Blogs / Bad Astronomy

The newest Carnival of Space blogfest is up at The Martian Chronicles. As always, lots of cool spacey blog posts there to keep you entertained while you goof off at work.

You may have noticed, if you watch the TV machine, that there is an incredible — literally — glut of credulous antiscientific woowoo garbage infesting the airwaves. UFO hunters, ghost hunters, psychics, speakers to the dead, and the like. You can look for a long, long time and never see any shows that actually lend a critical eye to such nonsense.

Well, that may be about to end soon.

Next week, I am flying to Los Angeles to film the pilot for a new TV show called "Skeptologists". It’s the brainchild of Brian Dunning, the brain behind the popular Skeptoid podcast, and Ryan Johnson from New Rule Productions, an LA production company. Here’s a quick summary:

The Skeptologists will be a reality-based TV series that assembles a group of highly educated and skilled experts to research, verify and de-mystify claims of the paranormal, pop-culture phenomenon, and other radical claims of interest to the skeptical community. The project will assume a skeptical viewpoint and will endeavor to use critical thinking, science, experimentation and the scientific method to produce valid and conclusive results in a fun and entertaining format.

The cast is actually pretty impressive, if I may so so myself, and I just did. Skeptics Guide to the Universe has more details, but here’s the quick version: The Skeptologists are:

• moi,
• Michael Shermer (top banana at The Skeptic Society),
• Yau-Man Chan (Chief Technology Officer at UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry and contestant on "Survivor: Fiji"),
• Kirsten Sanford (neurophysiologist and host of This Week in Science),
• Mark Edward (mentalist), and
• Steven Novella (medical doctor, host of The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, and professional Rebecca-reigner-inner).

We’ll be tackling claims that edge toward or wholly plunge over the cliff of antiscience. I can’t go into details here (it’s all hush-hush and sooper seekrit) but we’ll be revealing more as time goes on. It’s a reality show, but we won’t be locked into a house or forced to date each other or have to eat bugs. I hope. I’ll let Shermer eat the bugs if that comes up.

Mind you, this is a pilot we’re filming next week, and we’re going to shop it around to various networks. In other words, it has not been picked up and there is no guarantee it will. If any loyal BABloggees work at a network or have relatives at Discovery Channel, then by all means tell them how wonderful it would be to have a fun show about skepticism hosted by an incredible cast that should be showered with millions of dollars. Say.

Anyway, pray for us wish us luck send good thoughts let’s hope that some network out there is smart enough to realize that people want to be amazed, but that there is a deep need as well to see the world for what it is, and not how bamboozlers want us to see it.

As I wrote earlier, Florida creationists are trying to dumbify students by putting forward a bill that lets students say the Earth is 6000 years old, and the teachers can’t mark them wrong.

The bill passed committee yesterday.

It’s not too late to stop it though. PZ has details and ideas, good ones. If you live in Florida, don’t let this craptacular bill become a law! Get on the phones!

A Russian farmer is suing the Russian Space Agency Roskosmos for <Dr. Evil>one million rubles</Dr. Evil> because a rocket booster fell on his farm.

The story is a bit weird. If the booster came down and smashed his house, or crushed his outhouse, or flattened his dog, then sure, sue away. But the thing fell in his yard, as the article pointedly says, missing his outhouse (phew!). Sounds to me like he has a goldmine on his hands.

Problem is, stuff falls from rockets relatively often in that area, which is along the Russian launch path, so the novelty worth of the booster may not be that high. You can’t beat a quotation like this from the Roskosmos spokesman:

Technologically speaking, these parts are supposed to fall off during a launch. They fly, they fall, they fly, they fall. It’s how they work.

Well, yeah, boosters and such fall. But the article also mentions things like bolts, engines, and casings? I suspect there may be a translation problem here; he means fall to the ground, not fall off. Still. Yikes.

Anyway, given how cash-strapped the Russian agency is, I can’t imagine he’ll get anything from them. He should put the thing on eBay if he wants to see some money. Maybe he could paint a ghostly face on the side, just to up the value, too.

And now — literally — a word from our sponsor.

I’d like to take a moment and welcome Explora Dome by Polydome as an advertiser with Bad Astronomy. You may see the banner ad for Explora Dome by Polydome when you read my site.

Explora Dome by Polydome is a company that makes smaller domes for at-home astronomers. For around the cost of a decent ’scope, Explora Dome by Polydome makes complete domes for your yard so that you don’t have to worry about howling winds, freezing to death in the winter, and that annoying light on your neighbor’s house. I know a lot of my readers have telescopes in their yard, so if you do, consider taking a look at the Explora Dome by Polydome site.

And if you have a company or some other venture that you’d like to advertise here or on another OuterSpaceAds network site, then please let us know.

A few days ago I wrote about how the Cassini Saturn probe dove through water ice plumes erupting from the surface of the icy moon Enceladus. The pictures were incredible, but it may very well be that the other detectors got the big payoff.

They detected organic compounds in the plumes.

Now remember, organic molecules don’t necessarily mean life. What Cassini detected were heavy carbon-based molecules, including many that are the building blocks for making things like amino acids and other compounds necessary for life as we know it.

Edited to add: Carolyn Porco, imaging team leader for Cassini, says:

[…] it is now unambiguous that the jets emerging from the south polar fractures contain organic materials heavier than simple methane — acetylene, hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde, propane, etc. — making the sub-surface sources of Enceladus’ dramatic geological activity beyond doubt rich in astrobiologically interesting materials.

It’s been supposed for some time that Enceladus, like Jupiter’s moon Europa, has a subsurface ocean. The surface itself is mostly water ice, implying strongly that any ocean would have water as well. The plumes erupt out from cracks in the surface, and when Cassini dove through them it got to directly sample the interior of Enceladus. And it tasted organic compounds, 20 times as dense as previously thought.

There was a second discovery as well: the cracks were much warmer than expected. They were at an admittedly chilly -93 Celsius, but that’s 17 Celsius higher than thought. Two plumes come from the warmest of these regions as well.

Coupled together, these two items indicate that if there is an ocean beneath the frozen crust of the moon, then it’s reasonably warm, and rich in organic compounds. We don’t know how life started on Earth, but it’s a good guess that an ocean thick with organic compounds was involved at some point.

This is a fantastically provocative and interesting development! The ingredients for life exist on a tiny moon orbiting a ringed giant, and better yet they sit in a mixing bowl that has been churning away for billions of years. What lies beneath that hidden face?

Just a quick note: The Space Shuttle Endeavour is scheduled to land tonight at 7:05 p.m. Florida time. If all goes well they’ll do a de-orbit burn just before 6:00 and land a little over an hour later. I imagine it’ll be covered on NASA TV, or you can watch it on the UStream.tv channel.