. And for even more info, check out or FAQs.

We’re still accepting submissions! Please email ncbirofl@gmail.com with funny articles!

Last week I mentioned participating in a discussion at ScienceOnline ‘10 entitled “Online Civility and Its (Muppethugging) Discontents” featuring Janet and Isis. But there’s another equally exciting panel I’m part of earlier in the day with Rebecca Skloot and David Dobbs. Here is the description:

Getting the Science Right: — an underappreciated and essential art — and the role scientists can and should (but often don’t) play in it.

Description: Much of the science that goes out to the general public through books, newspapers, blogs and many other sources is not professionally fact checked. As a result, much of the public’s understanding of science is based on factual errors. This discussion will focus on what scientists and journalists can do to fix that problem, and the importance of playing a pro-active role in the process. Discuss here.

After turning in my latest manuscript just one week ago, I have a lot to say on the topic. This should be a terrific session and I encourage readers attending the conference to join us next weekend!

With that, I’m off to day one of Michael Webber’s energy technology and policy course at UTAustin.

In tomorrow’s New York Times, I dig up some of the fossil viruses that have been buried in our genome for tens of millions of years.

This is a subject I’ve explored here on the Loom before (1, 2), but now is a great time to stop and take stock of just how much progress scientists have made in exhuming the ancient invaders that helped make us what we are.

There was one dimension of this research that I didn’t have space to describe, but it’s too cool to let go unmentioned. In the article, I describe a virus protein called syncitin that is essential for placentas to develop. Cells push the protein to their surface, where it lets them latch onto other cells, fusing together to create a special layer through which nutrients can pass from mother to child. The protein got its start on viruses, which use it to latch onto host cells and fuse to them, allowing their genes to slip in.

But recent research has revealed an intriguing new twist to our viral legacy. It turns out that the viral surface protein in question has a second job. It also tamps down the immune system of its host. If the protein is altered to make it unable to suppress the immune response, viruses cannot successfully infect their hosts.

Thierry Heidmann, a leading paleovirologist whom I spoke to for the article, suspects that this second function may have been critical in the evolution of the placenta. That’s because there are two major challenges to being a placental mammal. First off, mothers need to be able supply their embryos with lots of nutrition for a long time through their circulatory system. Second, they have to cool down their immune systems. A baby’s tissues would otherwise look to the mother’s immune system like foreign tissue and be quickly rejected. So it’s possible that viruses not only let mothers feed their babies, but not kill them either.

This is a story that’s just going to get cooler, so expect updates as necessary.

I haven’t blogged on this subject in a while, due to the kinds of comments/blitzkrieg it always evokes. And I’m sure I’ll be accused of “arguing from authority” here, simply because I’m quoting someone I find particularly eloquent and persuasive.

But so be it: When I saw Chad Orzel’s post last week explaining why it is that science and religion can be compatible, I couldn’t help linking, as it so perfectly summarizes my own view, and in better terms than I myself can probably put it:

OK, fine, as a formal philosophical matter, I agree that it’s basically impossible to reconcile the religious worldview with the scientific worldview. Of course, as a formal philosophical matter, it’s kind of difficult to show that motion is possible.

We don’t live in a formal philosophical world, though, and the vast majority of humans are not philosophers (and that’s a good thing, because if we did, it would take forever to get to work in the morning). Humans in the real world happily accept all sorts of logical contradictions that would drive philosophers batty. And that includes accepting both science and religion at the same time.

So, in my view, it is not in any way an “unconscionable” political statement for professional scientific organizations to state that science and religion are compatible. It’s a statement of fact, an acknowledgment that in the real world, there are numerous examples of people who are both personally religious and successful, even prominent scientists. Guy Consolmagno, George Coyne, Bill Phillips, Francis Collins, and many more.

How do these people deal with the philosophical contradiction inherent in there beliefs? I have no idea. I don’t really care, either, any more than I care how philosophers resolve Zeno’s paradox. Religious scientists exist, and I can move from one side of the room to the other in finite time. End of debate, let’s talk about something that actually matters.

