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06/29/2017

3 miles per second and rising. Following Cassini on social media is fun. We see great pictures, and NASA is very good about providing updates about where the mission stands and what's next. Now you can see exactly what Cassini is up to both through a (virtual) image of Saturn as Cassini sees it at any given moment and real-time updates on Cassini's speed relative to the Earth and Saturn. Day by day you can visualize the affects of Saturn's gravitational pull on Cassini as the intrepid traveler speeds up on approach or slows down as it arcs away from the giant planet. As we prepare this post for publishing, Cassini is falling towards Saturn at a rate just over 3 miles per second. And rising. https://go.nasa.gov/2tkZGSC

Cassini is one of the most ambitious efforts in planetary space exploration. A joint endeavour of NASA, ESA and the Italian space agency, Cassini is a sophisticated spacecraft exploring the Saturnian system since 2004.

06/27/2017

What is Infinity...
Why is there "something" rather than nothing? Or is there...
Does theory matter if it can't be tested....
What was there before the big bang...
Just how many universes are there...
What are the limits of science...
What is the relationship between physics and "free will"...

Earlier this month (June, 2017), at the World Science Festival, a panel of ethereally bright physicists, philosophers, and cosmologists sat down on a stage and attempted to make these questions somewhat understandable to lay people - with the understanding, of course, that we have no answers.

The panel, appropriately called "Pondering the Imponderables: The Biggest Questions of Cosmology" filled an hour and a half with a good deal of debate, some flashes of insight, and a dash of good humor.

The moderator, Jim Holt of The New Yorker, organized a fascinating program and included brilliant articulate panelists but spoiled the event somewhat by misunderstanding that a panel discussion isn't a platform for him to give a one-man lecture. Chalk it up to excitement - his enthusiasm is palatable. It's a minor distraction anyway.

The inclusion of two science literate philosophers (David Albert, who is actually a physicist by training, and Barry Loewer) helped make this discussion particularly interesting. While all the panelists were respectful and listened attentively when others were speaking, none of the panelists hesitated to challenge the theories or assumptions of their colleagues on the stage.

Mr. Holt's exuberance aside, a listen to this discussion is an hour and a half well spent.

Physicists and cosmologists are closing in on how the universe operates at its very core. But even with powerful telescopes and particle accelerators pushed ...

06/12/2017

Do you like getting stung by a bee? It's bee season, so, assuming you're like most people out there and you do not like getting stung by a bee, let's learn to tell the dangerous bees from the not-so-dangerous bees.

First, the not-so-dangerous bees. The ordinary honey bee will not sting you unless it feels threatened. Why? Because if it stings you, it will die (when it stings its stinger gets stuck in you and its guts get ripped out). So, a honey bee will only sting you if you swat at it or you do something nasty to its nest. Therefore (unless you live in South America, Central America, or one of the US states along the Mexican border, which have a different kind of honey bee) don't swat at a honey bee or disturb its nest and you'll be fine.

Honey bees live in crevices in walls or trees. Of course, many honey bees live in man-made hives. They do not live in the ground, so if you see bees coming and going from a hole in the ground, they are not honey bees. Honey bees are fat and fuzzy like teddy bears and their black and white coloring is mottled and sometimes brownish. Honey bees will not chase you very far, even if you make one angry by swatting at it. If you run away, it'll stop following you and go back to its business pretty quickly. Remember, if one stings you, that's it. It won't sting you again, it will be dead soon anyway, and none of its buddies are likely to come after you.

Honey bees are great because the pollenate the flowers that become apples, corn, squash, and other food and because they make honey.

Another not-so-dangerous bee is the fat, black bumble bee. These bees have no interest in you or your food whatsoever. They are easy to recognize and safe to watch as long as you don't bother them. Bumblebees also pollenate flowers, so they're basically harmless and they do a lot of good. But they don't make honey.

Now let's look at a dangerous bee. Most bee stings are from yellowjackets. Yellowjackets look a little (just a little) like honey bees, but they are completely different from honey bees in behavior. For one thing, they can sting you a bunch of times because they don't lose their stingers, which means they don't die after they sting you. If you come across a yellowjacket, don't swat it, but move away quickly. If you get stung by a yellowjacket, run! because it will sting you again and most likely nearby buddies will join it. Be prepared to run far, too, because they don't quit quickly. Run and keep moving until you're sure they're not chasing you any more.

