• Bees and their hives aren’t just for honey anymore: They might help farmers in Kenya deter elephant raids that threaten crops.
• It’s a nice day for a weightless wedding, at least for the Brooklyn couple that will get married in zero gravity later this month. They’ll tie the knot on a commercial weightless flight, with a price tag of $5,200 per person.
• Conservatives are more easily grossed out by bugs, blood, and guts than are their liberal counterparts, according to a study in the journal Cognition & Emotion.
• And, finally, a video of the world’s only pet hippo!
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• Forget Graceland: If you’re in Huntsville, Ala., be sure to visit the graves of spacemonkeys Able and Baker, the first monkeys to survive a space flight. You can find the graves easily—they’re strewn with bananas.
• If you’re reading this, you have a UFO to thank—at least according to a Russian scientist, who claims an alien spacecraft saved earth from an approaching meteorite by smashing into it a century ago.
• To test whether beer or a joint does more damage to driving skills, researchers got students drunk, or high on marijuana. The results? Stoned drivers drive significantly slower than drunk ones, but—surprise!—both groups drove less safely than their placebo’ed peers.
• Think you’re smart? Not compared to this 16-year-old Iraqi. It took him only four months to solve a math problem that had been baffling academics for 300 years.
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Discoblog: Can Scientists Put All the Good Parts of Pot in a Pill? Discoblog: Where No Film Has Gone Before: Star Trek Screened in Space
Not that Star Trek was lacking for an audience to begin with, but it’s now been screened in space, surely spoiling entertainment for astronauts from here on out.
Last week, Paramount Pictures transferred a copy of the movie to NASA’s Houston center, which then uploaded the blockbuster to the International Space Station. Astronaut Michael Barratt then used a laptop to watch it inside the Unity module.
Still no word on whether he found it as uniformly “meh” as we did (well, not all of us).
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Image: Flickr / culture.culte
Astronaut Mike Massimino is the first man to tweet from space. Now we know for sure that the “launch was awesome!!”
Now that the anxiety over swine-flu fears have receded somewhat, a virus that up to 99 percent of us have can cause high blood pressure.
There’s something in the air in Barcelona and Madrid. It’s not love, it’s drugs.
Who needs Gatorade when all you need is the Michael Phelps diet—corn flakes and milk—to perform well.
English rats have reportedly developed resistance to poison. Sometimes we wish evolution were not true.
Last week’s Weird Science Roundup included a NASA-funded report warning if a glob of the sun’s plasma were to escape and enter the earth’s magnetic shield, it could disrupt our entire power grid… and basically cause the end of the world as we know it.
So just how credible is this theory? We asked our own Phil Plait for his thoughts on the matter, which, alarmingly, did not include it being a totally bogus possibility. Here’s what he had to say:
Actually, while they play up the worst cases, what they say is not totally out of bounds. I’m not sure about the number of deaths quoted, but the scenarios are plausible. Our grid is running nearly at capacity, and a huge DC current dumped into them from a geomagnetically induced current could overload a huge number of transformers. The 1989 Quebec event was a taste of how that could happen.
From what I understand, North America is more sensitive to this because of the huge granite slab that composes most of the continental plate; it sets up huge currents underground when the magnetic field of the Earth gets slammed from a CME from the Sun, and that induces current in the gird, and bang.
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In the age of unmanned missions to the moon, flowers might become the next iconic picture that will “stir enthusiasm for spaceflight.” And Paragon Space Development wants to be the first company to plant said flowers on the moon. Paragon’s CEO, Taber MacCallum, will plant the seeds in a greenhouse that has been designed to block off space radiation and withstand the moon’s extreme temperatures —which can dip to 240 degrees below Fahrenheit (F) at night and rise to 225 degrees F during the day.
Here’s how MacCallum plans to pull off his feat. First, the greenhouse (made of metal-reinforced glass) will hitch a ride on the Odyssey Moon, one of the competitors for the Google Lunar X Prize. When the greenhouse lands on the moon’s surface, the incubated mustard seeds will complete their life cycle, and bloom into six flowers (that’s all there’s room for). While it would take two weeks for a mustard seed to blossom into a flower on earth, it’ll take just a single lunar day for the flower to bud on the moon.
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It takes Sandra Magnus more than two hours and a roll of duct tape to cook garlic and onions. Granted, she’s doing it all in space, where for the last four months she has been practicing orbital cooking. It’s not the easiest of tasks in a low-gravity environment, where even the tiniest crumbs can get lodged in a shuttle vent or even float into an astronaut’s nose, posing a breathing hazard.
One of Magnus’s first space culinary efforts: pesto canned chicken with vegetables, olives, and sun-dried tomatoes. The result? “Mediocre,” she said. She kept a journal of her cooking experiences, jotting down observations that are sure to come in handy for astronaut posterity. She noted that mixing was most easily done with sealed plastic bags, duct tape proved useful as a way to keep items (especially waste) in place, and when slicing, large pieces were most practical.
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Astronauts make plenty of sacrifices to stay alive in space—including drinking their own urine if they have to. But when it comes to underwear, they need to change it every few days or else their briefs could turn into a bacterial mess, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Newcomer astronaut Koichi Wakata will pack 45 pairs of underwear for his trip to space, so he can help JAXA make some upgrades to its space under garments—including making it odor-free and bacteria-resistant in zero-g.
JAXA, Japan Women’s University, and five Japanese companies have given Wakata a week’s worth of underwear and other clothing to test in space. The clothes are easier on the skin, fitted for someone crouched in zero gravity, have Velcro to prevent static, and are made of antibacterial threads.
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Roman Catholic bishops have called for a new kind of abstinence this Lent: no text messaging. They have deemed every Friday during Lent “no SMS day,” partly to honor “concrete” rather than “virtual” relationships. But the refrain from phones is also an attempt to bring attention to the ongoing conflict in Congo, which is partly fueled by coltan, a mineral found aplenty in the eastern part of the country and which is crucial for many technologies, including cell phones.
Others, meanwhile, are embracing technology to the fullest—enough to try and turn magic carpet rides into reality. In space, no less. A Japanese astronaut will try to fly on a carpet when he arrives at the International Space Station later this month—he’ll also try 16 other challenges out of the total 1,597 total suggestions submitted.
Over in Italy, a “vampire” skeleton has been exhumed from a mass grave in Venice. It is thought to be from a period during the Middle Ages when vampires were believed to spread the plague by chewing on people’s shrouds after dying—an act that grave-diggers sought to prevent by putting bricks in the mouths of suspected vampires.
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For those who haven’t kept up on their space news, space junk is a growing problem that people simply can’t figure out how to handle. With an estimated 18,000 pieces of junk floating around in space (and that’s only counting pieces larger than 4 inches), the risks of collisions and damage to satellites are constantly increasing.
Now, Stanford University scientists believe they have a solution—though it certainly has a long path to approval, let alone implementation. They have suggested that countries that don’t dispose of space waste properly should be fined, on the grounds that establishing a formal international framework will encourage responsible behavior provide incentives to clean up the royal space mess. Any funds collected could be used to compensate owners of satellites damaged by debris, or to research cheaper ways to de-orbit satellites (though we can also count on a little stimulus cash to help with that one).
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