inkycircus

As light as a geological hammer

A little bit of magic for a drizzly Monday morning (unless of course it's sunny everywhere but Britain...) comes to you courtesy of NASA.com and features a phenomenon called the equivalence principle. Back in the 16th century, Galileo Galilei rolled spheres made of different materials down a long slope, and showed that even though the spheres were very different, they reached the bottom of the slope at the same time. He concluded that gravity accelerates all objects equally regardless of their masses or the materials from which they are made. This 36 year old video shows astronaut David Scott, demonstrating just that, by standing on the moon and dropping a heavy geological hammer and a light falcon feather. Both items hit the ground at the same time, reinforcing Galileo's theory.

The experiment shown in the above video isn't necessarily the most accurate scientific demonstration (nor is it brilliant quality, unsurprisingly), but it was the first such demonstration to be done on the moon, and it's very eye-catching. Even though you know the outcome, it's just impossible to make your brain accept that the hammer and the feather will fall at the same rate. And yet they do.

In space no-one can hear you scream

We depend on the Sun for life, but it an unpredictable master. Every now and again it flings out bundles of joy known as Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), which can do an awful lot of damage when they slam into our vulnerable little planet. The CMEs can produce magnetic storms that could have the power to knock our gadget-heavy lifestyle back into the dark ages. Most of the CMEs aren't anything like that powerful, in fact they happen reasonably often and usually don't do that damage. But they can do some damage, including messing with our satellites and electrical transmission lines. Which is why it's interesting news that a team at SOHO (The Solar and Heloispheric Observatory) have discovered that the really big ones are preceded by radio 'screams' from the Sun. Here's how it works:

Strong CME shocks accelerate electrons in the solar wind, which in turn produce the radio signal. The same strong shock must also accelerate atomic nuclei in the solar wind, which produce the radiation storm.

The radio signal moves at the speed of light, but the particles lag behind. So we can 'hear' the scream and know that the CME isn't far behind. The article from the European Space Agency explains how the early warning system could be helpful (and has a nice clear explanation of the phenomenon) - if astronauts are showboating around on the outside of spacecrafts they could be told to get inside rightaway to be protected from the extra radiation. Handy indeed. But seeing as how the Sun is quite big and we are quite small, if a big ejection is on the way it's not like we can say 'Umbrellas up! CME a-coming' just yet...

PHOTO: ETAC

My great-aunt was a shark you know

I CAN DEFINITELY SEE THE FAMILY RESEMBLANCE... (PHOTO:NATASHAW)
I was on a trip in South America once, and was trying to spell my name to a ticket agent to buy a bus ticket. The poor woman got a bit confused in the hustle and bustle, and got my name wrong, writing down "Katie Jaws" on my ticket. Turns out she was prescient, because I am related to sharks. Well, according to ABC News Australia we all are actually.

Long ago in the ancient mists of time (450 million years ago to be exact), we shared a relative with our toothy friends. The elephant shark has some genes that are nearly identical to ours, meaning we have more in common with it than we do with other species closer to us on the evolutionary tree. We also have genes in common with mice and dogs, but that's not so suprising since we're all mammals. But we do have at least two things in common with sharks, so it does make sense these traits or characteristics would be expressed in our genes. For one, a shark's immune system is similar to ours, as sharks have all four types of white blood cells that humans have. The other thing we have in common with sharks is sex. Fish that should be closer to us on the evolutionary tree abstain from sex, preferring to keep fertilisation tidily outside the body. Sharks don't do this, and in case you hadn't noticed, neither do we.

When the pen is truly mighty

DOESN'T IT JUST MAKE YOU WANT TO START WRITING? (PHOTO: SPHANTASY)
Letter writing is a lost skill and that's a tragedy. Email is great and all, but it's not exactly permanent, and most people don't bother to keep their old emails very long. That's fine when you're trying not to clog up your hard drive, but you just know we'll all regret it in the future. Just imagine if Darwin (owner of the best beard in all of history) had had a blog instead of written diaries and corresponded by post. We wouldn't know that he only used to wash his feet once a month while he was at school (or that he knew that was a nasty habit). Or that he engaged in correspondence with more than 2000 people during his lifetime. Or that when contemplating his earth shattering theory about the origin of the species he felt like  was confessing to a murder. How do we know these things? Because Darwin's entire entire collection of letters is going to be put online tomorrow, and the folks at Darwin Project have sent out these little taster to get us interested.

The site has a Daily Quote section which promises to be really cool - but it would be even more cool to have a feature like the 'random article' button on Wikipedia. Click on it and up would pop a different Darwinism each time so you wouldn't have to wait a day for the next one. I might drop the folks at Darwin Project an email to suggest it. On second thoughts, maybe I should send a note in the post, just in case.

