Scientific American - Space

#SciAmBlogs Thursday - tsunami debris, groundhogs, apes in suits, kakapos, butterfly drones and more

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 23:56:00 EST

- Harold Johnson – Tsunami Debris & North America: Is the Tail Wagging the Dog?

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Newfound Alien Planet Is Best Candidate Yet to Support Life, Scientists Say

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:15:00 EST

A potentially habitable alien planet -- one that scientists say is the best candidate yet to harbor water, and possibly even life, on its surface -- has been found around a nearby star.

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Could Simple Experiments Reveal the Quantum Nature of Spacetime?

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:00:00 EST

Conventional wisdom has it that putting the words quantum gravity and experiment in the same sentence is like bringing matter into contact with antimatter. All you get is a big explosion; the two just don t go together. The distinctively quantum features of gravity only show up in extreme settings such as the belly of a black hole or the nascent universe, over distances too small and energies too large to reproduce in any laboratory. Even alien civilizations that command the energy resources of a whole galaxy probably couldn t do it.

Physicists have never been much for conventional wisdom, though, and the dream of studying quantum gravity is too enthralling to give up. Right now, physicists don t really know how gravity works they have quantum theories for every force of nature except this one. And as Einstein showed, gravity is special: it is not just any old force, but a reflection of the structure of spacetime, on which all else depends. In a quantum theory of gravity, all the principles that govern nature will come together. If physicists can observe some distinctively quantum feature of gravity, they will have glimpsed the underlying unity of the natural world.

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It's a Small World, After All...

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:54:00 EST

A few days ago, NASA released this lovely composite image of our home planet:

Click for the full-resolution image

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#SciAmBlogs Wednesday - #scio12 art and video, pigmy hippos, spider webs, sunfish, synchronized eating and more.

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:34:00 EST

Wednesday, the new Video of the Week day – have fun!

LOTS of good reading today:

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ScienceOnline2012: The Music Video

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:39:00 EST

Video of the Week #28 February 1st, 2012

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Snap Asteroid Eros and Help Measure the Size of the Solar System

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 07:10:00 EST

Eros as seen on 14th February 2001 by the NEAR spacecraft. Credit: NASA

Fed up of simply reading about space and want to do some real science? Well, here’s your chance: astronomers are asking anyone with a pair of binoculars or telescope to train them on a new object visible in the night sky.

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Thanks to Plants, We Will Never Find a Planet Like Earth

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:30:00 EST

Astronomers are finding lots of exoplanets that are orbiting stars like the sun, significantly raising the odds that we will find a similar world. But if we do, the chance that the surface of that planet will look like ours is very small, thanks to an unlikely culprit: plants.

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#SciAmBlogs Tuesday - Cotard's syndrome, pigeon parasite, Haeckel, clumped bacteria, aurorae, `polite' sexism, and more.

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:19:00 EST

You may have noticed a little improvement installed today – now you can see each blog post in a print-friendly form and then print it that way. Just click on the “Print” button, like this:

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Life after Tevatron: Fermilab Still Kicking Even Though It Is No Longer Top Gun

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:02:00 EST

MINOS detector, courtesy Fermilab

Fermilab is dead. Long live Fermilab!

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Where Do Aurorae Come From?

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:40:00 EST

Aurora borealis above Bear Lake in Alaska. Credit: U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Joshua Strang

The Sun is hotting up, and we can see the results right here on Earth. Across the northern hemisphere, fantastic light displays have been visible of late, and the frequency of these events is set only to increase as the Sun heads toward a peak in its magnetic activity.

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Gigantic Radio Telescope to Search for First Stars and Galaxies

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:00:00 EST

More than 20,000 radio antennas will soon connect over the Internet to scan largely unexplored radio frequencies, hunting for the first stars and galaxies and potentially signals of extraterrestrial intelligence.

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Introducing #SciAmBlogs bloggers: Caleb Scharf

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 11:55:00 EST

Every week (or so) I post a quick Q&A with one of our bloggers on the network, so you can get to know them better. This week, I chat with Caleb Scharf from Life, Unbounded .

Hello! Let’s start with first things first. What is the name of your blog and why did you choose that name – what does it mean?

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#SciAmBlogs Monday - MIN awards, Quantum Entanglement, Neglected Tropical Diseases, living dirty, mimic spiders, coffee and more...

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:18:00 EST

Welcome back. As it is Monday, we have the new Image of the Week – it is just one of a series, so make sure to click through to the original blog post where that one came from.

I don’t know much about all those media awards (I am much more aware of the good old Kaufax Awards, ResearchBlogging Awards, 3 Quarks Daily Awards and such), but it seems this one is big as everyone is so excited about it. Scientific American is a finalist in four categories:

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An Enemy in the Ranks

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:34:00 EST

Image of the Week #28, January 30th, 2012:

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Kepler Finds Multiple Exoplanets around Single Stars

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:52:08 EST

Two decades ago, the only known planetary system started at Mercury and ended at Pluto.

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The Joys of Quantum Entanglement

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:00:00 EST

Quantum entanglement is such a mainstay of modern physics that it is worth reflecting on how long it took to emerge. What began as a perceptive but vague insight by Albert Einstein languished for decades before becoming a branch of experimental physics and, increasingly, modern technology.

Einstein s two most memorable phrases perfectly capture the weirdness of quantum mechanics. I cannot believe that God plays dice with the universe expressed his disbelief that randomness in quantum physics was genuine and impervious to any causal explanation. Spooky action at a distance referred to the fact that quantum physics seems to allow influences to travel faster than the speed of light. This was, of course, disturbing to Einstein, whose theory of relativity prohibited any such superluminal propagation.

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#SciAmBlogs Friday - Apollo 1 fire, shale gas, ambidextrous wallabies, slow loris trade, skin microbiome, and more...

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 00:51:00 EST

Another day with ‘quality over quantity’ marker… have a great weekend!

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YouTube SpaceLab top 60 Global Finalists Chosen!

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:21:00 EST

Take a look at what some clever American teens have come up with as an idea for an experiment on the International Space Station!

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Apollo 1: The Fire That Shocked NASA

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 06:52:00 EST

The Apollo 1 Command Module after the fire that claimed the lives of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. Credit: NASA.

NASA s Apollo program began with one of the worst disasters the organization has ever faced. A routine prelaunch test turned fatal when a fire ripped through the spacecraft s crew cabin killing all three astronauts. Today marks the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire, a tragic and preventable accident. There were warning signs, similar accidents that had claimed lives both in the United States and abroad. The Apollo 1 crew could have been saved from a gruesome death.

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