Discovery swooped through the darkness of the Mojave Desert and landed on the Edwards runway at 5:11 a.m. PDT, well before sunrise. It marked the conclusion of the first shuttle re-entry since Columbia’s tragic return. —Alicia Chang —Discovery Lands Safely in California (AP|My Way) Whew!
Discovery and seven astronauts blasted into orbit Tuesday on America’s first manned space shot since the 2003 Columbia disaster, ending a painful, 2 1/2-year shutdown devoted to making the shuttle less risky and NASA more safety-conscious. —Shuttle Discovery Blasts Into Orbit (AP|MyWay)
There are already educational and psychotherapeutic treatments for writer’s block, some fairly effective. But remember, not many people want to be treated for hypergraphia. Their writing is usually very important to them. That raises an important point: What right do I have to give a medical name to a character trait that people value in…
“Psychiatrists believe that these auditory hallucinations are caused when the brain spontaneously activates, creating a false perception of a voice,” says Professor Hunter of the university’s psychiatry department. “The reason these voices are usually male could be explained by the fact that the female voice is so much more complex that the brain would find…
Managers had held out hope, however slim, that they might be able to launch Discovery within a few days. But with engineers no closer to figuring out why the fuel sensor malfunctioned Wednesday – a potentially deadly problem – NASA had no choice but to call for a lengthy standdown. NASA is up against the…
“Middle world is like the narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum that we see,” he said. “Middle world is the narrow range of reality that we judge to be normal as opposed to the queerness that we judge to be very small or very large.” He mused that perhaps children should be given computer games…
The unmanned probe of the Deep Impact mission collided with Tempel 1, a pickle-shaped comet half the size of Manhattan, late Sunday as thousands of people across the country fixed their eyes to the southwestern sky for a glimpse. —NASA Cheers Probe’s Direct Hit on Comet (AP|MyWay)
Let’s say you picked a specific number of people in the United States at random. What then is the chance that the people you picked do not accurately represent the U.S. population as a whole? For example, what is the chance that the percentage of those people you picked who said their favorite color was…
After 2 1/2 two years of frustrating setbacks and delays, NASA officially set July 13 as the launch date Thursday for the first space shuttle flight since the Columbia tragedy. —Marcia Dunn —Space shuttle ‘go for launch’ on July 13Â (AP/My Way) In my mind, the space shuttle is intimately connected with school. The Columbia tragedy…
General Electric is the latest big corporate convert; politicians at the state and national level are looking for solutions; and religious groups are taking philosophical and financial stands to slow the progression of climate change. They agree that the problem is real. A recent study led by James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for…
Over the last three decades, building materials have changed dramatically. Plumbing, flooring, siding, roofing – most are now made from synthetics. The same goes for the stuff inside the building, like foam rubber seat cushions, plastic computer cases, and nylon carpet fibers. As a result, today’s blazes produce two to three times as much energy…
In popular conception, mathematics is the ultimate resolvable discipline, immune to the epistemological murkiness that so bedevils other fields of knowledge in this relativistic age. Yet Philip Davis, emeritus professor of mathematics at Brown University, has pointed out recently that mathematics also is “a multi-semiotic enterprise” prone to ambiguity and definitional drift. Earlier this year,…
For those of you who don’t know what Mono is… let me explain. It is known to most ignorant people as “The Kissing Disease.” This, of course, makes anyone who has it appear to be a whore or a gameshow host. But, this isn’t a proper representation of how the disease is actually spread. I…
After finding food, scout bees returning to the hive dance on the vertical walls of the honeycomb. A round dance indicates the food is very close, within 35 yards or less. A figure-eight pattern indicates that the food is farther away. The bee indicates the distance to the food by how long it dances; it…
The World’s Energy Problems Solved by My 7-year-old (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) For months now, my son has been requesting, for his bedtime stories, books about chemistry and energy. We just finished one on windmills. These aren’t kiddie picture books — they are thin, but they are chapter books, packed with statistics and chemical equations. For a…
Provided it is fed with cubes, the robot can create a copy of itself within a few minutes. To build a replica, a ‘parent’ robot bends down and places its own uppermost cube on the table next to it. This becomes the base of the ‘child’ robot. The parent then picks up a new cube,…
”You cannot overestimate the passion that engineers and scientists of that generation have for the slide rule,” said Douglas, carefully sorting these precursors to the calculator with her white curator’s gloves. —Jonathan Abel —For curator, slide rules are cutting edge (Boston.com)
Prof Roy Spencer, at the University of Alabama, a leading authority on satellite measurements of global temperatures, told The Telegraph: “It’s pretty clear that the editorial board of Science is more interested in promoting papers that are pro-global warming. It’s the news value that is most important.” He said that after his own team produced…
The researchers presented a group of vervet monkeys with a selection of toys, including rag dolls, trucks and some gender-neutral items such as picture books. They found that male monkeys spent more time playing with the “masculine” toys than their female counterparts did, and female monkeys spent more time interacting with the playthings typically preferred…
First, pigeons cannot fly through Windows. Second, since they don’t fly in darkness either, this method’s bandwidth drops to zero 50% of the time. Finally, there’s the problem of droppings download. We are pleased to report that all these shortcomings were resolved in our new data transfer protocol, as we now turn to describe. System…