Trump orders all climate scientists to bend over and jam their heads under the sand

Well close enough.

Trump has ordered the US Environmental Protection Agency to remove all climate change information from its websites.

My mind boggles at how this is all going in the USA.

What next? NASA told to de-orbit all climate research satellites? Or perhaps they'll just have to recalibrate them to "alternative facts"?

Geek out with these space and science events in Canberra

There are plenty of events coming up for Canberra space and science fans, with an inevitable clash unfortunately:

• European Space Agency mission experts on the Rosetta Mission
• Nobel Laureate Professor Brian Schmidt on the future of science
• Peter Garrett on ecology and climate science
• Anna Frebel (MIT) on the search for our galaxy's oldest stars
• Badri Younes (NASA) on the interplanetary communications and navigation network.

All of these events are free. Descriptions and details below are as published by the various event organisers.

The genesis of a new science-based political party?

An idea that has been tossing around for some time with a friend on Twitter Paul Salanitri was resurrected amid the spectre of Sophie Mirabella as Australia's Minister for Innovation, Industry and Science.

The idea is to form a political party based on building support for Education and STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. Not a single-issue party, but a party that is unashamedly and solidly grounded on improving education, and on educating our elected representatives as to the importance and benefits that flow from an educated population.

For far too long, the major political parties in this country have targeted everything they do towards society's "lowest common denominator".

Meanwhile, so many of our nation's scientists, educators and health experts are left seething as their funding is raided yet again to pay for nonsense like marriage bonuses, and their reputations as objective researchers is disparaged in the pursuit of cheap political points.

And along the way, we've managed to make senators of a gun nut because 318,000 people didn't know the difference between Liberal Democrats and Liberal Party, an unheard-of motoring enthusiast on the back of just 3% of a quota or less than 13,000 votes, and a sports party person who got just 2070 votes! These people will hold the balance of power in the Senate from July 2014, and determine what Abbott promises make it into law...

Some people think we should just throw our support behind the Greens. But the stark reality is that many voters will not vote for the Greens no matter how much they try to portray themselves as mainstream. The recent election has clearly demonstrated that an unprecedented proportion of the voting population were casting about desperately looking for an alternative they could vote for. A full 32% of first preference votes went to parties other than the ALP, Liberals and Nationals. That's almost 3.4 million people. For Pete's sake, more than half a million people voted first for Clive Palmer's party!

Ermagawd! School science experiment opens the gates of Hell!

This stunning little clip did the rounds a while back, but I have such a backlog of cool things to blog, and I know this one is in there somewhere. So as it's doing the rounds of social media again, there's no time like the present...

This chemical reaction makes a pretty impressive pyroclastic volcano analog. But that's only just the beginning!


According to The Daily Dot, one of the Polish creators of this abomination described it thus:

We've mixed two well known chemical experiments. Chemical Volcano + Pharaon Snake. Chemical Volcano is burning of NH4Cr2O7 which makes porous, green Cr2O3 as a product. Inside volcano we've hidden 4 tablets with HgSCN. This chemical burns producing N2 which is making a foam 20 times bigger than initial tablet.

It's all very well to know how they let the beast out, but how the hell do they get it back in??

This is not a movie trailer. This is a real space mission pitch.

Scientists are often accused of doing great science, but not doing very good at selling their science.

Perhaps this very cool 'trailer' is a sign things are changing around that?

It's for LISA—the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna—a European proposal to put three laser-equipped spacecraft into an Earth-trailing orbit and configured in a triangle with each side measuring one million kilometres. It uses lasers between the craft to measure separations down to picometres.

The goal? To detect that elusive phenomenon the gravity wave.


I like it!

This is how the mission purpose is described on the project website:

What I've been reading lately

Just an archival catch-up of recent The Beach House Weekly—my Paper.li auto summaries—of an interesting few weeks in science, space and Australian politics.

From rockets to meteorites, Roxon to Rudd, novas to Nobels, planet hunters to metric hunters.

25 March 2013
18 March 2013
11 March 2013
4 March 2013
25 February 2013
18 February 2013
11 February 2013
4 February 2013
28 January 2013
21 January 2013
14 January 2013
7 January 2013
31 December 2012
24 December 2012
17 December 2012
10 December 2012

Intriguing to look back through actually. Something in there for everyone.

This Cosmoquest Hangout is an absolute cracker! Live on air with a scanning electron microscope.

Scanning electron microscope picture of
a fly's eyes. (Screengrab

Courtesy of Cosmoquest, in this Google+ live Hangout recording you are taken on a guided tour of the nano world by Dr Jon Hillier, an electron microscopist in the Nanoscience & Technology Division at Argonne National Laboratory, US. As Cosmoquest describe the Hangout:

Jon’s research includes the development of state-of-the-art electron and ion beam instrumentation for materials and nanoscale research. He is most well known for his work in 3 dimensional Focused Ion Beam (FIB) tomography and complex sample fabrication for electron microscopy. His characterisation of diamond thin films has lead to the development of the artificial retina.

