Just A Theory

Pac-Man in the moon

Mimas is fast shaping up to be the nerdiest object in the solar system. The tiny moon of Saturn has already been compared to the Death Star from Star Wars, but the Cassini probe has revealed another geek-culture icon – Pac-Man.

Nom nom nom

The appearance of the classic video game character during a thermal scan of Mimas has baffled scientists. It could be due to differences in texture on the moon’s icey surface. Old, densely packed ice conducts heat away from the surface, while recently fallen snow acts as an insulator, trapping heat to create the distinctive Pac-Man shape.

Just A Review: Just A Theory

Physics World has published a rather nice review of Just A Theory. You’ll have to register on their site to see it in full, but here’s an excerpt:

Just A Theory offers a moderately UK-centric perspective on science news for interested members of the public and busy professional researchers alike. You will not find too many detailed, hard-science articles here, but sometimes that is not the point. As a student or professional physicist, it is easy to develop tunnel vision as you dig ever deeper into a relatively narrow research topic, but keeping the “bigger picture” in sight can be a time-consuming process in an ever-more-crowded media world.

Yesterday details emerged that China has selected its next generation of astronauts; a crew of five men and two women. However, to be one of those two women, recruiters demanded a rather unusual qualification, motherhood.

The Chinese space programme is known to be stringent in its selection of potential astronauts; even bad breath can shatter your chances. However, this requirement for maternity doesn’t stem from an inferred ability of mothers to better cope with the gruelling conditions of space. Instead China fear for what damage space-based radiation might inflict on a would-be female astronaut’s ability to have children in the first place.

Xu Xianrong, an expert at the air force general hospital, is quoted on the Guardian website as saying of the unique approach,

“It’s out of the consideration of being responsible for the female pilots. Though there is little evidence on how the space experience will affect the female constitution, we have to be extra cautious. After all, it’s unprecedented in China.”

Such things may be unprecedented in China, but the radiation dangers experienced when leaving the protective cocoon of the Earth have long been considered.

There are two main types of radiation that can cause damage to space travelers, high energy particles from the Sun, and cosmic rays arriving from the galaxy beyond. For those of us on the Earth’s surface our planet’s atmosphere and magnetic field duly shield us from these potential dangers. However, those in space can be hit with their full force, particularly when venturing to places like the Moon, which has neither a magnetic field nor an atmosphere.

In fact, the Apollo astronauts of the late 60’s and early 70’s knew full well the risks that an event like a solar storm could unleash and they travelled to the Moon anyway, albeit keeping mission length to a premium to narrow the risks. Such a storm would rain high energy particles upon the unprotected astronauts, penetrating their skin and ripping apart the DNA in their cells. Cosmic rays, coming from outside the solar system, represent a longer term threat; it is thought they could cause illnesses ranging from cancer to cataracts.

Clearly these doses of radiation harm both men and women alike, what is unclear are the effect such doses would have on female fertility. What is looking increasingly clear, particularly with President Obama’s recent cancellation of NASA’s Constellation programme, is that the next feet to scuff the lunar dust will be Chinese. If such feet happen to be female, then their obligatory offspring would be rightly proud.

The devastating earthquake which struck Chile on February 27th may well have had an effect on the rotation of the Earth itself according to a NASA scientist. Richard Gross of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has used computer models to calculate that our day is now about 1.26 microseconds shorter than it was on February 26th.

A small amount and yet it serves as a reminder that whilst we have exactly twenty four hours in our standard day, this never quite matches the actual rotation period of the Earth. Back in 1999 Gross published a paper in Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors in which he modeled the spin of the Earth from 1832 to 1997. The shortest day on record was apparently August 2nd 2004 whereas the longest day was sometime during 1912, the year the Titanic sank.

“The annual changes in the length of the day are caused mostly by the atmosphere – changes in the strength and direction of the winds, especially the jet stream. The Sun warms the equator more than the poles. That temperature difference is largely responsible for the jet stream. Seasonal changes in that temperature difference cause changes in the winds and, hence, the length of the day,” says Gross.

More significant events, like those in Chile, can enhance this process. The quake, which measured 8.8 on the magnitude scale, is also likely to have knocked the Earth’s axis slightly out of its previous alignment by about 2.7 milliarcseconds (roughly 3 one thousandths of one 3600th of a degree) or the equivalent of about seven centimetres.

Whilst this might not sound significant, knowing the precise alignment of the Earth is crucial for many modern day technologies such as GPS. And in an age where solar system exploration is on the increase, knowing the precise location of the Earth’s orientation with respect to these craft is a fundamental part of planning successful interplanetary maneuvers.

The Royal Observatory, Greenwich (ROG), in partnership with the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and Zooniverse are launching Solar Stormwatch, a new web project where anyone can help spot and track solar storms and be involved in the latest solar research.

The Sun is much more dynamic than it appears in our sky. Intense magnetic fields churn and pummel the Sun’s atmosphere and they store enormous amounts of energy that, when released, hurl billions of tons of material out into space in explosions called Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) – or solar storms.

Solar Stormwatch volunteers can spot these storms and track their progress across space towards the Earth. Such storms can be harmful to astronauts in orbit and have the potential to knock out communication satellites, disrupt mobile phone networks and damage power lines. With the public’s help, Solar Stormwatch will allow solar scientists to better understand these potentially dangerous storms and help to forecast their arrival time at Earth.

Julia Wilkinson, a Solar Stormwatch user says,

“The fact that any Solar Stormwatch volunteer could make a brand new discovery about our neighbouring star is very cool indeed. All you need is a computer and an interest in finding out more about what the sun is really like.”

Dr. Chris Davis, one of the STFC scientists behind Solar Stormwatch says of the project,

“The more people who can take part in Solar Stormwatch, the more we will know about solar storms. Collective measurements by many people are worth much more than the subjective opinion of one person.”

The project uses real data from NASA’s STEREO spacecraft, a pair of satellites in orbit around the Sun which give scientists a constant eye on the ever-changing solar surface. The UK has a major input in STEREO, providing the two widest-field instruments, the Heliospheric Imagers, which provide Solar Stormwatch with its data. Each imager has two cameras helping STEREO stare across the 150 million kilometres from the Earth to the Sun.

Solar Stormwatch is the latest chapter in a long history of solar research at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, dating back to the 1870’s, when the Observatory housed a photoheliograph, a telescope that took daily photos of the Sun to track sunspots. Visitors will be able to see this telescope again when the Altazimuth Pavilion at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, reopens in March 2010.

Chimp cinema

Earlier this week the BBC broadcast the first ever film shot entirely by chimpanzees:

The acting isn’t that great, and the special effects are terrible, but it’s still more interesting than some of the rubbish churned out by Hollywood! The film was part of a scientific study investigating how chimps perceive the world around them.

Mars movies

Although it seems we’re probably not going to step foot Mars any time soon, you can go there virtually today. Doug Ellison, founder of UnmannedSpaceflight.com, has used data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to recreate a faithfully recreated flyby of the Martian surface:

See more on his YouTube page.

Magnets…in space!

Have you ever wondered how magnets work in zero gravity? “Very well,” is the answer, according to video game developer/astronaut Richard Garriot:

Rumours are circulating that President Obama plans to scrap NASA’s new generation of rockets. It’s been leaked that his budget next Monday won’t include cash for the Constellation program, a series of spacecraft designed to replace the ageing Shuttle, and return us to the moon by 2020.

If that’s true, I’m incredibly disappointed. I understand that in a time of global economic turbulence, space exploration may not be Obama’s top priority, but his new vision for NASA seems incredibly short-sighted.

Instead of “boldy going”, astronauts will spend another ten years floating around the International Space Station. NASA will concentrate on Earth-based projects – mostly climate change related – and private companies will take over the Space Shuttle’s job of ferrying cargo in to orbit. The moon and Mars will just have to wait, it seems.

This worries me, but not because of some romantic idea of humans exploring the final frontier – my concerns are far more practical. I believe getting off Earth and colonising other planets is essential for the continuation of the human race. At the moment we’ve got all eggs in the proverbial basket – if an asteroid were to strike Earth, it could potentially wipe us out completely. Colonisation simply spreads the risk.

Building a base on the moon and then eventually Mars would not only be an incredible feat of human ingenuity, but also a kind of species-wide insurance policy. It’s a project that would take decades, and unfortunately politicians only think in four-year terms. I understand that Obama is under attack because of his healthcare plans, and the budget has to be balanced somehow, but cutting Constellation isn’t the answer.

Oh dear, one week in and I’m already off schedule. Two words: food poisoning. Leftover Chinese food can be deadly! On with this week’s roundup:

Next stop, outer space

Even London natives can struggle with the complicated spiderweb that is the Tube map, but surprisingly enough it is actually intended to simplify getting about the capital. Inspired by its iconic design, Harvard scientist Samuel Arbesman developed a similar map for getting about the Milky Way:

But where is Morington Crescent?

The coloured lines correspond to an arm of the spiral galaxy, and each stop is a star or other astronomical object.

Mental time travel

You won’t be journeying to the age of the dinosaurs just yet, but psychologists at the University of Aberdeen have discovered a strange form of time travel. Apparently thinking about the past or future causes people to move backwards or forwards. The researchers suggest behaviour could be the origin of temporal metaphors such as future = forward and past = backward.

Bond. Strange Bond.

The Royal Society of Chemistry continued it’s tradition of strange PR stunts this week by announcing a search for a Sean Connery lookalike.

As if devising a new ending for the Italian Job or cooking the perfect Yorkshire pudding weren’t enough, they want to use the lookalike in a bizarre photoshoot designed to highlight the importance of British research keeping the nation healthy. No, I don’t get it either.

NASA have released a photo of sunlight glinting off a lake on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. The image, snapped by the Cassini space probe, confirmed liquid in the Northern hemisphere to add to the discovery of liquid lakes in the Southern Hemisphere in 2008.

Sunlight reflecting off a lake on Titan

This part of Titan has been shrouded in darkness for the last 15 years as the moon’s North pole was angled away from the Sun, but as Saturn approached it’s equinox the lake in question slowly titled into the Sun’s glare.

A clever piece of detective work has pinned down the lake responsible as Kraken Mare, an enormous body of water stretching 400,000 square kilometres across Titan.

Titan is one of the most exciting places in our Solar System, particularly when it comes to finding life, and this discovery further adds to the wealth of information scientists are collecting about the planet-sized satellite.

