Happy birthday, ISS!
Futurismic 21/11/2008 04:39
Break out the cake and light the candles, the International Space Station is 10 years old today (November 20). (Via Phys.org.)
The Russians launched the first part of the station from Kazakhstan on November 20, 1998; the second piece was carried up by the space shuttle two weeks later, and the first astronauts and cosmonauts arrived two years after that. Since then it has travelled 1.3 billion miles, orbited 57,300 times, and hosted 167 people from 15 different countries. Currently there are ten people aboard, and with the new additions and improvements, courtesy of the current Endeavour mission, the ISS will soon be able to host six people for long-term missions, up from the current three.
I feel a song coming on. Feel free to join in.
“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear ISS, happy birthday to you…”
(Or, if you prefer, watch this video of STS-126 Commander Chris Ferguson and Expedition 18 Commander Mike Fincke marking the event in orbit.)
(Image: NASA.)
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Buran space shuttle
Futurismic 20/11/2008 23:56
On November 15, 1988, as snowy clouds and winds were swirling around Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the Buran orbiter, attached to its giant Energia rocket, thundered into the gloomy early morning sky. Three hours and two orbits later, the 100-tonne bird glided back to a flawless landing just a few miles from its launch pad.
Despite the kind of strong winds that would rule out any launch or landing attempt by the US space shuttle, Buran touched down just 3m off the runway centreline.
And this planet-wide ballet was performed with its “pilots” safely on the ground.
[from the BBC][image from benjamin-nagel on flickr]
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Marijuana is teh good, episode 3
Futurismic 20/11/2008 19:02
Research suggests drugs similar to THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, may help reduce memory impairment due to Alzheimer’s, from Physorg:
The research suggests that the development of a legal drug that contains certain properties similar to those in marijuana might help prevent or delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Though the exact cause of Alzheimer’s remains unknown, chronic inflammation in the brain is believed to contribute to memory impairment.
Any new drug’s properties would resemble those of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the main psychoactive substance in the cannabis plant, but would not share its high-producing effects. THC joins nicotine, alcohol and caffeine as agents that, in moderation, have shown some protection against inflammation in the brain that might translate to better memory late in life.
This following news THC could also be used as an antibiotic, and that cannabis is believed to be less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco.
[from Physorg][image from Wikipedia]
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Mammoth progress
Futurismic 20/11/2008 18:43
Scientists have successfully sequenced a reasonably complete genome from an extinct animal for the first time, in this case, a woolly mammoth:
The team sequenced the mammoth’s nuclear genome using DNA extracted from the hairs of a mammoth mummy that had been buried in the Siberian permafrost for 20,000 years and a second mammoth mummy that is at least 60,000-years-old.
By using hair, the scientists avoided problems that have bedeviled the sequencing of ancient DNA from bones because DNA from bacteria and fungi, which always are associated with ancient DNA, can more easily be removed from hair than from bones.
Another advantage of using hair is that less damage occurs to ancient DNA in hair because the hair shaft encases the remnant DNA like a biological plastic, thus protecting it from degradation and exposure to the elements.
[image and story from Physorg.com][photo credit: Stephan Schuster lab, Penn State]
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The Live Piracy Map
Futurismic 20/11/2008 11:54
The ICC’s Live Piracy Map does exactly what its name suggests - it collates reports of modern piracy (the ocean-going sort, not kids using peer-to-peer networks), and plots them out as a Google Maps layer:
What’s interesting to me (as someone who works in maritime history) is how some of the hotspots are comparatively new, but others are almost as old as ocean-going commerce itself - a reminder that geography remains unconquered by technological progress, at least as far as supply chains of physical goods are concerned. [story and screenshot via the indispensable BLDGBLOG]
It also suggests that Sven’s armed cruise ship story wasn’t quite as implausible as some seemed to feel…
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Direct evidence of dark matter detected over Antarctica?
Futurismic 20/11/2008 05:07
A high-altitude balloon experiment above the Antarctic may have just seen a possible signature of the mysterious “dark matter” thought to make up 85 percent of the mass of the universe–but as yet, completely unseen and not at all completely understood. (Via Nature News.)
The experiment, the Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter (ATIC), spotted a surplus of high-energy electrons coming from…somewhere. This matches something the PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics–don’t you love space-exploration acronyms?) satellite mission turned up earlier this year
Electrons at this particular energy could be the result of heavy dark-matter particles colliding, which according to Dan Hooper, a theoretical physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, is “certainly the sexiest of the possibilities.”
