Daily Archives: June 19, 2010

Get Your, er, Buns to Mars

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Seventh Graders Find a Cave on Mars

On their two targeted images the students found lava tubes, as they had hoped. And on the backup image, they also found a small, round black spot. Many Martian lava tubes are marked by aligned chains of collapse pits, which typically have flat floors and sloping sides. The spot they [sic] students found, however, appears to have vertical sides.
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The students have submitted their site as a candidate for imaging by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. HiRISE can image the surface at about 30 centimeters (12 inches) per pixel, which may allow a look inside the hole in the ground.

Falling Down on the Job

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Getting the drop on gravity

It’s an ingenious plan with two major problems: first, the super-cold atom clouds are extraordinarily hard to make. Second, the best way to test gravity is to make sure that no other forces are acting on an experiment. Short of launching it into orbit, the best way to do that is to drop the whole experimental apparatus so that it goes into free fall.

Incredibly, Rasel and his team have now licked both problems. They devised a special self-contained canister that can automatically generate a BEC. They then dropped the canister from the 146-metre-high drop tower at the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity in Bremen, Germany.

This is one of the experiments I mentioned in a discussion of chip-scale atomic physics a while back. And while it’s hard, I don’t know that it’s extraordinarily hard — the workshop I summarized was part of a push to move this type of technology forward. You get a lot of smart people thinking about the problem, trying different things, and you find solutions. But it is hard. It’s supposed to be hard. The hard is what makes it great.

here’s another story on the topic: Scientists Drop Theory of Everything Down Elevator Shaft

Just a Bit Outside

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If sports got reported like science..

HOST: In sports news, Chelsea manager Carlo Ancelotti today heavily criticised a controversial offside decision which denied Didier Drogba a late equaliser, leaving Chelsea with a 1-all draw against Sunderland.
INTERCOM: Wait. Hold it. What was all that sports jargon?
HOST: It’s just what’s in the script. All I did was read it – I’ve got no idea what it’s really on about.
INTERCOM: Nobody without a PhD in football’s going to understand that. Who wrote this crap? It’s elitist rubbish, people will just turn off when they hear it. “Late equaliser”? “Offside”? We’ve got to get this rewritten so it’s more accessible.

They need to work in how the early goal by Sunderland violated or has rewritten some rule, except that it didn’t, in order to parallel all of those science stories that claim that relativity has been violated or evolutionary theory has been upset by some discovery, only to find that (of course) nothing of the sort actually happened.