A busy week has meant a pretty poor showing on Just A Theory, but hopefully a packed roundup will make up for it:

LHC a-go-go

The Large Hadron Collider is finally up and running again! As our CERN correspondent Emma mentioned last month, scientist in Geneva have been working on restarting the LHC after it had to be shut down last year. Their hard work paid off on Friday, and proton beams are now successfully colliding in the 27km-long ring of the world’s largest experiment. Now for the science!

What if the Earth had rings?

Speaking of rings, check out this short video showing how it would look if Earth had its own set, like Saturn.

At the equator they appear to be a thin line through the sky, but further north or south they make an amazing sight, lighting up the sky even at night. Anyway we can build these things and cover them in solar panels or something?

Field less players to win the World Cup

It seems that having a large squad to choose from can actually be a hindrance when it comes to top football. You might think fielding substitutions lets mangers pick the best players for every situation, but research shows that sticking with the top 11 is the key to success.

Bacteria that can detect landmines

Scientist at the University of Edinburgh have developed a strain of bacteria that glow green near explosives. By mixing them with a colourless solution, they can be sprayed from the air on to suspected landmine fields, turning the ground green if mines are detected.

Today I was getting ready to leave my flat for my afternoon shift when, hurrying to finish my lunch, I managed to catch the very end of Prime Minister’s Question Time (PMQs) on the TV.

The twelfth and final question was asked by the Conservative member for Wells, David Heathcoat-Amory, and this is what he had to say:

As someone who is passionate about astronomy my ears immediately pricked up and I was momentarily diverted from my Marmite sandwiches. Did I really just hear a question on astronomy asked in the House of Commons? Really? Well this was our learned Prime Minster’s response:

What a bullshit answer. Now I’m the first to admit that this question wasn’t the most pressing matter of the day. There had already been questions on the Afghan election, the Lockerbie disaster and climate change, far more important than whether you can adequately star spot.

However, Gordy barely even answered the question instead using it to score cheap points against the Opposition. The token answer of “all of us have a responsibility blah blah blah blah” was about as satisfying as my Marmite sandwiches. He might as well have said piss off lets all go for some lunch.

And this is the great problem; there are too few advocates of science in Government. Regular Just a Theory readers will recall my ongoing debate with Labour peer and Science Minister Lord Drayson (which I am happy to say is going to happen with the next month or so). Despite my well documented grievances, Lord Drayson is really on science’s side and we should continue to hope for more of his ilk.

So, having seemingly ranted for eight paragraphs thus far I feel I should tell you the premise behind Campaign for Dark Skies. The essence is that there is so much wasteful light thrown up into the night sky that the skylines of most major UK cities are horribly hued a kind of murky orange. This limits the glory of the night sky to around 50-100 stars rather than the normal 1500 that should visible from these shores.

Jacob blogged earlier in the week about the Trillionth Tonne, a website counting the cost of our inability to tackle climate change. In his post he called the ever increasing figure “sobering to watch”. Equally the Campaign for Dark Skies have a counter clocking up the amount of money wasted due to street lamps showering some of their light up into the sky rather than down where we need it.

In fact, the counter ticks along at £4 a second, which means since the 1st January 2009 the UK has wasted over £100 million on electric lights that serve no purpose whatsoever. And that is just street lights. The full estimate, including business and industrial based lighting, is likely to be over £1 BILLION. I’m not even going to argue the astronomical perspective on this one. Yes you would be able to see more stars but £100 million pounds, or more likely £1 BILLION, is just a pointless waste our OUR money.

This comes on a day when after PMQ’s, Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth stood before Parliament and detailed a report suggesting MOD cost cutting led to the deaths of 14 service personnel in a Nimrod crash in 2006. Ainsworth said that,

“in our pursuit of financial savings the MoD and the RAF allowed their focus on safety to suffer. We accept this with regard to the Nimrod XV230”

Don’t get me wrong I am not blaming the deaths of those 14 servicemen on wasteful street lighting. However what really gets my goat is that when a valid science question that could save our economy upwards of £1 billion is actually asked in Parliament, and on a day when the Government is held to account for its penny pinching, that our dearest PM shits all over it.

Scientists in America have located what they believe to be the world’s largest crater and what’s more they are holding it responsible for the demise of the dinosaurs.

Researchers have traditionally pointed their finger at the Chicxulub crater in Yucatan, Mexico as the culprit for the extinction of T-Rex and his chums 65 million years ago, but Sankar Chatterjee and his team are turning their attention to India’s Shiva Crater.

This underwater basin measures almost 500km across, easily overshadowing Chicxulub’s measly 180km, and was most likely carved out when approximately 25km of space rock came hurtling to Earth. Dr Chatterjee and his colleagues hope to study the crater further to establish once and for all whether it was indeed caused by an impact 65 million years ago.

The underwater Shiva Crater, off the coast of India, may have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The tell-tale sign of a space-based impactor is abnormally high levels of Iridium, an element abundant in asteroids but a rarity in the Earth’s crust. Iridium levels at impact sites tend to be a hundred times greater than usual.

Whilst impacts of this size are certainly not every day, or even every millennium events, there have been five extinction level events, where over 50% of the animal population have been pole axed, in the last 540 million years. Many are attributed to asteroid and/or comet impacts, although there are other possibilities.

Subsequently the study of the position and trajectories of the asteroid and comet families has become big scientific business including NASA’s dedicated Near Earth Object program. Programs such as these led to a potential impactor being discovered in 2004 that experts rated as a 1-in-60 chance of colliding with the Earth.

Happily, they have since revised their estimations upwards. However, asteroid 99942 Apophis (2004 MN4) will still pass the Earth over 13 times nearer than the Moon, rather eerily on Friday 13th April 2029, culminating in the closest approach of such a sizeable object for a thousand years.

It is not a question of if but when a Shiva Crater causing asteroid has our name on it. Yet if Dr Chatterjee and his team are correct it will be another piece in the puzzle explaining what led to the disappearance of the dinosaurs and the advent of the mammals that would evolve to worry about a similar fate.

Apologies for my lack of posting this week, I’m once again hepped up on Lemsip as I battle against a cold. My fellow bloggers have done a great job at picking up the slack, but I still have a collection of interesting links from the past week. Here we go:

• 50 years of space exploration in graphic form. Click for bigger.
• Neuroskeptic takes a critical look at the placebo effect
• Scientist make mice play Quake to study the neurological activity of moving animals.
• Fermat’s Last Theorem, the comic.
• A “spider pill” that could crawl around inside you? I’d run screaming, even if it could cure my cold!

Cuddly quarks

Maybe I’m just a big nerdy kid, but it seems I just can’t resist plush versions of scientific concepts. Earlier this year we had internal organs, and now this week I came across The Particle Zoo. It’s all your friends from the standard model of physics, and more! My favourite has to be the incredibly devious looking tachyon:

Time for a new table?

The periodic table has been in use for nearly 150 years, ever since its invention by Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869. Is it time for chemists to rearrange the furniture and bring in something a little more…round? Mohd Abubakr of Microsoft India seems to think so, and presents his own version:

The circular periodic table

One advantage is that the 7 rings represent the 7 electron shells of an atom. Another is that the elements get larger as you move out from the center. As the Physics arXiv blog points out though, it’s hard to read a circular table without rotating it – which unlike the regular table, doesn’t make for a great wall poster!

Obama, the astronomical President

Colin provided me with this final roundup item, so I’ll hand over to him:

What a week it has been for President Barack Obama. On Friday morning he was woken up at 6am by his aides who broke the news that he had (rather controversially) won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

With such news his diary commitments on Wednesday evening have largely been overlooked. Yet on that evening he and 150 local school children took to the South Lawn for Astronomy Night at The Whitehouse with guests including the second man on the Moon, Buzz Aldrin.

But what really captured the imagination was his opening speech. It was a rallying cry for a change in education, an eloquent rendition of just why science matters and a piece of science communication par excellence. Take a look for yourself:

Scientists and curious onlookers are gearing up for what many are calling the day NASA ‘bombs’ the Moon in search of water. Tomorrow, at approximately 12:30pm UK time, the Lunar Crater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) will send 2,305kg of American engineering headlong into the south pole of our nearest neighbour in space.

The impact will see a new crater added to the already much pockmarked lunar surface with this man-made moon scar stretching twenty metres across. The momentum of the impact will hurl a 350 tonne plume of material into lunar orbit which the waiting Shepherding Spacecraft will fly through, searching for traces of water before impacting the Moon itself four minutes later.

The target is Cabeus, a crater found some 100km from the Moon’s South Pole, a location that precludes much penetration from sunlight, rendering the maximum temperature 100K.

Such low temperatures and data from a previous mission have led scientists to predict the existence of water ice hidden in Cabeus’ murky shadows. Slamming into the lunar surface is the best way to unveil the Moon’s hidden secrets.

As Jacob reported earlier in the year, evidence for lunar water has already been provided by the Indian Chandrayaan-1 probe and further evidence of water on the Moon would add to our understanding of our Solar System.

However, despite its scientific merits there has been a backlash against the mission with accusations of extra-terrestrial terrorism. Apparently LCROSS is NASA committing “an eco-sin on a galactic scale.” Nevermind that the Moon is 385,000 km away and the galaxy is 100,000 light years across.

With these words the blogger of ecosalon.com warns that, “the Moon is a celestial body revered by Earthlings of all cultures, inspiring poets, shamans and lovers across the globe.”

These feelings seem to be echoed by the imaginatively titled dontbombthemoon.com who quoth that, “it is dangerous to bomb the moon when we are unclear of the outcome. We feel that bombing the Moon could bring us consequences that are both psychic and physical. Disruption of cycles.”

Nowpublic.com take the celestial biscuit though when they philosophise that, “the problem is this, by bombing the moon in many exopolitic experts opinion is this action will cause an all out war in space with extraterrestrials. These same extraterrestrials even have bases and crafts placed on the Moon.”

This last totally absurd notion aside, there seems to be this wide held belief that the Moon is sacred and that by making a miniscule pinprick in it that somehow we are going to cause apocalypse. Never mind that asteroids hit the Moon all the time. Never mind that with your very own eyes you can see evidence of hundreds of much larger impacts which have left our “cycles” untouched. This isn’t the first time lunar lunacy has made it onto one of my blog entries.

There are just so many things wrong here. However, part of the blame for such nonsense has to lie at the media’s door. In their perpetual attempt for an attention grabbing headline they have fashioned this notion of ‘bombing’ the Moon, a label which quite misrepresents what is actually going on.

Depending on which camp you sit in, you can either watch an innovative scientific experiment or the destruction of life as we know it from 11:30am tomorrow at http://www.slooh.com/LCROSS.

