Just A Theory

Things are still a bit slim, weekly roundup wise, but here you go:

Keep on rovin’

Yesterday marked the fifth anniversary of the Mars rover Spirit, which touched down on the red planet on 3rd January, 2004. Spirit was joined 21 days later by a second rover, Opportunity

NASA had planned for the plucky little robots to last for at least three months, but half a decade later they’re still providing useful information about our planetary neighbour. The data gathered by the pair has conclusively shown that Mars was at one point home to liquid surface water, raising the possibility that life once existed there.

The pair of rovers are starting to show their age, however. Spirit has to explore the Martian surface backwards due to a jammed wheel, and Opportunity’s robotic arm has a glitchy shoulder. When they do eventually fail completely they will not be replaced until the 2011 launch of a more advanced probe, the Mars Science Laboratory, which has been delayed by technical and monetary difficulties.

The Sky in Motion

This video is made from a series of 7,000 separate images, and depicts the changes in the night sky over time. Stars dancing around, the Moon and Sun flying by, and many other astronomical wonders are all highlighted in this rather neat video:

…0! Happy New Year! Sorry if you’re a bit confused due to the reverse chronological nature of blogging, but I’m actually finishing the countdown of the previous post from moments earlier. How exciting. Well, let’s see in the new year with some predictions of what 2009 holds for science. The Telegraph spoke to some leading scientists to find out what’s in store.

Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics and Master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge (phew, deep breath) points out that it is both 400 years since Galileo first wielded his telescope, as well as Darwin’s bicentennial. I expect we’ll see a little competition between these two scientific greats in 2009, but Rees hopes that we will gain answers to a question “equally interesting to astronomers and to Darwinians” - is there life on other planets? In 2009 the search for exoplanets will continue, and Rees hopes that we will figure out where we should be looking.

The editor of New Scientist, Roger Highfield, expects that commercial space travel will be big in 2009, with Virgin Galactic beginning their test flights. The space agencies of the US, Russia and the rest will also be looking to increase our knowledge of the heavens, with missions to Mars and the launching of telescopes on the cards. Highfield also looks forward to the publication of the Neanderthal genome, the relaunch of the LHC, and the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.

Colin Pillinger, Head of Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open University, thinks that the credit crunch will scupper any space-based plans, and that most of the year will be spent looking back at past achievements. Pessimistic perhaps, but we shall see. Baroness Greenfield, Director of the Royal Institution, is a little more positive, hoping to see advances in the field of neurodegeneration, including treatments for brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Professor Sir John Bell, President of the Academy of Medical Sciences also hopes to see further cures by searching for genetic links using the human genome project. Finally, science minister Lord Drayson had a rather dull and on message prediction:

“My predication for 2009 is that the Government will continue to invest in science despite the global economic downturn.”

Only time will tell. If you’re still not quite ready to let 2008 go, have a crack at the Guardian’s Science Quiz 2008. I’m afraid to say I scored a measly 10 out of 20! Other than that, all I have left to say is happy 2009!

As another year draws to a close, you’ve got just 61 seconds left of 2008. That’s right, 61. This year, official timekeepers are adding a “leap second” on to the end of the last minute of the last hour of 2008. You might not notice the extra second flit past as you Auld Lang Syne your way in to 2009, but it serves an important purpose.

Our measurement of time used to be based on the movement of the Sun; you got up when it rose and went to bed when it set. Advances in technology meant that timepieces had to become more and more accurate. It starting with the need for coordinated train timetables across a country, meaning that local time just didn’t cut it any more. In the mid-19th century, railway companies around Great Britain adopted Greenwich Mean Time, the familiar GMT. Use by all soon followed.

GMT was still based on the movement of the Sun however, and this is where we hit a problem. The Sun, of course, does not actually move across the sky; it only appears to because the Earth is rotating. The Earth’s rotation is not constant though; changes in the atmosphere or the planet’s molten core can cause it to speed up and slow down.

With the introduction of technology such as GPS positioning and the internet, even more accurate time was needed. Physicists found that oscillation of caesium atoms could be used to define a second; and in 1967 the International System of Units (SI) decreed the duration of 9,192,631,770 such oscillations to be exactly one second.

These so-called atomic clocks are now the de facto standard of time, known as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The trouble is, this highly accurate measure doesn’t have any connection to the Earth’s rotation, so if we still want noon to occur when the Sun is at its highest point, corrections to UTC must occasionally be made. Enter the leap second.

Without the occasional leap second (the last was three years ago) UTC would gradually drift away from what we might perceive was “real” time. Eventually, the position of the Sun would have no relation at all to the time, and we can’t be having that. Earlier this year, some scientists proposed that rather than adding a leap second every few years, we should add a leap hour every 6 centuries. This doesn’t sound like the best idea to me - adding a few seconds here and there is easy to slip past people with out too much fuss, but an entire hour? No thanks.

What would we even call such an hour? For those of you with timepieces connected to an atomic clock (like this one, perhaps) might notice the strange occurrence of 23:59:60 before it flicks over to 00:00:00 and the new year. Would a leap hour run from 24:00:00 to 24:59:59? Surely it would cause nothing but problems.

No, a leap second seems to be the way to go. Even though you’re probably not reading this at 11:59pm (and let’s be honest, the sever is posting it at this time, not me!), join me in the rather unusual New Years countdown of 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 1…

Warning: This music may cause head injuries

The British Medical Journal is reporting that head banging, the favoured dance of rockers everywhere, may be bad for your health. The detrimental effects can be avoided however, by reducing the motion of the head, rocking out to lower tempo songs or on every other beat, or even resorting to neck braces.

Declan Patton and Professor Andrew McIntosh of the University of New South Wales attended concerts of noted metalers including Motörhead and Ozzy Osbourne, in order to construct a “theoretical head banging model”. It turns out that the risk of neck injury begins at a tempo of 130 beats per minute, but the average head banging song exceeds this at 146 bpm, and could lead to headaches and dizziness. Thankfully, the authors suggest a number of remedies, including public campaigns headed by Cliff Richard and the labelling of CDs with anti-head banging warnings. Rock n’ roll.

