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Found a broken link? May be the story can still be found.
Rachel Swirsky has been blogging from an event called Launch Pad - NASA folks interacting with science fiction community, as I understand.
I've read only one of the several reports she's filed so far - Day 3: Kevin R Grazier.
Recall Henry Kuttner & C L Moore's hilarious story, "The Proud Robot" (download).
Someone seems to have actually built a rather primitive version of Joe - a beer delivering robot for folks hard at work! Here is the 2:47 minutes video ("Beer Me, Robot") of robot in action , & the project description.
[via lal_truckee@rasfw]
IBM "350 Disk Storage Unit" with a capacity of 5MB, dimensions "60 inches long, 68 inches high and 29 inches deep", & contains "50 magnetic disks"!
Actually, its probably 6- or 7-bit bytes (to hold English alphanumeric characters) rather than modern 8-bit ones. About one MP3 song in a 5 feet by 5.5 feet by 2.5 feet unit weighting may be a few hundred kg.
Link includes a picture too.
[via Boing Boing]
Link. [via Boing Boing]
A couple of them I could not see & another one or two were already familiar. But most are very cool: how we perceive color & depth, how sexual maturity affects what we see, ...
Tip: Read the text underneath the picture too.
In Mail Online. [via Boing Boing]
He discusses 3 things in currently known physics that could be used to time travel to future (but not to past):
From Google Blog: "in our quest to minimize our carbon footprint", "More than 200 goats from California Grazing have once again arrived at our Mountain View headquarters where they’ll stay for over a week chomping away on grassy goodness. The cost of bringing in the goats is comparable to hiring lawn mowers for the same job and the green benefits are clear: the goats eliminate mower emissions, reduce noise pollution, restore plant species and fertilize while grazing."
Link.
"Across the animal kingdom, senses come online in a very specific order that doesn't vary much from one vertebrate to another. The first sense fetuses experience is touch. Then come the chemical-based senses—taste and smell. The ability to hear develops fourth. And finally, so late that many animals are born lacking it, comes sight."
This is very curious.
Recently, for a brief period, internet users in US & Chile too were being filtered by the censorship firewall of Chinese government!
Apparently, TLD DNS tables were polluted by a hacker.
Alexis Madrigal's "You’re Leaving a Bacterial Fingerprint on Your Keyboard" at Wired. [via Boing Boing]
"The bacterial communities that live on human skin may form a bacterial fingerprint on the items that you touch."
"researchers swabbed three different keyboards and nine mice for bacteria, then compared the genomic variation between the communities to deduce whose hands had been touching what. The people were clearly identifiable from the bacterial communities they’d transferred to their computer input devices."
That's not quite good enough for forensic evidence yet because "researchers will need a lot more evidence that human microbiomes don’t change rapidly in time — and that bacterial communities transferred to keyboards endure with few changes." "in real-world forensics, ... evidence is often collected long after contact with a keyboard or other surface would have ceased."
However, "Even identical twins harbor substantially different microbial communities, suggesting that the collective genomes of our microbial symbionts may be more personally identifying than our own human genomes".
This post is based on a front page story in Bombay "Late City" edition of The Indian Express newspaper today, quoting multiple ISRO & NASA sources.
"New analysis of scientific data from" a NASA instrument called "Mini-SAR" "that flew aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft" "found more than 40 small craters (2-15 km in diameter) with sub-surface water ice located at their base. The interior of these craters is in permanent sun shadow".
These craters are all located "in the lunar north pole". "there could be more than 600 million metric tons of water ice in the craters."
While previous investigations by ISRO & NASA have detected water on moon, "this is the first time that evidence has emerged of the presence of large quantities of lunar water."
From "Raining fish in Australia" in Boing Boing: "The phenomenon has been documented around the world and is believed to be cause by small twisters or waterspouts.
As they pass over water small fish can be sucked up into the clouds and kept there as the cloud moves over land.
Eventually they fall from the cloud to the ground, inevitably surprising any people who see them."
What I don't understand is "kept there". The moment twister gives way, I would expect it to fall. Or are clouds less flimsy than I thought?
From Times Online: "The 985 sq mile (2,550 sq km) block of ice was knocked off the Mertz Glacier Tongue, a spit of floating ice protruding from eastern Antarctica, on February 12 or 13." "and could disrupt global ocean patterns and weather systems for decades".
