Author: Alan Boyle

Which event do you think will happen first? Polar meltdown? Discovery of extra dimensions? Looks like synthetic life is the favorite so far, but I think that depends on what your definition of “life” is.

Total parody from the Onion News Network … there’s nothing like a little Armageddon humor to lighten your mood.

Just yesterday I was talking about the prospects for a robotic moon race. Here’s something from the Mainichi Daily News that could get those competitive juices flowing.

It’s been nine years since Douglas Adams, author of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” passed away … and May 25 is set aside as a day to honor the humorist.

We’re in the midst of the big transition to a new look for Cosmic Log, so if you see some strangeness today, remember the classic words of wisdom from Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”:
DON’T PANIC!
Also, you might want to hold off on submitting comments at this point, because they will not automatically be transferred over to the new-look blog. Stay tuned for the Cosmic Log relaunch in a couple of hours.
P.S.: Happy Towel Day!…(read more)

NASA / CXC / Penn State / STScI / UIUC

This image of the supernova remnant N49 combines optical observations (in yellowand white) with an X-ray view (in blue). Labels indicate the supernova point source toward the upper left as well as a speeding “bullet” of debris at lower right.

The stringy leftovers of a stellar explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud make up one of the most photogenic blast scenes in our cosmic neighborhood. In the past, astronomers have used the Hubble Space…(read more)

McDonald Observatory / U. Texas

Click for video: A graphic shows the star Upsilon Andromedae with lines tracing the orbits of three planets. Two of the outer planets have orbits that appear to be inclined about 30 degrees with respect to each other, astronomers say. Click on the image to watch an animation.

For decades, Pluto has been seen as an oddball in the planetary tribe – in part because its orbit was so much more eccentric and tipped than those of the big planets. But in recent years, more off-kilter worlds have been discovered in our own solar system. And today, astronomers are reporting that they’ve detected planets much bigger than Jupiter that are way more out of whack than Pluto.

Maybe Pluto, which was discovered by former Kansas farmboy Clyde Tombaugh 80 years ago, isn’t so weird after all.

“We’re not in Kansas any more as far as solar systems go,” Barbara McDonald, an astronomer at the University of Texas’ McDonald Observatory, said at a news briefing today.

Thierry Legault

Silhouettes of the shuttle Atlantis and the International Space Station pass over the sun’s disk in a May 16 picture captured by astrophotographer Thierry Legault. Click on the image to see a larger view from Legault’s website, Astrophoto.fr.

The space shuttle Atlantis’ final mission is hitting new heights for fantastic pictures – in part because every flight brings improvements in NASA’s capability to capture imagery, and in part because photographers are taking extra care to document the end of the shuttle era. For us earthbound spectators, it’s the next best thing to being there.

An artificial butterfly takes wing in a video from the Institute of Physics.

Why a robo-butterfly? Some robotics experts build buglike or birdlike machines, also known as entomopters and ornithopters, to serve as tiny airborne spies. Japanese researchers had a different purpose in mind: Harvard’s Hiroto Tanaka and the University of Tokyo’s Isao Shimoyama wanted to figure out how actual swallowtail butterflies navigate through the air.
You see, because the swallowtails’ forewings partly overlap their hind wings, they don’t have as m

A time-lapse YouTube video compresses the six-hour process of inflating E-Green Technology’s 235-foot-long Bullet 580 airship into two minutes.

The world’s biggest airship passed its first full-up inflation test this week inside Garrett Coliseum in Montgomery, Ala., opening the way for its maiden flight later this year. You can watch E-Green Technologies blow up the 235-foot-long, 65-foot-diameter Bullet 580 in this time-lapse video.
E-Green says the blimp … er, airship … can…(read more)

Daniel Beltrá / Greenpeace via EPA

An aerial view shows ships surrounded by the Deepwater Horizon oil slick on May 18.

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill is entering a new phase, one month after the explosion that touched off the disaster. It’s finally sinking in among environmental experts, policymakers and the general public that this spill is unlike any other. The impact will be felt hundreds of miles away from the deep-sea leak, for years after it’s been stopped.

M. Gieles / ESO

The spiral galaxy Messier 83 is a delicate wisp in infrared wavelengths, as seen at left by the HAWK-I instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. But it looks like a fiery pinwheel in the visible-light image at right, captured by the MPG/ESO telescope. Click on the picture for a larger view.

The spiral galaxy Messier 83, also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy, is a spectacular fireworks show when it’s seen through a big telescope in visible light. But when the European Southern Observatory looked at the pinwheel in infrared wavelengths, the result was a much more delicate, no less beautiful picture of the galaxy’s hottest young stars with the surrounding gas stripped away.

