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— Learning a language after age 12 is tougher. Awww, now I'll never learn Swahili!
— The Monitor #4 delves into dinosaurs, Hot Or Not, and Predator. "Get to the chopper," indeed!
— The Pentagon is researching a wide range of space weapons. Sadly, no AT-AT's on the list.
Giant Meteor Fireball Explodes Over Northwest U.S.
from National Geographic News: A meteor zipped across the U.S. Pacific Northwest sky early Tuesday morning before exploding, possibly littering eastern Oregon with marble- to basketball-size space rocks, an expert says. Impact sites are yet to be found, according to Richard Pugh, a scientist with the Cascadia Meteorite Laboratory at Portland State University in Oregon. Pugh is coordinating a search for potential meteorites. He said 40 to 50 eyewitnesses have contacted his lab to report the fireball. ... The meteor was first spotted over Washington State moving in an east-southeast direction. "The light was bright enough to wake up people even though the shades were pulled, and then the sonic boom hit, rattling windows and making the dust fly, and the dogs crawled under the bed," Pugh said.
Almost everyone — even the scientists among us — have likely had a brush with a lame science project of our own. I'll own up to copping out with the ubiquitous and ultra-lame "see what light grows plants best" experiment, and I seem to remember presenting a science project that had something to do with popcorn cooking times. Not my brightest moment.
But it takes real ingenuity to come up with a science project this great:
Check some more after the jump:
Continue reading 'Gallery: Most hilarious kids' science projects EVER' >
Long Nights, 90 Below. What More Could Astronomers Want?
from the New York Times (Registration Required): It's been called the whitest place on Earth, and at 90 degrees below zero, it could be the coolest place on the planet for astronomy. And so 17 Chinese astronomers, engineers and technicians boarded an old icebreaker last November, crunched into a harbor in East Antarctica and then set off on a 20-day, 1,000-mile trip across the snows to establish a new observatory at the bottom of the world. The observatory is called Plato, for the Plateau Observatory. For now it consists of a collection of boxes and towers holding seven small telescopes and cameras on a bump known as Dome Argus, which is 13,000 feet high and about 700 miles east of the South Pole. For the next year they will hold vigil alone, reporting by satellite radio through the long Antarctic night, but these instruments are the vanguard of great hopes.
Perhaps I spoke too soon with our "simulated" footage of the satellite strike. The Pentagon has released video of the successful missile strike:
Click through to see a vid of the satellite-busting missile taking off.
Continue reading 'UPDATE: Satellite destruction mission video footage' >
Woo-hoo! I don't know if I'm more excited about the success of our military's efforts to destroy a wayward satellite because 1) it's a bold tactical, interstellar move, or 2) now we'll get to stop writing about it. Either way, the Navy is "80-90 percent confident" that a missile aboard the U.S.S. Lake Erie took out most of the spy satellite, including that tank of poisonous hydrazine that caused such a hubbub. There's no official video of the takedown, but you can imagine that it went a little something like this:
Back around the turn of the century, some genius with a Burmese python realized his chosen pet was a lot more difficult to manage than a goldfish, so he dumped it in the Everglades. Meanwhile, another genius discovered the same thing and also released his or her Burmese python in the Everglades, and — voila! — by 2003, biologists with the park service confirmed an established breeding population of a 20-foot, 300-lb. snake.
But it gets better: See all the green space on the map? According to a new USGS survey, that represents the area of our country that climatically matches the python's historical range from Pakistan to Indonesia. Burmese pythons have already been spotted north and east of the Everglades, so it seems like only a matter of time before these highly adaptable reptiles spread even more.
Unsurprisingly, global warming could play a big part in the invasive animals' spread. Click through to see another USGS projection of the python's suitable range in 100 years:
Mysterious Creatures Found in Antarctica
from the San Francisco Examiner: SYDNEY, Australia (Associated Press) - Scientists investigating the icy waters of Antarctica said Tuesday they have collected mysterious creatures including giant sea spiders and huge worms in the murky depths. Australian experts taking part in an international program to take a census of marine life in the ocean at the far south of the world collected specimens from up to 6,500 feet beneath the surface, and said many may never have been seen before. Some of the animals far under the sea grow to unusually large sizes, a phenomenon called gigantism that scientists still do not fully understand.
From our friends at
Breathalyzers are no longer just good for getting a DUI citation. Now when a police officer suspends your driver’s license he can throw in, “By the way, not only is your blood alcohol level over the legal limit, but according to my breathalyzer—you have an inoperable malignant brain tumor.” Indeed, scientists have found that by simply blasting a person's breath with laser light, you can detect specific molecules that will tell you whether or not they have specific diseases like diabetes or cancer.
Actually, this StarTrekish advancement is not intended to diagnose drunkenness (although it can do that too), but rather is meant to make professional medical diagnostics quicker, less expensive, less painful and potentially even more accurate that current methods. Scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado at Boulder say the advancement would allow doctors to simultaneously screen for a variety of conditions with a mere exhale. Known as optical frequency comb spectroscopy, the technology earned it’s creators a Nobel Prize in physics, and is powerful enough to sort through all the molecules in human breath while also being sensitive enough to distinguish rare molecules that can serve as biomarkers for specific diseases.
