Science Buzz - Science Museum of Minnesota [and Best of the Web]

Earth and Moon seen from nearly a billion miles away!

Earth and Moon: Does this make my planet look small? (enlarge photo by clicking on it - then you'll see the Moon, too.)Courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute During the Apollo lunar missions in the late 60s and early 70s, many of the astronauts remarked at how small Earth seemed from the Moon. On this anniversary of his first steps on the lunar surface, I wonder what Neil Armstrong would have thought of this remarkable photograph taken yesterday by the Cassini spacecraft? In the center of a field of stars sits planet Earth and the Moon taken from more than 898,000,000 miles away!

More Cassini Photos

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Anniversary of first Moon landing

The LEM, the Earth, and the Moon: Astronaut Michael Collins captured this photograph of the lunar excursion module, the Moon, and the Earth from Columbia, the orbiting command module, during the historic Apollo 11 mission.Courtesy NASAForty-four years ago today, I was laying on the beach at Park Point in Duluth, Minnesota when those famous words, "The Eagle has landed" came over my little transistor radio, signaling Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong's and Buzz Aldrin's successful landing of their spacecraft on the Moon. That evening, I was working my shift at a local restaurant, busing tables. The manager (thankfully) had placed a television in the dining area so patrons (and I) could watch as Armstrong made his monumental first steps on the lunar surface. The rest, of course, is history.

LINKS
Apollo 11 mission
PBS - Race to the Moon
Moon landing not a hoax
National Park status for lunar landings (A great idea!)

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Good time for an astronomical photobomb!

Artists conception of big photo opCourtesy NASA/JPL-CaltechHey, everybody. Heads up! Today (July 19, 2013), at approximately 4:27 CDT the Cassini spacecraft, which is 898 million miles away, will take a snapshot from the other side of Saturn that will include not only the ringed planet but our very own planet Earth. The photo op will last for about 15 minutes. Perfect time for a photobomb don't you think?

NASA-JPL story

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Meet Heritage Crew!

The Kitty Andersen Youth Science Center
KAYSC LogoCourtesy KAYSC has a new crew on the block! The Heritage Crew is going to be working in the Archeology department in the museum and will be working out at an archeological dig site called Sheffield Site. They'll be digging up artifacts belonging to the Oneota along the St. Croix River. In August, they will also excavate the sites and process the artifacts back at the museum. Currently, they are learning about the different types of stone used at the site that the Oneota used for stone tools (lithics), the pottery at the site, and bones (faunal material). Most of the material dates to around 2000 years old. Follow us on Facebook at The Sheffield Site!

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Learn your personal risk factors for getting bit by mosquitoes

Mosquito: Researchers have tracked several traits that make people be more susceptible to mosquito bites. How do you rate?Courtesy JJ HarrisonWith all the rain we've had this summer, the conditions are prime for creating large mosquito populations. And researchers have now figured out certain factors – like blood type – that can make people be more tasty targets for the little buzzers. Question, do you think mosquitoes prefer to strike beer drinkers? Click here to find the answer to that, and other factors that can impact your appeal to mosquitoes.

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Corn hand-pollination in the Three Sisters Garden

Come out this afternoon to the Three Sisters Garden in the Big Back Yard to see and learn about how we are learning to increase the genetic diversity and vigor of our precious collection of American Indian heirloom corn varieties! We will have some guest coming to teach us how to transfer the pollen from one corn plant to fertilize the silk on another corn plant of the same variety. This is a time-consuming process that we will need to keep a close eye on all summer as the different varieties flower at different times. This help control any possible cross pollination with nearby varieties but also ensures that we don't have any cross-pollination with any corn grown up to two miles away - corn pollen can travel that far!

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A rare catch: a 46-inch albino muskie

Muskie, regular coloration: Here's a regularly colored muskie....now imagine it all white as an albino.Courtesy Engbretson, Eric / U.S. Fish and Wildlife ServiceI confess, muskies freak me out. They're scary looking. And now I read that a guy caught a 46-inch albino muskie. No way am I going in that lake!!! You can read about, and see photos of, this rare catch here.

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NASA Hubble Finds New Neptune Moon

Orbit of Neptune's Newly Discovered Moon: This diagram shows the orbits of several moons located close to the planet Neptune. All of them were discovered in 1989 by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft, with the exception of S/2004 N 1, which was discovered in archival Hubble Space Telescope images taken from 2004 to 2009.Courtesy NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)From a NASA issued press release:

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a new moon orbiting the distant blue-green planet Neptune, the 14th known to be circling the giant planet.

The moon, designated S/2004 N 1, is estimated to be no more than 12 miles across, making it the smallest known moon in the Neptunian system. It is so small and dim that it is roughly 100 million times fainter than the faintest star that can be seen with the naked eye. It even escaped detection by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft, which flew past Neptune in 1989 and surveyed the planet's system of moons and rings.

Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., found the moon July 1, while studying the faint arcs, or segments of rings, around Neptune. "The moons and arcs orbit very quickly, so we had to devise a way to follow their motion in order to bring out the details of the system," he said. "It's the same reason a sports photographer tracks a running athlete -- the athlete stays in focus, but the background blurs."

The method involved tracking the movement of a white dot that appears over and over again in more than 150 archival Neptune photographs taken by Hubble from 2004 to 2009.

On a whim, Showalter looked far beyond the ring segments and noticed the white dot about 65,400 miles from Neptune, located between the orbits of the Neptunian moons Larissa and Proteus. The dot is S/2004 N 1. Showalter plotted a circular orbit for the moon, which completes one revolution around Neptune every 23 hours.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a cooperative project between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md., conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy Inc., in Washington.

For images, video, and more information Neptune's new moon, click here.

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Osprey cam nest fails this season

Earlier this summer we posted a link to the osprey nest cam at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. As of late last week, however, it turns out the nest has been labeled as a "fail." The lone egg left in the nest did not hatch and the adult osprey are no longer regularly tending the egg. You can learn more by visiting this website. And below is a video produced by the raptor expert who is overseeing osprey nests in that section of the metro area.

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Special camera captured nuclear reactions

Less than one millisecond after detonation: Rapatronic camera image by U.S. Air Force 1352nd Photographic Group, Lookout Mountain StationCourtesy Public domain via WikipediaWe've all seen images and films of atomic bomb tests performed by the US government during the mid-20th Century: typically a brilliant flash of light followed rapidly by a mushroom cloud expanding outward and high into the sky. But that's not the only images to come out of the Atomic Age. Scientists were eager to gather as much information as they could about every aspect of fission and fusion, and used several means to glean as much as they could from those thermonuclear tests. The mechanical shutters in conventional cameras just weren't fast enough to photograph the very early moments of an atomic blast which occurred in a matter of nano-seconds. So scientists devised the rapatronic camera, an imaging devise that used three polarized lenses and a Kerr cell to capture the earliest moments of a nuclear reaction. Two of the polarized lenses were turned 90 degrees to each other with a third polarized lens turned at the diagonal and sandwiched between them. A Kerr cell is made up of liquid-suspended electrodes and rotates the light polarization when an electric field is applied (Kerr effect), allowing for super-rapid turning of lens orientation to record some amazing images.

SOURCES
io9 website story
Raptronic cameras and photos

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The Future of Medicine

Nanoscale science holds a lot of promise for the medical world (among many other fields). The idea of introducing teeny-tiny particles into the body that can seek and destroy harmful bacteria, without damaging the living tissue around it, is an exciting prospect! Nanobotmodels Company has created an artistic representation of what it might look like to have these teeny nanobots attack an infectious disease - in this case, tetanus.

Word of warning: the music in this video is a little over-the-top, but the actual simulation is pretty cool.

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Nikola Tesla's birthday

Nikola Tesla c. 1893: The inventor and electrical engineer was born July 10, 1856 and died on January 7, 1943.Courtesy Public domain via WikipediaToday marks the 157th anniversary of the birth of electricity wonderkind Nikola Tesla. He was born this date in Croatia in 1856. Want to know more about this remarkable inventor and innovator? Go here, here, and here. Oh, and here, too.

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Anniversay of hottest air temperature on Earth

The official record of the record heat: The world record high temperature is highlighted in yellow. Let's hope this was an anomaly.Courtesy Death Valley National ParkToday is the 100th anniversary of the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth. On July 10, 1913, the U.S. Department of Agriculture weather observer's thermometer at Greenland Ranch in Death Valley, California topped out at a scorching 134 °F! That's pretty dang hot! The highest temp I ever experienced was 115 °F in Las Vegas back in 1978. That was really hot (despite the low humidity), and I can't imagine what 19 degrees hotter would feel like.

National Weather Service page

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New life found in old lake

The gene sequences of some 3500 life forms discovered in ice cores from a deep lake buried a couple miles (3700 meters) beneath glaciers in Antarctica have been sorted out and found to be about 94 percent bacteria and 6 percent Eukarya. More than half of the life is made up of new genera and species previously unknown to science. That's kind of amazing. A while back, as the Russian-led team of scientists was just breaking through to the lake's surface, I put up what I thought was a short, satirical post about Lake Vostok, and what the researchers might encounter. Maybe it's not so satirical. These are life-forms that haven't seen the light of day (or the surface of the Earth) for more than 15 million years! Although none of them appear to be giant, carnivorous carrots revived from their cryogenic tombs, is it a good idea to bring these unknown microbes back up from their icy isolation? Are we just asking for trouble? What do readers think?

