February 22, 2012
It may be possible to travel to space in an elevator as early as 2050, a major construction company has announced.
Obayashi Corp., headquartered in Tokyo, on Monday unveiled a project to build a gigantic elevator that would transport passengers to a station 36,000 kilometers above the Earth.
It’ll take 7-1/2 days to get to the terminal. Better not have Yanni playing in that elevator…
February 15, 2012
Yes we can:
It sounds like a particularly suspicious late-night infomercial: Spray your way to a better wireless signal! Improve your range! Save battery! Transmit over great distances under water!
But Chamtech’s spray-on antenna is a real product with some impressive claims. It can be sprayed on almost any surface, even trees and orange barrels. It doesn’t suck up power. It works in a mysterious nanotech way.
Orange-barrels?
February 13, 2012
Physicists have come up with an equation that explains and predicts the shape of a ponytail.
The report in Physical Review Letters journal could help scientists better understand natural materials, such as wool and fur.
The researchers add that mullets remained a complete mystery…
* Pic.
February 11, 2012
Went here:
I have been spending some far too much time this past day looking intently at at the absolutely phenomenal sub-meter resolution images taken by the HiRES camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which are freely available for download. The full-resolution JPEG2000 files are whoppers: Some of them easily scale 250MB and half a gigapixel, so if you need an excuse to buy a new computer, this is it.
Ended up here:
High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment: “Explore Mars, one giant image at a time.”
And found things like this. (Click to enlarge.)
Many, many more mindblowing shots at the link. Happy Saturday…
February 3, 2012
It’s the new blue marble:
A ‘Blue Marble’ image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA’s most recently launched Earth-observing satellite – Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface taken on January 4, 2012.
Result:
That’s good, but you have to go here. The image takes a while to appear completely—but it is just mindblowing. And if you click on a spot in the photo you get incredible closeups.
More on SUOMI NPPP right over here.
February 2, 2012
They’ve been drilling for 20 years:
After drilling for two decades through more than two miles of antarctic ice, Russian scientists are on the verge of entering a vast, dark lake that hasn’t been touched by light for more than 20 million years.
Scientists are enormously excited about what life-forms might be found there but are equally worried about contaminating the lake with drilling fluids and bacteria, and the potentially explosive “de-gassing” of a body of water that has especially high concentrations of oxygen and nitrogen.
Yowza. Anyone mind if we stand back?
They’ve got a great graphic. Here’s a peek.
There’s more to the graphic over at the WaPo.
January 24, 2012
Jan 24 (Reuters) – Delta Air Lines said it is diverting some flights on polar routes between Detroit and Asia to avoid disruptions to aircraft communications by a strong solar radiation storm.
The storm has caused minor disruptions for U.S. airlines. Delta said it altered routes for “a handful” of flights and that changes are adding about 15 minutes to travel times.
“We are undergoing a series of solar bursts in the sky that are impacting the northern side of the world,” said Delta spokesman Anthony Black on Tuesday.
“It can impact your ability to communicate,” he said. “So, basically, the polar routes are being flown further south than normal.”
Here’s our question: Shouldn’t a news story about one airline doing this (they do say that one other did a wee bit of rerouting) be about…one airline doing this?
Here’s a good article on the recent flares.
And oh heckyeah. Awesome NASA video:
January 22, 2012
From the notes:
Seismometers from the EarthScope project Transportable Array measured the up-and-down motion of the ground from the magnitude 5.9 earthquake that occurred in Virginia on August 23, 2011. You can see the waves move across the country! Red is upward motion; blue down. The height of the wave was only 22 microns!
Too cool. And here’s an even better view, where you can blow it up to full screen.
That was posted to YouTube by Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy. (Even more info on this there.)
And: Maybe we should be using Twitter to measure earthquake activity?
January 18, 2012
January 3, 2012
According to reports, Mrs. Uncle John’s reply to this was: “I can see the day coming, when men are raised on farms and harvested for their testicle germ!“ (She admits that she did indeed say this, but denies crying “Hallelujah!” several dozen times afterwards.)
In a world first a team headed by Professor Stefan Schlatt, at Muenster University in Germany, were able to grow sperm by using germ cells. These are the cells in testicles that are responsible for sperm production.
Scientists grew the sperm by surrounding the germ cells in a special compound called agar jelly to create an environment similar to that found in testicles.
More here, and here, and – because why not? – at the Weekly World News.
We think this calls for a song:
