Astronauts could go blind on trip to Mars

  NASA reports that there's a chance Astronauts on a potential Mars mission could suffer some degree of permanent vision impairment, citing a recent study that shows that 29% of astronauts suffer some degree of visual impairment after a 5 month stay on the International Space Station. Details courtesy of Yahoo.

   Finally, NASA admits the consequences of their ill-considered "No Sex In Space" policy. No one would go blind aboard the ISS (or the way to Mars) if we'd just send a few hookers up there with them. I say we start a letter-writing campaign asking the House and Senate to buy the Astronauts the best lovin' our tax-dollars can buy.

E equals Coastline Paradox

Time to spin up the old FTL drive,  put a fresh coat of paint on your time machine, and get your texting fingers ready at the buttons of your subspace ansible or tachyonic antitelephone.  There are time-travellers among us, right now. There are already human colonies on other planets, too. Say goodbye to cause-and-effect, because the speed of light is no longer a barrier!

Seems the good folks at CERN, when not too busy blowing up the Earth of countless parallel dimensions*, have found the time to prove Einstein wrong about a little thing called Relativity.

Particles found to break speed of light

Finding could overturn laws of physics

An international team of scientists said on Thursday they had recorded sub-atomic particles travelling faster than light -- a finding that could overturn one of Einstein's long-accepted fundamental laws of the universe.

Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the researchers, told Reuters that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.

"We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he said. "We now want colleagues to check them independently."

If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.

The article simplifies the details a bit, since relativity does make allowances for hypothetical tachyonic particles that can move faster than light, provided they always move faster than light and are impossible to slow down, and might possibly have to be massless (or even have negative mass). Basically, the standard model of physics breaks everything down into three categories: objects with mass which can only travel slower than light, objects without mass which can only travel at the speed of light, and objects that probably don't exist (but which if they did exist would constantly move faster than light and appear to be in multiple places at once). It's all about the mass, really, as the fundamental equations behind relativity just require infinite energy to accellerate anything with mass up to the speed of light. So unless your big booty is made up of exotic matter that repels gravity and zips around the cosmos in two directions at once, you ain't never going anywhere near lightspeed.

But now it turns out the neutrino, a known particle which definitely has mass (though very very little per neutrino) breaks those basic rules, bringing everything else into doubt.

Unless of course it turns out the real problem is something to do with an incredibly tiny error in our maps or the grid of global positioning satellites that tell us how far away CERN is from San Grasso. The article doesn't indicate whether or not they actually shined a beam of light to compare it against. It'd be a real shame if the biggest news in science in our lifetime turned out to be nothing more than instrument malfunction or the coastline paradox. We are, after all, talking about 60 nanoseconds shaved off a 500-mile trip.

But if they're not somehow wrong, then this is the big one. If neutrinos can move faster than light, it's a whole new ballgame.

---

*: Why I'm no longer afraid the LHC is going to destroy us all when it gets to full power (1.21 Gigawatts, 55MPH) . I mean, aside from the fact that it hasn't yet, which is also pretty good evidence. 

I came to terms with the LHC thanks to Schroedinger's Cat. I'm sure we all know the experiment, where the cat is put in the box, along with a lethal mechanism that can only be triggered by radioactive decay, and the result is that the cat is simultaneously alive and dead at the same time, and the waveform doesn't resolve into one state or the other until you open the box and observe it. Provided the cat is wearing a blindfold, because otherwise it might, you know, observe whether or not it died. Which, when you think about it, you can probably observe that you're alive even in a blindfold. In fact, odds are good the cat can only observe that it's alive. If it's not alive, then it's not observing that fact, which means there's no one to observe the quantum waveform so it's not dead in the first place. (Though I am thinking vampire kittens in an undead quantum superposition that die if they look at themselves would actually be a great plot device for a really stupid B-movie somebody ought to make.)

