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19 December 2010
AGU 2010 – Day 2: Shoemaker Lecture and Icy Moons
My massive summary of the Day 2 AGU planetary sciences talks, starting with the Shoemaker Lecture, and then covering Titan, Enceladus and other icy moons. Hydrocarbon volcanoes and icy geysers and hidden oceans, oh my!
15 December 2010
AGU 2010: Day 1 – Astrobiology, Volcanoes, and More!
Planetary highlights from Day 1 of the Fall 2010 AGU conference: astrobiology, explosive volcanism, planetary atmospheres and lots of methane!
9 December 2010
Hell on Earth (and Io)
If you don’t follow the Boston Globe’s photoblog The Big Picture, you’re really missing out. The topics range widely from current events to pictures of saturn, and the photos are of course always stunning. Yesterday was an especially awesome set of photos from the indonesian sulfur mine Kawah Ijen. The photos were taken at night, and sulfur has the interesting quality that it burns blue, resulting in some spectacular and otherworldly scenes of fire and brimstone.
8 December 2010
Math doodles: Snakes on a Plane
Well, I was going to take lots of notes next week at AGU and blog about them, but now I might just end up drawing these awesome math doodles all week:
Akatsuki and Arsenic and AGU
Hi folks. Sorry for the lack of activity here lately. The AGU is throwing a little get-together next week, which means I have been working on overdrive to finish a paper before putting together my poster. In the meantime, the plot has thickened for the “arsenic life” story from last week. It is looking more and more like the results of the study were not as revolutionary as they claimed, …
2 December 2010
NASA Scientists Find Microbes with Arsenic DNA
NASA astrobiologists have found bacteria living in Mono Lake, CA that use arsenic rather than phosphorus as the backbone of it’s DNA and other biomolecules like ATP.
This is a pretty big deal! Until now, everyone thought that life required the elements C,H,N,O,P,S to survive, but the Mono Lake bacteria laugh in the face of that idea and use something typically though of as a deadly poison as a fundamental building block. Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the lead author of the study summed things up nicely when she said that “It has solved the challenge of being alive in a very different way.”
1 December 2010
Phobos on the Limb
I love pictures of a planet’s limb (jargon for the horizon of a planet seen from space). In the typical overhead views of planets that we get most of the time, it’s easy to forget that we’re looking at another planet from outer space. On the other hand, when you can see the terrain stretching off into the distance, and the darkness of space above it, it somehow seems more …
30 November 2010
Thanksgiving with the Kranzes
Well, I was going to post this on Thanksgiving, but thanks to my own ineptitude, I wasn’t able to get it to embed until today. In any case, better late than never. Without futher ado, here is an awesome Thanksgiving-themed spoof of Apollo 13 for your viewing pleasure:
20 November 2010
It Came from Another Galaxy
It came from hundreds of thousands of light years away. Trapped in a dance of death with an ancient, doomed star, this behemoth interloper roves through our galaxy, thirsty for blood! Okay, maybe not that last part. But believe it or not, I’m talking about a recent press release from the European Southern Observatory, not a B-movie from the 50s. Earlier this week, ESO announced that a team of astronomers …
19 November 2010
Hartley 2: Snowball Fight!
Remember those awesome pictures of Hartley 2 from EPOXI? Well, those were the low-res camera. The high-resolution camera on the Deep Impact spacecraft is a bit blurry, so it took some time for the scientists on the mission to process the data, but they have finally released high-resolution photos and there’s a big surprise: Hartley 2 is surrounded by a swarm of fluffy cometary “snowballs”. For more info and pictures, …
