Category: Science

To the heavens

Life is about journeys – here’s a spectacular example

Yesterday while I was travelling the 5,450 flight miles between London Heathrow and Los Angeles airports, another marvel of flight technology approached a small lump of rock far out in space.  I speaking of NASA’s Deep Impact/EPOXI spacecraft passing within 450 miles of the Comet Hartley 2.

“There are billions of comets in the solar system, but this will be only the fifth time a spacecraft has flown close enough to one to snap pictures of its nucleus,” says Lori Feaga of the EPOXI science team. “This one should put on quite a show!”

Cometary orbits tend to be highly elongated; they travel far from the sun and then swing much closer. At encounter time, Hartley 2 will be nearing the sun and warming up after its cold, deep space sojourn. The ices in its nucleus will be vaporizing furiously – spitting dust and spouting gaseous jets.

“Hartley 2’s nucleus is small, less than a mile in diameter,” says Feaga. “But its surface offgasses at a higher rate than nuclei we’ve seen before. We expect more jets and outbursts from this one.”

The EPOXI Mission website is here, from which has been selected this photograph of the Comet.

The details of this photograph are:

Caption: This EPOXI mission image of comet 103P/Hartley 2 was taken 34 days from Encounter (E-34d) using the Medium Resolution Instrument (MRI) and a clear filter. Science Team member Dr. Dennis Wellnitz combined three successive one-minute exposures to make this single image. The mid-exposure time was 2010/10/01 16:22:51 UTC. The comet was 1.12 AU from the Sun and 0.23 AU (35 million km) from the spacecraft.

Of course, when this Post is published, automagically, you will have to go onto the mission website to see the very latest information.

I will be more interested in catching a South-West airline flight into Phoenix.

By Paul Handover

Professor James Lovelock, the way forward

Prof. Lovelock is a most amazing thinker.

This makes fascinating listening and thinking. I am referring to the BBC4 programme, Eureka Moment, first broadcast in March 2010.

Lovelock

Some frightening stuff to reflect on, however, he is a tremendously positive person. His level of thinking and orginality is breath taking. Painful and not pleasant, but a snapshot of a possible outcome.

Interesting from a David Hawkins point of view to measure his level of integrity on the scale of human consciousness that Hawkins developed.

I’m delighted to see that the BBC still has a huge amount available about Lovelock’s claims.  A small extract from here.

The man who achieved global fame for his theory that the whole earth is a single organism now believes that we can only hope that the earth will take care of itself in the face of completely unpredictable climate change.

Interviewed by Today presenter John Humphrys, videos of which you can see below, he said that while the earth’s future was utterly uncertain, mankind was not aware it had “pulled the trigger” on global warming as it built its civilizations.

Here’s a video, taken quite recently, of the Professor explaining his approach to his science.

But whatever, don’t lose heart. Keep the faith in a better future, as Paul wrote yesterday.

By Jon Lavin

Man is very, very close to Dolphin

Dolphin DNA very close to Human DNA

I had real trouble in writing yesterday’s Post about the appalling slaughter of the dolphins in Japan. Perhaps there was something out there in the ether that recognised the pain that I was sharing with so many thousands of other dolphin lovers.

Because while I was writing the article, into my in-box came something from Save Japan Dolphins about how close dolphins are to mankind, in DNA terms.

The article opened thus:

Seema Kumar, of Discovery Channel Online, writes that scientists have discovered that the genetic make-up of dolphins is amazingly similar to humans. They’re closer to us than cows, horses, or pigs, despite the fact that they live in the water.

David Busbee of Texas A&M University is then quoted as saying:

Busbee says, “If we can show that humans are similar to dolphins, and anything that endangers dolphins is an equal concern for humans, it may be easier to persuade governments to keep oceans clean.”

And make it easier for all honest and loving people to join the fight to stop that most dastardly murdering of dolphins in Taiji, Japan.

If you do nothing else, at least sign up to receiving the latest news from Save Japan Dolphins – which is how this Post was conceived.

 

Kissing not killing, please.

 

By Paul Handover

Space exploration on peanuts!

Up, up and (nearly) away!

(Apologies for the minimalist post today.  Bit under the cosh in terms of free time.)

My good buddy, Dan Gomez, forwarded this piece on very, and I mean ‘very’, low cost space flight, courtesy of the Brooklyn Space Program.

Enjoy!

By Paul Handover

So I said to this dolphin …

Fascinating research on how dolphins develop ‘speech’

Once again, I am indebted to Yves Smith for posting a link in the edition of Naked Capitalism published on the 1st October that really caught my eye.  This follows nicely after my piece a couple of days ago about how the stray dogs in Moscow are learning new ways to survive.