After going around in circles for a while, the mind puzzles of the cat in a box settled down into the notion of Quantum Immortality. The idea that you will live forever, but only in your own universe, which is but one out of an infinite number of parallel universes (the Many Worlds Interpretation). Everyone else resides in universes where you do eventually die (but they don't). We are all The Highlander, we just don't figure it out till we hit 150 or so and start setting what are longevity records in our own little universe.  So take care of that body, because you're gonna be in it for a very long time. (Not to mention, you'll need it to be in good shape when The Kurgen shows up to challenge your geriatric self to a duel.)

Which brings me back to the LHC. Pretty much all the doomsday scenarios involving the LHC were in fact doomsday scenarios, not just inconvenience scenarios. Everybody buys it, as the earth turns into a quivering lump of steaming strange matter, breaks apart into a cloud of debris, or collapses into a black hole under the mass of the infinite matter from the future falling through the LHC's gaping time portal. In each of these scenarios, we all die. Which means there'd be nobody left to observe that we died, so therefore we're back to the position where we're not dead, or simultaneously dead and alive at the same time (a state you can avoid by simply unplugging your TV set).  That in turn means that the LHC can't go wrong, because the negative consequences would kill us all, and my consciousness by definition only exists in a universe where I am alive. That the LHC was largely an all-or-nothing apocalypse ensured it could only end happily.

I should be a lot more afraid of experiments (unlike the LHC) that only have the potential to ravage half the earth, or could release a plague that could kill everyone but me.... heck, maybe it's not that we're all The Highlander, maybe we're all I Am Legend. That would really suck. So, barring the slim possibility of the Earth being overrun by blindfolded vampire kittens and I am the only human left to open the canned food for them (a scenario I dread, but refuse to take seriously), I long ago overcame my fears of the LHC.

Cell phone exposure linked to bad behavior in kids

Recently, I took the plunge and got a cellphone. I probably won't answer it, either. The main point and purpose of me getting a cellphone was so that I would stop feeling smugly superior whenever I read articles like this one:

Cell phone exposure linked to bad behavior in kids: study

PARIS — Pregnant mothers in Denmark who regularly used mobile phones were more likely to have children with behavioral problems, according to a study released Tuesday.
The risk was higher when the kids themselves began using cell phones at a very early age, researchers reported in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
...

The researchers found that kids who had been exposed to mobile phones both before and after birth were 50 percent more likely to have behavioral problems.

The publishers have already announced they'll be following up that report with a sequel entitled "Cell phone exposure linked to bad behavior in kids, teens, adults, and pretty much everyone." The publishing date is set for 20 years from today, though as I understand it they've already begun collecting data to support the hypothesis.

The Future Is Now

A website after my own heart - by way of miniature robots rampaging through the blood stream. CNB labs dot com appears to be a start-up company called "Chicago Nanobionics Labs", but their most recent blog post is titled "Nanobionics - Dooming the World? We think not."

Now I must admit the barely-restrained luddite deep within me has all sorts of kneejerk reactions to this, but I gotta say there's something pretty awesome about reading that work is being done on fighting cancer with nanites. I went under the knife and radiation a few years back, and I find the idea of miniature robots sailing through my veins just slightly less frightening than either of the main treatments I did undergo. Is it possible to be a luddite and a transhumanist at the same time? 'Cause given the choice between chemo and nano, I'd choose to be a robot farm every time.

Alas, there'll be no personal-nano-invasion in my immediate future, as the only clinical trial they have going on is for people with no history of neural or skin disorders. Maybe there'll be a second round later where they pump robots into freaks like me.

Chupacabra Dogs

This is the third news report I've seen about this animal over the past three years. I'm calling it the "Texas Chupacabra" as at least the most recent two reports involved livestock disturbances that echo the Chupacabra reports out of Central and South America.

Or maybe "Chupacabra Dog" since it looks to be canine-related. Naw, that makes me picture a goat-sucker-on-a-stick, like a "Chupacabra Dog" is something you'd order at the state fair. Trust me, if you saw one of these things, you wouldn't want to eat, not even on a stick.