[via Boing Boing]
Link.
Related: Arthur Clarke's "The Shining Ones": Generating electricity by exploiting the difference in temperature of sea at different depths.
Link (stare a moment at the picture there; dark patch is wet ground).
[via Boing Boing]
From the lead story on front page of today's paper edition of Sunday Times, Bombay:
Picture: Has links to image in 3 different resolutions, plus some commentary.
Details of the Hubble-photographed image & its possible interpretation at HubbleSite.
Object in photograph is called "P/2010 A2" - looks like a comet but isn't. First seen on 6 January 2010.
"If this interpretation is correct, two small and previously unknown asteroids recently collided, creating a shower of debris that is being swept back into a tail from the collision site by the pressure of sunlight".
"At the time of the Hubble observations, the object was approximately 180 million miles (300 million km) from the Sun and 90 million miles (140 million km) from Earth."
[via James Nicoll]
Related: Ross Rocklynne's "Time Wants a Skeleton": A group of adventurers unwittingly time travel to the "fifth planet" days before it is to be impacted by a large body from space - an impact that would create the current asteroid belt between Mars & Jupiter from their debris.
Link. [via Boing Boing]
'Dust is one of the biggest obstacles for long-term lunar and Martian space colonies. On the moon, there’s no atmosphere and no water, so the dust particles don’t get moved around, worn down and rounded like they do on Earth.
Consequently, dust kicked up by rovers and astronauts is “very abrasive and sharp, like freshly broken glass”...
Electrostatic charging from solar winds and UV radiation on the moon makes this sharp dust cling to everything, including astronaut suits where it can work its way through the glove air locks. It also sticks to the solar panels that power rovers and other instruments.
On Mars, which has a thin atmosphere, dust devils scour the surface and keep the soil from being as sharp, but it’s still got plenty of static cling.'
Click image to enlarge to original size.
Explanation of weird tendrils is in Discover Magazine (but went over my head). You can actually see a few seconds old avalanche-in-progress in the picture too (bottom left quadrant, third tendrils from bottom, a little red cloud above right half with smaller growths).
[via Boing Boing]
io9 has a story about the very complex manually-powered Greek machine from some 150 BC, recovered from a shipwreck. "Devices with this level of complexity were not seen again for almost 1,500 years, and the Antikythera mechanism's compactness actually bests the later designs."
Link.
I'm not qualified to judge its significance, but some people think the finding (via Voyager 2 data) sheds new light on interstellar gas clouds.
At XKCD.
Corresponding texts are not very legible on my screen, but others seem to be able to read it well. A usenet discussion suggests there are some errors in numbers.
Arthur Clarke has written a famous farce called "The Food of Gods". A reader reports a real-life lab version of the edible at the heart of this story.
Charles Stross tells us why aliens looking for an earth-like world are far more likely to conclude that earth is uninhabitable than otherwise, in this rather longish article. Or why our search for earth like worlds is even more complex than intuition suggests.
[via Bibliophile Stalker]
From New Scientist, 26 September 2009: On moon, "shadows cast by crater margins keep some regions in permanent darkness." The measurements by "instruments on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter" "revealed they stay at a chilly -240C, just 33C above absolute zero. Pluto was measured at -230C in 2006."
Catch probably is: Pluto's temperature quoted is average, rather than on its coldest spot. But New Scientist doesn't mention it.
From an article of this title by Rachel Courtland in New Scientist, 26 September 2009:
"How far could an astronaut travel in a lifetime? Billions of light years, it turns out."
"The furthest that the light emitted from our sun could reach ... currently lies at about 15 billion light years away." Traveling in "a super-advanced rocket" at "a comfortable 1g", this journey would be made "in only 30 years" in "astronaut's reference frame, because time would pass slower than on Earth due to relativity", according to "a paper to appear in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia" authored by "Kwan & her colleagues".
"But ... returning home presents its own challenges... Beginning deceleration just a second too late could cause you to overshoot the Milky Way". "even if you did stop in the right place, you would be disappointed. Some 70 billion years would have elapsed back home, so the sun would long, long since have expired, taking Earth with it".
The announcement from NASA, later confirmed by ISRO, has 4 relevant papers, all published on 24 September 2009 online in Science magazine, outlining the find. Only abstracts are available without payment.
Times Now, a TV news channel here, is reporting the NASA instrument aboard Chandrayaan-1 has found evidence of water.
