Despite Shutdown, Astronauts Still Run Up Walls

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! 

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).

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

NASA Shut Down, But We Still Celebrate 55 Years

(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.

In the Realtime Web, Old Can Be Awesome

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!

Calvin and Hobbes Know Science Looks Good

These are a few of my favorite things

When reading the paper as a kid, one of the first things that I did was skip to the comic section to read the Calvin and Hobbes comic by Bill Watterson.  It's my favorite comic of all time, and it often provides hilarious geeky interpretations of science, math, and other things that are covered on this blog. Luckily the Daily Calvin and Hobbes Facebook page has been giving me life for a while now. It's been a great online version of the various compilation books that you see in the pic above, which I acquired from the clearance racks of Borders (RIP) and Barnes & Nobles over several years.

Check out the below comic where Calvin daydreams during math .. haven't we all done this?

Post by Daily Calvin & Hobbes.

Here's another comic featuring one of my favorite Calvin alter egos, Spaceman Spiff.  He travels through space and ... battles things.

Post by Daily Calvin & Hobbes.

Here's Calvin thinking about how far computers may go in terms of artificial intelligence. Remember, this comic was made way before high end computers and the spread of the internet. 

Post by Daily Calvin & Hobbes.

Finally, here's Calvin going through the struggle that us science geeks face when trying to explain our passions to others. 

Post by Daily Calvin & Hobbes.

Want Women in Tech? Change the Culture

My college engineering circuit board. My hope is that a diverse group of people get to deal with the all nighters and circuit burning that I did.

I use this site not only for cool science stuff, but also as a proponent of diversity within the sciences. It's critical to understand that simply improving numbers of women and minorities within the space isn't enough. The culture itself needs to be changed so that elements such as misogyny and racism are not acceptable by anyone. Making a welcoming culture is a huge step in attracting underrepresented groups into a situation that they previously saw as hostile.

In the tech space, events known as hackathons are quite popular.  These events require collaboration from teams of folks to develop a solution to a stated problem, usually involving software or hardware.  The results are typically presented to an audience by the collaborators themselves, and winners are chosen. Since a hackathon can show both technical aptitude as well as the ability to explain and demo your solution to an audience, this is an important space that needs to be culturally sensitive so that all feel welcome to contribute their brainpower.

A hackathon during an ongoing conference entitled TechCrunch Disrupt allowed several offensive presentations to pass its supposed screening process, including a joke app called TitStare centered around staring at women's breasts.  There were several other offensive presentations involving jokes about masturbation, shrinkage, etc. All of this was in front of an audience that included young children. TechCrunch did apologize after facing heat, but it was the usual halfhearted empty apology that only comes after being barraged by social media influencers.

You'd think that hackathons and similiar events would attract women and minorities because as long as you have great ideas and you can present well, you should be fine, right?  It's true, as long as the culture welcomes them as people as well as tech resources. Putting on the greatest demo in the world suddenly seems low on the totem pole when you are dealing with being demeaned in a personal way.

Sadly, this culture has existed for a very long time, as seen is a recent documentary about women in the chemistry indu

stry. This is why it's important to have schools that take diversity seriously, and to celebrate initiatives like International Women's Day. 

I wasn't going to write about this initially, but I felt compelled to. We all need to stand up against this crap, and it needs to be a united effort, not one limited to women.  Any jokes that disparage women and the contributions that they've made to society harm us all. Having groups that don't represent the true diversity of America harms us all. 

Check out the Storify below for a great discussion on the Disrupt issue and its aftermath.