There is nothing unconscionable, in my view, in professional organizations stating publicly that these people exist. What would be unconscionable is the reverse–a public statement that science and religion can never be compatible amounts to a denial of the existence of the many men and women who find some way to reconcile science and religion in their own lives. I find that sort of rhetoric deeply insulting even on blogs, let alone from a professional organization.

Amen amen amen….and now, let the wild ruckus begin.

The jewelry in Spain speaks mainly to the brains (of Neanderthals). So says a team of archaeologists this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers led by João Zilhão have turned up artifacts they believe to be jewelry dating back 50,000 years—a time only Neanderthals and not early humans occupied Europe—suggesting to them that those Neanderthals were capable of the abstract thinking necessary to make symbolic art.

Zilhão’s team found shells and bones that showed evidence of craftsmanship, the scientists say. First, some of the shells were perforated and could have been strung and worn as a necklace. It’s not out of the question that those holes could be natural, but the team says the finds also appear to have been painted. If the researchers’ analysis is correct, the Neanderthals could have mixed up reddish goethite and hematite, yellow siderite and natrojarosite, black charcoal and sparkly pyrite to create a spectrum of paints [MSNBC].

Scientists have found similar artifacts in Europe before. But those finds were roughly 40,000 years old – dating to a period where Neanderthals and modern humans would have shared the European continent. This has led other researchers to argue that the purported Neanderthal artifacts represented mindless imitation or were from later periods, but they somehow got mixed into the wrong soil layers of the archaeological digs where they were uncovered [Christian Science Monitor]. The new finds, however, date to a time 10,000 years before our ancestors migrated to the European continent. So if these fragments truly show signs of handiwork, and if the dating is correct, that points to Neanderthals as the creators.

For Zilhão, this means that Neanderthal mental capacity was closer to that of early humans than we often give them credit for. Objects and compounds like these would have been used to “tell other people who you are,” Dr. Zilhão said. “They are like socially recognizable identity cards.” What’s more, he said, “this is exactly how the same kinds of objects and finds are interpreted in early modern human contexts” [The New York Times].

That wasn’t Zilhão’s only Neanderthal study this week, either. He published a separate study in PNAS addressing the question DISCOVER posed last month: Did we mate with Neanderthals, or did we murder them? Analyzing the teeth of a 30,000-year-old early human child skeleton, he says that it shows similarities to Neanderthals—similarities that again raise the question of whether and how much early humans and Neanderthals interbred in Europe tens of thousands of years ago.

Related Content:
80beats: Did Spear-Throwing Humans Kill Neanderthals?
80beats: Controversial Study Suggests Early Humans Feasted on Neanderthals
80beats: Rough Draft of the Neanderthal Genome is Complete
DISCOVER: Did We Mate with Neanderthals, or Did We Murder Them?
DISCOVER: Cavemen: They’re Just Like Us

Image: João Zilhão

Time for some livestreaming! At the end of this week I’ll be heading to North Carolina to Scienceonline 2010, a confab about all things scientific on the Tubes. I’m going to be talking in a session on Saturday morning at 10:15 am called “Rebooting Science Journalism In the Age of the Web” along with fellow rebooters Ed Yong, John Timmer, and David Dobbs. You can watch live on UStream and Second Life. Later, our session (and all the others) will end up where everything ends up sooner or later: on YouTube. (More details here.)

Here’s the official description of our session:

Are blogs and mainstream media the bitter rivals that stereotypes would have us believe, or do the two sides have common threads and complementary strengths? How will the tools of the Internet change the art of reporting? How will the ongoing changes strengthen writing about science? How might these changes compromise or threaten writing about science? In a world where it’s possible for anyone to write about science, where does that leave professional science journalists? And who actually are these science journalists anyway?

If you want something to read in advance, Bora Zivkovic, one of the prime movers behind this conference, has kindly organized a veritable banquet of food for thought on this topic. If you’re interested in the experiences and opinions I bring to the discussion, read this. Basically, I find kvetching and yearning for some global system a waste of time. I am interested in people doing new things.

ScienceOnline has a strong tradition of openness, and so you’re welcome to visit the session wiki and help us formulate the discussion in advance. You can also start a discussion here, which I will track.

