The invasive Spanish slug, one of the worst alien pests in Europe, is naturally repelled by ecosystems if soils house a healthy population of earthworms, new research suggests. Photo by Xauxa Håkan Svensson

They creep through a garden, lubricated by their own secretions, leaving a trail of mucus behind. In their wake is destruction–their rapacious appetites can require them to consume several times their own body weight each day, chomping roots and leaves with guillotine-like jaws and thousands of backward-pointing teeth. Hermaphroditic as adults, they lay tiny pearls of eggs easily mistaken for fertilizer beads in potting soil, allowing them to rampantly proliferate in gardens and nurseries.

They’re slugs, and their fleshy, squishy bodies are basically one huge stomach on a foot, driven by one overarching goal: to consume. Although some native slugs help decompose dead organic matter, returning nitrogen and other nutrients to the soil, the voracious hunger of several invasive species can destroy gardens and farms in the damp regions of the globe that slugs prefer to roam. Slugs are known to devour ornamentals, leafy shrubs and–because they enjoy slithering underground–bulbs, tubers and plant roots. If you see large, irregular holes in your hostas, you know who to thank.

New research, however, suggests that there might be simple ways to ward off slug damage. A study published this week in the journal BMC Ecology by scientists at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna shows that earthworms burrowing in the soil can protect plants overhead from being a slug’s next meal. Further, higher plant diversity also decreases the destruction slugs can wreak on individual plants.

To come to these findings, the researchers used large incubators to create mini grassland ecosystems in a laboratory setting. Different incubators contained different levels of plant diversity–between three to 12 species of either grasses, forbs, or legumes. After four weeks of plant growth, researchers introduced to the soil of some of the incubators a healthy amount earthworms (about 333 per square meter) who were free to burrow, convert organic matter into richer and more fertile soil, aerate soil, excrete nutrients in a more accessible form for plants and do the myriad of other things that earthworms do.

Five weeks later, two Spanish slugs (Arion vulgaris)–a critter in the top 100 worst alien species of Europe according to projects funded by the European Commission–were added to select micro-ecosystems and left there for one week. Throughout this week, plants were monitored periodically for slug damage.

If you’re hoping for an epic battle between slugs and earthworms, think again. Instead, the mere presence of earthworms reduced the number of leaves damaged due to slugs by 60 percent. Additionally, the researchers found that slugs ate 40 percent less in bins with high plant diversity than in those with low.

“Our results suggest that two processes might be going on,” explained lead author Johann Zaller in a statement. “Firstly, earthworms improved the plant’s ability to protect itself against slugs perhaps through the build-up of nitrogen-containing toxic compounds. Secondly, even though these slugs are generalists, they prefer widely available food.” As a result, in highly diverse ecosystems “slugs eat less in total because they have to switch their diets more often since plants of the same species are less available,” he added.

Earthworms may play a crucial role in helping plants defend themselves from being devoured by slugs. Photo by Flickr user goosmurf

Gardeners are familiar with the idea that varying up their plant beds helps preserve the plants most tasty to invasive slugs. But the tenacity of these slugs and their insatiable appetites cause many horticulturalists hover over their plants like helicopter parents, employing all sorts of methods to curb slug infestation.

Approaches vary in their effectiveness and efficiency. For example, those with the time and inclination to coddle their plants can tent cardboard overnight on the ground around prize plants to create a moist shelter for the nocturnal gastropods. Removing the newspaper in the morning often yields a writhing clutch of slugs, which can then be removed and killed. Quicker methods can be found with slug bait, but many can increase the toxicity of surrounding soil and can be harmful to wildlife and pets if ingested. Salting slugs–death by dessication–also can be harmful to nearby plants, as salt can interfere with the plant’s ability to uptake water.

Some gardeners place copper strips around the perimeter of flower beds–the copper supposedly reacts with slug slime to produce a kind of electric shock, repelling the creatures. Others use cans of stale beer, buried around a garden, as traps–the slugs, lured by beer’s fermented smell, get caught in the can, can’t escape and then drown. But the new results suggest that earthworms–already the gardener’s best friend because of their ability to improve soil fertility–may be even more effective than all these methods, highlighting the idea that organisms in soil can affect the health of organisms above ground.

Such interactions are largely ignored in ecological research, according to Zaller. “What we know from other studies is that earthworms change the nutrition of plants, thus enabling them to better respond to herbivores,” he told Surprising Science in an email. “As a response against herbivores, plants usually change their chemistry and they build up (costly) secondary chemicals in their leaves. If the nutrition of the plant is improved by the activity of earthworms, more of these defense compounds can be build up and the plant is better protected against herbivores.”

Of course, “one has always be very cautious in translating results from a specific experiment into the natural world,” Zaller continued. “In ecology many results are context specific, species-specific etc. Whether our results can be applied to other invasive slug species (or herbivores in general) would of course demand specific experiments. However, I would guess the mechanisms we suggest happening in our setting should be similar in settings involving different species.”

Who’s in the suit? Increasingly, it’s our digital selves. Photo from NASA/STS-104

Ever since the collective “YOU” became Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2006, campaigns to get our attention have increasingly sought out our digital selves. You can name a Budweiser Clydesdale. You can pick Lays’ new potato chip flavor. And it’s not just retail that wants your online opinions: You can vote for who will win photography contests. You can play the futures market on who will win elected offices. And with enough signatures, you can get the White House to read your petitions.

Many science endeavors rely on such crowdsourcing. With a simple app, you can let researchers know the exact date that your lilacs or dogwoods bloom, helping them to track how seasonal cycles are shifting as a result of climate change. You can join the search for ever-larger prime numbers. You can even help scientists scan radio waves in space to search for intelligent life outside of Earth. These more traditional crowdsourcing efforts allow users to brainstorm ideas and process data from computers at home.

But now, a few projects are allowing us to put our virtual selves beyond Earth’s atmosphere through recently launched space missions. Who said that rovers, space probes, a handful of astronauts and pigs were the only ones in space? No longer are we just bystanders watching spacecraft launch and cooing over images returned of other planets and stars. Now, we can direct cameras, help run experiments, even send our avatars–of sorts–to inhabit nearby planetary bodies or return to us in a time capsule.

Here are a few examples:

Asteroid Chimney Rock: On April 10 (tomorrow), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will open up a campaign that allows visitors to their site the opportunity of sending their names and brief messages to the near-Earth asteroid (162173) 1999 JU₃.  Called the “Let’s meet with Le Petit Prince! Million Campaign 2,” the effort aims to get people’s names onto the Hayabusa2 mission, which will likely launch in 2014 to study the asteroid. When Hayabusa 2 lands on the asteroid, the names submitted–embedded in a plaque of sorts on the spacecraft–will stand as a testament to the idea that humans (or at least their robotic representatives) were there.

The Hayabusa2 mission, scheduled for launch in 2014, will attempt to return an asteroid sample back to Earth in 2020. Artist’s rendition by Akihiro Ikeshita/JAXA

The campaign is reminiscent of how NASA got more than 1.2 million people to submit their names and signatures, which were then etched on two dime-sized microchips and affixed to the Mars Curiosity rover. Sure, it’s a bit gimmicky–what useful function is brought by having people’s names out in space? But the idea of “tagging” a planet or an asteroid–preserving a bit of yourself on what will over decades become space junk–has powerful pull. It is why Chimney Rock, with its etchings from early explorers and pioneers, is the historical marker it is today, and why gladiators scored their names into the Colosseum before they fought to the death. For mission leaders hoping to get the public enthusiastic about space, nothing’s more exciting than a bit of digital graffiti.

Interplanetary time capsules: A key goal of Hayabusa2 is to return return a sample from the asteroid in 2020. Mission creators saw this as a perfect way to get the public to fill a time capsule. Those seeking to participate are encouraged to send to mission coordinators their thoughts and dreams for the future along with their hopes and expectations for recovery from natural disasters, the latter likely a way to get people to express their feelings on the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan’s east coast. Names, messages, and illustrations will loaded onto a microchip that will not only touch down on the asteroid’s surface, but will also be a part of the probe sent back to Earth with asteroid dust.

