Scientific American - Space

When Halley’s Comet last come around (the Earth) was so excited about it. I was checking out books, making special folders and writing up my own reports of the celestial event. I made plans to camp out on the front lawn – which was a shared common plaza because I lived in an apartment complex with my parents, cousins, uncle, and grandmother. I had to wikipedia the exact date – 1986. Huh, I was sure it was 984, because I was sure I was only 10 years old at the time. But I do remember this much. I was cold out. I has the patio chaise lounge padded with blankets and the hot cocoa ready for an all-nighter. Sadly, I learned that I wouldn’t be able to see the comet from my front door. Light Pollution. That’s the one not-so-great-thing about being a child urban scientist interested in the night sky. You really can’t see all of the great stuff, unless you have expensive equipment or reliable transportation to leave town. In the 1980′s, my family had neither. Who knows, had that worked out, I might have become an Astronomer instead. Oh well. (Then again, it’s said that 1986 wasn’t a great year to see Halley’s Comet for anybody.)

But I’m still an Astronomy fangirl. Sunday, May 20, 2012, the northern hemisphere will have a chance to see a rare Annular Eclipse of the sun. Folks in Asia will get the best views of it. Which is why the Dr. Jarita Holbrook, Astrophysicist, Anthropologist and Documentary Filmmaker, wanted to be in Tokyo, Japan this weekend to film this event. She’s currently making a new film about the Annular Eclipse on May 20, 2012 and the upcoming full Solar Eclipse November 3, 2013, and the two scientists who study these events: Drs. Alphonse Sterling and Hakeem Olusey. (You can learn more about this project and make a contribution, too: Black Sun: Documentary Film about the 2012 Solar Eclipses .)

Lucky sky-watchers in the western U.S. are in for a treat Sunday: an annular eclipse. [More]

Have a great weekend!

- Christina Agapakis – Plants! In! Space!

Today is International Fascination of Plants Day , so I wanted to share some plant science that I have recently been fascinated by. I’ve become a bit obsessed with research on growing plants in space, how plants respond to microgravity , and the potential for space agriculture. Plant research in space focuses on growing plants for long-term space flight, where the plants can not only feed the astronauts but also scrub the air of carbon dioxide, produce oxygen, and recycle water. The exchange of nutrients and wastes between plants and astronauts can form the cornerstone of a bioregenerative life support system (BLSS) for orbiting space stations and perhaps even future space colonies.

Figure from "Seeds in Space" by Mary Musgrave, Seed Science Research, 2002.

Point a camera at a particular patch of sky for more than 50 hours and what do you get? This image of Centaurus A, a galaxy 12 million light years away:

New image of Centaurus A. See bottom of post for link to bigger version. Credit: ESO

Annular eclipse (Credit: sancho_panza)

When the Sun is eclipsed by the Moon this Sunday, for many observers across much of the world it will be temporarily replaced by a beautiful ring of fire – a brilliant annulus of stellar plasma just peeking out around the dark lunar disk. This doesn’t always happen, partial solar eclipses merely trim away a chunk of the solar disk, and true total eclipses perfectly blank out the visible surface of the Sun. It’s all a matter of alignment between Sun-Moon-Earth and our mutual orbital gymnastics.

Blog of the Week:

For the greatest portion of the history of biology, every organism was a “model organism”. One would pick a problem and then choose which organism would be most suited for answering those particular questions. Then, in the 1990s, everyone jumped onto the bandwagon of studying just a handful of organisms that could be genetically modified at the time: mouse, fruitfly, thale cress, zebrafish, African clawed frog, bread mold, brewer’s yeast, or E.coli. All the other organisms were all but abandoned, only studied by a small number of die-hard researchers and, increasingly, amateurs. Now that technology allows us to investigate (and to some extent manipulate) entire genomes of almost any species we’d like, researchers are going back and rediscovering the abandoned model organisms once again. One of these is Anolis , a large group of species of lizards, noted for their dewlaps, and known especially for their fast adaptive radiation on tropical islands.

A sparse community of microbes can persist for eons in the clay beneath the deep blue sea. When scientists drilled into the Pacific Ocean bottom and pulled up a long core of clay, they also pulled up microbes living on so little that it was hard for the scientists to tell if they were alive in the first place.

The microbes are still being precisely identified but they are not like the other deep-sea extremophiles that scientists have found everywhere from hydrothermal vents to more than a kilometer beneath some parts of the ocean floor. These microbes, like those closer to the surface, rely on oxygen to live unlike other denizens of the deep sea muck that find the reactive element inimical to their lifestyle and were driven to the dark, secret places of the planet when photosynthetic organisms like plankton began to fill the atmosphere with oxygen more than 2 billion years ago.

FLU SECURITY [More]

On August 14th 2012 my new book, Gravity’s Engines , will launch. I’m enormously excited about this, and over the next couple of months – increasingly so as publication date approaches, Life, Unbounded will carry some posts that talk about the science between the covers. The subject matter of Gravity’s Engines may appear a little surprising given that Life, Unbounded focuses (for the most part) on planets, exoplanets, and astrobiology, but the book is in fact all about black holes. Small black holes, giant black holes, black holes in nearby galaxies and the Milky Way, and black holes at the dawn of cosmic starlight – more than 12 billion years ago. And it tells the story of how we’ve come to realize that black holes not only play a pivotal role in determining the characteristics of the universe we see around us, they may even play a role in our own origins and circumstances.

It’s wild stuff, but recent research ( including some of mine ) is leading astronomers to the conclusion that the flavor of galaxies, and the number of stars (and planets) that the universe makes, is intimately tied into the way that black holes eat matter and belch energy back out into the cosmos. Hence the subtitle for the book, which rather immodestly states `How Bubble-Blowing Black Holes Rule Galaxies, Stars, and Life in the Cosmos’. Cor blimey.

- Jason G. Goldman – Contagious Yawning: Evidence of Empathy?

Wednesday, thus time for a new Video of the Week !

- Kate Clancy – Happy Mother s Day: To All the Allomothers

Video of the Week #43 May 16th, 2012:

- Eric Michael Johnson – Out of the Mouth of Babes

Today we are happy to announce the newest blog at #SciAmBlogs – check out Molecules to Medicine!

And as usual on Mondays, we have the new Image of the Week .

Image of the Week #42, May 14th, 2012:

[More]

Scientists are looking for Earth-like planets around other stars. But one way to limit the search can be to figure out where an Earth-like planet cannot exist and eliminate those types of systems.

Here’s a hot topic: astronomers have detected infrared radiation from a faraway planet not much bigger than our own.

It is now expected by the science blogosphere that I post the full updated listing of all the submissions every Monday morning. This serves as a reminder for bloggers to submit their (and other people s) posts, and to some extent prevents duplicate entries. But most importantly, it presents a growing listing of some of the most exciting work on science blogs. This is a weekly post where bloggers can discover each other and discover blogs they were not previously aware of. Thus it is also a promotion for all the bloggers involved.

The submission form for the 2013 edition of Open Lab is now open. Any blog post written since October 1, 2011 is eligible for submission . We will close the form on October 1st, 2012.

Cosmic dust close to Orion's belt. Credit: ESO/APEX (MPIfR/ESO/OSO)/T. Stanke et al./Igor Chekalin/Digitized Sky Survey 2

I took a couple of weeks off blogging while I had my exams at the start of the month. This is what I missed.