Spaceship Could Fly Faster Than Light

Travel by bubble might seem more appropriate for witches in Oz, but two physicists suggest that a future spaceship could fold a space-time bubble around itself to travel faster than the speed of light.

We're talking about the very distant future, of course.

The idea involves manipulating dark energy � the mysterious force behind the universe's ongoing expansion � to propel a spaceship forward without breaking the laws of physics.

"Think of it like a surfer riding a wave," said Gerald Cleaver, a physicist at Baylor University. "The ship would be pushed by the spatial bubble and the bubble would be traveling faster than the speed of light."

In theory, the universe grew faster than the speed of light for a very short time after the Big Bang, driven by the dark energy that represents about 74 percent of the total mass-energy budget in the universe. Dark matter constitutes 22 percent of the budget, and normal matter (stars, planets and everything you see) makes up the remaining 4 percent or so.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20080813/sc_space/spaceshipcouldflyfasterthanlight

Mars Rover Leaves Crater for Martian Plains

After nearly a year rolling around inside an expansive crater on Mars, NASA's trusty rover Opportunity is headed back out to explore the Martian plains.

"The rover is back on flat ground," said Paolo Belluta, engineer and rover driver at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

"We're headed to the next adventure out on the plains of Meridiani," said John Callas, NASA's rover project manager for Opportunity and its robotic twin Spirit on the other side of Mars. "We safely got into the crater, we completed our exploration there and we safely got out."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20080829/sc_space/marsroverleavescraterformartianplains;_ylt=AhNL.LHGXr46xLhFzqqdyzpxieAA

Rochester physicist's quantum-'uncollapse' hypothesis verified

In 2006, Andrew Jordan, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, together with Alexander Korotkov at the University of California, Riverside, spelled out how to exploit a quantum quirk to accomplish a feat long thought impossible, and this week a research team at the University of California at Santa Barbara has tested the theory, proving it correct.
Quantum particles behave in ways that from our everyday experience seem utterly impossible. For instance, quantum particles have wave-like properties and can exist in many places at once. Why the objects we see around us every day—in what physicists call the "classical" world—don't behave this way despite being made of these very same strange quantum particles is a deep question in modern physics.

Most scientists have believed that the instant a quantum object was measured it would "collapse" from being in all the locations it could be, to just one location like a classical object. Jordan proposed that it would be possible to weakly measure the particle continuously, partially collapsing the quantum state, and then "unmeasure" it, causing the particle to revert back to its original quantum form, before it collapsed.

Jordan's hypothesis suggests that the line between the quantum and classical worlds is not as sharply defined as had been long thought, but that it is rather a gray area that takes time to cross.

In a recent issue of Nature News, Postdoctoral Fellow Nadav Katz explains how his team put the idea to the test and found that, indeed, he is able to take a "weak" measurement of a quantum particle, which triggered a partial collapse. Katz then "undid the damage we'd done," altering certain properties of the particle and performing the same weak measurement again. The particle was returned to its original quantum state just as if no measurement had ever been taken.

Because theorists had believed since 1926 that a measurement of a quantum particle inevitably forced a collapse, it was said that in a way, measurements created reality as we understand it. Katz, however, says being able to reverse the collapse "tells us that we really can't assume that measurements create reality because it is possible to erase the effects of a measurement and start again."

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news137245970.html

Tests clear way for Big Bang experiment

GENEVA (Reuters) - Tests have cleared the way for the start-up next month of an experiment to restage a mini-version underground of the "Big Bang" which created the universe 15 billion years ago, the project chief said on Monday.

Lyn Evans of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said weekend trials in the vast underground LHC machine in which the particle-smashing experiment will take place over the coming months and years "went without a hitch."

"We look forward to a resounding success when we make our first attempt to send a beam all the way round the LHC," said Evans, who heads the multinational team of scientists that shaped the project and the machine, the Large Hadron Collider.

The final tests involved pumping a single bunch of energy particles from the project's accelerator into the 27-km (17-mile) beam pipe of the collider and steering them counter- clockwise around it for about 3 kms (2 miles).