But why stop at a mere 6-year time capsule? The European Space Agency, UNESCO, and other partners are blending crowd sourcing with space technology to create the KEO mission–so named because the letters represent common sounds across all of Earth’s languages–which will bundle thoughts and images of anyone who seeks to participate and will launch this bundle in a probe that will only return to Earth in 50,000 years.

Project operators write on KEO’s website: “Each one of us have 4 uncensored pages at our disposal: an identical space of equality and freedom of expression where we can voice our aspirations and our revolts, where we can reveal our deepest fears and our strongest beliefs, where we can relate our lives to our faraway great grandchildren, thus allowing them to witness our times.” That’s 4 pages for every person who chooses to participate.

On board will be photographs detailing Earth’s cultural richness, human blood encased in a diamond, and a durable DVD of humanity’s crowdsourced thoughts. The idea is to launch the time capsule from an Ariane 5 rocket into an orbit more than 2,000 kilometers above Earth, hopefully sometime in 2014. “50,000 years ago, Man created art thus showing his capacity for symbolic abstraction.” the website notes. And in another 50,000 years, “Will Earth still give life? Will human beings still be recognizable as such?”Another logical question: Will whatever’s left on Earth know what’s coming back to them and will be able to retrieve it?

Hayabusa2 and KEO will join capsules already launched into space on Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2. But the contents of these earlier capsules were picked by a handful of people; here, we get to choose what represents us in space, and will get to reflect (in theory) on the thoughts bound in time upon their return.

You, the mission controller and scientist: Short of going to Mars yourself, you can do the next best thing–tell an instrument currently observing Mars where to look. On NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is the University of Arizona’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), a camera designed to image Mars in great detail. Dubbed “the people’s camera,” HiRISE allows you–yes, you!– to pick its next targets by filling out a form specifying your “HiWishes.”

A recently launched nanosatellite is allowing the crowdsourced winners of a crowdsourced screaming contest the chance to test whether screams can be heard in space. Launched in February, the nanosatellite’s smartphone-powered brain will broadcast the screams–no word yet on results. But you may find just listening to the yelling therapeutic! This guy’s roar got the most votes:

The gooey confections can be used to measure the speed of light and demonstrate relationships between the volume of a gas and its pressure and temperature. Photo by Flickr user John-Morgan

If the Easter Bunny comes to your house this weekend, you may find yourself with a plethora of marshmallows and Peeps. What to do with them all? Aside from simply eating them, cooking with them, or unleashing your artistic side by making dioramas, consider using them….for science!

Marshmallows, it turns out, are must-have pieces of equipment for at-home science experiments. Sure, you can use them test your kids’ self control through the the field of psychology’s notorious marshmallow test and its ever-more complex iterations. But if you’d rather not torture your kids by leaving tantalizingly in reach a marshmallow they’re ordered not to have, consider trying these easy science projects:

Marshmallows in a vacuum

The relationship between the volume of a gas and its pressure can be demonstrated at home with a simple set up. Photo by Mohi Kumar

No, not that kind of vacuum, despite the intriguing possibilities conjured by this phrase. You’ll need:

• A glass jar with a lid
• A mechanism to pump some of the air out of the jar
• Marshmallows

The Physics Hypertextbook recommends using a kitchen vacuum pump for this experiment. Cutting a small hole in the jar’s lid and squeezing a wine preserver’s vacuum pump into it also works.

Place a few marshmallows in the jar, seal it, and then pump the air out:

What’s going on? Marshmallows are basically a foam spun out of sugar, water, air, and gelatin. The sugar makes them sweet, the water and sugar combo makes them sticky and the gelatin makes them stretchy. But the air–which actually makes up most of the confection’s volume–makes marshmallows the tastiest way to encapsulate a gas in a solid. As you pump air out of the jar, the air inside the marshmallow expands and the marshmallow puffs up. Release the seal, and the marshmallows return to their normal size.

Congratulations! You’ve just demonstrated Boyle’s Law, which states that when the temperature doesn’t change, that the relationship between pressure (which is decreased by pumping air out of the jar) and volume of any set amount of gas (the marshmallow) is inversely proportional. In other words, decreasing one necessitates an increase of the other.

If you can’t eat ‘em, nuke ‘em!

If you’ve ever roasted a marshmallow over a campfire, you’ll know where this next demonstration is going. You’ll need:

• A microwave
• A microwavable plate
• A standard-sized marshmallow (avoid minis or jumbos; the former will fry and the latter may make an enormous mess!)

Place the marshmallow on one of its flat sides in the center of a plate. Then microwave the marshmallow for, say, 45 seconds on high.

It’s alive! This time, rather than changing the pressure surrounding the marshmallow, you’re changing the temperature. As the microwave bakes the marshmallow, the water in the marshmallow heats up and warms the air. When air becomes hot, it expands, forcing the marshmallow to puff up. The confection’s water also softens the sugars, causing it to ooze, as seen in the video above (created by YouTube user bbbpwns).

The relationship between temperature and volume is representative of Charles’ Law, which holds that any set amount of gas will expand when heated–increasing the temperature of a gas necessitates an increase in the gas’ volume.

Trying this with Peeps makes for a slightly alarming outcome, showcased by YouTube user UBrocks:

If you flashed back to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, alas–the monster marshmallow you pulled from your microwave doesn’t last–it will cool and deflate into a glob of ooze. But before it cools completely, the ooze is quite malleable and can be sculpted into shapes. But careful! The marshmallow remnants are like naplam–they’ll stick to you and burn. After it cools a bit, brush some oil on your palms before you mold anything, else your sculpture will stay glued to your hands.

 A gooey way to calculate the speed of light

For this demonstration you need a bit of background knowledge as you start out. The speed of a wave can be calculated by multiplying the wavelength (the distance from crest to crest) with the frequency (the number of crest-to-crest cycles that repeat in a stretch of time). Light is a wave, and its speed can be calculated the same way without fancy equipment. You’ll need:

A child measures the distance between melted patches after a layer of marshmallows was microwaved. Photo by Mohi Kumar

• A microwave with the turntable removed
• A  glass casserole dish or baking tray
• Mini marshmallows
• A ruler
• A calculator

Take the baking tray and pack one layer of marshmallows along the bottom, lined up like tiny puffy soldiers.  Make sure the turntable is removed from the microwave–this allows microwaves to move through the glass and the marshmallows in a standing wave pattern. Cook for a few minutes on low, watching the marshmallows carefully. With the turntable removed, the microwave doesn’t heat evenly–you’ll notice melted patches forming in your marshmallow field.

As soon as you see a few such patches, remove the dish and measure the distance between two that form a line parallel to the microwave’s door–these mark the locations of highest amplitudes within the standing wave. Multiply this by two to get the full wavelength of the microwaves that passed through your marshmallows (if you look at the geometry of a standing wave, your initial measurement only gave you half the wavelength). Convert this into meters.

Multiplying this result by frequency of the microwave, found in the microwave’s manual or in a label inside the device, gives ~299,000,000 meters per second–roughly speed of light! Catch a video of this here.

Landslides can be both sudden and devastating to people living in the shadows of mountains. This one, which slid in 2006 in the Philippine province of Southern Leyte, killed more than 1000 people. Image via U.S. Marine Corps/Raymond D. Petersen III

Imagine a 100-million-ton mass of rock, soil, mud and trees sliding off a mountain 30 miles from a major city, and no one knowing that it happened until days later.

