Tuesday, August 6

Oh!

Mars Curiosity rover celebrates loneliest birthday ever by singing 'Happy Birthday to Me'

The rover has already succeeded in its main mission, showing that ancient Mars could have supported life

There might not have been anyone around to hear it, but yesterday a very familiar tune played out across the surface of Mars. To celebrate the one year anniversary of landing on the surface of red planet, Nasa engineers managed to coax a rendition of ‘Happy Birthday To You’ out of the 2,000lb Curiosity rover.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=uxVVgBAosqg

Thursday, July 25

Monday, April 15

Darksiders?

Could the universe have a dark side, complete with its own force, a zoo of particles and even a shadow version of the Milky Way?

"Could there be a mirror world where interesting things are going on?

The way stars and galaxies move shows there is more mass present than we can see.  To account for this, 80 per cent of the universe's matter must be dark.  The trouble is the stuff stubbornly refuses to interact with ordinary matter, except through gravity, so has not been conclusively detected.

Thursday, January 31

Close call coming: Averting the asteroid threat–Simple! Ask the Lightbringers

With an errant space rock heading this way, just how good are our asteroid defences – and how do we avert the cataclysm?

IT COULD easily be the plot for a Hollywood disaster movie. Last February, a young dental surgeon called Jaime Nomen was sailing along the Mediterranean coast of Spain, checking images on his laptop from an observatory 600 kilometres away. Suddenly he spotted a speck of light speeding through the constellation Boötes. Nomen knew exactly what it was.

He alerted the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which collects information about asteroids and comets. Telescopes around the world swung into action, checking the new asteroid's orbit. The result was sensational: asteroid 2012 DA14 was on near-collision course with the Earth. (New Scientist; registration required.)

Wednesday, January 30

Maybe they’ll start looking somewhere else for Goldilocks Heaven?

No ultimate judge

Shockingly, Earth – which used to be smack-bang in the middle of our sun's habitable zone – is now a scant million kilometres away from the warm edge, so almost too hot for liquid water. Of course, we know Earth is robustly life-friendly – the mismatch is probably because neither definition accounts for clouds, which reflect sunlight away from Earth.

As Earth shows, the Goldilocks zone is no ultimate judge of habitability, something exoplanet researchers have known for years. As well as clouds, volcanic activity or the location of other moons or planets in the solar system, may be important for life to develop on planets like Earth.