Own two of a certain object in your home and you will almost guarantee your kids will do well in school. Can you guess what that object is?
Engineers have announced that their last ditch efforts to repair the reaction wheels on Kepler will begin today.
I remain skeptical they will succeed, but am very glad they are trying.
One of the world’s longest running experiments, now 69 years old, has finally captured on camera the fall of a drop of tar pitch.
The Dublin pitch-drop experiment was set up in 1944 at Trinity College Dublin to demonstrate the high viscosity or low fluidity of pitch — also known as bitumen or asphalt — a material that appears to be solid at room temperature, but is in fact flowing, albeit extremely slowly.
Video below the fold.
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Astronomers have found evidence which suggests that most of the universe’s gold was created during the collision and merger of two neutron stars.
A binary of two neutron stars will eventually spiral into each other. When they do, scientists believe that their violent merger produces short gamma ray bursts (GRB). Observations of a short GRB burst in June found a lot of spectroscopic evidence of gold.
[T]he explosion had been responsible for the creation of a whole menagerie of heavy elements. They estimated that an equivalent of 1% of the sun’s matter was being flung out from the collision in a tail, and about 10 parts per million of that tail was made of gold.
On July 8 NOAA released its monthly update of the Sun’s sunspot cycle, covering the period of June 2013. As I do every month, this graph is posted below, with annotations to give it context.
After a brief period of renewed but weak activity during the last three months, the Sun’s sunspot production has once again plunged, dropping back to the levels generally seen for most of 2012.
As predicted by some solar scientists, the Sun seems to have produced a double-peaked maximum, though the second peak appears at this time to have been remarkably wimpy and brief. It is still possible, however, that this second peak is not over and that we might see another burst of renewed activity in the next month or so, based on the Sun’s past behavior during the ending stages of the previous solar maximum in 2001 and 2002. Nonetheless, from all appearances it looks like the Sun has shot its load and is in the process of winding down from a solar maximum peak that occurred back late 2011.
What is especially fascinating about this is that when that peak occurred in 2011, no one noticed!
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After thirty years, someone has finally won the Sikorsky Prize for creating a human-powered helicopter that can fly for at least a minute.
Scientists have developed a technique for using GPS signals to precisely measure the wind speeds inside hurricanes.
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered another moon orbiting Neptune.
A blue exoplanet the size of Jupiter where glass rains sideways.
Got $125? You can do an experiment in space.
Engineers will attempt one more try this month to revive one of Kepler’s reaction wheels so that the telescope can resume observations.
They admit that the odds are not good that the attempt will work, but they are going to give it chance anyway.
Want to land on an asteroid? Watch out, a gentle touchdown might cause avalanches everywhere!
After more than eleven years, the sea-level tracking satellite Jason-1 has finally shut down.
A white dwarf star that has morphed into a massive pulsing crystal.
Mercury, world of fire.
The uncertainty of science: A science poster released at an American Geophysical Union conference this week finds again that the global warming climate models used by policy makers have all failed to predict what has actually happened.
Some devastating quotes from the poster:
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The Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel — who made up fake data for at least 30 published papers — has reached an out-of-court settlement with prosecutors.
After ten years of operation, NASA has turned off its Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) space telescope.
In a first-of-a-kind move for NASA, the agency in May 2012 loaned GALEX to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, which used private funds to continue operating the satellite while NASA retained ownership. Since then, investigators from around the world have used GALEX to study everything from stars in our own Milky Way galaxy to hundreds of thousands of galaxies 5 billion light-years away.
It appears this loan arrangement has now ended because of a lack of funds. Either way, it always baffles me when NASA shuts down a working science telescope merely because it has been operating for a long time. Eventually the space agency will call for a replacement, the building of which will be far more expensive than it would have been to keep the original in operation.
The uncertainty of science: Voyager 1 has found the edge of the solar system to be far more complex than predicted by scientists.
Scientists had assumed that Voyager 1, launched in 1977, would have exited the solar system by now. That would mean crossing the heliopause and leaving behind the vast bubble known as the heliosphere, which is characterized by particles flung by the sun and by a powerful magnetic field.
