“Our first images were taken along the moon’s terminator — the dividing line between day and night — making us initially unsure of how they would turn out,” said LROC Principal Investigator Mark Robinson of Arizona State University in Tempe. “Because of the deep shadowing, subtle topography is exaggerated, suggesting a craggy and inhospitable surface. In reality, the area is similar to the region where the Apollo 16 astronauts safely explored in 1972. While these are magnificent in their own right, the main message is that LROC is nearly ready to begin its mission.”
Brooke Greenberg (on the left in the above photo) is the size of an infant, with the mental capacity of a toddler. She turned 16 in January.
Brooke hasn’t aged in the conventional sense. Dr. Richard Walker of the University of South Florida College of Medicine says Brooke’s body is not developing as a coordinated unit, but as independent parts that are out of sync. She has never been diagnosed with any known genetic syndrome or chromosomal abnormality that would help explain why.
In her first six years, Brooke went through a series of medical emergencies from which she recovered, often without explanation. She survived surgery for seven perforated stomach ulcers. She suffered a brain seizure followed by what was diagnosed as a stroke that weeks later left no apparent damage.
“Without being sensational, I’d say this is an opportunity for us to answer the question, why we’re mortal, or at least to test it,” Walker said. “And if we’re wrong, we can discard it. But if we’re right, we’ve got the golden ring.”
Back in 2003, some scientists thought they had found a gene that significantly increases the risk of clinical depression after emotional trauma. Should be great news for treatment, right? Unfortunately, a new review concludes that no other studies have been able to replicate the finding, which, they conclude, was most likely due to chance. Yet another case of the “gene for X” turning out to be more complicated than that.
This image from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite from May 21, 2009, illustrates how the convergence of these two currents affect phytoplankton (the microscopic plant-like creatures that form the base of the marine food web).
When two currents with different temperatures and densities (cold, Arctic water is saltier and denser than subtropical waters) collide, they create eddies. Phytoplankton growing in the surface waters become concentrated along the boundaries of these eddies, tracing out the motions of the water. The swirls of color visible in the waters southeast of Hokkaido (upper left), show where different kinds of phytoplankton are using chlorophyll and other pigments to capture sunlight and produce food. The bright blues just offshore of Hokkaido may be churned up sediment, rather than phytoplankton.
A spectacular video of a “Full Earth-rise” shot in HD from the Kaguya lunar orbiter. The lack of typical atmospheric distortions we’re used to make the video seem surreal. Make sure you view this in full HD.
This article and this one — a short article on the idea that all manner of supernaturalism is due to humans’ built-in overactive pattern-finding — constitute a look at the psychology of pseudoscience. This part towards the beginning is especially telling:
In the beginning there were sightings, and those sightings began with private pilot Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947. As soon as news stories appeared reporting Arnold’s claim that he saw nine airborne objects that flew “like a saucer if you skip it across the water,” others began reporting seeing the “saucers” too (a curious development, since Arnold did not say that the objects looked like saucers—they looked like boomerangs, he said—but skipped like saucers, a subtlety lost in the public’s imagination). Soon sightings of “saucers” were pouring in from all around the country and from around the world.
The observation that space aliens, as well as other “evolving systems of paranoia” are highly mutable and constantly morphing in an effort both to entertain the public and locate the ever-elusive proof, is also spot on.
The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’
On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are over 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 650X microscope (individual pages are clearly visible with 100X magnification).
The beautifully preserved remains of a 47-million-year-old, lemur-like creature have been unveiled in the US. The preservation is so good, it is possible to see the outline of its fur and even traces of its last meal.