Such was the case after Typhoon Morakot hit Taiwan in 2009, dumping around 100 inches of rain in the southern regions of the island over the course of 24 hours. Known as the Xiaolin landslide, named for the village it hit and obliterated, the thick carpet of debris it left behind smothered 400 people and clogged a nearby river. Though only an hour’s drive outside of the crowded city of Tainan, officials didn’t know about the landslide for two days.

“To be that close and not know that something catastrophic had happened is just amazing,” notes Colin Stark, a geomorphologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO). But now, “seismology allows us to report on such events in real time.” Research published last week in Science by Stark and lead author Göran Ekström, an LDEO seismologist, show that scientists armed with data from the Global Seismographic Network can not only pinpoint where a large landslide occurred, but also can reveal how fast the churning mass traveled, how long it ran out, its orientation within the landscape and how much material moved.

All this can be done remotely, without visiting the landslide. Moreover, it can be done quickly, in stark contrast to the more tedious methods typically used to estimate characteristics of a landslide. In the past, scientists had to wait for reports of a landslide to filter back to them, and once alerted they searched for photos and satellite images of the slide. If they could, they coordinated trips to the landslide tongue—well after the event—to estimate the mass of disturbed rock.

But the new method puts landslide detection and characterization in line with how scientists currently track earthquakes from afar. Just as seismometers tremble when energy from a strong quake hits their locations, allowing seismologists to determine the precise location, depth and direction of rupture as well as the amount of energy released during the quake and the type of fault tectonic plates slid along, these same seismometers move during a landslide. The shaking isn’t the frenetic twitches typically seen in seismographs of earthquakes or explosions—the signatures are long and sinuous.

Ekström and colleagues have spent many years combing through reams of seismic data in search of unusual signatures that can’t be traced to typical earthquakes. Previously, their work on seismic signatures in tectonically dead Greenland classified a new type of shaking, called “glacial earthquakes.” But the genesis of the recent research on landslides can be traced back to Typhoon Morakot.

After the storm hit Taiwan, Ekström noticed something strange on global seismic charts—their wiggles indicated that a cluster of events, each with shaking exceeding a magnitude 5 earthquake, had occurred somewhere on the island. “Initially, no other agency had detected or located the four events that we had found, so it seemed very likely that we had detected something special,” Ekström explained.  A few days later, news reports of landslides—including the monster that swept through Xiaolin—began to pour in, confirming what the scientists hypothesized about the events’ source.

A view within the debris of Taiwan’s Xiaolin landslide. Photo by David Petley

Equipped with seismic data from the Xiaolin landslide, the authors developed a computer algorithm to search for telltale seismic signatures of large landslides in past records and as they happened. After collecting information from the 29 largest landslides that occurred around the world between 1980 and 2012, Ekström and Stark began to deconstruct seismic wave energies and amplitudes to learn more about each.

The guiding principles behind their method can be traced to Newton’s third law of motion: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. “For instance, when rock falls off a mountainside, the peak is suddenly lighter,” explains Sid Perkins of ScienceNOW. The mountain “springs upward and away from the falling rock, generating initial ground motions that reveal the size of the landslide as well as its direction of travel.”

Looking across all their analyses, Ekström and Stark find that, regardless of whether the landslide was triggered by an erupting volcano or a scarp saturated with rainwater, landslide characteristics are governed by the length of the mountainside that broke off to start the landslide. This consistency hints at hitherto elusive broad principles that guide landslide behavior, which will help scientists to better assess future hazards and risk from failing slopes.

For those who study landslides, the paper is seminal for another reason. David Petley, a professor at the U.K.’s Durham University, writes in his blog that “we now have a technique that allows large landslides to be automatically detected. Given that these tend to occur in very remote areas, they often go unreported.”

Petley, who studies landslide dynamics, wrote a companion piece to Ekström’s and Stark’s paper, also published in Science, that provides a bit of perspective to the new results. He notes that “the technique currently overdetects large, fast landslides by an order of magnitude, requiring considerable work, for example, with satellite imagery to filter out the false-positive events. Nevertheless, it opens the way to a true global catalog of rock avalanches that will advance understanding of the dynamics of high mountain areas. It may also enable the real-time detection of large, valley-blocking landslides, providing a warning system for vulnerable communities downstream.”

Pre- and post-views of landlsides that slid in 2010 on Siachen Glacier in northern Pakistan. Image via Science/Ekström and Stark

The insight gained by Ekström’s and Stark’s method is readily seen in a striking example of a landslide that occurred in northern Pakistan in 2010. Satellite images of debris flow, which is spread on the flanks of the Siachen Glacier, suggest that the event was triggered by one, maybe two episodes of slope failure. However, Ekström and Stark show that the debris slid from seven large landslides over the course of a few days.

“People rarely see large landslides happen; they typically only see the aftereffects,” Ekström notes. But thanks to him and his co-author, scientists around the world can now quickly get a first glance.

Fans celebrate Pi Day (3.14) with π pie. Photo by Flickr user pauladamsmith

March 14, when written as 3.14, is the first three numbers of pi (π). To commemorate the (completely artificial) confluence of the world’s most famous and never-ending mathematical constant with the way we can write the date, math enthusiasts around the country embrace their inner nerdiness by celebrating π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle and its diameter.

The date–which also happens to be Einstein’s birthday–inspires celebrations every year. Today. the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is posting password-protected decision letters on its admissions office site–would-be attendees can view whether they gained admittance at 6:28 pm (approximately equal to 2π, or the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its radius). Not to be outdone, Princeton’s celebrations of pi span an entire week, complete with a pie eating contest, an Einstein look-alike contest and a π-themed video contest (videos extolling pi and Einstein’s birthday must be less than 3.14 minutes; the winner will be announced at 3:14 today and will receive–you guessed it–$314.15).

Just why are people crazy about pi? The number–three followed by a ceaseless string of numbers after the decimal point, all randomly distributed–is the world’s most famous irrational number, meaning that it cannot be expressed as through the division of two whole numbers. In fact, it is a transcendental number, a term which boils down the idea that it isn’t the square root, cube root or nth root of any rational number. And this irrationality and transcendental nature of pi appeals, perhaps because pi’s continuous flow of numbers reflects the unending circle it helps to trace.

Pi has held an almost mystical quality to humans throughout time. Its unspoken presence can be felt in the circular ruins of Stonehenge, in the vaulted ceilings of domed Roman temples, in the celestial spheres of Plato and Ptolemy. It has inspired centuries of mathematical puzzles and some of humanity’s most iconic artwork. People spend years of their lives attempting to memorize its digits–they hold contests to see who knows the most numbers after the decimal, write poems–”piems,” if you will–where the number of letters in each word represents the next digit of pi, compose haikus (pikus)…the list goes on and on like pi itself.

Here are some notable moments in the history of pi:

1900-1650 BC: A Babylonian tablet gives a value of 3.125 for pi, which isn’t bad! In another document, the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, an ancient Egyptian scribe writes, in 1650 BC “Cut off 1/9 of a diameter and construct a square upon the remainder; this has the same area as the circle” This implies that pi is 3.16049, “which is also fairly accurate,” according to David Wilson of Rutgers University’s math department.

800-200 BC: Passages in the Bible describe a ceremonial pool in the Temple of Solomon: “He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it” (I Kings 7:23-26). This puts pi at a mere 3.

Archimedes’ method of approximating pi involved sandwiching a circle in two other shapes. Image via Wikipedia/Leszek Krupinski

250 BC: Archimedes of Syracuse approximates the area of a circle by using the Pythagorean Theorem to find the areas of two shapes–a 96-sided polygon inscribed within the circle and an equally faceted polygon within which the circle was circumscribed. The areas of the 96-sided shapes sandwiched the area of circle, giving Archimedes upper and lower bounds for the circle’s extent. Though he knew that he had not found the exact value of pi, he was able to approximate it to between 3 1/7 and 3 10/71.

