brainwagon

Well, today SpaceShipOne launched again, and if its final altitude of 368,000 feet is verified, will become the winner of the coveted X Prize. Congratulations to all involved. CNN.com

Volcanic unrest, that is. It appears that Mount St. Helens is rumbling a bit, enough so that scientists have posted a warning of volcanic unrest. Seismic activity at Mount St. Helens has changed significantly during the past 24 hours and the changes make us believe that there is an increased likelihood of a hazardous event, […]

Somebody had an idea that I had a long time ago: to use evolutionary techniques to evolve a better keyboard layout that QWERTY or even Dvorak. I sense a certain logic of design in the Dvorak that seems absent in the best of his evolved designs, but the evolved designs look pretty good overall.

NASA’s Genesis probe was to have parachuted into our atmosphere and snagged by special helicopters ala the old Corona project, but apparently the chutes didn’t open and bad things resulted. it is unclear whether the mission payload could be salvaged. Oops.

Finally got back to looking at the video from the crash of Armadillo Aerospace’s 48inch test vehicle. In the words of Bugs Bunny, what goes up, comes down hard. Ouch!

There were two failures of launch vehicles this weekend. The 48 inch launch vehicle of Armadillo Aerospace crashed, leaving what was described on their website as “$35,000 of rocket is now a whole lot of primo Armadillo Droppings”. Why the failure? Ran out of propellant. Doh! I’m told there are pictures and video on their […]

California scientists have created a synthetic prion, a rogue protein that was used to infect mice with a brain destroying infection. Prions are the cause of several fatal diseases, including BSE (bovine spongiform encephalitis) and CJG (Creutsfeldt-Jakob disease). It’s a nasty, nasty disease, which was chronicled in Richard Rhodes’ book Deadly Feasts. It’s not exactly […]

Francis Crick, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962 for his work with James Watson, is dead. You can get JPEGS of their 1953 paper from the Smithsonian Institute. It’s hard to quantify just how important a role that this discovery has played in the fields of biology and medicine. It’s also fun to […]

Oh, wait, I guess it is. Sorry Chewie.

The BBC is reporting that scientists Vitaliy Fadeyev and Carl Haber of Lawrence Berkeley Labs are using non-contact means to reconstruct sound from old records and wax cylinders. They have been funded by the Library of Congress to help in their preservation of the 128 million audio iteems in their inventory. You can read a […]

Nature ran an online article entitled: Could laptops run on spinach?: Solar cells turn over a new leaf. Curiously enough, I have been going over plant and animal metabolism with my son who is doing a semester of college biology, so I’ve been forced to review the chemical reactions that take place as part of […]

Everybody needs 5 lbs of Silly Putty, although I must admit I can’t imagine why. The official site is at sillyputty.com. Aaron’s Putty World offers all sorts different kinds which you can order in 1lb bags. Or you could try ordering 100lb quantities from Dupont.

After a seven year, 2.2 billion year trip, the Cassini spacecraft completed its SOI burn and entered Saturn orbit. Check out the details on CNN.com or review the project homepage. During its lifetime, Cassini is supposed to relay over three hundred thousand pictures of Saturn and its surrounding moons. Let the wallpaper downloading commence!

New Scientist is currently running an interview with Burt Rutan where he admits there was some potentially catastrophic failings in SpaceShipOne’s inaguaral space flight: a coupling collapsed when the rocket motor kicked in (the bang reported by astronaut Mike Melvill) and a brief period where the craft lost attitude control. Had this loss of control […]

I was pondering yesterday’s flight of SpaceShipOne, and decided to lookup the information surrounding the first American sub-orbital flights. Alan Shepard – Project Mercury Freedom 7 has most of the details. It’s interesting to compare the two flight profiles: Shepard pulls something over six g’s on ascent, and hits 11 on descent, whereas SpaceShipOne pulled […]