Crackle, like a bad reception? It almost works. I’m sorry, I just couldn’t pass up the post title

Were things always better in the good old days? It seems that this may not be the case, according to a study published in the journal Psychological Science. New research has found that negative memories could possibly fade faster than positive ones, as a defence mechanism against getting old.

Scientists at Duke University showed a series of 30 photographs to two groups of adults, one with an average age of 70, another with an average age of 24. Some were fairly mundane whilst others depicted negative images such as acts of violence. It was found that the older group could remember fewer negative images than the younger group - perhaps explaining their rosier outlook on the past.

Still waiting for a comment from the bear in the woods

Pope Benedict XVI has praised Galileo for his work in demonstrating that the Earth is not the centre of the universe, and in fact revolves around the Sun. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who disagreed with you nowadays, but back in 1633 Galileo was branded a heretic and forced to live the rest of his life under house arrest.

The Pope was speaking at an event celebrating the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first observations with a telescope. He said that understanding the laws of nature could stimulate an appreciation of God’s work.

I’ve finally succumbed to whatever winter bug is currently going around, and thus my ability to blog/think has been somewhat curtailed. As such, all I have for you today are some rather wonderful Hungarian maps of Mars, Venus, the Moon and the Earth. They’d make some nice wallcharts, if you’ve got a big enough colour printer.

Mars-velous.

Hopefully, I’ll be feeling a little better tomorrow, and return you to your regular blogging fun.

TIME magazine, as part of their “Top 10 Everything of 2008″ series have released the ten most impressive scientific discoveries of the year. “Discoveries” might be stretching it a bit for some of the entries - accomplishments, perhaps? Semantics aside, let’s have a look at the list:

1. Large Hadron Collider

No surprises here. The LHC was the biggest thing in science for most of the year, with extensive coverage in the mainstream media. Even here at Just A Theory I’ve written quite a bit on everyone’s favourite particle accelerator. Unfortunately, there won’t be any discoveries made at CERN for a while yet - a helium leak soon after it was started means the collider won’t be up and running again until sometime next June.

2. The North Pole of Mars

Well, we already knew it was there, but this year in May NASA’s Phoenix probe landed in Mar’s far northern region. No signs of life were found, but we now have further confirmation that Mars was once a wet planet, much like our own Earth.

3. Creating Life

Geneticist J. Craig Venter, instrumental in mapping the human genome, wrote the genetic code for an entirely new type of bacterium, Mycoplasma laboratorium. He and his team put together 582,000 base pairs that make up the genetic information of the new species. Next, this DNA must be inserted into a living bacterium to see if it can take over, effectively creating artificial life.

4. China Soars into Space

The world’s biggest country made new strides into space this year, with the first Chinese spacewalk spacewalk. Pretty impressive, since it’s only their third mission in a space programme that began in 2003.

5. More Gorillas in the Mist

For once, some good news on animal conservation. It turns out that previous estimates of the number of western lowland gorillas were too low, and the Republic of Congo is now thought to contain 125,000 gorillas - twice as many as previously thought.

6. Brave New Worlds

The discovery of extrasolar solar planets continued at a rapid pace this year, with 45 new worlds announced in June by Swiss astronomer Michel Mayor. Later on in November, we got the first ever pictures of planets around another star thank’s to good ol’ Hubble.

7. The Power of Invisibility

Scientists at Berkeley, University of California, announced the invention of an invisibility cloak. Nanotechnology and metamaterials make it possible for an object to completely vanish, but don’t expect your own cloak soon - it’s far from ready to be practical yet.

8. Cenozoic Park?

In Novemeber, biochemistry professor Steven Schuster of Penn State University revealed 80% of the genome of the ancient woolly mammoth, painstakingly recovered using fossilised hair. This lead to speculation we might one day be cloning the furry creatures - has no one seen Jurassic Park?!

9. Can You Spell Science?

Between 1979 and 2006, the percentage of science literacy in adults has doubled to 17%. It’s not that great news though - according to the survey by the University of Michigan, a quarter of the US population count as “civic scientifically literate”. In other words, three in four adults will struggle to understand science stories printed in the media - I wonder if that includes this blog?!

10. First Family

Finally, we have the discovery of the first “nuclear family”. In Saxony-Anhalt in central Germany, a 4,600-year-old grave was discovered to contain the remains of an adult male and female, and two boys aged 8 to 9 and 4 to 5. DNA evidence confirmed their relationships: they are indeed the First Family.

If you’re wandering about outside this evening, you may notice your surroundings feel a bit brighter than usual. No, I’m afraid the council haven’t sprung for additional street lamps. Look up at the sky, and you’ll see the Moon, closer to Earth than it has been for the past 15 years.

Assuming clouds don’t obscure the view (from where I’m sitting, that might unfortunately be the case) the Moon could potentially appear 14% bigger and 30% brighter than other full moons this year, according to NASA. The effect is due to the elliptical orbit of our satellite friend. This oval-shaped path varies the distance between the Moon and ourselves. Normally, it orbits at around 385,000km from Earth, but tonight it will close the gap to around 363,000km.

A lovely full moon.

According to Dr Marek Kukula, an astronomer at the UK’s Royal Observatory, this astronomical event only occurs every so often:

“Its only every few years that a full moon happens to coincide with the part of the Moon’s orbit when its closest to the Earth,

“What people will see is a full moon that’s really bright and a bit bigger than what they’re used to.”

Interestingly, a psychological illusion actually makes the Moon appear even bigger when it rises and sets, says Dr Kukula:

“When it’s close to the horizon, our brain interprets it as being bigger than it actually is, this is called the moon illusion,

Dr Robert Massey of the UK Royal Astronomical Society cautions against expecting too much of a sight, however:

“The Moon may be brighter and may appear somewhat larger, but it’s really quite hard for the eye to notice the difference; the eye will compensate for the extra brightness, it’s not like going from night to day.”

Still, for all you amateur astronomers out there, look to the skies tonight!

I’m afraid I’m in full on essay mode this weekend, so today will be brief. Thankfully, this is the last essay of the term, so soon it’ll be all Just A Theory, all the time.

