Rock in Sample Tube - Image c/o NASA In early August, the Perseverance Rover attempted to take a sample of Martian rock - and, regrettably, came up with an empty test tube. But, apparently second time's the charm; NASA confirmed on Monday that Perseverance had successfully collected and stored its first sample of Martian rock while exploring Artuby. Artuby is a half-mile ridgeline that is near an area believed to hold Jezero Crater's deepest and most ancient layers of exposed bedr...
Not to get super heavy or anything, but let me ask you: have you ever wished for just one more conversation with a loved one who's passed on? I think it's fairly safe to say that most people would answer yes to this question in some capacity - I know I sure would. I have said good-bye to many wonderful people in my life, and although when times get tough I can still hear them in my head and in my heart enough to imagine a pep talk from them, it's no substitute for having them here, in the fle...
Image courtesy of NASA On Sunday, November 15, four astronauts departed Earth on SpaceX's Crew Dragon spaceship to the International Space Station for a 6-month mission. The launch was previously scheduled for Saturday evening, but weather forced a 24-hour delay even in the face of 50/50 odds of more unsafe weather conditions. Fortunately, the weather was clear and the launch went off without issue. The crew for the spaceship is comprised of four astronauts: Shannon Walker, Mike Hopki...
Image from CDC.gov A few weeks after quarantine began in March, I woke up feeling under the weather. I had a headache, a stuffy nose, and a sore throat that was making me cough. Under normal circumstances, I'd recognize it as seasonal allergies rearing their ugly head, but considering the pandemic I immediately went to, "Oh crap, is this Covid?!" Fortunately for me, a brief nap at lunchtime shook most of the symptoms and when I woke up at 100% the next day, I realize I had perhaps pan...
Image courtesy Washington Department of Agriculture via Twitter 2020 has been quite a year already, but a few months ago nature decided to throw another curveball and add invasive Asian giant hornets - AKA Murder Hornets - to the proverbial Bingo card. Although we first heard about the hornets arriving in North America back in the winter of 2019, it has taken scientists some time to come up with strategies for how to locate and destroy the nests. Why all of the destruction, you ask? A...
Space and science fans, rejoice, for there is good news from the Red Planet this week. The InSight heat probe, which launched its mission back in 2018, has finally completely buried itself on Mars. While this might not seem like news, your perspective might shift when you learn that until now, the self-hammering drill has experienced numerous challenges and setbacks that have hindered its mission to drill into the core of Mars and collect valuable data, including temperature readings. ...
I wish windows media player was easier to use.
Ok I understand that we filled an empty nich. Maybe the great apes did. So for a long time the Americas were isolated from the rest of the world. Not even Native Americans. We even had mega Fauna that weren't in the rest of the world, or have became extinct everywhere els gre. So here is the question why were there no other humanoids, or other great apes for that matter when we had plenty of monkeys in the Americas while we evolved in the old world. First in europe then in Africa. The nich didn'...
Time is the propagation of electromagnetic radiation,time is light. The speed of light is a constant because there is no way to detect time changing speed in your own frame of reference. The speed of time-light is only an operant constant. The universe is filled with electromagnetic radiation, light has a finite speed possibly because light must travel through itself, this could be the limiting factor.Only light can travel at the speed of light because light is time. If yo...
Well there is at least one committee that is trying to do this in a hundred years. In the nineties NASA explored this and concluded it was not feaseable. What the problem is would shock everyone. Remember we don't need light speed, we could settle for almost. They have concluded that we have the technology for both the orion, or the dadulus projects the problem is we can't do it by any other methods. It wouldn't be required, but we even could use a matter, anti matter mixture. Appare...
I'm going to try to supplement my aging bioram with a record of whatever brilliant - or not - spin-offs from material in "Scientific American" that I'm able to generate. 1> The article "Eggshell Education" in the June 2016 issue dovetails nicely with some thinking I've been doing about mockingbirds. The OC went through a major decline in the Mockingbird population when the crows moved in en masse about 20 years ago. Every evening brought rivers...
See http://www.kurzweilai.net/why-evolution-may-be-intelligent-based-on-deep-learning My comment there: "I recall coming to essentially the same conclusion in the late '60's after reading Koestler's "The Act of Creation," or perhaps it was "Janus." I think it was referred to me by the Nathaniel Brandon Institute. As I recall, Koestler did not believe in junk DNA, for good reasons having to do with basic information theory. I agreed, but, in part, my agreemen...
Update 05-02-2016 One interesting note was the focus by the NASA reps on gender balance. (My estimate is that overall, of the ~60 participants, probably at least a third were women.) The large team immediately behind me that was working on an emergency person locator APP aimed at alerting first responders as to immediate emergencies was ~gender neutral, slightly less than half women. Their top coder, by universal acclaim, was a black woman. The NASA rep (this w...
As to the amazing bright spots. I cast my vote for bleach. As in sun-bleach. If you have a sublimation going on continuously for eons, then the stuff that get's kicked off is anything that can absorb a photon vs reflecting it. Hence the high albedo for the moon. The dark molecules absorbed energy until they got hit with enough to kick them into a slightly different position. This is a natural selection process that inevitably results in bright spots where the sun shines, while...
(03/28/15) I bring up below the issue of scientific religiosity and give some examples related to critically important research that is being blocked or ignored by a religious scientific orthodoxy right out of Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," sadly including Michael Shermer - the Skeptic, whose inept and misleading "Scientific American" piece on "scientific morals" does him little credit - altho it did trigger this blog entry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_...