Astronomers have discovered a gas cloud on a collision course with the Milky Way galaxy’s central supermassive black hole, set for impact in the summer of 2013.
R.I.P.: Russian space engineer Boris Chertok has died at 99.
Scientists have built the world’s smallest steam engine, only a few thousandths of a millimeter wide.
Scientists have found that walking through a doorway does make you forget what you were doing.
Though the research seems robust for proving the power of doors to make us forget, their theories as to why this happens strike me as nothing more than guesses.
The European Space Agency will make two more attempts to contact Phobos-Grunt.
Now they tell us: Hurricane predictors admit they can’t predict hurricanes.
We are discontinuing our early December quantitative hurricane forecast for the next year … Our early December Atlantic basin seasonal hurricane forecasts of the last 20 years have not shown real-time forecast skill even though the hindcast studies on which they were based had considerable skill.
Not there yet: CERN announces an update on the search for the Higgs Boson.
The main conclusion is that the Standard Model Higgs boson, if it exists, is most likely to have a mass constrained to the range 116-130 GeV by the ATLAS experiment, and 115-127 GeV by CMS. Tantalising hints have been seen by both experiments in this mass region, but these are not yet strong enough to claim a discovery.
Dawn has now lowered its orbit to an average elevation of 130 miles above the asteroid Vesta.
Expect lots of close-up images in the weeks to come.
The enormous bones of what is believed to be the biggest dinosaur in the U.S. were unveiled by paleontologists this week.
Phobos-Grunt is now predicted to fall back to Earth in early January.
CERN will be making an announcement on the status of its search for the Higgs particle on December 13. From this interview of one of its scientists:
The thing I know for sure is that [CERN Director General] Rolf-Dieter Heuer, who must know the results of both experiments, says that on December 13 we will not have a discovery and we will not have an exclusion.
The inteview is fascinating, as he notes how the Higgs research might also have a bearing on the search for dark matter.
In a press event today, LightSquared announced that just-completed tests prove that its internet service will not interfere with GPS.
According to the company, the three private companies — Javad GNSS, PCTel and Partron — that make GPS equipment have been testing interference solutions and those tests have gone well. “Preliminary results show that GPS devices tested in the lab easily surpass performance standards thanks to these newly developed solutions,” Ahuja said. “We are confident that this independent testing will mirror testing being done by the federal government.”
Here’s another perspective:
Jim Kirkland, vice president of Trimble and a founding member of The Coalition to Save Our GPS, is trying to slow LightSquared’s momentum. “It is obviously extremely premature to claim at this point that these latest tests demonstrate that LightSquared’s proposed repurposing of the mobile satellite band for terrestrial operations is ‘compatible’ with high-precision GPS,” Kirkland says in a statement. “Even if new equipment solutions are fully tested and verified, these existing high-precision receivers will have to be retrofitted or replaced. LightSquared still refuses to accept the financial responsibility for addressing interference to existing devices, and so has not offered a comprehensive solution in any way, shape, or form.”
An update on the climate treaty talks in Durban.
I gather from this article that the talks appear to be going nowhere. (The reporter desperately wants a deal, and you need to read between the lines to sense how unlikely the deal is.) Not only is the U.S. reluctant to sign anything, so is India, China, and Brazil. Furthermore, even if the Obama administration agreed to something, it is highly unlikely any treaty could get through the Senate.
Also, it appears that the $100 billion Green Climate Fund is is in trouble as well.
All good news, as far as I am concerned. None of these deals have anything to do with climate or science. Instead, they are designed to redistribute power and wealth, by fiat, from one set of countries to another.
The trial of seven Italian earthquake experts facing manslaughter charges for not correctly predicting a deadly earthquake continued this week.
The prosecution’s argument that the experts had underplayed the possible occurrence of a major quake was bolstered by testimony from Daniela Stati, the former civil protection officer for Abruzzo, who took an active role in the March 31 meeting. Stati confirmed what she had previously told prosecutors in 2010, that one of the indicted said during the meeting that the continuing tremors represented a “favorable signal” because there was a continuous discharge of energy that made stronger tremors less likely. In fact, scientific evidence suggests that groups of small earthquakes tend instead to increase the chances of a major earthquake nearby, even though the absolute probability of such a quake remains low. Stati said that nobody within the commission objected to this statement. She also underlined that the “reassuring message” given to the press by her, L’Aquila Mayor Massimo Cialente, and two of the indicted, Franco Barberi and Bernardo De Bernardinis, was based on comments made at the meeting.
The final results for the 2011 hurricane season show that the number of Atlantic hurricanes this year was completely average, not too many or too few, but well below what was predicted. See the graph at the bottom of the page.
The uncertainty of science: Recent results from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have found no evidence of dark matter, a result in some conflict with data obtained from several underground research detectors.