Watch some pretty amazing live on-air demonstrations of scanning electron microscopy.


The hosts are left speechless during the demos. Understandably so. One of the coolest Hangouts I've seen yet.

And Hillier promised to come back from a reprise with an even better microscope...

My photos of all the Enlighten projections for Questacon, Canberra

Over several hours on Sunday night, I photographed all of the wonderful projections on the landmark buildings in Canberra's parliamentary triangle. There are too many for a single blog post, so I'm splitting them up by building.



These photos are from Questacon, also known as the National Science Centre. There are quite a few in this set, all with gorgeous science themes.

Is this the most awesome selfie ever? And it's on Mars...

This latest photograph from Mars Curiosity really does set the benchmark. Gigapan have done one of their incredible photo merges to form this huge single image that lets you pan around and zoom in almost to the point of seeing individual dirt grains.

The screen grab on this page is only a fraction of the shot. You have to click through to GigaPan, go full screen, then immerse yourself! Look down to the left too, where you can see the red dirt scuffed off the surface, leaving a grey patch near a white gypsum vein. That's where Curiosity performed its first drill test just today.

The only thing you can't see in this image is the robotic arm itself, because that's where the camera is mounted. In mosaicing the photos, they have to choose one frame with the arm right out of the way down low, or else there'd be bits of arm scattered across the shot. Of course there'll be some crazies out there who can't wrap their heads around this, and will be claiming the photo was taken by a person, meaning that it's all staged somewhere here on Earth. Let them have there delusions...but it's just like taking a 360-degree panorama shot with your smartphone with neither your phone or your feet showing. If you have an iThing, try it for yourself with the free app 360 Pano.

This is the official JPL animation showing how the photos were compiled:

Siding Springs Observatory damaged by bushfire (FINAL UPDATE)

Anglo-Australian Observatory, Siding Springs, in the firing line

Australia's premier astronomy site, the Sidings Spring Observatory in the Warrumbungle Mountains near Coonabarabran, has been damaged by an out of control bushfire this afternoon.

All staff were evacuated from the observatory in time. Temperature sensors shot to 120 degrees Celsius as the fire-front passed over the site. Flames have been caught on webcams.

Weather readings from the site, posted by English astronomer James Allen, currently working at SSO.
Note the peak temperature!

The Rural Fire Service has reported two nearby properties as destroyed and the observatory as "damaged". A journalist has cited a good RFS source as saying the damage "is significant".

New exoplanet PH2 b is the second for citizen science project PlanetHunters.org

Artist's impression of exoplanet PH2 b

Tens of thousands of people are contributing to online citizen science projects.

And it would be a rare individual who wouldn't admit to a secret hope to one day be one of the people to discover a new type of galaxy (www.GalaxyZoo.org), unravel an ancient mystery (www.ancientlives.org), or find a new planet around a distant star. And that is just what has happened for people working on www.planethunters.org.

For the second time, PlanetHunters has announced a new exoplanet. Designated PH2 b, this find is a Jupiter-sized planet, in the so-called Goldilocks zone where atmospheric temperatures of 42 degrees make water viable—except for it being a gas giant... It's orbiting a star that is similar to our sun, and goes by the memorable name of KIC 12735740.

This brings the confirmed exoplanet total to 854, with three in 2013 already.

In addition, PlanetHunters has announced they have another 42 exoplanet candidates undergoing validation processes, including 15 in the habitable zone.

The paper has been published on arxiv.org and commentary is on the PlanetHunters website.

The Exoplanet smartphone app allows you to follow such developments, long before it gets picked up by mainstream media.

Citizen science projects such as PlanetHunters allow volunteers around the world to contribute to real science, and scientists to leverage the innate human ability to detect patterns in data that computers have failed to find.

Some other astronomy-based citizen science projects include as Vesta Mappers, Moon Mappers, and Mercury Mappers.

Like to take your astronomy interest to another level? How about some free online university courses through Coursera.org?

Are you interested in more than looking at the pretty space pictures? You can now take university-standard courses for free through www.coursera.org.

I'm in the middle of the Introduction to Astronomy course, run from Duke Iniversity in the USA. It is admittedly a pretty tough course—especially if you haven't done any algebra for 30-plus years like me! There is a lot of maths. Although there were originally some 65,000 people enrolled, and the maths load has taken a heavy toll on them, there are still more than 6500 people who've made it through the first three weeks. That's right—one lecturer, two assistants, 6500 students!

