Year's Biggest Full Moon Friday Night

From Space.com

The full moon Friday night will be the biggest one of the year as Earth's natural satellite reaches its closest point to our planet.

Earth, the moon and the sun are all bound together by gravity, which keeps us going around the sun and keeps the moon going around us as it goes through phases. The moon makes a trip around Earth every 29.5 days. But the orbit is not a perfect circle.

The moon's average distance from us is about 238,855 miles (384,400 km). Friday night it will be just 221,560 miles (356,567 km) away. It will be 14 percent bigger in our sky and 30 percent brighter than some other full moons during the year, according to NASA.

Tides will be higher Friday night, too. Earth's oceans are pulled by the gravity of the moon and the sun. So when the moon is closer, tides are pulled higher. Scientists call these perigean tides, because the moon's closest point to Earth is called perigee. The farthest point on the lunar orbit is called apogee.

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Satellites Spy On Washington From On High [Slide Show]

OBAMA'S NEW ADDRESS: From its orbit 423 miles (681 kilometers) above Earth, the GeoEye 1 looks down on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The satellite, launched September 6, can capture natural and man-made features to within nine feet (three meters) of their actual location on Earth's surface.

From Scientific American:

A satellite imaging company provides clear new pix of features on Earth's surface as India mulls the role played by such imagery in the deadly Mumbai attacks

Washington, D.C., home of the CIA, National Security Administration (NSA) and FBI, is a well-known haven for spies and surveillance. But new satellite pictures of the White House, Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial show these government agencies aren't the only ones watching and being watched.

These latest images from Dulles, Va., satellite-imaging company, GeoEye, are among the first to be collected by the GeoEye 1, a satellite launched into polar orbit on September 6 that can "see" objects on Earth as small as 16 inches (0.41 meter) in size in black-and-white mode or 64.6 inches (1.64 meters) in color. Images from the GeoEye 1, which stands 20 feet (6.1 meters) high and weighs more than 4,300 pounds (1,950 kilograms), so impressed Google that the Internet search giant plans to add the satellite's high-resolution, digital color photos to Google Earth next month.

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The Shopping Mall: A 2,000-Year-Old Tradition

An archaeological team found the very first traces of an Illyrian trading post that is more than 2,000 years old, including more than 30 boats. Credit: University of Mostar

From Live Science:

At this time of the year, the pressure to shop, buy and wrap is overwhelming. And so we drag ourselves to the mall, a hopefully one-stop shopping place where any number of stores can accommodate any holiday shopping list. Checking that twice, we schlep up and down until our bags are full and our minds are empty.

And every year, it seems like the list grows longer, the schlep more tedious, and the time deciding on gifts endless. Eventually we sit down, have a holiday drink and thank our lucky stars for the mall, because without this modern market place, we'd be also be driving all over town and screaming.

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Does Obama Want to Ground NASA's Next Moon Mission?

Barack Obama and NASA administrator Michael Griffin,
Charles Dharapak / AP; NASA; Matt Stroshane / Getty

From Time Magazine:

Getting into a shouting match with the HR rep is not exactly the best way to land a job. But according to the Orlando Sentinel, that's just what happened last week between NASA administrator Mike Griffin and Lori Garver, a member of Barack Obama's transition team who will help decide if Griffin keeps his post once the President-elect takes office. If the contretemps did occur, it could help doom not only the NASA chief's chances, but the space agency's ambitious plans to get Americans back to the moon.

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Look Up Tonight For A Spectacular Treat In The Sky

From Times Online:

Biggest full moon for years enhanced by shooting stars

If the full moon tonight looks unusually large, it is not your imagination – it is the biggest and brightest full moon to be seen for 15 years.

Each month the Moon makes a full orbit around the Earth in a slightly oval-shaped path, and tonight it will swing by the Earth at its closest distance, or perigee. It will pass by 356,613km (221,595 miles) away, which is about 28,000km closer than average.

The unusual feature of tonight is that the perigee also coincides with a full moon, which will make it appear 14 per cent bigger and some 30 per cent brighter than most full moons this year – so long as the clouds hold off from blocking the view.

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Ancient Indian Ocean Coral Points To Another Disastrous Tsunami

From Times Online:

The eastern Indian Ocean could be due for another earthquake rivalling the one that caused the deadly tsunami in December 2004, according to research on ancient corals in the area.

It has long been said that earthquakes occur in cycles, yet until now evidence has been hard to come by. Now a pioneering study of the corals off the west coast of Sumatra has revealed that the region's earthquakes during the past 700 years occurred in series of shocks that spanned decades.

Corals lay down growth rings every year, just like trees, and these record environmental changes including upheavals of the seabed. They show that the region's earthquakes usually come in a sequence.

