Today in Space: Sun explodes, NASA takes pictures

Xehalus

I realize that program is cancelled, but that's clearly all they have right now.

Which really fucking sucks.

Druhim

A cancelled program is all they have? It's like you don't understand what cancelled means.

Xehalus

I do understand what private companies joining the space program means.

They're building, Dream Chasers.

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

Hobnail

Man I just read that the JWST is delayed until 2020, that is a fucking bummer

L|ama

that's... really shit

I mean with space exploration nothing has really been happening anyway so stopping really working at that isn't as big a deal, but space telescopes have been a consistent thing going up with better ones all the time and always getting really useful information out of them

Hobnail

Well auction off a couple B2's or something, it's sposed to cost 6.6 billion or something along those lines

L|ama

checked NASA budget compared to US military budget

noticed this was playing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWlXyzWdPhI

seemed fitting

Hobnail

L|ama

yeah that earned a "thank you for these tweets" from me

rare praise!!

Blake T

If you adjust for inflation NASA recives the same funding that it did in the sixties.

Wanna now see Tyson make the same posts comparing it to welfare.

Hobnail

What're you driving at here? He's making the comparison to show that vastly more money gets spent on blowing shit up and the tools to do so than is funded to NASA, not that funding has gone down over the past sixty years.

As for the good old "intellectual elite scientists don't care about poor people" angle, it's not like the entire species hasn't benefited from bare scientific curiosity over the last century.

L|ama

the only sensible way to compare it is as % of total budget, which has definitely gone down a lot since the 60s

Artreus

Hobnail wrote: »

What're you driving at here? He's making the comparison to show that vastly more money gets spent on blowing shit up and the tools to do so than is funded to NASA, not that funding has gone down over the past sixty years.

As for the good old "intellectual elite scientists don't care about poor people" angle, it's not like the entire species hasn't benefited from bare scientific curiosity over the last century.

Spoiler:

undeinPirat

BOOM ROASTED!

Vann Diras

Artreus wrote: »

Hobnail wrote: »

What're you driving at here? He's making the comparison to show that vastly more money gets spent on blowing shit up and the tools to do so than is funded to NASA, not that funding has gone down over the past sixty years.

As for the good old "intellectual elite scientists don't care about poor people" angle, it's not like the entire species hasn't benefited from bare scientific curiosity over the last century.

Spoiler:

every time i see this i go blind from unimaginable rage

i can honestly say that very few things could provoke me to fight someone

but that girl? i'd punch her. no question

Artreus

Yeah reading that gets me so mad

Hobnail

I'm fairly jaded from working with ignods, so that didn't hurt me as bad as it could've

Blake T

L|ama wrote: »

the only sensible way to compare it is as % of total budget, which has definitely gone down a lot since the 60s

How come? % per year is not a good way of comparing things.

I mean in the 60's there was little to no money into environmental research.

Does that mean we should keep that percentage fixed for modern day?

Xehalus

Since Mars is about half the size of Earth, it means we sadly won't have room for people like BOOM ROASTED or YEEHAW.

jackal

Just going to leave this here. http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGKeAxIHsMw

Druhim

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wJYpRJQVbo&feature=youtu.be

#pipe

My favourite part about that video

is that Sagan is talking about scientists in the media

and the visuals go

• Stephen Hawking
• Neil deGrasse Tyson
• Steven Novella
• Bill Nye

Jimothy

Wait, what are you saying about Bill Nye.

Junpei

Holy shit that facebook image fills me with rage D:

LTM

People are dumb, yo.

Houk

Blake T wrote: »

L|ama wrote: »

the only sensible way to compare it is as % of total budget, which has definitely gone down a lot since the 60s

How come? % per year is not a good way of comparing things.

I mean in the 60's there was little to no money into environmental research.

Does that mean we should keep that percentage fixed for modern day?

Did...anyone say that we should? Cuz it seems to me that Tyson is suggesting that other programs (such as NASA) deserve a higher percentage of funding that is currently going to things that don't need it (such as the military).

