April 2007 - Posts
Virgin Galactic, the company that’s working with physicist Stephen Hawking to get him into space someday, hails his better-than-expected zero-gravity flight as a significant step toward his goal. “We’ve still got a lot of work to do with Stephen, but this can only be good news,” Stephen Attenborough, Virgin Galactic’s vice president of astronaut relations, told me today.
As he discussed the next steps for Dr. Hawking's outer-space quest, Attenborough also touched upon the milestones ahead for Virgin's other would-be space fliers.
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• Welcome to the Earth Portal | More about the Digital Universe
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• Grist: From pole to shining pole
Zero Gravity Corp. |
Physicist Stephen Hawking floats free during a parabolic airplane flight Thursday,
while Zero Gravity Corp.'s Peter Diamandis looks on at right. The weightless apple
is a tribute to Isaac Newton, who was famous for his theory of gravitation.
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Is Stephen Hawking's excellent adventure over, or is it just getting started? In the wake of his unprecedented weightless flight, the focus is shifting to the theoretical physicist's goal of actually flying to outer space. There's no other interpretation you can put on his latest one-liner: "Space, here I come!"
Hawking won't be going to space all that quickly, and the trip won't be as easy as Thursday's flight turned out to be.
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World-famous physicist Stephen Hawking experienced eight rounds of weightlessness during a better-than-expected airplane flight that he saw as the first step toward a trip in space.
"It was amazing," Hawking told reporters afterward, using his well-known computerized voice. "The zero-G part was wonderful, and the high-G part was no problem. I could have gone on and on.
"Space, here I come."
Read the full story here, and stay tuned for a final update this evening.
Physicist Stephen Hawking boarded the Boeing 727 plane for his weightless experience, and just a few minutes later "G-Force One" took off from NASA's Shuttle Landing Facility in Florida.
As Hawking rolled up to the door of the jet, Zero Gravity co-founder Peter Diamandis stood by his side and flashed a thumbs-up sign for the cameras. One of Hawking's nurses held up his paralyzed hand for the same gung-ho gesture.
It took several steps to get Hawking aboard the plane, which was sitting at one end of the runway at NASA's Shuttle Landing Facility in Florida. He was lowered from a shuttle bus on one lift. Next, a nurse assistant ushered him across the runway to a waiting panel truck. Another lift raised him up into the truck. The whole back of the truck rose up on a hydraulic scissors lift to bring Hawking to the level of a door at the rear of the airplane.
Hawking and his entourage emerged from a ramp that went over the truck's cab, and that's when the thumbs-up photo op unfolded. Hawking was then carried to his seat at the back of the specially equipped plane - and then the plane rolled out and flew up, up and away.
During his final preparations for today's weightless flight, physicist Stephen Hawking explained why an intellectually brilliant, physically challeged guy like him is taking all this trouble for what could be a few brief encounters with zero-gravity - for what must have seemed to him like the (n+1)th time.
Truth to tell, some of the reporters here have been wondering that themselves. He doesn't need the publicity, and he doesn't need to prove anything here. Or does he? His statement echoed a lot of the deep-thinking pronouncements he's made in the past, including the Q&A session he had with NBC News. Nevertheless, here's his reasoning, encapsulated for the last time before his flight:
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British physicist Stephen Hawking has always been an overachiever, particularly considering his disability - and when he goes up today for what he hopes will be his first moments of not being supported in almost four decades, he won't be content with mere success.
He made that perfectly clear at a news conference today out here at the Shuttle Landing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, just a couple of hours before he boards a modified Boeing 727 jet for a historic zero-gravity flight.
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Zero Gravity Corp. |
Ted Straight, the 14-year-old stand-in for Stephen Hawking, is lifted into a
weightless float by Zero Gravity Corp.'s Peter Diamandis (left) and Byron
Lichtenberg (hands at right) during a practice flight in Florida today.
