Yes, right on schedule. The UFO story was yesterday, and today the Inventor story. It starts out with his three-way ping-pong table (of course! – and it’s called TriPong1), but before I even clicked on it I knew there’d be a “oh, and by the way, he has an alternative theory of the universe”, at the end.
I was not disappointed. My favourite bit of Katrin Stanton’s AP story: […] Click to continue reading this post
The Bad Astronomy Blog gives a top ten list of astronomy images for 2006. There are some really wonderful choices there, and Phil Plait gives a good deal of discussion of each one. The winner is this fantastic back-lit (by the sun, not some giant NASA flashgun) image of Saturn taken -of course- by the Cassini mission:
Now there’s another wonderful feature of this photo that makes it such a clear winner. […] Click to continue reading this post
This is a diagram of the layout of the equipment on the Corot (COnvection, ROtation and planetary Transits) space telescope, launched recently from a site in Kazakhstan:
It’s a European Space Agency (ESA) mission, primarily run by the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES – the French Space Agency, if you will) and it’s going to be looking closely at about 120,000 stars for signs of planetary bodies in orbit around them, in addition to studying the stars themselves. There’s a BBC story here, with video, more figured and images, and links to other sites, such as this condensed mission guide. The Proteus platform in the diagram refers to that fact that this is but one of a series of craft in the “Proteus†series, the platform itself being the design of the core containing the instrumentation and control systems of the device. Learn more about that here.
By going over to ESA’s site, you can learn a lot more about the scientific objectives and […] Click to continue reading this post
No, probably not, but we are probably in for a battle. The FDA is said to be about to announce the approval of using cloned animals for food. The announcement will be on Thursday, but there are several news reports about it already. Here is a link to an AP article written by Libby Quaid. (I also borrowed from that article the picture -left, by Chris Gardner- of cloned dairy cows Cyagra1 and Genesis.)
What will the battle be about? Well, Let’s get the fear-mongering (that opponents of this announcement will use to their advantage) out of the way first. If these were indeed clones in the purest sense of the word, produced in unquestionable circumstances, in an industry that did not already have several unsettling and dysfunctional features to it (see for example here) then there would be no issue. The bottom line is that we should be no more scared of clones than we should be of twins.
But it is not that simple. According to the article to which I pointed, here are claims -backed up with documentation- (I have not read the research, so am merely reporting that it exists) that the cloned animals are not produced in a manner that would be acceptable for the production of animals by other means -there are still many deaths and deformities in the process, and these birth defects are still not fully understood.
Carol Tucker Foreman, director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America, said the FDA is ignoring research that shows cloning results in more deaths and deformed animals than other reproductive technologies.
The consumer federation will ask food companies and supermarkets to refuse to sell food from clones, she said.
“Meat and milk from cloned animals have no benefit for consumers, and consumers don’t want them in their foods,” Foreman said.
That alone might not be so terrible, you’re thinking, but the big thing […] Click to continue reading this post
One sees them a lot around here, given the town I’m in, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
There’s a Spitzer telescope press release about the possible discovery of the most early stars detected to date. These would be the very first stars to have formed in the universe. Remembering that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, pause for a moment to be impressed by the claim of Kashlinsky, Arendt, Mather and Moseley that these stars appeared less than a billion years after the big bang. You should also read some discussion in John Baez’ recent post. [Update: See remarks from Ned Wright at the end of this post.]
The new milestone on the timeline of the universe’s history, if this is correct, would look roughly as in this image (from the press release):
Extraordinary claims (like this one) require extraordinary evidence, and so there’ll no […] Click to continue reading this post
Young1 Bee does it again, this time with an excellent post entitled “Anomalous Alignments in the Cosmic Microwave Background”. You’ve heard a huge amount about the success of modern precision cosmology, driven so muchn in recent times by the extraordinary data from the Cosmic Microwave Background measured by experiments such … Click to continue reading this post
Well, sort of.
I could not resist:
These are the kittens of Copy Cat, the cat that was cloned back in 2001/2 at Texas A&M. They’re lovely. They were produced the old-fashioned way with a father who was […] Click to continue reading this post
To add to the seasonal mood, I thought I’d point out that there’s a virgin birth about to happen any day now. Maybe even Monday. Fingers crossed. And tail, if you have one. What am I talking about?
Here’s Flora, a proud-looking mum if I’ve ever seen one:
She’s a Komodo Dragon. She lives in Chester Zoo in England. In May, she laid several […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, there was something I could not tell you about before that I now can. There’s a new TV show called “Wired Science” about to launch. It is made by the PBS affiliate KCET, and will air on your local PBS station (on Wednesday, January 03, 2007, 8:00-9:00 pm ET). It looks like it is going to be informative and fun!
