The WOW Science Thread

[STEVE G]

First film of the earth from space.

Here's a bit of film that is not generally known about from the very beginning of the space race.
In 1946 at White Sands test site in New Mexico, a movie camera was fitted into the nose of a captured German V2 missile, launched and recovered to bring back the first hazy views of the earth from just over 100km up, the very edge of space.

[pharvey]

Timeline of the assembly of the International Space Station - fascinating stuff.

http://i.usatoday.net/tech/graphics/iss ... /flash.htm

[sandman67]

Another example of animals using tools...Dolphins who wear protective sponge gloves

In 1984, researchers spotted dolphins doing something unusual in Shark Bay, Western Australia. When the animals got hungry, they ripped a marine basket sponge from the sea floor and fitted it over their beaks like a person would fit a glove over a hand. The scientists suspected that as the dolphins foraged for fish, the sponges protected their beaks, or rostra, from the rocks and broken chunks of coral that litter the sea floor, making this behavior the first example of tool use in this species.

But why do dolphins go to all of this trouble when they could simply snag a fish from the open sea?

The answer, researchers hypothesize and report online today in PLoS ONE, is that the bottom-dwelling fish are a lot more nutritious. Some species also don't have swim bladders, gas chambers that help other fish control their buoyancy as they travel up and down the water column. In the Bahamas, where dolphins are also known to forage for bottom-dwelling fish, dolphins hunt partly by echolocating these bladders, which give off a strong acoustic signal. That helps the cetaceans find prey even when it's buried in sea sand.

But bottom-dwelling fish, such as barred sandperch, which are favored by some Shark Bay dolphins, don't have swim bladders and so are harder to find with echolocation. The sea floor is not nearly as soft here as it is in the Bahamas, so if dolphins want to probe for these fish, they risk injuring their rostra.

Enter the sea sponge. Some ingenious Shark Bay dolphin figured out that by prodding the sediments with a sponge attached to its beak, it could stir up these swim bladder-less fish without hurting itself.

To find out more about the types of fish that might respond to this "sponging" technique, Eric Patterson, a graduate student in behavioral ecology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., asked a colleague to try it in Shark Bay while he filmed the results. The pair fitted a marine basket sponge on the end of a pole and dove into the same channels where the dolphins hunt. "We had to switch sponges after every five to six dives because they were torn to bits by the sediments," Patterson says. Although not nearly as graceful as sponging dolphins, "which are really elegant in their moves," Patterson says, the human sponger nonetheless managed to scare up a hidden prey fish every 9 minutes. "The prey are numerous and reliable," Patterson says, "and their behavior is so predictable—they always dart out of the sands—that they make this hunting behavior worthwhile for the dolphins."

Patterson has also observed the sponging dolphins. After a fish emerges from its hiding spot, it swims a few meters away and doesn't immediately rebury itself. That interlude gives the dolphin just enough time to drop its sponge, surface to get a breath, and dive again to snag the fish, most of which are about 12 centimeters in length. "They are not a huge prey, but are very nutritious," Patterson says, because fish lacking swim bladders typically have a high lipid content.

Not every dolphin in Shark Bay hunts with sponges. "It's primarily done by females," says Janet Mann, a behavioral ecologist also at Georgetown University and Patterson's dissertation adviser. She believes the female dolphins invented the method because of the "selective pressures they face while raising a calf as long as they do," about 4 to 5 years. "These clever dolphins have figured out a way to target fish that other dolphins cannot," she says, adding that even the local fishermen do not catch, or even know about, this particular species. Mann's previous research has shown that dolphin mothers pass the sponging method to their daughters and some of their sons, rare evidence of a cultural tradition in an animal other than humans. The team has documented three generations of sponging dolphins.

The study provides a "better understanding of the why and how of sponging" by the Shark Bay dolphins, says Louis Herman, a cognitive psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. The work "adds to previously documented" examples of "innovation by this highly intelligent species." Patterson's and Mann's results also "reinforce a pattern" often seen in other tool-using animals, says Simon Reader, a behavioral biologist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. "Tool use appears to be almost a last option, taken when other options fail or are unavailable," he says, noting that woodpecker finches in the Galápagos Islands "turn to tool use only in arid areas," wielding cactus spines to extract grubs from tree branches. Using tools takes time and energy, Reader says, and animals tend to rely on them only when there's a guaranteed payoff, such as turning up a fatty fish that most other dolphins (and fishermen) know nothing about.

original article with photo: http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2 ... e771781866

[sandman67]

When I was younger the theory that at some point we could replace a heart with a totally artificial one was considered pure sci-fi. Medical experts said that the heart, whilst being relatively simple in its functionality, was way too complex a bio-mechanical organ to synthesise effectively.

