Daily science stuff

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

This is wicked cool!

Ride a space shuttle rocket booster into space, then plunge back to Earth

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

The solar system is two million years older than we thought... and that changes everything

15 Strange Things About Outer Space

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

This Summer’s Sexiest Images From Saturn

[honeybee]

Cool physics news:

http://io9.com/5630715/to-create-water- ... -starlight

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Top 10 Lost Technologies

[justTripn]

OK, this is amazing and I read it The Economist which is not a science magazine, so I will investigate further, but, apparently the "fine structure constant" is different in different parts of space. Measurements taken from Hawaii seemed to indicate that "alpha was around 0.0006% smaller 9 billion years ago than it is now." But measurements taken from Chile showed just the opposite! "The further back they looked with the VLT, the larger alpha seemed to be—in seeming contradiction to the result they had obtained with the Keck. They realised, however, that there was a crucial difference between the two telescopes: because they are in different hemispheres, they are pointing in opposite directions. Alpha, therefore, is not changing with time; it is varying through space."

Ye Cannae change the laws of physics. Or can you?

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

^ I love the headline, which only a Trek fan would understand...

[justTripn]

I just realized that Honeybee announced this news first in her cool physics news. But wow!

[justTripn]

WarpGirl posted this: Alien Planet Looks Just Right for Life

!!!!! Twenty light years away!

[Enerdhil]

WarpGirl posted this: Alien Planet Looks Just Right for Life

!!!!! Twenty light years away!

Maybe Vulcan is a little far away...

[justTripn]

These are cool! Imagine taking these with your own telescope, eh, jT!

Behold the best amateur space pictures of the year!

Those are pretty good! I can't do that (take images like that), but I know the people who can. CCD cameras have revolutionized everything. Last night I was out observing and was hanging out with people doing that stuff--taking pictures like that through our club's 24 inch telescope. What's funny is that the imagers would scoff at two of those pictures in the "best pictures of the year." Two are of the Orion Nebula, which is considered "easy," lol . . .

[justTripn]

A new Enterprise (it's a commercial suborbital spaceship):

Virgina Galactic's spaceship makes solo flight

[Distracted]

Cool. I wish I had the money to go.

[Aikiweezie]

This is from last week. I am not sure if I think this guy is cute or just weird looking.

A Nose for Fruit
Photograph courtesy Piotr Naskrecki, Conservation International

This tube-nosed fruit bat is just one of the roughly 200 species encountered during two scientific expeditions to Papua New Guinea in 2009—including a katydid that "aims for the eyes" and a frog that does a mean cricket impression, Conservation International announced late Tuesday.

Though seen on previous expeditions, the bat has yet to be formally documented as a new species, or even named. Like other fruit bats, though, it disperses seeds from the fruit in its diet, perhaps making the flying mammal crucial to its tropical rain forest ecosystem.

In all, the expeditions to Papua New Guinea's Nakanai and Muller mountain ranges found 24 new species of frogs, 2 new mammals, and nearly a hundred new insects. The remote island country's mountain ranges—which have yielded troves of new and unusual species in recent years—are accessible only by plane, boat, foot, or helicopter.

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Does the Earthlike planet Zarmina actually exist? Some say no.