The scientists’ assumption turned out to be half-right. On Aug. 25, Voyager 1 saw a sharp drop-off in the solar particles, also known as the solar wind. At the same time, there was a spike in galactic particles coming from all points of the compass. But the sun’s magnetic field still registers, somewhat diminished, on the spacecraft’s magnetometer. So it’s still in the sun’s magnetic embrace, in a sense.
Orbital Sciences’ Pegasus rocket this evening successfully launched NASA’s newest solar research satellite, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS).
Kepler’s planet-hunting predecessor, CoRoT, has been shut down.
CoRoT suffered a computer failure on November, 2, 2012 and although the spacecraft is capable of receiving navigational commands, the French Space Agency CNES reports it can no longer retrieve data from its 30-centimeter telescope. After a valiant effort to try and restore the computer, CNES announced this week that the spacecraft has been retired. CoRoT’s journey will come to a fiery end as it will be deorbited and it will burn up on re-entry in Earth’s atmosphere.
CoRoT found 32 exoplanets with at least a hundred more candidates still to be confirmed.
Worlds without end: Astronomers have found a solar system with six exoplanets, three in the habitable zone.
These planets orbit the third fainter star of a triple star system. Viewed from one of these newly found planets the two other suns would look like a pair of very bright stars visible in the daytime and at night they would provide as much illumination as the full Moon. The new planets completely fill up the habitable zone of Gliese 667C, as there are no more stable orbits in which a planet could exist at the right distance to it.
The planets in the habitable zone are all super-Earths.
Update: you can download and read the science paper here.
Scientists have finally discovered the forgotten formula for the concrete the Romans used.
The secret to Roman concrete lies in its unique mineral formulation and production technique. As the researchers explain in a press release outlining their findings, “The Romans made concrete by mixing lime and volcanic rock. For underwater structures, lime and volcanic ash were mixed to form mortar, and this mortar and volcanic tuff were packed into wooden forms. The seawater instantly triggered a hot chemical reaction. The lime was hydrated—incorporating water molecules into its structure—and reacted with the ash to cement the whole mixture together.”
The Portland cement formula crucially lacks the lyme and volcanic ash mixture. As a result, it doesn’t bind quite as well when compared with the Roman concrete, researchers found. It is this inferior binding property that explains why structures made of Portland cement tend to weaken and crack after a few decades of use, Jackson says.
Six places we like to go to right now.
A billion pixel view of Mars from Curiosity.
Russian concerns about a build-up of mold inside the European ATV, now docked to ISS, has caused a delay in the opening of its hatch.
The Spaceflight101 portal said the delay was due to possible “mold and bacteria contamination on three cargo bags that are inside the spacecraft” and that a decision is yet to be made on whether the crew should use anti-mold kits to clean ATV-4 cargo before taking it inside the ISS.
The Russians had a lot of problems with mold in their early Salyut space stations, and understand the unpleasant consequences should mold spread into the station. Thus, I am not surprised if they are taking this issue seriously.
After six years of study, Venus Express has found that during that time the super-rotating winds of Venus have actually increased in speed.
When Venus Express arrived at the planet in 2006, average cloud-top wind speeds between latitudes 50º on either side of the equator were clocked at roughly 300 km/h [186 mph]. The results of two separate studies have revealed that these already remarkably rapid winds are becoming even faster, increasing to 400 km/h [250 mph] over the course of the mission.
Engineers have decided to keep the New Horizons spacecraft on its original fly-by path past Pluto, scheduled for July 2015.
The New Horizons team recently completed an 18-month study of potential impact hazards – mostly dust created by objects hitting Pluto’s small satellites – the spacecraft would face as it speeds some 30,000 miles per hour (more than 48,000 kilometers per hour) past Pluto in July 2015. The team estimated that the probability of a mission-ending dust impact was less than 0.3 percent if the spacecraft followed the current baseline plan, far below some early, more conservative estimates. So, with the concurrence of an independent review panel and NASA, the project team expects to keep New Horizons on this baseline course, which includes a close approach of about 12,500 kilometers (nearly 7,800 miles) from the surface of Pluto.
