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The Kepler satellite’s first photo, captured on April 8, 2009. Photo: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

It’s been just over four years since NASA’s exoplanet-hunting Kepler satellite switched on and began staring unwaveringly at the same patch of the universe, watching for the subtle dips of light caused by a far-off planet passing in front of its star. Where the ancient Greeks knew of five planets besides our own Kepler gave us thousands. Extrapolations from this tiny patch of sky gave us hints of billions more.

Originally designed to run for three-and-a-half years, Kepler has pushed on. But the satellite’s quest may be at an end. Sad news came out from NASA yesterday that one of the satellite’s reaction wheels, a device that keeps Kepler’s eye steady, has failed. There may still be a way to fix the broken wheel or concoct some other strategy to keep Kepler shooting straight. But without a steady gaze the satellite can no longer carry out its mission.

In the science press, the obituaries are already rolling out. Though many scientific experiments teach us something new about the world, few have been able to so clearly redefine our place in the universe as Kepler. Decades ago, the planets in our solar system were all we knew. Now, we’re practically swimming in them.

Kepler may be down (but not “out”), but that doesn’t mean the discoveries will stop. It will take years to sort through and analyze all the data the mission has already collected. And, follow up research using other satellites on Kepler’s exoplanet “candidates” could still yet unveil the marvels of the universe.

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Photo: Ron Lute

Up on the roof of a government research building in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, the Canadian province that straddles Montana and North Dakota, Barbara Cade-Menun has a tarp filled with poo. Little brown pucks of cow manure that bake in the sun and freeze in the winter, where temperatures regularly drop below 5 degrees.

Cade-Menun and students are tracking how bacteria such as E. coli survive the harsh prairie winters. “[I]f E. coli can survive here, they’ll survive anywhere,” says the CBC. The research has important implications for people living in or downstream of agricultural regions as E. coli in your water can be a very bad thing.

Thirteen years ago this month tragedy struck a small Ontario, Canada, town when E. coli bacteria got into the water system. In Walkerton, Ontario, a town of 5,000 people, 2,300 fell ill suffering from “bloody diarrhea, vomiting, cramps and fever.” Seven people died. Over time, the tragedy was traced to manure spread on a nearby farm that had managed to carry the E. coli bacteria through the ground and into the town’s water system. That, alongside regulatory missteps, caused the preventable disaster—the “most serious case of water contamination in Canadian history.”

Though steps have been taken in the region to prevent similar disasters in the future, there is still much that is unknown about how E. coli moves through a watershed. From her rooftop investigation Cade-Menun found that E. coli are sneaky little bacteria.

Cade-Menun and her colleagues found that when the temperature plummets the frozen manure pucks seem to be bacteria-free. But the bacteria aren’t dead, and when the spring warmth returns so too do the bacteria.

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Image: Rosie O’Beirn

Every so often you hear about the oldest person in the world dying. On April 1st, Elsi Calvert Thompson, America’s oldest person, died at 114. On December 17th, 2012, the 115-year-old Dina Mandredini passed away, handing off the world’s oldest living person title to Besse Cooper. But how often does the world’s oldest person die?

Here’s what that question looks like to a mathematician:

If you live in a country with Ncountry people, a continent with Ncontinent people and a world with Nworld people, during a year and on average, how often will you be notified (if you’re paying attention to your quality tabloid) of the death of the oldest man/woman/person alive of your country/continent/world? (Note that a death will result in at most one notification.)

On Stackexchange, which calls itself “a question and answer site for people studying math at any level,” Marc van Leeuwen tried to answer that question, and with the help from the community, came up with lots of ways to think about it.

Mortality tables from the CDC, for example, give one answer, provided by Chris Taylor. These tables only go up to 100, and since many of the oldest people crack that ceiling, he had to extrapolate a bit, knowing that the oldest person to have ever lived died at 122.

For each age a, the number of people of age a in year t is the fraction of the population aged a−1 at time t−1 who don’t die, i.e.N(t,a) (1−h(a−1))×N(t−1,a−1)

Eventually, he had an answer:

Taking the total number of events, and dividing by the number of years that I run the simulation for, gives an approximate rate. The punchline is that in my simulation, I see 15,234 events in 10,000 years, for an approximate rate of once in every 0.66 years.

