“The most important thing I found out from (my father) is that if you asked any question and pursued it deeply enough, then at the end there was a glorious discovery of a general and beautiful kind.”
On the same day the president of the United States decided to ignore that whole science thing and opt out of the Paris Agreement, a gigantic iceberg the size of Delaware is about to break off from one of the largest ice shelves in Antartica.
From bbc.com, scientists are reporting yet another burst of gravitational waves.
Back in 2013 I was staying in a hotel in New Mexico, put a coffee cup next to the tv, started pouring cream, and static electricity pulled the cream into the tv. Cool.
I enjoy Phil Plait’s writing style in this “Bad Astronomy” article, A 3 billion solar mass black hole rockets out of a galaxy at 8 million kilometers per hour. Yes, seriously. He clearly enjoys what he’s writing about.
bbc.com has a good story on How to super-size your memory using techniques like a memory palace.
(The image is from the bbc.com article.)
ExtremeTech.com has this story about newly restored nuclear test footage. From the article, “Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is in the process of restoring those films, and they’ve uploaded the first batch to YouTube.”
From this story on sciencemag.org:
“NASA’s Curiosity rover usually keeps its instruments firmly focused on Mars’s ground, zapping grit with its laser or drilling cores in bedrock. But every few days, the SUV-sized robot, like any good dreamer, shifts its sights upward to the clouds. Well into its fifth year, the rover has now shot more than 500 movies of the clouds above it, including the first ground-based view of martian clouds shaped by gravity waves ...”
(See the story for more information, and some animations which unfortunately just keep endlessly repeating.)
space.com has this article about scientists going rogue as “a response to the Trump administration's order for at least four government agencies to stop all communications with the public.”
Here’s a link to a wired.com article, Quantum Gravity Research Could Unearth the True Nature of Time.
The history of the Earth in a 24-hour clock, from flowingdata.com.
Why is it that I can eat salty potato chips with a glass of water, but I can’t drink a glass of saltwater?
Fact of the day. (Image from this Twitter page.)
Here’s a video showing how Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans to take people to Mars:
ExtremeTech has a few more details.
“The plural of anecdote is not data.”
“On Venus it snows metal.” This image comes from the Google search results, with the story contents coming from smithsonianmag.com.
From the video notes: “This is footage of Orbital ATK’s QM-2 solid rocket booster test taken by NASA’s High Dynamic Range Stereo X (HiDyRS-X) camera. HiDyRS-X records high speed, high dynamic range footage in multiple exposures simultaneously for use in analyzing rocket engine tests. Traditional high speed video cameras are limited to shooting in one exposure at a time, but HiDyRS-X can record multiple high speed video exposures at once, combining them into a high dynamic range video that adequately exposes all areas of the video image for comprehensive analysis.”
The video doesn’t change much over the three minutes, so if you watch a few seconds of it you can see how it works. As an aerospace engineer who was most interested in propulsion, watching the rocket plume is cool.
From this NY Times article, Moon Express just received approval from the FAA to try to put a lander on the Moon before the end of 2017.
The “international space treaty” portion of the story is particularly interesting to me. I didn’t know if there was such a treaty, and who governed efforts like this.
scientificamerican.com has a nice little article on SpaceX landing their fifth rocket booster last night, this time after helping to deliver some cargo to the International Space Station (ISS).
“Ironically, the bounty was made possible when the Kepler space telescope's pointing system broke.”
For more information on this story, see this phys.org link.
