Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

The Year in Science Stories


29 Dec

I love end of year lists. They let me sort through things and find what I’ve missed. It’s not my full time job to find interesting movies or books, or scientific breakthroughs, even though I love all of those things. Reading the year end lists from those whose full time jobs it is, means that I get to catch up.

To that end, over the next week or so, you’ll probably be seeing a number of posts by me from the Cosmic Log’s year end round ups of the biggest stories in outer space, archeology, and science stories in general.

Space Harpoon


21 Dec

NASA is developing a harpoon. They aren’t looking for blubber (Star Trek IV taught us not to kill the whales), but for other natural resources, in comets.

This isn’t an offensive weapon. It’s a research tool. The goal is for astronauts to be able to harpoon a comet and bring samples back so that they can study what comets are made of and how they are formed. But, knowing how comets are made could help us learn how to deflect them away from the earth.

And, we’ll leave the tip of the harpoon in the comet. What a nice souvenir.

More MythBusters Mayhem


08 Dec

No new MythBusters last night so I’m still talking about the accident that had them sending a 30lb softball (I know, what’s soft about a ball weighing 30lbs) into a neighborhood near the bomb range where they conduct many experiments.

Jamie and Adam went to visit the home and help clean up. The show has insurance for exactly this reason. Everyone is grateful for the fact that no one was hurt.

However, some people in the neighborhood don’t want them back if they’re going to be doing “dangerous” things. My response to that- dude, you live near a BOMB range.

Can you say “Oops”?


07 Dec

The surprise isn’t that this happened. The surprise is that it hasn’t happened before, like a hundred times before. In an experiment gone awry, the MythBusters appear to have shot a cannonball through a house near the gun range where they normally test their artillery myths.

Apparently, the cannonball took some weird bounces, and went through two walls of a nearby house. Having once lived near a rifle range, I can tell you, the owners never thought anything like this could happen.

It does, however, make you wonder what happened to Jamie’s perfect period cannonball from the tree cannon myth.

The Goldilocks Planet


06 Dec

You all know I love space exploration. I am excited by the discovery of Kepler-22, the first potentially human habitable planet discovered by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. But here’s what gets me. Notice how I said “human habitable”. Everyone else just say “habitable”. There is the assumption that life couldn’t have formed on a planet that humans couldn’t live on. Hydrogen based life, perhaps, couldn’t form on a planet without water as we know it, but why are we so certain that all intelligent life has to be hydrogen based? And why are we certain the planets need to be Earth-size?

The Arabian Route


03 Dec

Every once in a while, I regret my decision not to follow through and become a trained “historian”. The truth is, I wouldn’t have been involved in this kind of expedition anyway, since Paleolithic would not have been my era, and I hate the heat, so tramping around the deserts of Arabia would have been totally off the list.

But still, how cool is this that they are finding a trail of breadcrumbs that indicates humans started leaving Africa earlier than expected and by a different route than most theorize.

The story of humanity is being written before our eyes.

MythBusters Season Finale (ep 180)


01 Dec

I actually think the 48 Hours 2 myth was busted. The reason- pouring liquid nitrogen on a bomb doesn’t give you 2-3 seconds to get safe, it gives minutes- 15 in this case, but I’m sure that varies by how much liquid nitrogen is used. Danny & Mel could have walked out of the house with that much time. As for the cast iron tub being an effective bomb shelter- not surprised.

As for planes, it’s more fuel efficient to fly one big plane flying than 5 little ones, so I don’t think formation flying is the future of aviation.

MythBusters Wheel of MythFortune


25 Nov

I was aware of the math behind the Monty Hall paradox when it came to switching, but I hadn’t been aware of the psychological tendency to stick instead of switch. I found that interesting. I also noticed that Adam won a lot more than 2/3 of the time with switching and that Jaime won a lot less than 1/3.

In the gun holding myth, target shooting is one thing, but in a gunfight, no one’s accurate, not the military, not the police. I don’t know that how the gun is held matters when no one is actually trying to aim.

Oh, The Places We’ll Go


23 Nov

Sticking with space news for one more day, did you realize that we (and by we, I mean astronomers, not me at all) have found over 700 planets outside our own solar system?

I should clarify, according to the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, run by Jean Schneider of the Paris-Meudon Observatory, 702 planets outside our solar system have been located. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory maintains a different database called PlanetQuest: New Worlds Atlas, and it currently has 687 alien planets.

What’s really exciting is how quickly the databases have grown in recent years. I love living in an age of discovery.

Back to Mars


22 Nov

On Saturday, the Mars Science Laboratory mission takes it’s next big step- the launch of the next Mars rover, the Curiosity. It will take almost 9 months to reach the Red Planet, and be lowered to the planet in a brand new method, using a rocket powered sky crane  and cables.

Stop and think about everything in that last paragraph- Mars Rover, rocket powered sky crane, the Red Planet. How cool does all of that sound. How cool is all of that? Doesn’t it make you want to be a rocket scientist? Why couldn’t I have been better at Physics?

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