It's a good day for nerds.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Wind Tunnel Tests Reveal Pterosaurs Could Soar for Hours

7 Amazing Exoplanets [Interactive]

Flying ophidians! Physicists uncover how snakes soar between trees [Video]

Beware 'Imbibing Idiot Bias'

[Ronja]

Thank you - definitely marking this thread as worthwhile.

[klr]

Wind Tunnel Tests Reveal Pterosaurs Could Soar for Hours
...

"It's a good day for flying ..."

I saw the thread title and was reminded of a line from a song. As usual.

[Rob]

Wind Tunnel Tests Reveal Pterosaurs Could Soar for Hours
...

"It's a good day for flying ..."

I saw the thread title and was reminded of a line from a song. As usual.

When you're old enough...

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Astronomers Get First Peek at Atmosphere of a "Super-Earth" Exoplanet

New constraints on a relatively small extrasolar world are beginning to reveal what the planet is made of--and whether it looks anything like our own

By John Matson December 1, 2010

Someday in the coming years, if astronomers finally succeed in locating a virtual Earth twin outside the solar system—a tiny dot of a world at a temperate, life-enabling distance from a sunlike star—the achievement will hardly be cause for resting on observational laurels. Instead another race will begin: to characterize the planet and its atmosphere and to determine if the world is truly habitable or, tantalizingly, if it is already inhabited by some extraterrestrial life-form.

In the meantime, astronomers are honing their techniques on the closest thing available—so-called super-Earths, just a few times the mass of our own planet, which are too hot to be habitable but are interesting in their own right. To that end, a team of researchers has managed to capture the light spectrum of a super-Earth backlit by its host star. The measurements provide an unprecedented glimpse of the atmosphere of a relatively small planet; most worlds that have been located in other planetary systems are behemoths more massive than Jupiter. The research appears in the December 2 issue of Nature. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

Balance of article at URL above.

[FBM]

This is where I get my nerd on: http://www.sciencedaily.com/

[Gawdzilla Sama]

India Proposes Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Monitoring System
In an attempt to resolve a sticking point between the U.S. and China, Indian negotiators have proposed monitoring the emissions responsible for climate change from all large countries

By Lisa Friedman and Climatewire December 1, 2010

India is pushing a global emissions monitoring system in Cancun talks that could become the centerpiece of a compromise with the United States if other developing countries sign on. Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh is said to expect a "quid pro quo" from the United States to make the deal work, new documents show.

In proposing a system that the United States and China might agree upon, Ramesh in no uncertain terms told U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern and Deputy National Security Adviser Michael Froman that money and technology assistance to developing countries must be part of any deal on formulating a transparent system. Moreover, he said, extending the 1997 Kyoto Protocol beyond its expiration date in 2012 is a key element to any agreement.

"Let me also say that without a firm commitment to have a second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol and improved mitigation pledges from the USA, the [transparency] framework I am suggesting simply will not fly," Ramesh wrote.

Balance of article at URL above.

[cowiz]

You missed today's announcement that we've been underestimating the number of stars in the universe by a factor of 3

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101201/ap_ ... arry_night

[Gawdzilla Sama]

You ignored today's announcement

Yes, I did.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Three times as many stars in sky
Posted on December 1st, 2010

The chance of alien life in space got a fresh boost tonight with the announcement that astronomers have discovered there are three times as many stars in the universe than was previously thought.

Scientists revealed that they have seriously underestimated the number of other suns in other galaxies – and that means there must be many more planets orbiting them where ET might live.

Galaxies are vast star cities, each containing many billions of stars. But as well as bright stars like the sun, there are many much fainter ones called red dwarfs.

The dimmer stars are difficult enough to detect in our own Milky Way spiral galaxy. But they are harder still to spot in more distant galaxies.

Now powerful instruments on the Keck Telescope on Hawaii has been able to pick out the red dwarfs in eight massive so-called elliptical galaxies which lie at a relatively close distance of 50 million to 300 million light-years.

The astronomers were startled to discover that red dwarfs – which are between a tenth and a fifth the mass of the sun – are 20 times more common in elliptical galaxies than they had imagined.

The discovery tripled the total number of stars of all types counted together throughout the universe. And it is exciting because a red dwarf called Gliese 581 in our own galaxy is already believed to host an Earthlike planet.

Red dwarfs are also billions of years older than stars like the sun which means any life would have had much longer to evolve.

Lead researcher Pieter van Dokkum, of America’s Yale University, whose paper appears this week in Nature, said: “There are possibly trillions of Earths orbiting these stars.”

He added: “No one knew how many of these stars there were. Different theoretical models predicted a wide range of possibilities, so this answers a longstanding question about just how abundant these stars are.”

Colleague Charlie Conroy of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said: “We usually assume other galaxies look like our own. But this suggests other conditions are possible in other galaxies. So this discovery could have a major impact on our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution.”

• Discover space for yourself and do fun science with a telescope. Here is Skymania’s advice on how to choose a telescope. We also have a guide to the different types of telescope available. Check out our monthly sky guide too!
©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

Please click here to get FREE email alerts of our latest space stories!