Why was the Voyager 2 probe sending back digital gobbledygook from the edge of the solar system? Answer: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the cause of the garbled data was apparently a single bit in the memory of an onboard computer that was flipped from a 0 to a 1. The effect was successfully re-created on a computer at JPL, and engineers expect to reset the memory bit on the actual spacecraft on Wednesday. Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, rank among the most distant objects…(read more)

	Tom Iraci / U.S. Forest Service file
	Research ecologist Charlie Crisafulli holds a frog that was netted during amphibian sampling in March 2005. A small steam plume rises from Mount St. Helens behind him.

It’s been 30 years since Mother Nature kicked off an experiment in creative destruction at Mount St. Helens, and today the volcano serves as a prime example of how life adapts to changing conditions.

The changes on the mountain are fascinating to biologists – and perhaps unexpectedly, creationists as well.

For example, consider the amphibians of the ponds: When the volcano blew on May 18, 1980, an avalanche of logs, rocks and other debris wiped out some lakes and reshaped others. Biologists thought amphibians such as salamanders, frogs and toads would be among the hardest-hit species.

“They’re thought to be very sensitive to environmental change,” Charlie Crisafulli, a U.S. Forest Service ecologist who has been studying St. Helens since shortly after the eruption, told a “Nova” documentary team.

Tim Laman / National Geographic

 
Click for slideshow: Get a good look at the long-nosed tree frog and other new species from Indonesian New Guinea’s Foja Mountains.

Biologists returned to an exotic “Lost World” in Indonesian New Guinea – and found a fresh assortment of new species, including the kangaroo’s smallest cousin and a frog with a Pinocchio nose.
Conservationists are so heartened by all the creatures they’re finding in the world’s wild places that they’re aiming…(read more)

DigitalGlobe

An airplane, visible at top left, flies above the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico after an explosion at the Transocean Deepwater Horizon drilling platform. This image was taken from space on April 26 by DigitalGlobe’s QuickBird satellte. Click on the image for a wider, high-resolution view of the scene.

The massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is being tracked from outer space, where the sea’s ugly slick takes on a strange kind of beauty.

I’m talking about “The Case for Pluto” and the search for planets again this week in the Second Life virtual world. You can catch me during a return appearance on “Virtually Speaking” with host Jay Ackroyd at 6 p.m. SLT/PT tonight. Then I’ll be giving a talk at the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics at 10 a.m. SLT/PT Saturday. Don’t worry: I’ll go easy on the computational astrophysics. And even if you miss seeing my spruced-up avatar in real time, both talks will be…(read more)

Xing Lida and Song Qijin

Scientists say the feathers of early and late juvenile Similicaudipteryx dinosaurs had markedly different looks, especially on the wings and tail, as shown here.

A rare fossil find from China reveals how dinosaurs’ feathers changed as the creatures matured. The discovery, announced in this week’s issue of the journal Nature, suggests that dinosaurs molted like modern-day birds do – even though their feathers developed in an un-birdlike way.

“This find suggests that early feathers were developmentally more diverse than modern ones and that some developmental features … have been lost in feather evolution,” the researchers wrote.

NAMI / AFP – Getty Images

A photo from Noah’s Ark Ministries International shows a member of the Chinese- Turkish evangelical exploration team looking at wooden beams inside a compartment of a structure that the team has linked to the Biblical Noah’s Ark.

Web sites are buzzing over claims that remains from Noah’s Ark may have been found on Turkey’s Mount Ararat. The finders, led by an evangelical group, say they are “99.9 percent” that a wooden structure found on the mountainside was part of a ship that housed the Biblical Noah, his family and a menagerie of creatures during a giant flood 4,800 years ago.

But researchers who have spent decades studying the region – and fending off past claims of ark discoveries – caution that a boatload of skepticism is in order.

Illuminati Motor Works

Members of the Illuminati Motor Works team hoist their Seven automobile onto a flatbed trailer for the trip from their Illinois garage to X Prize trials in Michigan. Nate Knappenburger holds Seven in place while Thomas Pasko secures a wheel.

After months of technologizing and tinkering, dozens of next-generation automobiles are converging on a Michigan speedway for the first round of on-track tests leading to $10 million in prizes. For some teams, this may be the end of the road.

“It’s certainly possible that some teams may not make it all the way through shakedown,” Eric Cahill, senior director of the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize, told me today from the Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, Mich.

Twenty-eight teams from around the world – ranging from high-school and college students to backyard inventors and honest-to-goodness automakers – are bringing 36 super-fuel-efficient vehicles to the speedway for this first phase of the X Prize competition.

…(read more)