Fast forward to 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/ ... cial-heart

it seems we do "have the technology to rebuild him".....

[sandman67]

Latest stuff from NASA shows that there may be seasonal flowing water on Mars outside the Ice Cap regions....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14408928

so....when will we be going?

Ahhhh....yeah I forgot. Tax breaks for rich ba$tards are more important than space exploration.....

heres a line its easy to draw. Most Republicans, and a lot of Democrats, are anti-science - its mainly down to the fact they are pig ignorant Evangelical happy clappy christians who think God did IT is an answer on biology tests, and hate evolution and science as it proves their invisible mate is as real as Santa. Now, proving life exists anywhere except Earth sort of totally discredits their Iron Age book of fairy tales once and for all. Find life anywhere else in the Solar system and thats it...game over for their religion. They get to decide on who gets the funding. So...how likely is it they will fund relevant exploration to find life on Mars or Titan or Europa or any other non terran body where it is incresingly likely we have seen signs of potential life?......

over to you then Ivan

[sandman67]

Another one from space.com, my favorite site for all things astronomical

from now on if you want to sound clever instead of saying "Black as coal" you can say "Black as exoplanet TrES-2b"

Coal-Black Alien Planet Is Darkest Ever Seen

http://www.space.com/12612-alien-planet ... epler.html

funnily enough its in a constellation called Draco....ooooeeeerrrrrr

theres also a link in the article to a gallery of the top 20 oddest planets found so far....love the fluffy planets.

click over to the site and have a surf around = there are some amazing videos and articles there.

Its also the peak of the activity this weekend of the Perseid Meteor Shower we go through every year, so if you are on the beach or out in the darker boonies of Issan just before sunrise take a look up and see if you can see any shooting stars.

[sandman67]

Im a big fan of Bill Maher, and a big fan of Neil DeGrasse Tyson who I think is one of the most passionate and eloquent fighters for the science side in the US at the moment, so this clip is the perfect storm...

Here Neil discusses the shame and ridiculousness of the short sighted budget allocation...or more proper cuts ... to NASAs research budgets. As Neil says we have lost the dream. And as Bill says the budget for the telescope replacement for Hubble is the same as one months deployment costs in Afghanistan.....1 month!

When I was a nipper if you asked kids what they wished they could be when they grew up a common answer was "astronaut". I was one of them...."David Attenborough" being my first answer. Yeah....I was a geeky kid from being knee high to a grasshopper.

Now only kids in China and Russia will grow up saying that.

[pharvey]

I'm with you on space exploration SM, whilst I didn't get to experience the Apollo Missions ''live'', I've been fastinated by them and future missions - Mars Landers, Space Shuttle etc. ever since.

However, I'm also a great believer in exploration closer to home and considering 70% of the Earth is covered by water and we have only explored around 3% of that, imagine the possibilities of what could be found on our own doorstep.

One venture which is looking at a series of ''super deep'' diving expeditions is Virgin Oceanic - like him or loathe him, Richard Branson certainly tries to get to those out of the way places!! One of the dives will be to the Mariana Trench - the lowest elevation on the Earth's crust. The dive will clock in at an incredible 11Km (7 miles). The Sub will also be able move horizontally for up to 10Km which obviously is some improvement on the Bathyscaphe dives which have previously got close to these depths but were simply vertical dives (or literally drops). There are incredible pressures involved - at 1,000 atmospheres (10Km), the quartz dome of the sub will be subjected to 13 million pounds of pressure.... not something you want to break!!

The ''Super Catamaran'' acting as the Mother Ship so to speak, hasn't got bad stats either......... you should invest in one Barry!!

Take a look at the site - http://www.virginoceanic.com/mission/

[dtaai-maai]

The ''Super Catamaran'' acting as the Mother Ship so to speak, hasn't got bad stats either......... you should invest in one Barry!!

Hmm, I'll bet the "Mother Ship" doesn't have a Jacuzzi...!