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Hubble Finds Carbon Dioxide On An Extrasolar Planet

This is an artist's impression of the Jupiter-size extrasolar planet, HD 189733b, being eclipsed by its parent star. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have measured carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide in the planet's atmosphere. The planet is a "hot Jupiter," which is so close to its star that it completes an orbit in only 2.2 days. Credit: ESA, NASA, M. Kornmesser (ESA/Hubble), and STScI

(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star. This is an important step along the trail of finding the chemical biotracers of extraterrestrial life as we know it.

The Jupiter-sized planet, called HD 189733b, is too hot for life. But the Hubble observations are a proof-of-concept demonstration that the basic chemistry for life can be measured on planets orbiting other stars. Organic compounds can also be a by-product of life processes, and their detection on an Earth-like planet may someday provide the first evidence of life beyond Earth.

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Previous observations of HD 189733b by Hubble and the Spitzer Space Telescope found water vapor. Earlier this year, Hubble astronomers reported that they found methane in the planet's atmosphere.

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Wind, Water And Sun Beat Biofuels, Nuclear And Coal For Clean Energy

Wind power is the most promising alternative source of energy, according
to Mark Jacobson. (Credit: LM Glasfiber)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 11, 2008) — The best ways to improve energy security, mitigate global warming and reduce the number of deaths caused by air pollution are blowing in the wind and rippling in the water, not growing on prairies or glowing inside nuclear power plants, says Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford.

And "clean coal," which involves capturing carbon emissions and sequestering them in the earth, is not clean at all, he asserts.

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The Energy Debates: Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion

From Live Science:

The Facts

Most of the planet is covered by the oceans, and they absorb a staggering amount of energy from the sun each day. Ocean thermal energy conversion, or OTEC, taps into this energy to produce electricity.

Ocean thermal energy conversion relies on the fact that water near the surface is heated by sunlight while seawater deep in the dark is much colder. OTEC plants use warm surface water to heat ammonia or some other fluid that boils at a low temperature. The resulting gas is used to drive turbines that produce electricity. The gas is then cooled by cold water pumped up from the ocean depths and the resulting fluid is recycled to help generate power.

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The Dirty Side Of Clean Coal

DIRTY COAL Mountaintop removal mining pollutes communities in Appalachia.
Courtesy of Douglas Fischer, The Daily Climate

From Scientific American:

DOROTHY, W. Va. – Larry Gibson lives on an island in the sky.

It didn’t start that way: His land was once a low hill in a rugged hardwood forest – cherry, oak, hickory – skipping from ridge to ridge across one of the poorest, most rural areas of the Lower 48.

Then came the mining companies with their dynamite and trucks. They clear-cut the forest, blew the tops off the ridges and scraped the rocks into the hollows, pushing hundreds of feet of mountains into the valleys below.

They came for the coal – energy that provides half of the nation’s electricity and has been touted as a major plank in the United State’s bid for energy independence. They left, in Gibson’s view, a swale of extirpation and death.

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1/5 Of Coral Reefs Lost Due To Acid-Filled Oceans

From National Geographic:

The world has lost nearly one-fifth of its coral reefs, and much of the rest could be destroyed by increasingly acidic seas if climate change continues unchecked, a conservation group warned Wednesday.

Rising temperatures from greenhouses gases are the latest and most serious threats to coral, which are already being damaged by destructive fishing methods and pollution, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

About 19 percent of coral reefs have disappeared during the last 20 years, said IUCN's director general, Julia Marton-Lefèvre.

"If current trends in carbon dioxide emission continue, many of the remaining reefs will be lost in the next 20 to 40 years," Marton-Lefèvre said at Wednesday's U.N. talks, which are focused on creating a new climate change treaty.

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Henry M. Dies At 82; Victim Of Brain Surgery Accident Offered Doctors Key Insights Into Memory

From The L.A. Times:

For 55 years, he was known to the world at large only as HM or Henry M., the survivor of brain surgery that went catastrophically wrong, leaving him with a form of amnesia that prevented him from collecting any new memories and living in a pre-1953 world.

But when he died Dec. 2 of respiratory failure at a nursing home in Windsor Locks, Conn., his tightly guarded identity was finally revealed to the world. His name was Henry Gustav Molaison and he was 82.

The ill-conceived surgery was a personal disaster, but it was a major boon to the scientific community, providing researchers with the first window into how and where memories are formed in the brain.

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The Physics Every President Should Know

BROOKS KRAFT/CORBIS (Photo from Businessweek)

From NPR:

From gravity to the greenhouse effect, Richard Muller, a physicist at University of California at Berkeley, details the basic physics President-elect Barack Obama should know. Muller is author of Physics for Future Presidents and teaches a class at Berkeley by the same name.

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What's Inside A Black Hole?