Earlier in the month a clockwise trial in the LHC -- which runs deep under French and Swiss territory between the Jura mountains and Lake Geneva -- had been equally successful, CERN said.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080825/sc_nm/science_cern_dc

TV 'Mythbusters' Tackle Moon Landing Hoax Claims

In 2005, Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, special effects experts better known by the title of their popular Discovery Channel series, "MythBusters", were asked during an interview about the myth they would most like to test provided an unlimited budget.

"Jamie and I have done the research, and figured that the only way to end the debate about the 'myth' of the Apollo moon landing is to go there," Savage replied to Slashdot, a technology news website, about the belief held by some that the United States faked the lunar landings.

Three years later, the Mythbusters are ready to share the results of their 'trip' as they devote their next show, airing on Wednesday, to the moon landing hoax claims.

"We built a hybrid rocket that was fueled by poo and nitrous oxide — thought we had enough Teflon tape on the seals but the stink got through anyway. Too bad that the footage got lost in transit to the editors," Hyneman told collectSPACE.com, explaining that their limited budget would not cover the cost of regular rocket fuel.

Of course, he was joking.

"Dude, I sooo wished we could have gone there," Savage admitted.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20080826/sc_space/tvsmythbusterstacklemoonlandinghoaxclaims

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See also:
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/top10apollohoaxes.html

TOP 10 MOON LANDING HOAXes
By Robert Myers and Robert Pearlman


In the early days of the Cold War, three men claim they were chosen by a powerful new government agency to undertake a historically perilous journey. They claim this well-funded operation was staffed with the best scientists and engineers using technology pioneered by the Nazis, and they created the most powerful machine ever built.

In July of 1969, they claim, they climbed aboard an enormous rocket assembled in a Florida swamp, and were sent hurtling at incredible speeds into the sky … all the way to the Moon! Two of them even claim they landed on the Moon, got out, and walked around!

And what prize did they bring back from this momentous journey? Well … they have a bunch of black and white photos of unidentifiable persons in bulky white spacemen costumes in a field of gravel (but curiously without any stars in the black sky) -- and several bags of gray, dusty rocks.

Put that way, the story of the Apollo program can sound pretty far-fetched.

But why should we believe the stories? What evidence is there, really, that the Apollo program landed men on the Moon and brought them back?

Phil Plait, an astronomer at Sonoma University in California, and the Web master of BadAstronomy.com, has his reasons.

If I were trying to fake this, I would put stars in the image," he said referring to the complaint made by hoax proponents that the Apollo photos lack stars. If this had been an oversight, he said, it's an amazingly stupid thing to have forgotten, considering the scope of the "hoax."

Not to mention that with the way cameras work, photographing stars under those conditions would have been nearly impossible.

"If you do know about physics and photographs, you can see these arguments are all ridiculous," Plait said.

So why do people even give an idea like this a second thought?

"I'm not exactly sure," said Plait, "Michael Shermer is a renowned skeptic… and he has a list of reasons (such as) we have an innate thing inside of our brain, we have a need to believe."

"But one thing he leaves off, is that some of these things are just believable. If you don't know much physics, these arguments might sound convincing."

Besides, Plait says the political realities of the time would have made a fraud of that scale almost impossible to pull off.

"We went to the moon to beat the Soviets. If the Soviets had suspected that we faked these missions in any way, they would have been screaming at the top of their lungs."

Scale models of the Orion

Scale models of the Orion crew exploration vehicle recently were tested at NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, or NBL, at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston and at a wave tank at Texas A&M University in College Station.

NASA conducted a series of buoyancy and flotation characteristics tests using the NBL and a 1/4-scale model of the Orion crew capsule. The model was lowered into the NBL’s 6.2-million-gallon pool and was floated in a series of positions. This testing will allow the engineers and the NBL team to develop their full-scale crew training mock-up that will be used for mission training and for creating the crew safety procedures for water-based landings of the Orion crew capsule.

Source: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/main/index.html

NASA fixes moonship shaking with shock absorbers

WASHINGTON - A space-age version of the rusty springs under old pickup trucks will help NASA fix the most pressing technical problem with its high-tech new rocket to send astronauts back to the moon.

NASA is going to use 17 super-sized shock absorbers in its not-yet-built rocket to keep the top from shaking too much for astronauts, agency officials said in a Tuesday press conference.

For close to a year, NASA engineers working on the new Ares 1 rocket and Orion crew capsule have been wrestling with the problem of heavy vibrations from the massive rocket engines about two minutes after launch. If the vibrations are not dampened, it could potentially harm the crew or make it too difficult for them to operate for a few seconds.