What I have for you this evening is an interesting astronomical quirk. If you’ve been staring up in to the sky recently you might have noticed two very bright stars, quite close together. In fact, these aren’t stars at all, but a very visible Venus and Jupiter. We are also experiencing a crescent moon at the moment, and if you’re in the Southern hemisphere these three astronomical bodies may have come together quite satisfyingly to form a smiley face, much like this one :)

There are some great photos around, so if you were unable to see it don’t worry. The Daily Mail have a few nice ones, as do the BBC, but my favourite has to be this one on Astronomy Picture of the Day. It’s currently enjoying a spot on my desktop background!

Can you spot the face?

Just a short little story for you today, but it’s quite a sweet one. Earlier this week, four teddy bears have been sent to the very edge of space by a group of 11-, 12- and 13-year-olds, with the help of members of the Cambridge University Spaceflight student club.

Boldy going bears!

The brave bears were lifted to just over 30 km above sea level with the aid of a helium-filled latex balloon. Each bear wore a different space suit, designed by the kids to determine which materials provide the best insulation against the -53 °C temperatures they would encounter during their mission.

The Daily Mail have a few quotes from the kids involved. Thia Unsworth, aged 12, said:

“It was unbelievable to see the balloon take off and it’s incredible to see the pictures of the teddy bears in space.

“I’ve always loved science before, but I now understand how it helps in the real world.”

It’s great to see kids involved with activities such as these, which allow them to see that science isn’t just sitting in the classroom and reading textbooks; it also involves getting out into the field and designing experiments. Their teacher, Steve Hinshelwood, seems to agree, as he told the Guardian:

“Suddenly scientific ideas such as insulation, convection, conduction and radiation became important. Thinking about weight made ideas of buoyancy, pressure and the composition of the atmosphere relevant,” he said.

“The need to get the teddies back gave the students a chance to think about computer control and radio communications.

“I don’t think that the students realised how much science they were learning – they were just having fun.”

Four months without a heart

In what is really an amazing story, D’Zhana Simmons, a 14-year-old girl from South Carolina, USA, spent 118 days hooked up to a machine that kept her blood flowing - because her heart had been removed. It is believed that this is the first time such a young person has been kept alive this long without a heart.

On July 2nd of this year Ms Simmons underwent a heart transplant operation at Miami’s Holtz Children’s Hospital, but the operation was unsuccessfully and the new organ had to be removed. Artificial substitute heart chambers were implanted and hooked up to two blood pumps, until she was was strong enough to have another, successful, transplant.

Unfortunately, doctors believe that her troubles are not over yet. Although her prognosis, is good, there is a 50% chance she will need another new heart before she turns 30.

Live longer and prosper

Increased amounts of telomerase, a naturally forming protein, in the body could prevent cells from dying and extend your lifespan, according to a team at the Spanish National Cancer Centre in Madrid.

Telomerase protects a cell’s chromosomes, but as we age and cell division activity increases this protection can get worn out, causing cells to die. By increasing natural levels of telomerase, scientists hope to stop this from happening.

The theory was tested with genetically engineered mice, whose bodies produced 10 times the normal levels of the protein, and as a result lived 50% longer than normal mice. Lead researcher, Maria Blasco, was optimistic but cautious about the results:

“You can delay the ageing of mice and increase their lifespan,” she said.

“(But)I think it is very hard to extrapolate data from mouse ageing to human ageing.”

One problem to overcome is that telomerase can lead to increased risk of cancer, but Dr Blasco believe that this could be overcome by combining the treatment with cancer drugs.

Lost in space

NASA has lost one of its astronauts aboard the International Space Station - but thankfully, it’s not one of the human crew. One of two spiders that were launched into orbit on the Endeavour last week has gone for its very own spacewalk.

After finding it absent from its tank, NASA managers insisted that the spider was not lost; it just couldn’t be found. So says Kirk Shireman, NASA’s deputy space station programme manager:

“We don’t believe that it’s escaped the overall payload enclosure,

“I’m sure we’ll find him spinning a web sometime here in the next few days.”

Efforts to search for the spider in its neighbour’s tank have been scuppered, because the poor creature is so confused by the zero-gravity environment that it has filled it with a dense web, making any search difficult.

The two arachnids had been sent into space by the University of Colorado, who hoped to answer schoolchildren’s questions about spider webs in space. It’s clearly a very sticky issue.

I’m in Cambridge this weekend, so I’m afraid all I have for you today is the image below. It’s a recently restored photo taken in 1966 by NASA’s Lunar Orbiter 1, and represents the first glimpse of the Earth from the Moon. I’ve lifted it from Astronomy Picture of the Day, so go there to check out the full resolution version. Have a look around whilst you’re there, it’s a great site.

If you’re still hungry for some science, might I suggest watching Einstein and Eddington this evening on BBC2 at 9.10pm. Starring Andy Serkis and David Tennant in the titular roles, it tells the story of the relationship between the two great scientists. I’ve been looking forward to it for some time, and you can expect a full review next week. See you tomorrow for the usual Weekly Roundup, but until then I’ll let the picture do the talking:

The first ever image of Earth from the Moon

Recycling seems to be all the rage these days, with our collective eco-conscience pushing us towards rummaging through the bins to sort the paper from the plastic. In space however, recycling is a necessity. Each extra kilogram of material that has to be blasted into orbit increases the cost of a launch, so making the most of what you’ve got is essential. To this end, NASA’s latest scheme is to make astronauts drink their own urine.

The crew of the International Space Station require water just like the rest of us, but at 350 km above the surface of the Earth there is a distinct lack of rainfall. Up to now, NASA’s solution was a rather ingenious one: use waste water from the space shuttle. The spacecraft produces water as a byproduct of its normal electrical systems, so this was simply bagged up and delivered every time the shuttle and the ISS docked. Unfortunately, plans to retire the vehicle in the next two years will put an end to these regular deliveries.

Just try not to think where it came from...

The space shuttle Endeavour docked with the ISS yesterday for a mission that has been unofficially dubbed “Extreme Home Improvements”. In addition to providing expanded crew quarters and a new toilet, Endeavour is also carrying the astronauts new water system.

By distilling, filtering, ionizing and oxidizing the waste water of the ISS (including the astronauts own urine), the crew will be provided with an ample supply of fresh water - but how does it taste?

