I have philematophilia. I practice on my wife every day, and I’m not ashamed to say I spent a good part of my youth working on it as well.

So what’s philematophilia? Actually, I made up that word — though a web search will turn it up, it’s not officially a real word. But it should be: it means a lover of kissing. I based it on philematophobia, a proper word, and I learned that one in a very cool book called The Science of Kissing, penned by my Discover Magazine co-blogger Sheril Kirsehnbaum, who writes at The Intersection.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book — literally, I had no idea about the history of kissing, the science of it, or even if you could study it scientifically — but it turns out to be a very fun read, with a lot of really interesting information about locking lips.

The first part of the book is devoted to the history of kissing as a greeting, which I found interesting (I always assumed shaking hands was an ancient custom, but she implies it’s actually rather modern, for example). But of course it was the hardcore science that got me hooked. The flush of cortisol and oxytocin, the change in the way the brain fires, the heart pounding… but I have to admit, it was the chapter on cooties that had me engaged the most. As you might expect, a lot of little beasties ride the wave when oral fluids are exchanged, and it was fun reading about them. That might give some people pause, but I assure you it won’t deter me in the least in engaging with my wife.

For those of you still out there looking for mates (even temporary ones), this book may help. (more…)

On February 9 at around 19:30 UT, a small asteroid the size of a car will cruise past the Earth, missing us by a distance of about 100,000 km (60,000 miles). By astronomical standards that’s pretty close (about a quarter of the way to the Moon) but it’ll miss us for sure.

Called 2011 CA7, it was discovered earlier this month. The short notice is not too surprising, given that it’s at a very faint magnitude of 20 — you’d need a big telescope to be able to see it at all! Even at closest approach it’ll be magnitude 17, less than a ten-thousandth as bright as the faintest star you can see with your unaided eye.

There is some small uncertainty by exactly how much it’ll miss us; the orbit isn’t precisely determined yet. According to the JPL small-body data browser, the minimum distance 2011 CA7 will pass us is 93,000 km (58,000 miles), and the maximum is 114,000 km (71,000 miles), but the most likely distance is 103,000 km (64,000 miles). These numbers may change as time goes on, but the important thing to note is that it will miss us.

Given the brightness of the object, it’s obviously pretty small, probably around 3 meters in diameter, or about 10 feet. That’s a little bit bigger than 2011 CQ11 which blew past us last week, but not significantly so. Even if it were to hit us it would certainly disintegrate high up in the Earth’s atmosphere and at worst rain down a few rocks; that sort of event happens several times a year somewhere on Earth, if that makes you feel any better. In other words, it’s relatively common and presents very little danger. Interestingly, this little guy has probably passed us many times in the past, but this is the closest encounter yet (which makes sense; it’s so small and faint it’s only when it gets close that it can be seen at all).

This is an interesting rock. Its orbit goes from roughly the orbit of Venus out to that of Mars, and that means it spends most of its time in near-Earth space. I imagine over a long period of time, maybe millions of years, an impact is inevitable — but again, something this small will make a pretty light show but present very little real danger. In that picture above you can see the orbit in teal; the Earth and the asteroid are to the lower left. On this scale — hundreds of millions of kilometers across! — the rock looks like it’s right on top of us, but 100,000 kilometers is a long way off in real terms. A miss is a miss.

I haven’t seen any imaging of it yet but I’m keeping my eyes open, and hopefully we’ll get some nice pictures of this. Stay tuned!

Well, it’s Super Bowl Sunday, and while I bet a lot of folks who read this blog are fans, I’m guessing a lot aren’t.

So I figured hey, why not take this chance to insert a little geekery into this normally overly-macho event? Something for the non-American-football-enthusiasts out there? So I pulled out my trusty HP 41CX calculator, grabbed a pencil and paper, and worked out some math and physics trivia based on the game. Over the next few hours I posted these facts on Twitter one by one, enjoying the comments I got on them. They’ve all been tweeted now, and I thought it might be helpful to post them all in one place for your nerdish enjoyment.

So here are your #AstroSuperBowl facts!

[Note: Regular readers know I usually use metric, but since the game is an American one, I used Imperial units. Also, 140 characters means being brief, so I left off the metric units.]

Are you ready for some football… SCIENCE?

• On Jupiter, Pittsburgh Steeler QB Ben Roethlisberger would weigh 610 pounds. [Assuming he weighs 241 pounds, and the surface gravity at Jupiter's cloud tops is about 2.5 times the Earth's... and he doesn't immediately plunge through the atmosphere and burn up as a meteor.]
• On the other hand his opponent, Packers QB Aaron Rodgers, would weigh 557 pounds.
• But then, on a neutron star Pittsburgh QB Roethlisberger would weigh 12 billion tons.
• Spinning a thrown football makes it act like a gyroscope, keeping it stable in flight.
• The GB Packers may like it cold, but with temperatures of -300 F, Saturn’s moon Enceladus scoffs at them.
• Commercial breaks during the Super Bowl would seem much shorter if you were near a black hole. [Assuming you were near a black hole and receiving a broadcast from Earth; this detail was too long to put in tweet form.]
• Superbowls would be 248 Earth years apart on Pluto.
• An asteroid impactor the size of the football stadium would explode like 100s of 1-megaton bombs.