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How many 14-year-old kids can say they've taken the place of Stephen Hawking, one of the world's smartest guys? Ted Straight can say that as of today. The 105-pound, 5-foot-5 eighth-grader served as the stunt double for the 105-pound, 5-foot-5 physicist during a practice run for Hawking's first-ever weightless experience. "I think it's really cool," Straight told me.
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• New Scientist: Artificial mucus developed for artificial nose
• GamesIndustry.biz: Protein research succeeds as video game
• Dilbert Blog: Cool new planet with a (crappy) name
• The Onion: Weird kid shines during dissection project
N. Smith / UC-Berkeley / NASA / ESA / STScI |
The Hubble Space Telescope charts the chaotic environment of the Carina Nebula,
a star-forming region 7,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Carina.
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Today marks the 17th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope's "birth" in space, and in a reversal of the usual routine, it's traditional for the Hubble team to give a gift. This time, astronomers are offering a wide-angle panorama of the Carina Nebula - a blazing-hot cosmic cookery that may be much like the environment that gave rise to our own solar system.
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• Discover Magazine: Mapping the blogosphere
• OmniNerd: Busting the Mythbusters (via Slashdot)
• The New Yorker: The way we age now
• N.Y. Times (reg. req.): The tail is a tip-off to dogs' body language
Sun-generated electricity may not be America's salvation in the short term, but the public-TV documentary "Saved by the Sun," premiering Tuesday in the wake of Earth Day, shows how technology and savvy marketing tactics are brightening the outlook for solar power.
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• Power and Control: Fusion project funded (via Slashdot)
• Table of Malcontents (Wired): The science of fast-walkers
• Honolulu Advertiser: Mission to 'Mars on Earth' (via HobbySpace)
• National Geographic: Jamestown and the Powhatan
After witnessing a horrific week for humanity in Iraq, Virginia and Texas, we're in the midst of brighter days for celebrating the natural world: You all know that Sunday is Earth Day, of course – but that’s not all: Saturday is Astronomy Day, and observatories and skywatching clubs around the world are planning a constellation of events to introduce newbies to the joys of the sky. We're also in the middle of National Dark-Sky Week. And then there’s Tuesday, the 17th birthday for the Hubble Space Telescope.
My advice? Step away from the doom and gloom, go outside and see the sights.
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• The Economist: Lasers take aim at fusion power
• The Guardian: Robot could transform heart operations
• News.com: 'Freakonomics' and monkey business
• KurzweilAI.net: Reality check for World War III
Why does the universe seem so fine-tuned for the emergence of life – including intelligent life capable of asking that “why” question? Believers simply say that God did it, while scientists are trying to come up with complicated extradimensional multiverse theories to explain our lucky break.
Theoretical physicist Paul Davies takes a completely different tack in a new book titled "Cosmic Jackpot." He argues that the cosmos has made itself the way it is, stretching backward in time to the very beginning to focus in on “bio-friendliness.” Read on for an extended Q&A; that includes Davies' answer to the ultimate question.
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• Wall St. Journal: How safe is the space tourist race?
• The Real World: Inside Bigelow's mission control
• Discovery.com: Dispatches from an Everest expedition
• Seed: String theory cribsheet (via Cosmic Variance)
It's been a grim week for Michael Laine, who founded the LiftPort Group four years ago in hopes of someday building a space elevator to send payloads on a vertical railroad to space. How grim is it? "It's grim to the point that I'm over at my mom's, scoping out the garage and trying to figure out if I can move in," the 39-year-old entrepreneur told me today.
Grim to the point that Laine lost his company's building in a foreclosure last week. But not grim to the point that he's shutting down LiftPort, although that's the way it looked to space-elevator bloggers. In fact, Laine told me that his 14-employee company - which will have to set up shop in new, more expensive digs - today decided to refocus its efforts on balloon-borne platforms in hopes of turning a profit by this fall.
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• Nobel Intent: Reality might be overrated
• BBC: 'Smart dust' to explore planets
• PhysOrg: Are extra dimensions timelike?
