Ongoing important Science news thread

[HPLovecraft]

Closest supernova observed in over 25 years - just gone supernova on the 23rd, and getting brighter by the day

Man, I wish night skies were darker where I was at. This star in the Pinwheel Galaxy went supernova Tuesday night (of course, it really went supernova 21 million years ago, but to us here on Earth, the light's just reaching us now), and was observed at around apparent magnitude 17.1. It's getting brighter by the day, and is expected to brighten up to 6 more magnitudes! It'll be tough, but I'll be out trying to see it in about a week's time. I might have to find a way out to some darker skies to catch a glimpse of it. For low contrast deep sky objects like this, really dark skies are necessary.

http://www.space.com/12745-closest-s...explosion.html

[troutman]

Op-Ed Columnist

Republicans Against Science

By PAUL KRUGMAN

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/op...?_r=2&emc=eta1

Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.

According to Public Policy Polling, only 21 percent of Republican voters in Iowa believe in global warming (and only 35 percent believe in evolution). Within the G.O.P., willful ignorance has become a litmus test for candidates, one that Mr. Romney is determined to pass at all costs.

So it’s now highly likely that the presidential candidate of one of our two major political parties will either be a man who believes what he wants to believe, even in the teeth of scientific evidence, or a man who pretends to believe whatever he thinks the party’s base wants him to believe.

And the deepening anti-intellectualism of the political right, both within and beyond the G.O.P., extends far beyond the issue of climate change.

Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by troutman

Op-Ed Columnist

Republicans Against Science

By PAUL KRUGMAN

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/op...?_r=2&emc=eta1

Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.

According to Public Policy Polling, only 21 percent of Republican voters in Iowa believe in global warming (and only 35 percent believe in evolution). Within the G.O.P., willful ignorance has become a litmus test for candidates, one that Mr. Romney is determined to pass at all costs.

So it’s now highly likely that the presidential candidate of one of our two major political parties will either be a man who believes what he wants to believe, even in the teeth of scientific evidence, or a man who pretends to believe whatever he thinks the party’s base wants him to believe.

And the deepening anti-intellectualism of the political right, both within and beyond the G.O.P., extends far beyond the issue of climate change.

Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.

Related:

http://www.pointofinquiry.org/david_...s_and_science/

David Frum and Kenneth Silber discuss the current american conservative movement and it's aversion towards science.

Pretty interesting.

[photon]

My pic of the Palomar Observatory

[photon]

One more to give an idea of scale:



And somewhat science related

[HPLovecraft]

The Earth and its faithful companion, the Moon, as viewed by the Juno spacecraft 6 million miles from home on its way to Jupiter.

“The image of the Earth Moon system is a rather unique perspective that we can get only by stepping outside of our home planet,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator, in an exclusive interview with Universe Today. Bolton is from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

“On our way to Jupiter, we’ve looked back at home and managed to take this amazing image.”

“Earth looking much like any other planet or star from a distance is glorious as this somewhat average looking “star” is home to all of humanity. Our companion, the moon, so beautiful and important to us, stands out even less.”

“We appear almost average and inconspicuous, yet all of our history originates here. It makes one wonder just how many other planets or solar systems might contain life like ours,” Bolton told me.

http://www.universetoday.com/88524/f...moon-portrait/

Juno will be within 3000 miles of the cloud tops of Jupiter. Those are going to be some amazing photographs.

[troutman]

Originally Posted by HPLovecraft

The Earth and its faithful companion, the Moon, as viewed by the Juno spacecraft 6 million miles from home on its way to Jupiter.

http://www.universetoday.com/88524/f...moon-portrait/

http://planetary.org/explore/topics/..._blue_dot.html

This excerpt from A Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.

"Every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam"

[Flash Walken]

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...cial-bacteria/

It’s an accepted concept by now that taking antibiotics in order to quell an infection disrupts the personal microbiome, the population of microorganisms that we all carry around in our guts, and which vastly outnumbers the cells that make up our bodies. That recognition supports our understanding of Clostridium difficile disease — killing the beneficial bacteria allows C. diff room to surge and produce an overload of toxins — as well as the intense interest in establishing a research program that could demonstrate experimentally whether the vast industry producing probiotic products is doing what it purports to do.
But implicit in that concept is the expectation that, after a while — after a course of antibiotics ends — the gut flora repopulate and their natural balance returns.
What if that expectation were wrong?
In a provocative editorial published this week in Nature, Martin Blaser of New York University’s Langone Medical Center argues that antibiotics’ impact on gut bacteria is permanent — and so serious in its long-term consequences that medicine should consider whether to restrict antibiotic prescribing to pregnant women and young children.