It looks a lot like a dog, but with a dark blueish-grey skin (no or little fur), and completely wrong proportions. The ears and head are a bit like a chihuahua, but it's big, with a really large and lanky body, and in some cases disproportionately large canine teeth. It may be a mutant coyote, some sort of inbred wild version of the Mexican Hairless Dog, possibly a new species related to one or both of the above, a blood-sucking alien fiend, or it might just be a relatively mundane chihuahua-greyhound crossbreed with a bad case of mange. The truth is out there.

Three were found as roadkill in Cuero, Texas in 2007. One was killed when a family in Blanco, TX, put down poison in their barn to kill whatever had been attacking their livestock in 2009. Now in 2010, there's two shot to death within a week of each other in different locations in Hood County, TX.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I love how at the end of the video he oddly asserts that we'll know for certain whether or not it's a Chupacabra once the DNA tests come back. I find that amusing. I mean, if it's just a dog, the tests could show that. But if it's a Chupacabra... I mean it's not like we have Chupacabra DNA on file somewhere, do we? Do we? Na, that'd be silly.

As I said this is the third such report I've seen, over the past 3 years. Before that was the Elmendorf Beast, a very similar body found (also in Texas) in 2004, but I've only read wikipedia on it, so I can't say how closely it actually resembles the more recent critters.

Yet, this latest report (and the one from last year) make no mention of the previous carcasses or events. In fact, if memory serves correctly, all three reports have ended by saying that we're waiting on DNA tests to tell us what it is. Either they're dogs, in which case the third report/incident should mention the previous two cases turned out to be dogs, ...or the previous cases were something other than dogs, and it's suddenly big news. Makes you wonder why they haven't mentioned this.

Me, I suspect there's a real chupacabra out there, carefully framing wild dogs. Here we are calling these poor ugly dogs monsters, when the truth is they're the victims. One of these days we'll catch El Chup red-handed, planting a dead dog at the scene.

Flying Cars - No, Seriously, I Do Mean Flying Cars

For those of us who have been crying out for a flying car while there's still a few drops of oil left in the world to fuel it... well, here's some progress... though I guess I'll concede it's more like a street-legal convertible airplane.

News via CNN:

Flying car production rolls forward

A highway-worthy airplane moves one step closer to production...
...
Going from plane to car "takes about the same amount of time as putting down your convertible top," and the transition takes place from inside the cockpit. After landing, a cockpit-operated system folds up the wings, and the pilot can drive away.

Transition is designed for trips of up to about 450 miles and can travel about 100 miles per hour in the air and "highway speeds" on the ground of "65, 70, [miles per hour] -- something like that," Dietrich said.

...
Terrafugia anticipates the Transition will cost $194,000. The first delivery will occur in about 18 months, Dietrich said.

Of course, even if I had $194,000 to burn, it'd do me no good. The wife and I traded in our car for bus passes to be greener. Maybe they'll get a few Transitions at ZipCar? :) Not gonna happen... but if I'm lucky, I'll get a jetpack when I'm 90.

Anyhow, a thumbs-up to Terrfugia for making our Jetsons-inspired retrofuturistic dreams just a little more down-to-Earth.

(No) Sex In Space!

I was going to complain about how NASA was a bunch of prudes...

No sex please, we’re astronauts: NASA commander

TOKYO — There is no room for romance on board the cosy confines of the International Space Station, a NASA space shuttle commander said Monday when asked what would happen if astronauts had sex in space.

"We are a group of professionals," said Space Shuttle Discovery commander Alan Poindexter during a visit to Tokyo, after a reporter asked about the consequences if astronauts boldly went where probably no others have been.

"We treat each other with respect and we have a great working relationship. Personal relationships are not ... an issue," said a serious-faced Poindexter. "We don't have them and we won't."

...anyhow, I was going to complain about NASA's quaint morals, and how it might be holding back science. Going to, that is, until I noticed this guy's name is actually Poindexter. It's no surprise he's not getting any sex in space. I expect most Poindexters don't get any sex on Earth, either. So, maybe it's not NASA policy, just this commander guy saying his fellow astronauts wouldn't give him the time of day. We can only hope.