Another person looked to the Gerontology Research Group, who keeps records on the death of the oldest living person. A user named Gwern calculated:

I extracted the final column, death dates, and formatted it and extracted the intervals between the death dates of each person, reasoning that if the Oldest Person In The World who died in 1955 is succeeded by a person who died in 1956, that meant an observer would, in 1955, wait ~1 year for the new Oldest Person to die. The mean interval between deaths turns out to be 1.2 years, but the median wait turns out to be 0.65 years! This seems to be due in large part due to the astounding lifespan of Jeanne Calment, as you will see on the interval graph shortly.

Jean Calment holds that 122-year record. The Gerontology Research Group has images of Jean from age 20 to age 122.

At Stackexchange, a few more people came up with answers, but things seem to settle around one oldest-person death every 0.65 years. Now, obviously, figuring out who the oldest person in the world is, is pretty hard. But since most of us will never hold the title of oldest person in the world, we can at least savor the fact that, for at least a few seconds, we were at one point the youngest.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Besse Cooper, World’s Oldest Person, Passes Away

The skeleton army. Photo: Joe Giardino, YouTube

Producer and animator Ray Harryhausen, who invented a kind of stop motion model animation called ‘dynamation’ and created special effects for classics such as Jason and the Argonauts and One Million Years B.C., died today, NPR reports.

A Facebook page managed by the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation broke the news two hours earlier today that Harryhausen passed away in London at the age of 92. Already, thousands of fans have responded, including the likes of directors Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg and others. James Cameron commented, “I think all of us who are practioners in the arts of science fiction and fantasy movies now all feel that we’re standing on the shoulders of a giant. If not for Ray’s contribution to the collective dreamscape, we wouldn’t be who we are.”

George Lucas said simply, “Without Ray Harryhausen, there would likely have been no Star Wars.”

Harryhausen began working in stop motion after seeing and being inspired by King Kong in 1933. He began experimenting with animated short films using stop motion, getting his break in 1949 with Mighty Joe Young. The film took home the Academy Award for Best Special Effects later that year. From there, Harryhausen blazed a career producing and directing visual effects for just under two dozen films. The last movie he made was Clash of the Titans, in 1981.

Here, Harryhausen talks about his work in a 1974 interview:

And here is a collection of Harryhausen’s greatest stop motion animation creations:

And here, one of his most famous scenes – the skeleton fight from Jason and the Argonauts:

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Left: Women’s Media Center, Right: Ms. magazine

Mary Thom, feminist editor, writer and behind-the-scenes activist, died earlier this week in a motorcycle accident in Yonkers. Thom was the editor-in-chief at the Women’s Media Center. The center’s co-founders said:

“We who are Mary’s friends and family haven’t absorbed her loss yet; it’s too sudden,” said Robin Morgan, Gloria Steinem, and Jane Fonda, co-founders of The Women’s Media Center. “Ms. Magazine, the Women’s Media Center, the women’s movement and American journalism have suffered an enormous blow. Mary was and will always be our moral compass and steady heart. Writers from around the world have been able to share their words and ideas because of her. Wherever her friends and colleagues gather, we will always ask the guiding question: What would Mary do?”

Thom might be best known for her role at Ms. magazine, where she joined in 1972 as an editor and where she eventually became the executive editor. As Ms. she pushed the magazine to cover more politics, specifically the actions of lawmakers surrounding things like abortion and birth control—issues that remain at the forefront of women’s rights struggles today. The other editors at Ms. found Thom a refreshing presence, according to the New York Times:

At Ms., she often stayed late into the night reading letters to the editor. “It was incredibly moving and exciting, to just get that kind of response,” Ms. Thom recalled in a 2005 interview. “And no one had expected it.”

Her former colleagues said she brought a pragmatic, self-deprecating viewpoint to the magazine, which some saw as too serious.

Eventually, Thom wrote a book about the history of Ms., and helped to produce an oral history on the congresswoman Bella S. Abzug with the epic title Bella Abzug: How One Tough Broad From the Bronx Fought Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy, Pissed Off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the Rights of Women and Workers, Rallied Against War and for the Planet, and Shook Up Politics Along the Way.

The accident happened on the Saw Mill Parkway in Yonkers, where Thom was riding motorcycle, which many called her one true love. Thom never owned a car, they say, and it was the 1996 Honda Magna 750 that got her where she needed to go, both physically and mentally.

The next issue of Ms. will feature more on Thom’s life both at the publication and beyond.

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