13 April 2009
Dune Mars, Visiting Mars and Carnival #98!
It seems that the astro-blogs have Mars on the brain today! Bad Astronomy has a post about some mind-bendingly cool HiRISE pictures of dunes on Mars, and The Spacewriter has a post about Mars as a whole and Ganges Chasma in particular. And, if you’d like a little more diversity in your space-blogging, go check out the 98th Carnival of Space at Universe Today!
11 April 2009
Moon Trailer
This looks surprisingly good, although a bit too similar to 2001: A Space Odyssey:
Rover Huggers
Stuart Atkinson just posted a very nice short story over at his blog Cumbrian Sky that you should all go and read. Here’s a teaser: “Hurry up!” Catriona said loudly into her helmet mike. She didn’t bother to turn round towards her brother as she spoke. She didn’t need to; apart from herself and her mother, whose hand she was clutching tightly, he was the only other person for miles …
10 April 2009
The Thermodynamics of Life
Markus Hammonds over at Supernova Condensate has a really interesting post about a recent paper showing that 10 of the 20 amino acids used by life are thermodynamically favored to form in all sorts of environments. That means that it’s very likely that life elsewhere in the universe would have the same most fundamental building blocks! Here’s a quote from the paper: Our results also indicate that a certain degree …
9 April 2009
I have joined the dark side
Guess what? I finally joined twitter! I am marschronicler! Do you want to know about the minutiae of my life? My most (and least) profound thoughts? What I had for breakfast? Well, then you are in luck, my friends!
8 April 2009
How to Talk Like a Physicist
Unfortunately, I missed Talk Like a Physicist Day this year (March 14), but I wanted to share this site anyway. It covers the basics of talking like a physicist, such as: Ground State: You’re not being lazy, you are in your ground state. and: First-order approximation : That is only a first-order approximation to a good cup of coffee… “The living room is clean. Well…at least to a first order …
6 April 2009
Spirit and Opportunity: Good Old Girls
Know what’s awesome? This video, put together by Steven Hammond, is awesome: That’s the song, “Good Old Girl”, by Marian Call. And the pictures, of course, are from Spirit and Opportunity. The song is actually about a somewhat larger, somewhat more fictional spacecraft, but it sure is fitting for the rovers.
Big Pictures of Mount Redoubt Eruption
The Big Picture, an awesome photo-blog that you should be reading, has a very cool set of photos of the Mount Redoubt eruptions in Alaska. I thought it was especially cool to see how the glacier on top of the mountain is collapsing as it melts from beneath. Update: Just like last time the Big Picture posted volcano photos, global warming deniers are posting in the comments and claiming that …
5 April 2009
400 Years of the Telescope
So, you do know that this year is the International Year of Astronomy, right? Well they chose 2009 because it marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first look at the night sky with his telescope. As part of the IYA festivities, PBS is airing an awesome new documentary on April 10 called “400 Years of the Telescope“. It was filmed with a new type of technology with ~5 times the …
Creepy Batteries
I saw two rather disturbing articles today about batteries. First: batteries that feed on blood. Apparently they are powered by a colony of specialized yeast that can consume blood for energy. Obviously this would be useful for things like pacemakers, assuming that the cyborg battery doesn’t infiltrate its host’s central nervous system, become sentient and then take over the world… Second: Virus-powered batteries. Apparently some researchers at MIT have used …