• The Gadgeteer: The alarm clock that runs away (via GeekPress)
WGBH Science Unit |
If you're looking for the traces of the first humans, you go to Africa. But if you're looking for the mother of all gardens, you go to China. At least that's what botanists and film crews did for "First Flower," an exotic blooming documentary that premieres on public television tonight.
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• Nature: Dark matter looks to be particularly wimpy
• Scientific American: Make your own quantum eraser
• Improbable Research: Why science dominates the headlines
• The Onion: Roomba violates all three laws of Roombotics
Blue Origin, the usually secretive rocket venture backed by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos, is gearing up for yet another test of its prototype suborbital rocketship. The test launch was signaled today in a notice to airmen issued by the Federal Aviation Administration. The time frame set aside for the test is 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. ET, Thursday through Saturday.
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FIRST |
A referee makes a call during FIRST's "rack-and-roll" robot competition in Atlanta.
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Thousands of students from around the world gathered over the weekend for two grand competitions for contraptions. And although there are winners to report, the biggest payoff from the FIRST robotics championship and NASA's Great Moonbuggy Race may well come in the form of future waves of exploration and innovation.
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NASA / JPL |
There's fresh imagery this week from NASA's robotic emissaries at Mars, including video of dust devils spinning through the Spirit rover's field of view and pictures of a scary-looking route down to the floor of the crater that the Opportunity rover is investigating. This comes in addition to the latest view of the Face on Mars, provided by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
All this cool imagery might ease some of the sting felt after last year's loss of Mars Global Surveyor - which resulted from a regrettable chain of events detailed today in a report from a NASA review board.
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• Jerusalem Post: 'Jesus Tomb' scholars backtrack (via Daily Grail)
• Wired: Testing the boundaries of quantum physics
• The New Criterion: M is for messy (via GeekPress)
• New York Magazine: The science of bosses (via Slashdot)
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is just the latest name to be dropped as someone who's supposedly interested in buying a multimillion-dollar spaceflight. Microsoft itself says it "makes it a practice not to comment on rumors or speculations," but the report naturally leads us to speculate on who else who's famous has been interested in going up to the final frontier - and why they won’t be going up anytime soon.
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Today's a big day for squares, sisters and faces in space ... and we're not just talking about the parties to celebrate Yuri's Night. Researchers explained what gives the Red Square nebula its extremely symmetrical shape, as reported in this story from our partners at Space.com. Meanwhile, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has come out with a colorful infrared image of the Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters. (I do hope you're able to see Venus and the Sisters in the heavens.) And the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has delivered a fresh look at an old favorite, the Face on Mars. Click on the links below for the highlights:
• HiRISE: Orbiter's camera steals a peek at the Face on Mars
• Spitzer takes a feathery picture of the Seven Sisters ...
• ... And sheds light on a mystery of galactic proportions
• CICLOPS: Shifting strands around Saturn
When Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin blasted off to become the first man in space, his first words after launch were “Let’s go!” The phrase takes on a different meaning on Thursday, exactly 46 years later, with 119 parties marking Yuri’s Night in 32 countries around the world.
Let’s go … to party down with space fliers in New York and Seattle, with space scientists in Washington and San Antonio, or with virtual space residents in Second Life’s online realm. Even the international space station is getting into the act, with a six-course gourmet meal to mark the holiday celebrated as Cosmonauts Day in Russia.
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• New Scientist: Money game reveals our inner Robin Hood
• Things computers can do in movies (via Buzzworthy)
• Improbable.com: Infanticide in Japanese ducks
• Onion News Network: Panda demands abortion
Reuters file |
World-famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking was in the Seattle spotlight Monday night to explain the big questions: Why does time seem to move always forward but never backward? Why does he think running time backwards the only way to solve the universe's biggest mystery? But the small questions can be just as intriguing: For example, how does Hawking “autograph” a book? When he composes a sentence on his gesture-controlled computer, does he blink or does he sneer?