[sandman67]

PH

with you 100% there mate, and thanks for that link to the Virgin Oceanic page. Im a Branson fan...met him very very early in my CS career and he is a Duracell Bunny character, and after meeting him its damn hard to dislike him at all....decent nice bloke (I met him as part of an extended investigation into the British Airways black ops and dirty tricks campaign against Virgin Airways in the UK - believe me the stuff that came out in the papers was merely the tip of the iceberg of ugliness and criminality).

Agree that exploration of the oceans is important - important for a lot of reasons. Without deep oceanic research we would not have established plate tectonics as fact for example back in the 60s. The US deep oceanic research which mapped the Mid Atlantic Ridge and established its activity was the seal on the theory of plate tectonics. Again hats off to the US, who were also the frontronners in Marianas Trench exploration, another key element to plate tectonic confirmation (its a subduction trench). My old geology master at school would wax lyrical about those days, and explain how to him and much of the scientific community that final confirmation was a milestone in science. Its one now we forget about. In my school days it was the discovery at deep levels (again Mid Atlantc Ridge and hats off to the USGS govt scientists) of the "brown smokers" (geothermal vents along the ridge) and lifeforms that live around them in their own little "non oxygen" ecosystems.

Deep marine archaeology is also an imporatnt and vastly undefunded field we need to spend more on. Stuff like this for example:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/1923794.stm

The Virgin Oceanic page has an interesting and very relevant Hawking quote

Humans are an adventurous species. We like to explore and are inspired by journeys to the unknown. Science is not only a disciple of reason but, also, one of romance and passion. Exploration by real people inspires us.

Im with NDG Tyson though....it is unjustifiable to fight stupid wars and waste economies then justify cutting science and exploration budgets to fund those wars, and a sad intitement of politics and electorates when that is allowed to happen. I just hoped that in my lifetime I would get to watch a Mars mission and hear that iconic phrase "The Eagle Has Landed". There is sod all hope of that now I think.

You really do have to admire guys like the old astronauts and the pilot of that sub though. The enclosed space, the isolation, and the knowlege that if anything goes wrong you are dead.... men and women who do this sort of stuff are real heroes in my book.

[pharvey]

Yep, the Hawking quote also touches a nerve with me - I especially agree with ''Science is not only a disciple of reason but, also, one of romance and passion''

The likes of ''Lost city found off Indian coast'' from the BBC link was typical of the reasons I started to dive. As a kid I loved the whole ''Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World'', the search for Atlantis, Sea Monsters etc. ...... By the way, one of the latter being the giant squid which has since been found on numerous occasions due to further exploration. Unfortunately, I've not been able to dive for a number of years, but the sea fascinates me - just think what could be out there...... Sea Monsters and all!!

I truly share your passion with regards to a Mars mission and still hold out hope that I'll hear the iconic words of the first human to set foot there....... unfortunately, I think I'll need to study up on my Mandarin to understand the bugger - unless of course the West is able to pull digit from ample arrogant arse.... mind you, if we could actually work together, it may be even more of an achievement!

You really do have to admire guys like the old astronauts and the pilot of that sub though. The enclosed space, the isolation, and the knowlege that if anything goes wrong you are dead.... men and women who do this sort of stuff are real heroes in my book.

Could not agree with you anymore SM.......''The Real Stuff''

[sandman67]

well this week marked the 40th anniversary of the psychology experiment that remains the fields most notorious.... The Stanford Prison Experiment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

Here is an anniversary writeup in the UNi magazine with interviews with the participants

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/maga ... s/spe.html

I remember at Uni learning about this and the earlier and equally disturbing Milgram Experiments with slackjawed horror. I guess it was about then I realised that human beings are, at heart, completely screwed up and pig easy to control and program. Maybe thats why Im so cynical??? I do know for a fact that practicioners in the use of the blacker aspects of social psychology are drilled heavily in the techniques and results of these experiments. They are also essential training in genocide studies and work - the original experiments were in part inspired by an attempt to understand how the German death camps came to be.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millgram_experiment

UK HHADers may recall that the BBC re-ran the Staford Experiment using a bunch of UK joe shmos back in the 1990s and the results were equally horrifying, resulting in the experiment being ended early. I think that series was called "The Prison"??? I remember watching it with my wife to be and explaining the history of the experiment and predicting the outcomes accurately....humans never change. Derren Brown re-ran the Milgram Experiment as part of a program with simlar results...over 50% of the participants willingly followed the orders of the white coat and administered lethal shocks. Scary eh?