Autotune the cosmos

Autotune is a piece of software designed to tidy up slightly out of tune singers, but people have discovered it can also be used to turn almost anything in to a song. Results vary, but this Autotuned version of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos is actually really good:

Ig Nobel 2009

This year’s Ig Nobel awards, which celebrate “improbable research” in science, were announced earlier this week. Amongst the winners were a team who investigated whether it is better to be hit over the head by a full botle of beer or an empty one, and the creators of a bra which can convert in to two protective face masks.

The best seat in the house

Above is Bruce McCandless II, around 100 meters away from the space shuttle Challenger. He’s the furthest out in space that anyone has ever been, and he’s got quite a view.

Scientists find water EVERYWHERE

Well, not quite, but close. In a strange coincidence, the discovery of water on the surface of both the Moon and Mars was announced this week. Future astronauts could use the water to establish a lunar or Martian bases.

The findings were made by the Indian Chandrayaan-1 probe, a fantastic result for the nation’s first lunar mission. The probe detected that light reflected from the Moon’s surface was missing wavelengths known to be absorbed by water. This was later backed up by the NASA Deep Impact and Cassini probes.

NASA also made the discovery on Mars, where the agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped pictures of melting water-ice that had been thrown up from under the surface by a recent meteorite impact.

Science rap returns

It’s nearly exactly a year since rapper Jonathan Chasa entertained us with his astrobiology rap, but now he’s back again as
Oort Kuiper to tell us about genes:

Recently I’ve been getting quite excited about the prospect of augmented reality. If you’ve not heard the buzzword, its about about overlaying digital information on to the real world. With the rise of powerful handheld devices like the iPhone, augmented reality is becoming more common – check out this Tube-location app that helps you navigate around London.

Mobile phones are a start, but what I’m really interested in is a wearable computer. Rather than living in your pocket, such a device would be built in to a pair of glasses or even contact lenses. Its not a new idea – people like Steve Mann have been using wearable computers for decades – but now there seems to be a greater appetite for a proper commercial product.

The WEAR in action

That goal could be getting closer, thanks to some experimental kit being used on the International Space Station. Astronauts are trialling the Wearable Augmented Reality (WEAR), developed by Belgium-based Space Applications as a replacement for their current system – pen and paper. This surprisingly low-tech solution allows the ISS crew to consult operational manuals with ease, but requires them to physically hold on to their instructions. WEAR offers voice-activated hands-free controls, highlighting important objects in the real world and displaying information directly in the user’s field-of-vision.

The WEAR is built from off-the-shelf components, but is currently limited by scheduling and budget constraints, rather than technology. All equipment used on-board the ISS is subject to strict checks, and the team behind the WEAR found it easier to use what was already up there. Rather than using an ultra-modern PC, the WEAR interfaces with tried-and-tested laptops that are over five-years-old. As a result, the WEAR can only operate for an hour at a time before the batteries need recharging.

While the hardware up in space may be limited, there are no such restrictions here on Earth. Space Applications is considering applying the technology to fire-fighting, presumably as a way of navigating smoke-filled buildings. I’m excited to see new uses of augmented reality coming up, and I’m looking forward to eventually trying it myself!

Amazing astronomy

Check out this set of astronomy images from flickr user victorvonsalza. This one below is my favourite – be sure to click through for the larger version!

The images were taken in Portland, Oregon, and show a variety of dramatic starscapes.

See-through frog

This little guy comes from an amphibian family known as glass frogs, for reasons that should be fairly obvious. It’s both fascinating and slightly horrifying that you can see their innards from the outside…

Wet Mars, Dry Mars

Giant cracks across the surface of Mars hint that the dusty planet had a much wetter past. Although the cracks have been observed before, it’s only now that their true origin has been revealed.

Ramy El Maarry, a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, created a computer model of the cracking process, which forms irregular shapes in the ground up to 250 metres in diameter. The marks have previously been attributed to the heating and cooling of the planet’s surface, but El Maarry’s model showed that this would only produces shapes as large as 65 metres.

He realised that the shapes resembled the “desiccation cracks” found on Earth when water evaporates to leave dry and dusty mud. Comparing the two side by side makes it a pretty convincing hypothesis:

Cracks on Earth (left) compared with Mars (right).

You’ve probably noticed that things have slowed down a little bit here on Just A Theory. We’re all hard at work pumping out 10,000 words of juicy dissertation goodness, and unfortunately that doesn’t leave much time for blogging. Science doesn’t stop though, and I’ve still been collecting interesting science news and links from all over the web. Enjoy:

Weird NASA mission badges

NASA create patches for each of their missions, and sometimes they like to get a little wacky. Wired Science has a rundown of some the weirdest, including this little gem:

Heroes in a half-shell probably wouldn't last long in space

The “ideal” David Bowie song

Health psychologist Nick Troop has created what he calls the “ideal” David Bowie song by performing a lingustic analysis. Bowie’s back catalogue was scanned to calculate the use of positive and negative words, as well as references to different categories such as sex, religion and food. Troop then used the data to write “Team, Meet Girls; Girls, Meet Team”, which he performs here:

I admit it sounds a bit like Bowie, but I when I read the headline I was hoping for some sort of average of all of his songs – “The Man Who Sold Changes to Rebel Rebel Heroes Ziggy Stardust in Suffragette City on Mars”, perhaps. Anyway, everyone knows that this is the ideal Bowie song.

Molecular paparazzi

Researchers at IBM have created this amazing image of pentacene, a molecule made of carbon and hydrogen:

The structure is clearly visible

Using an atomic force microscope, they mapped the chemical bonds between the molecules atoms. The instrument works by detecting changes in vibrations as a scanning tip passes close to the molecule. This previous attempts to image molecules found that the tip was just too blunt to get a decent picture, but they realised that a single carbon monoxide atom, which doesn’t interact with the pentacene, made the perfect tip.

I,Science is now online

Many contributors to Just A Theory also worked on this year’s editions of I,Science, the Imperial College science magazine. Until now, the only way to get a copy of this esteemed publication was to pick it up around campus, but the I,Science website has now been updated for all to read.

For some reason only the first two editions of this year are up on the site. Perhaps the summer term issue, which featured a scratch-n-sniff cover, could not be so easily digitised.

How to read a scientific paper

Reading scientific papers can be intimidating if you’ve never tried, but much of the literature is fairly accessible if you’re prepared to give it a go. Examiner.com offers some advice on where to start.

Tips include not reading from beginning to end – the dull methods section will bog you down. Instead, skim the abstract then jump to the discussion section, before moving on to the conclusion. Worth a read.

Is it me, or is it getting dark?

Wednesday this week saw the longest solar eclipse of the 21st century. If you missed it, which you probably did because it didn’t effect the UK or US, check out this image capture by a Japanese satellite:

Sometimes a picture is all you need:

The Soap Bubble Nebula

But for the full details, see the Guardian.

As you have been hearing from the Just a Theory team, this week has been a special one for everyone and particularly those of us involved with astronomy and space science.

With Jacob pipping me to writing stories both about the moon landings and Lord Drayson’s announcement that the UK will once again fund UK astronauts, you can hear my take on it, as well as a shameless plug for Just a Theory on this week’s BBC 5Live Pods and Blogs podcast.

Head on over to the BBC website to check it out (21st July episode, I’m first up)

More to come from me on tomorrow’s solar eclipse soon!

I really must stop with that headline, but I just can’t help myself. Last weekend, science minister Lord Drayson announced that Britain is to officially support human space-flight. In the reversal of a decades-old government policy, British citizens will now receive funding to become astronauts. Speaking to The Sunday Times, Drayson said:

“Britain should be playing a full role in space exploration. There was a special fund for training astronauts and we did not contribute, but that is now changed. There are important benefits that come from manned space-flight and we have dropped our opposition. We have an astronaut entering training soon and I hope he will be the first of many.”

Army test pilot Tim Peake became the first European Space Agency astronaut earlier this year, and it is thought that Drayson used Peake’s appointment as leverage for the policy change.

Drayson has always been in favour of human space-flight, and is also considering the expansion of the British National Space Centre from just 30 civil servants into a full-blown space agency. However, The Observer reports that there will be no extra money for this “British NASA”, making me wonder how this expansion might actually happen. He said:

“We spend around £250m a year of public money on space projects, and that generates more than £6bn for the economy in terms of contracts for the manufacture of satellites, robotics and other industrial work. We get a tremendous bang for the buck when it comes to space, but we have to ask if there is a better way to do it.”

If the current return on investment is 2400%, surely a small increase of cash would be worth it? Either way, it seems we can expect more Brits heading to space in the coming years.

To mark the anniversary of Apollo 11 touching down on the lunar surface, Google have decided to release an updated version of their Google Earth software, featuring detailed maps of the Moon:

On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their first small steps on to the surface of the moon. Forty years later you can join them, thanks to a new release from Google. Moon in Google Earth brings the lunar landscape to your desktop, complete with photos, video and guided tours provided by the astronauts themselves.

Downloading the new Google Earth software allows users to roam the moon in full 3D for the first time. You can visit the historic Apollo landing sites to see the astronauts at work, or fly above the surface hunting for your favourite crater.

Read the rest at the Guardian

I quite enjoyed putting this story together, as it involved looking through the auction catalogue to see all the cool space stuff on offer:

Artefacts from the history of space exploration went under the hammer yesterday at an auction in New York. Auctioneers Bonhams presented nearly 400 lots, including many that were used on the surface of the moon.

The auction coincided with the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch, with over 50 items from that mission on sale. These included the star chart used by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to determine their position on the lunar surface, which went for $218,000. The chart comprises two rotating plastic discs 9 inches across, and a velcro patch on the back containing traces of lunar dust.

In a letter accompanying the chart, Aldrin called it “the single most critical navigational device we used while on the moon.”

Read the rest at the Guardian.

The piece I wrote for the Guardian today hasn’t gone up yet, so instead of linking to that I’ll write briefly about something else that happened today – albeit, 40 years in the past. On 16 July 1969, Apollo 11 blasted off in to space. Today marks the 40th anniversary of what would be humanity’s first journey to another world.

It’s amazing to think that nearly two decades before I was even born, men walked upon the surface of the Moon. Sometimes that seems so unlikely, it’s hard to get your head around the fact that it actually happened.

NASA has released restored video of the landing to celebrate. Whenever I watch the famous footage, I can’t help but imagine what a modern day landing would look like. I hope that it isn’t too many years until we can find out.

For now, you will have to settle for the past. We Choose The Moon allows you to follow Apollo 11 in “real time”. As I write this, the mission has entered stage 6, with the ignition of the command service module.

