And they're off!

Space shuttle Endeavor lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 4:14 a.m. this morning. Clouds had delayed the launch the day before, and while the sky was still dark, the control room took advantage of a hole in the clouds to set Endeavor on its way. Great NASA footage of the event:Endeavor is the 130th space shuttle flight, and is also one of the last; at least for the current space shuttle program. Only four manned shuttle flights are scheduled to take place after Endeavor.After.. Read more »

Chicken Head Tracking

Chicken head what?Youtube aficionados may have already seen this video. Once the giggles die down, consider the mechanism that makes this possible! (The chicken makes a loud noise at the end, which thoroughly frightened my coworkers. Just a warning if you're not wearing headphones.)Hummingbirds are also good at keeping their heads very still while they flap their wings furiously:The purpose of this, for the chicken, is to keep the her wits about her - i.e. make sure she knows which way is up, an.. Read more »

Is the Ozone Keeping Out Cosmic Rays?

A paper that appeared recently on arXiv.org (a site where people can post physics papers that have not been reviewed or edited by any journals) and the Technology Review blog, says that the volume of cosmic rays that reach particle detectors on Earth matches up with temperature fluctuations in the ozone layer. Is there a direct correlation?Well - lets back up.The researcher who put the paper on the arXiv is with the IceCube experiment, which is a neutrino detector buried under the ice in Antarct.. Read more »

Study Physics - It's the Whole Enchilada

If you're gonna study something, you might as well study physics. At least that's what I used to tell my students when I taught at the University of Arizona. Physics is the heart of all, physics is the whole enchilada, physics is totality, physics is everything, physics is existence. Every morsel of our lives, every fabric of our being, every bit and piece of all that stuff that we see and don't see is driven by, exists because, and perhaps most importantly is a manifestation of physics. My God.. Read more »

I love a baseball post!

My computational physics professor in college was a baseball fanatic, and insisted on pushing that obsession onto his students. So for most of the semester we wrote algorithms that would map the path of a baseball pitch, based on variables like the angle of release, the speed and the spin of the ball. We demonstrated that very small changes in any of these variables can drastically change where the ball ends up.That was some years ago, and these days I couldn't program my way out of a paper bag,.. Read more »

Hubble 3D!

If you haven't heard yet, the IMAX film crew who put together Space Shuttle 3D and Deep Sea 3D have a new film coming out called Hubble 3D. Le trailer:Reports say that there will be some never before seen images from Hubble at the end of the movie (I'm drooling already), but most of the film is a documentary about the space shuttle crew of STS-125 going up to repair and upgrade Hubble last May. The trailer also makes it sound sort of scary (it is always scary to strap human beings to a bomb and .. Read more »

Part 1 of "Prediction is difficult . . .

. . . especially about the future." Niels BohrWith all due respect to Professor Bohr, I think some things are easy to predict. Take the latest stab at the air car. For at least a century, futurists have been predicting that we'd be flying to work eventually. Check out the video below to see NASA's late air car idea. I feel like it's pretty easy to predict if and when these sorts of things will be commonplace. I'm going to try my hand at futurism for a bit. I plan to throw some cold water on a fe.. Read more »