U.S. Space and Rocket Center

On the trip from Nashville to Chattanooga, we went by way of Huntsville AL to see the US Space and Rocket Center, with a pause at the Tennessee/Alabama border to pick up some fireworks. We spent about three hours, which wasn't enough time to see everything, but we did get a look at the Wernher von Braun exhibit, the Moon Program hall with the Saturn V in it, the A12 (precursor to the SR71), and the park with a timeline of interceptor missiles. I was tempted to go on the centrifuge--the G Force Accelerator, which subjects the rider to 3g--but, perhaps fortunately, it started raining and there was no one at the machine.
In retropect, we should have allocated a full day to this.

Brown Dwarf planet

Astronomers have announced the discovery, through gravity lensing, of a planet in orbit around a brown dwarf about 6000 light years away. The planet is about twice the mass of Jupiter; the dwarf is about twenty Jovian mass.

Permanent Lightning Storm

There is a more or less permanent lightning storm over Maracaibo, and it's been going on since at least 1597. The lake is boxed in on three sides by mountains, so the air moving across the lake rises and produces thunderheads. The lightning that results is called Catatumbo Lightning, based on the Cataumbo River that flows into Maracaibo; it's also called the Lighthouse of Maracaibo, since it can be seen for miles around the lake.

Methane-based ecosystem

From Popular Science:


Scientists on a research mission sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have found what could be the U.S. Atlantic Coast's largest methane cold seep near Virginia.

Cold seeps are regions in the sea floor where fluid rich in compounds like methane flows out at the same temperature as the surrounding ocean water (in contrast to the hot water that seeps from hydrothermal vents).

Methane seeps allow life to flourish in otherwise fairly barren deep sea environments. This is the third seep documented on the Atlantic Coast, and is much bigger than previously discovered sites, with areas up to a kilometer long and hundreds of meters wide. Mussels can survive in seeps through chemosynthesis, a process that utilizes bacteria in their gills to turn methane into energy. The seep's surrounding ecosystem also contained sea cucumbers, shrimp and fish, some of which exhibited what the researchers call "unusual behaviors," though they did not elaborate.

Studying these undersea ecosystems can help us understand how life exists in harsh environments, including potentially other planets, researcher Steve Ross explained in a press statement. It could also enhance our understanding of gas hydrates, a potentially huge alternative energy source.

Conjunction

Not the sort that puts together phrases and clauses; this conjunction was planetary. Jupiter, Venus and Mercury were visible together in the west, just after sundown.

Cosmic impact event

According to an article on Physics.org:

About 12,800 years ago when the Earth was warming and emerging from the last ice age, a dramatic and anomalous event occurred that abruptly reversed climatic conditions back to near-glacial state. According to James Kennett, UC Santa Barbara emeritus professor in earth sciences, this climate switch fundamentally –– and remarkably –– occurred in only one year, heralding the onset of the Younger Dryas cool episode. The cause of this cooling has been much debated, especially because it closely coincided with the abrupt extinction of the majority of the large animals then inhabiting the Americas, as well as the disappearance of the prehistoric Clovis culture, known for its big game hunting.

By examining microspherules in the geological strata of North and South America, Europe, and the Middle East, a research team has concluded that a catastrophic cosmic impact event caused continent-wide wildfires,and threw enough dust into the atmosphere to block significant amounts of sunlight, leading to the destruction of the American megafauna.

The impact that scooped out the Caribbean and killed the dinosaurs was 65 million years ago, but this impact was comparatively recent. One wonders what the odds are of it happening again.

Memory

I saw an article on Instapundit to the effect that neuroscientists have something of a handle on the chemistry of memory, leading to the possibility of selective memory erasers. Just some random thoughts arising from that--treat these as story seeds for the next science fiction novel:

• does it become possible to treat PTSD? Do you only treat those people who are completely shell shocked and nonfunctional? If not, where do you draw the line? For crimes like rape, assault, and burglary, where there's a sense of violation, are the victims treated with memory erasers? How about consensual statutory rape--if the victim gets memory erasers, does it still deserve to be a major crime?
• If war and violent crime are bad, shouldn't we leave the memories so people have the emotions that, yes, these things are bad? If we can make them less bad by alleviating the memories, does that mean that people will make less effort to avoid those events and they'll happen more often?
• How about making other people take it? If you have an evil neighbor, the sort of person who is spiteful and petty, and she takes offense at something and starts a feud...are there circumstances in which you can legally compel her to forget the incident that started it?
• if you're in front of your peers and do something stupid, you can take an eraser, but you can't make everyone else take it. You could find that you don't remember the impromptu stripper act you did when you were drunk at the company New Years party, but everyone else does. Is that better than if you did remember it? Do you tend to seek out strangers, because that way if you do something embarrassing, you can forget it and they won't be around to remind you?
• To what extend could memory be modifiable? Can you erase your entire memory of a person--your ex-husband, for example? Your mother? How about if you then want the memory back?
  

