Science

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Gravity + Neil deGrasse Tyson = Awesome

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I like space. I like movies. I like space movies. Contact is one of my favorite movies of all time, and introduced me to Carl Sagan. Moon is a lesser known flick that I've recommended to many folks. And Apollo 13 was better than most Tom Hanks movies.

I saw Gravity this weekend and it left a huge impression on me.  The acting and dialogue was good, but the breathtaking portions involved little to no dialogue and facisnating shots of the Earth, stars, floating astronauts, and satellites that may or may not survive.  

There was even a Shareef in the movie! Ok, a Sharif.  Close enough. 

The movie was extremely fun, and there were some great scientifically accurate parts (i.e. sound can't carry in space so there is no sound). With that said, it is a movie, and some things are exaggerated for truth.  Everyone's favorite astrophysicist Neil deGrasse tyson does his best job to ruin the party.

 

Neil just can't help being a scientist.  I don't blame him at all. I couldn't even bring myself to criticize the movie though because I LOVED it.

 

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Despite Shutdown, Astronauts Still Run Up Walls

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The current government shutdown has severely impacted NASA. According to The Verge: 

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration will see over 90 percent of its civilian workforce immediately furloughed: 17,701 out of 18,250 total employees, according to the shutdown plan the agency filed last week. As President Obama put it in an emergency address last night, "NASA will shut down almost entirely, but Mission Control will remain open to support the astronauts serving on the Space Station."

The shutdown plan link in the article no longer works, since all of NASA's websites and social media accounts have beeen shut down. The good news is that the astronauts on the ISS will be supporrted.  One way they can deal with the stress is to run up a wall! 

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Creepy photo, huh? I took the above photo of the treadmill that astronauts use to stay in shape while on the International Space Station (ISS) during my trip to NASA Mission Control in Houston, TX earlier this year.  Using the port and starboard nautical terms for left and right, the treadmill is essentially on the wall.  But in a weightless environment of space, the terms up, down, left or right have no absolute meaning. 

Here's a photo of the actual treadmill, which was named after Stephen Colbert after he won a naming contest. As you can see his smiling face in the photo above, the treadmill is officially called the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (COLBERT).

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Astronaut Karen Nyberg posted this video recently of her experience on the treadmill. She needs to be tethered so she doesn't float off, and the treadmill itself can't be fixed completely onto the wall - it needs to be able to move so that the forces put on the treadmill by the runner don't affect the flight path of the station.  Remember, this is space, and there is no drag or wind resistance to prevent movement - any little push can seriously set you off course. 

The video is set up so that it looks like the treadmill is on the "bottom" of the ISS, but if you look closely at the orientation of other objects, you can see that we are actually on the "wall". 

In addition to seeing the treadmll, I was fortunate enough to meet Karen and the other current residents of the International Space Station before they departed on their trip as Expedition 36. Of course I'm right next to Karen because she loves me.  Here's one of my favorite pics ever!

Fyodor Yurchikhin, Karen Nyberg, me, Luca Parmitano  

Fyodor Yurchikhin, Karen Nyberg, me, Luca Parmitano


 

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NASA Shut Down, But We Still Celebrate 55 Years

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(Editors Note: Most of the NASA links are inactive because of the government shutdown. Yay Congress.) 

In the midst of the Cold War, the US government created NASA in 1958 to gain an edge in space exploration. It was partially a defensive move agains the Soviet launch of the first Earth satellite, Sputnik, in 1957.  NASA superseded the existing National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which was formed in 1915 to pursue aeronautical research.

In the past 55 years, NASA has grown beyond its iniitial goals to be part of a global initative in support of space travel and harnessing its benefits for Earth. Check out the following infographic to get a sense of accomplishments as well as future endeavours. My hope is that this blog will be around long enough to cover each of the "things to come"! For more info, click on the infographic or visit this site.