Theres a wealth of material online about both the Stanford and Milgram experiments, and I recommend you read about both. They are both real eye openers. There are also a good few documentaries online about them....compulsive viewing.

[sandman67]

Whilst generally Im a big fan of science sometimes the whitecoats get muddled up with the military, and then things usually go off the scale titsy. This was no bigger the case than the insanity of the 50s and 60s nuclear arms race...Mutually Assured Destruction....never a better acronym....MAD.

Anyway, this is relevant as we are fast approaching the 50th anniversary of the peak of this madness...the Oct 31st 1961 anniversary of the Russians exploding the biggest ever nuke...the so called TSAR BOMBA or BIG IVAN bomb. 57,000,000 tons of TNT yield......deliberately scaled down from its full potential of 100,000,000 tons.

Here are a couple of Youtube vids and a writeup:

October 30th 1961 - The Tsar Bomba, King of the Bombs, Царь-бомба or Big Ivan.

This footage is courtesy of the documentary "Trinity and Beyond", directed by Peter Kuran, and other footage is courtesy of the Discovery channel. The original footage was from declassified Soviet Archives. The music used is from The Planets Suite composed by Gustav Holst. The movement is 'Mars: the Bringer of War'

Before I get into the details of the test, I want to clear up something very important. The title of this video is "Tsar Bomba - King of the Bombs - 57,000,000 Tonnes of TNT". Understand now that this test wasn't the result of a detonation of 57,000,000 Tonnes of TNT, but rather the nuclear yield EQUIVALENT of a detonation of 57,000,000 Tonnes of Trinitrotoluene. The actual weight of the device was 27 tonnes. And coincidentally, one tonne is taken as a metric tonne, or 1000 kilograms - (2200lbs). All units used in physics are metric. The reason the yield equivalent system is used is because the energy released from the explosion of a set amount of TNT is a constant.

Second to that: I KNOW THE SCREENSHOTS AT THE END ARE OF THE CLOUD OVER THE GROUND. The reason I made a mistake was because when I made this video I was using a 6 year old CRT monitor with numerous problems, some of which with the shading. I greatly regret it butI cant be bothered removing/re-uploading the video again so Ill just live with it.

The bomb was designed as a 100 Megaton device, not a 50 Megaton device. This was due to its 3 stage design: fission-fusion-fusion. There is fission initiator that when detonated, begins a fusion reaction. Then there is a further fast-fission detonation (With neutrons from the second stage) of a Uranium-238 tamper which boosts the yield by 50 Megatons. For the test, the Tsar had its Uranium tamper replaced with lead to reduce the maximum yield by half (To 50 Megatons).

The blast yield was equal to that of a blast of 57,000,000 Tonnes of TNT....or to put that into context: The weight of 270 Empire State Buildings worth of TNT. This makes the Tsar the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated in history. Think of the destruction at Hiroshima. The Tsar was 3800 times more powerful than Hiroshima.

The bomb's weight was 27 tonnes, and its dimensions were: 8 meters (26ft) in length, and 2 meters (6.5ft) in diameter.

It was air-dropped, from a modified Tupolev Tu-95 Bear, and it used a nylon parachute to slow its decent to give the crew time to escape.

The bomb was dropped from an altitude of 34,500 feet AGL (10,500 meters), and it detonated a little over three minutes later at an altitude of 13,100 feet AGL (4,000 meters). In this time: The Tu-95, travelling at a ground speed of 480kts (552mph, 864kph), travelled into the safe zone (about 45km from ground zero) and was therefore 79km away from the blast.

When the bomb detonated, immediately the temperature directly below and surrounding the detonation would have risen to millions of degrees. The pressure below the blast was 300 pounds per square inch, ten times the pressure in a car tyre. The light energy released was so powerful that it was visible even at 1000km (621 miles), with cloudy skies. The shockwave was powerful enough to break windows at even up to 900 kilometres (560 miles) from the blast. The shockwave was recorded orbiting the earth 3 times. The mushroom cloud rose to an altitude of 64,000 meters (210,000 feet) before levelling out. The thermal energy from the blast was powerful that it could cause 3rd degree burns to a human standing 100 km (62 miles) away from the blast.

The radius of the fireball was 2.3 kilometres (1.4 miles). The blast radius (area in which total destruction ensured) was 13km (8 miles).