Occasionally the voices of the crew crackle through on the radio, communicating with mission control. These are recordings of the actual conversations the astronauts had on their way to the Moon. It’s incredibly well done, and I feel as if I’ve been transported back to 1969, awaiting the landing in just under four days time. Great stuff.

Drayson vs Stuart, round two

Our very own Colin Stuart had an article in the Times Higher Education supplement this week, in a continuation of his Twitter debate with science minister Lord Drayson. In it, he criticises the decision to merge science with business, fearing it will result in pure science losing out as applied science is brought to the fore.

The internet…in space!

A headline I never get tired of, because it always sums up a story beautifully. The internet now has a permanent connection to space, aboard the International Space Station.

The space internet differers slightly from our Earth-bound version. The regular internet uses TCP/IP connections, which repeatedly sends information until the computer knows they have got through. This wouldn’t work in space due to bandwidth issues, so the computer aboard the ISS uses delay-tolerant networking, which holds on to information at each step in the communication chain until it has been received.

Citizen science exposes false vegan restaurants

This is pretty neat. Vegan food blog quarrygirl.com were worried about imported vegan foods being served in a number of restaurants in Los Angeles, so decided to run some tests.

Using industrial food testing tools, they examined meals from 17 establishments for traces of egg, cheese and shellfish – all foods which are not compatible with a vegan diet. The found evidence of these foods in all of the meals, suggesting that the common source of production, Taiwan, has not been enforcing strict vegan regulations.

What I like about this is the way their investigation is presented in a very scientific manner. Hypothesis, methods, results and discussion are all laid out in such a way that anyone wishing to dispute or replicate their results can do so. In fact, that’s exactly what happened, with many of the restaurants contacting the blog to say they would conduct tests of their own. It just goes to show, you don’t have to be a scientist to follow the scientific method.

Whoops. Wrote this yesterday but somehow failed to put it on the site. Warning: incoming link dump. I’ve still got loads of interesting stuff left, so I thought I’d burn it all off at once.

Honours for UK astronauts

The British Interplanetary Society (BIS) have created an award for people from the UK who have flown in to to space – all five of them.

The silver pins were give to Helen Sharman and Richard Garriott, who were backed by private funds, and Michael Foale, Nicholas Patrick and Piers Sellers who all became US citizens to fly with NASA.

Despite UK government resistance to human spaceflight, the BIS have made up another five pins that they hope to give to future UK astronauts.

One quarter of Londoners believe in creationism

The figure falls to one in seven nationwide, which is still fairly concerning. Worse though are the one in five Londoners who have never even heard of Darwin – you don’t have to believe the guy, but at least know his name!

US Navy is building electromagnetic plane guns

As in, guns that fire planes. Well not quite, but the Pentagon has spent half a billion dollars on building a new launch system for aircraft carriers.

Currently, they use “steam catapults” to launch planes off the short carrier runways – which is pretty much what it sounds like. The new Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System will instead use an electric linear motor to shoot the planes off in to the sky.

Self-help books don’t

A psychological study has found that self-help books can actually have the opposite effect to that intended. The research showed that people with low self-esteem actually feel worse about themselves after repeating typical self-help statements like “I am a lovable person”.

Monkeys barter and trade on a simian stock market

Instead of pounds or dollars, non-human primates use grooming as currency. Scientists from the University of Strasbourg in France examined monkey exchange rates by placing food in a box that only one female was trained to open.

An hour after she did, the other members of the group rewarded her with longer and more frequent grooming, and she reciprocated less.

Her new-found wealth wasn’t to last however. When the scientists introduced another trained monkey, the first female’s grooming “stock value” decreased as the second female’s rose. Eventually the “market” equalised and they were both groomed for the same amount of time.

Darwin’s children’s drawings on display

Charles Darwin used sheet after sheet of paper when writing On the Origin of Species, since redrafting before the days of Microsoft Word meant writing the whole thing out again. Only a handful of these draft papers have survived, mostly because Darwin gave his used sheets to his children for use as drawing paper.

Battle of the Vegetables

Next week one such sheet will go on display in a new exhibition at Cambridge University Library. Named “Battle of the Vegetables” by Library staff, it depicts a battle between one man riding a carrot and another on what could possibly be a stale potato.

Did Michael Jackson’s death contribute to climate change?

Duncan Graham-Rowe of the Guardian asks whether we should consider the carbon cost of all the increased web activity following the singer’s death. I’ve discussed the carbon cost of Googling before – 0.2g per search, according to the company’s own figures.

As one commenter points out, if you added up the tiny contributions of all the tributary Tweets and YouTubes they probably wouldn’t exceed the Jackson’s personal carbon footprint, considering the lavish life he led.

The Guardian’s James Randerson also chimes in to say the point of the article isn’t really the carbon cost of Jackson’s death, but to highlight the issue of unsustainable internet growth. Whilst this is a problem, I can’t imagine that alternative methods of information distribution are any greener. As with many climate change conundrums, the answer is far from clear.

What’s on alien TV?

Webcomic Abstruse Goose has this rather nice image of what aliens might be watching on TV. When TV signals are broadcast some of them radiate out from the Earth, and could be picked up by any extraterrestrials out there. Like all electromagnetic radiation, the signals travel at the speed of light, so depending on how far from Earth the aliens are it’s going to take them a while to receive our latest programmes.

Whilst inhabitants of the relatively near Sirius system might have been enjoying episodes of Family Guy and The Sopranos for the past few years, everyone out in Aldebaran is still waiting for coverage of World War II to arrive. I just hope any aliens out there will forgive us for polluting space with broadcasts of Big Brother…

The days of the lone astronomer are long gone. Modern astronomical research is a multi-national and highly organised outfit with million dollar telescopes perched high on mountain tops in some of the most remote places on Earth. These optical leviathans don’t even need a pupil at the eyepiece; computers are more than capable of doing that for us.

You might think then, that this world of highly mechanised, suped-up star-spotters was beyond the clutches of your average Joe, but you’d be wrong. Around the world an army of enthusiastic amateurs, often armed with nothing more than their home computers, are reeling in the secrets of the universe. Meet the citizen astronomers.

Comets

David Evans works for SERTEC, a company based in Coleshill, Warwickshire, specialising in the manufacture of parts and components for the automotive industry. At least that’s what pays his bills. David’s real passion is astronomy and he has discovered nineteen comets previously unknown to science, all from the comfort of his home PC.

“My first discovery was confirmed 22 June 2002 by Derek Hammer of NASA. I found the comet in images which were taken by the SOHO Space Telescope on 13 June 2002,” David explained, referring to a telescope whose job it is to stare at the Sun. As these comets pass in front of the Sun their silhouettes can be spotted by those who have the patience to sift through the mountains of data produced by modern telescopes.

And that’s the appeal of citizen astronomers to those who research the cosmos for a living. Often a human is still better at discerning detail than computers, but the professional astronomers simply don’t have the time or the resources to analyse all the data. By farming it out in manageable chunks to citizen astronomers, more research can be done and the public get a real chance to contribute to cutting edge science.

GalaxyZoo

One extremely successful example is Galaxy Zoo, a citizen astronomy project designed to get members of the public classifying galaxies. Galaxies are huge collections of stars gathered together in space, and they come in many different shapes and sizes. The Galaxy Zoo community are presented with photos of galaxies and asked simple questions about what they can see. They might be asked to choose from a sliding scale as to how round it is, or how many spiral arms it’s got.

The beauty of Galaxy Zoo is that it sends out the same photo to many users and only if a consensus is reached between a high percentage of users do the team know they can trust the classification. Such has been the success of the project that a completely new type of galaxy has been discovered this way.

Melanie-Jane Ryal, a personal assistant, is a keen Galaxy Zoo user, “The Galaxy Zoo project is amazingly easy to get involved with. All you have to do is register and then do a short test to ensure you know what you’re looking at. As an amateur it allows you to feel involved as you’re helping to classify galaxies that very few other people have seen,” she said. That’s the kicker, sometimes you get to be the very first human ever to lay eyes on a particular galaxy, a galaxy that contains billions of stars, and perhaps even other life forms.

SETI@home

And the search for aliens, or more officially The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), hasn’t been overlooked by citizen astronomy; in fact it was one of the trail blazers. I’ve previously blogged about the SETI@home project celebrating it’s tenth year keenly listening to signals from space and trying to detect evidence of an interstellar phone call. But the key to the success of this project has been that, in true citizen astronomy style, the data is farmed out to you and I. SETI@home uses your spare computer power to work its way through the radio waves received by the giant Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico.

Once downloaded to your PC the SETI@home program gets to work whilst your not. When you’re away from your PC having a cuppa or fielding a phone call, SETI@home kicks in and starts using your computer to decipher the messages. No signal has been found yet that astronomers believe not to have come naturally from space but thanks to home PC’s they are getting through the data much faster than would otherwise be possible.

Public Engagement

It is appropriate that SETI@home is celebrating it’s inaugural decade, just as astronomers are celebrating another temporal milestone. This year has been designated International Year of Astronomy or IYA2009, to mark four centuries since Galileo first used the telescope to gaze at the heavens. IYA2009 has been an opportunity for professional astronomers to engage with the public and Dr Marek Kukula, Public Astronomer at The Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and sees citizen astronomy as an indispensable tool in this process.

“Citizen astronomy is a tremendous opportunity to engage members of the public with real scientific research in a way which would have been impossible only a few years ago,” he said. And he agrees that the astronomers get more than just an extension of their computing power. “It’s not a one-sided process either – the scientists also benefit enormously because it enables them to answer questions which they simply couldn’t tackle on their own, getting extra value out of the large amounts of data which are now routinely gathered by telescopes, space missions and earth-monitoring experiments.”

So citizen astronomy is many things. It’s an opportunity for astronomers to engage with the public. It’s an opportunity for that public to actively, and often indispensably, contribute to cutting edge research. But most importantly it’s a way for astronomers to unlock the scientific secrets hidden amongst the astronomically sized sets of data churning out of the myriad of hardware both in space and on the ground.

As we move into the 401st year of the telescope, the next great discovery could just come from you, your friends, or the citizen astronomer next door.

That’s one small Tweet for man…

To mark the anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission next month, Nature are using Twitter to relive the Moon landing, 40 years on. You can follow @ApolloPlus40 in the run up to July 20th, and imagine what a mission to the Moon would be like in the internet age.

First image from Herschel

Emma covered the launch of Herschel and Planck, the two latest telescopes to be sent off in to space, and now Herschel’s first image has been beamed back.

The first Herschel image.

It shows the Whirlpool Galazy, also known as M51. First discovered by Charles Messier in 1774, it lies 23 million light-years away. Impressive stuff.