Image from NASA

From The Guardian:

At the centre of the Milky Way lies a giant black hole, but can we shed light on what lurks in the darkness?

Thanks to German astronomers, we now have the most accurate measurements yet of the giant black hole that sits at the centre of our galaxy.

And what a beast it is: as wide as Earth's orbit around the sun and 4.3 million times more massive than our home star. Lucky, then, that it is 27,000 light years away.

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Unprecedented 16-Year-Long Study Tracks Stars Orbiting Milky Way Black Hole

This is the central parts of our galaxy, the Milky Way, as observed in the near-infrared with the NACO instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope. By following the motions of the most central stars over more than 16 years, astronomers were able to determine the mass of the supermassive black hole that lurks there. (Credit: ESO/S. Gillessen et al.)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 10, 2008) — By watching the motions of 28 stars orbiting the Milky Way's most central region with admirable patience and amazing precision, astronomers have been able to study the supermassive black hole lurking there. It is known as "Sagittarius A*" (pronounced "Sagittarius A star"). The new research marks the first time that the orbits of so many of these central stars have been calculated precisely and reveals information about the enigmatic formation of these stars — and about the black hole to which they are bound.

"The centre of the Galaxy is a unique laboratory where we can study the fundamental processes of strong gravity, stellar dynamics and star formation that are of great relevance to all other galactic nuclei, with a level of detail that will never be possible beyond our Galaxy," explains Reinhard Genzel, leader of the team from the Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching near Munich.

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Sugar Can Be Addictive, Study Suggests

From Live Science:

A study of rats finds they show all the signs of addiction to sugar. The finding could help better understand eating disorders in humans.

Professor Bart Hoebel and his team in the Department of Psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute have been studying signs of sugar addiction in rats for years. They had previously demonstrated a behavioral pattern of increased intake and then showed signs of withdrawal.

New experiments captured craving and relapse to complete the picture.

"If bingeing on sugar is really a form of addiction, there should be long-lasting effects in the brains of sugar addicts," Hoebel said. "Craving and relapse are critical components of addiction, and we have been able to demonstrate these behaviors in sugar-bingeing rats in a number of ways."

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Google Doubles Street View Coverage

US coverage by Google Maps Street View. (Google)

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Memphis, Maine, Birmingham, Charleston: Google’s been watching.

The search giant on Tuesday rolled out the biggest update ever to its mapping feature that lets visitors take a virtual stroll down the Champs Elysees, the National Mall, or their (well, in this case, my) old street.

This update includes parts of some states that hadn’t yet gotten the Google treatment, including Maine, West Virginia, and the Dakotas (yes, you can click your way through downtown Fargo, but the pictures were taken in the summertime.)

Besides being fun to play with, the feature makes it easy to get to know an area before going there. Street View was also recently added to the mobile version of Google Maps to enhance driving directions.

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Black Hole Found In Milky Way

From BBC:

There is a giant black hole at the centre of our galaxy, a study has confirmed.

German astronomers tracked the movement of 28 stars circling the centre of the Milky Way, using the European Southern Observatory in Chile.

The black hole is four million times heavier than our Sun, according to the paper in The Astrophysical Journal.

Black holes are objects whose gravity is so great that nothing - including light - can escape them.

According to Dr Robert Massy, of the Royal Astronomical Society, the results suggest that galaxies form around giant black holes in the way that a pearl forms around grit.

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NASA Delays Mars Science Laboratory Launch To 2011

In a rare astronomical occurrence, called planetary conjunction, planets Venus (top l.), and Jupiter (top r.), were seen with a crescent moon. The three orbs created a momentary smiley face in the sky over Asia on Monday. Bullit Marquez/AP

From Christian Science Monitor:

For folks looking forward to the launch of another ground-breaking Mars mission next year, you’ll have to wait. Top officials with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced today that they have pushed back the launch of the Mars Science Laboratory by two years.

In the process, the agency’s green-eye-shade crew will have to come up with an extra $400 million for the project. That’s the delay’s cost on a mission whose price tag already is estimated at $1.88 billion before all is said and done.

The delay is the second in a year, with the project currently running about two months behind schedule.

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Hubble Finds Carbon Dioxide on Extrasolar Planet

From Wired Science:

The Hubble Space Telescope has detected carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside of the solar system, a significant step in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Though the planet is more similar to Jupiter than Earth and is too hot to harbor life, the ability to identify organic compounds on other planets is key to being able to find other habitable worlds, and potentially life.

"The carbon dioxide is kind of the main focus of the excitement, because that is a molecule that under the right circumstances could have a connection to biological activity as it does on Earth," astronomer Mark Swain of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a press release. "The very fact that we're able to detect it, and estimate its abundance, is significant for the long-term effort of characterizing planets both to find out what they're made of and to find out if they could be a possible host for life."

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