It was a piece on the BBC Earth website about how dolphins attempt to learn the language of other dolphin groups.

The BBC article starts thus:

Just magnificent

When two dolphin species come together, they attempt to find a common language, preliminary research suggests.

Bottlenose and Guyana dolphins, two distantly related species, often come together to socialise in waters off the coast of Costa Rica.

Both species make unique sounds, but when they gather, they change the way they communicate, and begin using an intermediate language.

That raises the possibility the two species are communicating in some way.

Biologist Dr Laura May-Collado of the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan made the discovery studying dolphins swimming in the Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge of the southern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica.

Later the article says:

As yet, Dr May-Collado cannot be sure if both species are changing the way they communicate, or whether it is one species attempting to call more like the other.

That is because her sound equipment could only record the total calls produced by mixed species groups of dolphins, and could not separate out sounds made by individuals.

“This limits how much I can say about how much they are communicating,” says Dr May-Collado.

However, dolphins are known to have an extraordinary ability to change their calls when ‘talking’ to other individuals, or to ensure they are heard over the din of background noise pollution.

So “I wouldn’t be surprised that they can modify their signals to mimic, and even possibly communicate with other species. Particularly when their home ranges force them to interact on a daily basis, which is the case of this study,” she says.

Read the full piece here or access details of the publication here.

And, finally, enjoy this:

By Paul Handover

In my lifetime?

Possibly the greatest discovery of all time.

What would that be?  Finding evidence that there is intelligent life on another planet.

With the assumption, of course, that there is intelligent life on Planet Earth 😉

So what prompted this article?

Simply that the British Magazine The New Scientist on its website has a recent article with the intriguing heading of Found: first rocky exoplanet that could host life.

Here are some extracts:

Astronomers have found the first alien world that could support life on its surface. It is both at the right distance from its star to potentially harbour liquid water and probably has a rocky composition like Earth.

“That’s the most exciting exoplanet I’ve seen yet,” says James Kasting of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, who was not involved in the discovery.

The planet orbits a dim red dwarf star 20 light years from Earth called Gliese 581. Four planets were already known around the star, with two lying near the inner and outer edges of the habitable zone, where liquid water – and therefore potentially life – could exist on its surface.

A rocky world has been found squarely in the middle of the star Gliese 581's habitable zone (Image: Lynette Cook)

The article continues:

The discovery suggests habitable planets must be common, with 10 to 20 per cent of red dwarfs and sun-like stars boasting them, the team says. That’s because Gliese 581 is one of just nine stars out to its distance that have been searched with high enough precision to reveal a planet in the habitable zone.

“If you take the number of stars in our galaxy – a few hundred billion – and multiply them by 10 or 20 per cent, you end up with 20 or 40 billion potentially habitable planets out there,” says Vogt. “It’s a very large number.”

For more years than I can imagine, I have always thought that the most amazing scientific find of my lifetime would be the discovery of life on another planet.

I’m 65 at present – wonder what the odds are? But surely this announcement by The New Scientist does increase them?

V838 Monocerotis

Awesome!  Plain and simply awesome.

V838 Monocerotis

From the Hubble website.  Here’s the description of the image:

“Starry Night”, Vincent van Gogh‘s famous painting, is renowned for its bold whorls of light sweeping across a raging night sky. Although this image of the heavens came only from the artist’s restless imagination, a new picture from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope bears remarkable similarities to the van Gogh work, complete with never-before-seen spirals of dust swirling across trillions of kilometres of interstellar space.

This image, obtained with the Advanced Camera for Surveys on February 8, 2004, is Hubble’s latest view of an expanding halo of light around a distant star, named V838 Monocerotis (V838 Mon).

The illumination of interstellar dust comes from the red supergiant star at the middle of the image, which gave off a flashbulb-like pulse of light two years ago. V838 Mon is located about 20,000 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Monoceros, placing the star at the outer edge of our Milky Way galaxy.

Credit:

NASA, the Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI) and ESA

Here are my thoughts.

A single light-year is approximately 6 trillion miles, or 9,460,730,472,580.8 kms for the metric brigade!  Thus 20,000 light-years is 120,000 trillion miles, or 120,000,000,000,000,000 miles.

It is beyond imagination – yet it is real!

It humbles one beyond measure that in this short lifetime on mine, science has reached out so far.  And then one looks more closely to home and remains appalled that we have learnt so little about living in peace and with integrity on this funny third rock from the Sun.

The ultimate paradox!

By Paul Handover

2001: A Space Odyssey

Even today, still an amazing film

Jean and I watched this film the other evening.  I have seen it a number of times but Jean just once before when it first was released in 1968!  Yes, over 40 years ago!

