IdeaFestival

Fishing for extremophiles

In contrast to the mesophiles - that would be you and me! - that live in the temperate climes that prevail over most of our world, what life forms may lie in the dark hidden lakes of the Antarctic? Nature:

Over the past 40 years, radar imagery has revealed around 150 freshwater lakes of various sizes and ages beneath the massive Antarctic ice sheet. Some have been isolated from the outside world for millions of years, raising the possibility that they hold unique life forms. The dark, nutrient-deprived environment of the lakes could resemble conditions on Jupiter's moon Europa, which is assumed to hold a large ocean beneath its frozen surface.

Three projects designed to carefully sample the lakes, at least one of which is as large as Lake Ontario, will happen beginning next year. Hat tip: Alan Boyle

Wayne

Wikipedia: extremophile

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30685567@N03/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Filming canyons on Saturn moon

Recently released by the NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, this video is the result of work by an amateur researcher working with surface data produced by the Cassini mission, which has been studying Saturn and its moons since 2005, and which sent the doughty lander Huygens to Titan's surface shortly after its arrival.

Such terrain bears strong similarities to the Karst topography of Utah, and might even suggest caves below the surface.

Dr. Pamela Gay will be at the Kentucky Center on Friday, April 2 for an afternoon presentation sponsored by the IdeaFestival that will touch on the recent phenomenon of "citizen science," and the exciting hunt for life as well. Astronomy and planetary sciences are two areas where amateurs can, and do, make significant contributions to the state of the science.

While most of the 400+ extrasolar planets discovered in just the past fifteen years are "hot Jupiters," astronomers are beginning to turn up worlds closer to Earth in mass. And Titan, as the video demonstrates, hosts geological processes similar to those found in the western United States.

Follow @ideafestival on Twitter for more on Dr. Gay's appearance in Louisville.

Wayne

Dry Moon, barren idea: "Millions of tons" of water ice discovered

The Moon is dry, barren place of little consequence.

Not so fast.

Finding "more than 40 small craters with water ice," a NASA radar, Mini-SAR, that flew aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft has confirmed the presence of substantial water ice deposits, perhaps as much as 600 million metric tons, enough to sustain a moon base or, if the oxygen were converted to fuel, to power rockets for thousands of years.

Those permanently shadowed crater walls haven't seen sunlight in billions of years and are as cold as the surface of Pluto.

'The emerging picture from the multiple measurements and resulting data of the instruments on lunar missions indicates that water creation, migration, deposition and retention are occurring on the moon,' said Paul Spudis, principal investigator of the Mini-SAR experiment at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. 'The new discoveries show the moon is an even more interesting and attractive scientific, exploration and operational destination than people had previously thought.'

The NASA news release is here.

These results follow the work of a mission late last year that crashed a rocket hull into a cold, dark crater. Orbiting craft analyzed the ejected plume of material, which strongly suggested the presence of water ice on the moon’s surface.

Wayne

Image source: NASA

An ocean beneath the geyser moon, Enceladus?

According to completed research on data collected by Cassini following dives through the Saturn moon's now-famous jets in 2008 and 2009, Enceladus joins Earth, Titan and comets as the only known places where negatively charged ions are known to exist. The short-lived ions are further evidence that the moon hosts a subsurface and, perhaps, relatively warm ocean. At right is a picture of the moon's active geysers, first observed by Cassini soon after the doughty explorer arrived in 2005.

More about this story may be found here, at Centauri Dreams.

Wayne

Chess intelligence, a 1,000 year song and the "Calculus of Friendship"

Links from my feed reader today:

• Former world champion, Garry Kasperov describes what kind of intelligence it takes to master chess.
• What might your speech intonations be telling the listener? Empathy is like music to the ears.
• "An infinite piece repeating every thousand years," the 1,000 year song by Longplayer has now been making music for over 10 years. You can listen here.
• TierneyLab discusses how monkeys and humans tend to rationalize their choices.
• Inferred only over large cosmological distances, could dark energy be detected in the lab?
• Two of the most supple thinkers about information and networking, Ethan Zuckerman and David Weinberger, blog Georgetown law professor Julie Cohen's recent presentation to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The video is here.
• It takes "quite a lot of phonological awareness to turn 'l8r' into 'homework' or 'hmwrk'". How does texting affect learning?
• Hunkering down for the planet's winter, has the Martian rover Spirit become a lander after five years?
• The secret to happiness could be an hourly wage.
• What do physicists dream - and worry - about?
• SEED writes about the poignant relationship between math teacher and pupil documented in the new book, "The Calculus of Friendship." You can listen to one exchange in this recording.
• The image above taken by the robotic explorer Cassini is of the Saturn moon Tethys appearing behind Titan. The atmosphere of a very hydrologically active Titan can clearly be seen. Click to enlarge.

