Tag: science

Mars500

studying long-term effects of extreme confinement

The purpose of the Mars500 study is to gather data, knowledge and experience to help prepare one day for a real mission to Mars. Obviously there will be no effect of weightlessness, but the study will help determine key psychological and physiological effects of being in such an enclosed environment for such an extended period of time.

White Dwarf Habitable Zones

Planet hunters may be missing a trick. White dwarfs could be good targets for exoplanet searches. They are as common as Sun-like stars, the most common ones have a surface temperature of 5000 K and this should produce a habitable zone at distances of 0.01 AU for periods in excess of 3 ga. That’s long enough for something interesting to have emerged on these bodies.

my drake equation estimate just went up

Birth of a word

a great example what our imminent mylifebits future enables.

MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language — so he wired up his house with video cameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son’s life, then parsed 90K hours of home video to watch “gaaaa” slowly turn into “water.” Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn.

BART Seats

Fecal and skin-borne bacteria resistant to antibiotics were found in a seat on a train headed from Daly City to Dublin/Pleasanton. Further testing on the skin-borne bacteria showed characteristics of methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, the drug-resistant bacterium that causes potentially lethal infections, although Franklin cautioned that the MRSA findings were preliminary.

Runner’s High

Although the full intricacies of the endocannabinoid system’s role in motivating and rewarding exercise is not yet understood, it seems obvious that the cannabinoid-deprived mice were not getting some necessary internal message. Typically, the endocannabinoid system “is well known to impact onto central reward networks”. Without it, exercise seemed to provide less buzz, and the animals didn’t indulge as much.

No Heat Death?

gravity saves the day. or rather, the future of the cosmos.

The Fang/Dyson idea (for the lack of a better name) says that rather than an inexorable sinking towards heat death, the universe is biased toward a slow and steady march towards increasing differences over time. Gravity will continue to accentuate the uneven clumping of matter, and create ever more uneven energy potential, constantly building up order, even while local areas run down. But over the very long term, the universe as a whole is running up.

Planet X?

at 15k AU. meanwhile the supposed nemesis would be at 50k-100k AU.
2018-10-02:

A new extremely distant object far beyond Pluto with an orbit that supports the presence of an even-farther-out, Planet X. “These distant objects are like breadcrumbs leading us to Planet X. The more of them we can find, the better we can understand the outer Solar System and the possible planet that we think is shaping their orbits—a discovery that would redefine our knowledge of the Solar System’s evolution”