Late 1300s: Indian mathematician and astronomer Madhava of Sangamagrama first posits the idea that pi could be represented as the sum of terms in an infinite sequence–for example, 4 – 4/3 + 4/5 – 4/7 + 4/9…His work helped inspire branch of mathematics that examines the results of mathematical operations performed over and over on a never-ending stretch of numbers.

1706: Welsh mathematician William Jones began to use π as a the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Famed Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler adopted this usage in 1737, helping to popularize it through his works.

1873: Amateur English mathematician William Shanks calculates pi out to 707 digits–his number was written on the wall of a circular room–appropriately named the Pi Room–in the Palais de la Découverte, a French science museum. But his number was only correct to the 527th digit–in 1946, the error was finally caught, and in 1949, the number was corrected.

1897: Lawmakers in Indiana almost pass a bill that erroneously labels the value of pi to 3.2. Cajoled by an amateur mathematician Edwin Goodwin, the Indiana General Assembly introduced House Bill 246, which introduced “a new mathematical truth” for sole use by the state. The “truth” was an attempt to square the circle–a puzzle which requires that a circle and square of the same area be constructed using only a geometrical compass and a straightedge. The bill unanimously passed the house, but the senate and hence the state was spared from embarrassment by C.A. Waldo, a Purdue mathematics professor who coincidentally happened to be in the State House that day. “Shown the bill and offered an introduction to the genius whose theory it was, Waldo declined, saying he already knew enough crazy people,” Tony Long of Wired wrote. Waldo gave the senators a math lesson, and the bill died.

1988: Larry Shaw of San Francisco’s Exploratorium inaugurates the first Pi Day celebration. This year, even as it prepares for its grand re-opening in April, the museum holds its 25th annual Pi Day extravaganza.

2005: Chao Lu, then a graduate student in China, becomes the Guinness record holder for reciting digits of pi–he recited the number to 67,980 digits. The feat took him 24 hours and 4 minutes (contest rules required that no more than 15 seconds could pass between any two numbers).

2009: Pi Day becomes official! Democratic Congressman Bart Gordon of Tennessee’s 6th congressional district, along with 15 co-sponsors, introduced HR 224, which “supports the designation of a Pi Day and its celebration around the world, recognizes the continuing importance of National Science Foundation math and science education programs, and encourages schools and educators to observe the day with appropriate activities that teach students about Pi and engage them about the study of mathematics.” The resolution was approved by the House of Representatives on March 12 of that year, proving that a love of pi is non-partisan.

How are you celebrating Pi Day?

Comet PanSTARRS, seen here from Australia, will be visible in the Northern Hemisphere starting around March 6. Photo by stargazer Terry Lovejoy

This year is shaping out to be an exciting one for us to see chunks of rocks and ice as they hurl through space. We’ve had an asteroid the size of half a football field zoom within the paths of our orbiting satellites and a 10,000 ton meteor the size of a grey whale blow up over Russia. Now, Comet PanSTARRS is making its closest approach to Earth today and will be visible to observers in the United States starting later this week and through the middle of the March.

People in the Southern Hemisphere have been able to see PanSTARRS for weeks because its orbit was traveling below the celestial equator–the projection of Earth’s equator out into space. The comet hooks northward, crossing the celestial equator, on Thursday–look for it low in the western sky, just after sunset, for a few weeks thereafter.

Comets–balls of ice and dust–glow because heat from the Sun vaporizes ice. This direct change from ice into gas causes the comet to develop a coma–a large cloud of gas around its solid nucleus. The path of the coma through space creates two tails, a broad dust tail and a thin ion tail composed of gas molecules ripped apart by sunlight, both of which always point away from the Sun. Although each tail may be more than a million miles long–and PanSTARRS’s tails are sure to lengthen as they get closer to the Sun–they look short and stubby, according to Space.com. This tiny tail is likely an optical illusion that results from viewing the comet over a relatively bright twilight background, so astronomers recommend that you use binoculars or a small telescope to catch a better glimpse.

Officially called PanSTAARS C/2011 L4, so named because it was discovered by the University of Hawaii’s Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) in 2011, the comet is now about 100,000 million miles from Earth. The “L4″ in its name stems from the fact that it was the the fourth comet discovered during the first half of June. But it’s the “C” that’s getting astronomers excited. This letter indicates that it’s a non-periodic comet, meaning that the icy body never has–and never again will–come close to the Sun.

Born from the Oort cloud–a giant spherical cloud at the edge of our solar system named after a 20th century Dutch astronomer–PanSTARRS and other comets like it hold dust and gases from our solar nebula’s earliest days, 4.5 billion years ago. And unlike Halley’s comet, which returns every 75 years, PanSTARRS’s upcoming trip to the Sun will be humanity’s only chance to see it.

The behavior of these types of comets is anyone’s guess. “Prepare to be surprised. A new comet from the Oort Cloud is always an unknown quantity equally capable of spectacular displays or dismal failures,” explained Naval Research Lab astronomer Karl Battams, according to a NASA video about the comet. “Almost anything could happen. On one hand, the comet could fall apart–a fizzling disappointment. On the other hand, fresh veins of frozen material could open up to spew…jets of gas and dust into the night sky.”

How bright will it be? Answering that question requires knowing how astronomers scale the apparent brightness of objects in the sky. Low numbers and negative numbers are the brightest. For example, the Moon’s brightness averages about -12.75. Sirius, the brightest star in our night sky, has a magnitude of -1.47 and the North Star’s magnitude varies, but hovers around +2. Under the best conditions, the faintest stars that humans can see without the aid of binoculars or telescopes is +6. Late last week astronomers were skeptical that PanSTARRS would get brighter than +2.2. But now, experts anticipate that the comet will be +1 or brighter when we attempt to scan the evening sky in hopes of viewing it.

A wide-field view of PanSTARRS over Western Australia on March 3. Photo by Jim Gifford

PanSTARRS will likely be its brightest as it makes its closest approach to the Sun on March 10. At that time it will be just inside the orbit of Mercury–coincidentally, there will be no Moon in the sky to overpower its glow. And its glow–particularly its characteristic tails–is what viewers hope to see.

Comet PanSTARRS will be viewable to the unaided eye in the western sky just after sunset–on March 12 and 13, it will visible near a thin crescent moon, presenting a great photo opportunity. Artist rendition via NASA

PanSTARRS will show off its best photos ops on March 12 and 13 when the comet will appear close to the thin crescent Moon. As the Moon waxes in the days to follow, its brightness will make the comet look fainter.

Check out viewing tips, and be sure to catch viewing parties in your area. Let us know what you see!

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Cordell Grant assembles the BRITE telescope, a nanosatellite. Image via the University of Toronto

Picture a telescope orbiting in space, and your mind probably flies to the Hubble Space Telescope. At roughly 43 feet long and weighing 25,000 pounds, its footprint is the size of a small house and it’s just a little shy of the weight of a subway car. But not all satellite telescopes are behemoths–one launched yesterday from India, designed and developed by the Space Flight Laboratory of the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies, is roughly the size of a cooler you’d bring to a picnic.

The telescope is part of the Bright Target Explorer (BRITE) mission, an effort designed to observe stars and record changes in their brightness over time. Launched into orbit above the masking effects of our atmosphere, the telescope and its simultaneously launched twin will focus on the brightest stars–such as those in well-known constellations like Orion and the Big Dipper–looking for pulsations and reverberations in brightness that indicate spots on a star, a planet or another celestial object crossing its orbit, or flickering energy intensities within the star itself. These flickers, called “starquakes,” give clues to the composition and internal structure of stars.

BRITE ‘s telescopes are nanosatellites, meaning that they weigh less than ten kilograms. At seven kilograms–about as heavy as a large bowling ball–and measuring 20 centimeters on each side, they are the smallest telescopes in orbit. The cubic satellites did not require a dedicated rocket to get there–these hitched a ride on India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. Future launches of similar twin nanosatellites will help BRITE to become a satellite constellation that scans the sky for different wavelengths of light pulsing from stars.