I bet if you asked him if something like environmental research should also get a higher share of funding, he would most likely say yes. But he's not an environmental researcher, so he doesn't have any real reason to lobby for that over the program he himself is involved in.

Solar

That facebook image made me so mad

But then Carol Sagan's soothing tones made me feel good again

We love you Carl!

Grey Ghost

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/07/12/photo-father-and-son.html

Solar

Woah

Druhim

that's pretty cool

Junpei

That is a hella awesome side by side for 30 years

Weaver

The Dawn probe just reached the asteroid Vesta.

Silmaril

I was just reading about that. Its pretty cool.

ACSIS

L|ama wrote:

I mean with space exploration nothing has really been happening anyway so stopping really working at that isn't as big a deal, but space telescopes have been a consistent thing going up with better ones all the time and always getting really useful information out of them

Uhm...

With a hibernation period of up to 100 million years, bacteria discovered on the Arctic sea floor may have longest life cycle of any known Earthly organism.

Deinococcus accomplishes its resistance to radiation by having multiple copies of its genome and rapid DNA repair mechanisms. It usually repairs breaks in its chromosomes within 12–24 hours through a 2-step process. First, D. radiodurans reconnects some chromosome fragments through a process called single-strand annealing. In the second step, a protein mends double-strand breaks through homologous recombination. This process does not introduce any more mutations than a normal round of replication would.

A persistent question regarding D. radiodurans is how such a high degree of radioresistance could evolve. Natural background radiation levels are very low—in most places, on the order of 0.4 mGy per year, and the highest known background radiation, near Ramsar, Iran is only 260 mGy per year. With naturally-occurring background radiation levels so low, organisms evolving mechanisms specifically to ward off the effects of high radiation are unlikely.

Bacteria taken from the scrumptiously named fishing village of Beer on Britain's south coast have proven themselves some of the hardiest organisms on Earth -- or in space for that matter. Bacteria found in rocks taken from the cliffs at Beer have survived a grueling year-and-a-half exposure to space conditions on the exterior of the ISS and returned home alive, becoming the longest-lived photosynthesizing microbes to survive in space.

In September 2007, after enduring a 12-day orbital mission and a fiery reentry, the European unmanned spacecraft Foton-M3 was retrieved from a field in Kazakhstan. The 5,500-pound capsule, seven-feet in diameter, carried a payload of 43 European experiments in a range of scientific disciplines – including fluid physics, biology, crystal growth, radiation exposure and astrobiology. The capsule contained, among other things, lichen that were exposed to the radiation of space. Scientists also strapped basalt and granite disks riddled with cyanobacteria to the capsule's heat shield to see if the microorganisms could survive the brutal conditions of reentry. Some bacteria, lichens, spores, and even one animal (Tardigrades) were found to have survived the outer space environment and cosmic radiation.

While the CESS report said there was no apparent relationship between the loud sound (possibly a sonic boom) and flash of light which preceded the red rain, to Louis and Kumar it was a key piece of evidence. They proposed that a meteor (from a comet containing the red particles) caused the sound and flash and when it disintegrated over Kerala it released the red particles which slowly fell to the ground. (...) "The red cells found in the red rain in Kerala, India are now considered as a possible case of extraterrestrial life form. These cells can undergo rapid replication even at an extreme high temperature of 300 °C. They can also be cultured in diverse unconventional chemical substrates. The molecular composition of these cells is yet to be identified".

A meteorite originating from Mars known as ALH84001 was shown in 1996 to contain microscopic structures resembling small terrestrial nanobacteria. When the discovery was announced, many immediately conjectured that these were fossils and were the first evidence of extraterrestrial life — making headlines around the world. Public interest soon started to dwindle as most experts started to agree that these structures were not indicative of life, but could instead be formed abiotically from organic molecules. However, in November 2009, a team of scientists at Johnson Space Center, including David McKay, reasserted that there was "strong evidence that life may have existed on ancient Mars", after having reexamined the meteorite and finding magnetite crystals

Richard B. Hoover of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center has photographed biological microfossils found in carbonaceous meteorites such as Orgueil and Murchison. They are unlikely to be recent earthly contaminants because their nitrogen and phosphorus are depleted and several of life's amino acids and nucleotides are missing, as in million-years-old fossils on Earth, and unlike recent contamination.