Wayne

Image credit: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA

Louisville to host Star Stryder

Noted astronomer Pamela Gay will be in Louisville on Friday, April 2 to talk about the discovery of hundreds of new worlds, the possibility of finding life as well as another Earth, and the emergence of "citizen scientists," a bottom-up movement of people contributing their time and clock cycles to advancing the science in fields as diverse as ornithology, particle physics and, through projects like Galaxy Zoo, astronomy.

Pamela Gay is well known and very active in the astronomical and science community, and blogs under the pseudonym "Star Stryder," where the IdeaFestival first encountered her. You may also follow Pamela @starstryder on Twitter.

She also answered "Five Questions" in a 2008 email interview posted elsewhere on the IdeaFestival blog that you might find interesting.

More information about her April appearance will be forthcoming, so mark that date on your calendar. And for the very latest, follow us @ideafestival on Twitter.

Wayne

How much, or little, would a second Earth look like ours?

[Cross-posted from Kentucky Space] In this video Sixty Symbols explains the technique Kepler is using to look for evidence of second Earth's transiting their host stars in the Milky Way, and the clever way in which the radius of our own was calculated. Given the reference to the "Nerf" planet recently pinpointed by Kepler, the video has only recently been filmed.

In the 15 years since the discovery of the first extrasolar planet, 424 have been discovered, and current and planned observatories are adding to that list at a rapid pace.

Wayne

Writing Eden's music to a wall

Similar in concept if not execution to the Allosphere, the light sculpture in front of the Niels Bohr Institute takes live data from the work being done at the Large Hadron Collider and writes it to the side of a building. Think allegory.

According to the English language version of the "Colliderscope" page,

What you see on the front face of the Institute is a transmission of particle collision as they are seen by one of the accelerator's four detectors. The signal is reproduced with a broad spectrum of tones and varied impact strength as if the accelerator was a kind of giant musical instrument. Maybe you can see the work as a kind of visual translation of the music that sounded at the birth of the Universe.

"A kind of visual translation of the music that sounded at the birth of the Universe?" I like that. For a fuller description of the sculpture and the how data is being passed to it, see this page. Hat tip: Symmetry Magazine

Wayne

Links for a Thursday: Long bets, lies and grassroots space

Here are some links culled from the torrent of information in my feed reader:

• From Cognitive Daily: why can't you get the song out of your head?
• How can design make digital communication less overwhelming?
• Pew profiles the Millennials.
• The purpose of Big Science projects like the Large Hadron Collider and big orbiting space observatories is in the search itself.
• A truly big idea: "Quantum darwinism" might explain the mysterious transition from the quantum world, which obeys the strange laws of quantum physics, to the world we experience, which obeys classical Newtonian laws.
• The Long Now Foundation runs down a list of long bets - predictions about the future - that are up for payment in 2010. Like all predictions about the future, the list makes for interesting reading.
• We subconsciously tend to mimic the physical and facial expressions of the people we're talking to. But doing so makes us less able to detect lies.
• Humans are "rationalizing," not "rational" creatures: Johnnie Moore has a brief post on complexity and organizations that rings true.
• Kentucky Space will be testing some components of its upcoming orbital craft on a suborbital launch soon.
• Newly stationed in Earth-trailing orbit, Kepler has turned it its first batch of planetary finds, including one baffling "Nerf" planet. Kepler is looking for Earth-massed planets in orbits that would suggest the presence of liquid water.

The image above is of the doughty Mars rover, Spirit. Six years into a mission that was expected to last closer to six months, the explorer finds itself stuck in very, very fine sand and unable, so far, to extract itself. Click to enlarge. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Wayne

Infinite is not a Big number

This video at Sixty Symbols describes two approaches to infinity. While mathematicians spend a lot of time with the concept - John Barrow discussed infinities at length during the 2006 IdeaFestival - physicists take infinite results as a sign of incompleteness or failure, a point made by 2002 IF participant and theoretical physicist Brian Greene.

Astronomer and writer Pamela Gay pointed out the Sixy Symbols site @starstryder recently.

Wayne