My advice to NASA: In the name of science, there ought to be sex in space. Eventually, as a species we must leave this rock and voyage out to the stars. That voyage will take decades, and no nookie for decades is a far worse obstacle to overcome than delta v, oxygen storage, and radiation shielding combined. If our race is to survive in the long run, NASA needs to get busy gettin' busy.

I realize resources are limited on the International Space Station, and there's never enough time or money for all the experiments they want to conduct. What they aren't realizing is that this is the opportunity to make the space program actually turn a profit. You send up about four really good looking astronauts on the next mission. You install some mood lighting, beam up a little Barry White from ground control, maybe slip some aphrodisiacs in their freeze-dried icecream, and start the cameras rolling. It'd be the next internet sensation, at least. Even if it doesn't sell enough DVDs to pay for the next launch, you'd at least get the voting public interested in space exploration again.

Cool New Spaceship

Now, in general, I'm really not one for privatization of anything. For all it's inefficient waste, the government is generally better than the private sector at not killing us all for the sake of an extra ha-penny on the dollar. Look at the banking giants, the housing bubble, the Gulf of Petroleum, the endless stream of toxic and dangerous "goods" from China, etc. Everywhere private industry goes, it robs and murders us, then robs our corpses again. As broken as our government is, in general I'd choose it over an unregulated corporate equivalent every time.

So you should be surprised that I'm about to applaud a corporation that recently did something that has traditionally been done only by our government. Yesterday, a corporation called Space X launched the Falcon 9 orbital rocket from Cape Canaveral. I must admit I'm dramatically impressed by the fact that putting a human into orbit now costs a quarter of what it did just two days ago. That's freakin' amazing! It's a good step towards a non-zero Drake equation. Hooray Space-X! Let's get off this rock!

Read more about the Falcon 9 at: Daily Kos

Laying Pipe (21 inches vs 4 inches)

Just a random thought from an uneducated layman, but maybe this deep-water drilling for oil thing wasn't such a great idea, after all?

Article via RAW

BP has succeeded in capturing "some" oil and gas by inserting a mile-long tube into the main Gulf of Mexico leak, but would not say if it was a significant percentage of the gusher or just a dribble.

Despite the uncertainty, it was still the first tangible sign of success in more than three weeks of efforts to prevent at least 210,000 gallons of oil from spewing unabated into the sea each day and feeding a massive slick off the coast of Louisiana.

BP senior executive vice president Kent Wells refused to be drawn on quantity Sunday, ...

"We will look to... capture as much of the oil as we can," he told reporters in Houston, Texas. "At this point, we don't know what percentage we will capture" by the process, in which the oil was sucked up as if through a straw to the giant ship.

A BP statement said simply that the four-inch (10-centimeter) diameter tube inserted into the 21-inch leaking pipe using undersea robots had captured "some amounts of oil and gas."

Since BP wouldn't comment on quantity, I thought I'd make a little visual aid. In the very simple graphic shown to the right, the black circle is 21 units in diameter, to represent the 21-inch diameter pipe / hole that oil is flowing out of. The lighter teal circle is 4 units in diameter, to represent the 4-inch diameter "sucking straw" that is pulling oil up to burn off. The area of the teal circle is just over 3.6% the area of the black circle. Look at that cute little teal circle. So tiny and cuddly. The oil pipe followed me home from school, mommy, can I keep it?

I have zero data on the suction rate or force of the 4-inch extraction pipe. It may be a fast-flowing siphon, a miracle of modern engineering built to suck like nothing else has ever sucked before. Or it might just use the same pressure that's making the existing leak flow. If the later, then I imagine it doesn't catch too much of the leak, fluid dynamics being what they are... but, I suppose, even if it were just 3.6% of the flow, that's still like 7,600 gallons per day less being poured into the ocean. It's better than nothing, I guess, and it's not like I'm an expert on oil, physics, or engineering.