“Some people may think it’s downright disgusting, but if it’s done correctly, you process water that’s purer than what you drink here on Earth,” said Endeavour astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper.

Bob Bagdigian, who oversaw the development of the new water system, found that the most common complaint was a faint taste of iodine, which is used in the recycling system in order to restrict the growth of microbes.

“Other than that, it is just as refreshing as any other kind of water,” Mr Bagdigian said.

“I’ve got some in my fridge. It tastes fine to me.”

So next time you find yourself grumbling as you sort the weekly recycling, remember: it could be worse!

The Hubble Space Telescope has snapped the first visible-light picture of a planet outside the Solar System. Although so-called “extrasolar” planets have been found before - 300 had at the last count - this is the first time we have been able to view one directly. Previous discoveries were made using indirect methods such as radial-velocity surveys which search for stars that “wobble” due to their planets.

The new planet, called Fomalhaut b, is suspected to be more than three times the mass of Jupiter. It orbits the star Fomalhaut, 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis, which is surrounded by a huge cloud of dust similar to the Kuiper Belt around our own sun.

This debris disk was discovered when Hubble took a picture of the star in 2004. Astronomer Paul Kalas, of the University of California at Berkeley suspected in 2005 that the dust was being gravitationally modified by a planet lying between the star and the ring’s inner edge.

The dusty Fomalhaut system, and the newly discovered planet Fomalhaut b.

Kalas and his team’s suspicions have finally paid off now that Hubble has photographed a point 1.8 billion miles inside the ring’s inner edge. Taking the picture was no mean feat however.

“Our Hubble observations were incredibly demanding. Fomalhaut b is 1 billion times fainter than the star. We began this program in 2001, and our persistence finally paid off,” Kalas says.

“Fomalhaut is the gift that keeps on giving. Following the unexpected discovery of its dust ring, we have now found an exoplanet at a location suggested by analysis of the dust ring’s shape. The lesson for exoplanet hunters is ‘follow the dust,’” added team member Mark Clampin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

A second observation of Fomalhaut in 2006 was used to confirm the planet’s existence. By noting the difference between the two photos, the team were able to calculate a 872-year-long orbit for the planet. By comparison, Pluto only takes 248 years to orbit the sun.

An artist's impression of the planet.

Scientists will be keeping their eye on Fomalhaut b for a while yet. Future observations will attempt to view the planet using infrared light and look for evidence of water vapour in the atmosphere. This and other observations will be made possible by the launch of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The replacement for Hubble is scheduled to launch in 2013.

Cash for codebreakers

Bletchley Park, home to the Allied codebreakers of World War II, has secured a grant of £330,000 to restore the roof of the historic site. The Grade II-listed mansion is at risk due to previous neglect.

Codebreakers who were at Bletchley include Alan Turing, arguably the founder of computer science. The need to crack the German Enigma machine lead to great developments in cryptoanalysis and other sciences. It’s a fascinating place that I’d love to visit one day, so hopefully this new money will help preserve the site.

China plans their own Moon buggy

The Chinese media has reported the nation’s ambitions to put an unmanned buggy on the moon by 2012 as a step along the road to a full-on manned mission.

The news follows on from China’s previous space efforts at the end of September, in which they broadcast footage of a first space-walk back to those watching on Earth. It could also be seen as an answer to the American’s testing their latest moon buggy prototype.

China says that its lunar mission will include three steps of “orbiting, landing and returning”, but has not yet set any dates for manned moon mission yet.

Not lead into gold, but tequila into diamonds

Mexican scientists have discovered a way to turn tequila into diamonds. It turns out that the chemical makeup of the drink has a ratio of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon atoms which places it within the “diamond growth region.”

The scientists turned to tequila not for its intoxicating quality, but because previous efforts to create diamonds from organic solutions such as acetone, ethanol, and methanol had proved unsuccessful. They then realised that their ideal compound of 40% ethanol and 60% water was remarkably close to tequila.

Luis Miguel Apátiga was one of the researches from the National Autonomous University of Mexico:

“To dissipate any doubts, one morning on the way to the lab I bought a pocket-size bottle of cheap white tequila and we did some tests,” Apátiga said. “We were in doubt over whether the great amount of chemicals present in tequila, other than water and ethanol, would contaminate or obstruct the process, it turned out to be not so. The results were amazing, same as with the ethanol and water compound, we obtained almost spherical shaped diamonds of nanometric size. There is no doubt; tequila has the exact proportion of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms necessary to form diamonds.”

The diamonds were made by heating tequila to transform it into a gas, and then heating this gas further to break down the molecular structure. The result: solid diamond crystals, about 100-400 nanometres in size. They could be used to coat cutting tools, or as high-power semiconductors, radiation detectors and optical-electronic devices.

Apparently “socialite” Paris Hilton has bagged herself a $200,000 seat on the first Virgin Galactic (for the long-term readers, you may remember one of my first posts was about the company) flight into space.

She joins other rumoured “commerc-onauts” (a phrase I believe I’ve just coined) such as William Shatner, Sigourney Weaver, and Stephen Hawking, but has expressed some rather strange fears.

“I’m very scared to do it. What if I don’t come back?” she said. “With the whole light-years thing, what if I come back 10,000 years later, and everyone I know is dead? I’ll be like, ‘Great. Now I have to start all over.”

Ah yes Paris, that “whole light-years thing.” The esteemed Ms. Hilton appears to be referring to Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity, in which your perception of time can be affected relative to others, depending on your speed. In a famous thought-experiment Einstein suggested that placing one of a pair of twins on a near-light speed flight, whilst the other remains on Earth, could have some interesting effects.

Due to time dilation, the journey would take much longer from the point of view of the twin on Earth. When the space-faring twin returns, he would find that his Earth-bound brother had aged much more than him. It’s all due to the fixed speed of light, and explained by Einstein’s theory.

Paris seems to have been slacking in her Advanced Physics class however, because this effect (known as the twin paradox) can only happen at the speed of light. The Virgin Galactic flights will barely leave the atmosphere, let alone get up to 300 million metres per second, so she’s probably safe for now. Unfortunately.

