Category: Science

The live Nasa TV feed of Discovery docking with the ISS makes for fascinating viewing.

This is a spectacular photo of comet Tempel 1 taken from the flyby craft just after the impactor craft had hit the comet – actually 67 seconds afterwards.

The New Scientist has a piece about urban gaming which I found especially interesting as I’m in the very early stages of designing an “experience” myself. It’s quite exciting.

There’s a nice piece by Simon Singh in today’s Times about junk science. He calls for proper checks and trials such as those that real medicines have to go through before alternative remedies are flogged.

It’s for stories like this one, that I read the Bad Science column in The Guardian. And what a charming bunch some of those Penta water people sound like. For those who are unaware, Penta water is an “ultra premium purified” water. Their site is full of scientific bollocks giving reasons why this water should…

I learn from listening to Material World on Radio 4 that the digital camera on the Cassini and Huygens probes have lower mega-pixel ratings than the average mobile phone (Cassini is 1 mega-pixel and Huygens, much smaller) – and of course they’re black and white. Obviously this is a combination of things like data rates…

This piece from Slate details exactly what Cassini and Hugens have been through to get where they are. Even though none of it is “news” to me, it does put in perspective what our society has achieved.

The Huygens probe seems to have been phenomenally successful with all sorts of pictures and even sounds being released. It’s incredible to see these pictures from such an alien world so far from our own. The whole thing’s phenomenal!

It’s all very exciting today with the Huygens probe landing on the surface of Titan. What will it find? Will it all work? We’ll find out later today, and in the meantime, I’ll be looking at the Cassini-Huygens website quite a lot.

There’s a lot more to randomness that you might realise. I actually did a course in it once, but I’ve mostly forgotten it all. This is a good primer (via Boing Boing). Incidentally, it seems that coin tossing isn’t fair.

Go to the NASA site to see this picture of one of Saturn’s moons as seen by the Cassini probe. Actually Mimas looks quite a lot like the Death Star… (Obviously, I’m not the first to notice this resemblence)

The Cassini probe has been sending back some spectacular pictures of Titan from its first close flyby. (Incidentally, last week’s Horizon was all about Saturn and Cassini. If you missed it, you can either read the transcript or watch the signed version very late next Monday night or very early Tuesday morning depending on how…

The press is full of stories today about a new small species of human that was alive in a remote part of Indonesia 18,000 years ago. Both The Guardian and The Independent had pictures of it on their front pages today. And Nature, where the findings are published, has a special section with a certain…