lol great quote, talk about adventurous scientists!
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The pair took a helicopter across the border into the Canadian territory and camped while they gathered ancient carbonate rock samples in an area of that had once been the floor of a shallow ocean. A persistent grizzly bear forced them to cut their search short by about 10 days.
"There were two of us and only one gun," she recalled. "I was holding a can of bear spray."
But by then the pair had gathered enough samples for their research.
The combined data indicate that we may soon be headed into what's known as a grand minimum, a period of unusually low solar activity.
The predicted solar "sleep" is being compared to the last grand minimum on record, which occurred between 1645 and 1715.
Known as the Maunder Minimum, the roughly 70-year period coincided with the coldest spell of the Little Ice Age, when European canals regularly froze solid and Alpine glaciers encroached on mountain villages.
There was a press briefing today giving some early science results from MESSENGER and it was surprisingly meaty. I'm going to focus on just one set of the results that they presented. As usual with MESSENGER, the most exciting stuff is not from the "pretty pictures," although there were some of those, which you can see at the page full of visuals for the press briefing. What's most exciting out of Mercury is what we're learning from the other, relatively arcane instruments on MESSENGER. Whenever you send a spacecraft to orbit a planet for the first time, you're going to wreck a lot of people's neat theories, and this mission is no exception.
What's being plotted here is the ratio of the abundance of magnesium to the abundance of silicon on the horizontal axis, and the ratio of abundance of aluminum to the abundance of silicon on the vertical axis. Earth's mantle has a high magnesium-to-silicon ratio, representing its bulk composition. The Moon has a very high abundance of aluminum, a result of its history of having a global magma ocean in which aluminum-rich feldspar crystals floated to the top. Earth's basalts (black lava rock that covers most of the planet's ocean floors) formed from partial melting of mantle rocks, a process in which they get more aluminum- and less magnesium-rich. But Mercury's composition doesn't match the compositions of either lunar or Earth rocks, indicating that its geologic history is unique.
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a mega-science project to build a revolutionary radio telescope with global involvement and unprecedented scientific and technical ambition. It is being planned and designed by a twenty-nation collaboration of engineers, astronomers, astrobiologists, physicists, industrialists and policy makers.
The SKA will be made of thousands of receptors linked together across an area the size of a continent. The total collecting area will be about one square kilometre, giving 50 times the sensitivity and 10,000 times the survey speed of the best current-day radio telescopes. The SKA will be located in either Africa or Australia-New Zealand, and the first astronomical observations will be made in 2019.
Are we alone?
The SKA will be able to detect extremely weak extraterrestrial signals and may even spot other planets capable of supporting life. Astrobiologists will use the SKA to search for amino acids, the building blocks of life, by identifying spectral lines at specific radio frequencies.
A spokesperson on CBC Radio Calgary yesterday said they should be able to say by 2020 if there are other intelligent civilizations in the universe.
The bill, which would cut $1.6 billion, or about 9 percent, from NASA's overall budget, would have to clear the full House and gain Senate approval before becoming law.
Scares me when he says that there is only one chance to get it right when put into 'orbit'. As mentioned in the video, we know the Hubble telescope had to be fixed a few times (1 major one that I can think of). We also know of goof ups and bad luck on several of the Mars landers and probes.
It would be awful to see it become useless, and probably set back the space and research programs even more, with all the people who didn't want to see money spent on it saying 'I told you so.'
Probiotics might be good for the brain, and other possible benefits including neurological disorders.
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Probiotics, often referred to as 'good bacteria', are known to promote a healthy gut, but can they promote a healthy mind? Exploring the new world of neurological probiotics, researchers in BioEssays present new ideas on how neurochemicals delivered directly to the gut, via probiotic intestinal microbiota, exert their beneficial effects in maintaining gastrointestinal health and even psychological well-being.
The enteric nervous system is often called the "second brain" and uses something like 30 neurotransmitters much like the CNS, so it's not a huge surprise to hear that a healthy gut can equate to a healthy mind.
Scares me when he says that there is only one chance to get it right when put into 'orbit'. As mentioned in the video, we know the Hubble telescope had to be fixed a few times (1 major one that I can think of). We also know of goof ups and bad luck on several of the Mars landers and probes.
It would be awful to see it become useless, and probably set back the space and research programs even more, with all the people who didn't want to see money spent on it saying 'I told you so.'
That is a bit worrying, but since that's a design constraint to begin with you can at least plan for that, whereas the Hubble they knew they'd be able to go back.
Most of the stuff with the Hubble has been extending and expanding it, other than the initial repair to account for the incorrectly ground primary mirror, I think all the other missions have been to put better instruments in place, or repair things that had failed but the failure was a reasonable one (i.e. was operating beyond what was planned for).
But yeah, if it didn't open as planned and just became a piece of junk, that'd be a kick in the pants.
__________________ Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position.
But certainty is an absurd one.
Erik Verlinde, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, whose contention that gravity is indeed an illusion has caused a continuing ruckus among physicists, or at least among those who profess to understand it. Reversing the logic of 300 years of science, he argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” that gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.
“For me gravity doesn’t exist,” said Dr. Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms.
Looking at gravity from this angle, they say, could shed light on some of the vexing cosmic issues of the day, like the dark energy, a kind of anti-gravity that seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, or the dark matter that is supposedly needed to hold galaxies together.
