Daily science stuff

[Distracted]

That's a bummer about the Mars rover being stuck in the sand.

[Reanok]

Saturn news stories at Astronomy.com Spitzer spies giant ring around Saturn link http://www.astronomy.com/news/n0910/7satring Short days on Saturn link http://www.astronomynow.com/news/n0910/07saturn Ring environment discolors saturns moons http://www.astronomynow.com/news/n0910/06saturn Inverse storms fuels Jupiter storms link http://www.astronomynow.com/news/n0910/06jupiter

[Silverbullet]

Distracted, the thing is still running years after it was supposed to quit. It has survived other hazards so i believe they will find a way to get it out.

[Linda]

This article which I just discovered is not new but is another milestone for the avian brain - a parrot that understands the concept of zero.

http://www.cityparrots.org/post/a-brand ... tands-zero

[Entilzha]

http://www.nikonsmallworld.com/gallery/year/2009/1 Estonian won the Nikon's Small World photography contest.

[Alelou]

Wow. All of those 137 pictures were just amazing!

[Reanok]

Opportunity rover finds Meteorite link http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0910/11meteorite Sky merger yields dividends in Hubble shot link http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0910/13hubble

[Asso]

I am incapable of expressing clearly myself, probably. But this news item makes me think about Universe.

[Reanok]

Asso One of my favorite tv series on the History channel is The Universe series.

[Asso]

I remember my starry-eyed conversations with my best friend, when he and I were two boys.
How much "Universe" there was on our mouths.

[Reanok]

Life's ingredients found around exoplanet link http://www.astronomynow.com/news/n0910/21exo

[Linda]

It is encouraging that the chemical ingredients of life as we know it may be commonly found together and that they are 150 light years away. But it seems that life may not be found as close as 16 light years from earth, darn.

[Reanok]

Ares1x Nasa assembling parachutes and Ares 1x booster data link http://spaceflightnow.com/ares1x/091029dent

[Alelou]

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colber ... ang-theory

If you can get past the commercial, you might get a hoot out of Stephen Colbert's riff on two physicists' theory that the Large Hadron Collider is being sabotaged from the future.

[Elessar]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33626447/ns ... nce-space/

This is pretty cool... I think it probably falls in the technological evolutionary line between the rapid prototyper and the actual replicator. It's using a raw material to produce whatever object they desire... Right now it can only handle 2 materials, but that's twice as many as any other can handle. Just like anything else, it's going to increase exponentially. Eventually, they will learn how to combine 4 and 8 and 16 materials and then before you know it, thousands.

What's really fascinating about this is that it takes me back to the remarkable advent of the steam engine. Few times in history has an invention actually been developed that, study of the invention itself in operation actually taught us about the laws of physics as opposed to having to learn the laws of physics first and then building the device. Studies of steam engines basically lead to the formulation of the laws of thermodynamics... I guess another example would be the way study of the transistor in the decades after its development helped us refine quantum field theory.

It would be amazing if we get one of these devices working with dozens of input materials and soon find that we can program different ratios of composition and just get never-before-produced random kinds of alloys we've never seen before