What struck me watching it today was how beautifully slow the film was.  I mean in the sense of camera and scene changes.  I had forgotten just how beautiful the film was from a technical perspective.  It held the eye and brain in a way that seemed so foreign to the way that films have been made in the last so many years.

WikiPedia has a very good summary of the film.

And there are more summaries on the INDB website, here’s an example:

“2001” is a story of evolution. Sometime in the distant past, someone or something nudged evolution by placing a monolith on Earth (presumably elsewhere throughout the universe as well). Evolution then enabled humankind to reach the moon’s surface, where yet another monolith is found, one that signals the monolith placers that humankind has evolved that far. Now a race begins between computers (HAL) and human (Bowman) to reach the monolith placers. The winner will achieve the next step in evolution, whatever that may be.

The sign!

What is just as interesting is remembering the feelings that I had when I first saw the film, probably in 1968 or 1969, when I was living out in Australia, aged mid-twenties!

I was incredibly fascinated by the US expeditions out to the moon with the actual landing in July 1969.  Indeed, I rented a TV and took a complete week’s holiday from work just to watch every minute of this historical event.

So the film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, seemed to capture, for me anyway, the feelings and mood of a brave new world reaching out beyond Planet Earth.  The year 2001 felt like aeons away.  It was obvious that when we eventually got to the 21st century, mankind would be unbelievably advanced in many exciting and positive ways.

Ah, the dreams of the naive young!

Now here we are heading towards the year 2011 and the world, I mean mankind, seems to be going where?  Here’s Jon Lavin’s rather sombre view:

Have been musing about the part failure of the Russian grain harvest and the resultant speculation, that has forced the grain price up astronomically, the impact on bread/food/beer etc., evidence of the same mentality that kicked the banks/investments recession off.

Also, the fact that Lloyds TSB are 43% owned by the British people and are charging interest on non-approved loans of 165% and have a bonus fund of half billion pounds that certainly they have not asked my permission about.

This continuing lack of integrity, in the face of food shortages, untold hardship for millions of people, just goes to show that until an absolute calamity strikes to stop the whole of mankind in our tracks, it’s business as usual for the financially-led people and get-rich-on-the-back-of-anything-and-anybody crowd.

Are we still at consciousness level 204 or have we crossed back below the threshold, back below integrity 200, where falsehood rules?

The answer is to retain faith in the future, faith in the power of love and compassion, and faith in the fact that being the best that we can be today, now, in the present, just as dogs are so wonderful at doing, will bring us the better tomorrows we all dreamed about in 1968.  Here’s a reminder:

By Paul Handover

P.S. Serendipity at work.  Saw this from the BBC less than 5 minutes after completing this Post!

Silent river runs deep!

And how so …

Wikipedia has been quick to register an account of something that I saw on the The Daily Telegraph website on the 1st August, 2010.

That is:

Researchers working in the Black Sea have found currents of water 350 times greater than the River Thames flowing along the sea bed, carving out channels much like a river on the land.

The undersea river, which is up to 115ft deep in places, even has rapids and waterfalls much like its terrestrial equivalents.

If found on land, scientists estimate it would be the world’s sixth largest river in terms of the amount of water flowing through it.

The researchers at the University of Leeds in England used a robotic submarine to carry out the investigations, as their news item explains.

These channels are the main transport pathway for sediments to the deep sea where they form sedimentary deposits. These deposits ultimately hold not only untapped reserves of gas and oil, they also house important secrets – from clues on past climate change to the ways in which mountains were formed.

Now the team, led by Dr Dan Parsons and Dr Jeff Peakall from the University of Leeds, has been able to study the detailed flow within these channels. Dr Parsons, said: “The channel complex and the density flow provide the ideal natural laboratory for investigating and detailing the structure of the flow field through the channel.

Fascinating!

Black Sea underground 'river'.

By Paul Handover

More on those noctilucent clouds

Otherwise known as Night Shining Clouds

There was an article on Learning from Dogs on July 22nd about these mysterious and beautiful clouds.

This is just an update to show you an example of photographs taken by Finn Jari Luomanen over the night of the 29th-30th July. All the pictures may be seen here – they are of this quality:

2010_07_29-30 Mesoscale convective system

Here’s what Jari said about this night:

This mesoscale convective system sweeped over Finland with ferocious energy. The day before was historical as a record breaking temperature of 37,2 degs Celsius was recorded. The MCS proved to be a good match.

Thunderstrikes happened every two seconds at the peak and it was difficult to expose correctly due to the multiple strikes in each exposure.

Noctilucent clouds shone above the swiftly moving cell creating an eerie electric blue backdrop for the spectacle.

Never before have I seen anything close to this. I was jumping behind the tripod firing away in the hot, humid night. Since when has Finland turned into tropics?

This is a very beautiful planet!

By Paul Handover