Nanosatellites, part of a recent trend to conduct space-based science at low cost and with fast results, “can be developed quickly, by a small team and at a cost that is within reach of many universities, small companies and other organizations,” said Cordell Grant, manager of satellite systems for the Space Flight Laboratory, in a statement. “A nano-satellite can take anywhere from six months to a few years to develop and test,” he added. In contrast, Hubble took more than 12 years to design and construct before it launched with space shuttle Discovery in 1990.

But nanosatellites aren’t the only kind of small satellites out there. Here are some other tiny orbiters:

Sprites:

Sprites, a femtosatellite, are about the size of a postage stamp. Image via Cornell University

First launched on the last flight of Endeavour, sprites–also called femtosatellites–look about the size of a postage stamp. Developed by Cornell University scientists, these satellites are in interplanetary space collecting data about chemistry, radiation and particle impacts. Lead engineer Mason Peck, now a chief technologist at NASA, told the Cornell University Chronicle that “Their small size allows them to travel like space dust.” He added, “Blown by solar winds, they can ‘sail’ to distant locations without fuel.”

CubeSats:

The grapefruit-sized CubeSat, a type of picosatellite, measures 10 centimeters on each side. “I got a 4-inch beanie baby box and tacked on some solar cells to see how many would fit on the surface,” Bob Twiggs, the satellite’s lead designer, told Space.com. “I had enough voltage for what I needed so I decided that would be the size.” Developed in 1999 with the help of Jordi Puig-Suari of California Polytechnic State University, along with students at Stanford University while Twigg was a professor there, CubeSats are now the go-to small satellite. They appeal to universities–at roughly $65,ooo to $80,000 a pop, they can fit within research budgets, allowing students the opportunity to design and build a research satellite.

Some, like GeneSat-1 provides life support for bacterium and are aimed at helping scientists learn more about how spaceflight affects the human body. Another–SwissCube-1–examines nightglow in Earth’s atmosphere. Launched alongside BRITE, the STRaND-1–a string of 3 CubeSats stacked together–is the first smartphone-powered satellite ever launched into space. The Android phone that serves as the device’s brain will run apps that will photograph its orbit, monitor the Earth’s magnetic field, and–perhaps most exciting–will allow people to upload videos of themselves screaming to test whether sounds broadcasted in space can be heard by the satellite playing them.  Other CubeSats in development will assist researchers understand space weather, phenomena that could short out the other satellites that orbit Earth.

It’s interesting to remember that the first satellite–Sputnik-1, launched in 1957–was a 23-inch diameter sphere. These nano-, pico-, and femto-satellites harken back to those roots. But their size, cost, and ability to be developed quickly may make them the most useful satellites of the future. Hopefully they won’t lead to oodles more space junk!

Lake-effect snow, which can blanket communities downwind of lakes, is influenced by upwind geographic features, a new study finds. Photo by Flickr user singloud12

People who live by large, inland bodies of water have a phrase in their lexicon that describes the blizzards that hit them throughout the winter: “lake-effect snow.”  When wintry winds blow over wide swaths of warmer lake water, they thirstily suck up water vapor that later freezes and drops as snow downwind, blanketing cities near lake shores. These storms are no joke: a severe one dumped nearly 11 feet of snow over the course of week in Montague, N.Y. before New Year’s Day, 2002; another week-long storm around Veteran’s Day in 1996 dropped around 70 inches of snow and left more than 160,000 residents of Cleveland without power.

Other lake-effect snowstorms, such as those that skim the surface of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, are more of a boon, bringing fresh, deep powder to ski slopes on the leeward side of nearby mountains. But new research shows that mountains don’t just force the moisture-laden winds to dump snow. Mountains upwind can actually help guide the cold air patterns over lakes, helping to produce severely intense snowstorms. Mountains far afield can also deflect cold wind away from water, reducing a lake’s ability to fuel large storms. If these forces work with smaller topographic features, they may help illuminate whether gently rolling hills near the Great Lakes contribute to the creation and intensity of lake-effect snow.

The research, published yesterday in the American Meteorology Society‘s journal, Monthly Weather Review, focused on wind patterns that swirl around the Great Salt Lake. “What we’re showing here is a situation where the terrain is complicated–there are multiple mountain barriers, not just one, and they affect the air flow in a way that influences the development of the lake-effect storm over the lake and lowlands,” said the study’s senior author Jim Steenburgh, in a statement.

Steenburgh, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah, and lead author Trevor Alcott, a recent doctoral graduate from the university and now a researcher at the National Weather Service in Salt Lake City, became interested in studying Utah’s winter weather after they noticed that current weather forecast models struggle to anticipate the intensity of the dozen or so lake-effect storms that strike their state’s major cities each winter. These models don’t include the effects of topography, such as the Wasatch Range (which forms the eastern border of the valley that encloses the Great Salt Lake), the Oquirrh Mountains (which forms the western border of the valley) or the mountains along the north and northwest borders of Utah some 150 miles away from the population centers of Salt Lake City and Provo.

So Alcott and Steenburgh ran a computer simulation that incorporated mountains close to the lake as well as those closer to the Idaho and Nevada borders to mimic the creation of a moderate lake effect storm that occurred over the Great Salt Lake from Oct. 26-27, 2010, which brought up to 11 inches of snow to the Wasatch. After their first simulation–their “control”–was complete, they ran several more simulations that plucked out geographic features. Using this method, “We can see what happens if the upstream terrain wasn’t there, if the lake wasn’t there, if the Wasatch Range wasn’t there,” Steenburgh explained.

When they removed the lake and all mountains from their simulation, the model didn’t produce any snowfall. When they kept all the mountains but removed the lake, only 10% of the snow simulated the model of the real storm fell. Keeping the lake but flattening all the mountains resulted in only 6 percent of the snow falling. Resurrecting the Wasatch Range but removing the other mountains yielded 73 percent of the snow compared to the simulation of the real storm.

But the real surprise is what happened when both the Wasatch and Oquirrh ranges were retained, but the ranges in northern Utah at the Idaho and Nevada borders were removed. The result? 61 percent more snowfall than simulated in the real storm.  The Wasatch and Oquirrh ranges form a funnel, guiding wind over the lake and enhancing snowfall in the downwind cities of Salt Lake City and Provo. Further, without the barrier of the northern mountains, which range between 7,600 feet to 10,000 feet in peak elevation–considerably less than the Wasatch’s peak elevation of nearly 12,000 feet, waves of cold air can reach the Great Salt Lake without deflection.

In effect, Utah’s major cities are shielded by moderately sized mountains that together cast a long snow shadow!

Trash dumped on Antarctica’s King George Island in the 2008/2009 field season mars its image as a pristine area. Photo by A. Nordt, included in a new report (PDF)

Most people think of Antarctica as a harsh but pristine ice landscape where mountain tips poke through thick ice sheets and penguins lounge on ice shelves. But Antarctica, particularly the ice-free areas that serve as research hubs, have a darker, dirtier side.

A report released Friday (PDF) called  ‘”Current Ecological Situation of the Fildes Peninsula Region and Management Suggestions,” authored by scientists at Germany’s Jena University, shows that decaying field huts, piles of trash and oil-slicked shorelines mar Antarctica’s King George Island, a logistical hub for international Antarctic research.

Tire treads from vehicles that veer off specifically designated tracks have gouged up sparse vegetation, including fragile native mosses. Toxic chemicals, oil cans and broken down car batteries lie exposed in open pits. Fuel leaks from research stations infiltrate in streams. “We have a genuine waste problem in the Antarctic,” said Hans-Ulrich Peter of the University Jena, in a statement.

An abandoned field hut on Antarctica’s King George Island. Photo via Hans-Ulrich Peter

In 1998, when the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty entered into force, countries who signed on committed themselves to conserving Antarctic biodiversity and ecology. So how did the island get so polluted?

