USS Eisenhower Crew Spoofs Star Wars the Force Awakens Trailer

I LOLed at the BB-8 replacement.

WANT! The Cobalt Valkyrie

Looking more like a high-tech fighter than a light plane designed for private use, the Valkyrie from Cobalt aircraft has just been launched. With a canard front wing, sleek aerodynamic shape and a turbocharged 350 hp (260 kW) engine, the new Valkyrie is claimed to be capable of traveling at speeds of up to 260 knots (482 km/h, 300 mph) and has capacity for up to five adults and their luggage.

link.

Like Angry Birds but With Pumpkins and Drones!

A Single Cell Organism With an *EYE* Developed From Endosymbiotic Components

Eye-like ocelloids are built from different endosymbiotically acquired components

Authors:

Gavelis et al

Abstract:

Multicellularity is often considered a prerequisite for morphological complexity, as seen in the camera-type eyes found in several groups of animals. A notable exception exists in single-celled eukaryotes called dinoflagellates, some of which have an eye-like ‘ocelloid’ consisting of subcellular analogues to a cornea, lens, iris, and retina. These planktonic cells are uncultivated and rarely encountered in environmental samples, obscuring the function and evolutionary origin of the ocelloid. Here we show, using a combination of electron microscopy, tomography, isolated-organelle genomics, and single-cell genomics, that ocelloids are built from pre-existing organelles, including a cornea-like layer made of mitochondria and a retinal body made of anastomosing plastids. We find that the retinal body forms the central core of a network of peridinin-type plastids, which in dinoflagellates and their relatives originated through an ancient endosymbiosis with a red alga. As such, the ocelloid is a chimaeric structure, incorporating organelles with different endosymbiotic histories. The anatomical complexity of single-celled organisms may be limited by the components available for differentiation, but the ocelloid shows that pre-existing organelles can be assembled into a structure so complex that it was initially mistaken for a multicellular eye. Although mitochondria and plastids are acknowledged chiefly for their metabolic roles, they can also be building blocks for greater structural complexity.

No Robopocalypse Required: Have Your Furniture Grown

Much of our furniture is made from timber. The wood to make that furniture has to be harvested from a felled tree which is then milled, sawed, planed, sanded, put back together with glue and screws, and finished. Wouldn't it be easier to avoid most of these steps and simply coax a tree to grow into a piece of furniture? That way, it would be one-piece, inherently strong, and could potentially last many years longer than assembled furniture. Gavin Munro thought this too, and about a decade ago set about achieving this goal. He now creates furniture by cajoling trees to grow into one-piece items that are not only inherently practical, they are also eminently beautiful.

link.

We now Have the Technology to Detect Relavistic Starships

Limits and Signatures of Relativistic Spaceflight

Authors:

Yurtsever et al

Abstract:

While special relativity imposes an absolute speed limit at the speed of light, our Universe is not empty Minkowski spacetime. The constituents that fill the interstellar/intergalactic vacuum, including the cosmic microwave background photons, impose a lower speed limit on any object travelling at relativistic velocities. Scattering of cosmic microwave phtotons from an ultra-relativistic object may create radiation with a characteristic signature allowing the detection of such objects at large distances.

Step one. grab all the RAW kepler data.

Step two. write a search program like the supernova factory guys do.

Step Three.  Run, baby.  Run.  (or rather  debug, baby.  debug.  Then, run, baby.  Run!)

Step Four (probable).  Sigh with the lack of detections.

Step Five.  Grab everyone else's raw data too.  ;)

Rinse lather repeat.

Wanderers

Wanderers - a short film by Erik Wernquist from Erik Wernquist on Vimeo.

TEH AWESUM: If the Moon Were One Pixel...

link.

A Little bit of Awesomeness: the Ties Between the USS New Mexico & Mesilla's La Posta Restaurant

On a weekday afternoon Dick Brown, Chairman of the USS New Mexico committee of the Navy League is giving a presentation about the nuclear-powered submarine to an audience at the Branigan Cultural Center in Las Cruces.

Brown gives these updates to people all over the state to raise awareness and funds for the crew of the USS New Mexico.

