Urban astro-nerds, rejoice! The smog and lights of the city will obscure your view of the heavens no more. And your star photography will twinkle. Now you can go online to access high-quality scopes at dark-sky sites worldwide and order them to take photos for you — cheaply or for free, and at decent resolution. It may take some preparation, but even if the results aren’t exactly Hubble-icious, there’s something out-of-this-world about playing astronomer for a night.
Archive for 2008
Four Online Telescopes Serve the Stars to Interstellar Paparazzi
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008Report: 32% Of Prayers Deflected Off Passing Satellites
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008HOUSTON—According to an official NASA report released Saturday, nearly 32 percent of all prayers exiting Earth are deflected off satellites orbiting the planet—ultimately preventing the discharged requests for divine intervention from ever making it to the Gates of Heaven. “After impact with the satellite, these diverted prayers typically plummet back into the atmosphere, where they either burn up or eventually land, unanswered, in a body of water,” the report read in part. “Of the remaining prayers, research confirms 64 percent fail to make it past the stratosphere because they aren’t prayed hard enough, 94 percent of those with enough momentum are swallowed by a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and 43 percent are eaten by birds.” The report concluded that, of the 170 billion prayers issued last month, one made it to God, whose reply was intercepted by a hurricane and incorrectly delivered to a Nigerian man who reportedly did not know what to do with his brand-new Bowflex machine.
First ‘Rule’ Of Evolution Suggests That Life Is Destined To Become More Complex
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008– I don’t find the core idea here at all surprising. Evolution is an arms race between those evolving and better perceptions, better reasoning and better equipment are what it is all about. All of these lead to higher complexity.
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Researchers have found evidence which suggests that evolution drives animals to become increasingly more complex.
Looking back through the last 550 million years of the fossil catalogue to the present day, the team investigated the different evolutionary branches of the crustacean family tree.
They were seeking examples along the tree where animals evolved that were simpler than their ancestors.
Instead they found organisms with increasingly more complex structures and features, suggesting that there is some mechanism driving change in this direction.
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Self-Experimenters: Psychedelic Chemist Explores the Surreality of Inner Space, One Drug at a Time
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008Alexander Shulgin is the world’s foremost “psychonaut.” The 82-year-old chemist has not only created more of the 300 known consciousness-altering (or psychoactive) compounds than anyone living or dead, he has, by his own account, sampled somewhere between 200 and 250 of them himself—most of them cooked up in the musty lab behind his home in the hills east of Berkeley, Calif., where he has shared many a chemical voyage with his wife of 26 years, Ann.
“I take them myself because I am interested in their activity in the human mind. How would you test that in a rat or mouse?” says Shulgin, known to friends as Sasha.
He has paid the price for his avocation. Some of his creations have induced uncontrollable vomiting, paralysis and the feeling that his bones were melting, among other terrors. And though some believe Shulgin has opened the doors of perception to a new class of potentially therapeutic mind-altering compounds, others argue that he bears responsibility for the damage that ongoing abuse of such now-illicit substances can cause.
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Homosexual Geneticists Isolate Cause of Christianity
Monday, March 24th, 2008Thanks to ScienceBlogs & Greg Laden, I can offer you this gem:
Trashing the Beijing Road
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008– The Economist Magazine just happened to have a correspondent in Lhasa as the Tibetan riots broke out. So, in spite of the efforts of the Chinese government to control information about what happened there,we have here an uncensored view of what went on.
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ETHNIC-Chinese shopkeepers in Lhasa’s old Tibetan quarter knew better than the security forces that the city had become a tinder-box. As word spread rapidly through the narrow alleyways on March 14th that a crowd was throwing stones at Chinese businesses, they shuttered up their shops and fled. The authorities, caught by surprise, held back as the city was engulfed by its biggest anti-Chinese protests in decades.