Peter, the lead author of the report and an ecologist who has been researching the island’s Fildes peninsula for the past 30 years, points to the very thing that has made Antarctica a symbol of unspoiled purity. “The Fildes Peninsula is one of the largest ice-free areas of the Antarctic with a relatively high degree of biodiversity,” he said. The opportunity to view this biodiversity–mosses, lichens, algae, penguins, seals, migratory birds–has brought researchers, associated staff and tourists to the island in droves: the tiny peninsula currently houses Antarctica’s highest concentration of year-round scientific stations–three Chilean, one Chinese, one Russian and one Uruguayan–crowded into roughly 16 square miles. The area is home to between 100 to 300 researchers and staff depending on the season, and last year was visited by more than 900 tourists.

All this comes with the detritus of a permanent human settlement. Research, the infrastructure to support it and tourism is “putting a considerable strain on the area and are leading to a conflict of interests between the various user groups and…nature conservation and environmental protection measures,” the report’s introduction states.

Also ironic: The biodiversity many researchers came to investigate has been threatened by invasive species they brought. “Some years ago we  found some non-native plants nearby the Russian research station Bellingshausen,” explained Christina Braun, a report co-author. The report also documents the sitings of insects and other animal and plant species inadvertently brought to the peninsula by visitors.

Invasive grass on King George Island. Photo by A. Nordt, taken December 2008, included in a new report (PDF)

Bellinghausen was arguably one of the most polluted sites in Antarctica, with thousands of tons of waste lying around, accumulated since its construction in 1968–this waste has now been removed, thanks to volunteer efforts. But over time, waste buried here and elsewhere has become exposed–open pits of debris dot the peninsula, allowing trash to scatter in the wind.

But since Antarctica’s Environmental Protocol came into effect, dumping and pollution on the peninsula was supposed to grind to a halt. However, the report shows that it is ongoing and almost every research station contributes to it. Page after page of the report details just how derelict the environment has become due to recent occurrences. For example, of 220 sites identified to have large amounts of litter, about 22% were freshly dumped and 15% were cast ashore by the ocean. According to the report:

The overwhelming majority of hazardous material findings were 200-litre drums (13 findings) that had been “lost” in the countryside, as well as canisters or jerry cans of various sizes (12 findings), which still had traces of their contents. According to the labelling, which was mostly still legible, the contents ranged from aircraft fuel to disinfectant and antifreeze.

Who exactly is generating the newly dumped trash? Not so much the tourists, the report says. Tourists spend less time in sensitive areas and are monitored by guides who ensure that they pack out their trash and stay recommended distances from wildlife.  However, researchers and staff can access station vehicles and boats and can off-road into remote areas unsupervised. “Particularly problematic here is that, based on empirical evidence, a large proportion of station staff regard the Antarctic environment as being insensitive and not really worth protecting,” the report states (p.103). “Moreover, not all station members, including scientists, receive sufficient training with respect to behavioural guidelines and environmental issues.”

These off-road treks can potentially disturb nesting sites and seal pupping localities. Further, air traffic for logistical purposes is high. “The minimum distances from animal colonies recommended by the Antarctic Treaty Parties were regularly and clearly transgressed, particularly where nesting southern giant petrel and penguins in the Fildes Strait and Ardley Island area were concerned,” the report continues.

Antarctica’s environmental protection protocols are international law. The problem, however, is that rule-breakers must be prosecuted in the violators’ home countries. As many of these staff are government employees, the likelihood of severe transgressors facing consequences seems low. And although the report does document many concerted efforts to clean up garbage pits and pack new and old waste out on ships, “If there isn’t a profound change of direction, these negative environmental influences will be amplified in the next few years,” Peter warned.

Peter and the report’s other authors are calling for Fildes Peninsula to be designated as an ‘Antarctic Specially Managed Area’ (ASMA). Such a designation would implement more stringent legally binding standards concerning the use of the region, forcing  science, tourism, the protection of geological and historical sites, and the environment to come into some kind of balance. But progress on this will likely be slow, and Peter fears that a lack of consensus among the nations who signed the Antarctic Treaty will stymy conservation efforts.

Is anyone else thinking of WALL-E right now?

Galaxy M106′s spiral arms. Image via NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), and R. Gendler (for the Hubble Heritage Team) and J. GaBany

Space added several stunning new images to its photo album this week, including the one above of spiral galaxy M106, located 23.5 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici, Notice something?

The image, released yesterday, actually contains two spirals overlain on each other. One is the cloudy, blue-white spiral with a yellow core. The core itself is a composite of images take by the Hubble Space Telescope‘s Advanced Camera for Surveys, Wide Field Camera 3, and Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 detectors. Spiraling outward, the cloudy arms also come from Hubble, but were colorized with ground-based images captured from relatively small telescopes (12.5-inch and 20-inch) as they imaged from dark, remote sites in New Mexico. The telescopes, owned by photo-astronomers Robert Gendler and R. Jay GaBany, helped these astronomy enthusiasts fill in gaps left by Hubble’s cameras. The images were meticulously assembled into a mosaic by Gendler, a physician by training, to form the base spiral of the photo illustration above.

But what about the second spiral? Emanating at odd angles is a glowing red swirl, known as the “anomalous arms” of M106, These arms, captured by Hubble imagery and GaBany’s telescope, are enormous streamers of irradiated hydrogen gas molecules which glow red when seen through special filters. This begs the question–what’s cooking the hydrogen?

The answer is…a black hole! As astronomer Phil Plait blogs in Slate, “Every big galaxy has a supermassive black hole in its core. The Milky Way has one, and it has about 4 million times the mass of the Sun. The black hole at M106’s heart is about 30 million times the mass of our Sun. Besides being heftier it’s also actively feeding, gobbling down material swirling around it (our own galaxy’s black hole is quiescent; that is, not eating anything at the moment).”

While this photo shows stars at the brink of death within M106, another photo released yesterday shows the environment of stars at their birth:

The Orion nebula, newly imaged by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Tinged an eerie green–like smoke from a witch’s brew–the new image from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) was taken after zooming in on bright dot in the “sword” of the constellation Orion. Visible to the naked eye as a single fuzzy star (also known as M42), the dot is actually a cluster of stars, surrounded by the Orion nebula. Here, stars are born.

The image captures the infrared nimbus formed as newborn stars are compressed from vast clouds of gas and heat the wisps that remain. White regions are the hottest part of these stars’ first dust bath, while greens and reds show lukewarm dust. Carving holes through the dust are massive stars–newly formed–such as the one seen at the picture’s center.

The Orion nebula is a site of star formation close to the Earth, giving scientists the opportunity to study its characteristics and hypothesize on how our Sun was born five billion years ago, perhaps from a similar cloud of dust. The white orbs seen here are less than 10 million years old.

The images of the death and birth of stars–both hauntingly beautiful–showcase the evolving nature of space. Mirrored by our own cycles of life and death, the pictures help to link our daily grind with the vastness beyond Earth.

Super-Earth exoplanets may actually be severely uninhabitable, new research suggests. Artist’s rendition from NASA

The discovery of planets beyond our solar system, along with recent efforts to catalog them, has fueled the search for rocky planets similar to Earth that may have conditions suitable for life. For the past 20 years, many scientists have focused on locating “super-Earths“–planets heavier than Earth but with masses quite a bit below that of Neptune or Uranus–in the so-called “habitable zone” of their stars. Within this zone, it is theoretically possible for a planet with the right atmospheric pressures to maintain liquid water on its surface.