Last week a team of NASA engineers, astronauts and geologists took a new lunar rover prototype for a spin in the Arizona desert. The Small Pressurized Rover was tested in the 11th annual Desert RATS field tests. Research and Technology Studies, that is - no rodents here!

The Small Pressurized Rover in action.

The design differs from the old Apollo lunar rover, because it allows the crew to sit inside a pressurized environment and drive about with the need for bulky spacesuits. The new rover was put through its paces with day-long trips around the desert to determine performance. Although these are some of the longest trips the prototype has made, this week the team will shift gears and begin three-day testing.

The original Apollo rover, on the surface of the Moon.

Although I understand the need for more versatile equipment, I’m kind of sad to see the Apollo buggy bite the moon-dust. It has a kind of retro-futuristic feel, looking kind of like someone knocked it up in their backyard in a spare afternoon, and it just looks pretty stylish. The new rover, whilst it might have increased functionality, just looks a little bit awkward. You certainly wouldn’t catch me puttering about the Sea of Tranquillity in one.

Does your name decide where you work?

When I first read the press release that psychologists in Belgium have discovered that a person’s initials have a link to the company they work for, my immediate thought was “yeah, whatever.” I thought that the conclusion had probably come about because some letters in the alphabet are more common than others, so a Mr E was more likely to work for E Inc. simply because there are more “E”s floating about than any other letter.

On reading the actual paper however, I can’t fault their methodology. It really does seem that a persons name can unconsciously effect their choice of work place. The phenomena is known as the name-letter effect, and has been demonstrated in other areas, for example a Jack is more likely to live in Jacksonville than in Philadelphia. It just goes to show that whilst scepticism is healthy, it’s not always right!

Now you seem them, now you don’t

The Daily Mail have some wonderful pictures of camouflaged animals. Yes, it’s a bit of a fluff piece, but they’re really quite something. My personal favourite is this one:

I'm not telling you what it is, you'll have to guess!

It came from outer space

A couple of weeks ago, The University of Western Ontario Meteor Group caught a falling meteor on camera. The team of astronomers are now looking for local residents who might have seen meteorites break off and crash to Earth.

The meteor streaks across the sky in this time-lapse image

Videos of the meteor are available online. I’ve never managed to see one of these space rocks in real life, so it’s pretty cool to be able to catch one on film.

Buzz Aldrin, the second man to have ever walked on the Moon, has suggested that the first astronauts sent to Mars shouldn’t plan on coming back.

In an interview with AFP, he compared a Martian expedition to European explorers heading for America knowing that they would not be returning. His argument is that since Mars is a much more hospitable place than the Moon, a one-way trip makes sense - especially considering the time taken to get there.

At between 55 and 400 million kilometres (depending on the arrangement of the planets around the Sun), Mars is much further than the 0.38 million km to the moon. Aldrin made the trip with Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins in just 8 days in 1969, but a Martian mission would be in transit for around a year and a half.

“That’s why you [should] send people there permanently,” said Aldrin. “If we are not willing to do that, then I don’t think we should just go once and have the expense of doing that and then stop.”

He asked: “If we are going to put a few people down there and ensure their appropriate safety, would you then go through all that trouble and then bring them back immediately, after a year, a year and a half?”

As I mentioned earlier this week, NASA already have plans for a return to the Moon. They hope to apply the knowledge gained from this experience into a manned mission to Mars, to take place around 2030 or 2040.

Life support systems and other equipment would be sent in advance by unmanned rockets, followed by half a dozen people. Aldrin suggested others could join them in later missions to make a colony of 30.

“They need to go there more with the psychology of knowing that you are a pioneering settler and you don’t look forward to go back home again after a couple a years,” he said.

“At age 30, they are given an opportunity. If they accept, then we train them, at age 35, we send them. At age 65, who knows what advances have taken place. They can retire there, or maybe we can bring them back.”

I tend to follow the British government’s official view: manned space exploration is an unnecessary expense and risk, and we should focus our efforts on improving the probes we send out. On the other hand, I can’t help but feel something stir when I think how much of an achievement a colony on Mars would be.

Perhaps Aldrin is right, but would anyone volunteer to leave the planet and never return? I think required reading for any potential Martian is the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, an epic tale of the colonisation of the Red Planet. Even if you’re planning on keeping your feet firmly on the Earth, I highly recommend it.

India’s unmanned moon rocket Chandrayaan 1 was successfully launched today from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, an island off the coast of Andhra Pradesh.

Chandrayaan 1 on the launch pad. The name is Sanskrit for 'moon craft'.

It will take about eight days to reach its destination, the Moon. It’s mission: detailed mapping of the lunar surface, and analysis of the distribution of mineral and chemical elements.

The chief of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Madhavan Nair, called the launch a “historic moment” for India.

“Today what we have charted is a remarkable journey for an Indian spacecraft to go to the moon and try to unravel the mysteries of the Earth’s closest celestial body and its only natural satellite,” Mr Nair said.

The entire mission is expected to cost 3.8bn rupees (£45m), much less than Japanese and Chinese probes sent to the Moon last year. India is keen to keep up with its other space-faring neighbours, leading to an Asian space race in much the same way the US and USSR competed during the Cold War.

The spacecraft will move to increasingly higher orbits in order to get to the Moon.

One objective of the mission is to look for water in the form of ice on or just under the surface of the Moon, particularly at the poles. The presence of water could make a permanent base on the Moon more likely, although such a mission would be far, far into the future.

America, the only nation to have sent men to the Moon, have announced plans for a return in 2019. The Russians also intend to land humans for the first time by 2025, and establish a base by 2027-2032. Whatever happens, it seems that the Moon will be much busier in the coming decades.

Now that’s what I call a sticky situation

The world’s longest stick insect has been discovered in the rainforests of Borneo. A member of the species Phobaeticus chani, the specimen measures 56.6cm, beating the previous record holder Phobaeticus serratipes by over a centimetre.

As you might imagine, it looks like a stick.

If you want to check it out for yourself, it will soon go on display in the Creepy Crawlies exhibition at the Natural History Museum.

