The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

The Robot Blimps of Mars

Wired has me eager for interplanetary conquest with their look at our armada of airships and robotic rovers:

With the miniature lab tests complete, [Wolfgang Fink, of Cal Tech’s Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory,] plans to take his show on the road, probably to the Arizona desert. Over a large geographic region, they’ll float an airship with on-board camera and release rovers controlled by the feature analyzer software.

“For initial test purposes, we could put a Coke can and see if the science algorithms will flag these anomalies,” Fink said, “And then, once they are flagged, generate the navigation commands that are issued from the airships to the ground.”

They plan to try the Coke can test in the next year.

Entered on 30 October 2009 at 6:46 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SURPRISE! Asteroid nearly blows up Indonesia.

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, the Telegraph reports that an asteroid just blew up over Indonesia with the force of three atomic bombs:

Scientists are concerned that it was not spotted by any telescopes, and that had it been larger it could have caused a disaster.

The asteroid, estimated to have been around 10 metres (30ft) across, hit the atmosphere at an estimated 45,000mph. The sudden deceleration caused it to heat up rapidly and explode with the force of 50,000 tons of TNT.

Luckily, due to the height of the explosion – estimated at between 15 and 20 km (nine to 12 miles) above sea level – no damage was caused on the ground.

However, if the object had been slightly larger – 20 to 30 metres (60 to 90ft) across – it could easily have caused extensive damage and loss of life, say researchers.

Entered on 29 October 2009 at 6:00 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

DMSD stands for “Digital Mantis Shrimp Discs”

Discover has an interesting bit of unexpected biomimicry. The mantis shrimp (probably the scariest marine predator less than 3 feet long) has an unusual way of looking at the world… and one that might help create better DVD players:

Circular polarized light is one of two forms of polarized light, or light waves that travel in a specific plane.

The specialized CPL detecting cells in shrimp eye are similar to the optical detectors found in DVD players; each can convert polarized light into other forms so it can be stored or processed. However, shrimp eyes can do this with all colors of circular polarized light across the spectrum, according to the study in Nature Photonics. The detectors in DVD and CD players can only recognize circular polarized light in a few colors. The research team thinks that in the future, optics devices might be beefed up by chemically engineered crystals that could mimic the light polarizing cells of the mantis shrimp eye.

Many more facts (they can see 100,000 colors!) at the link.

Entered on 28 October 2009 at 6:48 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Not the kind that belongs to a club, but the kind with a club that belongs to him…

We all want a primitive man, says the Telegraph, reporting on new evidence that modern humans got it on with Neanderthals:

[Said Professor Paabo, who is director of genetics at the renowned Max Planck Institution for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig:] “I’m sure that they had sex, but did it give offspring that contributed to us? We will be able to answer quite vigorously with the new [Neanderthal genome] sequence.”
…

In recent years, fossils with both Neanderthal and modern human features have been found suggesting the two species interbred but previous scans of Neanderthal genes reveal Neanderthal DNA to have a very different make-up to modern man’s.

Entered on 27 October 2009 at 6:18 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

The green planet-killer.

Forget asteroids or nuclear war. Science Daily now has me worried that we’re all going to die from toxic pond scum:

The microscopic plants usually exist in small concentrations, but a sudden warming in the water or an injection of dust or sediment from land can trigger a bloom that kills thousands of fish, poisons shellfish, or even humans.

James Castle and John Rodgers of Clemson University think the same thing happened during the five largest mass extinctions in Earth’s history. Each time a large die off occurred, they found a spike in the number of fossil algae mats called stromatolites strewn around the planet.

…

They explode in population, releasing chemicals that can act as anything from skin irritants to potent neurotoxins. Plants on land can pick up the compounds in their roots, and pass them on to herbivorous animals.

Of course, as winters get warmer, the stuff has been creeping further north every year.

Entered on 26 October 2009 at 6:56 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: Von Karman Vortices

^{Click to embiggen vastly}

Landsat 7 gave us this memorable look at clouds moving rapidly over the Aleutian Islands. These whorls happen, as any canoeist knows, when a fluid moves around an object.

Hypnotic, even when the moment is frozen in time.

Found at the USGS Earth Resources and Observation Science (EROS) “Earth As Art 2″ gallery.

Entered on 25 October 2009 at 6:19 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: Let’s Take the Boat Out

SONG: Let’s Take the Boat Out
_{(To download, double right click and “Save Target As…”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “A Rocket for the 21st Century”, from SEED, 29 Sep 2009, as used in the post “Plasma drive. We have one.” (with necessary allusions to “YOU PUT IN OTHER DETAILS”).