Google News, however, is picking up conflicting reports: NASA about to officially make announcement today, ISRO chairman refusing to confirm the find, evidence of water moving around on moon, ...! Hopefully, next few weeks or months should clarify the picture.
From MacGregor Campbell's "Microscopes zoom in on molecules at last" in New Scientist:
Krishnan at Musings & Miscelleny offers an interesting tidbit.
Link. [via Boing Boing]
Reminds me of land dwelling & pre-biological goo with far more voracious appetite in Hal Clement's "Half-Life".
Update 20 July 2009: Some more information on the original story.
Both ISRO & NASA have posted lunar pictures taken by instruments on-board Chandrayaan-1, including some of lunar surfaces never seen before. ISRO's pictures aren't well annotated, but I loved the image on the right (click to enlarge to original size).
Link. [via James Nicoll]
6 times Jupiter mass, orbiting a star in Andromeda galaxy! Could be a "brown-dwarf" or a planet.
Kelly Beatty's "Why is earth moving away from the sun" in New Scientist. [via SF Signal]
I'd seen a similar, but old, article by Isaac Asimov some years back that explained how tidal interaction between earth & moon was slowing earth's rotation period (a day is now 4 times longer than at earth's birth) & why moon is running away.
I wondered why I'd not seen something similar about earth/sun - so here it is.
Well, not exactly, but ... someway to there.
How about building a house by setting up a projector that knows the 3D shape you want, & pointing it where you want the building erected? That's Leinster's story, where you can later switch off the projector to destroy the building.
The real-life version Bruce Sterling links is a 3D printer that can build - not quite the house, but parts of it at a time - in place. No force field projection, but real physical sand-like thing with the strength of reinforced concrete.
Science Daily: Newly discovered "Gliese 581 e", fifth world to be found in "Gliese 581" solar system about 20 light years from Sol, is just 1.9 times earth mass - but too close to its sun to be inhabitable.
But a previously known world in this system, "Gliese 581 d", is now thought to be "well within the habitable zone", though it is 7 times as massive as earth. It "could even be covered by a large and deep ocean — it is the first serious 'water world' candidate".
[via 42Blips]
Victoria Gill at BBC talks of an ant species that has gotten rid of the need to "waste" energy on having males! Reproduction by cloning the queen's genome.
"It avoids the energetic cost of producing males, and doubles the number of reproductive females produced each generation from 50% to 100% of the offspring."
[via io9]
In an unusual experiment, a little toy robot navigates across New York City - with kind help from complete strangers!
"Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal."
PS: Linked page has an embedded video too - of the little bot's journey & its interactions with strangers.
[via Boing Boing]
I've no idea of the origins of this document which presumably is an old one. Or may be someone is having fun.
"If man should invade space ... at the terrific speed of two miles a minute"!!!
Includes very imaginative illustrations of "spaceships" that can do the traveling & interesting computed values of time required to reach various bodies in Sol (we aren't told their location relative earth used in calculations, but may be it's the most favorable one).
[via Boing Boing]
Makes me wonder living on Mars is going to be even harder than just fighting the elements - protecting against regular impacts of this power!
PS: Nature article later talks of usefulness of meteor impacts as hammers. There is a very interesting novel that explores this idea at great length: "Utopia" by Roger McBride Allen. A badly terraformed world is dying because thermal distribution is not happening right. Someone thinks the problem can be fixed by linking up northern seas with equatorial ones - they're'nt naturally connected here. How to do it economically, & in the few years or decades before the place becomes inhabitable? Use natural meteors & guide them as hammers hitting the necessary places to aid digging!
[via Bruce Sterling]
Very interesting demonstration in the form of a half-minute YouTube video. [via Boing Boing]
Annotated picture slide show. [via Boing Boing]
Robot gardeners themselves are built over Roomba.
Link.
What caught my attention & made me write this post was the rather sensational heading a couple of hours ago in Times Now - a local TV news channel. Something to the effect that first alien species had been found by ISRO!
ISRO's press release uses saner language & details, but includes this bit of titillation: "While the present study does not conclusively establish the extra-terrestrial origin of microorganisms, ..."
David Shiga's "Crew chosen for Mars isolation test" at New Scientist.
[via Bruce Sterling]
Link.
Minus magic, though.
Story: Gordan Randall Garrett's "[Or Your Money Back...]".