Officials on Tuesday said they have settled on a solution that is similar to what smooths the rides of pickup trucks: shock absorbers. But NASA's shock absorbers will be big and mostly remote-controlled.

The plan is to install 16 canisters in the bottom of the rocket with 100-pound weights attached to springs. Battery-powered motors will move the weights up and down to stop vibrations. Those are essentially remote-controlled shock absorbers, said Garry Lyles, who headed the team of NASA engineers tackling the shaking problem.

A 17th shock absorber will be a ring of weights and springs near the middle of the rocket.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080819/ap_on_sc/sci_nasa_moonship

The Lagoons of Titan: Oily Liquid Confirmed on Saturn Moon

Earthlings might be scrambling to find liquid hydrocarbons buried in our planet, but Saturn's moon Titan has plenty to spare.

Scientists say that a dark, smooth surface feature spotted on the moon last year is definitely a lake filled primarily with liquid ethane, a simple hydrocarbon.

"This is the first observation that really pins down that Titan has a surface lake filled with liquid," said the paper's lead author, University of Arizona professor Robert Brown.

The new observations affirm that Titan is one of the likeliest places to look for life in our solar system. Some astrobiologists have speculated that life could develop in the moon's hydrocarbon lakes, although it would have to be substantially different from known life on Earth, which requires liquid water.

Mixed in solution with the ethane, the lake is also believed to contain nitrogen, methane, and a variety of other simple hydrocarbons.

The Cassini-Huygens probe determined the chemical composition of the liquid by the way it reflected light, a technique known as spectrometry that has provided most of our knowledge about other planets' atmospheric compositions.

"It was hard for us to accept the fact that the feature was so black when we first saw it," Brown said. "More than 99.9 percent of the light that reaches the lake never gets out again. For it to be that dark, the surface has to be extremely quiescent, mirror smooth. No naturally produced solid could be that smooth."

Further, the scientists saw the specific absorption signature of ethane, which absorbs light at exactly 2-micron wavelengths.


Source: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/07/lake-of-petrole.html?mbid=wir_newsltr

Plan a Trip to a Total Solar Eclipse

A total solar eclipse will cut a swath of shadow through Greenland, the Arctic, Russia, Mongolia and China on August 1. And thousands of people will travel to remote locations just to stand in the dark for three minutes -- and maybe perceive the vast size of the solar system.

Locations are rarely convenient, and planning a successful eclipse trip involves specialized maps, astronomical charts, statistical weather data, GPS and optical gear, backcountry camping equipment (perhaps), and a good working relationship with uncertainty.

The reward, though, can be like a short trip into space. The corona itself is a big freakish thing: a feathery halo of streaming particles along magnetic field lines, which look not like nice summer rays but kill-you-dead radiation.

It's also so big and far away as to bend one's sense of scale. At least three planets are usually visible, and this August there will be four: Mercury, Venus, Saturn and Mars.

On my second eclipse the sight of the sun and grouping of planets overtook me: I knew I was looking at the Middle. The absence of the blinding photosphere provides depth perception, with the corona serving as a reference point relative to the planets in front of and beyond the sun. It allows you to see the big mechanical picture, like a life-sized version of the classroom model, minus a few parts. With some mental effort, it's possible to actually grasp a sense of the size of the solar system. It can crack your brain a bit.

I've seen three solar eclipses, venturing to Eastern Europe, South America and Africa. The plan this time is to trek into the Gobi Desert from Mongolia, where transport options are restricted to Jeep and camel, to an area in the center of the shadow's path in China. That's the plan, at least. There are border and government permission issues to deal with, and plans may not survive first contact.

Source: http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2008/06/solar_eclipse?mbid=wir_newsltr

Solar Eclipse footage, 1 aug 08

Solar Eclipse footage, 1 aug 08

Source: http://atomic-motor.blogspot.com/2008/08/bill-gates-surprises-energy-debate.html

Watching the Skies: Space Is Really Big — But Not Too Big to Map

Watching the Skies: Space Is Really Big — But Not Too Big to Map
By Michael D. Lemonick

In 1930, a young astronomer named Clyde Tombaugh found Pluto. He did it with a high tech marvel called a blink comparator; he put two photographs of the same patch of sky taken on different nights into the contraption and flipped back and forth between them. Stars would stay fixed, but objects like comets, asteroids, and planets moved.

