I juat learned that Richard Hoagland will be talking about the Apollo 11 tapes — meaning the "UFO" –on the radio show Coast to Coast AM. That’s bad enough, of course, but — uchhhh, I can hardly type this– Buzz Aldrin will join the program at 11:00 (Pacific).

Criminy. Did they tell him who Hoagland is? Maybe not. Given Hoagland’s history, and the fact that he attends UFO conferences where I’ve heard he charges $20-40 a head to lecture for hours about his, um, wacky ideas on Mars, I suspect he’ll play up the UFO angle. He has to defend that the astronauts went to the Moon, since he claims there are alien cities there, but a UFO following them won’t hurt that silly theory, and may even enhance it in his mind.

Yecccch. I’ll listen in for as long as I can stand it.

Tip o’ the space helmet to Jim Oberg for telling me about this.

I get press releases from various astronomy sources, and the headlines are usually pretty descriptive. But when you get one that says "Mars surface probably can’t support life" you kinda have to say, well duh. It’s cold, the Sun’s UV zaps the surface, the air is 1% that of Earth’s, and what’s there is mostly CO₂ and argon.

However, another press release was issued about the same topic (sometimes the universities of different team members will produce their own releases), and in it one of the astronomers says:

the intense ultraviolet exposure, the low temperatures, the lack of water and the oxidants in the soil would make it difficult for any microbe to survive on Mars.

… so I feel better.

The story itself is that electrical storms on Mars– which can be real doozies– can zap the carbon dioxide and water in the air there and create hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂). That will snow down onto the surface, and any little microscopic critter there will get sterilized. When I pour hydrogen peroxide on a cut, it fizzes merrily as it oxidizes bacteria, sending them to the Great Petri Dish in the Sky. So having that toxic stuff snowing down might very well make sure that nothing grows in the martian soil (and by looking at that image above, having giant pluses and minuses flying around can’t help either). Bummer.

What’s very cool about this idea is that it might explain an old apparent paradox from Viking, the first martian lander. It had some experiments on board that looked for life. One said no, and one said maybe, in seeming contradiction. It may be that the one that said no was because it really didn’t detect any organic matter (which is what it was designed to look for), and the one that said maybe might have been because it was detecting the chemical reactivity of hydrogen peroxide, and couldn’t distinguish between that and the reactions due to life.

It’s not for sure if this is what happened or not. We’re sending more probes to Mars, including the Mars Science Lab, which is a monster compared to the two rovers there now. More sophisticated landers will yield a lot more info about the Red Planet, and hopefully answer some of these long-standing questions. If, that is, they can avoid the monster storms, solar UV, low temperatures, H₂O₂ snowflakes, and of course the giant pluses.

I don’t want to venture too deeply into any potential FDA behind-the-curtains corruption (unless it deals with direct suppression of science, of course), but this was too interesting to pass up: CBS reports that the FDA was getting a little too close to the manufacturers of Vioxx. A Senator has even sicced an inspector general on them. I wonder what they’ll find?

Tip of the child-proof cap to Bad Reader Dan Gerhards.

Whaddya know? Even the Washington Post has figured out NASA’s having some troubles.

I just watched a program on the Discovery Science Channel about the epic voyage of Apollo 11 to the Moon. I didn’t know it was going to be on until my buddy Chris Pirillo told me about it.

I’m glad he did. Well, kinda. The show was awful, which is bad, but it gave me a chance to review it on the main website. I’ll talk about it here too, briefly.

It was called "First on the Moon: The Untold Story" and purported to be a look at stories you might not have heard about Apollo 11.

The show had lots of little errors; not enough for me to write about on their own, really, but then the show screwed up in a major way: it talked about the Apollo 11 "UFO".

Basically, on their way to the Moon, the crew reported seeing something out their window, and it was following them. It couldn’t have been the booster rocket that sent them to the Moon, because at the time it was 6000 miles distant. The show then intones, quite (over)dramatically,

If it wasn’t a part of their rocket, it could only be one thing: a UFO.

Dun dun duhhhhhhhh!

Besides that being a dumb thing to say (if it’s not identified, it’s a UFO by definition, duh), it’s incredibly misleading, since by even using the phrase "UFO" you’re strongly implying aliens.

In fact, this thing has been identified. It was one of the panels from the booster rocket that separated when the crew went into their lunar trajectory. Here’s a drawing:

The panels would have been on a similar trajectory as the module, and would have appeared to have followed them. It explains lots of other details about the "UFO" the show mentions, as well.

Worse, the show interviewed Buzz about this, and Buzz himself has said they quoted him out of context. To me, this was an obvious and ham-handed attempt to make this event far more dramatic than it really was.

I remind you, this was on the Discovery Science Channel, and not some lame channel that features ghost-hunters and other such silliness. Damnation, that makes me unhappy.

I have a lot more detail about this whole thing over on the main website. Go ahead and take a look there and get more info. But I’ll quote myself here:

This is one of the things that irritates me most about some of the documentaries about Apollo, as well as Moon hoax believers in general. Apollo wasn’t just some wacky scheme cobbled together by a handful of people– it was a carefully planned, heavily-practiced, and expertly-executed program that had the brains of hundreds of thousands of people behind it.

It was one of the singular great achievements of humankind: sending men to another world, exploring it, and bringing them home again. Isn’t that exciting enough?

With science under attack so much, astronomy has been getting its share of the flak. Because of this, some of the bigger ideas are getting hit, from the Big Bang to star formation to stellar (gasp) evolution.

I’ve been meaning to write more about this, but daily life interferes. However, The Angry Astronomer has written a brief overview of Big Bang myths. It’s a pretty good start. I’m sure I (and you) could come up with a zillion more things to talk about — and I do have a chapter in my book about this topic — but AA does a good job of getting the big picture boiled down to really just a few words. There are other sources as well for more info, but if someone comes along and starts getting in your face about where the BB came from, point ‘em to AA. But don’t CC me — I hear enough about this already.

Update (July 29, 2006): The style sheet has been fixed, thanks to Bad Reader Aaron Knapp! This means the layout problem in IE is definitely fixed. However, I do not have access to Safari, so if you are a Mac/Safari surfer, leave a comment here and let me know if the problem with the single column layout is fixed.

Folks, I upgraded the blog today, and there were some issues with the software. I think I fixed all the critical ones (I don’t have error messages screaming at me when I try to post, for example), but I know there is at least one bug floating around; IE is displaying my sidebar at the bottom of the screen. Grrrr. I’ll be fixing that one on Saturday if I can figure it out. Anyway, stick tight, and if you see anything weird, then feel free to comment.

It looks like I’ll have to upgrade again soon, too, since they’re releasing another patch to WordPress. Sigh. It’s good software, and I recommend it to people who are starting blogs. But once you start to hack the code, like I did for this theme, upgrading gets complicated. Bear with me please.