This sweet video from the American Museum of Natural History takes you from the Himalayas out through the Solar System and into the very distant reaches of space, eventually past the edge of the known universe.
I’ve seen something very similar to this at the Imiloa Planetarium, but judging from their schedule it looks like they don’t show it to the public. Very unfortunate, because this is incredible on the big planetarium screen in 3-D.
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Tonight NASA launched a Delta II rocket with the Kepler Telescope atop it.
Kepler’s mission is to observe 100,000 stars constantly for three and a half years. It’s doing this to watch for dips in brightness caused by a planet passing in front of the star. By observing so many stars for so long, it’s expected that Kepler will about fifty Earth-sized planets with an orbit of about a year in length!
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David Attenborough talks about evolution and the tree of life on Earth. It’s a bit simplistic and focuses mostly on animal life, but how can you go wrong with David Attenborough?
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News came out at the beginning of February that researchers had found a new form of super-hard boron when the element is compressed by extremely high pressures. This is the fourth known stable form of boron.
If you read down to the bottom of that article you’ll find that the author originally got it wrong and reported that there were three stable forms of boron.
Conan O’Brien called him on it.
Popularity: 13% [?]
The Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope, or BLAST, was a submillimeter telescope whose goal was to do a wide submillimeter survey of the sky. What makes BLAST different from most telescopes is that it was carried by a huge balloon. It made two flights, one in the Arctic (launched from Sweden and picked up in Canada) and another in Antarctica.
There’s a movie about BLAST called BLAST! The Movie. Here’s its trailer:
A friend of mine, Ed Chapin, worked on BLAST. I didn’t see him anywhere in the trailers, but here’s a picture of him in Antarctica. I see from Gaelen Marsden’s blog that Ed showed up nearer the end, probably to be all rock star and grab all the glory for himself.
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When you visit Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park you’re inundated with hazard warnings. There are warnings about hazardous fumes, there are warnings about steam vents, earth cracks, and cliffs, and there are warnings about invisible cows. Oh wait, that’s Mauna Kea.
There are also warning signs about lava delta collapses, where huge chunks of land can just break off and fall into the ocean. To most visitors, this is a rather abstract warning, as the land looks incredibly stable. It’s rock, after all!
The main problem is that the lava bench isn’t built on a stable foundation. It’s typically formed covering jumbles of sand and smaller rocks formed by the lava entering the ocean. This unstable foundation eventually gives way under the enormous weight of the lava covering it, and the whole thing drops into the ocean.
Not surprisingly, the USGS has an excellent description of how lava deltas form and collapse. Pictures and descriptions still don’t give any sense of magnitude. Videos are much better.
Luckily the USGS caught a lava delta collapse on November 28, 2005. A 34-acre delta at the East Lae`apuki ocean entry collapsed in five hours, taking an additional ten acres of land with it.
Even more amazingly, the entire bench reformed in only four days.
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NASA recently announced the discovery of seasonal plumes of methane on Mars. I’ll let Michael Mumma do some of the explaining:
And now for a few details.
We know the methane was produced recently because methane, made up of one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms, breaks up easily when struck by ultraviolet light from the Sun. Because it breaks up quickly, if we’re to detect it it must be being replenished somehow.
The hypothesis that the methane is created by subterranean volcanos is on the unlikely side. Mars shows no evidence of recent volcanic activity, and we should be able to detect other gases produced by volcanos such as sulfur dioxide.
Methanogens are bacteria whose waste products include methane. They have been found in many extreme locations on earth, including three kilometers under the ice shield in Greenland and in desert soil samples near the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah.
This discovery was made through years of observations using the Keck Observatory and NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility, both located on Mauna Kea.
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I’m going to get back into the Weekly Science Video habit this year. The first one of the year comes courtesy Andrew Cooper
Avalanche from Andrew Cooper on Vimeo.
When it snows on Mauna Kea, one of the most important jobs to be done is clearing the telescope domes of snow. At JCMT and UKIRT, a snow-removal crew has to get on the roof (of JCMT) or dome (of UKIRT) and shovel the snow off by hand. At Keck, they turn the dome shutter into a giant snowplow, and Andrew captured the result.
Andrew has a good post on snow-clearing at Keck, which is where the video’s from.
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These two videos are making their way around the intertubes today, but they’re too good not to share. They’re from the Deep Impact spacecraft (now renamed EPOXI), and show something rather magical:
Visit the Bad Astronomy Blog for a much better write-up than I could ever do.
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This one takes a personal twist, as a couple of weeks ago I was stricken with a case of campylobacteriosis, caused by Campylobacter jejuni. This video explains what the bacteria is, what it does (oh god it makes you sick) and how to avoid getting it into your system:
I don’t think I’ve got Guillain-Barré Syndrome yet…
Popularity: 10% [?]
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