“We do things for the crew that the Navy cannot do. One of those things is that we bring crew members to New Mexico so that they understand the state a little bit better. They learn about the geography, the history, and the culture. We usually have about five or six sailors about twice a year,” says Brown.

According to Brown, the crew has learned much about New Mexico and the submarine also has a southwest decor throughout the ship that is hard to miss.

“There are pictures of Carlsbad Caverns, The Balloon Fiesta, and White Sands. The bunk curtains have a Southwest-Native American design, including the pilot, and co-pilot chairs in the diving station,” says Brown.

Another part of the USS New Mexico that shares something in common with the state is the galley, or kitchen. It is named after La Posta de Mesilla, a popular Southern New Mexico restaurant housed in a centuries-old adobe building in the town of Mesilla.

Navy Captain Mark Prokopius, a former commander of the USS New Mexico shares the story about a contest that led to the naming of the submarine’s galley.

“When we decided that we were going to name our galley we put it up to the crew and there were several restaurants that were in the running to be named,” says Cpt. Prokopius.

Tom Hutchinson owns and operates La Posta de Mesilla with his wife Jerean. He is a former Navy Captain and aviator and actually worked with submarines during his time in the Navy.

“They sent several of their Mess specialists down here and trained with us for two to three days, took all that information after visiting all of the establishments back to Virginia, visited with the Skipper and the final vote and tally was that they would name their galley after La Posta de Mesilla,” says Hutchinson.

The crew decided to name it La Posta Abajo del Mar (La Posta under the sea). Captain Prokopius says that restaurant in Mesilla really represented what the crew was looking for.

“When I sold this to the crew and told them about La Posta being a family-owned, Tom Hutchinson being a former Navy captain, and a family oriented restaurant; It really seemed like a perfect fit,” says Cpt. Prokopius.

After the contest ended the crew's culinary specialists were sent to the restaurant to learn recipes. Hutchinson and his employees gave the crew members a firm understanding of the restaurant’s cuisine.

link.

DeExtinction: Efforts at Harvard are Underway to "Bring Back" the Woolly Mammoth

There's a mission to bring back one of history's most famous animals, it's already underway, and it's closer to becoming a reality than even some of the most forward-looking minds think it is.

For all the talk and attention it gets, de-extincting an animal isn't exactly easy—it's difficult to clone cells from an animal that has been dead for thousands of years, tougher to turn it into a viable embryo, and, most importantly, more difficult still to find a closely-related animal that can serve as a surrogate mother to give birth to the cloned animal. There's certainly work still being done in that area, but, increasingly, researchers are working to hybridize existing animals with extinct ones in order to create what Brand calls a "2.0" version of the animal.

That's what Harvard synthetic biologist George Church is doing with woolly mammoths. Using a genome editing technique known as CRISPR, Church is working on inserting three key genes from woolly mammoths into Asian elephant cells, with the hope of eventually creating a hybrid between the two that will ideally be more mammoth-like than elephant-like.

The project and technology has been touched on before, most notably in a lengthy New York Times Magazine article from February, but Church tells me that the team has now successfully migrated the three genes, which gave the woolly mammoth its furry appearance, extra layer of fat, and cold-resistant blood. In theory, given what we know about both the woolly mammoth genome and the Asian elephant genome, the final product will be something that more closely resembles the former than the latter.

link.

(more info)

Sunspot Cycle IDed (!!!) in Chinese Calymmian MesoProterozoic Biolaminites

Sunspot cycles recorded in Mesoproterozoic carbonate biolaminites

Authors:

Tang et al

Abstract:

Well-preserved carbonate biolaminites from the early Mesoproterozoic Wumishan Formation (ca. 1.5–1.45 Ga) of North China show submillimeter-scale yearly couplets that consist of alternating dark and light laminae, and are texturally similar to those reported from Holocene tufas. Power spectrum and wavelet transform analyses of laminar couplet thickness variations and geochemical series (Ca, Fe, Co/Ti, Cr/Ti, and Br) reveal a prominent periodicity at 9.0–11.7 and a less prominent periodicity at 19.7–21.4 couplets. These coherent periodic modes match well with the 11-yr Schwabe sunspot cycle and 22-yr solar Hale cycle. The observed layering pattern is thus interpreted as recording solar induced climate changes that may have modulated microbial growth rate and biomass production in restricted subtidal environments on a broad epicontinental platform. The documented example represents the first reported solar signature in Mesoproterozoic marine carbonates and implies the sensitivity of microbial life to environmental changes prior to metazoan evolution.