SOURCE
Open study at PloS

NOTE: The video embedded above is only the first of 4 parts of the 49 minute BBC documentary, The Lost World of Lake Vostok. The remaining parts can be viewed in the clips below. It's worth watching.

Lake Vostok, part 2 of 4
Lake Vostok, part 3 of 4
Lake Vostok, part 4 of 4

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Kicking in the power: new soccer ball invention is lighting Third World villages

Using his head: On his recent trip to Africa, Presudent Obama tried out the new SOCCKET soccer ball.Courtesy APKids' soccer games in Third World nations can help provide needed power to electricity-lacking villages through this new invention of two college student. The SOCCKET puts a gyroscope inside a soccer ball, capturing kinetic energy generated by the ball's motion. That energy is stored in a battery in the ball. A cap can be popped off the ball at night exposing a socket to the battery. Thirty minutes of kids' soccer action can power a LED light for three hours. Here's we're you can learn more and see the ball in action.

http://unchartedplay.com/soccket/

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Plants do math!

It's almost commonplace these days to discover hidden talents in animals, but...plants doing math?

Yep.

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Exhibit and lectures reveal hidden worlds of the Maya

Maya stone idol: A towering replica of Stela A, seen here in artist Frederick Catherwood's wonderful illustration, greets visitors to the new Science Museum of Minnesota Maya exhibit. Catherwood and writer John Lloyd Stephens re-introduced the Maya culture to the world in two travel books written in the early 19th century.Courtesy Mark RyanThe new Science Museum of Minnesota exhibit, Maya: Hidden Worlds Revealed has just opened and is a must-see for anyone interested in the ancient and mysterious civilization that once flourished and ruled in Central America. This wide-ranging exploration of the social, political, spiritual and cultural world of the Maya includes artifacts, displays, and hands-on interaction for museum visitors. In conjunction with this very special Science Museum of Minnesota exhibit, the SMM is partnering with the Maya Society of Minnesota to present several lectures at Hamline University during the exhibit's run this summer and into the winter.

I attended the first lecture in the series last Friday night. Archaeologist Jaime Awe
Professor Jaime Awe at Hamline: the director of the Institute of Archaeology in Belize lectured on his exploration of Maya ritual sites in the caves of western Belize.Courtesy Mark Ryan gave a brief overview of the early Maya worldview then talked about his work investigating some impressively large caves in western Belize near where he was born and raised. Inside the caves he and his research team have discovered pottery, torch sticks, writings, and ritualistic artifacts along with human footsteps and unburied skeletal remains, many of children.

Awe hypothesizes that the caves were used by the Maya (from the Classic Period) to make desperate ritualistic pleas by way of human sacrifices to the Maya rain deity. And evidence seems to back him up. Using carbon dating techniques and core analysis of stalactites from the caves, the time-frame of these cave rituals correlate with a period of severe drought in that region of Belize.

The Maya culture is a truly fascinating one. There are several more lectures and workshops to catch each month through next December, and the Maya exhibit at the museum runs through January 5, 2014. By the way, the museum's Omnitheater is also presenting the film Mystery of the Maya. which presents a very nice overview of the early Maya exploration and discoveries. I recommend you view the film first before going through the Maya: Hidden Worlds Revealed exhibit.

LINKS
Lectures and Workshops Schedule
Maya Society of Minnesota Facebook page
Hamline University location

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The incredible story of a camping trip leading to T-Rex

Going camping out west this summer? Keep your head down and maybe, just maybe, you can find a near fully intact T-Rex, too!!!! This is a remarkable story of a dinosaur find.

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If a million monkeys with typewriters can produce a Shakespeare play, can a million chimpanzees on the mound throw a strike? Probably not.

Chimpanzee banging out Shakespeare: "To walk or not to walk"... hmm, that doesn't sound quite right.Courtesy Public domain via WikipediaBecause of mechanical limitations in a chimpanzee's throwing arm, the old "monkeys with typewriters" metaphor may not bring the same results on the baseball diamond. Despite being weaker, slower and less agile than our chimp cousins, the hominid shoulder configuration may have given mankind the edge in hunting prey and fending off scavengers. The study appears in the journal Nature.

Washington Post story
The monkey typewriter theorem
The infinite monkey theorem in popular culture

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Graphic artist discovers the essence of historic scientists

Historic scientists: Newton, Galileo, and EinsteinCourtesy Public domain via WikipediaKapil Bhagat, a graphic artist living in Mumbai, India, created a series of clever, minimal graphics honoring historic scientists and their discoveries for India's National Science Day. I especially like the one for Einstein. National Science Day is celebrated in the India each year on February 28. Go here to check out some of his very cool artwork on Tumblr.

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