You are browsing the archive for Ryan Anderson.
29 July 2010
We Didn't Fake the Moon Landings
But I want to get one of those dramatic glowing tables!
27 July 2010
MSL Roves!
I’m a little late on this, but I thought I should share the news: MSL now has a good head and neck on its shoulders, and has officially “roved”. Last week, engineers at JPL installed the “Remote Sensing Mast”, bringing MSL‘s total height up to nearly seven feet tall (2 meters). Also, MSL drove for the first time in the clean-room where it is being assembled! Here is a 3D …
Starcraft Cloaking Devices
Today’s the big day: Starcraft 2 comes out! Over at my Science of Starcraft blog I have two new posts. One is a nice short video summarizing the plot of the original game, so if you want to know what I’m talking about when I make game references in other posts, check it out. I also posted an article about real-world research into cloaking devices, a technology that is common …
24 July 2010
HP dv6t Select Edition Notebook Review: First Impressions
Please excuse me while I geek out about my new laptop… My work now involves some really significant number crunching, to the point that I was regularly using all the CPU and RAM of my previous laptop, and was then struggling to get anything else done while the calculations were running. And then they would crash. It also helps that I will soon need to renew the license on one …
23 July 2010
The Science of Starcraft: Creepy Slime Molds
My second article is up over at my new Science of Starcraft blog! This one is about the weird substance in the game called “creep” and its similarities to real-world slime-molds. Check it out! Even if you don’t play Starcraft, slime molds are really cool/weird. (PS – I swear I’ll be posting some real Martian Chronicles content soon instead of just pointing to articles elsewhere! But I’m trying to get …
22 July 2010
New Deep Sea Vents Discovered in the Caribbean
Here’s the second of my recent Universe Today Articles: scientists have discovered new deep sea vents in the Caribbean that will teach us more about sunless ecosystems. Good to know if we ever want to look for life in the oceans of Europa some day! Check out the article here.
WISE Maps the Sky
I have two new articles up at Universe Today! The first is about the WISE infrared survey of the entire sky, which involved approximately a bazillion images, including the lovely view of the Pleiades shown here. You should go check it out.
21 July 2010
The Science of Starcraft
In 1998 the computer game Starcraft came out, setting the bar for real-time strategy games for the next decade. I loved playing Starcraft, and spent more time that I’d like to admit doing so. Starcraft also gave me my first taste of computer programming: the game came with a “map editor” which let you construct your own maps, including simple if-then statements. IF an enemy unit enters my base THEN …
19 July 2010
New Evidence for an Ocean on Mars?
There’s a new Nature Geoscience paper that has made a big splash in the Mars community, reviving interest in the possibility of a northern ocean. This news was making the rounds a couple weeks ago, but I decided to hold off because at last week’s Mars Journal Club we discussed the paper. The idea behind the paper is deceptively simple. The authors, Gaetano DiAchille and Brian Hynek, searched all over …
15 July 2010
Hubble Confirms Comet-like Tail on Vaporizing Planet
Aren’t you glad our planet isn’t being vaporized by the heat of the sun? Me too, especially after writing this article over at Universe Today about an extrasolar planet that is suffering this fate. Go check it out!