And assuming the game lasts 4 hours…

• … during the game, a beam of light would travel about 2.7 billion miles: the distance to Neptune.
• … during the game, the Sun will emit enough energy to supply the US for 30 billion years.
• … during the game, the Earth will have moved 270,000 miles around the Sun.

And there you have it. And in the spirit of the game’s competition, I’ll add that you may consider yourself a nerd, but it takes an übernerd to make the Super bowl nerdy.

Scientists are now having their day in the Sun… a day that will last 8 years.

In October 2006, NASA launched a pair of twin spacecraft into space. Called STEREO — Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory — they traveled in opposite directions, one ahead and the other behind the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. The goal was to get a wide, stereoscopic view of the Sun which would provide 3D information on our star.

Today they reached that goal. After traveling a combined 470 million kilometers (290 million miles) relative to the Earth, they are now on opposite sides of the Earth’s orbit, staring down at opposing faces of the Sun.

This image [click to ensolenate], taken just four days ago, is the result: the far side of the Sun! If you could bore straight through the center of the Sun in this image, plunging through nearly 1.4 million kilometers of solar fire, out the other side, and straight on for another 150 million kilometers, you’d be back at the Earth.

Mind you, the STEREO spacecraft reached their 180° separation today, and this image was taken just before that happened. The black line represent the small amount of solar real estate still invisible to the twin probes last week, but which can now be seen (I expect we’ll get that image from NASA pretty soon). The images are slightly fuzzy around that line because to the two spacecraft that’s the edge of the Sun where their view is distorted by perspective. However, that’s a minimal issue, and this is the first time we’ve ever seen the actual entire far side of the Sun!

I’ll note that there is no real, permanent far side of the Sun like there is for the Moon. (more…)

The newest edition of the SETI radio show "Are We Alone" is up, and in the segment called Skeptic Check astronomer Seth Shostak and I poke fun at the latest silliness about Betelgeuse and the Mayan doomsday. The rest of the show is, as usual, really good and fun to listen to (all about ESP — but you knew that already), so head over there and give it a download. But do it before December 21, 2012.

Or wait until afterwards. It’ll still be around, as will the Earth.

My pal Zach Weiner is a good guy. Smart, funny, talented — and he draws Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, my favorite web comic bar none. And it’s that last bit which has elevated him into my exclusive pantheon of personal heroes. Let me tell you this tale (and you can read Zach’s version too).

On Thursday, he posted this cartoon:

Pretty funny, and like most of his stuff, also kinda true. What it isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, is an endorsement of "traditional" modes of insemination, or an indictment of the homosexual lifestyle.

But that’s how the National Organization of Marriage interpreted it. This is a group that believes marriage should be between a man and a woman, and you can imagine how I feel about that. To give you an idea of how low this organization goes, I’ll remind you of this truly vile and despicable ad they put together a couple of years ago against gay marriage.

Yeah. So this group decided somehow that Zach’s cartoon supported their cause, and they used it on their site. Thing is, they hotlinked it: instead of grabbing the image and uploading it to their server, they linked it straight from Zach’s server. So whenever someone went to the NOM site, Zach’s server had to send the image. Hotlinking is a big net no-no; it puts the burden on the other person’s server (that they pay for, as well as for bandwidth, the amount of data sent), and is considered at the very least to be rude.

But from that group, which espouses hatred and inequality, it was far more than merely rude to Zach.

[UPDATE: My mistake: Zach doesn't mind hotlinking his comics, so the above is incorrect. It was just, and justifiably, the intolerance and bigotry of NOM that prompted Zach's following actions!]

So he decided to play a prank. (more…)

Just in case you haven’t seen enough snow this week, NASA and NOAA have released an amazing video made from GOES 13 weather satellite images. I present to you Snowpocalypse 2011:

[Set the resolution to 480p to see it best.]

The animation goes from January 31 to February 2, and you can really see how the wet air from the ocean and Gulf of Mexico gets slammed by incredibly cold arctic air that had screamed south, creating this enormous storm front that swept across the nation. I was in Nebraska when this hit; the night before it had been unseasonably warm, but then temperatures dropped a lot — like 40°C (65°F) — by the next day. Nebraska looked like another planet. Boulder didn’t get much snow (you can see from the animation that snow was mostly east of Colorado) but the temperatures were so cold they had to cancel schools; the fuel mix used in school buses wasn’t rich enough to start the engines!

The GOES satellites (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites, just so’s you know) orbit the Earth over the Equator at a height of about 40,000 km (24,000 miles) above the surface. This makes their orbital period 24 hours, so they orbit once for every time the Earth rotates once. (more…)