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Alien life form ‘is here on Earth’

Posted on November 30th, 2010

NASA scientists will announce a major discovery this Thursday that could boost the chance of life on other worlds. Experts believe they will say they have found a new form of life on Earth that is completely alien to anything known before.

NASA, who have called a full scale press conference for tomorrow, have tried to keep their findings under wraps, though an accompanying scientific paper has been released to some journalists under embargo.

Skymania has not seen the paper and so has been free to do some detective work to discover what will be announced. Despite wild speculation on the internet, there is unlikely to be an announcement that extra-terrestrials have been discovered, for the reasons very well put forward by Stuart Atkinson’s Cumbrian Sky.

But our own investigations suggest that it follows a breakthrough in the discovery of microbes in a lake that get their energy from the usually poisonous arsenic. Experts say this shows they had a completely different origin to any other creature known on our planet. It means that life began not just once but at least twice on Earth.

A key scientist on NASA’s panel will be Dr Felisa Wolfe-Simon who has spent two years investigating Mono Lake, close to California’s Yosemite National Park. The lake has no outlet and has, over many millenia, built up one of the highest natural concentrations of arsenic on Earth.

Geobiologist Dr Wolfe-Simon has been looking to see whether microbes with a totally different make-up to that of conventional carbon-based life could have developed. There was an interesting article about her search for alien life on Earth in NASA’s online Astrobiology Magazine.

The importance that NASA attaches to her discovery and its implications for finding extra-terrestrial life is demonstrated by the fact that they will have on tomorrow’s panel experts on two other sites in the solar system where life might have developed.

They are Pamela Conrad who is looking for life on Mars and Steven Benner who is studying Saturn’s largest moon Titan which has a dense atmosphere like Earth but lakes of liquid methane rather than water. Also on the panel will be ecologist James Elser who is involved with a NASA-funded search for ET.

All life previously discovered is of one basic type because it relies on phosphorous as an essential building block. The newly found microbes seem to use arsenic instead.

Astrobiologist Dr Lewis Dartnell, of the Centre for Planetary Sciences in London, told Skymania today: “Mono Lake has a very high concentration of arsenic dissolved in it which is usually poisonous and consequently there’s not much life.

“I’m 90 per cent certain that Felisa has found something in Mono Lake and they have been able to demonstrate in some way that it uses arsenic in its metabolism rather than be poisoned by it.”

He added: “Phosphorous is key and absolutely essential for life. It forms the backbone of DNA. Every form of life of Earth we have known so far depends on phosphorous as well as another molecule called ATP, an energy storage molecule, or biological battery.

“It is exciting to find life in an arsenic-rich environment. If these organisms are using arsenic in their metabolism, it demonstrates that there are other life forms to that as we know it.”

Dr Dartnell went on: “There is no reason to expect that life arose just once on Earth. It could have arisen any number of times. The only reason that all life we have found so far has all descended from the same progenitor – the same mother of life – is because we’ve been looking for life in the same way.

“But if you start looking in extreme environments like Mono Lake, where our kind of life doesn’t survive very well, that’s where you find fundamentally different life forms with a separate origin. They’re aliens, but aliens that share the same home as us.”

Dr Wolfe-Simon has previously said of her research: “It may prove that there are other possibilities that are beyond our imagination. It opens the door for us to think about biology in ways we have never thought.

“We are going to look for life on other planets and we only know to look for that which we know. This may help us to develop tools to look for something we have never seen.”

Last year NASA revealed the detection of plumes of methane on Mars that offered compelling evidence that there might be life on the red planet.

British space scientist Professor Colin Pillinger, who has devoted his life to finding life on Mars, told Skymania: “If they have found anything which they can attribute to arsenic-based life then it is very interesting and obviously has connotations for other places in the universe where life forms other than the ones on Earth may very well have developed.”

• Discover space for yourself and do fun science with a telescope. Here is Skymania’s advice on how to choose a telescope. We also have a guide to the different types of telescope available. Check out our monthly sky guide too!
©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

Please click here to get FREE email alerts of our latest space stories!

[Trolldor]

Everytime I read something like this I get a little excited, but what hits me secondarily is how little people give a shit.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Everytime I read something like this I get a little excited, but what hits me secondarily is how little people give a shit.

TMH, I used to post hundreds of these links, and mostly they never got a response. But people read them. More care than speak.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Everytime I read something like this I get a little excited, but what hits me secondarily is how little people give a shit.

TMH, I used to post hundreds of these links, and mostly they never got a response. But people read them. More care than speak.

I do a lot of that. Usually there is nothing really to add - unless the article is complete bollocks! I tend to read most of them though.

[Ronja]

Everytime I read something like this I get a little excited, but what hits me secondarily is how little people give a shit.

TMH, I used to post hundreds of these links, and mostly they never got a response. But people read them. More care than speak.

I do a lot of that. Usually there is nothing really to add - unless the article is complete bollocks! I tend to read most of them though.