‘Perfect shower’ is far from it

Yet another “formula for” story, with “scientists” developing a “mathematical formula” for the perfect shower. Apparently “The balance of privacy, pressure, time and temperature in the shower all need to be carefully moderated to create the perfect shower experience.”

The “research” was of course sponsored by someone - surprise surprise, a shower manufacturer. Neuropsychologist Dr David Lewis of Mindlab International had some nonsense to spout which I won’t bother repeating here.

You know what the worse thing is? They didn’t even include the bloody “formula” in their press release.

What does space smell like? Steak, apparantly

News about the aroma of space is doing the rounds at the moment. Supposedly NASA have hired fragrance firm Omega Ingredients to recreate the smell of space, to help astronaut training feel more realistic. Right…

Astronauts de-suiting after a space walk have reported “particular odours”, such as fried steak and hot metal. Surprisingly, the Sun is alone in reporting that this is most likely “non-scents”, with Sir PatricK Moore weighing in:

“These odours may have come from astronauts’ suits or spaceships. The vacuum of space is unlikely to have its own scent. It is more likely to be reacting to man-made equipment. There is nothing in space and nothingness cannot really have a smell.

“Boys or girls attempting to go to space because they think there is fried steak flying about might be disappointed.”

That looks pretty hot

And finally, some beautiful pictures of the sun (our star, not the newspaper discussed above, that is), perfect for brightening up any cold autumn morning. Enjoy.

Today is the 10th of October, or 10/10. The Eames Office has dubbed this “Powers of Ten Day” in honour of Charles and Ray Eames, who in 1977 created a film that allows one to grasp the diverse scales that make up our world, going up in powers of 10 from a picnic to the vastness of space and back down to a single atom in a human hand. If you’ve never seen it before, it’s well worth a watch:

When I watch this I find it amazing that science has allowed us to see so far out into the universe, whilst also giving us the ability to peer right into the basic building blocks of everything around us. It’s both humbling and awe inspiring, communicating many ideas about the world in a clear, engaging, and easy to understand many. No wonder that “over ten million” have viewed the film. It’s something that I think everyone should see, so I hope you watch it and enjoy Powers of Ten Day!

Better luck next year

Everyone has heard of the Nobel Prize, one of the highest achievements a scientist can win, but what about the Ig Nobel Prize?

The organisers say they honour achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think” - and winners have certainly come up with some of the strangest discoveries in science. This year, the 18th Ig Nobel Prize ceremony was held last Thursday at Harvard University.

Highlights include Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc of Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse who discovered that fleas on a dog can jump higher than those on a cat, and Dorian Raymer of the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Douglas Smith of the University of California who mathematically proved that a heap of string will inevitably tangle into knots. You can view the full list of winners here.

It’s the freakiest show snow

It’s not quite “Life On Mars”, but maybe David Bowie would consider changing the chorus of his classic song - NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has found snow falling from clouds on Mars. Using a laser sensor from the planet’s surface, the plucky little probe detected snow 4 kilometres above its landing site. Whilst the snow evaporated before hitting the ground, scientists think it might be possible to find signs that snow has reached the surface in the past.

Another experiment that analysed soil samples has also found suggestions of calcium carbonate (which makes up chalk) and possibly, clay. These substances tend to form only in the presence of liquid water here on Earth, giving further evidence that Mars had a “liquid past”.

Could future cars be used for electric storage?

The popularity of hybrid cars such as the Toyota Prius continues to increase as drivers become more environmentally concious - so much so that the Prius actually goes up in value, as hybrid enthusiasts are prepared to pay over the odds for a second hand car.

Hybrids work by using a traditional petrol-based engine in combination with a recharging battery that captures energy from wasteful actions such as braking, but plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) take this one step further, allowing you to hook up the car to a socket and charge from the National Grid.

Scientists at the University of Michigan have come up with a cunning idea to use PHEVs as overnight batteries, storing excess energy in your car whilst you sleep, and then releasing back into the gird when it is needed. Storing electricity until it is needed can often be costly and inefficient for power plants, but using this distributed model would allow the electric companies to keep up their supply without wasting energy. They’ll even pay you for the privilege of using your car’s battery - if the system ever takes off, that is.

Round ‘em up boys - it’s the carbon capturers

Carbon, carbon, carbon. Life as we know it could not exist without carbon, but this poor little element has a bad reputation these days. Really, it’s only when carbon gets together with two of it’s oxygen friends to form carbon dioxide (CO₂) that the trouble starts. Now, a team of climate change researchers at the University of Calgary have invented a machine that pluck CO₂ straight out of the air.

Although CO₂ only makes up around 0.04% of the Earth’s atmosphere, it is the main contributor to global warming. Removing CO₂ molecules from the air would help slow down climate change. The new machine uses less than 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity to remove one tonne of CO₂ from the air, and can capture the equivalent of a US citizen’s average yearly emissions - around 20 tonnes CO₂ per annum - on one square metre of scrubbing material. Team leader David Keith is optimistic about the technology’s prospects:

“This means that if you used electricity from a coal-fired power plant, for every unit of electricity you used to operate the capture machine, you’d be capturing 10 times as much CO₂ as the power plant emitted making that much electricity,”

At the moment, however, the machine is still in its early stages. The current cost of capturing CO₂ is too high to make it commercially viable, but work continues on bringing the technique to market.

Tiny pictures, big prizes

You can now vote for your favourite entry in the 34th Annual Small World Photomicrography Competition. Some stunning pictures of the very small have been entered, so I encourage you to take a look. Winners will receive thousands of dollars worth of Nikon photography equipment, and personally I’m going for this strange looking chicken embryo.

Following on from the LHC rap, postgraduate student Jonathan Chasa (aka Oort Kuiper) has created a rap explaining all about astrobiology, the study of the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe.

I have to admit I prefer the LHC rap (indeed, I actually found myself humming it at one point…) but Chasa’s effort is a good one, with lots of scientific language presented in an accessible way. Commissioned by NASA’s Astrobiology Magazine European Edition, the rap was reported on by the BBC and already has over 65,000 views on YouTube. Watch it for yourself:

Which scientific topic will be next for the rap treatment, I wonder?