What began, or may have begun (Lhasa feeds on rumour), as the beating of a couple of Buddhist monks by police has turned into a huge political test for the Chinese government. Tibet has cast a pall over preparations to hold the Olympic games in Beijing in August. Protests in Lhasa have triggered copycat demonstrations in several monasteries across a vast swathe of territory in the “Tibet Autonomous Region” of China and in areas around it (see map). Not since the uprising of 1959, during which the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, fled to India, has there been such widespread unrest across this oxygen-starved expanse of mountains and plateaus.
Years of rapid economic growth, which China had hoped would dampen separatist demands, have achieved the opposite. Efforts to integrate the region more closely with the rest of China, by building the world’s highest railway connecting Beijing with Lhasa, have only fuelled ethnic tensions in the Tibetan capital. The night before the riots erupted, a Tibetan government official confided to your correspondent that Lhasa was now stable after protests by hundreds of monks at monasteries near the city earlier in the week. He could not have been more wrong.
It was, perhaps, a sign of the authorities’ misreading of Lhasa’s anger that a foreign correspondent was in the city at all. Foreign journalists are seldom given permission to visit. In January 2007, in preparation for the Olympics, the central government issued new regulations that supposedly make it much easier for them to travel around the country. Travel to Tibet, however, still requires a permit. The Economist‘s visit was approved before the monks protested on March 10th and 11th, but the authorities apparently felt sufficiently in control to allow the trip to go ahead as planned from March 12th. As it turned out, several of the venues on the pre-arranged itinerary became scenes of unrest.
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UN Report Reveals Glaciers Melting at Record Speed
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008A new United Nations study has found that glaciers across the globe are shrinking faster than ever before. The UN says the consequences could be grim for billions of people who depend on glacial melt and urges global leaders to act swiftly on climate change.
Glaciers across the globe are melting faster than at any point in the last century. Many could disappear within decades, and their decline could cause droughts and chaos for billions of people who depend on rivers fed by glaciers.
This was the sobering message delivered Sunday by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), along with a plea to international leaders to act swiftly and drastically to address climate change, which the UNEP says is to blame for the glacial melt.
Glacial melt is the “canary in the climate change coal mine,” said UNEP executive director Achim Steiner in a statement. “It is absolutely essential that everyone sits up and take notice,” he said.
The announcement was based on a study that tracked glacial melt at nearly 30 glaciers across the globe. Some of the most dramatic losses were in Europe; Norway’s Breidalblikkbrea glacier topped the list by shrinking 3.1 meters (10.2 feet) in 2006.
“The latest figures are part of what appears to be an accelerating trend with no apparent end in sight,” Wilfried Haeberli, director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service, a Zurich-based research institute that conducted the study.
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(red emphasis, above, was mine)
Fresh bird flu outbreak in India
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008Veterinary workers in India have begun culling tens of thousands of chickens in an attempt to combat a fresh outbreak of bird flu in West Bengal.The disease surfaced in the region in January. More than one million birds were slaughtered.
But about a month ago officials said the situation was under control.
Both outbreaks involve the potentially fatal H5N1 virus, although so far there have been no reports of humans being infected in India.
Scientists fear that the virus could eventually mutate into a form easily transmitted between humans, leading to a pandemic that could kill millions worldwide.
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Samurai-Sword Maker’s Reactor Monopoly May Cool Nuclear Revival
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008March 13 (Bloomberg) — From a windswept corner of Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, Japan Steel Works Ltd. controls the fate of the global nuclear-energy renaissance.
There stands the only plant in the world, a survivor of Allied bombing in World War II, capable of producing the central part of a nuclear reactor’s containment vessel in a single piece, reducing the risk of a radiation leak.
Utilities that won’t need the equipment for years are making $100 million down payments now on components Japan Steel makes from 600-ton ingots. Each year the Tokyo-based company can turn out just four of the steel forgings that contain the radioactivity in a nuclear reactor. Even after it doubles capacity in the next two years, there won’t be enough production to meet building plans.
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