The Cassini spacecraft has successfully entered orbit around Saturn, after a seven year voyage. The planet is now the most distant from Earth to be orbited by a spacecraft. —Cassini slips smoothly into Saturn orbit (New Scientist)
Spirit has begun to negotiate her way up into the Columbia Hills where she has encountered a strange rock called Pot of God that she found contains hematite, something that may well lead to the discovery of past water there. On the other side of the planet, Opportunity has continued her descent into Endurance Crater…
Flying a foam composite rocket ship powered by laughing gas and burning rubber, Mike Melvill took off faster than a bullet over a ramshackle airport in the desert Monday and overcame serious malfunctions to become the first astronaut to reach space in a mission entirely funded by private entrepreneurs. —William Booth —Starship Private Enterprise: Rocket…
Materials that could jump-start organic evolution have shown up in interstellar dust clouds and dusty planet-forming discs around many stars. These findings fuel an increasingly strong suspicion that the raw material of planet Earth was primed for life. —Robert C. Cowen —Outer space: not so lifeless after all (CS Monitor)
A 24-foot sailboat was raised Thursday from the murky depths of Monterey Harbor by divers who filled its hull with pingpong balls. —Kevin Howe —Sunken boat raised by pingpong balls (Monterey Herald)
Researchers at Cambridge University have discovered sheep prefer smiling or relaxed human faces, over angry or stressed ones. — Sheep like smiles say researchers (BBC) What about sheepish grins? Okay, that was a ba-a-ad joke. The news story says this research took place three years ago. What is the “news hook”? Is this article discussing recent…
NASA’s Mars rovers have completed their long cross-country quests and are now at two very different sites that scientists have been restlessly waiting to reach. —Mars rovers arrive at long-awaited sites (New Scientist)
After six years of regulations and restrictions that have cost builders, local governments and landowners on the western fringe of the Great Plains as much as $100 million by some estimates, new research suggests the Preble’s mouse in fact never existed. It instead seems to be genetically identical to one of its cousins, the Bear…
Associated Press editors were forced to retract an earlier report that a meteorite might have hit near Olympia, Wash., this morning after discovering that a source, one Bradley Hammermaster, claiming to be an astronomy professor, had perpetrated a hoax. —Joe Strupp —AP Meteor Crash Report Was a Hoax (Editor and Publisher)
eeeeeee ee [iiiiiii:’ii] v. to move. e eeeeeeee ee eerp mph; move over, you meatball, I can’t breathe under your furry butt. —Harrap’s Rat-English Dictionary (ratbehavior.org) A rat-English dictionary. Via join the dots.
Neckties worn by doctors can and do carry dangerous pathogens, a clever new study released yesterday reveals. It suggests a bedside visit by a well-dressed physician could dole out disease along with comfort and care. —Helen Branswell —MDs’ neckties ‘a health hazard’ (Toronto Star)
Europe’s Mars Express probe has sent back detailed images of a region of the Red Planet that was shaped by intensive continental plate activity. —Image Reveals Mars’ Active Past (BBC) Thanks for the suggestion, Neha.
Right now, roses can be grown in lots of different shades, including pink, yellow, peach, and even green. But blue roses can only be created artificially; one way is to fresh cut flowers and put their stems in blue-colored water. This is not permanent, and doesn’t create a true blue rose. —Karen Lurie —Roses are…
What do films like Independence Day, Armageddon and X-Men have in common? The answer is that apart from costing millions of dollars to make, they all feature in a new course called Physics in Films that is being taught to students at the University of Central Florida. Costas Efthimiou, the mathematical physicist who teaches the…
So much for the evolutionary advantage of love. As to the proximate, immediate cause of love, scientists have found that the mother-offspring bond in humans and other animals is mediated by the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin. What researchers at University College London have now found is that romantic and maternal love activate many of the…
Stan Wagon, a mathematician at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., has a bicycle with square wheels. It’s a weird contraption, but he can ride it perfectly smoothly. His secret is the shape of the road over which the wheels roll. Stan Wagon rides his square-wheeled trike over a special roadway. Courtesy of Stan —Riding…
One jarring aspect of proposals to reform scholarly publishing is that, all too often, they implicitly consider ‘journals’ as a single homogenous entity, to which one universal publishing model can be applied. On the contrary, diversity is everywhere. In any discipline, journals range from high quality ‘must reads’ with high rejection rates — which in…
Individuals and groups need to remain vigilant in finding and naming bad science and bad therapy. Our guide isn’t Foucault, but Aristotle, who saw virtue in the mean behavior. No one wants to live in a world in which there is a deficiency of social control. Bad guys need jails. Drug addicts and the mentally…
“Mixed in with the usual stuff about CIA mind-control beams, talking dogs, and monkey-people, I heard him mention beta decay, instantons, density matrix, and subspaces of n-dimensional Riemannian manifolds,” Willard said. “I’m not sure where he got it, but he definitely seems to have had extensive schooling in theoretical physics. Man, what could’ve happened to…
A new object has been discovered in the Solar System; it’s nearly as large as Pluto, but 13 billion kilometres away. Tentatively named Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the Sea, it’s approximately 1,700 km in diameter, which makes it the largest Solar System object found since Pluto was located in 1930. —Astronomers Find a Second…