World’s first spaceport begins construction

I’ve been following the progress of Virgin Galactic for quite some time, as they bring the promise of commercial spaceflight ever closer to reality. I even blogged about the company in Just A Theory’s very first week. It’s quite exciting then to see construction begin for Spaceport America in New Mexico. The design is fantastically futuristic:

You can tell it's the future, look at all the blue lights.

Due to be completed in 18 months time, it will serve as the commercial base for Virgin Galactic, but other companies will eventually make use of the facility. I can’t wait.

Three stories for you today from the great big universe out there. First up, astronomers have found evidence for the birth of a new planet orbiting a binary star system. A rotating molecular disk formed around a pair of stars known as V4046 Sagittarii is thought to be a planet in the making. It is also first confirmation that planets can emerge from binary star systems, giving us new places to look in the search for other planets. David Wilner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics says:

“This is strong evidence that planets can form around binary stars, which expands the number of places we can look for extrasolar planets. Somewhere in our galaxy, an alien world may enjoy double sunrises and double sunsets.”

Whilst that star system is growing, another one is getting smaller. The red supergiant Betelgeuse, located in the top left of the constellation Orion, has shrunk by 15% in 15 years.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have been monitoring the star, but don’t know the cause for the shrinkage. Betelgeuse is about ten times wider than the distance from the Earth to the Sun, meaning it has shrunk be a distance equivalent to the orbit of Venus.

Discoveries like these could get harder to make in the future however. Light pollution now means that one fifth of the world’s population cannot see the Milky Way in the night sky. Those missing out are mostly in mainland Europe, the UK and the US, according to Connie Walker, an astronomer from the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. She presented her findings to the American Astronomical Society at a meeting this Wednesday.

When Thomas Passvogel applied for a job at the European Space Agency in 1996 he did so for one reason. He had his sights set on the role of Programme Manager for the launch of a satellite called Herschel. Four years later his dream was realised, but before long he found himself co-ordinating the launch of two satellites, as a second satellite, Planck, joined the line-up.

Herschel and Planck have been hailed as two of the most sophisticated astronomical spacecraft ever built, and the project itself is an impressive example of worldwide teamwork between scientists and technicians. Although the two satellites are going to the same region of space, they are there to observe very different things.

Herschel is looking for clues as to how stars and galaxies are formed. The problem is that much of this process occurs in the heart of vast dust clouds, so is difficult to see. This is where Herschel’s huge mirror comes in. It is the largest mirror ever to be launched into space, and allows Herschel to detect light at the far infrared. This type of light is able to penetrate through the clouds and will hopefully produce a unique insight into what happens in these areas of deep space.

The Planck satellite will look at echoes of the Big Bang itself. Background radiation still lingers from the Big Bang moment, and is subject to temperature changes. Planck will monitor these changes, to hopefully give clues as to the universe’s origin, evolution and future.

Charles Lawrence from NASA describes the project as an “outstanding example of international collaboration… despite the issues of working together across different time zones.” Dr Passvogel admits it wasn’t easy to co-ordinate teams from around the world. “In theory,” he said, “all the pieces would arrive from all the different labs on the correct day, and would be assembled together. However in practice, there was much more to it.”

The only real hiccup in the project was a delay in the launch. In March, the European Space Agency revealed the launch was being postponed by at least a couple of weeks. Although this announcement came close to the original launch date, Dr Passvogel explained that this was the best scenario as “the time allowed us to be better prepared for the launch which went like clockwork.”

The two satellites were finally launched into space on May 6th, and nobody was more excited than Dr Passvogel. He described the feeling as “fantastic but emotional, like when your kids leave home. You’re happy for them because they’re living on their own; however it’s still emotional to let them go.”

It is clear when talking to both Dr Passvogel and Dr Lawrence that they are very proud of this project, and indeed passionate about their fields. “I can’t imagine doing anything else that I enjoy as much,” says Dr Lawrence, whilst Dr Passvogel describes the launch as “the most exciting moment of my academic career.”

I’m almost tempted to leave you with just the title of this post, but perhaps a little bit of explanation is required. It seems that scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have found a rather novel way to monitor penguin population levels in the ice region – using satellite imaging to search for their poo.

Peter Fretwell and Dr Philip Trathan of the BAS outlined their novel technique in a paper published this week in Global Ecology and Biogeography. Using images taken by space satellites they were able to identify colony locations of emperor penguins in Antarctica. Despite the image quality being too low to pick out individual penguins, they were able to infer the presence of a colony by the distinctive brown stain they left behind.

Spot the stain.

Penguin poo, or guano, stands out from the white and blue sea ice as the only brown around. By picking out these areas of discolouration, Fretwell and Trathan found a total of 38 colonies, 10 of which were previously unknown. Emperor penguins are vulnerable to changes in the sea ice, so accurate information about colony locations is important in assessing the impact of climate change on the population.

Whilst searching for poo from space might sound silly, this research actually has important consequences for animal conservation. Unfortunately this method, whilst useful for finding unknown colonies, cannot really provide accurate estimates of the number of birds at each location. As such, the researchers call for further research to determine emperor penguins vulnerability to climate change.

Fretwell, P., & Trathan, P. (2009). Penguins from space: faecal stains reveal the location of emperor penguin colonies Global Ecology and Biogeography DOI: 10.1111/j.1466-8238.2009.00467.x

Imagine an unknown journey without now commonplace GPS systems. Ping a quick signal between a few pieces of high flying space hardware and you know exactly where you are. Now two astronomers believe they have an equivalent system, a sort of cosmic TomTom than can pin your galactic position down to the nearest metre.

Yet in deep-space dialling up a satellite in Earth orbit would be pretty useless, so instead the new system proposed by astronomers Bartolome Coll and Albert Tarantola uses pulsars. Pulsars are the rapidly rotating, super-dense relics of massive stars that give out very precise and regular signals of radio waves. By measuring the arrival times of these stellar pulses from four different pulsars you can work out where you are in relation to them.

On the vast scales that any future wider exploration beyond our Solar System would require, Einstein’s relativity comes into play and that is why four pulsars beacons are needed to map out space-time; three to cover the dimensions of space and the other to deal with time.

The only limitation to precision of the arriving signal is interaction with the interstellar medium but this only affects the pulses on the order of nanoseconds (billionths of a second) which translates into an accuracy of the nearest metre.

So far, astronomers searching the universe for planets outside of our solar system have mostly discovered gas giants, like Jupiter. If you want a planet that can support life, something a bit smaller and wetter is in order. Now scientists believe they have found such a planet. It’s called Earth.

Well, obviously they haven’t only just comes across it. Using Deep Impact, a probe launched by NASA in 2005 to study a comet by smashing in to it, researchers devised a new planet-hunting method by re-discovering Earth. By imagining themselves as aliens hunting for planets like our own, they were able to ‘discover’ that Earth does indeed have liquid surface water.

By making two separate 24-hour observations of Earth’s light intensity, in wavelengths from near ultraviolet to near infrared, the researchers were able to monitor the changes in brightness as the Earth rotates and cloud-cover shifts. These changes show up as deviations from an average colour. Two wavelengths were dominant: red for long wavelengths and blue for short.

Interpreting red as land masses and blue as ocean water, the team were able to make colour maps of the planet as it rotated. Comparing this to the real Earth, the oceans became crystal clear. Nicolas Cowan, a University of Washington doctoral student, explains:

“You could tell that there were liquid oceans on the planet. The idea is that to have liquid water the planet would have to be in its system’s habitable zone, but being in the habitable zone doesn’t guarantee having liquid water.”

Cowan, who is lead author of a paper explaining the research and due to be published in Astrophysical Journal, hopes that their new technique will guide the construction of future Earth-hunter telescopes. Just don’t expect to be going for an extrasolar dip any time soon.

Flying carpets…in space!

I pretty much never get tired of that headline.

Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata has demonstrated a “working” flying carpet aboard the International Space Station, as part of a series of experiments submitted by members of the public.

A whole new world...

He had to cheat a little bit, however. Wakata’s feet were stuck to the carpet with sticky tape, which if you ask me doesn’t really count.

The Science News Cycle

Courtesy of PhD Comics, the Science News Cycle:

Strange measurements of science

The BBC have an article on some of the more interesting measurements made in the name of science. From the bluest sky to the crunch of a fresh biscuit, they’re quite strange. All were requests to the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, Middlesex, which is responsible for defining and standardising units in the UK. Sounds like quite a cool job, and last Wednesday they celebrated World Meteorology Day in honour of their meticulous measuring.

A pioneering project linking together millions of computers around the world, all in the name of finding out whether we are alone in the universe, turned ten this week. SETI@home (SETI is the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) was launched on 17th May 1999 and broke new ground in harnessing your idle computer time to crack some of science’s greatest questions. The internet is now awash with similar projects such as climateprediction.net or the World Community Grid but SETI@home was the first such scientific distributed computing project.

The project regularly farms out data from signals captured by the giant Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico straight to your desktop. Then when you pop out for a quick cuppa it uses your computer to trawl the radio waves for signs of artificial messages sent by alien civilisations.

Unsurprisingly the search thus far has been fruitless. The usual needle and haystack analogies just don’t cut it when it comes to what the project is looking for. For a more in depth look the current state of SETI, including where astronomers are looking and how likely they are to find them, you can read my account of it here. To borrow a quote from it, what the astronomers behind SETI@home are doing is “casting their nets a few times into a vast ocean of interstellar signals, searching for a minute bottle that may, perhaps, contain a tiny piece of paper.” That’s the thing, we don’t even know if what we are looking for exists, let alone exactly where to look for it.

However, we shouldn’t give up hope of receiving an interstellar phone call from our galactic cousins. The work SETI@home continues to do, based wholly on charitable donations, could yet provide the most momentous discovery in the history of science. Happy Birthday SETI@home!

Were Neanderthals wiped out by our stomachs?

Bit of a strange one this. A study published in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences suggests a possible explanation for the disappearance of the Neanderthals – we ate them.

A Neanderthal jawbone appears to show marks similar to those found on deer remains from the early Stone Age. Lead researcher Fernando Rozzi, of the Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique in Paris, believes that this idea has been suppressed in the past. “For years, people have tried to hide away from the evidence of cannibalism, but I think we have to accept it took place.”

I’m not sure eating Neanderthals is technically cannibalism, as they are a different species, but they’re human enough to make it pretty creepy. Urgh.

Beware the “super rats”

The governing principle of natural selection is that the fittest survive. In the case of rats, those with a genetic resistance to poison will survive attempts to exterminate them, and pass on this immunity to their descendants. Before you know it, we’ll be over-run by super rats.