Here’s some of their blurb from the press release:
WIRED SCIENCE is a one-hour program that translates Wired magazine’s award-winning journalism into a fast-paced television show. WIRED SCIENCE brings Wired magazine’s cutting-edge vision, stylish design and irreverent attitude to the screen with breakout ideas, recent discoveries and the latest innovations. The pilot episode takes the viewer into the world of meteorite hunters, where space, commerce and art intersect; travels to Yellowstone National Park to harvest viruses that may hold the key to a technology revolution; and dives underwater to explore NEEMO, NASA’s extreme astronaut training program. Viewers will meet rocket-belt inventors, stem cell explorers and the developer of an electric car that goes from zero-to-60 in under four seconds. As a series, WIRED SCIENCE hopes to span the globe to uncover novel developments in biomedicine, space exploration, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, robotics and military technology.
And you can go to the site to see stills from some of the location work they did in making the show, and some of the studio work too. You can go to this Wired blog post to see the rather nice title sequence of the show, and the teaser trailer. To the right, there’s a screen shot I made just now (click for larger).
I don’t think that they have the go ahead to make a full series yet. This is a pilot. I imagine that whether they get the full series go ahead depends upon whether it is well liked and supported by you, the viewer. I’d say support it. the people behind it really care about getting good science programming out to you.
So what’s the big deal? Why did I not tell you about it if I’ve known about it for so long? Well, nobody told me not to tell you, but it seemed the right thing to do. You see, I have a little secret. How do I put this? I’m going to get so beaten up in the playground for this. […] Click to continue reading this post
While we’re on the subject of women in science, some other news*:
Well, they’ve done it! Some of the women – Anna and Anne – who run InkyCircus (Life in the Girl Nerd World) have done what they said they’d set out to do a while back – they’ve started a science magazine.
Congratulations Anna and Anne!
It is called Inkling (…on the Hunch that Science Rocks), and here’s the banner (I hope they don’t mind me linking it for advertising purposes): […] Click to continue reading this post
When I first came to the USA, I recall being scared and shocked upon going to the hobbies section of a magazine shop and seeing all the different gun magazines. Come to think of it, it still scares me a bit, but I suppose I’m used to it – cultural differences and all that. Today I found something I’d not noticed before in the magazine section of Borders at Sunset and Vine that scares and shocks me a bit. I’m not sure I should just leave it at cultural differences. It seems more like a problem, to me. Let me see if it jumps out at you:
Is it just me, or is one of these magazines scarily out of place?* (Click for larger).
Well, yesterday I handed in my grade sheets for my courses, so I’ve finished all undergraduate teaching duties for the calendar year! Time now to turn to all those things that have been piling up waiting to be done. Eventually, this will mean research, but in between there are various tasks, from writing letters of recommendation to reviewing grants, fellowship applications, and more.
Mostly, I just want to disappear for a while. Leave the planet for a bit and go walkabout, like I did last year’s holiday season. That might happen, but I have to be partly available for a little while for a number of duties. Either way, I need to get out of the old mode, and into the more contemplative one. In order to begin the resetting, I decided to hide away from campus entirely and in the afternoon visit one of my other offices… the beach.
I had some errands to run out in Santa Monica, such as picking up my boots from that great boot repair place (where I’d dropped them off to get stretched a bit… the miracle repair I told you about before had resulted in them a bit stiff and slightly tighter on the slopes, and so I thought I’d try a stretching of a few days), and so this fit well. I figured I’d just stay there until the evening.
I have a love-hate relationship with Santa Monica. It sometimes annoys me a lot, and seems to be a place that is so squeaky clean that all the flavour of real life has been drained out of it, to be replaced by mostly smugness…. but at other times, I’m very happy with it, since it has a number of gems that I like a lot.
If the truth be told, one of the main reasons that I like to go over there is the tarts. […] Click to continue reading this post
Yes, in other words, tonight and tomorrow night are the maximum event rates for the Geminids, the meteor shower that originates from the direction of the constellation Gemini. From Gary Kronk’s site, I borrowed this diagram that shows roughly where to look:
[image]
So as you can see, you’re popping out to look in a Easterly direction, more or less, and after about 9:00pm you should get some results. There’s some more information here at this site.
You’ll recall from a number of earlier posts on meteor showers that I’ve mentioned that they are caused by the Earth passing through the debris field of a comet. The Geminids are somewhat different. Well, yes and no. They are actually passing through […] Click to continue reading this post
This is a test of LaTeX on the site*.
The first equation I shall try is the following (for more on unpacking this equation and its meaning, see this post and links therein):
Yay! It works. I have implemented it in the comments too. So now we can have a new, sharper tool for our discussions and arguments.
Click to continue reading this post
Well, what else can it be? It is not April 1st, so my only explanation is that it is an Onion article that somehow was picked up by the BBC. What do you think? It reads exactly like one, right down to the picture of the pleasant bearded academic at the board, the well-scrubbed English schoolchildren, and the quotes from the children. The only thing missing is the […] Click to continue reading this post
