momusradar

Just by coincidence the N.Y. Times’ Dot Earth presented a fantastic photograph of a real snow leopard on the very same day Apple Inc. started selling its Snow Leopard:

Dot Earth likes a good animal photo as much as the next blog, particularly when the animal is beautiful and endangered. So we’re pleased to present a photograph of a snow leopard, taken by a camera trap in the Wakhan Corridor in northeastern Afghanistan.

News Junkie Post covers a compelling study that should be read by all:

Senator Ted Kennedy’s brain cancer could have been prevented if he had not used his cell phone so much. At least that is the argument being raised by health advocates who released a new study that concludes that too much cell phone use could lead to brain cancer.

The study, “Cellphones and Brain Tumors: 15 Reasons for Concern, Science, Spin and the Truth Behind Interphone” was released by the International EMF Collaborative this week to counter another study funded by cell phone industry giants (The Interphone study), which minimizes the risk of cell phone use.

I’m duly impressed with how far we’ve progressed in those four hundred years since Galileo’s watershed contribution to science.

As commemorated by the International Year of Astronomy and observed elsewhere on this site, 2009 marks the 400th anniversary of the year that astronomer Galileo Galilei began fashioning his own telescopes and turning them to the heavens. Before long, he started to characterize the surface of the moon, discovered a quartet of Jupiter’s moons and began to revolutionize our view of Earth’s place in the universe.

Four hundred years ago this week, Galileo reached a milestone along this journey, presenting his telescope to the Senate in Venice on August 25, 1609. The senators were duly impressed, according to historical accounts, doubling the astronomer’s salary and making his university appointment a lifelong one.

From the Scientific American article, Ammonite trove exists in Agony Creek, in suburban New Jersey:

Outside Freehold, N.J.—The water is icy cold and the stone is slippery as I wade in up to my calves. Along the banks of this slow-flowing stream, guarded by prickly brambles, lies one of the richest caches of fossils dating back to the extinction that claimed the dinosaurs. The remains of marine creatures buried here, kept secret to prevent looting, tell an unusual tale: rather than dying off 65 million years ago, these creatures lived on afterward, albeit briefly. The discovery is causing scientists to rethink why some creatures survived the so-called KT extinction while others did not.

Unlike this one, significant fossil sites tend to be found in exotic locales such as the searing hot Gobi Desert or the windswept pampas of Patagonia, areas remote from the kind of urban development that can ruin them. “You don’t expect to find them here in suburban New Jersey some 90 minutes away from New York City,” explains Neil Landman, curator of fossil invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History.

Taking into account that New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the nation, I’m impressed they managed to keep the site in relative secrecy for the past six years.

From the New Scientist article regarding the possibility that the GEO600 gravitational wave detector is detecting a holographic projection of grainy space-time:

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.

I immediately think of the closing scene from the film Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain where the narrator states:

September 28, 1997. It is exactly 11 AM. At the fun fair near the ghost train, the marshmallow twister’s twisting, while in Villette Park, Félix Lerbier learns there are more links in his brain than atoms in the universe. At the Sacré Coeur the Cardinals are practicing their backhands. The temperatur is 24 degrees Celcius. Humidity 70%. Atmospheric pressure 999 millibars.

I can’t help but empathize with Monsieur Lerbier.

This is truly awe-inspiring:

What distinguishes this outcome as teleportation, rather than any other form of communication, is that no information pertaining to the original memory actually passes between ion A and ion B. Instead, the information disappears when ion A is measured and reappears when the microwave pulse is applied to ion B.

I heard about it on FSRN during my drive home from work:

About 40 miles west of Knoxville, Tennessee, millions of gallons of ashy sludge have broken through a dike at a coal-fired power plant, flooding homes, burying roads, and threatening rivers and drinking water. Tom Kilgore is the president of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which owns the power plant: “I fully suspect that the amount of rain we’ve had in the last eight to 10 days, plus the freezing weather might have had something to do with this.”
The holding pond contained about 70 acres of fly ash – that’s the residue left over from burning coal. It often has elevated levels of toxic metals. And according to the EPA, the spill has released about 525 million gallons of the sludge – that’s nearly 50 times the size of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

An article at Scientific American notes:

The residue of millions of tons of coal burning at Kingston Fossil power plant in the Watts Bar Reservoir in Tennessee burst the bounds of the pond in which it was contained, burying as many as 400 acres of land in up to six feet of sludge.

Disturbingly, I haven’t seen or heard this headlined anywhere else, but I’ve seen plenty on the water main break in Maryland.

One aspect of Polaroid’s instant films that simply can not be replaced by any digital medium is its completely self-contained mechanics. No external batteries, no transfer cables, no medium readers; Polaroid’s instant film requires none of these. All that is needed are three steps: exposure to light, exposure to chemistry & about a minute of your time. Yet with everything needing to be digital now-a-days, I suppose it was inevitable. Polaroid plans to discontinue manufacturing its instant film.

Fortunately they are willing to license the technology to other manufacturers.

addendum January 21, 2009

The Impossible Project’s aim is to re-start production of analog INTEGRAL FILM for vintage Polaroid cameras in 2010. They have acquired Polaroid’s old equipment, factory and seek your support.

rethinkingschools.org has a wonderful map game that tests your geographic knowledge of the Middle East.

I’m humbled to admit my unfamiliarity of the ‘-stan’ nations as well as the African countries not on the continent’s north shore.

Amitabha Buddhists from New York released imported reptiles into New Jersey’s Passaic River this past Sunday as part of a ritual. The river was chosen because it was thought to give the creatures “the best chance of surviving and realizing their full karmic potential.”

Apparently no concern was given to the bad karma of possibly altering the local ecosystem.