T-Rex: tastes like chicken

HOW MANY CHIPS WOULD YOU NEED TO GO WITH A T-REX DRUMSTICK? (PHOTO: BLUMPY)
It's official, the humble chicken is related to the mighty T-Rex. The link has been suspected for a while, but scientists needed a sample of soft tissue to prove it. That tissue has just been found in Hell Creek in Montana, and hey presto, kinship is proven. 

More from the NZ Herald.

The Scale of Things

Ignore the wanky music (there's an option to turn volume off) on Nikon's Universcale flash site and it's pretty damn cool. Seriously. It spans  femtometres (10⁻¹⁵ meters) all the way through meters and kilometers all the way up to light years (10¹⁵ meters) while giving you examples of things that size. Left to its own devices the display will shrink down to the examples of size. From mountains to skyscrapers to the London eye down to people, and microbes. Again, like the large blue whale captured in WDCS's website, there's something completely hypnotic about it. Meditative even.  Go ahead. Get yourself a sense of scale. It ought to do you good.

Star trekkin' across the universe

You can always tell it's a special day when Google goes all themed, and today is no exception. On the 12th of April in 1961, soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin made history and became the first person ever in space. Most people in the world were delighted, one notable exeption probably being American Alan Shepherd who missed out on claiming the title by a mere 23 days. Yuri did one leisurely loop of the Earth in Vostok 1, then landed just under two hours later. He apparently landed in a field in front of a farmer and his daughter, scaring the life out of them. In an attempt to reassure them, he is meant to have said "I am a Soviet like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow". That seems typical of his straightforward style, while he was up in space, he is reported to have said things like "I am feeling fine. I am in good spirits. I feel splendid. The craft is operating normally." I can't helping thinking that if that were me who was the first person in space there'd be a lot more swearwords involved, but maybe that's one of the many reasons I'm not an astronaut...

Diminutive 5 ft 2 Yuri never lived to see NASA steal back the lead in the space race by sending the first men to the moon in 1969 - he died tragically in a plane crash in 1968. As recognition of his stellar acheivement, Yuri has a couple of commemorative coins bearing his likeness, a crater on the dark side of the moon, an asteroid, a town near to where he was born, numerous streets and squares, and the Cosmonaut Training Facility in Star City named after him. He also has his own mineral, gagarinite, and a 40ft titanium statue in Moscow. Nobody could ever say that Russia is not proud of it's trailblazing son - their very own Columbus of the Cosmos. Happy Anniversary, Yuri, wherever you are.

The jam-packed night sky

Wikisky could almost be mistook for whiskey, on first glance. But this google map of the night sky is anything but. It's a draggable, zoomable, web-based star map. When you click on an object, all the info on it, like recent articles and photos, pop up. Take a tour and enjoy the best in desktop journeys.   

Why can't we all just get along?

If you have to work to earn your crust, it's important that the people you work with are a nice bunch. Your colleagues can make or break your job, working with great people makes a mediocre job acceptable, and working with a bunch of berks will ruin any fantastic role in the end. But the fact remains that you can always walk away from your workmates at the end of the day, unless of course you work in an enclosed space. Say for example a space shuttle. Cooped up in a tin can miles above the earth's surface, it's doubly important that your colleagues are sane, so after astronaut Lisa Nowak went a bit nuts over a love rival earlier this year, NASA have apparently ranked up their psychological screening process, just to make sure. Turns out they also have a detailed written procedure in place for dealing with a suicidal or psychotic astronaut in space. It sounds a bit draconian, until you realise that a psychotic astronaut could do quite a bit more damage than a psychotic office drone. Then the suggested use of duct tape and bungee cord restraints and tranquilizer injections doesn't seem quite so extreme...

Via FOX News. Photo from NASA.gov.

Green by decree

Most of us could manage to be a bit greener in our lives. Whether that means not eating Chilean strawberries in winter, not flying around the world quite so much, or just replacing some of our lightbulbs with energy efficient ones, we could do more. But who should be compelling us to do so? It's reasonably clear that most people don't bother to make such efforts when left to their own devices. But does that mean that the government should intervene and start making non-green things illegal? Australia's government is just about to do exactly that, and ban normal incadescent lightbulbs in favour of the energy efficient equivalent (via The Guardian).

This Big Brother theory can actually work, as shown in Ireland where you have to pay a small fee in shops to get a plastic bag. They give you a paper one free of charge, but plastic costs extra, leading to a huge drop in the number of plastic bags used each year and a nice little nest egg of money to be put towards green projects (via MSNBC). Of course, this hasn't solved all the country's environmental ills, but it certainly has made a difference. I think it's a good idea. Normal light bulbs waste a lot of the energy they use, by turning it into heat instead of light. So masses of energy will be saved if everyone uses the efficient light bulbs. People will get used to the weird neony light in no time.

(PHOTO: BUZZYBEE)