There's a slight chance that
an asteroid could impact Mars at the end of this month. Usually, collisions between heavenly bodies have vanishingly small odds (a million to one, say), but the chances on this one have been steadily improving, from 350-to-1 to 75-to-1 to
25-to-1 (link to Washington Post). Scientists say that this could be comprable to the famous
Tunguska blast in Siberia a hundred years ago (not to be confused with
this other Tunguska blast).
[more inside]
posted by math
on Jan 7, 2008 -
37 comments
Who Speaks for Earth? "After decades of searching, scientists have found no trace of extraterrestrial intelligence. Now, some of them hope to make contact by broadcasting messages to the stars. Are we prepared for an answer?"
posted by homunculus
on Jan 1, 2008 -
63 comments
Warp Drive, When? "Have you ever wondered when we will be able to travel to distant stars as easily as in science fiction stories?"
posted by amyms
on Dec 15, 2007 -
60 comments
Growing drugs in space. If the rainforest runs out of undiscovered medicines, just grow new drugs in space:
Wired reports that "a swaggering Texas investor" wants to turn the
International Space Station into a kind of orbiting drug lab: "If people knew what I already know," he says, "the International Space Station would be considered one of the most valuable resources our world possesses." Think of it as
New Jack City in zero-G – full of weird, crystallized proteins (and billion dollar cures).
posted by BLDGBLOG
on Oct 7, 2007 -
19 comments
In honor of
this morning's impressive lunar eclipse, another moon-photo post: For decades you had to be a scholar or specialist to get access to the original Apollo flight films, most of which have been stored in freezers at Houston's Johnson Space Center. Now Arizona State University and NASA are scanning the negatives with high-resolution equipment and creating
an online digital archive of downloadable images for the general public.
Here are
the first few, from Apollo 15.
(Similar topics previously:
1,
2,
3,
4.)
posted by GrammarMoses
on Aug 28, 2007 -
9 comments
Let's send a knowledge Ark to the Moon, says a French University. The founders of the group Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC) agree:
"extending the Internet from the Earth to the moon could help avert a technological dark age following "nuclear war, acts of terrorism, plague, or asteroid collisions." Better than sending
1679 binary digits, into space? The French are no strangers to
CETI , inventor
Charles Cros petitioned the French Government for years for funding to construct a giant mirror to burn giant lines of communication into the deserts of other planets. [
previously]
posted by takeyourmedicine
on Aug 18, 2007 -
45 comments
A Pale Blue Dot - An Unauthorized view. Some time before he died in 1996, Carl Sagan recorded a partial audio version of his 1994 book "Pale Blue Dot". Often described as the "sequel" to Cosmos, the audio version of Pale Blue Dot is, at this moment, regrettably out of print.
This video is "episode one" of an unauthorized attempt at producing a series of videos based on Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" audio book combined with a soundtrack and appropriate video and still images intended to recall the feel of the classic documentary series "Ascent of Man" and "Cosmos"
posted by empath
on Jul 9, 2007 -
8 comments
“Thirty-six characters from different stages of life - representations of different times - interact in one room, moving in loops, observed by a static camera. I had to draw and paint about 16.000 cell-mattes, and make several hundred thousand exposures on an optical printer. It took a full seven months, sixteen hours per day, to make the piece”[ source]:
Zbig Rybczynski on the making of his award winning (
and much imitated) animation "
Tango "
(YT, mildly NSFW).
posted by rongorongo
on Jun 19, 2007 -
27 comments
Mars and Beyond - 50 years ago, this animated episode of Tomorrowland aired on Disneyland a few months after the launch of Sputnik - an entertaining melange of astronomy, sci-fi, pop culture, science, speculation, and surreality. Walt himself and Wernher von Braun make guest appearances and clip 5 is particularly trippy. (Parts
2,
3,
4,
5,
6)
posted by madamjujujive
on Jun 10, 2007 -
9 comments
Scientists have discovered a planet composed of
scorching hot ice. Originally thought to be a gas giant due to its mass, its actually only four times the size of Earth and most likely composed of exotic forms of ice, such as
Ice VII and Ice X with s surface temperature of 300° C.
posted by Artw
on May 16, 2007 -
30 comments
