Here is an amazing photo collection taken by on the most recent Space Shuttle flight.
Click each image for a larger version.
Photos from above the clouds.
How well do you know basic physics?
Apparently I don’t know basic physics as well as I thought. As I was taking the quiz, I began to anticipate scoring around 70% or so. I was quite disappointed to attain only 47.5%. I guess it’s a good thing I never taught science.
- Basic Physics Savvy Quiz (40 total Questions)
Shuttle Launch on NASA TV Today
If you near a computer at 5:00 EST today, take a look!
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite Photos of Mars
NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander has been taking some amazing pictures lately. Here is a nice gallery.
I made it to the Official Google Documents Blog!
A while back I got a comment here from one of the editors of the Official Google Documents Blog. She asked if I could put something together to include on their blog. I’m glad to report that my contribution went live today.
Here is a link to my post over there.
Does this mean I’m famous? Or maybe infamous? 
Amazing Image of the Earth at Night
The red areas are wildfires. Looks like Africa is having some huge ones.
You really need to see the larger version here.
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite Funny Science Fair Photos
Energy Source of Northern Lights Found
Very cool!
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteScientists think they have discovered the energy source of the spectacular color displays seen in the northern lights. New data from NASA’s Themis mission, a quintet of satellites launched this winter, found the energy comes from a stream of charged particles from the sun flowing like a current through twisted bundles of magnetic fields connecting Earth’s upper atmosphere to the sun.
The energy is then abruptly released in the form of a shimmering display of lights visible in the upper latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, said principal investigator Vassilis Angelopoulos of the University of California, Los Angeles.
So who wants to live on the moon?
Not sure I’m ready for that, but I’d be interested in checking out the property values.
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteNASA announced new details yesterday about its plans for a Moon base that included a pair of small, pressurized rovers with a range of nearly 600 miles.
The space agency plans to return astronauts to the Moon around 2020. Agency officials first described proposals last December for a polar lunar base powered by near constant sunlight on solar panels.
Earlier proposals to carry small habitation modules to the Moon in stages might be supplanted by a proposal that would heave a single large module to the Moon on an unmanned cargo ship, Doug Cooke, the NASA official leading the lunar study group, said.
The new rover would not be much larger than the buggies the Apollo astronauts drove, but would be pressurized so that astronauts could drive in shirt sleeves and be protected from radiation — probably by a layer of water in the rover’s body, said Geoff Yoder, an official working on the lunar plans. To explore on foot, astronauts would put on spacesuits and leave the vehicle, Mr. Yoder said. The cost? “More than a Ferrari,” he joked.
The Panama Canal is getting wider
This reminds me of a famous palindrome.
- A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.
Anyway, I guess it’s time some improvements were made to the canal.
Start Slide Show with PicLens LitePanama blasted away part of a hillside next to the canal on Monday, marking the start of the waterway’s biggest expansion since it opened 93 years ago.
The $5.25 billion expansion is expected to double the 50-mile canal’s capacity and lower the price of consumer goods on the East Coast of the United States by allowing wider vessels to squeeze through with more cargo.
About two-thirds of the cargo that passed through the canal is headed to or from the United States. China is the Panama Canal’s second-largest user.
The waterway now moves 4 percent of the world’s cargo. The new locks, approved in a referendum nearly a year ago, are expected to be ready for use between 2014 and 2015.
Teacher-Astronaut to Fly Decades After Challenger
This is a great story. I’m glad she will get her chance.
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteBarbara R. Morgan is now an astronaut by profession, heading into space this week for the first time on the space shuttle. But she said she would be approaching her mission “with the mind, eyes, ears and heart of a teacher.”
“That’s what I am, a teacher,” Ms. Morgan said, “That’s what I am at my core.”
She said patience and perseverance were virtues that defined good schoolteachers. Living her principles, she is about to fulfill a two-decade-old dream by becoming the first “educator astronaut” when she and six fellow astronauts blast off in the space shuttle Endeavour on Wednesday on a mission to the International Space Station.
The flight will also fulfill a dream deferred from January 1986, when the shuttle Challenger blew up during takeoff, killing a crew that included the first designated teacher in space, Christa McAuliffe, Ms. Morgan’s friend. A high school teacher from Concord, N.H., Ms. McAuliffe had planned a series of educational sessions from space.
Not losing faith in the program, Ms. Morgan, as the backup teacher for that mission, kept the dream alive even when returning to the classroom by becoming an advocate for spaceflight and helping the National Aeronautics and Space Administration find a way to continue including teacher-astronauts in its plans.
“I believe in my heart that space exploration is key for all of us, especially for our young people to keep their futures open-ended,” she said in a preflight news conference.
We have the technology to rebuild him/her!
I was always a fan of The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. Maybe soon those will be reality shows that I won’t watch.
Seriously, it’s good to see that amputees will have better options.
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite Baby Mammoth Found Frozen in Russia
I haven’t posted anything from National Geographic in a while, but I had to get this one up.
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteA Russian hunter traipsing through Russia’s remote Arctic Yamalo-Nenetsk region in May noticed what he thought was a reindeer carcass sticking out of the damp snow. (See a map of Russia and its remote Siberian regions.)
On closer inspection, the “reindeer” turned out to be a 40,000-year-old baby mammoth, perfectly encased in ice.
The six-month-old female mammoth is the most well-preserved example yet found of the beasts, which lumbered across the Earth during the last Ice Age, 1.8 million to 11,500 years ago.
“It’s a lovely little baby mammoth indeed, found in perfect condition,” Alexei Tikhonov, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Science’s Zoological Institute, told the Reuters news agency.
At 110 pounds (50 kilograms) and 51 inches long (130 centimeters long), the baby is the size of a large dog, Reuters reported.
Venus Eclipse
Now this is something you don’t see every day.
(Click image for larger version)
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteSomething was about to happen. Just two days ago, two of the three celestial objects easily visible during the day appeared to collide. But actually, Earth’s Moon passed well in front of the distant planet Venus. The occultation was caught from Switzerland in the hours before sunset. Moments after this image was taken, the Moon, visible as the crescent on the right of the above image, eclipsed Venus, appearing in gibbous phase on the lower left. Clouds that once threatened to obscure the whole event, were visible on the far left. About 90 minutes later, Venus re-appeared just to the right of the bright crescent.