The Google Lunar X-Prize: One competitor has unveiled its full-size prototype rover, designed to hunt for water in the craters of the Moon.
The company, Astrobotic Technology, is consider to be in second place in the race to build the first private lunar rover.
Resurrecting the chestnut tree.
As chief scientist of the American Chestnut Foundation (ACF), a group of chestnut enthusiasts and scientists, Hebard has bred thousands of hybrids at the organization’s research farm in Meadowview, Virginia. He crosses descendants of the original American chestnut with the much smaller Chinese variety (Castanea mollissima), which has some natural immunity to the Asian fungus. And after decades of work, he is within reach of his goal, a tall American tree with enough Chinese traits to keep it healthy. Other researchers are trying to attack the blight with viruses or are creating trees that are genetically modified (GM) to resist the fungus, and could be the first GM forest trees released in the wild in the United States. Progress with all three approaches is raising hopes that chestnuts will soon start to flourish again in the forests of the American east. “We’re starting to pull the American chestnut tree back from the brink of extinction,” says Hebard.
This work is an example of human behavior at its best, using our ability to adapt as well as our brains to help another species come back to life. And we aren’t doing just to help the trees. Bringing the chestnut tree back will benefit us as well as other species.
An evening pause: This is not what happened during yesterday’s Falcon 9 launch.
As it does every month, NOAA today posted its monthly update of the ongoing sunspot cycle of the Sun. This latest graph, covering the month of September, is posted below the fold.
Not only is the Sun’s sunspot production continuing to fizzle, it is fizzling even more than before.
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An evening pause:
A star has gone supernova and astronomers get to see it from the very beginning, and even earlier!
The star had erupted several times before but had not produced a real supernova explosion. On September 26 it finally did so. Moreover, astronomers have images of the star prior to any eruption, information that until recently was not available for any supernovae.
It’s now official: NASA and the Russians have agreed to fly a two-person year long mission on ISS beginning in the spring of 2015.
NASA has denied that this agreement has any connection with the Sarah Brightman/Russian deal, but I still wonder. Either way, it is very good news. Not only will they finally be using ISS appropriately, a mission like this will generate some real excitement for space exploration that the repeated boring six month expeditions to ISS have failed to do. Even better would be to schedule a two year mission, simulating a journey to and from Mars.
Deep Impact fired its engines today to adjust its orbit, giving it the option of visiting a near Earth asteroid in the future.
The press release is very vague about this future mission. I suspect there is a question of funding, which means that even if they can go to the asteroid, they might not have the funds to staff the mission.
A new study has found that scientific misconduct and fraud is on the rise.
A review of retractions in medical and biological peer-reviewed journals finds the percentage of studies withdrawn because of fraud or suspected fraud has jumped substantially since the mid-1970s. In 1976, there were fewer than 10 fraud retractions for every 1 million studies published, compared with 96 retractions per million in 2007.
The study’s authors suggest that the high pressure of big science might be a cause, combined with an overall decline in our culture itself. I wonder if the influence of government money, granted not because of good science but in the service of a political agenda, might also be a contributing factor.
Astronomers have identified the same kind of minerals found in comets in our solar system in the dusty disk surrounding the nearby star Beta Pictoris.
The uncertainty of science: Using data from the Spitzer Space Telescope astronomers have narrowed the universe’s rate of expansion to about 74.3 kilometers per second per megaparsec.
The importance of this number, also called the Hubble Constant, is that it allows astronomers to extrapolate more precisely backward to when they believe the Big Bang occurred, about 13.7 billion years ago. It also is a crucial data point in their effort to understand dark energy, in which this expansion rate is actually accelerating on vast scales.
Back in 1995 a team led by Wendy Freedman, the same scientist leading the work above, announced that they had used the Hubble Space Telescope to determine the expansion rate as 80 kilometers per second per megaparsec. Then, the margin of error was plus or minus 17 kilometers. Now the margin of error has been narrowed to plus or minus 2.1 kilometers.
Do I believe these new numbers? No, not really. Science has nothing to do with belief. I do think this is good science, however, and that this new estimate of the Hubble constant is probably the best yet. I would also not be surprised if in the future new data eventually proves this estimate wrong.
A vehicle powered by cheese has set a speed record for its class.
And you did read that right.
