I don’t know why it seems like every other story is from MIT. Are they simply awesome at applied science, or really good at making press-releases for everything they do? Whatever the reason is, they are now announcing a solution to a major problem with solar energy.

I’m sure you’ve heard a bunch about solar power the past few years, being touted as the greatest thing since sliced bread and all (which i’m not disputing). Every week it seems we get news about a new great way to harness the energy from the sun, which is so abundant that a single hour of sunlight hitting the earth could cover our energy needs for a full year! As awesome as it all sounds there are still problems. One of the major problems is the obvious fact that only half of earth is lit by the sun at any time, leaving them unable to harness solar energy. So if we’d want a world powered exclusively by solar power, we’d need some way to store energy harnessed during the day, and use it once the sun sets.

Now you may be thinking, why not just store the energy in normal batteries? The problem with that is that it would be exceedingly expensive to do on a scale of a whole powerplant (just think how much a replacement battery for your computer costs!). The idea from MIT is quite simple really, they will use excess energy during the day to separate water into it’s base atoms (Hydrogen and Oxygen) and use those as a fuel to create electricity at a later time. Splitting water into it’s base atoms is not a new idea, but the way they do it in, is. It is a process inspired by the natural process of photosynthesis, and it’s key component is a new catalyst that extracts the hydrogen and oxygen when electricity is run through it, and what’s more, it’s made out of abundant non-toxic materials and works at room temperature. Honestly MIT do a good job with their press releases and I’d say it should be readable by anyone, unlike many scientific press-releases I see. So if you’re interested in some more details on the new process, check it out here.

If you’ve been following recent reminders on the total solar eclipse this friday, you might’ve been a bit reluctant to spend all your savings on a trip to the northern Canada, Greenland, Mongolia or China just to run into some bad weather and go home empty-handed. But dispare not, NASA is here to help you as usual.

On their website you can this friday follow the solar eclipse live as it happens, which means you probably won’t have to move an inch from your current position, making it bareable even for the lazy part of us. I would have told you some stuff about eclipses, but in line with the aforementioned lazyness I’m just going to recommend you the Wikipedia article on solar eclipses, which does a very good job explaining these spectacular events.

So no excuses! This is too easy and too cool to let pass.

Holy crap! I did actually know this but i was still kind of shocked when i read it just now, Virgin Galactic plans on being operational, sending space tourists up into space by 2010! That’s two frigging years! Virgin Galactic is the love child of charismatic billionaire Richard Bransons and Scaled Composites. You probably remember Scaled Composites from a few years back when they won the much publicized X-Prize, which gave 10 million dollars for the first privately funded team to send a person into space (SpaceShipOne).

What prompted me to make this post, is that today Virgin Galactic revealed the latest milestone in this journey, the launch airplane WhiteKnightTwo (warning: Press release contains a lot of circle jerk and buzzwords). You see, unlike the space launches you are used to seeing on TV where a humongous space shuttle takes off from the ground using huge rockets, their vehicle SpaceShipTwo (just like SpaceShipOne) takes off from another airplane! So WhiteKnightTwo takes off, with SpaceShipTwo attached to it, flies up to 50.000 feet and then releases the spaceship. At this point the rockets on SpaceShipTwo kick in and take it into space, where passengers will experience weightlessness before floating back down to earth and landing on an airstrip like any other airplane.

What also makes this a very interesting scientific/engineering breakthrough (apart from going into frigging space!) is that it’s the first aircraft that’s entirely made out of composite materials (like carbon fiber). It’s a much lighter and stronger material then the traditionally used aluminum, but there are many engineering obstacles to cross, and you may remember some of the news coverage given to the heavy criticism that (not surprisingly) Airbus gave to their biggest rival, Boeing, for making 80% of their new Dreamliner airplane out of composite materials, claiming it was not safe. But Burt Rutan (guy in charge of SpaceShipOne and two) is an incredible engineer and innovator, and i would have absolutely no reservations about stepping into this creation of his.

Now as i said in the header here, it’s “affordable”, the first passengers are paying 200.000$ per flight (and there are already 200 orders for that), but the prices are set to go down as time goes by. Just imagine, a few years ago saying you wanted to be an astronaut was in the same category as saying you wanted to be president, now i’m fairly confident that i’ll make it into space in my lifetime.

P.S. There are some more pictures (including a high res version of the one used in this article) over at their website.