Here are some insights into those questions, great and small, gleaned during a close encounter with Cambridge University's frail genius:
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• Air & Space: Fields of Dreams
• Science News: Pictures posing questions
• N.Y. Times: Birds do it, bees do it, people seek the keys to it
• Scientific American: Move over, nanotubes - here comes graphene
As physicist Stephen Hawking tours America in advance of his April 26 date with weightlessness, he’s clearly hyped up about the trip, says Zero Gravity Corp. founder Peter Diamandis, who saw the great man up close and personal at the California Institute of Technology last week. "He is so excited about the flight,” Diamandis told me. “It was wonderful to see him smile."
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Billionaire Robert Bigelow is due to detail the business plan behind his orbital space venture at the National Space Symposium on Tuesday, and over the weekend Aviation Week & Space Technology published a preview. Bigelow outlined a timetable that called for three private-sector space stations to be available in orbit for tenants by 2015. But that's not the only big plan that's being previewed on the Internet. Click on the links to learn more about Bigelow Aerospace's vision as well as the SpaceShipOne patent, NASA's CosmosCode scheme and a sky show worth making your own plans for:
• Aviation Week: Bigelow reveals business plan
• SpaceRef: SpaceShipOne patented | Rand's reaction
• Wired: Young scientists design open-source program
• San Antonio Express-News: See Venus and the Seven Sisters
"Who do the people say I am?" The question posed by Jesus in Luke's gospel always gets a thorough airing this time of year. And during this Easter season, there are a few new answers to the historical questions about Christianity's founder. The most ballyhooed controversy focuses on the so-called "Jesus Family Tomb" - the freshly publicized claim that a burial place in suburban Jerusalem could have contained the bones of Jesus' kin, perhaps including his wife. (Mary Magdalene, of course - don't you know your "Da Vinci Code"?)
A good many Christians are thoroughly sick of hearing hypotheses about the historical roots of their religion. But even if you're a true believer, there's still some good that could come out of all the books, magazines and TV shows: You don't have to accept the pop-culture premise to learn a lot about the culture that shaped Christianity.
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Science @ NASA: 'Lab on a chip' really works! •
LiveScience: Mathematician says Yankees will win it •
'Nova' on PBS: 'Sinking the Supership' •
ScienceDaily: Religiousness seems to be genetic
The blogosphere crashes into the peer-reviewed academic sphere this week with an essay that tells scientists they must “frame” their findings on controversial issues such as climate change and stem cells, or risk being run over by political spin machines. It’s a view you often find on science blogs - and indeed, the co-authors of this week’s piece are two well-known science bloggers. But this essay appears in Science, America's most prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal.
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Georgia Tech: Nanogenerator produces power •
Newsday: Turning brain cells on with light •
Toronto Star: Scientists find key to memory •
Discovery.com: Titanic letter recounts the horror
Two unconventional auto races are getting an extra push of publicity this week: The Automotive X Prize has just formally unveiled its draft rules for super-efficient cars at the New York Auto Show, while one of the teams in the DARPA Urban Challenge is taking its robo-car show on the road.
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The Economist: Flying wind farms •
Technology Review: A better biofuel •
New Scientist: The Stryngbohtyk model of the universe •
Nature: Did Hitler have an Antarctic base?
NASA / ESA / STScI / AURA |
The galaxy NGC 1672 sparkles in a new image from the Hubble Space Telescope.
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Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have produced a sparkling new picture of a spiral galaxy called NGC 1672 - a distant relative of our own Milky Way, only sexier.
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Wired: Mixed feelings •
Archaeology: How to build a pyramid •
N.Y. Times (reg. req.): Time in the animal mind •
The Guardian: How we learned to stop having fun
There are plenty of ways to become a virtual traveler in outer space. Second Life may be the simulation flavor of the week, and NASA may be carving out its own space there, but there’s a long history of virtual worlds that give you the feel of the final frontier.
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Purdue: 'Invisibility cloak' would look more like a hairbrush •
Science News: Biological fuel cell turns drinks into power •
Slashdot: Serious failure at CERN's new accelerator •
'Nova' on PBS: 'Kings of Camouflage'