In “bad thing turns out to be good, but only in small amounts” news

Chocolate lovers rejoice; new research shows that eating 6.7 grams of dark (not milk, sorry Cadburys) chocolate a day could help protect against heart disease. A joint study by the Research Laboratories of the Catholic University in Campobasso and the National Cancer Institute of Milan investigated the link between the levels of C reactive protein in the blood and a persons chocolate intake. The amount of the protein in the body increases during inflammation, which is a risk factor for heart disease amongst other conditions. The researchers hypothesised that antioxidants in cocoa seeds could help fight inflammation:

“We started from the hypothesis,” says Romina di Giuseppe, lead author of the study “that high amounts of antioxidants contained in the cocoa seeds, in particular flavonoids and other kinds of polyphenols, might have beneficial effects on the inflammatory state. Our results have been absolutely encouraging: people having moderate amounts of dark chocolate regularly have significantly lower levels of C-reactive protein in their blood. In other words, their inflammatory state is considerably reduced.”

Unfortunately this isn’t an excuse to pig out just yet: 6.7 grams a day works out to a small square two or three times a week. Sorry!

Turns out, he couldn’t actually see the Great Wall

China conducted its first spacewalk over the weekend, in only the country’s third manned space mission. The honour fell to Zhai Zhigang, who’s words of welcome were broadcast live: “I am here greeting the Chinese people and the people of the world.”

Just three nations have demonstrated the ability to launch people in to space: the US, Russia (and the USSR before it) and China, who first sent a man into space five years ago. It seems that we have the beginning of another space race on our hands, with both China and the US aiming to send manned missions to the Moon by 2020. The last space race, although militaristic in origin, brought with it many technological marvels that still benefit us to this day such as frozen food and GPS tracking systems. Bring it on, I say!

Duck!

An artist's impression of Dasornis, a gigantic bird which once flew over Britain.

Britain was once home to birds that were nearly the size of a small plane, a newly discovered fossil skull has shown. The species has been known for nearly 150 years, but the skull found on the Isle of Sheppey is one of the best preserved examples of Dasornis. This bird lived 50 million years ago and ith a 16 ft wingspan and a beak full of sharp teeth, it’s slightly more intimidating than its modern-day relatives of ducks and geese.

If you’ve ever been to the Empire State Building, or any other similarly tall structure, you may have found yourself taking a rather long ride in a lift. Imagine then how long riding a lift into space might take. It sounds straight out of a sci-fi nobel, and indeed the concept of a “space elevator” (sorry for the Americanism, but “space lift” just sound a bit naff) was popularised by the great Arthur C. Clarke in his book The Fountains of Paradise.

A space elevator - it brings a whole new meaning to the phrase 'lift-off'!

Here’s how it works: a satellite is launched into a geostationary orbit at a height of 35,786 km above the Earth’s equator. This orbit is so-named because at this exact height the satellite appears to remain stationary above a fixed point on the surface of the Earth, making it perfect to run a space elevator up to. The main problem is producing a cable strong but light enough to send anything up. Scientists at Japan’s Space Elevator Association believe that they are close to producing such a material, and building a space elevator.

The JESA is holding an international conference in Japan to try and lay out a timetable to construction. They believe that carbon nanotubes could hold the key to making the all-important cable. These special particles are much thinner than they are long, meaning they can be woven to incredibly strong fibres whilst also remaining relatively light.

Yoshio Aoki, director of the JESA and professor of precision machinery engineering at Nihon University thinks that the cable would need to be four times stronger than current nanotubes, but is confident that this can be achieved since improvements of around 100-fold strength has been made in the past five years.

Carbon nanotubes - one 50,000th the width of a human hair, but several millimetres long

A space elevator would be an amazing sight to behold, and perhaps the greatest ever feat of human ingenuity. Who could not fail to be moved by the sight of a cable reaching from the ground, far into space? Not I, for one. A space elevator would have many other (and more practical) benefits: easy and cheap access to space. Solar-powered generators could bring cheap electricity down to Earth, whilst rocket ships such as the inefficient Space Shuttle could be completely replaced. In their stead, space ships could be built with parts sent up into orbit on the elevator, and then launched from there.

Its all impressive stuff, but can the Japanese pull it off any time soon? I’d love to say yes, but I fear their November conference might be a bit too ambitious. Still, if they can build it, I can’t wait to ride it - even if it does mean hours upon hours of muzak!

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, makes a good point. The sheer giganticness of the universe is extremely difficult for us to comprehend. I find that even with adequate analogies, my brain still wants to dribble out my ears in protest at just how big it is. Even so I’ll give it a try. Let’s start locally, in our own solar system.

The Earth orbits the sun at an average distance of around 149,598,000 km - a distance known as one astronomical unit, or AU. In comparison, the average circumference of the Earth is just 40,041 km, or 0.0003 AU. Already, the mind boggles. Don’t Panic, as Douglas Adams’ Guide would tell us. We can use a trip to the chemist’s to help us understand.

Imagine we shrink the Earth to a circumference of 1 km. Forget about pesky things like changes in gravity or the question of where all 6.5 billion of us are going to stand - we’re just interested in making a new scale. On one side of our 1 km Earth is your house. On the exact opposite side is the chemist’s - at 500 meters away, it’s about a 5 minutes walk. The orbit of the Earth around the sun is now 3736 km - still pretty big, but we can visualise it. Roughly the same as the journey from New York to Los Angeles on the real Earth, it would take you a little over three and a half weeks to walk there from your house. That’s quite a few trips to the chemist’s.

Suppose the chemist’s decides to open a new branch, on the sun. Maybe head office decided they’d make a killing in the sun cream market, who knows. The trouble is they’ve closed your local branch on the 1 km Earth, and you really can’t be bothered to make the three and a half week trip to the new solar store. You call up head office to complain, and they agree to cut you a deal. They’re still going to open their new branch, but they’ve offered to shrink the solar system for you, so that the Earth is 1 km away from the sun. It’ll be twice the walk you had before, but it’s only ten minutes away so you can’t really grumble.