[JohnnyB]

Looking at that picture of the Earth and the moon it is just phenomenal to think that any of us humans ever actually got there.

[Yasa]

Originally Posted by HPLovecraft

Looking at how far the moon is at that scale, and imagining the fact that humans have been able to travel to it blows my mind. To think that's the furthest we've physically got and how the space program has atrophied since then really saddens me.

[Daradon]

^^^ I was going to say, at that scale the moon seems really far away! I thought it would orbit closer than that. Is angle or light or something playing tricks on me?

[ricosuave]

smallest electric motor!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14763223

[photon]

Originally Posted by Daradon

^^^ I was going to say, at that scale the moon seems really far away! I thought it would orbit closer than that. Is angle or light or something playing tricks on me?

I was the opposite, I thought "man that looks close".

But it makes sense, the moon orbits at 385,000km or thereabouts, the diameter of the earth 12,756km, so the moon orbits at 30 earth diameters.

The picture doesn't look quite 30 earth diameters to the moon, but unless the picture was taken at the exact right time it wouldn't appear that far away anyway.

[SeeGeeWhy]

Physicists create a hole in time

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknap...o-hide-events/

"The time lenses that were created for this experiment were split time lenses. Essentially, two halves of a lens were placed so that the points met in the middle. There was one split time lens on one side of the cloaked event and another split time lens on the other side. A laser was then passed through the first time lens. This dispersed the light around the events happening between the lenses. The light then passed through the second split time lens and returned to its original phase. So to an observer, it’s as though the events between the lenses never happened."

Actual paper here:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/...107.2062v1.pdf

[SeeGeeWhy]

CERN: 'Climate models will need to be substantially revised'

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08...first_results/

[Canada 02]

a fossil of a transitional species between Australopithecus and Homo has been found in South Africa - the so called missing link in human evolution

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle2158182/

for hard core science geeks:

http://www.sciencemag.org/site/extra/sediba/

[Thor]

I cringe when I hear the words missing link, damn you creationists.

Here´s a good BBC article on A. sediba and a video as well.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14824435

[Daradon]

I think the term 'missing link' was used by a lot more than just creationists. It was a fairly popular term many years ago (30+) was it not? Didn't even the scientific community use it for a while? (I'm talking further back now)

[photon]

Originally Posted by SeeGeeWhy

CERN: 'Climate models will need to be substantially revised'

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08...first_results/

Here's what the author of the paper itself says:

Originally Posted by TFA

[The paper] actually says nothing about a possible cosmic-ray effect on clouds and climate, but it’s a very important first step.

Which of course doesn't stop "journalists" from reporting that this shows "global warming is caused by cosmic rays and the sun".

All the paper does is establish that there is a mechanism by which something might happen, it doesn't actually mean it is happening.

There are papers that have compared cosmic ray levels and temperatures over the past few decades (when such things have been directly measured) and in the past (when large increases in cosmic rays are detectable via other means) and neither have shown any strong relationship to temperatures.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...y-interesting/

[Thor]

Oh man, Cassini with some AMAZING HD images of Saturn, including a vimeo video below, MAKE SURE YOU WATCH THE VIDEO.

Science fiction movies have spoiled us on high definition views of our planetary neighbors, but real-life photographs with equal jaw-dropping potential are exceedingly rare. That's what makes NASA's awe-inspiring snapshot of Saturn (hi-res version here) such a stunning piece of eye candy.
Taken by NASA's Cassini robotic orbiter, the shot was captured from the dark side of Saturn as the Sun's bright rays illuminated every piece of dust and debris circling the planet. Cassini has offered astronomers a never-before-seen look at Saturn and revealed more information about the planet than any craft before it. The craft has taken so many pictures of the ringed wonder that they were recently made into a short flyby film that looks like it was created by George Lucas rather than a robotic space explorer.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technolo...144133480.html