Nancy Atkinson at Universe Today (pretty much the best ressource for space news) has an article about a presse conference by the team of the Phoenix Mars lander that gave some great news: They confirmed that a white substance that has been visible in some Phoenix photos is indeed water ice.
Water is a prerequisite for life. Some people think that at some point there has at least microbacterial life on Mars, and this has just become a little more probable. Just as important, if humans ever want to build a permanent base on Mars it would be a lot easier if they haven’t to bring their own water from earth.
Here is the original article from the phoenix web site.
It’s “Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften” – The Long Night of the Sciences – in Berlin and Potsdam; the Universities and Science Institutes in the two cities will open to the public with dozens or even hundred of shows, speeches, discussions and exhibtions, ranging in theme from social sciences over languages, history, geography and medicine to mathematics, chemistry, physics… well go see for the self, you’ll find the complete list of events (in german) if you follow the link above.
I caught a cold during a motorbike trip and don’t feel quite fit, but I will nip out to catch at least a talk about the history of quantum mechanics and the related exhibition about Max Planck.
The Long Night of the Sciences is a pretty cool event – the width of topics covered is nothing short of amazing. If you’re in Berlin today you shouldn’t miss this.
Not much text here, just a link to a text about a very cool evolution experiment with E. coli bacteria (and any commenter who says that microevolution doesn’t prove macroevolution or such nonsense will get kicked in the shins, very hard).
P.Z.Myers at the Pharyngula science blog relates a story how 50 indians got blind after looking at the sun while looking for an apparition of the holy virgin Mary. This would be very dumb if it were true.
As a proud reader of Philip Plaits book I have to say this looks like a hoax since looking at the sun does not cause “retinal burns” (unless you do it through a telescope, or during an eclipse, or use a filter that blocks visible light while letting through UV, none of which is mentioned in the linked news article).
Phil Plaits source is astronomer Andrew T. Young, who has a page on the topic at http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/GF/vision/Galileo.html (scroll down to “Naked-eye solar hazards”).
This should neither encourage you to look at the sun nor should it stop you from making fun at the virgin Mary if you feel like it (personally I consider this a waste of time), but it should be a reminder not to easily trust things that you find on the internet.
Phil Plait of badastronomy.com is doing a live chat on his website – an experiment that, he says, might turn into a regular feature. I sure hope so and I hope he will do an “european edition” at a time that is a little more convenient for us here (this chat will start at three o’clock in the morning and I don’t think I’ll hold out until then).
And while I’m at it I can just as well plug his books a little – one is already published, it’s called Bad Astronomy (well, what else) and describes 24 common astronomical fallacies, including the beliefs that the Coriolis effect determines the direction that water drains in a bathtub and that planetary alignments can cause disaster on Earth. The author sharply and convincingly dismisses astrology, creationism, and UFO sightings and explains the principles behind basic general concepts (okay, so I copied the blurb from amazon.de).
The second one will be published this year and will be called, if I remember the announcement correctly , “Death from the Sky”. It will describe several way the Earth could possibly (but isn’t likely to, so no worries) be destroyed, and since I happen to do a talk about the end of the world in December I think I will do a little inofficial book promotion for the Bad Astronomer.
Okay, I won’t make it to the chat. I’m off to bed now.
Space shuttle Atlantis (STS 122) is scheduled to launch Thursday, Feb 7, after the mission had been repeatedly postponed due to technical problems. Atlantis will carry the Columbus laboratory to the International Space Station which will greatly (finally!) enhance the stations capability to do some actual science.
I hope everything works out this time. I’m a bit of a space enthusiast, so it would be such a perfect birthday present for me.
Yesterday I went to the movies to see “I am Legend”. I love Mathesons novel, so I knew I would be disappointed. But I had at least hoped for some kind of mindless action flick, a dumbed-down version of the original story with cool special effects. The movie was mindless, alright, but in a annoying rather than a fun way.
It was probably not the fault of the leading man. I had seen Will Smith first in Men in Black and had cast him down as a decent Eddy-Murphy stand-in, but had really come to like him after his performance in Ali. Smith makes an excellent Robert Neville; here he is very much a character actor, and at the end of the movie he looks exhausted and even old, an Robinson Crusoe without hope for rescue on his desert island of Manhattan. So, no objections here.
Nor was it the scenery, the desert Manhattan through which the Protagonist stumbles. Of course the movie is in large parts a Quiet Earth-ripoff, with much better production values and a lot less atmosphere. But plagiarism is a form of flattery, plus IaL had some potentially cool monsters thrown in so that was okay also.
(massive spoilers below the fold)
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“Intelligent Design” is a fundamentalist religious movement that, despite it’s claims that physics, chemistry, biology, history, archeology etc are all wrong and the world has been created relativly recently by some superbeing (okay, let’s not play games here, they mean the christian god) tries to disguise itself as a science. At the moment most supporters of that idea live in the USA – I sometimes wonder if they have some kind of contest over there like, you know, “who manages to do the most damage to the countries reputation” (at the moment they have a tie between warmongers and religious nutjobs). (more…)
Kim Stanley Robinson is a man after my own heart, and the Science in the Capital-Series deals with one of the most important topics of our days, so it’s a bit of a pity that I cannot praise him without reservations. But while the writing here is competent it’s never compelling, and for a book it’s not enough to deal with an important topic (not in fiction anyway), yet I found it not particularly entertaining or inspiring.
Sixty Days and Counting is the closing book in a trilogy about man-made global warming, after Fourty Days of Rain and Fifty Degrees below. The main story is about humanities (that is US-American with the Russians and Chinese on the sidelines) attempt to mitigate the consequences of global warming by large-scale carbon sequestration projects and other terraforming stuff. And then there are a few subplots that do not seem strictly necessary, like about rogue Black Ops and wisdom-dispensing Bhuddist immigrants.
It might be that I missed some important parts though – the books violates quite gratitously what I’ll call for the moment “Eikes law of typesetting” which dicates that italics are strictly for emphasizing words, so don’t use them on whole chapters if you actually want somebody to read them – anybody who can read ten pages of 10 point italics has clearly better eyes than me.
The whole shebang from 40 to 60 is not bad, it’s just that it’s boring, which might as well be a matter of taste, so you might give it a try. As for me I rather watch An Inconvenient Truth on DVD to learn about the global warming thing. But I’m still going to try Robinsons Mars-Trilogy because – did I mention it? – as far as his politics and general Weltanschauung are concerned he seems to be pretty much a man after my own heart.