The most important thing to note is that this bomb was designed as a 100 Megaton device (Yield equivalent of 0.1 billion tonnes of TNT). If detonated, everything within a 48 kilometer (30 mile) diameter would be vaporised. Everything within a 195 kilometer (120 mile) diameter would be incinerated in a fireball. This would ensure total destruction of a large city like New York, Paris or London, as well as devastation on its outskirts.

At the beginning of this excerpt, the explosion that you see is the 'Tsar Bomba' or 'Emperor Bomb' in English and it was detonated by the soviets on October 31st, 1961, on an island in the arctic sea to the north of Russia.

The weapon packed a yield of 57 Megatons on detonation, meaning that it was equal to the explosive force of 57,000,000 Tons of TNT, or 3800 times larger than the Hiroshima explosion. This monster bomb is famous for being the largest nuclear detonation on the face of this planet.

112 days earler the project to build the weapon, codenamed Ivan, was initiated by the soviet premier of the time Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev.

3 years before the Tsar Bomba was detonated, Khrushchev was enstated as the Premier of the Soviet Union in March 1958, and shortly after his enstatment the Soviet Union issued a statement in which it planned to suspend nuclear weapons testing. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the United States President until at the time, and he issued this statement shortly after the Soviet Union's announcement: "The United States is prepared, unless testing is resumed by the Soviet Union, to withhold further testing on its part of atomic and hydrogen weapons for a period of one year from the beginning of the negotiations."

There was a nuclear weapons moratorium in effect from late 1958, the last nuclear weapon detonated by the United States being 'Titania', a small sub-kiloton device detonated on October the 30th 1958 in Nevada, the last device detonated in the Hardtack II series of tests. Almost exactly 3 years later, the Soviet Union detonated the Tsar Bomba, effectively destroying the moratorium. The United States were furious. The Ambassador to the United Nations at the time was Adlai Stevenson, as pictured in the film giving this statement:

"Mr. Khrushchev has exploded his 'Giant Bomb' in cynical disregard of the United Nations. By this act, the Soviet Union have added injury to insult: They broke the moratorium on nuclear weapons testing. They have raised atmospheric pollution to new heights. They have started a new race for more deadly weapons. They have spurned the humanitarian appeal of the United Nations, and of all peace loving peoples. They have advanced no solid justification for exploding this monstrous and unnecessary weapon. They have been wholly unmoved by the dangers of radioactive fallout to the human race. The United States delegation deeply deplores this contempt for world opinion and we think that in the light of this sombre development, other delegations may wish to express their views on this shocking and distressing news. For today, Mr. Chairman, the world has taken a great leap backwards, toward anarchy and disaster."

The United States testing that was to follow the ending of the moratorium was codenamed Operation Nougat, a series of 69 nuclear weapon tests which began a month before the Tsar Bomba explosion. This was at the height of the aptly named 'Cold War' and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it stood not only as testing, but as a deterrent against Soviet aggression. Any nuclear attack by either country would have escalated and triggered a full-scale thermonuclear war in which many millions would have perished, and making much of the world inhospitable. These weapons designed and constructed by the United States and Russia were designed to protect the countries but instead, if the Cold War became a reality, they would have had the destructive power to destroy much of the human race.

Interesting factlet.....despite being the only country in the world ever to have had nukes dropped on them Japan (pre Fukishima) ranked relatively low on the "radioactive country" scales. The US tops the league wth a massive margin, thanks to all the in country nuke testing they conducted, with Russia and China coming in second and third. Pakistan and India are now just below them. Seems developing a nuclear arsenal is actually more risky to your own countrys health rather than others.

[sandman67]

One of my bookmarked news sources is MSNBC and its onine newsfeeds. I have an issue or two with the site, but the main one is the constant barrage between every news segment of the same one or two ads playing over and over and over. In particular I have a serious isssue with this one....now who can tell me why?



hint: try Junk Geology 101.....then throw in the fact that gas, being light, tends to rise up.....

heres a clue as to why I call bullshit on it





but theres miles and miles of rock and concrete between the fracking and the groundwater!

In a way it helps us Brits understand why Americans are so cynical about science....because they have shabby liars like Mr Geologist telling porkies to em 100 times a day.

[STEVE G]

There's another small problem with hydaulic fracturing at the moment; the fact that it requires millions of gallons of water:

Worst Drought in More Than a Century Strikes Texas Oil Boom
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-1 ... -boom.html