Science

When I was a kid, this was common science fiction fodder. To see this on the horizon is amazing.

In a speech to Virgin Galactic customers on September 27, the company’s founder, Sir Richard Branson, outlined these plans and more for the future of his commercial space fleet. “Using small, purpose-built, two-man spaceships based at space hotels our guests will be able to take breathtaking day trips programmed to fly a couple of hundred feet above of the moon’s surface,” Branson said. “They will be able to take in with their own eyes awe-inspiring views of mountains, craters and vast dry seas below.”

Sign me up!

Researchers at MIT wanted to create a robot that could reassemble itself into a variety of shapes. This is the proof of concept, a set of blocks, each of which contains a spinning motor with a break, along with all required electronics. The purpose of the motor is to generate inertia to allow the block to jump from one position to another.

Fascinating.

Amazing osprey dives for fish. Words do not do this justice. Watch fullscreen if you can.

Britain’s Peter Higgs and Francois Englert of Belgium won the Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday for predicting the existence of the Higgs boson particle that explains how elementary matter attained the mass to form stars and planets.

Half a century after their original work, the new building block of nature was finally detected in 2012 at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) centre’s giant, underground particle-smasher near Geneva.

The Higgs boson is the last piece of the Standard Model of physics that describes the fundamental make-up of the universe. Some commentators – though not scientists – have called it the “God particle”, for its role in turning the Big Bang into an ordered cosmos.

Higgs’ and Englert’s work shows how elementary particles inside atoms gain mass by interacting with an invisible field pervading all of space – and the more they interact, the heavier they become. The particle associated with the field is the Higgs boson.

Way to go, guys!

Thoughtful read. Important issue.

This is an important step. To give you some perspective on the size of a nanotube:

100 microns – width of human hair 10 microns – water droplet 8 microns – transistors in Cedric 625 nanometres (nm) – wavelength of red light 20-450 nm – single viruses 22 nm latest silicon chips 9 nm – smallest carbon nanotube chip 6 nm – cell membrane 1 nm – single carbon nanotube

Fascinating.

Back in 2009, I had the chance to spend some time with the folks at MIT’s Aerospace Controls Lab to watch some of the groundbreaking work being done with variable pitch quadcopters (basically, a helicopter with four horizontal propellors, each capable of operating at an independent speed). The thing I loved most about their setup was that the whole thing was controlled by an iPhone, communicating with a series of sensors mounted on the ceiling.

Things have really come a long way since then. Watch Raffaello D’Andrea throw this quad like a baseball and the quad instantly recover. Beautiful.

This is dark, sad, and powerful. About a year ago, David Hilfiker was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. This past January, he decided to blog about his journey. Here’s his self-written bio:

I am a 68-year-old retired physician and live with my wife in the nation’s capital. I practiced for seven years in an isolated rural area and then for ten years in an inner-city neighborhood. In 1990 we founded Joseph’s House, a home for homeless people with AIDS and cancer. I have continued to write, teach and lecture about poverty, politics and other issues. I am writing this blog to dispel some of the fear and embarrassment that surrounds Alzheimer’s.

And here’s a bit from his first post:

Garrison Keillor said recently, “Nothing bad ever happens to writers; it’s all material.” So, at least for a time, this Alzheimer’s disease will become material for my website and for this blog. I want to write about what Alzheimer’s is like from the inside. What is the experience of losing one’s mind? Do I still experience myself as the same “self”? Obviously, I don’t know how long I can do this, although my good friend Carol Marsh has volunteered to keep it going with interviews when I can no longer write. We’ll have to see.

If you want to follow from the beginning, here’s a link to the start of the blog. Brave man.

I just love science. This is all parlor tricks, but so fun to watch. Great payoff at the end.

Today is a big day for the Italian cruise ship that ran aground and tipped over in January 2012. The so-called Parbuckling Project, with the goal of tipping the Concordia upright and refloating it, is now underway. Th engineering involved is massive and fascinating. Should take about two days.