Hey, I've got an idea, though, one that I think we could all get behind. Instead of going to war over oil in the Middle East, how about we just don't freakin' pour what we've got left into the ocean?

That's what really wrenches my gut about all this. The ecological catastrophe is horrendous, and will poison the Gulf for generations, but even worse is the thought that the oil companies who aren't involved with this particular spill are probably going to be able to sell crude at a higher rate thanks to this disaster. We need to get on solar and wind power ASAP, because burning dinosaurs seems to be more and more to looking like a really bad idea in general. That's just my opinion, though, your mileage may vary - and you'd better have a car that gets good mileage, 'cause the oil is gonna get real expensive again in the near future.

Genetic breakthrough could produce ‘babies with three parents’

via Raw:

Genetic breakthrough could produce ‘babies with three parents

Researchers in the UK have developed a method of curing a class of genetic disorders by transplanting parts of embryonic cells from one mother to another, creating the possibility of babies with three biological parents.

Pros:
Twice as many MILFs!

Cons:
All those dorks exploiting a poorly written rule in D&D to play half-ogre-half-elf-half-dragon characters suddenly have a defense. "No fair, GM! I can't believe you're discriminating against people with 3 parents! My game master is a bigot!"

Science-Gate

Hilarious video on the ridiculousness of Climategate. That one won't let me embed it on blogger, but it's worth following the link to watch.

Here's another one by the same cartoonist:

With you 120% of the way

Did Fox News falsify numbers to support their own theories on Global Warming?

120% Somewhat Likely
59% Very likely
35% Voted for Bush twice, and continue to watch Fox, thereby demonstrating that their opinions should not be trusted anyway








Photo Source: Raw

Soggy Cheese

via NASA

LCROSS Impact Data Indicates Water on Moon

The argument that the moon is a dry, desolate place no longer holds water.

Secrets the moon has been holding, for perhaps billions of years, are now being revealed to the delight of scientists and space enthusiasts alike.

NASA today opened a new chapter in our understanding of the moon. Preliminary data from the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, indicates that the mission successfully uncovered water during the Oct. 9, 2009 impacts into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus cater near the moon’s south pole.

That is some awesome news! I'm hoping this is a shot-in-the-arm for space exploration, serve as reason to land on the moon again soon. Either we'll find life on the moon, or we won't. Either way, we stand to learn a lot about our galaxy in the process. Here on earth, where there is water, there is life. And as they used to say at the start of every episode of the old BSG: "There are those who believe that life down here started out there..."

Holding Human Brains In My Hands

A couple days ago, we went to the Bodies exhibition. Waves of awe and shock and wonder passed over me.

We are lucky and privileged to live here and now. For the vast majority of history, to learn so much about human anatomy up close you'd have to commit a crime. But here we are, in an age and culture where we can pop down to a museum and see the intricate majesty of the human form, in all it's glorious layers. It was breathtaking.

There's a (black) hole in me pocket

Invisibility is at our fingertips. ...anybody seen my fingertips? I can't figure out where I put them.

Via Nature News (but I first learned about it at Arcana Wiki) :

Researchers create portable black hole

Physicists have created a black hole for light that can fit in your coat pocket. Their device, which measures just 22 centimetres across, can suck up microwave light and convert it into heat.

Those same physicist are now working on a device that can do the same to visible light. Light will approach it, get bent and sucked in, and never leave.

I'm honestly not sure it'll actually be invisible. It might just be ultimate black. Projected ultimate blackness. Like a cloak of darkness. I'm Batman!

Super Massive Black Holes

There are things to like about all four of those words. Combine them and there is reason to get really excited. Now double that and you may just have to clean yourself afterwards.

Supermassive Black Holes Collide to Become Even More Super and Massive | Wired Science | Wired.com

Well That About Wraps It Up For God

I just finished reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I must say, it was really good, and I now agree with nearly everything he had to say.

