Farewell Pluto, now demoted to being merely a dwarf planet.
I guess we should think ourselves lucky it’s not red. 🙂
Category Archives: Science
Updating Donna’s Events
Just updated Donnas’ events page to list the first of the talks in the US in November!
SBS: Insight: Understanding Autism
Well tonight the SBS Insight program “Understanding Autism” was on tonight, and Donna and myself were on talking about how we live with Donna’s autism.
One question I didn’t get to ask was going to be this:
Why, if we hear that people with autism react so very differently to different treatments with one helping one child and then for another child it has no effect (or makes things worse), do we continue to assume that there is just one thing called autism ?
Some children improve on gluten free diets, some don’t. Some improve on cassein free diets, some don’t. Some respond well to ABA, some become phobic because of it. Some are intolerant to salycliates, some have no problem with them. Etc, etc, etc..
To me, as a physicist, it makes sense when you change different variables on the same thing and it reacts differently then it usually is not the same thing!
So, to me, it makes good sense that there are multiple underlying issues (multiple autisms) that are causing symptoms that look similar.
A final plug – Donna mentioned the website we built almost a year ago now for people on the spectrum to advertise their employment skills to the world – it is called auties.org – go visit and hire someone with autism!
StarDust@Home Launches
Just reading the Planetary Society blog and saw a posting saying that the Stardust@Home project which I’ve written about previously has launched!
Go forth and find cool stuff.
Has Cassini Found Lakes on Titan At Last ?
The Planetary Society is reporting some really interesting news:
Saturn’s moon Titan was once thought to conceal a global ocean of methane and ethane beneath its smoggy atmosphere. However, while the landforms seen by Cassini and Huygens show ample evidence of past modification by the action of flowing liquids, actual bodies of present liquid have proven elusive through more than two years of investigation. Until now. During a July 22, 2006 flyby, Cassini’s RADAR instrument has finally unveiled what appears to be a land of lakes in Titan’s northern polar regions.
Pretty neat stuff, and this image is a neat example of some of the data they’ve got..
Inflatable Spacecraft in Orbit
New Scientist is reporting the successful launch of an inflatable spacecraft called Genesis 1 by Bigelow Aerospace which is a test of technology they’re working on to build various structures in space.
Bigelow themselves now have the first image from the spacecraft, a low-res thumbnail of the vehicle, saying:
We have extracted from early quick look data a low resolution thumbnail image of the Genesis I vehicle which verifies the success of vehicle inflation and solar array deployment. At this point in time, the vehicle is happy and healthy.
More news at their site here.
Dinosaur Soft Tissue
Last year the scientific media was buzzing with the news of the possible recovery of soft tissue from fossilised dinosaur bones. Leon ran across an old MS-NBC story about it and that made me wonder if there had been any developments, so I went searching and found this rather good story in the Smithsonian Magazine from May 2006 with heaps of information.
Most intriguingly it would appear that this wasn’t a one off:
Schweitzer and Wittmeyer have now found probable blood vessels, bone-building cells and connective tissue in another T. rex, in a theropod from Argentina and in a 300,000-year-old woolly mammoth fossil. Schweitzer’s work is “showing us we really don’t understand decay,” Holtz says. “There’s a lot of really basic stuff in nature that people just make assumptions about.”
Unfortunately the Young Earth Creationists have tried to hijack Schweitzer’s work (herself a committed Christian), claiming that the bones can’t be that old.
This drives Schweitzer crazy. Geologists have established that the Hell Creek Formation, where B. rex was found, is 68 million years old, and so are the bones buried in it. She’s horrified that some Christians accuse her of hiding the true meaning of her data. “They treat you really bad,” she says. “They twist your words and they manipulate your data.”
Space Titbits
Some interesting space stuff just spotted – double vortex spotted at Venusian south pole by Venus Express as well as imagery from Venus Expresses first orbit released by the ESA.
Also Saturn now has nine new moons discovered by a team using the Subaru 8.2-meter telescope. The Planetary Society blog post goes on to say:
If you’re keeping score, Jupiter is stil in the lead with 63 moons, but Saturn is running a close second now with 56. Uranus has 27 known moons and Neptune has 13, but both of those planets almost certainly have a lot more than anyone has spotted yet.
RIP Harriet the Tortoise, 175 years old
The oldest known living animal, 175 year old Harriet the Tortoise has died of a heart attack following a short illness at Australia Zoo in Queensland.
Whilst it was long thought that Harriet was collected by Charles Darwin on his visit to the Galapagos Islands, genetic testing has shown that although she was born prior to his visit she actually came from a population that lived on an island that Darwin didn’t visit.
Exploding Laptop
This is exactly what you don’t want to happen if you’ve got a laptop on your lap..
Dell laptop fall down go boom
Via: Graham