Astronomers have since traded photographic plates for massive digital images. But Tombaugh's method — take a picture of the sky, take another one, compare — is still used to detect fast-changing stellar phenomena, like supernovae or asteroids headed toward Earth.

True, imaging the entire sky, and understanding those images, won't be easy. The first telescope that will be able to collect all that data, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, won't be finished until 2014. Perched atop Cerro Pachón, a mountain in northern Chile, the LSST will have a 27.5-foot mirror and a field of view 50 times the size of the full moon seen from Earth. Its digital camera will suck down 3.5 gigapixels of imagery every 17 seconds. "At that rate," says Michael Strauss, a Princeton astrophysicist, "the numbers get very big very fast."

The LSST builds on the most ambitious attempt to catalog the heavens so far, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Operating from a New Mexico mountaintop, the SDSS has returned about 25 terabytes of data since 1998, most of that in images. It has measured the precise distance to a million galaxies and has discovered about 500,000 quasars. But the Sloan's mirror is just one-tenth the power of the mirror planned for LSST, and its usable field of view just one-seventh the size. Sloan has been a workhorse, but it simply doesn't have the oomph to image the entire night sky, over and over, to look for things that change.

The LSST will cover the sky every three days. And within the petabytes of information it collects may lurk things nobody has even imagined — assuming astronomers can figure out how to teach their computers to look for objects no one has ever seen. It's the first attempt to sort astronomical data on this scale, says Princeton astrophysicist Robert Lupton, who oversaw data processing for the SDSS and is helping design the LSST. But the new images may allow him and his colleagues to watch supernovae explode, find undiscovered comets, and maybe even spot that killer asteroid.

Source: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/anderson08/anderson08_index.html

Visualizing Big Data: Bar Charts for Words

A visualization of thousands of Wikipedia edits that were made by a single software bot. Each color corresponds to a different page.
Image: Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, and Kate Hollenbach

The biggest challenge of the Petabyte Age won't be storing all that data, it'll be figuring out how to make sense of it. Martin Wattenberg, a mathematician and computer scientist at IBM's Watson Research Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a pioneer in the art of visually representing and analyzing complex data sets. He and his partner at IBM, Fernanda Viégas, created Many Eyes, a collaborative site where users can share their own dynamic, interactive representations of big data. He spoke with Wired's Mark Horowitz:

Wired: How do you define "big" data?

Wattenberg: You can talk about terabytes and exabytes and zettabytes, and at a certain point it becomes dizzying. The real yardstick to me is how it compares with a natural human limit, like the sum total of all the words you'll hear in your lifetime. That's surely less than a terabyte of text. Any more than that and it becomes incomprehensible by a single person, so we have to turn to other means of analysis: people working together, or computers, or both.

Wired: Why is a numbers guy like you so interested in large textual data sets?

Wattenberg: Language is one of the best data-compression mechanisms we have. The information contained in literature, or even email, encodes our identity as human beings. The entire literary canon may be smaller than what comes out of particle accelerators or models of the human brain, but the meaning coded into words can't be measured in bytes. It's deeply compressed. Twelve words from Voltaire can hold a lifetime of experience.

Wired: What will happen when we have digital access to everything, like all of English literature or all the source code ever written?

Wattenberg: There's something about completeness that's magical. The idea that you can have everything at your fingertips and process it in ways that were impossible before is incredibly exciting. Even simple algorithms become more effective when trained on big sets. Perhaps we'll find out more about plagiarism and literary borrowing when we have the spread of literature before us. We think of our current age as one of intellectual remixing and mashups, but maybe it's always been that way. You can only do that kind of analysis when you have the full spectrum of data.

Wired: Is that why, on Many Eyes, you have visualizations of Wikipedia using simple word trees and tag clouds?

Wattenberg: Wikipedia also has this idea of completeness. The information there again probably totals less than a terabyte, but it's huge in terms of encompassing human knowledge. Today, if you're analyzing numbers, there are a million ways to make a bar chart. If you're analyzing text, it's hard. I think the only way to understand a lot of this data is through visualization.

Source: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/anderson08/anderson08_index.html