Tag Archives: space exploration

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (Apr ’12)

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No less than five articles this month! I’ve been a little busy bee, especially with moving into a new house and all.

  • Jon Stewart commented that you rarely see a headline in 2012 that sounds like it should be a headline in 2012 when you were just a kid. This is of course apropos of the asteroid mining plan announced by space startup Planetary Resources. There are lots of articles on this all over the web but this one from Forbes talks about the firm’s plans to be cashflow positive even though no actual mining will happen for more than ten years at least. That makes it sound a bit more real and less of a pipe dream, even if it is backed by Google’s founders and the creator of Microsoft Office.
  • The wise old mentor is a trope that everyone knows, but is it true? Does age actually confer wisdom? Inasmuch that wisdom can be quantifiable, researchers from the University of Waterloo, Canada, has attempted to verify just that, as detailed in this article from The Economist. The results are nothing short of astonishing. North Americans do appear to gain wisdom with age, but the Japanese appeared to be nearly as wise as wizened North Americans even when young and their wisdom scores never varied much with age. This is just the sort of finding that calls for lots more cultural study.
  • When I was studying in France, my French language professor liked to comment about how the Chinese can say so many things with so few words. This is because each syllable in the Chinese language is unusually dense with information, possibly because of the different tonal variations possible. This Scientific American article shows how to correlate this fact with another observation: different languages are spoken at different speeds. It turns out that while each syllable in Chinese is packed with more information than the norm, the Chinese language is also one of the slowest spoken languages, so its overall information transmission rate still roughly matches that of other languages. In the same way, languages which are spoken very fast, such as Spanish, have less information per syllable.
  • Ever since buckyballs were invented in 1985, it was hailed as a game-changing revolutionary material and science writers loved to hype it up. I suspect that it’s at least partly because using the word buckminsterfullerene in print is so fun. Until very recently however, very few practical applications have been found for its unusual properties. This blog post points at a completely unexpected use for it. A team studying the long-term toxicology effects of the molecule by giving it to rats in a solution of olive oil not only found it to be completely non-toxic, it actually extended the lifespan of the rats by some 90% making it the most effective life-extension treatment ever found for rodents. Now, that is game-changing indeed.
  • On the astronomy front, a huge new discovery about what surrounds the Milky Way is new reason to think that the mysterious dark matter might not exist after. Dark matter was posited to explain why the relatively sparse matter that we can observe is far less than the mass that the universe needs to have. It turns out that we simply haven’t been looking hard enough. This news release from the AlphaGalileo Foundation trumpets the discovery of a vast structure of satellite galaxies and clusters of stars that surrounds the Milky Way. I guess space just isn’t that sparse after all.
Science, Science Fiction

The end of the space shuttle

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A timely post on QT3 today reminded me that the venerable space shuttle is scheduled for retirement this year. The current mission by the Atlantis is its last one. The last mission for Discovery is in September later this year and the last mission for Endeavor will be in November. Huge crowds are expected at Cape Canaveral for these final two launches. After that, NASA will be relying on Russian spacecraft for its missions until the alternatives currently under development by private companies like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences come to fruition.

It’s sort of hard to believe that the space shuttle has been in service for close to 30 years now given that it’s such a icon of technology and humanity’s ambitions for space. Reading through its extensive Wikipedia page however, it’s sobering to realize how much of it is still based on 1970s technology. Its computers are probably less powerful than the cheapest netbooks you can buy today. Until 2007, the shuttles could not even be used in missions that started at the end of December and ended in January of the next year as the software couldn’t handle the transition to a new year.

Yet back in the 1980s, the space shuttle seemed like only a foretaste of greater things to come. I remember newspaper articles crowing about space habitats and colonies, complete with artists’ renditions of such wonders as torus-shaped stations large enough to create their own gravity and grow their own crops. It’s pretty humbling how far back we’ve scaled our ambitions since then. In an age when governments are busy dealing with economic recessions and unemployment, it seems that even keeping the International Space Station from falling out of the sky is an achievement.

Even my own views on space exploration have come a long way since I was a kid. Back then, I’d have happily voted for any big ticket space project, regardless of cost. Nowadays, I see that these projects yield relatively few benefits other than prestige and that actually useful scientific work can be better performed with unmanned spacecraft and at far lower cost. It’s clever stuff like the Mars Pathfinder that is the future of NASA while the development of manned spacecraft should depend on its ability to sustain itself financially through space tourism.

Of course, the space shuttle has more than earned its place in history even if it did cost too much and didn’t do as much real science as its boosters like to pretend. It’s so recognizable and has fueled so many dreams that it simply can’t be otherwise. I understand that one of the shuttles is to be given to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum while the two others will be sold off to private collectors. It would be interesting to see in whose hands they end being.