National Geographic has a new set of Space Photos up. You can check out a beautiful picture of lightning arcing through the clouds while the shuttle Discovery is rolling out to the launch pad. Stunning!
Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
Electrifying Shuttle Photo
Thursday, August 6th, 2009Cool photos of the Space Shuttle
Thursday, July 30th, 2009The Sacramento Bee is hosting a series of photos of the Space Shuttle Endeavour‘s recent mission to the ISS. There are some really great shots. Check it out, space geeks.
My favorite photo is this one:
The shuttle has such amazing texture up close. You don’t see any of that in the long shots on the pad or at liftoff.
Man lands on the moon. News at Eleven.
Friday, July 17th, 2009The 40th anniversary of man landing on the moon is coming up (July 11th, 1969, just under the wire for Kennedy’s goal). Here’s a couple of interesting links.
Lowry Digital in Burbank was brought on board to apply their video processing techniques to the available footage from Apollo 11. You can check out the press conference at National Geographic.
Unfortunately, a group of researchers were unable to locate the original telemetry tapes from the Apollo mission. They hoped to rebuild the video from those sources, which would have been first-generation video copies, but it turns out the tapes were recycled (probably).
And, of course, the obligatory “Would anybody care about the moon landing if it happened today” opinion piece. People would care if it were the first time we walked on the moon, but it’s not. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were hardly the first explorers to be lauded and then quickly set aside. Magellan anyone? Even Columbus Day is more of a hassle to us than a celebration.
If you do want to follow the events of that celebrated mission, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and AOL have put together a really awesome Flash site that lets you follow along.
It’s bad enough that we use so much oil…
Thursday, June 11th, 2009Now Nature has created a strain of bacteria that eats it.
Chinese Scientists Discover Bacteria Eating Up Their Oil
Scientists have had critters like this in the lab for some time now. In fact, years back I remember talk about using these oil-eating bugs to clean up oil spills at sea. It seems Nature has gotten the same idea.
It’s interesting to ponder why a complex ecosystem like the Earth would spawn a bacteria that eats oil. It’s even more interesting to theorize why these bacteria are only now being discovered, when oil, at least easy to reach oil, is going down in quantity.