Richard Feynman is the master of all explainers. He takes incredibly complex concepts and break them down to make them more easily digested. Professor Feynman gave a series of seminal lectures at Caltech in the early 1960’s that were transcribed and edited, evolving into book that became the definitive introduction to physics. Now those lectures are available online, for free. Here’s an example:

To illustrate the power of the atomic idea, suppose that we have a drop of water a quarter of an inch on the side. If we look at it very closely we see nothing but water—smooth, continuous water. Even if we magnify it with the best optical microscope available—roughly two thousand times—then the water drop will be roughly forty feet across, about as big as a large room, and if we looked rather closely, we would still see relatively smooth water—but here and there small football-shaped things swimming back and forth. Very interesting. These are paramecia. You may stop at this point and get so curious about the paramecia with their wiggling cilia and twisting bodies that you go no further, except perhaps to magnify the paramecia still more and see inside. This, of course, is a subject for biology, but for the present we pass on and look still more closely at the water material itself, magnifying it two thousand times again. Now the drop of water extends about fifteen miles across, and if we look very closely at it we see a kind of teeming, something which no longer has a smooth appearance—it looks something like a crowd at a football game as seen from a very great distance. In order to see what this teeming is about, we will magnify it another two hundred and fifty times and we will see something similar to what is shown in Fig. 1–1. This is a picture of water magnified a billion times, but idealized in several ways. In the first place, the particles are drawn in a simple manner with sharp edges, which is inaccurate. Secondly, for simplicity, they are sketched almost schematically in a two-dimensional arrangement, but of course they are moving around in three dimensions. Notice that there are two kinds of “blobs” or circles to represent the atoms of oxygen (black) and hydrogen (white), and that each oxygen has two hydrogens tied to it. (Each little group of an oxygen with its two hydrogens is called a molecule.) The picture is idealized further in that the real particles in nature are continually jiggling and bouncing, turning and twisting around one another.

This is an incredible gift to the world.

NASA built this thing thirty-six years ago (in 1977) and it still works. Amazing.

Thirty-six years after it rocketed away from Earth, the plutonium-powered spacecraft has escaped the sun’s influence and is now cruising 11 1/2 billion miles away in interstellar space, or the vast, cold emptiness between the stars, NASA said Thursday.

And just in case it encounters intelligent life out there, it is carrying a gold-plated, 1970s-era phonograph record with multicultural greetings from Earth, photos and songs, including Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” along with Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Louis Armstrong.

At this point in its journey, it takes seventeen hours for the Voyager signal to get back to Earth. My (very) rough math:

11,500,000,000 m / 186,000 mps = 61,827 seconds = 1,030 minutes = 17.17 hours

Cool.

Virgin Galactic, part of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, wants to bring you into space. Their first goal is to provide a supersonic suborbital spaceflight for space tourists. Ultimately, their goal is to offer orbital satellite launches and, following that, human orbital flights.

After a successful sound-barrier-smashing test flight, Virgin Galactic has released footage from a camera on its prize spaceship’s tail. The view, though not as extraordinary as the one that future ticketed passengers can expect to see as they float at the craft’s windows, is a white-knuckle-inducing one of a plume of fire and a distant desert below.

Here’s said footage. And sign me up, please.

There was a slight glitch in the stabilizing system, but looks to be minor and fixable.

LADEE’s reaction wheels were turned on to orient and stabilize the spacecraft, which was spinning too fast after it separated from the final rocket stage, Worden said. But the computer automatically shut the wheels down, apparently because of excess current. He speculated the wheels may have been running a little fast.

This launch is a critical step in enabling high-bandwidth communications with future long haul manned missions to Mars and beyond.

If you are on the US east coast and have clear skies tonight (Friday, Sept 6) around 1130p, keep an eye out for the launch.

This Friday (September 6), NASA will launch its Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft. LADEE will be fitted with a sophisticated laser comm device that will significantly speed up communications with Earth. This is a proof-of-concept mission. The biggest hurdle to overcome is relaying the data almost 240,000 miles to ground telescopes on Earth.

“This pointing challenge is the equivalent of a golfer hitting a ‘hole-in-one’ from a distance of almost five miles… Developers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory have designed a sophisticated system to cancel out the slightest spacecraft vibrations. This is in addition to dealing with other challenges of pointing and tracking the system from such a distance. We are excited about these advancements.”

Interesting stuff.

