science

Ten years ago today, Carl Sagan, one of the greatest humans of the 20th century died. What he did for humanity is too vast to cover in this post, he was awarded the Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Medal of the Soviet Cosmonauts Federation, the Public Welfare Medal and NASA's Exceptional Scientific Achievement award among many many others. What he gave back to human society is incalculable. Although he was less well known in Britain then other countries, Patrick Moore has always been our "...

This is something I bring up a lot. Private companies sending people into space, it's all the hype nowadays, and obviously people are unable to see the dangers, after all what's the track record of private companies on the ground? I was reading Another World is Possible, the blog of John McDonnell MP, who is standing in the Labour leadership contest when Blair steps down, he wrote the following entry:...

A couple of months back the Cassini spacecraft took the following spectacular image of Saturn. This image is actually composed of 165 individual images in total all stitched together and taken over several hours, the reason it looks so weird compared to other images of Saturn you have seen in the past is this was taken during an artificial solar eclipse, the team positioned Cassini on the opposite side of Saturn to the Sun....

After being launched some ten years ago and after returning 240 000 images of Mars, it appears the spacecraft come to an end of its career. The spacecraft hasn't made contact with the Earth since the 2nd of November, attempts to contact it have failed. The spacecraft being assembled: "Realistically, we have run through the most likely possibilities for re-establishing communication, and we are facing the likelihood that the amazing flow of scientific observations from Mars Global Surveyor is over,"...

Before I start, I'll just mention a little safety tip - DO NOT LOOK AT THE SUN. Mercury will be passing between the Earth and the Sun today. It'll appear as a tiny dot taking 5 hours or so to cross the whole solar disc. It'll kick off at 19:12 (UTC) and end at 00:10 (UTC). That's 11:12 Pacific time. From the BBC: The Sun is below the horizon then for myself and a lot of other people so we won't be watching this one....

We can add dinosaur meat to the menu at last. We've only got a small amount, so the bidding starts at £10 million. On a more serious note, scientists have discovered tissue fragments from a 70 million year old Tyrannosaurus rex. When paleontologists find fossilized dinosaur bones during a dig, they usually do everything in their power to protect them, using tools like toothbrushes to carefully unearth the bones without inflicting any damage....

The Russian Duma (parliament) came to the only obvious course of action and voted against allowing Madonna to be launched into space, idiot Duma member Alexei Mitrofanov, put forward the idea of booking her a $20 million seat on a launch on Soyuz in 2008. The only acceptable courses of action would be 1) blowing the rocket up with her onboard, 2) depressurizing the space craft while in orbit 3) throwing her in jail for being retarded....

The IAU have just in the last few hours voted on the definition of the word planet. The new definition removes Pluto from the family of planets and places it into a new category of dwarf-planets. Here is resolution 5a: The IAU therefore resolves that planets and other bodies in our Solar System be defined into three distinct categories in the following way: (1) A planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit....

From the BBC: US space agency NASA has named its new manned exploration craft Orion. The vehicle is being developed to take human space explorers back to the Moon and potentially then on to Mars. It is hoped the name Orion could eventually mean as much for manned space exploration as Apollo did in the 1960s and 1970s. Its first manned flight - to the International Space Station - will take place no later than 2014 and its first flight to the Moon no later than 2020....

Talk about depressing. The following is the result from a poll asking "Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals." the results are below: America managed to beat Turkey but that is all... Well done America. I'm sure most of you can guess the reason, right? The total effect of fundamentalist religious beliefs on attitude toward evolution (using a standardized metric) was nearly twice as much in the United States as in the nine European countries (path coefficients of -0....