Yellowjackets have slick, bright, yellow and black bodies that are narrow in the waist. If you can see the color lines clearly and the colors are bright, it's not a honey bee so give that bee plenty of space. Yellowjackets live in holes in the ground and they are easily annoyed. Do not go anywhere near a yellowjacket nest. Call a professional to take care of it.

In the spring, yellowjackets are carnivores and actually help to keep gardens clear of pests like caterpillars, and they're not likely to come near people. Unfortunately, once summer starts yellowjackets begin looking for sweets. This means they are attracted to picnics and patio lunches, especially if sweet drinks (fruit juice and soda), jams and jellies, cakes or other sugary foods are on the menu.

Yellowjackets don't pollenate flowers and they don't make honey.

Hornets and wasps are like yellowjackets: they don't make honey and they sting. The yellow and black ones are shiny and not fuzzy and they can sting you repeatedly. Stay away from them and don't do anything to make them angry.

Take a moment the next time you see a bee buzzing around a bush or a flower and look at it closely. Is it fuzzy? Are the colors somewhat mottled? Does it have a really skinny waist or is its waist straight or roundish? If it's fuzzy, mottled, and not skinny, then it's a honey bee.

What should you do if a bee comes to you? If it's attacking you, do not swat it - move away fast. If it's not attacking you, stay still until you can get a good look at it. If it's a honey bee (fuzzy, fat, mottled colors) just go about your business and it will go about its business. If it's a yellowjacket, wasp, or hornet, whatever you do, do not swat at it. Move away quickly. If it wants your soda, don't argue - or wait until the right moment to retrieve the soda without upsetting the bee.

Here are a few tips for avoiding bee stings:
* Stay away from nests. Especially underground nests.
* Never, ever swat at a bee. Duck and move away if you have to.
* Avoid anything with floral scents (perfume, hairspray, lotion)
* Don't drink sugary drinks from cans or bottles. Use a cup so you can see inside.
* Cover garbage cans.
* If a yellowjacket or wasp makes an appearance, find a new place to eat.

Every once in a while, bees will move into your yard. Are they honey bees? Then they're probably not a problem. Find a beekeeper to remove them (or set up a hive in your yard!). Are they hornets or wasps? Then carefully consider your options, but the best option may be to hire a pro to remove them. Are they yellowjackets? No doubt about it, we strongly encourage you to hire a pro.

Finally, a word on Africanized Honey Bees (AHBs). Think of these monsters as yellowjackets that look like honey bees and make honey. AHBs are a hybrid bee that started in South America in the 1990s and have been slowly spreading north. Fortunately for most people living in the United States and Canada, AHBs don't seem to handle northern climates well and they haven't been found much outside the states that border Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico. If you live in South America, Central America, Mexico, Texas, Southern California, or Southern Florida, be careful because AHBs look like honey bees (because they are honey bees) but they behave like yellowjackets.

If you found this post interesting or useful, please Like and Share. Thanks!

Notes on images:
Honey bee by Maciej A. Czyzewski, licensed under GNUFDL
Yellowjacket by Beatriz Moisset, licensed under GNUFDL

05/11/2017

Survival mode. Anyone under 60 has grown up with access to memorable TV footage of nature. Wild Kingdom. Jacque Cousteau. Steve Irwin (aka The Crocodile Hunter). With the advent of drones, ever smaller and lighter cameras, and submarines that can dive deeper, the video has only gotten better and more common. Here's the latest - a clip from BBC showing the desperate struggle of the flying fish to stay alive, fleeing predators in the water, it's natural habitat, and in the air, it's supposed escape route. Natural selection hiccuped.

04/27/2017

For those who remember our earlier post on currents in the atmosphere, this will look familiar. NASA has created an 3 minute video showing actual ocean currents over a year and a half period. The resulting animation is both aesthetically striking and intellectually eye-opening. We all know these currents exist, but now we can see how complicated they are. And these are just the surface currents. https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/perpetual-ocean.html

Tens of thousands of ocean currents are captured in this scientific visualization created by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

04/14/2017

The summer of Cassini. All eyes are turning to Saturn this summer as the Cassini probe wraps up its 20 year mission with a fiery finish. On April 24th, 2017, after a 7 year one-way journey to Saturn and 13 years of exploration in the vicinity of our solar system's second largest plant, Cassini will make the first of 22 dives between the rings of Saturn and Saturn itself - one per week for 22 weeks. Maneuvering between the rings and Saturn will allow Cassini to explore both the rings and the gas giant itself more closely than had been dared before. The risks are great - smashing into even a bebe sized speck of ice or dust could damage Cassini and end the mission abruptly. Only now, as Cassini runs low on fuel and time, is the risk worth taking. IF (big "if") it survives these last 22 laps around Saturn, on September 15th, 2017, Cassini will dive into Saturn's atmosphere where it will burn up, hopefully providing a steady stream of data about the atmosphere as it does so. Why destroy this magnificent extended hand of man? Because it may carry life from Earth and scientists fear contaminating Saturn's icy moons. Visit the linked NASA page for more information and a great video on Cassini's final exploration.