Sexy and, to non-physicists, more than a little weird:
The exact nature of the dark-matter particles that produce electrons is uncertain, but one idea is that they may be ordinary particles that spend part of their lives in a compact extra dimension of space. Whereas the particles would appear relatively stationary to observers trapped in three spatial dimensions, they could be moving at ultra-high speeds in a fourth spatial dimension. At high speeds, they would create a gravitational force that could be felt by matter trapped in three dimensions of space-time. “It’s very wild,” Hooper says.
I’ll drink to that!
Of course, there are other possibilities. In particular, the electrons could be coming from a nearby pulsar, the fast-spinning remnants of a supernova.
How do we figure out? More experiments, of course. A new orbiting telescope called Fermi can spot electrons and positrons (though it’s designed to hunt for high-energy X-rays), and thus may confirm the data, or even pick up other high-energy particles that could be produced by dark-matter collisions.
Check back in the spring.
(Photo: NASA.)
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The Internet will go interplanetary
Futurismic 20/11/2008 00:42
NASA finished first tests on a system that
could one day be used to automatically relay information between Earth, spacecraft, and astronauts, without the need for humans to schedule transmissions at each point. …
For the test, dozens of images of Mars and its moon Phobos were transmitted back and forth between computers on Earth and NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft. The craft, which sent an impactor into Comet Tempel 1 in 2005, has been renamed “Epoxi” now that it its mission has been extended to search for extrasolar planets.
Further tests will begin on the International Space Station next year.
[Story: New Scientist; picture: NASA/JPL]
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Stress physically reshapes the brain
Futurismic 19/11/2008 23:49
A neuroscience conference in Washington, D.C. this week could stress you out all by itself. Lab rats put in stressful situations — like being immobilized and forced to listen to loud rock music — grow fewer fibers that connect neurons. Stress isn’t that great for people, either.
“Stress causes neurons (brain cells) to shrink or grow,” said Bruce McEwen, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University in New York. “The wear and tear on the body from lots of stress changes the nervous system.”
He said that stress is “particularly worrying in the developing brain, which appears to be programmed by early stressful experience.”
Stress in early life, even in the womb, can later lead to undesirable changes in behavior and the ability to learn and remember. Other consequences may be substance abuse and psychiatric disorders, researchers said…
“Pre-natal stress can change the brain forever,” said Tallie Baram, a neurologist at the University of California, Irvine. “Stress changes how genes are expressed throughout life.”
[1899 drawing of pigeon neurons by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Wikimedia Commons]
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Bruce Sterlings Last Viridian Note
Futurismic 19/11/2008 20:19
His post before embarking on his next project has been getting a fair amount of attention. At the risk of turning Futurismic into all Bruce all the time, here’s one of my favorite bits:
I strongly recommend that you carry a multitool. There are dozens of species of these remarkable devices now, and for good reason. Do not show them off in a beltpack, because this marks you as a poorly-socialized geek. Keep your multitool hidden in the same discreet way that you would any other set of keys.
That’s because a multitool IS a set of keys. It’s a set of possible creative interventions in your immediate material environment. That is why you want a multitool. They are empowering.
A multitool changes your perceptions of the world. Since you lack your previous untooled learned-helplessness, you will slowly find yourself becoming more capable and more observant. If you have pocket-scissors, you will notice loose threads; if you have a small knife you will notice bad packaging; if you have a file you will notice flashing, metallic burrs, and bad joinery. If you have tweezers you can help injured children, while if you have a pen, you will take notes. Tools in your space, saving your time. A multitool is a design education.
As a further important development, you will become known to your friends and colleagues as someone who is capable, useful and resourceful, rather than someone who is helpless, frustrated and visibly lacking in options. You should aspire to this better condition.
OK. Recommendations for a multitool, anybody?
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TV science-fiction: The origin of Doctor Who
Futurismic 19/11/2008 19:56
For those of us who like to know where things came from, the BBC Archive Project has posted some amazing memos and reports revealing the thought processes that led to Doctor Who. Typewritten pages with skeptical scrawls reveal conversations with Brian Aldiss and Kingsley Amis. (Imagine such a consultation today.) Wondering if sf could work on tv at all, the network looked at stories like Poul Anderson’s Guardians of Time and C.L. Moore’s “No Woman Born” as possible projects. They almost went with “The Troubleshooters,” about a consulting firm that dealt with otherworldly events. The archive also includes the initial proposal for the series, as well as the (mixed) audience reaction for the first episode of the series that (some of us) know and love.
[Story tip: SF Signal; William Hartnell as the first Doctor, BBC]
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