“Only small amounts of methane are present in the Martian atmosphere, coming from very localized sources,” said Fonti. “ We’ve looked at changes in concentrations of the gas and found that there are seasonal and also annual variations. The source of the methane could be geological activity or it could be biological – we can’t tell at this point. However, it appears that the upper limit for methane lifetime is less than a year in the Martian atmosphere.”

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has discovered the best evidence yet for a large-scale saltwater reservoir beneath the icy crust of Saturn's moon Enceladus.
The data came from the spacecraft's direct analysis of salt-rich ice grains close to the jets ejected from the moon.Data from Cassini's cosmic dust analyzer show the grains expelled from fissures, known as tiger stripes, are relatively small and predominantly low in salt far away from the moon. But closer to the moon's surface, Cassini found that relatively large grains rich with sodium and potassium dominate the plumes. The salt-rich particles have an "ocean-like" composition and indicate that most, if not all, of the expelled ice and water vapor comes from the evaporation of liquid salt water. The findings appear in the journal Nature.

Europa has emerged as one of the top Solar System locations in terms of potential habitability and possibly, hosting extraterrestrial life. Life could exist in its under-ice ocean (...)

Three scientists have analyzed the rates of divergence for seven metazoan genes with interesting results. Although the data are rather loose, all seem to indicate that these genes began to diverge from their respective common ancestor genes much longer ago than the Cambrian explosion. The three scientists conclude, "...the only reasonable interpretation is that the metazoan phyla began to diverge long before the Cambrian." This conclusion directly challenges the consensus of paleontology that dates the Cambrian explosion at 570 — or maybe only 530 — million years ago. But when the data are interpreted within the neo-Darwinian paradigm, this conclusion is not unreasonable.

The data look different from the perspective of Cosmic Ancestry. According to this paradigm, the genes for evolutionary advances were delivered to Earth in the same manner as life on Earth originally. Life originally came as bacterial spores delivered by comets. Genes for further evolution could come within bacterial spores or within viruses carried by comets. Such genes would reside within lower life forms as silent DNA until all the pieces were in place for the next evolutionary step

Presently, only the function of a few percent of the DNA is known, the rest has been believed to be useless garbage, commonly called "Junk DNA" by molecular biologists.

Increasing evidence is now indicating that this DNA is not "junk" at all. Especially, it has been found to have various regulatory roles. This means that this so-called "non-coding DNA" influences the behavior of the genes, the "coding DNA", in important ways.

However, the knowledge is still very incomplete about this DNA. And there is little knowledge about the relationship between non-coding DNA and the DNA of genes.

Without this knowledge it is completely impossible to foresee and control the effect of artificial insertion of foreign genes.

This is a very important reason why genetic engineering is unsuitable for commercial application. It is still at a stage of early experimentation with very incomplete understanding about its consequences. According to the ethical standards of sound science, the products of such experimentation should be strictly contained in labortories, especially as released DNA may spread indefinitely in an uncontrollable way.

"nothing"

Artreus

I read some of the post without seeing how posted it, and was wondering who is this crazy.

Then I saw the name.

Foolproof

this has all happened before

TheStig

because time is cyclical

Clint Eastwood

Weaver wrote:

The Dawn probe just reached the asteroid Vesta.

just three years until it reaches Ceres. that might actually be interesting

ACSIS

TheStig wrote:

because time is cyclical

Because genetic material from space in conjunction with adaptive evolution compliments microevolution well and eliminates many problems of the darwinian model of evolution, and the evidence in favour keeps mounting. All the top NASA and ESA missions are astrobiology missions and interest in life suited to extreme environments catches incresing interest. Naysayers may find the door is closing on them rapidly.

Of course... when the view on the world changes its always difficult. There will always those who are more comfortable with a flat earth because they are afraid of change, even if it means ignoring solid evidence.

Weaver

Isn't acsis the resident "government is hiding true science" guy?