Once every eleven years, the sun’s magnetic fields reset. When this happens, it can play havoc with things like wireless communications. Researchers at Stanford have been studying the underlying process and have cracked some of the secrets behind the mechanism that makes this happen.

The mechanism, known as meridional flow, works something like a conveyor belt. Magnetic plasma migrates north to south on the sun’s surface, from the equator to the poles, and then cycles into the sun’s interior on its way back to the equator.

The rate and depth beneath the surface of the sun at which this process occurs is critical for predicting the sun’s magnetic and flare activity, but has remained largely unknown until now.

Interesting article.

The last “soft” landing on the moon was by the Soviet Luna 24, which made its unmanned, non-destructive landing on Augsust 18th, 1976 and returned to Earth four days later. That was 37 years ago.

This week the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced that it has finished construction of its first lunar landing module. It is now ready to move Chang’e 3 to the “launch implementation phase,” and fully expects to launch China’s first moon landing mission by the end of the year. This will be an unmanned mission, but given that China only just launched its first lunar orbiter, Chang’e 1, in 2007, the military-led space agency is making remarkably quick progress.

China, Japan, India, Russia, and the US are currently the only countries to have put objects into a stable lunar orbit, and if Chang’e 3 is a success they will be just the third nation ever to achieve a “soft” landing on the moon — meaning that the lander will not be destroyed in the process.

This is a big deal for China, which will become the third nation (after the US and Russia) to make a successful “soft” landing on the moon.

This is fascinating.

Brain researchers say that for the first time one person has remotely triggered another person’s movement, a flicking finger, through a signal sent to him by thought.

Though this particular experiment is simplistic in nature, the implications are a bit staggering. Imagine someone hacking into the system and controlling people’s actions, all over the net. Yikes!

Last week, a panda cub was born to Mei Xiang at the National Zoo. Given the rarity of panda births, this was pretty big news, especially in the nation’s capital.

Turns out, that brand new panda baby instantly belongs to China. As do all other pandas on the planet. I was a little shocked by this. Every single giant panda in the world belongs to China.

Originally, China gave pandas to others — no strings attached. Starting in the 1950s, the Chinese government used the popularity (and adorableness) of giant pandas to curry favor with other nations, by gifting the creatures to governments around the world. In 1972, for example, China gave two giant pandas to the United States as thanks for President Nixon’s visit to their nation (which itself historically began to normalize the relationship between the two). First Lady Pat Nixon ensured that those two pandas, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, were housed at the National Zoo. The program was very successful. Other countries — many who had little in the way of relations with China — asked for pandas as well. But in 1984, China stopped giving pandas away. Instead, the Chinese government began loaning them out.

Under the terms of the revised Chinese plan, zoos were offered pandas only for a ten-year period. (There’s some evidence that renewals are possible.) Because all the pandas now in captivity outside of China were born after the 1984 change, “all giant pandas outside China are actually on loan from the country,” as NPR points out. The cost of renting a panda is $1,000,000 per year, to be payable to China’s Wildlife Conservation Association. And, perhaps most strikingly, the lease agreement requires that any cubs born to loaned-out pandas be returned to to China. So if Mei Xiang’s recent addition survives, the baby will likely go back to China at some point early on in its life. The good news, though, is that the baby will be reunited with its brother. Tai Shan, a panda born to Mei Xiang in 2005, was returned to China in 2009.

Pretty interesting and, seemingly, pretty ironclad.

Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano blogs about his near death by drowning, in his helmet, on a recent space walk.

…as I turn ‘upside-down’, two things happen: the Sun sets, and my ability to see – already compromised by the water – completely vanishes, making my eyes useless; but worse than that, the water covers my nose – a really awful sensation that I make worse by my vain attempts to move the water by shaking my head. By now, the upper part of the helmet is full of water and I can’t even be sure that the next time I breathe I will fill my lungs with air and not liquid.

Riveting.

…the beam entered the back of Bugorski’s head and came out around his nose. Shortly after this happened, Bugorski’s left half of his face swelled up beyond recognition. He was taken to the hospital and studied as this was something that had never been seen before and so they closely monitored him thereafter, fully expecting him to die within a few days at most.

Yikes!