ABSTRACT: First, I should say that I’m definitely bending one of my rules here – the one against “egregious” sampling. I don’t really think this sample is egregious, for one thing, and I think (hope) Mr. Gabriel would agree. I’m certain Mr. Gabriel approves of Dr. Franklin Chang-Diaz’s work superheating hydrogen and helium to form plasma, then using magnetic fields to make an invisible bottle that directs the plasma into jets powerful enough to send people to Mars in 39 days, rather than the 8 months conventional chemical rockets would take. (Remember: plasma is scrambled eggs! Also, remember that “Mercy Street” may have been written as a tribute to Anne Sexton, but was really always about the psychological challenges of space flight. Really.)

I also used a vocoder in this, albeit crudely, and referred to the surface of Earth as the shore of an ocean to be crossed, which is totally a concept and recording method used much more artfully in that “A Glorious Dawn” video. Exploration, new horizons, faster ways of getting to places we’ve never been before – that’s all pretty universal stuff, isn’t it? Uh, so to speak.

Entered on 23 October 2009 at 6:34 in the Songs file | 1 Observation |  Print

Rock the Power, Gramps.

Designboom recently gave a green design award to the Murakami rocking chair.

Great invention – it’s a rocking chair with a dynamo and a built-in reading lamp. Your rocking makes the light go.

Rochus Jacob, designer:
Advanced nano-dynamo technology which is built in to the skids of the chair and more efficient light sources such as the newly developed OLED generation makes it possible to build a rocking chair with a reading lamp running on electricity generated from the rocking motion. During daylight the energy gets stored in a battery pack. The construction of the flat and bendable organic light emitting diodes allows new form factors such as using the traditional shape of a lamp but instead of having a light bulb the lampshade himself turns out to be the light source.

[via Ubergizmo].

Entered on 22 October 2009 at 20:00 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Spies in the house of science.

So first there was that little problem with Al Qaeda and the Large Hadron Collider. Now, the Belfast Telegraph reveals a similar link between Mossad and NASA:

In an affidavit supporting the complaint that was unsealed yesterday, FBI agent Leslie Martell said that on September 3, Nozette received a telephone call from an individual purporting to be an Israeli intelligence officer. The caller was an undercover FBI agent.

Nozette agreed to meet with the agent later that day at a hotel in Washington and in the subsequent meeting the two discussed Nozette’s willingness to work for Israeli intelligence.

Nozette allegedly informed the agent that he had, in the past, held top security clearances and had access to US satellite information, the affidavit said.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

It’s actually worse than that – he was not only trying to sell secrets to Israel, but may already have sold classified information to India.

Entered on 21 October 2009 at 6:15 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

LSD is medicine – and so are magic mushrooms.

…and not only that, but painkilling medicine, too. Newsweek reveals that the psychedelic rocket fuels of 1960s culture are proving to be unique weapons against the otherwise untreatable agony of cluster headaches:

Bob Wold, the president of Cluster Busters, has a story like many of the group’s members. His headaches went misdiagnosed for four years (he even had a few teeth pulled because his dentist suspected hidden cavities were causing the pain—a common, and unproductive treatment among wrongly diagnosed cluster headache sufferers). When he was properly diagnosed, none of the 75 medications he tried gave him lasting relief. During a particularly painful episode in which he began to consider a radical, and mostly unproven, surgical treatment that would have involved severing his trigeminal nerves and killing all sensation in his face, Wold came across an online discussion about using LSD or psilocybin to treat cluster headaches. He was hesitant, but 45 minutes after his first dose of psilocybin, he could tell that something remarkable was happening: “My head was clearer than it had felt in 20 years.”

…

So in 2006, Halpern and colleagues Andrew Sewell and Harrison Pope Jr. published an analysis of interviews with 53 subjects who had tried LSD or psilocybin for their cluster headaches. What they found was astounding: 41 percent of those who took psilocybin during a cluster episode (which can last for months) reported a decreased intensity or frequency of headaches, and an additional 52 percent said the episode ended altogether; 95 percent of those who took psilocybin between episodes said their next episode was delayed or totally averted. The study was preliminary, unblinded, and uncontrolled, but convincing enough to prompt more methodical research. McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School are currently reviewing a prospective study using psilocybin to treat cluster headaches in a controlled environment.

Entered on 20 October 2009 at 18:58 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print