As a small follow-up to the previous post on scientific image galleries, one of which showed a bunch of pictures of colorful deep sea animals, I couldn’t let this new list of 25 Amazing and Bizarre Deep Sea Creatures pass by without a mention.

As opposed to the previous one, this list even has some nice descriptions of the animals in addition to the pictures, so go check it out. My personal favorite is the fishing monster-fish (it is of course the Deep-sea Anglerfish), shown in the image to the left.

Just like something out of a badly scripted 90´s film, scientists have found previously unknown insects preserved in pieces of amber. As you probably know (from the Jurassic park opening scene), what happens is that insects become captured in the resin dropping from a tree, before the resin eventually fossilizes, becoming Amber.

Now i think it’s fair to say that there will be no T-Rex clones running around in skull-shaped islands as a result of this find, but it’s still a damn neat thing. Animals that have been extinct for millions of years, perfectly preserved in a time-capsule of nature. Sadly the news piece that i found this in has little to no information about this whole thing, in fact it just-barely mentions the necessary facts in the story, but here is the most worth-while quote from it:

Several types of arachnids, as well spider webs and plant remains, were found fossilised in the amber discovered at the site, added Penalver, a researcher with the science ministry’s Geology and Mine Institute.

You’ve heard it before, that a picture can be worth a thousand words, and in some cases, it really is true. We’ve all seen pictures from various fields of science that just makes you stop for a second and wonder how nature has been able to create these scenes and objects, and how incredibly talented photographers (or whoever made it look so good) have been able to capture them. This post is just a short list of galleries and image sites I’ve recently come across, that made me go WOW!

Well pictures are basically just snapshots of light in a scene at a given moment, so why not start the list with a collection of the 20 Most Incredible Light Phenomena? This list really is incredible, and it’ll show you some of the most daunting visual experiences that you can have from the surface of Earth, most of them actually visible to the naked eye under the right circumstances. I’ll save you the whole 1000 words and let you see for yourself.

The next gallery is going above the surface of the Earth, looking down at it. While not as visually pleasing, the pictures in this collection of the 10 Greatest Major-Impact Craters on Earth (actually from the same cool picture site, www.environmentalgraffiti.com) really tell their story, and with the accompanying text, you can actually learn some things. As an added bonus, you get to see the traces from some of the most important events in the history of the Planet.

Moving on to the field of biology, National Geographic presents a small sample of Colorful Sea Creatures that makes you and me look quite boring if you ask me. I’ve always been fascinated by the diversity of sea animals, and the more we investigate of the deep oceans, the more strange species we’ll definitely come across.

Last, but definitely not least, I want to mention a special site that has been made available. If you’ve been looking at astronomical pictures, you’ve most certainly come about pictures from the NASA archive, who have been producing an amazing amount of pictures from ground and space-based telescopes as well as satellites, probes and rovers all around the Solar System. So whats new? Well NASA has in collaboration with Internet Archive created a new dedicated media site, that holds the largest amount of NASA images to date, and promises to add a lot more so we can all be amazed by space, and the incredible amount of work behind the pictures. Believe me, I’ve tried reducing the data from telescopes in order to get just a vaguely decent picture, and it’s everything but easy.
The new site is located at www.nasaimages.org, and will also include sound and video footage. If you’re more interested, go read the press release.

This marks the end of my short list, but there are an uncountable number of amazing galleries out there, so if you have some favorites that are not on the list, please share them with us in the comments below.

Well here’s a science i know absolutely nothing about, in fact i like to make fun of my friends in those fields saying it’s not a science at all (but in truth i must admire them for being able to read the insane amount of textbooks they have). Given all this, it’s a good guess that i’ll almost never make posts about these things, mostly because i know nothing about it, but i found this pretty fascinating and wanted to share it with you guys (well that and i can’t find much interesting to write about in real science ;) ).

I stumbled over these two videos on youtube, and they illustrate nicely how desperate the human animal is to conform with it’s pack. If everyone else thinks one thing will you be strong enough to resist and not conform with the rest?

These two example are quite tame, but still pretty fascinating, and I’m hoping now that I’m aware of it, it will be something you can consciously resist.

I’ll try not to be prematurely excited here, but there are rumors running around that a team of astronomers have found 2 more planets around Gliese 581 (we already know of one planet there), which might be located in the habitable zone, meaning that the distance to the star is just right so that the temperature is in the range where liquid water can exist. And liquid water is the one thing that makes a planet habitable by human standards.

