Tag: space

Tardigrades in Space

The world’s toughest animal has been sent into space. Tardigrades can survive incredibly harsh conditions, including freezing to near absolute 0, extreme vacuum and radiation. Exposed to open space on the Russian FOTON M3 satellite, tardigrades are the first animals tested and perhaps the best candidate on earth for surviving space travel.

I wonder how much of their hardiness is a function of their size, and how much of superior genes
2021-12-23: And now they’ve demonstrated another feat:

To perform their entanglement experiment, Dumke and co cooled their tardigrade to below 10 millikelvin, almost to absolute 0, while reducing the pressure to a millionth of that in the atmosphere. In these conditions, no chemical reaction can occur so the tardigrade’s metabolism must have entirely halted stopped and the processes of life halted. “This is to-date the most extreme exposure to low temperatures and pressures that a tardigrade has been recorded to survive, clearly demonstrating that the state of cryptobiosis ultimately involves a suspension of all metabolic processes given that all chemical reactions would be prohibited with all its constituent molecules cooled to their ground states”

Smallest Human

She isn’t expected to grow past about 76 cm or weigh more than 4 kg.

this trait would be perfect for space travel. imagine the weight savings!

Moon X Prize

A morning brainstorm featuring Google’s Larry Page and Virgin’s Richard Branson had already turned up scores of possible new X Prize targets, from early cancer detection to ultracheap solar energy. During a break for lunch, Page dropped one more on X Prize chief Peter Diamandis: He and Google cofounder Sergey Brin had been “kicking around” the idea of sending low-cost robotic landers to the moon. Diamandis, who has been launching extraterrestrial enterprises since he was an MIT undergrad in the 1980s, grabbed his laptop and disappeared, returning half an hour later with a freshly minted PowerPoint deck. Page looked it over, then said, “Talk to Sergey.” That evening, as the guests sipped cocktails in the shadow of the little white spaceplane, Diamandis cornered the Google technology chief and pitched. Brin loved it. “Some endeavors are too speculative, even for venture capital. If they’re really worth doing, you try to find some other way.”

this is why i love this place. not just puny crap like the guys in sunnyvale.

Planet sized diamond

BPM 37093, now known as the biggest diamond in the galaxy, 50LY away from Earth in the constellation Centaurus, has a diameter of 4000 km.

conspiracy-minded folk would call it an artifact of a kardashev type II civilization 🙂 also, earth is 6000 km.

CMB Cold Spot

Aastronomers have found an enormous hole in the Universe, nearly 1b light-years across, empty of both normal matter such as stars, galaxies and gas, as well as the mysterious, unseen “dark matter.”

Lunar Ark

Kilian Engel, an instructor at the International Space University who is involved in post-doomsday research, said the lunar archive is actually Plan B.

A Star with a Comet Tail

It’s amazing to discover such a startlingly large and important feature of an object that has been known and studied for over 400 years. Mira’s comet-like tail stretches more than 13 light years.

Under Atlantis

the death trap is pretty apparent, don’t you think?

Acoustic Planetology

Imagine listening to babbling brooks of methane on Titan, or hearing deep thunder booming through Venus’s dense, noxious atmosphere.

4-way Galaxy Merger

4 massive galaxies are colliding in the largest galactic merger ever seen. The smash-up is shedding light on how the biggest galaxies in the universe form – and why many of them stopped giving birth to stars billions of years ago.

massive galaxies lose their gas early and do not create new stars.