The mystery here is that there is no doubt that something causes the outer objects in galaxies to move faster than expected. Scientists have labeled this something as dark matter, guessing that some undetected and unknown mass exists in the outer reaches of galaxies, thereby increasing the gravity potential and hence the velocity in which objects move.
The problem is that they have yet to identify what that dark matter is.
City lights as seen from space show the evolution and development of countries over time.
NASA looks to 3D printing to create spare parts and tools on ISS.
On the way to its winter haven, Opportunity found more evidence of liquid water that once flowed on Mars, specifically a geological vein that they think might be gypsum.
The vein examined most closely by Opportunity is about the width of a human thumb (0.4 to 0.8 inch, or 1 to 2 centimeters), 16 to 20 inches (40 to 50 centimeters) long, and protrudes slightly higher than the bedrock on either side of it. Observations by the durable rover reveal this vein and others like it within an apron surrounding a segment of the rim of Endeavour Crater. None like it were seen in the 20 miles (33 kilometers) of crater-pocked plains that Opportunity explored for 90 months before it reached Endeavour, nor in the higher ground of the rim.
According to what project scientist Steve Squyres said at a press conference today at the AGU meeting, “This is the single most significant piece of evidence that liquid water once flowed on Mars.”
The monthly update of the solar cycle graph produced by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center was released yesterday. I have posted the graph below the fold.
The fast ramp up to solar maximum is continuing. For the fifth month in a row the Sun’s sunspot activity leaped upward. Not only has the sunspot activity once again exceeded the prediction for this particular time period, the activity is shot way above the solar maximum peak predicted for several years hence. This behavior is far different then what we’ve seen during the just completed long and deep solar minimum, when the Sun consistently underperformed the predictions for sunspot activity. Now it appears to be outperforming the predictions.
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Mad scientists at their best! An experiment designed to mimic the dynamo at the Earth’s core is about to be turned on.
Ten years in the making, the US$2-million project is nearly ready for its inaugural run. Early next year, the sphere will begin whirling around while loaded with 13,000 kilograms of molten sodium heated to around 105 °C. Researchers hope that the churning, electrically conducting fluid will generate a self-sustaining electromagnetic field that can be poked, prodded and coaxed for clues about Earth’s dynamo, which is generated by the movement of liquid iron in the outer core. If it works, it will be the first time that an experiment that mirrors the configuration of Earth’s interior has managed to recreate such a phenomenon.
This is a really very cool experiment, as we really do not have a good understanding of how planetary magnetic fields are produced.
According to comments left on a number of particle physics blogs, the word is that the LHC is closing in on the Higgs. The Higgs boson is theorized to be the “force carrier” of the Higgs field — a field thought to permeate the entire Universe, endowing matter with mass. Only by using powerful particle accelerators like the LHC do we stand a chance of seeing these mysterious particles. Apparently, both the ATLAS and CMS experiments are independently seeing a Higgs signal, and the predicted mass of the particle agrees with the experimental results. In particle physics-speak, the Higgs appears to have a mass of 125 GeV (gigaelectronvolts).
The rumors are fun, but this quote from the chief at CERN puts some damper on them:
“These results will be based on the analysis of considerably more data than those presented at the Summer conferences, sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs.”
I suspect in this case we will need to wait for an actual announcement.
Speaking of press release journalism, they just ended a press conference at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) fall meeting led by James Hansen, head of the NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York. Hansen is a devoted global warming scientist, most well known to the public from his testimony to Congress in 1988 outlining the serious threat the world faces from global warming and carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere.
I had very much wanted to ask Hansen (as well as the rest of the panel) this somewhat challenging question:
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The pathetic state of science journalism.
Many survive as a science journalist just by paying attention to press releases and reproducing them, as long as others do the same. A recent BBC analysis of its science coverage in its own news reports revealed that 75% came from press releases, and only a tiny fraction contained views not expressed in those press releases.
This lip service is not good enough, and editors should wise up that science journalism has lost its edge and demand reform. It has also become uncritical and therefore not journalism. Too many who profess to practice journalism are the product of fashionable science communication courses that have sprung up in the past fifteen years. It’s my view that this has resulted in many journalists being supporters of, and not reporters of, science. There is a big difference.
I couldn’t agree more. I sometimes think my rants against “press release journalism” sound like a broken record. I am glad I am not the only one ranting.
And the winner is: The Hubble Space Telescope has now been used as a reference in more than 10,000 peer-reviewed science papers.
Tonight’s press conference at the American Geophysical Union conference focused on the latest results from Dawn, orbiting the giant asteroid Vesta. Or to put it as scientist Vishnu Reddy put it, “Vesta is the most colorful asteroid in the solar system.”
At least, in geological terms. To our human eye the asteroid wouldn’t be so spectacular. However, the false color images released by the scientists show the global geological diversity of Vesta. From the press release:
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