TEH AWESOME: John Conway's Dinosaur Pet Guide

link.

Think you can Find it?

Forest Fenn hid the box of gold and jewels somewhere in NM.  He left a poem with hints about the locale.  The above is a picture of the poem which he left with clues as to where the box of treasure lies.

A little romance for the world.  I sure as hell hope he didnt hide it in a national monument or whatnot.  That'd seriously suck.

Think you can find it?

There are Times When San Francisco Absolutely Rocks

link.

Confirmed Video: Noel Maurer @ Universidad de los Andes on Petropolitics

Its in spanish though and my spanish sucks.  Love the accent, Noel. 

Noel hangs his hat on the internet here.

Adam Spencer's Love of Math

Mark Whitton is Getting HITCHED!

Whoa!  That must have been SOME mating display!!!

HD 189733b is *BLUE*

Wow.

They have directly imaged an exoplanet in color for the first time...and its BLUE...with ferocious, hot winds. Venus is a whimp by comparison!

Another nice write up is here.

Three Worlds in the Habitable Zone of GJ 667C 22 light years away?

A team of astronomers, including Carnegie's Paul Butler, has combined new observations with existing data to reveal a solar system packed full of planets. The star Gliese 667C is orbited by between five and seven planets, the maximum number that could fit in stable, close orbits. A record-breaking three of these planets are super-Earths found in the so-called habitable zone around the star—the zone where liquid water could exist. This makes them good candidates for the search for life.

Gliese 667C is a very well-studied star. It is just over one third of the mass of our Sun, and it is part of a triple star system known as Gliese 667. Gliese 667 is remarkably similar to our solar system, compared to other stars studied in the search for habitable planets.

Previous studies of Gliese 667C found that the star hosts three planets, with one in the habitable zone. Now, a team of astronomers led by Guillem Anglada-Escudé of the University of Göttingen, a former Carnegie post-doc, reexamined observations taken between 2003 and 2012, along with new observations from a variety of telescopes, and found evidence for five, and possibly as many as seven, planets around the star.

If seven planets exist, they would completely fill the habitable zone; there are no more stable, long-lived orbits in which a planet could be so close to the star. Because Gliese 677C is part of a triple-star system, the other orange stars would be visible in daytime on each of these planets, and in nighttime they would provide the same illumination as the full moon on earth.

"We identified three strong signals in the star before, but it was possible that smaller planets were hidden in the data" said Anglada-Escudé. "We reexamined the existing data, added some new observations, and applied two different data analysis methods especially designed to deal with multi-planet signal detection. Both methods yielded the same answer: there are five very secure signals and up to seven low-mass planets in short-period orbits around the star."

Three of these planets are confirmed to be super-Earths—planets more massive than Earth, but less massive than giant planets like Uranus or Neptune—which are within the star's habitable zone.

"This is the first time that three such planets have been spotted orbiting in this zone in the same system," Butler said.

Compact systems around Sun-like stars have been found to be abundant in the Milky Way. However, many of these systems consist of super-Earths lying very close to their star, within the orbit of Mercury. In systems built around Sun-like stars, these orbits are very hot and planets there are unlikely to be habitable.

This is not the case for cooler and dimmer stars Planets found very close to such stars could still be habitable planet candidates. The Gliese 667C system is the first example of a system in which a low-mass star is seen to host several packed planets with habitable conditions.

This discovery illustrates that low-mass stars are currently the best targets for searching for potentially habitable planets, an important finding given that around 80% of the stars in our Milky Way galaxy, and many stars near to us, fall into this lower mass bracket. If such packed systems are common around low-mass stars, the number of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy could be much larger than previously expected.

Oh the dangers of writing SF about exoplanets these days... must be like how it was during the 1960s and 1970s for the Sol System.

Paper link.

Many pop sci write ups. 

Timelapse of a Rotating Supercell