moonbuggy

This is an old trailer for the first Star Wars movie. It makes the whole movie look stupid, so I assume they came up with a better one before the movie was actually released. 🙂

(4.9meg Flash video)

see it here »

`It ranks among the most enduring mysteries of the cosmos. Physicists call it the Fermi paradox after the Italian Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, who, in 1950, pointed out the glaring conflict between predictions that life was elsewhere in the universe – and the conspicuous lack of aliens who have come to visit.

Now a Danish researcher believes he may have solved the paradox. Extra-terrestrials have yet to find us because they haven’t had enough time to look. [..]

He found that even if the alien ships could hurtle through space at a tenth of the speed of light, or 30,000km a second, – Nasa’s current Cassini mission to Saturn is plodding along at 32km a second – it would take 10bn years, roughly half the age of the universe, to explore just 4% of the galaxy.’

(627kB Shockwave)

see it here »

An amusing little web comic.

`A reader in New Zealand wrote to ask about the Playmate photos unwittingly taken to the moon in 1969 by Apollo 12 astronauts Al Bean and Pete Conrad. We described in the December 1994 issue how pranksters on the ground crew had reprinted Playmate photos on fireproof plastic paper and inserted them with captions into each of the astronauts’ cuff checklists. [..]

Conrad told us in 1994: “I had no idea they were with us. It wasn’t until we actually got out on the lunar surface and were well into our first moon walk that I found them.” Bean recalled: “It was about two and a half hours into the extravehicular activity. I flipped the page over and there she was. I hopped over to where Pete was and showed him mine, and he showed me his.”

Conrad: “We giggled and laughed so much that people accused us of being drunk or having ‘space rapture.'”‘

`The most spectacular comet in 40 years, named after the Australian astronomer who discovered it, will streak through the southern hemisphere over the next month.

Clear skies permitting, McNaught’s Comet will reveal itself against the western horizon at sunset, beginning on Saturday. [..]

It has already appeared in the northern hemisphere and will be visible for up to one month but will burn brightest on Monday evening, fellow ANU astronomer Paul Francis said.’

`NASA is investigating whether incorrect software commands may have doomed the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, which abruptly fell silent last year after a decade of meticulously mapping the Red Planet.

The space agency said that theory is just one of several that may explain the probe’s failure. NASA on Wednesday announced the formation of an internal review board to investigate why the Global Surveyor lost contact with controllers during a routine adjustment of its solar array. [..]

The software was aimed at improving the spacecraft’s flight processors. Instead, bad commands may have overheated the battery and forced the spacecraft into safe mode [..]’

`We may have already encountered Martian life about 30 years ago and accidentally killed it, according to a new analysis of NASA’s Viking mission to Mars presented Sunday at a major astronomy conference in Seattle. [..]

Schulze-Makuch and Houtkooper suggest that the hydrogen peroxide detected by Viking could have come from killing Martian microbes that, like some peculiar creatures on Earth, use hydrogen peroxide the same way humans use water.

The Mars landers did all their chemical analyses by mixing samples with water — a step that would have prompted a powerful chemical reaction in any microbe full of hydrogen peroxide, killing it and releasing the peroxide.’

From the French Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Possible answers are the moon, the sun, mars and venus.

People are retards. 🙂

see it here »

`Until recently, scholars thought only 8 or 10 of these important early telescopes _ made between 1608 and 1650 of tightly rolled paper and crudely ground lenses _ had survived to the present day.

Then two historians on a visit to a museum in Berlin last fall had an “aha!” moment. One of the oldest known surviving telescopes at the German museum gave them an idea of places to look for other, as yet undiscovered examples.

Their insight apparently was correct. According to Marvin Bolt of Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, he and his colleague found a previously unreported 1627 telescope in a Dresden museum storage room within 24 hours of their brainstorm. Less than a day later, they found a second, slightly earlier telescope that had lain unnoticed in the storage room of a museum in Kassel.’

`Twinkling in the sky is a diamond star of 10 billion trillion trillion carats, astronomers have discovered.

The cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallised carbon, 4,000 km across, some 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus.

It’s the compressed heart of an old star that was once bright like our Sun but has since faded and shrunk.’

`Federal officials say it was probably just some weird weather phenomenon, but a group of United Airlines employees swear they saw a mysterious, saucer-shaped craft hovering over O’Hare Airport in November.

The workers, some of them pilots, said the object didn’t have lights and hovered over an airport terminal before shooting up through the clouds, according to a report in Monday’s Chicago Tribune. [..]