In the past, I've been turned off by Dawkins' appearances in videos I've seen, because of his sometimes self-righteous condescension and hyperbole. In those videos and interviews, he's made sweeping (and seemingly insulting) statements that came off as if he was claiming every person of faith is crazy, and I've often felt like he's presenting a strawman version of mainstream faith, with no data to back it up.

In the book, however, not only does his smugness seem toned down, but he actually presents the factual case that mainstream faith includes a great deal of craziness - and, more dangerously, aids and abets the more radical craziness that technically isn't part of mainstream religion, but hides amongst it's ranks. He also took the time to lay out what he really means by the "imaginary friend" line that is so often thrown around - which I'd previously assumed to be just a joke or insult - and makes an interesting case for it. Being not so pressed for time, he's able in print to elaborate on this positions, and present a lot more evidence for them. I was impressed, and swayed, as I've never been by those videos.

Perhaps it's just his accent. Here in the former colonies, we generally assume that any man with that accent is either a snobby upper-class elitist, or about to be strangled by Darth Vader. I think this works against Dawkins.

Chicken-Eating Dogs of Texas

I don't know whether to be happy, sad, paranoid, or really let down.

Happy, 'cause this is starting to look like another awesome example of speciation in our time. Two finds now (this year and 2 years ago) of hairless gray dog-like creatures with abnormally large teeth and abnormally long legs, wandering the wilds of Texas and attacking chickens.

Sad, because the poor little puppies were killed both times. And the poor little chickens. The horror!

Paranoid, because 2 years ago the news promised us gene-sequencing to find out if it was a new species... ...and then never followed up! They must be hiding something! It's a conspiracy!

Or really let down because it may turn out that El Chupacabra is just a mangy dog. Man, that would really suck (goats)!

Updates on The Holy War in America

Those right-wing nutjobs are scaring the crap out of me again, making overt attempts to steer the development of culture and society away from science.

Lots of things to do this morning, so no time to elaborate my views on what I just read, but here's two quotes with links, so you too can feel the sinking sensation in the pit of your stomach...

---

via RAW:

US House Representative Wally Herger, of California’s 2nd congressional district, expressed “enthusiastic approval” of a town-hall attendee who described himself as a “proud right-wing terrorist,” newspapers in northern California report.

...

“Amen, God bless you,” Herger reportedly replied to the comment. “There is a great American.”

Doesn't that make you sick to your stomach?

---

via the Guardian

...the training at the seminary is aimed at producing infantry for a religious war against science and reason; proof of this, and in Dembski's own words, lies in another of his exam questions for the same course:

You are the Templeton Foundation's new program director and are charged with overseeing its programs and directing its funds. Sketch out a 20-year plan for defeating scientific materialism and the evolutionary worldview it has fostered if you had $50,000,000 per year in current value to do so. What sorts of programs would you institute? How would you spend the money?

The Dembski fellow he mentions, by the way, is the same "Professor" at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary who requires online trolling to pass his courses, as I'd blogged about previously.

Trolling for God - well, for Grades anyway

Here's a new wrinkle. Apparently, Trolling for McCain wasn't enough, nor was Trolling for the good ol' fashioned reason of "I'm just a jerk and it amuses me". No, apparently, it's now considered acceptable at certain schools to make Trolling a mandatory part of a class.

Here's an excerpt from a professor's syllabus at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, a class called "Intelligent Design and Unintelligent Evolution"

AP410 This is the undegrad [sic] course. You have three things to do: (1) take the final exam (worth 40% of your grade); (2) write a 3,000-word essay on the theological significance of intelligent design (worth 40% of your grade); (3) provide at least 10 posts defending ID that you’ve made on “hostile” websites, the posts totalling 2,000 words, along with the URLs (i.e., web links) to each post (worth 20% of your grade).

Emphasis mine.

So remember, the next time you want to unload on some dunderhead who's violently arguing nonsense on your favorite forum or blog - they might not genuinely want to ruin your day by crapping in your stream, they may just have to post it so they can get an "A" at divinity school.

Question on my mind: Does "A" stand for "Astroturf", or just "Asshole"?