The team hasn’t yet released any data, so we have to wait for that before drawing any conclusions, but if this is true, it is exciting news. Also, the method used to discover the planets make it hard to tell exactly what size and composition they have. If you’ve followed Reduced Mass for a while, and remember our articles on exoplanets, you’ll remember how most planets have been found using the method of radial velocity. This method measures a characteristic wobble of the star caused by orbiting planets. Until now this method has been cursed by not being able to find small (rocky) planets in large enough distances from the planets for them to be habitable. But now the technology has improved to the point where this is actually possible.

Thats all good, but there are still some problems with this method. For one it can only give a lower limit on the mass, meaning that it could be more massive than the proposed 5 Earth masses, depending on the how the solar system is tilted compared to our line of sight. Secondly it can only deduce the (err, lower limit of the) mass of the planet, and not the size, which is very important to know weather it is made of rock or gas. Rock is good, gas is bad, from a habitable point of view of course. So even if the data holds, and this is a 5 Earth mass planet in the habitable zone, we won’t know if it’s actually habitable before we are able to either analyze the light from the planet itself and determine the chemical composition of the atmosphere (if any), or somehow measure the size of it (meaning its radius).

Well fish is not exactly the most noisy type of animal I could think of, but this LiveScience article nevertheless attributes human speech and general vertebrate sound production to the evolution of vocal capabilities found in certain fish, like the Midshipman fish.

It is widely accepted that humans and most other land animals have evolved from fish in the Devonian period where fish of the Sarcopterygii class (eg. lungfish) evolved lungs and protolimbs and were able to leave the sea as Tetrapods and kickstart the evolution of land animals. What has now been proposed, is that vocal communication, a thing we normally consider as intelligent behaviour (although I’m sure you can name a few exceptions), may have originated in sea animals and passed along to the rest of us through evolution. An evolution that has also brought us the close to impossible lingua of biologists.

The LiveScience article also has an accompanying video showing some of the sound production skills of fish, however primitive these skills may be. Although the video is in a pretty bad quality, and in fact a bit boring, there are some fun facts in there. For example the Midshipman Fish male make a humming sound to attract females, a sound that to me sounds a bit like the noise in computer speakers if the jack is not plugged in. This hum will last for at least an hour, and will be repeated throughout the night. OMG! I wonder if the females really likes the sound or are engaging the males just to make them shut the fuck up.

The buzzwords of this era is definitely “green”. It’s hip and popular, everyone wants to save the world (or at least themselves) from the doom of global warming. One of the biggest obstacles is the massive use of fossil fuels, especially on personal transport (cars/motorcycles etc). Here’s the thing though! There is a perfectly clean fuel that we have in abundance (unlike many of the other clean proposals), hydrogen!

You may think it’s like the electric or solar car, a nice idea but ultimately a car that noone really uses (although that’s certainly changing for those two), but the fact of the matter is that these cars are in use around the world. In fact, right here where i live now, Reykjavík (Iceland), there are buses driving around that are run on hydrogen, and i went whale watching the other day on a boat that can also use hydrogen.

While there are many problems associated with hydrogen cars, one of the main problems is that it takes energy to create hydrogen, because we mostly get it by separating the Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms in the water (H20) molecule. And where does this energy come from? You guessed it, fossil fuels that pollute. An exception to the rule might be a country like Iceland where we actually get our energy almost exclusively from hydro-power (huge dams essentially) which is a clean and renewable source of energy, but for the rest of the world this is not the case.

That’s why i was happy to read a story about researchers from Penn state and Purdue claiming to have found a method of extracting hydrogen without leaving a carbon-footprint. Using a few different nanotubes (even more buzzwords!) and energy from the sun, they’ve been able to split water into it’s two basic atoms, and extracting the hydrogen for later use, without releasing any Carbon Dioxide. If you’re interested in the finer details of the process check out the press-release i linked at the start of this paragraph, I’m afraid i’m not much of a chemist or nano-guy, so i won’t recite the details too much.

Although the efficiency of the device is extremely low in this first try (0.3% of the energy from the sun gets translated to electric energy), they are apparently very easy and cheap to make and last for a long time. I must admit though that I’m not sure what the advantage of using this method is, as opposed to just using a traditional solar-panel with MUCH higher electricity and then using that energy to separate the molecule. But like i said before, I’m not much of a chemist.

Whatever the deal is, i personally have high hopes for hydrogen as an energy source. There are many sources around like biofuel, ethanol etc. But these are all resource that are limited, while hydrogen is by far the most common element in the universe, so advances in it’s extraction are always good news for me.