 

Some more detail is available on NASA's site:

We’ve sent 12 humans to walk and work on the moon, sent four rovers and four landers to explore Mars and sentVoyager into interstellar space.
We’ve studied our home planet, every other planet in the solar system, and the sun at the center of it all.
We’ve peered deep into the distant past of the universe with Great Observatories like Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra.
We’ve built an International Space Station larger than a five-bedroom house and sent humans to live and work off the planet continuously since November 2000. 
We've flown 30 years of space shuttle missions to launch and repair Hubble, build the space station and perform science in Earth orbit.
We've developed experimental aircraft and tested technologies that make today's airplanes safer and greener
We’ve produced hundreds of innovations that enable current and future NASA missions and improve the daily lives of everyone on Earth, from life-saving medical technologies to advances in telecommunications, weather forecasting, robotics and emergency response.
There’s way too much to list it all … and we’re not done yet.
We plan to land humans on Mars in the 2030s. We're getting set to send MAVEN to Mars and OSIRIS-REx to an asteroid, and we'll be watching as Juno arrives at Jupiter and New Horizons arrives at Pluto. We’ll launch the James Webb Space Telescopeto follow Hubble in the quest to understand our universe, looking all the way back to the first luminous glows after the Big Bang.   We’ll continue looking at the home planet from our unique perspective in space, improving air travel and developing cutting-edge technologies for the benefit of all mankind.
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In the Realtime Web, Old Can Be Awesome

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Old News - canon rebel t2i

In this world of realtime information when things are deemend "old" after hours or even minutes, if we miss something as soon as it drops it can get lost forever. There's so many awesome science things happening on the internet that it's almost impossible to keep up with everything.  I love when I find out something that may be days, months, or even years in the past but still awesome. This is one of those times, thanks to the twitter stream from @omaflinger.

Scientists are just normal folk following their passion like anyone else, and the blog The Protein Strangler had several scientists discuss this in a blog series entitled Meet a Scientist. This resulted in two great videos . The first is 3 minute collection of tweets from the #IAmScience Twitter hashtag. On Jan 27, 2012, people tweeted about why they became scientists - check it out! 

The second, much longer video (30 minutes) is from a film "I'm a Scientist" that delves a bit deeper into why scientists do what they do. This video was uploaded to YouTube on Sept 16, 2011 - an eternity in terms of the realtime web.  But still great!

These old videos were included on a Protein Strangler post from Jan 2012. I'm sure there's other awesome things that I've missed over the years. Don't only depend on the latest news and links because you'll miss out on some jewels!

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The Uncanny Valley to our Robot Overlords

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Creepin up on ya

Creepin up on ya

Technology improves at a rapid rate - so fast that most people can't keep up. One of the key ways that we can recognize tech is by visual improvements.  Movies and video games have been on a steady trajectory toward realistic approximations of humanity.  Playing my Atari 2600 in the early 80s is way different from strapping on those virtual reality goggles at Sportsworld in Paramus NJ.  And that is a far time away from video games like Splinter Cell: Blacklist (shown above).

But when does the technology get too real? There's a gap between technology that's clearly fake and us, and straying within that gap can lead to creepy results. Being in that gap, known as the uncanny valley, is offputting because our brains like things to be categorized and orderly.  If we can't immediately peg the source of something, we begin to hyperfocus on anything that would make it different.  If we see a perfect stack of books, we'll look for imperfections in the pages, covers, etc - anything to categorize.  

The BBC has a great article on the uncanny valley:

"There are a few explanations that might account for our strange aversion to humanoid robots. One is that not being able to tell whether something is human or not can be a deeply unsettling feeling in itself. Artists and directors take advantage of this all the time for dramatic effect. The dread that viewers feel while trying to figure out who is a zombie, or Cylon, or alien might be the very same dread they feel when faced with a very realistic robot. "
"An unexpected break in humanness can be an unpleasant shock, one that sets off fearful and distrustful instincts. "

Interestingly, the creepiness doesn't only involve trying to act human. Some things are just damn creepy - like Teddy Ruxpin.