In other words, we’re now working at a scale of 1 km = 1 AU. The nearest star to the sun, Proxima Centuri, is about 4.2 light years away. A light year is exactly what it sounds like: the distance light will travel in a year. Light is pretty speedy at 300,000 km/s, and takes approximately eight minutes to get from the sun to us on Earth. Even so, Proxima Centuri is going to take you much longer to get to than the chemist’s. It works out that 4.2 light years is just over 265,600 AU, so in our shrunken solar system a walk to Proxima Centuri takes five years.

Time to kick things up a notch. The Andromeda Galaxy, the largest in our Local Group of galaxies, is 2,560,000 light years away. You’ve got some friends there, but you don’t see them very much because in a 1 km = 1 AU universe it takes 3 million years to walk and really, that’s hard to fit in to a day trip.

Thing is, they have some sort of magic communication device that can send messages across the vastness of space in an instance and they keep telling you about this great chemist’s, just round the corner from them. You borrow the magic communication device and call up the chemist’s to explain the situation. They’re very sympathetic, and shrink the universe for you down to 1km = 1,000,000 light years. We’re talking the better part of half an hour’s walk to get there, but it really is a very good chemist’s. Sure, your old chemist’s back on the other side of the Earth is now only a 0.000000000003 seconds away and you could walk there and back 15 million times in literally the blink of an eye, but let’s be honest - you never liked them anyway.

What does the universe look like on our new scale? Our current best estimate of the diameter of the observable universe is 93 billion light years. The observable universe is a subtly different concept to the universe proper. Since nothing can travel faster than light, we can have no knowledge of an object in the universe unless light emitted by it has reached us. The Big Bang, which created the universe, took placed 13.73 billion years ago.

“Hang on a moment,” you cry. “How can light have reached us from 93 billion light years away if there have only ever been 13.73 billion years for it to travel in?” The answer is expansion. The universe has been expanding ever since the Big Bang, and the space between galaxies and all other objects can expand faster than the speed of light.

It’s a difficult concept to grasp. The question that immediatly pops up is “what is the universe expanding into?”, but the truth is that there is nothing to expand into - it just expands. It’s a topic I plan to return to in the future, but for now let’s just stick to our figure of 93 billion light years.

After all this walking to and from various chemist’s, you’re probably pretty hungry. I’m going to steal another Hitchiker’s device, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. In the book the restaurant is at the temporal end of the universe, the end of everything, but I’m going to place my restaurant at the edge of the observable universe. Oh, and it’s a chain of restaurants so there is another one on the other side, separated by 93 billion light years. Even on our absolutely massive 1km = 1,000,000 light years scale, it would still take nearly two years to walk from one restaurant to another. That’s certainly a little bit further than a trip to the chemist’s.

I have decided that Sunday’s post will be a roundup of all the links that didn’t quite make the cut during the week. Enjoy.

The NASA Phoenix lander has found water in a soil sample on Mars. Previous probes had observed water-ice, but this is the first time actual water has been analysed by a probe. Apparently the White House has been briefed to expect a more “provocative” announcement than just the discovery of water, but I don’t think we can expect little green men any time soon.

A study of bees could help police hunt serial killers. The thinking is that bees create a “buffer zone” around their hive in which they do not forage for pollen, in order to avoid predators finding their home. Similarly, those who commit a series of murders tend to stay close to home, but not in the immediate area around their house. Scientists at Queen Mary, University of London tagged bees with coloured markers in order to track them as flew around a field of fake flowers filled with artificial nectar. Using “geographic profiling” - a technique used by police to hunt serial killers - they were able to identify the buffer zone and pinpoint the location of the bees nest. The study allowed them to refine the geographic profiling technique, which in turn will allow more accuracy for deceives in the search for a killer

Nearly all Spanish bank notes are contaminated with cocaine. I’d heard this one before (for British bank notes) but I didn’t actually think it was true. Chemists at the University of Valencia found the notes contained an average concentration of 155 microgrammes of cocaine, the highest in Europe. A full study has not been conducted on British notes, but data exists suggesting between 40% and 51% of bank notes are contaminated with 0.0011 microgrammes of cocaine per note.

At just past 9am tomorrow morning in the UK, a solar eclipse will begin. Solar eclipses occur when the moon passes between the Earth and the sun. The moon casts a shadow on the Earth as it passes, causing the sun to appear to dim and even vanish momentarily. Unfortunately for those of you in the UK, the eclipse will not be “total” - meaning a complete blackout of the sun - it will be more like 20% coverage, so only a slight dip in light levels.

Total solar eclipse in 1999

To see a total eclipse you would have to be on the “path of totality” -in this case northern Canada, central Russia, western Mongolia, India or China. These lucky countries will experience a moment much like the image above. You can check out the path with this handy Google Map.

A word of caution: as you should know, looking directly at the sun is extremely dangerous, and can damage your eyes. Even during an eclipse this risk is still present, and the safest way to view one is through indirect methods such as pinhole projection. Be safe when observing an eclipse!

On a slightly lighter note, I leave you with this not very scientific, but classic, Jaffa Cake advert:

Yesterday Virgin Galactic, Sir Richard Branson’s private spaceflight company, unveiled WhiteKnightTwo, designed to carry the smaller SpaceShipTwo 15.5km above the Earth before flinging it (along with its cargo of six passengers and two pilots) on its journey into space. The new WhiteKnightTwo has been christened “EVE” after Sir Richard’s mother.

WhiteKnightTwo on the tarmac

WhiteKnightTwo is based on the prototype White Knight, which together with SpaceShipOne won a $10mil prize in October 2004 when it was successfully launched to the edge of space, at 100km above the Earth. This success lead to Virgin Galactic commission the spaceship’s designer Burt Rutan to develop WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo with his company Scaled Composites.

WhiteKnightTwo is to begin test flights in the coming months, so it can be ready to carry SpaceShipTwo into the sky. Scaled Composites are nearing completion on the craft and they expect it to join its larger sibling in 2009.

SpaceShipTwo is launched with the aid of WhiteKnightTwo

Around 250 seats have been sold on Virgin Galactic flights so far, at a cost of $200,000. Sir Richard and his family plan to be aboard the maiden voyage which is set to take place in late 2009 to early 2010. Personally I wish them all great success, as going into space has always been a dream for me. I just hope the prices fall to affordable levels in the next few decades!