October 2009 Archives
You might have heard that scientists have discovered a new ring around Saturn.
The good folks at Sixty Symbols give us the skinny...
When an Australian schoolboy heard that the Soviets had launched Sputnik back in 1957, he decided to do something about it.
Fearing his country were falling behind in the space race, Denis Cox set about designing his own rocket ship.
He drew his own craft and included details such as Rolls Royce jet engines, antenna, space for a pilot and navigator, and guided missiles.
It wasn't complete, however, so he told the top scientists at the Woomera Rocket Range to 'put in the other details!'
Poor Denis never got an answer... until now!
NASA's new rocket is certainly a sight to behold.
The Ares I-X was given its first test launch earlier this week and this picture shows the moment it broke the speed of sound.
As it did so it created a 'shock egg' - a cloud of vapour formed around a craft crashing through the sound barrier.
Is it just me, or does it seem we're getting more and more rocks thrown at us these days?
Turns out that earlier this month an asteroid detonated above Indonesia with a force THREE times of the Hiroshoma nuke.
Weird Science Hero Neil deGrasse Tyson tells us how Weird Science Hero Carl Sagan shaped his career.
Weird Science Hero Carl Sagan sits down and works out how many advanced civilizations there are in the Milky Way.
Sagan uses the Drake Equation to find an answer.
This fabulous graphic (click to zoom) shows all of our excursions to the Red Planet so far.
If anything it shows just how difficult this space probe business is - we have a 52.4 per cent failure rate when it comes to throwing stuff at our nearest neighbour.
Just like the Littlest Hobo, Britain just can't settle down.
The geological history of the place beggars belief as it travelled from the Antarctic up to the equator and then further north.
Authors
Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
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"How long does the process take? ..."
"huh! well, i certainly would like to see a sabre-tooth in a zoo, or even in the wild. but I'm not so..."
"Very interesting, although we at Thinktank Planetarium (a first for Birmingham btw: we are the UK's ..."
"We are all from Mars! Modern day humans just like you and I once thrived on Mars only a few thousan..."
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"Odd that the mammoth didn't make the list. It would be truly fascinating to see some of these creatu..."
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