In early January, astronomers working on NASA’s Kepler Mission announced the discovery of KOI 172.02 (KOI for Kepler Object of Interest), an exoplanet candidate that is about 1.5 times the radius of Earth, orbiting in the habitable zone of a G-type star slightly cooler than our Sun. If confirmed, the planet, which orbits its sun every 242 days, is “our first habitable-zone super Earth around a sun-type star,” astronomer Natalie Batalha, a Kepler co-investigator at NASA’s Ames Research Center, told Space.com. Batalha and colleagues hail KOI 172.02 as the exoplanet most like Earth, and thus is a prime candidate for hosting life, they expect.

But don’t get too excited–new research suggests that most of these super-Earths may never support life because they are permanently encased in hydrogen-rich atmospheres. The findings, released yesterday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, show that these super-Earths may actually be mini-Neptunes. Further, these exoplanets will likely never evolve to look like Mercury, Venus, Earth, or Mars–the rocky planets of our inner solar system.

Led by Helmut Lammer of the Austrian Academy of Sciences’s Space Research Institute (IWF), researchers examined how radiation from the stars Kepler-11, Gliese 1214 and 55 Cancri would effect on the upper atmospheres of the super-Earths orbiting too close to their host stars to be in the habitable zone. These super-Earths have sizes and masses that indicate they have rocky interiors surrounded by hydrogen-rich atmospheres–atmospheres that were likely captured early in the planet’s history from the clouds of dust and gas that formed the systems’ nebulae.

Using a model that simulates the dynamic properties of planetary atmospheres, the researchers showed how the extreme ultraviolet light from the host stars heat up the exoplanets’ atmospheres, and as a result, the atmospheres expand several times the radius of each planet, allowing gases to escape. But not fast enough.

“Our results indicate that, although material in the atmosphere of these planets escapes at a high rate, unlike lower mass Earth-like planets many of these super-Earths may not get rid of their nebula-captured hydrogen-rich atmospheres,” Lammer said in a statement.

A rough concept of the newly modeled super-Earths compared to the actual Earth. Super-Earths are more massive than Earth, but are generally less than 10 times Earth’s mass. By contrast, Neptune is about 15 times Earth’s mass. Image from H. Lammar

If their model is correct, its implications spell doom for life on exoplanets further out, in the ‘habitable zone.’ Although temperatures and pressures would allow liquid water to exist, gravity and an inability for their suns to blow off their atmospheres would forever preserve their thick hydrogen-rich atmospheres. Thus, they probably could not sustain life.

Scientists may have to wait until 2017–after the European Space Agency launches the Characterising Exoplanets Satellite (CHEOPS)–before they can learn whether these findings stand the test of time. CHEOPS. Until then, the search for exoplanets with conditions ripe for life has gotten a lot harder.

Jupiter, which is now close to the Moon in the night sky, will be less than a finger’s width from the Moon tonight.

Over the weekend, the Sun moved into the constellation Aquarius, blocking it from view in the night sky. Although the “Age of Aquarius” of popular culture is far off, tonight some Western Hemisphere observers will get a little bit of astronomical free love as the Jupiter–the second brightest planet in the night sky (the brightest being Venus)–kisses the Moon.

To sky watchers in most of North America, the planet and the Moon will flirt: Jupiter will be less than a finger’s width from the waxing Gibbous Moon. The time of their closest approach varies by location–observers on the East coast will see it at around 11:30 p.m. Central time stargazers should look up at around 10:00 p.m., while those in Mountain time will see Jupiter’s nearest approach to the Moon at about 8:30 p.m. Pacific time observers will catch their best view early in the evening, at roughly 7:00 p.m.  The close approach can be best seen with a wide-field telescope at low magnifications (40x or lower) or binoculars, but can even be viewed with the naked eye.

From much of South America, the planet will appear touch the Moon; in some regions, the Moon will completely hide Jupiter from view. This game of hide-and-go-seek, termed occultation, will cause Jupiter to disappear and reappear from the skies over much of central South America. However, when viewed from much of the east coast of Brazil and Uruguay, the Moon will set before Jupiter reemerges.

In some parts of South America, shaded above, the Moon will hide Jupiter from view. Observers in the oval region will see Jupiter disappear, but will not see its reappearance, as the Moon will set before the planet reemerges.

For the past few days, Jupiter has been close to the Moon at sunset, but today, careful observers may even be able to spot Jupiter in the late afternoon, before the Sun sets.  “First locate the Moon medium-high in the east; then look a few Moon-widths left or lower left of the Moon for Jupiter,” explained Tony Flanders,  associate editor at Sky & Telescope magazine. “It should be easy to spot with binoculars if the air is clear,” he said in a statement.

Those with telescopes can even see Jupiter’s Great Red Spot between 9:00 p.m. and 10:40 p.m. EST today. In addition, Jupiter’s moon Europa will pass in front of Jupiter between 8:13 and 10:37 p.m. EST, although the moon’s shadow–which crosses Jupiter from 10:22 p.m. to 12:46 a.m. will be easier to spot. Have fun planet-watching!

Invented by N. Joseph Woodand, the barcode revolutionized global commerce. Woodand died December 9. Image via Wikimedia Commons

Today as the year ends, several scientists, innovators and scientific advocates pass into memory. From the inventor of the barcode to the first human to perform an organ transplant, their lives and their work helped to shape our culture, modern way of life and place in human history.

Space Sciences: 2012 saw the passing of a few key figureheads of space exploration, as mentioned in a previous post. In addition, Bernard Lovell, a physicist and astronomer who founded Britain’s Jodrell Bank Observatory of radio telescopes, died August 6. The telescopes he helped build were the first to identify quasars, and one was the only telescope in the western hemisphere capable of tracking Sputnik–the first artificial satellite–after it was launched by the Soviets in 1957. In 1960, his telescope became the first to transmit a command to a deep space probe–Pioneer V–22 million miles away, directing it to separate from its carrier rocket.

Earth and Environmental Sciences: F. Sherwood Rowland, winner of the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1995, died March 10. Sherwood and colleagues warned in a landmark 1974 Nature paper that chlorofluorocarbons–CFCs, a chemical found in refrigerants and aerosol spray cans–were destroying the ozone layer at alarming rates. The ozone layer protects life from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays which damage tissues and cause skin cancer in humans; without this layer, life couldn’t exist. His discovery and his efforts to draw public attention to the ozone layer’s destruction  helped pave the way for the Montreal Protocol, which in 1987 was adopted by the world community to phase out CFC production.

Barry Commoner, labeled as the “Paul Revere of ecology’ by Time magazine in 1970, passed away September 30. Commoner, a biologist, helped to make saving the planet a political cause by showing that the post-World-War-II technological boom had environmental consequences–he documented the global effects of radioactive fallout and spoke against pollutants released by the petrochemical and nuclear power industries–and he argued that the public had a right to know about the use and extent of industrial pollutants.

Medicine: On July 24, Robert Ledley, a radiologist who invented the CT scanner–technology that produces cross sectional images of the human body–died from Alzheimer’s disease. The technology revolutionized how physicians treat cancer–before this invention, health professionals used exploratory surgery to search for cancerous masses. Joseph E. Murray, the doctor who performed the first successful human organ transplant in 1954 (PDF) when he removed a kidney from one twin and placed it in the other ailing twin, died on June 28. He won the Nobel prize in medicine in 1990. Also dead this year is William House, who invented the cochlear implant–a device that helps restore hearing to the profoundly deaf. He died on December 7.

On Feburary 20, Renalto Pulbecco died; Pulbecco shared the Nobel prize for medicine in 1975 for his work on how certain viruses altered DNA and caused cancer cells to spread at accelerated rates. This finding provided the first concrete evidence that cancer growth is tied to genetic mutations. Another Nobel prize winner to pass away this year was Andrew Huxley, who helped to unravel the mechanism behind how nerve impulses control muscle action. Huxley died on May 30. Joining the list of deceased Nobel laureates is William S. Knowles, who died June 13. Knowles helped devise a mechanism that allowed researchers to separate medicinal compounds from their toxic mirror images (same composition, different chemical orientations); his work won him the Nobel prize in chemistry in 2001.