Ratcatchers in Swindon are reporting a 500% increase in rodent populations, and Professor Robert Smith of the University of Huddersfield thinks that Darwin is to blame:

“Natural selection means that when you have a rat population in your town, poison will kill the ones that aren’t resistant, the ones that survive may have the gene, they then have babies who can receive the gene themselves,” he said.

“There are mutations and changes in their DNA that alter the ability of rats to deal with these poisons. It appears to be moving west and has now been located in Swindon and Bristol. It is a warning of things to come.”

An appropriate photo for Sunday

You may have already seen this image circulated around the press, but it’s worth another look:

The Space Shuttle and Hubble telescope pass in front of the Sun. Photo Credit: (NASA/Thierry Legault)

Earlier this week astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis undertook a mission to repair the Hubble telescope, and photographer Thierry Legault managed to catch them in the act. The spaceships appear as tiny dots in front of the vast Sun, but you can just make out the iconic shape of the Shuttle. More pics available here.

What were you doing when you were eleven? I was just starting high school having broken my wrist the night before Princess Diana died. Whilst stumbling bleary eyed into my parents bedroom, sporting a plaster cast, and breaking the news of the car crash is still very much a vivid memory it is hardly anything to go down in the annals of history.

The same can’t be said for Venetia Phair who died on the 30th April aged 90. In 1930, aged just eleven, she became the unlikely heroine of world astronomy when she offered the name for a newly discovered planet. Pluto was named over the breakfast table. The story goes that a young Venetia was in Oxford having breakfast with her grandfather Falconer Madan, the retired librarian of The Bodleian Library in the town. In a highly middle class moment the tale tells of Madan reading The Times and relaying the fact that a new planet had been discovered and was yet to be named. The young Venetia who, in an interview with the BBC in 2006, said “I was quite interested in Greek and Roman myths and legends at the time,” suggested that that the planet should bear the name of Pluto, The God of The Underworld. And it stuck.

Venetia Phair, the woman who named Pluto.

Madan just happened to be chums with Herman Turner, Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, who also just so happened to be attending a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society who were discussing possible names for the newly discovered celestial body. Venetia’s suggestion was eventually passed to Clyde Tombaugh, the original discoverer of the planet and Pluto was officially adopted.

What was her reward for such a landmark moment? Five pounds in pocket money from her granddad. It might not sound like much but one estimate puts that at roughly £230 in today’s money, not too shabby for a quick comment over the breakfast table. There was some suggestion that she had named the planet after the Disney character Pluto but it was subsequently proven that her suggestion came first.

Then in 2006 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) demoted Pluto’s rank, robbing it of planetary status, instead relegating it to the lowly newly coined group of dwarf planets. All Phair had to say was “I suppose I would prefer it to remain a planet.”

What happened to the only woman to ever name a ‘planet’ and only the third person to do so in the history of modern civilisation? She went on to study Mathematics at Cambridge and went on to lecture in economics.

So next time you are having idle chit chat over the morning papers, tread carefully, if you’ve got the right connections you may just find yourself indelibly marked on the pages of history.

As someone with more than a passing interest in science I often find myself screaming “that’s just plain wrong!” at films or TV programmes with a laughably poor grasp of basic scientific principles. One notion that just will not go away is the prorogation of sound in space. Whether it’s the destruction of the Death Star in Star Wars, or Dalek spaceships being vaporised in Doctor Who, everything in space seems to go ‘boom’.

Sound waves reach your ear as vibrations passing through matter – normally air. If you’ve ever been at a gig with large subwoofers you might have felt these vibrations passing through the floor and up your legs, providing you with that ‘thumping bass’ feeling.

Air is actually not a very good medium for transmitting sound. Try tapping a hard surface and listening to the sound it makes. The vibrations caused by your finger have been transferred through the molecules in the air and into your ear. Now place your ear on to the surface, and tap again. The sound should be louder. This is because the molecules of the solid surface are more tightly packed, and thus transfer the vibrations faster than air can.

What does this have to do with the Death Star? Well, in the vacuum of space there are no molecules – that is essentially what the word ‘vacuum’ means. Since there are no molecules there is nothing to transmit the vibrations caused by the Death Star blowing up, and so Luke Skywalker (and the audience) should not be able to hear the explosion.

At this point I have to mention Firefly, a TV programme created by Joss Whedon (best know for Buffy the Vampire Slayer). In Firefly, spaceships float serenely by in complete silence, often accompanied by some twangy (a very scientific technical term) guitar music. The effect is very strange, but only because the myth of sound in space has been perpetuated on our screens for so long.

Thankfully, someone is fighting back against this and other on screen gafs. The Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics website is one that I discovered many years ago now, but if you have never seen it before, it’s well worth a look. Sound in space is part of the ‘Generic Bad Movie Physics’ list, along with flaming cars and visible laserbeams.

The site also reviews movies, but not in the traditional sense. Ratings are dished out on a scale based on the American system ranging from GP for good physics to XP – physics so bad they can only come from a universe other than our own. The Terminator is deemed ‘pretty good’ despite the titular time-travelling cyborg, whereas Star Wars Episode III takes place, as you might expect, in a galaxy of physics far, far away.

Unfortunately it looks like the site hasn’t been updated in a while, but what is up there is still pretty entertaining. Of course, no one is expecting Hollywood to have a team of expert scientists on every film set, but it doesn’t hurt to get a few facts right.

With the sun-drenched days we’ve had of late, chances are you’ve been enjoying the glorious weather and topping up your tan; and you aren’t the only one. Research published in Nature by a team at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) suggests that, as well as bronzing your skin, the Sun colours the surface of asteroids too.

But unlike us, the hue of the asteroid is honed not by UV light but by particles streaming away from the Sun in the solar wind. This ionised surge of matter from the Sun peppers the surface of the asteroid in so-called ‘space weathering’, turning the surface of the asteroid a distinctive red colour.

What has surprised astronomers, using ground based telescopes such as the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, is the shear speed at which these asteroids seem to ‘tan’. Studying collisions between asteroids, and examining the freshly exposed surfaces of the resulting fragments, the team discovered that this tanning process takes only a million years. That may sound a lot to a very short lived species such as ourselves, but taken in the context of the age of the solar system, it is the equivalent of five days in the lifespan of a seventy year old human.

This rapid timescale has led to better understanding of the so called Near Earth Asteroids (NEA’s), which Jacob talked about recently. Some of these space rocks, the ones mostly likely to worry us about possible impacts, don’t appear to exhibit this reddening. This could suggest that they are less than a million years old and caused by asteroid-on-asteroid collisions that are more frequent than previously thought. However, the team suggest their apparent ‘freshness’ is due to gravitational interactions with planets effectively wiping the weathered red dust off the surface, therefore the asteroids are much older.

Vernazza, P., Binzel, R., Rossi, A., Fulchignoni, M., & Birlan, M. (2009). Solar wind as the origin of rapid reddening of asteroid surfaces Nature, 458 (7241), 993-995 DOI: 10.1038/nature07956

Astrobiologists looking for the building blocks of life in the centre of our galaxy have instead found the faint aroma of rum and a slight taste of raspberries.

The team from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany used a 30m telescope based in Spain to probe deep into the heart of our home galaxy, The Milky Way. They were looking for amino acids, thought to be a crucial factor in the development of life. Radio telescopes are perfect for this kind of astronomy as it allows you to peer through layers of cosmic dust right to the heart of the galaxy.

However, they failed to find what they were looking for. Instead their investigations yielded traces of ethyl formate, the chemical that apparently puts the taste in raspberries and the smell in rum. Whilst this isn’t as exciting as actually finding the ingredients for life, you could always make yourself a nice pavlova. And the novelty factor of this story hasn’t been lost on the national media, with the story reported in The Guardian.

So it seems astronomers are discovering quite a kitchen store cupboard in space. Now we have raspberries and rum to go with steak and beer. Sounds like we have the possibility of a three-course meal on the cards. Steak and beer for main, and pavlova for pudding. Deep fried Mars bars to start?

I have to admit I have a bit of a soft spot for wine; good old grape juice is probably my greatest vice. As an astronomer at The Royal Observatory, Greenwich, the Moon also plays a big part in my life too, whether I’m being asked about how it was formed or looking at it through a telescope. So it will come as no great surprise that a story invoking these two staples of my life grabbed my attention.

The BBC magazine reported yesterday on Maria Thun’s Biodynamic Sowing and Planting Calendar, devised in the 1950’s. The calendar is based on the cycle of the Moon as it orbits around the Earth and its effect on living organisms on it. It particularly talks about how wine tastes better on different days of the month. Now obviously this calendar is nothing new, it’s been around for half a century. However, the interest comes in when you find out that Tesco and Marks & Spencer have adopted Thun’s musings, to the extent that they will only let wine critics sample their wares (or should that be ‘weres’) on days when her Moon calendar suggests their goods to be most palatable. On a day when Tesco have announced ‘credit crunch’ busting profits of £3.13bn who am I to argue with their business strategy? Well let’s take a closer look at this magical moon calendar.

Thun classified five different types of day based on the motion of our nearest neighbour in space. These days are “fruit”, “root”, “leaf”, “flower” and “unfavourable”, and apparently the wine will satisfy your tastebuds most completely on a “fruit” day. Quite how these days are defined is far from clear. However, it seems to form part of growing belief that the Moon has an effect upon human, animal and now even plant behaviour. From what I can tell, the thinking most often behind this notion is that as the Moon has such a significant tidal effect of the world’s water mass that it somehow must have an effect upon water in living things, altering their behaviour. Now I’m not normally one for diving into the maths of things in a blog entry, but this time I will make an exception (Jacob will be pleased!)

Let us turn to our good friend Sir Isaac Newton for a little mathematical inspiration. I want to find the force with which the Moon pulls on a 1 millilitre droplet of water. Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation states that the gravitational force between two objects is proportional to the product of their masses divided by the distance between them squared. In equation form,

Might look scary but not if you break it down. In the above equation the letters mean the following:

• F is the gravitational attractive force we are after.
• G is a constant, just a number and it’s equal to 6.67 x 10^-11 (units unimportant)
• m1 = mass of the Moon at 7.36 x 10²² kg
• m2 = mass of water particle. 1ml of water has a mass of 1 gram or 1 x 10^-3 kg
• r = distance between the Earth and the Moon. Let’s use 3.63 x 10⁸ (see below)

NB. If you want to nitpick, then the Moon doesn’t follow a perfectly circular orbit around the Earth. Instead it traverses around our planet in a squashed circle, or ellipse, and so at some points it is closer to the Earth than at others. To account for this I have used the closest distance the Moon gets to the Earth, above. Right, stick with me it’s about to get interesting.

