Nowadays new exoplanets are found every week. Exoplanet blog systemic has an article from February about possible Earth-like planets around Alpha Centauri B.
What’s remarkable is the easiness with which they could be detected if some resources are spent. And if a planet like that exist, it’s one of the top destinations for future interstellar probes [...]
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There’s been some press about the “invisibility cloak” that would become possible with the new metamaterials that can exhibit negative refractive index. There’s an article about a specific “lens” design here at the Japanese Tech On site. The basic idea is just to bend the light rays coming from behind the object and make them [...]
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Posted in Science, Uncategorized on Sunday 2008.05.04 | No Comments »
EDIT: Wikipedia had a good page already about it which clarified a lot, I have made corrections to my post that has been up for only a few minutes.
If this article about the memristor, a new fundamental electric circruit component is any good, then some radical new things are coming up in electronics. It’s a [...]
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Posted in Climate, Science, meta, tagged development, glacial isostatic adjustment, global warming, ground rising, Helsinki, ice age, postglacial rebound, sea level, zoning on Wednesday 2008.04.23 | 1 Comment »
Michael Tobis has discussion on sea level rise. Everybody should probably know how the IPCC sea level estimate doesn’t include ice sheet dynamics and thus is open at the top end of the scale.
I remember here in Helsinki a long time city official telling how he organized lectures on global warming around 1989 and drove [...]
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Our solar system is only marginally stable, and also “filled to the brim” with planets. If you added another planet, the system would eject planets until it reached stability. During the disk accretion and the planetary embryo collisions, small variations determined the characteristics of the system, for example how many rocky planets would result from [...]
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I’ve been wondering at this ever since the meme has been circulating. People make a printer that shoots glue, layer upon layer and thus it can print 3d objects.
But saying such 3d printers will replace factories and manufacturing is very clearly wrong. Take a look at almost anything you’re using or wearing right now. It’s [...]
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Michael Tobis, a climate scientist, thinks climate modeling is progressing too slowly and might have even reached a plateau of sorts. There still aren’t very good regional precipitation predictions for example.
And he thinks, far simplified, that the disorganized mess of patching the old fortran codes is the reason - the climatology community should take a [...]
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Posted in Astronomy, Motivation, Science, Spacecraft, Uncategorized, tagged christmas, cutaways, flight international, foton, soyuz, venera, venus, yes2 on Friday 2007.12.21 | No Comments »
I can link you some nice images:
Nicolas Pillet’s photo gallery of Soyuz / Foton-M3 & YES2. An example.
Don P. Mitchell’s restored Venus photos from Soviet Venera probe material. An example.
And finally, for the technology fetishists like me, Flight International’s generous offer of past cutaway drawings, space systems section. Or have a look at this cutie from the engine cutaways [...]
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Hello, had some time with not so many posts. I’ll write more stuff soon, including something that is slightly offtopic for a spaceflight blog.
But in the mean time, the newest Carnival of Space had a nice link to a fine blog which had a great picture (beware it’s full size on the front page) that New Horizons snapped of Io in front of Jupiter. Also shows the glow of the Volcano Tvashtar in the [...]
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Ray Pierrehumbert is writing a book on it, working name being The Climate Book and the work in progress is available online here. Link via Rabett Run.
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