Every weekday, Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, picks the raddest articles from the mainstream media so we don't have to. Open wide: Today's Science in the News is piping hot.
The Most Intense Laser in the Universe
from Nature News: Is this really the most intense laser in the Universe? Yes, that's what scientists working on the HERCULES laser at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor claim. ... This record-breaking beam actually has very low energy - at just 20 joules, it is less than the 8,000 joules stored in a tic tac - but the energy is squeezed into a tiny spot (1.3 micrometres in diameter, about a hundred times thinner than a human hair) for a very short time, just 30 femtoseconds (10^-15 seconds). So the beam has an intensity of 2 x 10^22 watts per square centimetre: two orders of magnitude more intense than achieved before.
War is bad and all, but recent news of an errant satellite and our military's plans to blow it out of the sky has stoked the fires of our Millennium Falcon-loving youth. Luckily, our thoughtful, do-gooder big brother spent less time breaking out the action figures and actually investigated the possibility of the U.S. and China engaging in a protracted arms race in outer space. Basically, the Pentagon is already thinking about it seriously, but astronomical (heh) costs and mitigating factors (debris in orbit from space battles could interfere with essential communications satellites) might hold us or the Chinese back from building a Death Star anytime soon.
Even cooler than the article, though, is the space weapons slideshow our sibling provided at no extra charge. It covers possible space weapons, connected technology, and the feasibility and costs of getting said super-weapons off the ground. Badass entries include: a ground-based antisatellite laser, kinetic-energy interceptors, offensive satellites, and space-based hypersonic bombers (pictured left). Yes! Way to go, bro!
Continue reading 'Pew! Pew! Is an arms race in space on the horizon?' >
Well, what did we learn this week, kids? What didn't we learn:
— Thomas Edison had a birthday. Luckily, no pachyderms were harmed in celebration.
— So did Darwin. Some pachyderms died this time. "Natural selection" my ass.
— We learned the creators of Jumper aren't so science savvy — twice. Doug Liman should really stick to the understated drama of Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
— Pollen detectives shut down a Chinese bogus drug ring. Look out CSI!
Continue reading 'Weekly Wrap-Up: Learning is fun Edition' >
Every weekday, Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, picks the raddest articles from the mainstream media so we don't have to. Open wide: Today's Science in the News is piping hot.
Five-Seat Concept Car Runs on Air
from BBC News Online: An engineer has promised that within a year he will start selling a car that runs on compressed air, producing no emissions at all in town. The OneCAT will be a five-seater with a glass fibre body, weighing just 350 kg and could cost just over 2,500 [pounds]. It will be driven by compressed air stored in carbon-fibre tanks built into the chassis. The tanks can be filled with air from a compressor in just three minutes - much quicker than a battery car. Alternatively, it can be plugged into the mains for four hours and an on-board compressor will do the job. For long journeys the compressed air driving the pistons can be boosted by a fuel burner which heats the air so it expands and increases the pressure on the pistons. The burner will use all kinds of liquid fuel. The designers say on long journeys the car will do the equivalent of 120 mpg In town, running on air, it will be cheaper than that.
Continue reading 'A car that runs on air, FEMA trailers toxic, and remembering our digital past' >
After all the hand-wringing about what's going to happen to the U.S.'s broken, poisonous satellite on track to crash into earth, it looks the military is going to go ahead and do the Hollywood thing after all and blow it out of the sky. Or at least, they're going to try.
Right now, the military has a two-week window in which to shoot down the school bus-sized satellite; after that point, it would begin to break apart and tumble down into the earth's atmosphere, depositing its half-ton of frozen, hazardous hydrazene rocket fuel in an unknown place. Because the satellite circles the earth 16 times a day, we'll have a second and maybe even a third chance to hit it if we miss on the first blast.
The plan is to use ship-based anti-ballistic missile weaponry to take out the busted satellite, which, um, hasn't exactly been done before. If it works, it stands to serve not only as a way to take out a potentially dangerous piece of space junk, but also a powerful proof-of-concept for the U.S.'s antisatellite capability.
Continue reading 'Asteroid practice: U.S. plans to shoot down errant spy satellite' >
Every weekday, Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, picks the raddest articles from the mainstream media so we don't have to. Open wide: Today's Science in the News is piping hot.
MS Therapy Shows Promise in Test
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required): An experimental treatment for multiple sclerosis that targets a portion of the immune system not previously subjected to therapy reduced damaging lesions of the nervous system by 91 percent and relapses of the disease by 58 percent, researchers report today. A single course of the drug, called rituximab, helped patients for the full 48 weeks of the trial and suggests a new way to treat relapsing-remitting MS, the most common form of the disabling disease. Researchers said they were still concerned about potential long-term side effects of the drug, which is used under the brand name Rituxan to treat non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and rheumatoid arthritis, like MS an autoimmune disease.
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