Lake Vostok

According to Discover, "After two decades of drilling through miles of Antarctic ice, Russian scientists are about to breach an underground lake that has not been exposed to the surface in more than 20 million years. "

Of course, as Charles Stross tells us in A Colder War, some things might be in the lake that we really don't want to know about.

From "Armed and Dangerous"

Armed and Dangerous: "Two bits of science news appeared on my radar today with not much in common except that they’re both exceedingly bad news for the political class. That more or less guarantees that they’ll get poor or nonexistent coverage in the mainstream media and is a good enough reason for me to write about them."

Self guided bullet

According to Wired, Sandia has developed what the article is calling a "self-guided bullet", i.e. a four inch long, finned bullet that can home in on a laser spot.

Sunspot Minimum?

Some talk from The Daily Mail about whether Cycle 25 will be lead to a mini ice age.

Dogs and screens

We've had several conversations with Josh by Skype, and in some of them Josh has said "Hi Zoe!" However, The Mutt doesn't respond. She can certainly hear; drop a bit of bacon on the kitchen floor and she will rush downstairs. And it's not like she doesn't know who Josh is; if he were here, Zoe would be bouncing around and romping with him. So does she just not recognize voices? Do dogs need a smell-o-vision? Does Skype not carry the full frequency audio range, so it doesn't sound real to her? I think I detect the opportunity for a multimillion dollar research grant...

Antimatter belt

A research team reports that they have detected antiprotons contained in the Van Allen magnetic fields.

Mini Ice Age ?

The next sunspot cycle has been unable to obtain a government waiver and may be cancelled. This in turns means we may really be in for climate change...but of the Mini Ice Age sort rather than the Global Warming sort, which is obviously a Bad Thing.

Sun blows up

Watch the video, think about how big the Sun is (about 860,000 miles across, more than 100 times the size of Earth), and think about how big that explosion is.

Antimatter containment

Last year, CERN announced that they'd captured 38 antimatter atoms for 172 milliseconds. They've just announced that they have now captured and kept antimatter for 1000 seconds.

Inattentive Superheroes

From Oscillatory Thoughts (Thoughts of a Neuroscientist), a post about human sensory capabilities. The superhero he's referring to is Daredevil.

Photopic Sky Survey

Select the one that says "Zoom In" and...zoom in.

Planet-gazing

For the month of May, the planets Jupiter, Venus, Mercury and Mars will be visible before dawn, low on the eastern horizon, as described in Sky and Telescope. Hat tip to Indy Kochte for the pointer.

Stones and Scriptures Notes

Now that you've seen the pretty pictures, here are some notes from the seminar.

Dr Carroll, speaking of the ancient scriptures, said "I may have touched and seen more of these things than anyone else in the world." He led two seasons of the excavation of a monastic complex at Wadi el Natrun, Egypt, which was at that time the oldest known intact church, dating from the third century.

One thing he used to do to train his archaeology students was to get three 5000 piece jigsaw puzzles, put into it a couple of handfuls of pieces from each puzzle into one bag, then take the bag into class and say "Put this together. Keep working at it every day. Document what you think it is." He seemed to look forward to the day when a student would realize they had five or more corners...

He noted that some people will say the Bible must be full of mistakes for the same reason the Telephone Game is interesting. The books were copied and the copies were copied and now we have no idea what the originals look like. But this doesn't take into account that the scribes weren't listening to someone whisper; they could see what they were copying and they took great care to make it accurate. This is provable--we can compare scrolls from 250BC with the Leningrad Codex, written around AD1000, and there are very few changes across 1250 years.

He also said there are things to remember about archaeologists:
1. They like to find things, but they don't like to publish. Of potential archaeological sites in Iraq, less than 1% have been examined and published. The percentage is even lower in Israel and Egypt. The collection Dr Carroll is working with has 11,000 cuneiform tablets; he said it would take about 150 years to publish them all.
2. They need funding, and that affects what they announce and when. You'll hear about things which could be a spectacular find, but it won't make news when it turns out to be a mistake or a forgery. "The bone box of James the brother of Jesus? Forgery. Shroud of Turin? I'd love for it to be the real thing but I think it's probably from a crusader in the late Middle Ages. The idea that the ark of the covenant is hidden in Ethiopia is preposterous. As for Noah's ark, I wouldn't waste a second or a dollar trying to find it; it's not "on top of Ararat", it's "somewhere in the Ararat range" and the wood wouldn't have survived this long anyway. The chariot wheel on the floor of the Red Sea? When a diver went to look, it had miraculously transformed into the steering wheel of a 1971 Jeep.
3. Archaeologists have political and religious biases, and that affects how they interpret data.