Dark Matter Lab Dedicated 5,000 Feet Underground

From: io9.com

By Stephen Goldmeier, 2:08 PM on Tue Jun 23 2009

“This week, the Sanford Lab dedicated an underground science fortress to research dark matter. The lab is 5,000 feet underground in the mountains of South Dakota, shielded from cosmic radiation.

“The lab is on a site that used to do physics research, and was a gold mine before that. The current Sanford Lab, in collaboration with the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL), is the deepest underground lab in the world. It's divided into three levels: the shallow lab, the mid-level, and the deep campus. The deep campus is 6 and a half Empire State Buildings deep, or around 8,000 feet.”

The Weirdest Object in the Solar System?

From: LiveScience.com, 22 June 2009 07:42 am ET

By Andrea Thompson, Senior Writer

“…the minor planet now known as the dwarf planet Haumea…shaped something "like a big squashed cigar…" said…Mike Brown of Caltech.

“…astronomers…noticed that it was getting brighter and fainter by about 25 percent every two hours…Astronomers determined…Haumea is elongated and rotating every four hours.

"We see this thing tumbling end over end getting brighter and fainter," Brown said.

“Haumea is the fastest spinning object in the solar system.”

 

Haumea and her children…

From: Space.com, September 2008

By Clara Moskowitz, Staff Writer

“Brown and his team initially spotted the dwarf planet in December 2004 just after Christmas, leading them to nickname it "Santa"…

“Haumea joins Ceres, Pluto, Eris and Makemake as the fifth dwarf planet in our solar system. Pluto was re-classified from planet to dwarf planet in 2006, following the discovery of Eris.

“The new dwarf planet has the same diameter as Pluto, but is much thinner, and contains about 32 percent of Pluto's mass.

“Haumea is currently about 50 times as far from the sun as Earth is, but its orbit can swing it in as close as 35 times the sun-Earth distance. It is part of the trans-Neptunian class of cold and rocky objects in the outer solar system.

“Two small companion objects, thought to have been knocked off Haumea's body by past impacts…were…designated…Hi'iaka and Namaka, after the two children born to the goddess Haumea in Hawaiian myth. In the story, Haumea's children were created out of parts of her own body, just as the dwarf planet's two moons were apparently born out of itself.”

Times Online - Science Central - WBLG: Is there a Life On Mars Conspiracy?

Michael Brooks, consultant for New Scientist and the author of 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense, sends us a new perspective on the riddle of the empty planet next door

Some pesky scientists have just pointed out an appalling design error in NASA’s latest attempts to find life on Mars. This is beginning to look like a conspiracy. Does someone not want us to find life on Mars?

The best argument for why no one has even found carbon brought in on asteroids and comets is that chemicals called perchlorates, also thought to be in the Martian soil, have destroyed it all. When perchlorates get hot, they burn up carbon-based molecules. That’s why NASA uses them in rocket fuel. The problem is, as NASA's Douglas Ming (the Merciless) has pointed out in a recent paper, the experiments to search for carbon involve heating soil samples to a few hundred degrees and sniffing the vapours. If the soil contains carbon molecules and perchlorates, the carbon molecules will simply burn up. No wonder they couldn’t find any.

Is our a universe just a quantum hallucination?

Physics of the "multiverse" and multiple universes suggests life is most likely to be created as hallucinating disembodied brains that pop up as a quantum fluctuation from the vacuum and float through space imagining the universe, with the thoughts and memories of a human, rather than as "normal" biologically evolved humans.

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SETI scientist finds Alien signal

AFTER you’ve spent more than 20 years hunting for an alien signal, you think you’d be celebrating if you noticed a mysterious pulse suddenly rising up on your computer readouts. A regular pulse, amid the random clatter of the cosmos, suggests that someone very smart at the other end is sending a message.

Instead, he’s spent the past few months meticulously investigating whether the unrecognised signature was caused by a glitch in his instrumentation, a rogue astrophysical phenomenon, or some unknown random noise.

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Note: SETI at Home needs your help:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/

Strange & Unsolved Mysteries from America's history

A collection of places and people that have a kind of mystery attached to them because of eerie happenings. Some of those are really chilling.

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Weird physics: Heaven and Earth, UFOs, consciousness

Some scientific views about our universe now include ideas about multiple dimensions in a "multiverse," bridges or portals between them, fields of "zero point energy," the nature of UFOsand other fascinating concepts. How do these newer ideas about ways the universe might operate compare to traditional concepts about an afterlife or "Heaven?"

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Where is Planet X? Where is Nemesis?

In a publication recently published to the arXiv database, one Italian researcher has dusted off this topic and asked a very basic question: Can we constrain the possible locations of Nemesis and/or Planet X if they did exist? His results are fascinating!

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The End of the World As We Know It

An unexpected, thick layer of solar particles inside Earth's magnetic field suggests there are huge breaches in our planet's solar defenses, scientists said.These breaches indicate that during the next period of high solar activity, due to start in 2012, Earth will experience some of the worst solar storms seen in decades.

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Massive solar storm coming in 2012

The last time we had a solar storm this big (1958), northern lights were seen in Mexico! One expert says 2012, another says 2010 or 2011. It's a three-year old post, but I've found nothing to contradict it. Read on...

March 10, 2006: It's official: Solar minimum has arrived. Sunspots have all but vanished. Solar flares are nonexistent. The sun is utterly quiet.

Like the quiet before a storm.

This week researchers announced that a storm is coming--the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). "The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one," she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.

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The History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less

A really, really really really really really really brief history of time. By Eric Schulman.

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Galaxies in gridlock - Cosmic Log - msnbc.com

NASA / JPL-Caltech / STScI / ESA This image of a pair of colliding galaxies called NGC 6240 shows them in a rare, short-lived phase of their evolution just before they merge into a single, larger galaxy.

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Quantum Physics Made Relatively Simple

Put down the remote and get schooled on Quantum Physics by Hans Bethe, who was the head of the theoretical physics division on the Manhattan Project. 3 lectures, 45-50 minutes each. Respect.

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We know time is the 4th dimension, how about the 10th?

This animation illustrates the concepts presented in chapter one of the book "Imagining the Tenth Dimension"by Rob Bryanton.

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