Crunch all these numbers together and you get a force of gravitational attraction between the Moon and a 1ml droplet of water as roughly 4 x 10^-8 Newtons. To put this into perspective that is the equivalent force that a speck of dust exerts as it rests on a table! Or put another, perhaps more apt way, the same as the force exerted on a table by about 250 millionths of your average (full!) bottle of wine; a miniscule force and hardly likely to have much of an effect.

Wine may well taste better on different days but a small piece of high school physics tells us that it is highly unlikely that our Moon will have a gravitational effect. It might stabilise our seasons, pull our tides and make our days gradually longer, but I’m afraid to say its gravitational influence doesn’t improve a smooth glass of Merlot. Another piece of lunar lunacy.

In fact, taking a closer look at Thun’s predicted upcoming “good” days for wine tells a truer tale. Join in me in raising a glass between Friday at 6pm and 9am on Sunday and you’ll realise that she probably just wanted an excuse for a good weekend bender!

At the beginning of the month, NASA told us that last year’s record low in Solar activity may well be bettered in 2009. 87% of the days in the first quarter of this year had no solar flares. 73% of the days in 2008 saw similarly inactivity. The Sun is keeping very quiet.

Today, the BBC’s Pallab Ghosh produced a video news report on UK astronomers’ reaction to this. One of the physicists he interviewed, Professor Mike Lockwood from Southhampton University, was on the Radio 4’s Today show discussing it.  And, inevitably, the conversation turned to climate change.

It was inevitable because Solar radiation effects our weather: it certainly feels much warmer when the Sun is out. But, climate change patterns are a very different thing to our day-to-day local weather. There is significant debate over both the possible scale and nature of the sun’s affect on climate change. The Royal Society have a brief summary that explain the situation better than I can.

A clip of Lockwood’s Today show interview is available here. There is a wonderful Radio 4 ‘ah’ when Lockwood explains that there might be changes on Earth because of this lack in solar activity, but that solar variation is only by  “hundredths of percents”. And so the effects are likely to be very small. Lockwood’s story is not really related to climate change. The excitement for scientists is that the Sun, the things they spend all day studying, is doing something strange.

To give Ghosh credit, that is what he reports. Nor were the Today show’s team at fault either. They have a political mandate and were right to take this angle during the interview: particularly given the extent to which some climate sceptics rely on solar activity as an argument against anthropogenic climate change. They questioned the scientist hard about the potential climate repercussions, leaving no room for spin-off reports to exaggerate the claims made. A good interview technique in my book. Even if it did aggravate Professor Lockwood a little.

There was nothing loaded about the questions and reporting here, but back in 2007 the BBC was criticised by its own news executives for having a biased stance on climate change. It was planning a PlanetRelief day that would encourage green-thinking in everyday activities.  This was seen as pro-anthropogenic climate change campaigning, and the day was eventually cancelled. What aggravated me at the time was that most of the BBC reporting on climate change is of the kind we saw today: interview-based and quite science heavy. It is not biased in general, but was tainted by that episode.

The exception to that rule was Dr David Whitehouse, BBC Online’s science editor and now author of ‘The Sun: a biography’. Yet, he was biased against anthropogenic arguments: the opposite point of view to the one the BBC were criticised for. He expounded his minority views about solar effect on global warming on the BBC website for almost ten years without any comeuppance.

In 2000, Whitehouse reported on weather records found in Armagh in Ireland that supposedly showed that the Sun has been the main contributor to global warming over the past two centuries. He did not mention of the complex scientific debate behind the solar effects on our climate, choosing instead to quote Dr John Butler, who discovered the records: “I suspect that the greenhouse lobby have under-estimated the role of solar variability in climate change.”

Four years later, he reports on the high solar activity levels in the later 20th century. A group from the Institute of Astronomy in Zurich claimed that over the last century the number of sunspots rose at the same time that the Earth’s climate became steadily warmer. According to the article, there is a causal link. The only reason why the Sun’s recent low activity (it was low in 2004 as well) is not matched by a reverse climate change is because fossil fuel burning is starting to have some effect. Again, nothing about the debate over whether the sun can really effect climate change.

By 2007, Whitehouse starting writing in the mainstream press. Interestingly his tactic changes. He is no longer arguing that the Sun’s high levels of activity last century increased global warming. He claims instead that the Sun’s potential inactivity over the next fifty years might cause global cooling, reducing the effects of man made warming.  He wrote a long feature for The Independent, “Ray of hope: Can the Sun save us from global warming?”, in December that year.

That newspaper piece takes a much less contentious stance than the BBC reports. This is in part due probably to the increase in evidence against Whitehouse’s position. But it also highlights the difference in care taken over an online piece buried in a Science and Technology tab and one in the mainstream press. Which is worrying. Not least because that BBC tab is taking more and more of the newspaper readership.

Today’s reporting of solar activity showed a return to form by the BBC. There was no climate change headline: no overenthusiastic claims about a new model for global warming. Instead, the science came first. The sun is being a bit strange, which has got some scientists very excited. But that’s it really – no one really knows what it means for next summer’s hose-pipe ban.

Fans of late 90’s disaster flicks will remember that 1998 saw the release of not one but two films about Near Earth Objects. Both Deep Impact and Armageddon featured massive space rocks on a collision course with Earth, and in both cases the day was saved by blowing them up with nuclear weapons.

Back in the real world, David French of North Carolina State University has come up with an unusual alternative. Instead of breaking out the nukes, aerospace engineer French has suggested using a big rope and some weights to save the planet from destruction.

It’s an idea that probably won’t be picked up by Hollywood any time soon, but it would work. By using an asteroid-tether-ballast system you change the object’s centre of mass, which according to Newton’s laws will in turn change its orbit. The space rock flies by, completely missing Earth, and Bruce Willis doesn’t even have to get out of bed. It’s a bit like attaching a tennis ball to a football – the change in centre of mass would mean even David Beckham would find it hard to score a goal/destroy the planet.

Would such a scheme be practical though? One thing’s clear: we’d need a lot of rope. French estimates using a tether of between 1,000 kilometres to 100,000 kilometres – the latter of which you could wrap around the Earth two and a half times!

Maybe it’s not such a good idea then, but when you compare it to other options it doesn’t seem so far fetched. Alternative proposals for Earth defence include painting the asteroid to alter the effect of sunlight on its orbit, and a cosmic game of snooker which uses one asteroid to knock another off course. As for the nuclear weapons used in the films, French thinks they come with just too many problems:

“Nuclear weapons are an intriguing possibility, but have considerable political and technical obstacles. Would the rest of the world trust us to nuke an asteroid? Would we trust anyone else? And would the asteroid break into multiple asteroids, giving us more problems to solve?”

Looks like the tether and ballast wins out then – if we can work out how to build one. Perhaps the same technology could be used to make a space elevator? Oh, and if you’re still up for a game of Asteroids – enjoy.

One of the most powerful telescopes ever constructed has finally seen first light. The e-MERLIN array, centred on The Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, is the only system of telescopes in the world capable of rivalling the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) for resolution.

In order to achieve this one telescope is not sufficient. Instead e-MERLIN is made up of seven radio telescopes separated by 217km and spread all over Britain. It turns out that the maths behind this is very simple. To work out the resolution of your telescope all you have to do is divide the wavelength of the signal you are receiving by the diameter of your telescope. That’s it. So the e-MERLIN is almost three thousand times more sensitive than the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell, itself a leviathan in ‘scope terms, at 76m. It is the Lovell (which you can see me climbing in a short film about it, here) which is the centre-piece of the array and makes up a considerable fraction of the observing power.

A map showing the 7 e-MERLIN telescope spread across the country.

However, this system of telescopes is not new; it is used to be called MERLIN. What makes e-MERLIN new is the way that the seven telescopes communicate with one another. Super-fast optical fibres have now been laid underground to replace the old system of microwave transmission which restricted astronomers to receiving only 1% of the signal received at the telescopes. Dr Tim O’Brien, Head of Public Outreach at Jodrell, is likening the upgrade to switching from dial-up to broadband internet. In truth, this is an understatement. The upgrade means that that e-MERLIN can now do in one day what used to take three years to achieve.

This speedy connection and almost unrivalled resolution means that the array can tackle new astronomy when it goes fully online at the beginning of next year. Jodrell’s speciality is pulsars, rapidly rotating neutron stars formed when massive stars collapse at the end of their lifetimes. These exotic objects are so dense that just a spoonful of their material would weigh more than every person on Earth put together. Over 100 institutions worldwide have bid for observing slots on e-MERLIN, to study pulsars and other cosmic phenomenon that stretch all the way out to the edge of the observable universe.

But it almost didn’t happen. In a spending review in early 2008, the UK funding panel the STFC decided to pull the plug on the funding for Jodrell and the e-MERLIN upgrade. At the time I was a final year undergraduate at The University of Manchester, the university which owns and operates Jodrell and e-MERLIN. The department rallied together to try and save what we felt was a very necessary project from losing funding. For my part I shot and directed a campaign video airing the views of the students and explaining what actions could be taken to save the project. I also went on local TV to argue the case for overturning the decision. Eventually, at the eleventh hour, the STFC had a change of heart and the project was saved.

So as an ex-Jodrellite and for my former colleagues who campaigned for this cutting edge project to continue, today is a very proud day.

The first picture has been released from Kepler, NASA’s $600m planet-hunting satellite. This latest eye-in-the-sky is pointing its 95 mega-pixel camera at the same patch of sky and staring at it for three and a half years. Hidden deep within this cosmic window are over 100,000 suns that astronomers have identified as possible host stars for Earth like planets. The aim of the mission is to get a handle on just how many Earth like planets there are out there in our galaxy.

The patch of sky in which Kepler team hope to find Earth's 'twin'.

To do this the Kepler team are utilising what is known as the transit method, one of three main techniques for looking at so-called extra-solar planets. Of course, planets like our own are far too dim compared to their luminous gravitational masters and so can’t be seen directly. Instead Kepler is looking for small dips in the star’s brightness as the planet passes or ‘transits’ in front of it. Kepler’s instrumentation is so sensitive that it can detect dips in brightness of just one part in 50,000 or 0.002%. This is actually more sensitive than required to find planets the size of the Earth. If there were some alien blogging astronomer out there staring back at us, they would see our Sun dim by 0.008% as our planet glided across our star.