[Image: 2001 Internet Archive]

As regular Intersection readers know, I’ve long been interested in energy. Today I’m flying to Texas to join Michael Webber’s three day energy technology and policy course at UTAustin. Here is the description:

Dr. Michael Webber, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and Associate Director of the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin, will share his insights and candid views about the best and worst of US energy practice. His fast-paced and information-packed lectures will include real-world examples, entertaining anecdotes, engineering fundamentals, historical perspectives, and an outlook for the future of energy. This crash course is perfect for people who want an energy credential or a graduate class in energy, but only have a few days to spare.

With lectures covering transportation, biofuels, climate, security, and food, I can’t wait. So expect some energy related posts this week as I have time to blog.

If someone woke me out of a sound sleep and forced me at gunpoint to say which is my favorite camera in the solar system, they’d probably have to shoot me. But I think that HiRISE onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter would be in the top three. And it’s pictures like this one that put it there:

[Click to get to greatly embiggened pictures.]

That is not a closeup of my chin before I shave. It’s Mars, a dune field in the far north; at latitude 83.5° to be precise, less than 400 km (240 miles) from the north pole. The eternal Martian wind blows the heavy sand into dunes, and you can see the hummocks and ripples from this across the image. The sand on Mars is from basalt, which is a darkish gray color. The red comes from much smaller dust particles which settle everywhere.

But what are those weird tendril thingies?

In the Martian winter, carbon dioxide freezes out of the air (and you thought it was cold where you are). In the summer, that CO₂ sublimates; that is, turns directly from a solid to a gas. When that happens the sand gets disturbed, and falls down the slopes in little channels, which spreads out when it hits the bottom. But this disturbs the red dust, too, which flows with the sand. When it’s all done, you get those feathery tendrils. Note that at the tendril tips, you see blotches of red; that’s probably from the lighter dust billowing a bit before settling down.

Now, you might think I’m making this all up. How do we know this stuff is flowing downhill like that? Ah, because in this picture we’ve caught it in the act! In this image, a closeup of a region just to the left of center of the big image, you can actually see the cloud of dust from an avalanche as it occurs.

Oh, baby. The cloud is only a few dozen meters across, and can’t be more than a few seconds old.

I love stuff like this. I tend to think of Mars as a stiff, still, unchanging place, but then HiRISE goes and slaps me in the face with something like this. Mind you, this is an avalanche. On another planet. Caught as it happened.

Awe. Some.

We’ve seen this before on Mars, but it’s still shocking and amazing. I can imagine some future settlers on the Red Planet, dealing with the lack of air, bitter cold, dust in all the machinery, radiation hazards from the Sun. And, apparently, they’ll have to dodge landslides too. It’ll be a tough life for sure… but then, I look at pictures like this and think it would be worth it, just to stand on the surface of another world and be able to simply look around.

If we can see this kind of thing from space, with robotic probes, what will humans see when they go there and can kick over some rocks?

I’ve been meaning to blog this radio segment, on Minnesota Public Radio’s Midmorning program, in which renowned physicist Lawrence Krauss and myself discuss the scientific year in review–with particular emphasis on the changing of the guard in the Obama administration, the climate conundrum, and even the battle over science and religion (where I differ with Krauss maybe 5 %). You can listen here:

Science grad students can still register for my science writing workshop. Course outline and registration here: http://bit.ly/6lh3B8 It will meet 1/25 and 2/1. The workshop will be at Yale, but non-Yale grad students are welcome to get in touch about attending, too.

Romeo and Juliet by Sir Frank Dicksee

Submit your original photo or artwork to The Science of Kissing Gallery here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The shuttle Endeavour rolled out to Launch Pad 39A on January 6^th.  I included an image from a railing on Pad 39A, to me it’s an eerie reminder of another mission where cold weather was an issue.

Does this remind you of anything? Credit: NASA

For now the shuttle is being kept “warm” with heaters and warm air purges. Let’s hope the weather warms before the February 7^th targeted launch date.

Video from NASA TV

D. J. Grothe, the new President of the James Randi Educational Foundation, was interviewed by the folks at Pod Delusion. I’ve embedded the interview below (D. J.’s part starts around the 10:40 mark).

D. J. is a good guy, and I think the JREF is in excellent hands.

Tip o’ the electron to Jon Treadway, and James O’Malley for the embed.