Nominal Second stage cut off (SECO) - Falcon 1 has made history as the first privately developed liquid fueled launch vehicle to achieve earth orbit!!!!!!

Spacex Falcon 1 has made history as the first privately developed liquid fueled launch vehicle to achieve earth orbit!!!!!!

"We suggest that the transient may be one of a new class" I get a chill of oooh-aaahness down my spine. Especially when after a hundred days of observation, it disappeared from the sky with no explanation. Get your tinfoil hats out, because it gets even weirder.

Hubble: Hubble Finds Unidentified Object in Space, Scientists Puzzled

Just in case anyone is interested in learning a bit about what I do at work, here are some video journal articles I did for JOVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments). Its kind of a neat concept - JOVE has teamed up with Current Protocols in Cell Biology to film complex protocols. This is helpful for people in the scientific field who need to pick up a new technique for their research. With these movies, a person who is unfamiliar with a certain technique (for example, Xenopus egg extract) can watch these films while reading the protocols to learn how to do certain things.

Anyway, enjoy!

Crazy. Cool.

JoVE Browse:Global Search for: Marie Cross Maureen Powers

Global warming may not be the only threat to the polar bear. Scientists are puzzling over the discovery of the jawbone of a young polar bear in the stomach of a Greenland shark, a species that thrives in the cold waters of the far north.

The find suggests that the polar bear may have a serious challenger to its place at the top of the Arctic food chain. Until now, only killer whales were thought to offer a threat to Ursus maritimus as the Arctic's top predator.

Polar bear shark theory hard to swallow - 13 Aug 2008 - Oceans news - NZ Herald

To make sense of this large body of research, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) commissioned a review. From 2002 to 2004, each paper was re-read by at least three expert reviewers and critiqued for its applicability to the field of knowledge based on what we consider to be a good study with today's understanding of EM exposures. The results of this literature study netted 1411 publications that were considered to be the best work in the field; these were used to develop the latest edition of the IEEE safety standard: C95.1 -2005: IEEE Standard for Safety Levels with Respect to Human Exposure to Radio Frequency Electromagnetic Fields, 3 kHz to 300 GHz. Human exposure from cell phones and Amateur Radios alike is limited by FCC regulation to be lower than what the safety standard calls Maximum Permissible Exposure (MPE).

After 50 years and 1411 good scientific studies, what additional research could my correspondent and Dr Herberman know about that is vastly different? Certainly it was not research that was peer-reviewed, much less independently replicated. As scientists, they should know better than to base their scientific beliefs on such weak evidence. Granted, they are not experts in the field of electromagnetic bio-effects and are probably not aware of the wealth of knowledge that has been developed on this topic. But that's all the more reason that they should not overreact to anecdotal information that has not been subjected to scientific confirmation. Unfortunately, when the director of a large cancer institute makes such a proclamation, it is widely believed by people who know even less about the science than he does.

You could tell the good doc didn't have a clear understanding of what he was saying once he started warning about the dangers to others, of using cell phones in public places.

Hijacking Science

Explanation: What's large and blue and can wrap itself around an entire galaxy? A gravitational lens mirage. Pictured above on the left, the gravity of a normal white galaxy has gravitationally distorted the light from a much more distant blue galaxy. More normally, such light bending results in two discernable images of the distant galaxy, but here the lens alignment is so precise that the background galaxy is distorted into a nearly complete ring. Since such a lensing effect was generally predicted in some detail by Albert Einstein over 70 years ago, such rings like SDSSJ1430 are now know as Einstein Rings. SDSSJ1430 was discovered during the Sloan Lens Advanced Camera for Surveys (SLACS) campaign, an observation program that inspected lens candidates found by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) with the Hubble Space Telescope's ACS. Strong gravitational lenses like SDSSJ1440 are more than oddities -- their multiple properties allow astronomers to determine the mass and dark matter content of the foreground galaxy lenses. Given these determinations, SLACS data has now been used, for example, to show that dark matter fraction increases with overall galaxy mass. The inset images on the right depict, from top to bottom, a computer reconstructed image of what the background blue galaxy really looks like, just the white foreground galaxy, and just the lensed blue background galaxy.

APOD: 2008 July 28 - SDSSJ1430: A Galaxy Einstein Ring

Send the ISS somewhere.

The ISS, you see, is already an interplanetary spacecraft -- at least potentially. It's missing a drive system and a steerage module, but those are technicalities. Although it's ungainly in appearance, it's designed to be boosted periodically to a higher altitude by a shuttle, a Russian Soyuz or one of the upcoming new Constellation program Orion spacecraft. It could fairly easily be retrofitted for operations beyond low-Earth orbit. In principle, we could fly it almost anywhere within the inner solar system -- to any place where it could still receive enough solar power to keep all its systems running. nullnull

HERE HERE!

It's All Decked Out. Give It Somewhere to Go. - washingtonpost.com

It is not just a direct hit that is worrisome. Through its charge, lightning can harm any creature within a fifty-metre radius of the strike point. We can also be harmed collaterally, by getting knocked off our feet by the percussive force or walloped by a struck tree. We cannot outrun it — lightning comes to earth at an estimated 220,000 kilometres an hour — and we cannot dress for it, as a bolt reaches temperatures of 28,000 degrees. We can only hide.

The Walrus Magazine » Struck By Lightning

His main finding: blacks who “sound black” earn salaries that are 10 percent lower than blacks who do not “sound black,” even after controlling for measures of intelligence, experience in the work force, and other factors that influence how much people earn. (For what it is worth, whites who “sound black” earn 6 percent lower than other whites.)null

How Much Does It Cost You in Wages if You Sound Black? - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog

Great collection of photos from natural history museum.

American Museum of Natural History Library 'Picturing the Museum'