"Magenta is the evidence that the brain ... has apparently constructed a colour to bridge the gap between red and violet, because such a colour does not exist in the light spectrum. Magenta has no wavelength attributed to it, unlike all the other spectrum colours."
Quote & link at Boing Boing.
Some very cool amateur photography of Antarctica - particularly icebergs, but other things too; probably still an ongoing series. ToC is at the bottom of linked page.
[via Boing Boing]
Some truly weird physics in Marcus Chown's "Our world may be a giant hologram" at New Scientist.
Plus possibly some early experimental evidence of this cosmic weirdness - that space-time comprises of discrete "grains" at microscopic level that can be modeled as holographic projections of some kind of pixels written over the outer surface of the universe!! Grains with dimensions of the order of 10e-16 meters.
[via Jay Lake]
Emily Lakdawalla's post titled "The wind blows rocks on Mars?" at The Planetary Society Blog.
Observed fact: Martian planes are littered with small rocks, & puzzlingly, they're about evenly spaced.
Lakdawalla's post summarizes a possible explanation of this even spacing, since neither gravity nor flowing water can help on plains there.
[via James Nicoll]
Related: Fiction set on Mars or its moons.
This is pretty much all over the web - first pictures in visible light & infrared of 4 worlds outside of Sol, in two different solar systems (as opposed to detecting them indirectly). All are several times the size of Jupiter, & farther out in their systems than Jupiter.
NASA Astronaut Clay Anderson had dumped "a tank of toxic ammonia coolant the size of a fridge" "from the International Space Station in June 2007". Of course, after a year, it was falling down to earth!
When I first read about it a few days back, the best NASA could do was to "track it". There was no way of knowing where it would fall on earth, & of course no way of preventing a major disaster should it fall on a population center. Odds are low, I know. But ask someone who gets unlucky!
Now io9 reports the debris that survived reentry has fallen "into the ocean between Australia and New Zealand". "The end result was estimated at around 15 pieces ... each one somewhere between 1.4 ounces and 40 pounds."
Only strengthens the belief that no agency, however esteemed, can be trusted to act responsibly! I mean, it must be human nature to litter - since it saves the cost & effort of safe waste disposal.
Related: More recent Chandrayaan updates are available.
Sections of this somewhat longish post are ordered from the perspective of science fiction fans; if you are not one, interesting stuff may be down below rather than early in the post.
Related: More recent Chandrayaan updates are available.
US manned launches took 4 days to reach moon; some Soviet launches took two. Why are we taking
a fortnight?
While I haven't seen any official explanation from ISRO nor an analysis of Chandrayaan-1 trajectory elsewhere, my speculation is: answer might be a trade between cost & travel time. They are probably trying to get a gravity boost from earth rather than burning fuel - hence lower weight, hence lower cost. Someone better qualified at making sense of trajectory might offer a saner comment.
More (& wild) speculation - safety. By always staying in earth orbit or moon orbit - even a highly elliptical one - could you increase chances of recapturing the ship even if something went wrong during the moon-capture maneuver?
Related: More recent Chandrayaan updates are available.
Related: More recent Chandrayaan updates are available.ISRO has this fantastic schematic of the 3D trajectory of the spacecraft on its way to moon. Click image alongside for full sized image at ISRO site. I wish they had animation showing current location of the craft too!
Rest of this post is based in three articles on the subject from today's Times of India newspaper, Bombay edition.
Note: 1 cr(ore) = 10 million. For numbers above 1000, most languages in India have words in multiples of 100 (rather than 1000 in English). So 1 lakh = 100,000; 1 crore = 100 lakh; ... These words are very commonly used in Indian variant of English.
Emily Lakdawalla offers some tidbits in this post titled "Why is only half of Mars magnetized?" at The Planetary Society Blog. Her post also has elevation & magnetic maps from 70 degree N to 70S.
Related: More recent Chandrayaan updates are available.
Today morning, the first spacecraft from India for a mission beyond earth's orbit took off for a 2 year orbiting job around moon - "to provide a detailed map of the mineral, chemical and topographical characteristics of the moon's surface".
I'll restrict this post to what is not said elsewhere - or, at least, not emphasized. For information on mission: There are any number of news reports on the subject on pretty much any India-centric news service, & a Google search on "Chandrayaan" 4 hours after the launch threw up a quarter million documents, not counting those on Google News.