https://go.nasa.gov/2ofj8Kx

Cassini is one of the most ambitious efforts in planetary space exploration. A joint endeavour of NASA, ESA and the Italian space agency, Cassini is a sophisticated spacecraft exploring the Saturnian system since 2004.

04/13/2017

Like stargazing? Residents of Sky Village, AZ have banned outdoor lights, required blackout curtains on windows, and insist nighttime driving be kept to a minimum so they can spend their evenings studying the universe without intruding ambient light. http://bit.ly/2o9whFL

Nearly every house in this rural 450-acre development of stargazers is equipped with its own domed observatory, and outdoor lights are strictly forbidden. Does it also hold answers for combatting America’s problem with light pollution?

03/28/2017

Comet debris clouds. We've all seen the meteor showers caused by comet or asteroid debris falling into the Earth's atmosphere, but astronomers and engineers have created a startling new animation that shows all that debris in orbit through the solar system. Vibrant and interactive, this visualization is both fascinating and beautifully designed.

Following the link below, you will see all the comet and asteroid debris already in the system, but use the settings to select debris from individual comets or look at particular years. You can even adjust the passage of time. Use your mouse or trackpad to zoom in/out, shift the viewing angle, or rotate the entire image.

Peter Jenniskens, an astronomer with SETI and NASA/Ames, and Ian Webster, a software engineer, created this little gem using data from the CAMS (Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance) network, which has captured over 300,000 meteor trajectories.

http://bit.ly/2nosDYW

Watch as Earth flies through clouds of meteors.

03/15/2017

25 million tons. Of spiders.
Yup. Spiders
That's how many spiders we have in the world, according to Dr. Martin Nyffeler of the University of Basel. Also, spiders eat 400-800 million tons of prey per year - mostly insects. Many of those insects are herbivores, which means spiders are essential to protecting plants.

The space station weighs about 462 tons, so the world's spiders eat about a million space stations worth of prey - mostly insects - every year.

On the other hand, all those spiders are food for birds. Even people who can't stand spiders, probably like birds.

Suddenly, our appreciation of spiders has risen a bit.

Indeed, Dr. Nyffeler hopes his research will help humans become more conscious of the importance of spiders in the global web of life.

http://bbc.in/2msvi1I

The world's spiders consume between 400 million and 800 million tonnes of primarily insect prey every year, say scientists.

03/14/2017

Carl Sagan famously said, "We are made of star stuff." It is, however, much easier to recognize star stuff if you look at the dust settling on your roof than if you look at human bone fragments. A Norwegian jazz musician / aspiring geologist has published a scientific paper and a book on identifying micro-meteorites, which are, apparently, almost indistinguishable from common terrestrial dust. Almost but not impossible. Jon Larsen spent eight years collecting samples and working out ways to identify extraterrestrial dust, which he says "is something anyone can do." As he put it, "Once I knew what to look for, I found them everywhere." Perhaps you can, too. http://nyti.ms/2ndTLNl

A jazz musician from Norway hunted bits of cosmic debris for eight years and found it everywhere. Turns out, tons of it land every day.

03/11/2017

PopChartLab makes some pretty amazing science related products. Our favorite is this poster of all the space missions! But after you've clicked through and clicked on this particular poster (so you can zoom in and explore), we encourage you to browse around their stuff. We feel like kids in a candy shop! http://bit.ly/2n8CPrx

03/10/2017

"Everything about Mars is the Worst"
"What Going to Mars will Do to Our Minds"
"All We Really Need to Get to Mars is a Boatload of Cash"

These are just a few of the article titles in a series published by FiveThirtyEight. Ok. Ok. We know that FiveThirtyEight is an ESPN funded statistical analytics company that focuses on sports and (depending on whether or not it's an election year) politics, but they're really, really smart people and this series is both interesting and informative. The link below will take you a listing of all the "Earth to Mars" articles. Dig in. Enjoy.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/earth-to-mars/

Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight uses statistical analysis — hard numbers — to tell compelling stories about elections, politics, sports, science, economics and lifestyle.