“Our theory on this is that it was a weather phenomenon,” Cory said. “That night was a perfect atmospheric condition in terms of low (cloud) ceiling and a lot of airport lights. When the lights shine up into the clouds, sometimes you can see funny things.”

The FAA is not investigating, Cory said.’

Followup to: ‘UFO’ spooks pilots over Chicago

`Federal officials in the US say it was probably just some weird weather phenomenon, but a group of United Airlines employees swear they saw a mysterious, saucer-shaped craft hovering over Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.

The workers, some of them pilots, said the object did not have lights and hovered over an airport terminal on November 7 before shooting up through the clouds, according to a report in today’s Chicago Tribune.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) acknowledged that a United supervisor had called the control tower at O’Hare, asking if anyone had seen a spinning disc-shaped object.

But the controllers did not see anything, and a preliminary check of radar found nothing out of the ordinary, FAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory said.’

`2. The part of the brain that regulates reasoning, impulse control and judgment is still under construction during puberty and doesn’t shift into autopilot until about age 25. [..]

6. Cheese consumption in the United States is expected to grow by 50 percent between now and 2013. [..]

8. The U.S. government has paid about $1.5 billion in benefits to thousands of sick nuclear-weapons workers since 2001. [..]

13. Ancient humans from Asia may have entered the Americas following an ocean highway made of dense kelp. [..]

50. Researchers from the University of Manchester managed to induce teeth growth in normal chickens – activating genes that have lain dormant for 80 million years.’

This is footage from a camera mounted on one of the booster rockets. It’s actually pretty cool in a way. Especially some of the sounds. 🙂

see it here »

see it here »

`What’s it for? Good luck answering that question. There is scientific research to be done on the moon, but this could be accomplished by automatic probes or occasional astronaut visits at a minute fraction of the cost of a permanent, crewed facility. Astronauts at a moon base will spend almost all their time keeping themselves alive and monitoring automated equipment, the latter task doable from an office building in Houston. In deadpan style, the New York Times story on the NASA announcement declared, “The lunar base is part of a larger effort to develop an international exploration strategy, one that explains why and how humans are returning to the moon and what they plan to do when they get there.” Oh–so we’ll build the moon base first, and then try to figure out why we built it.’

`NASA photographs have revealed bright new deposits seen in two gullies on Mars that suggest water carried sediment through them sometime during the past seven years.

“These observations give the strongest evidence to date that water still flows occasionally on the surface of Mars,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, Washington. [..]

Today’s announcement is the first to reveal newly deposited material apparently carried by fluids after earlier imaging of the same gullies. The two sites are inside craters in the Terra Sirenum and the Centauri Montes regions of southern Mars. ‘

`NASA has announced it plans to build a permanently occupied base on the moon, most likely at the lunar north pole.

The habitat will serve as a science outpost as well as a testbed for technologies needed for future travel to Mars and construction will follow a series of flights to the moon scheduled to begin by 2020.

NASA’s associate administrator for exploration, Scott “Doc” Horowitz, told reporters of the plans in a teleconference from the Johnson Space Centre in Houston on Monday.

“We’re going for a base on the moon,” he said.’

`Not content with having them dotted all over the countryside, Sweden is now considering putting a little red cottage on the moon. The idea, first conjured up by the artist Mikael Genberg seven years ago, may become reality with the help of the Swedish Space Corporation (SSC), according to N24.

The state agency SSC has carried out a technical study showing that it is indeed possible to put a little red cottage on the moon.
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“If we manage to do this Sweden will be the third country to occupy the moon”, said SSC’s Fredrik von Schéele.’

`An enormous ring of superconducting magnets similar to a particle accelerator could fling satellites into space, or perhaps weapons around the world, suggest the findings of a new study funded by the US air force. [..]

The tunnel would direct the cone to a ramp angled at 30° to the horizon, where the cone would launch towards space at about 8 kilometres per second, or more than 23 times the speed of sound. A rocket at the back end of the cone would be used to adjust its trajectory and place it in a proper orbit.’

`An Australian researcher using high-tech software has found the tiny missing article in Neil Armstrong’s declaration as he became the first human to step onto the moon’s surface.

[..] Armstrong always insisted he had intended to say: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”, and he and NASA believed that he had. [..]

Now Sydney researcher Peter Shann Ford says he has the technological proof that Armstrong said the critical “a”.’