Technology: Stanford R. Ovchinsky, who died on October 17, invented the rechargeable nickel-metal hydride battery. He also played a role in the development of solar panels, rewritable CDs, and flat panel displays. December 9 saw the death of N. Joseph Woodand, the co-inventor of the barcode now ubiquitous in global commerce. Woodand drew inspiration for the think and thin lines of his product identifiers from Morse code, which he learned as a Boy Scout.

Paleoanthropology: For upwards of 50 years, Phillip Tobias led excavations in South Africa that helped identify extinct species of human ancestors. Tobias, who discovered more than a third of the world’s early hominid fossils, died on June 7. One of his benchmark finds was an extraordinarily complete 2.2-million-year-old fossil skeleton, nicknamed “Little Foot,” uncovered in 1995.

However you celebrate the New Year, may these late greats be in your thoughts!

Space shuttle Endeavour at its new location in the California Science Center. Image via Wikimedia Commons

The year is almost over and media outlets across the country are reflecting on the news makers of the past 365 days and the celebrated and notorious who passed away in 2012. Their compilations show that a handful of late greats of space exploration will not be with us in 2013.

Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the moon, passed away on August 25. Image via NASA

2012 witnessed the passing of two legends in human space exploration: Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride. Armstrong, who died on August 25 from complications following heart bypass surgery, made history when stepped off the Apollo 11 spacecraft and onto lunar soil on June 29, 1960. The commander of the mission, Armstrong and his “small step for man” but “giant leap for mankind” inspired a nation slogging through the Cold War–millions of people turned on the TV to watch his moonwalk live and to witness what humanity can accomplish with dedicated investment in science. Armstrong has been the subject of several books, the namesake of elementary schools, and the inspiration for a 1969 folk song. A lunar crater near the Apollo 11 landing site is named after him, as is an asteroid. But perhaps his most lasting legacy will be his footprints on the moon, which without any weather to disturb them may last for thousands of years, giving mute encouragement to future generations that efforts to explore our solar system can meet with success.

Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, died on July 23. Image via NASA

Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, died July 23 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. An astrophysicist with a doctorate degree from Stanford, Ride flew first on a Challenger mission in 1983; at 35 years old at the time of her flight, she is the youngest American to have ventured to space. When she flew in a second Challenger mission in 1984, she became the only American woman to fly into space twice. Her career made her household name and, after enduring a continual skepticism on whether a woman should be an astronaut, she became a role-model for women who sought entrance into male-dominated fields.

Six months before the space shuttle Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986, Roger Boisjoly warned that cold weather could disrupt the seals connecting the solid rocket booster together. “The result could be a catastrophe of the highest order, loss of human life,” Boisjoly, a mechanical engineer and fluid dynamicist wrote in a memo to Morton Thiokol, his employer and the manufacturer of the boosters. Later investigations showed that Boisjoly’s recommendations became mired in corporate bureaucracy. Below-freezing temperatures the night before the launch prompted Biosjoly and others to plead to their bosses that the flight be postponed. Their advice went unheeded, and 73 seconds after launch, Challenger exploded, killing all seven crew members. Boisjoly was called as a witness by a presidential commission that reviewed the disaster, but was later shunned by colleagues for being a whistle-blower. He then became an advocate for workplace ethics and was given the Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility by the AAAS. He died January 6 of cancer in his colon, kidneys, and liver.

The shuttle program itself reached the end of its lifetime in 2012. On Oct 14, Endeavour made its last trek–through the streets of Los Angeles–to its final home at the California Science Center. Atlantis was moved to the Kennedy Space Center’s tourist exhibits on November 2, and Enterprise was delivered to the U.S.S. Intrepid, docked off Manhattan’s West Side, this June. Discovery arrived at Smithsonain’s Udvar-Hazy Center on April 19.

The Sun traces a figure eight pattern in the sky when viewed at the same time every day for a year. This pattern, called an analemma, allows you to know when the solstices occurred. Image courtesy Jailbird

Despite all the doomsday hype about December 21 being the last day of the Mayan long count calendar, dawn broke today and the world hasn’t ended. Though there is still day left for apocalypse to start, NASA in particular will be relieved when today turns into tomorrow–over the past few weeks, hundreds of concerned citizens have been calling the agency every day for reassurance, prompting NASA to post a video intended for release tomorrow on “Why the World Didn’t End Yesterday.”

“Dec. 21, 2012, won’t be the end of the world as we know,” NASA relates on its website, “however, it will be another winter solstice.”

Perhaps the coincidence of the solstice with the resetting of the Mayan calendar has fueled the idea that today is a mystical day. The winter solstice is the day of the year that contains the shortest amount of daylight and the longest amount of night–it marks the beginning of winter, and many cultures celebrate how it heralds longer amounts of daylight to come. But astronomically, the Northern Hemisphere’s winter solstice was the specific time of the day–6:11 a.m. Eastern, in fact–when Sun’s rays at the the Tropic of Capricorn were directly overhead. The Sun’s rays will never be directly overhead at any point south of this latitude.

Archaeological evidence supports the idea that many ancient cultures knew about the solstices–several monuments, such as the earliest known ancient astronomical observatory in Newgrange Irelend (where the rising sun today illuminated the structures inner chamber for the first time since the last winter solstice) were built in such a way as to mark solar events. But this all begs the question–how did the ancients know when the solstice would occur?

The answer may lie in the meaning of the word “solstice.”  Derived from the Latin sol (Sun) and sistere (to make stand, as in to stand still), during the solsticies the Sun’s position north or south of the celestial equator (an imaginary plane that extends Earth’s equator out into space) stands still. In other words, the seasonal movement of the Sun’s path, as seen from any fixed location on Earth, reaches a low point before reversing direction.

This low point is something that given clear skies and patience, you could see for yourself. Imagine going outside at the same time of day every day for a year and taking a picture of the Sun. As the days pass, you’d notice that the position of the Sun in each picture changes with respect to the horizon. Combining all your pictures into a single image shows that the Sun’s position traces a figure eight pattern, called an analemma.Depending on the time of day and that you record your observations (a.m. or p.m.), and your latitude, the analemma will be tilted. The analemma traced at the North Pole would be fully vertical with the small loop at the top, and the one traced at the equator would be horizontal. The analemma at the South Pole would be vertical with the big loop at the top, but you would only be able to see a portion of it–the rest would be hidden by the horizon.

Why does the Sun trace this odd path? The reasons boil down to two facts. First, the Earth is titled at an angle when it rotates, and second, the Earth has an eccentric orbit–it orbits in an ellipse as it revolves around the Sun. Universe Today puts it this way: “an object with a perfectly circular orbit and no axial tilt, the Sun would always appear at the same point in the sky at the same time of day throughout the year and the analemma would be a dot, an object with a circular orbit but axial tilt similar to Earth’s, the analemma would be a figure of eight with northern and southern lobes equal in size, an object with eccentricity similar to Earth’s, but no axial tilt, the analemma would be a straight east-west line along the equator.”

Looking at the analemma you created over the course of the year, you can notice a key thing–your figure eight is symmetrical. A line of symmetry drawn through the analemma intersects the shape at two points other than where the lobes touch. The days that you recorded the Sun at those points are the solstices; the one lower in the horizon is the winter solstice and the higher one is the summer solstice. You can also notice that the point on the analemma closest to the horizon–marking the latest sunrise or sunset, depending on whether you made your analemma in the morning or evening–was not recorded on the day of the solstice.

The ancients didn’t have cameras, so their calculations of the solstice may have involved how the shadow of a stick planted in the ground, when measured at the same time every day, traces a similar analemma to what you can document with your camera. In fact, the Mayans were adept at using shadows to mark the equinoxes and solstices.

The solar analemma may have been a powerful tool to tell the ancients that longer days were about to begin. The same can be said for us–all we need to do is make it past midnight today!

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