With Kepler scrutinising this patch of sky for around 42 months it should be able to catch approximately three orbits of such Earth-like planets. And there is good reason to look for planets with the same orbital period as our own. Johannes Kepler, the 16th century astronomer after whom the satellite is named, formulated three laws of planetary motion, one of which says the time it takes a planet to orbit its star is precisely related to its distance from it. Planets that take a year to traverse their elliptical path around their Sun will be in the habitable zone, the small window of space around a star where water is liquid. Sometimes referred to as the Goldilocks Hypothesis, where the Earth is porridge that’s temperature, instead of being too hot or too cold to have liquid water, instead is just right, this region around a star is the most likely place to find life.

And so the search to answer the age-old question of whether we are alone in the Universe has entered a new and I have to admit an exciting phase. When the data from this mission is released, probably in the middle of the next decade, we should have a much better idea of just how rare watery blue marbles like our own are. Perhaps, as always in science, the most intriguing outcome will be the unexpected. The question of just how rare Earths are formed a part of my undergraduate dissertation (which you can read here). At the time I approximated that there should be around 10 million Earths in our Milky Way galaxy. Whether this prediction is in itself a form of Goldilocks’ porridge, being too low, too high or just right, I really can’t wait to find out.

This week in Ben Goldacre news

Everyone’s favourite doctor/columnist has put an extra chapter of his book Bad Science online for free. I’m actually a bit behind the times on this one, it was meant to go in last week’s Roundup but I forgot, so you might have already read it. If not, you can grab the PDF here.

The chapter deals with vitamin pill salesman Matthias Rath, who was suing Goldacre and The Guardian when the book was first published. Now that they have won the court case the book is being republished with the extra chapter, but Goldacre was kind enough to provide it for everyone else as well. Isn’t he nice? For the next few days you can also see him on the latest episode of Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe. His section starts around 11 minutes in, with a tirade against “the media’s greatest ever science hoax”, the MMR vaccine.

New science journalism course at City University

The Association of British Science Writers has highlighted a new science journalism course starting this September at City University. With tuition fees of £7,495 it’s a lot more expensive than the Imperial course (which covers more than just journalism), and the general feeling on the ABSW members mailing list is it’s perhaps just a re-branding of City’s existing journalism courses with a bit more science thrown in.

The Exquisite Corpse of Science

Speaking of Imperial, fellow sci-commer Tim Jones has put his group project online for all to see, and it’s a far cry from my group’s altar piece. Along with Arko Olesk and Graham Paterson, Tim drew inspiration from the exquisite corpse of the surrealist movement to create a picture of science as perceived by the public, the media, and scientists. Go have a look.

Time to feel small

As both Douglas Adams and I have said before, space is big. Really big. So big that I’m only able to include a small part of this excellent illustration in the post:

You ain't seen nothing yet.

Go here if you want to see the rest, and appreciate just how vast the universe is. Unless that’s just too much for a Sunday afternoon!

We’ve had a few stories on Just A Theory about people sending objects into space using impressively cheap materials, and each time I’ve come away wondering just high high about the planet we count as “space”. Now, scientists at the University of Calgary in Canada can provide an answer.

Two years ago their research team created an instrument for a NASA mission designed to monitor the difference between the winds of Earth’s atmosphere and the flow of charged particles in space. These flows can reach speeds of over 1000 km/hr, and they mark they very edge of the atmosphere – the gateway to space.

Data from that instrument has now been analysed, and results published this week in the Journal of Geophysical Research confirm that space begins 118km above the Earth’s surface. I can’t access the paper, “Rocket‐based measurements of ion velocity, neutral wind, and electric field in the collisional transition region of the auroral ionosphere”, but it’s there if you want it.

Called the Supra-Thermal Ion Imager, the measuring instrument was launched aboard the JOULE-II rocket on 19th January 2007. Costing $422,000 to develop, it collected data for just five minutes as the rocket passed through the edge of space. An expensive way to find out where out planetary backyard ends and the rest of the universe begins, but carrying out such a measurement is actually quite tricky.

The region containing the edge of space is too high for balloons, but too low for satellites. This experiment marks the first time comprehensive data has been gathered, says one of the paper’s lead authors, David Knudsen:

“It’s only the second time that direct measurements of charged particle flows have been made in this region, and the first time all the ingredients – such as the upper atmospheric winds – have been included.”

Knudsen is an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Calgary, and explained that the Supra-Thermal Ion Imager measured the heat released by frictional forces rubbing on the atmosphere:

“When you drag a heavy object over a surface, the interface becomes hot. In JOULE-II we were able to measure directly two regions being dragged past each other, one being the ionosphere — being driven by flows in space — and the other the Earth’s atmosphere.”

Besides the simple satisfaction of knowing, is there any reason to find the edge of space? Yes, says Knudsen. It could further our understanding of the Earth’s atmosphere and help in the fight against climate change.

“The results have given us a closer look at space, which is a benefit to pure research in space science,

“But it also allows us to calculate energy flows into the Earth’s atmosphere that ultimately may be able to help us understand the interaction between space and our environment. That could mean a greater understanding of the link between sunspots and the warming and cooling of the Earth’s climate as well as how space weather impacts satellites, communications, navigation, and power systems.”

Before we get on with the Weekly Roundup, I should introduce the latest Just A Theory blogger. You may have already noticed Emma’s post yesterday about tasty vaccines, but if not go and have a read. She previously studied pharmacology at Newcastle University before joining the sci comm course at Imperial, and works part time at Understanding Animal Research. Welcome Emma! Now, on with the roundup.

Finding the science behind the news

It’s terribly annoying to read an interesting science story with no link to the original paper. Ever since I started writing Just A Theory, I’ve come across this problem again and again. When I write something, I’ll always link to the paper if I’ve been able to track it down.

A new tool will hopefully make this a little easier. Recently launched, the science behind it will hunt down those pesky papers for you. It currently only works for stories on the BBC and Reuters and since it uses PubMed it’s generally only of use for biological or medical research articles. It seems that designer Adam Bernard is planning to expand its scope though.

I had a go with the “robotic scientist” story that Sam wrote about on Friday, and it seems to work quite well. The result could be a bit prettier, but that’s a fairly minor complaint if it means I can get my hands on a few more papers!

Life on Mars Russia?

Ah, David Bowie, where would we be without you? Having to come up with original headlines for stories about Mars, that’s where. Earlier this week the Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow began a 105 day experiment to simulate a journey to the Red Planet.

Six volunteers climbed into their new home, three windowless steel capsules only 550 cubic metres big – just enough space to hold a tennis court under a moderately high ceiling. Inside, each volunteer has their own cabin furnished with bed, desk and chair. They will be able to contact the outside world, but only with a simulate Earth-Mars delay of 20 minutes.

Although it sounds like a potential Channel 4 reality show, the volunteers will be conducting serious science. As well as finding out how astronauts might deal with a cramped journey to Mars, they will conduct experiments and wear electrodes as they sleep to monitor brain activity.

It could be worse. If this experiment is a success, a subsequent experiment lasting 520 days will simulate a round trip to Mars with a 30 day stay on the surface. Unlike a real Martian mission however, the volunteers will be allowed to leave if they wish to abandon the task, though this will be counted as “death” for the purposes of the experiment…

Prince Charles, Told Off

Prince Charles’s Duchy Originals company, which recently hit the headlines with its false “detox” claims, has been .

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) informed Duchy Originals they must change the product description on their website. The MHRA granted Duchy Originals a license to sell their products, but not to make claims on their effects. At time of writing, the product page remains unchanged.

Underwater volcano

Earlier this week a volcano off the coast Tonga erupted from in the Pacific Ocean. This spectacular display has resulted in the formation of a new island, made up of pumice as the result of emerging lava and gas.

To the stratosphere on just £56

The curvature of the Earth is clearly visible in this photo taken by four Spanish schoolboys from their weather balloon.

Four students at a Spanish school have capture images of the stratosphere using a weather balloon and camera that cost just £56. Whilst there is no clear boundary between the Earth and outer space, the stratosphere is defined to be between 20 and 50km above sear level.

Aged between 18 and 19, the students attend the IES La Bisbal school in Catalonia. Gerard Marull Paretas, Sergi Saballs Vila, Marta­ Gasull Morcillo and Jaume Puigmiquel Casamort were “overwhelmed” with their results, and had to travel 10km to find the balloon when it eventually came crashing back to Earth.

Webcams in spaaace!

NASA have stuck a webcam on the outside of the International Space Station, so that we can watch the world go by. The camera will normally transmit 6pm to 6am GMT, whilst the astronauts inside are asleep. Outside of this time, you’ll see a map of the world showing the current location of the ISS, streamed in from Mission Control in Houston. Pretty cool.

The Map of Science

Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory have created a “Map of Science“, which describes how different areas of science link together. Similar projects have been undertaken before, but the team lead by Johan Bollen took a new approach.

“This research will be a crucial component of future efforts to study and predict scientific innovation, as well novel methods to determine the true impact of articles and journals,” Bollen said.

Rather than relying on citations in papers to find links, the new method tracked user requests for online scientific papers. By observing how scientists would hop from one paper to another, Bollen and team were able to study the network of articles and journals.

Whilst the citation method typically places the natural sciences at the centre, this latest map gives prominence to the humanities and social sciences. These areas can act as interdisciplinary bridges that can connect otherwise unrelated areas of science. The map could also be used to indicate emerging relationships between scientific areas, such as ecology and architecture.

What’s the risk?

I stumbled across this interesting tool for exploring risk. As regular readers will know, I can get quite cross about the confusion between relative risk and absolute risk. By playing with this little application, you’ll easily be able to get an understanding of the difference.

The tool allows you to display in various ways the increased risk of cancer from eating bacon sandwiches. There are of course options for relative vs absolute, but you can also choose to see the results in text form, pictorially, or as a variety of graphs. Have a go, and hopefully you’ll find it useful

Scientists, I know it’s tricky, but please figure out a cure for the common cold at some point in my lifetime. Todays’ post is less of a roundup and more of list of links – I’m hoping that normal service will resume on Wednesday, when both my cold and essays should be a thing of the past! Here we go:

A newly discovered species of tree has been named Sorbus Admonitor or “No parking” after the sign stuck to the first known sample. Discovered in the 1930s in Watersmeet in North Devon, it is only recently that a biochemical analysis has identified it as a distinct species.

The state of Illinois has declared that Pluto is still a planet, despite the 2006 ruling by the International Astronomical Union that downclassed it to “dwarf planet”.

Don’t miss your chance to bid on Einstein’s doctorate diploma. Issued 15 January 1906 by Zurich University’s school of mathematics and natural sciences, bidding will start at around SFr20,000-SFr30,000 ($17,340-$26,000).