‘When NASA announced its “Galileo into Jupiter” option, among those to publish immediate, serious objections (and later to repeat them on “Coast to Coast AM”) was an engineer named Jacco van der Worp. Van der Worp claimed that, plunging into Jupiter’s deep and increasingly dense atmosphere, the on-board Galileo electrical power supply — a set of 144 plutonium-238 fuel pellets, arrayed in two large canister devices called “RTGs” (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators — see image and schematic, below) — would ultimately “implode”; that the plutonium Galileo carried would ultimately collapse in upon itself under the enormous pressures of Jupiter’s overwhelming atmosphere —

Triggering a runaway nuclear explosion!’

`Having sex in the weightlessness of outer space is the stuff of urban legends and romantic fantasy — but experts say that there would be definite downsides as well.

Spacesickness, for instance. And the difficulty of choreographing intimacy. And the potential for sweat and other bodily fluids to, um, get in the way.

“The fantasy might be vastly superior to the reality,” NASA physician Jim Logan said here Sunday at the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace 2006 conference. Nevertheless, Logan and others say the study of sex and other biological basics in outer space will be crucial to humanity’s long-term push into the final frontier.’

`Scientists and science fiction fans alike have big plans for carbon nanotubes; it has been hoped that a cable made of carbon nanotubes would be strong enough to serve as a space elevator. However, recent calculations by Nicola Pugno of the Polytechnic of Turin, Italy, suggest that carbon nanotube cables will not work.

[..] Laboratory tests have demonstrated that flawless individual nanotubes can withstand about 100 gigapascals of tension; however, if a nanotube is missing just one carbon atom, it can reduce its strength by as much as thirty percent. Bulk materials made of many connected nanotubes are even weaker, averaging less than 1 gigapascal in strength.

In order to function, a space elevator ribbon would need to withstand at least 62 gigapascals of tension.’

`The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there’s an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, world-renowned scientist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday. [..]

He added that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth.

“It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species,” Hawking said. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.”‘

‘The size of a shoebox, a mysterious bronze device scooped out of a Roman-era shipwreck at the dawn of the 20th century has baffled scientists for years. Now a British researcher has stunningly established it as the world’s oldest surviving astronomy computer. [..]

Scooped out of a Roman shipwreck located in 1900 by sponge divers near the southern Greek island of Antikythera, and kept at the Athens National Archaeological Museum, the Mechanism contains over 30 bronze wheels and dials, and is covered in astronomical inscriptions.

Probably operated by crank, it survives in three main pieces and some smaller fragments.’

`There is no subtle way to say this: Brian Walker plans to shoot himself nearly 20 miles into the air aboard a homemade rocket launched from what could be the world’s largest crossbow. (Seriously.) [..]

Walker’s idea of fun? Stretch a carbon-fiber bowstring 24 feet along a rail, fire up a jet turbine with 1,350 pounds of thrust, hit a trigger, and pull 10 gs as his craft, modeled on spaceships from Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, shoots to the stratosphere. He’ll plummet back to Earth using hydrogen peroxide rockets (the propulsion system used in 1950s jet packs) to slow his descent.’

`Specifically, Louis has isolated strange, thick-walled, red-tinted cell-like structures about 10 microns in size. Stranger still, dozens of his experiments suggest that the particles may lack DNA yet still reproduce plentifully, even in water superheated to nearly 600?F. (The known upper limit for life in water is about 250?F.) So how to explain them? Louis speculates that the particles could be extraterrestrial bacteria adapted to the harsh conditions of space and that the microbes hitched a ride on a comet or meteorite that later broke apart in the upper atmosphere and mixed with rain clouds above India. If his theory proves correct, the cells would be the first confirmed evidence of alien life and, as such, could yield tantalizing new clues to the origins of life on Earth.’

followup to Red Rain Proof of Extraterrestrial Life?.

`Still, when it comes to grand ambition, the impresarios of the Strip are mere pikers next to Budget Suites owner Robert Bigelow. For his next hotel enterprise, Bigelow is looking beyond the bright lights of Las Vegas—beyond Earth’s atmosphere, in fact. He is actively engaged in an effort to build the planet’s first orbiting space hotel. Bargain-basement room rate: $1 million a night. For its water show, this hotel will have all of Earth’s blue oceans flying past its windows at 17,500 miles an hour. Guests on board the 330-cubic-meter station (about the size of a three-bedroom house) will learn weightless acrobatics, marvel at the ever-changing face of the home planet, and, for half of every 90-minute orbit, gaze deep into a galaxy ablaze with stars.’