There are two more directly space-related course coming up in January, as well as an interesting sounding one called "Image and video processing: from Mars"! Anyone with a telescope knows it doesn't take long before you progress from looking at the night sky to wanting to photograph it so you can show others what you are seeing. And suddenly your hobby becomes a whole lot more involved...

This link is my wish list, although I think January needs a dose of reality! From that page you can easily browse the upcoming courses and come up with your own list.

(Declaration: other than being a current student, I have no links with Coursera.org)

The obscenely-named Australian Vaccination network called to account. At last.

Amidst a very sad news day, a glimmer of light in this news.

The Australian Vaccine Network is a lobbying group that is anything but. It's charter is to oppose vaccinations—and indeed medication of any sort—irrespective of any and all research and evidence to the contrary.

But its name has confused and misled the public for years. Until now.

In this great news, the NSW Fair Trading Minister Anthony Roberts paid the head of "AVN" Meryl Dorey (resist urge to deliberately misspell her name) a visit to very publicly deliver an official demand that the group change its name within two months or face de-association:

NASA Johnson Style - rocket science meets Gangnam in a brilliant video.

Oh this is wonderful: a whole bunch of the crew at NASA's Johnson Space Centre get in on the act in this Gangnam parody, including astronauts  Tracy Caldwell Dyson, Mike Massimino and Clay Anderson, and even the Chariot Moon Rover that Keri Bean did some work for.

Enjoy:


I love how for such a funky effort, the description goes all trad NASA agency-speak:

NASA Johnson Style is a volunteer outreach video project created by the students of NASA's Johnson Space Center. It was created as an educational parody of Psy's Gangnam Style. The lyrics and scenes in the video have been re-imagined in order to inform the public about the amazing work going on at NASA and the Johnson Space Center.

Some things won't change...

(Hat tip to Keri Bean. Go to the link above and listen to her interview now—it's great. Now. Go on...)

My blog has been archived by the National Library, plus the week's readings.

The National Library of Australia run an amazing resource called Pandora that saved entire copies of important websites in Australia, creating a historical record of this new societal resource. And recently they contacted me for authorisation to duplicate my blog!

To be fair, I think it had a lot more to do with my being an election candidate that the intriguing mix of science and society news—in fact I think that was really the only reason... But hey—it means they 'accidentally' preserved a whole bunch of neat science stuff too!

So, saved for posterity, is my blog in Pandora: http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-136401.

And wrapping up some other 'saved for my own reference' info, here's the last week's readings, via paper.li, replete with slushie Tony Abbott, bouncing tiger cub, homeopathy comeuppancy, climate crisis, and lots of rocket science:
Week ending 3 December 2012

And lastly, 60,000 views! Crikey...

My readings over the last month or so...

Another catch-up of my readings via various sites and social media forums, for anyone interested (but mainly just for my own record), through the Paper.li automatic magazine tool.

There's something in here for everyone...

Week to 26 November
Week to 19 November
Week to 12 November
Week to 5 November
Week to 29 October
Week to 22 October
Week to 15 October

My interview with Keri Bean: Mars meteorologist, Curiosity Rover team member

Keri Bean in the NASA JPL Mars Yard, with the Curiosity test-bed twin 'Maggie'

Keri Bean is a meteorologist specialising in the atmospherics of other planets. She is on the team operating the Curiosity Rover for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission. Prior to MSL, Keri has had roles in the missions for other Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, a prototype Moon rover, the Phoenix Mars Lander, and the Hubble Space telescope. And she's just 25 years old! That's a pretty incredible CV to rack up already...

In this interview, Keri talks with me about her work on MSL and the other missions, plus how and why she got into space science. It all started when a tornado hit her pre-school...




(If Soundcloud widget doesn't show in your browser, use this link to play the file direct.)

2013 looks like being the year of the comet!

Comet Lovejoy, taken by astronaut Dan Burbank
from the ISS

The astronomy world has been buzzing since it was announced on 24 September - C/2012 S1 is a new comet that could be lighting up our skies like none in living history by November 2013. It's been named Comet ISON after the telescope research network used to discover it - the International Science Optical Network, using its 16" telescope in Russia.

It has since been confirmed, using one of the scopes from the public subscription-based telescope network iTelescope.

With a trajectory taking it very close to the Sun, people are predicting that it could be bright enough to be visible in daylight, like Venus. Ernesto Guido, Giovanni Sostero & Nick Howes  advised on the blog for the Associazione Fruiulana di Astronomia e Meteorologia that it will pass within 0.012AU of the Sun - with one AU being the distance of Earth from the Sun - at the end of November and about 0.4AU from Earth in early January 2014. That's about 1.8 million kilometres from the Sun.

They predict it will become a naked-eye object from early November, and peak in negative magnitudes between 25 November and 3 December, with the brightest a whopping -10.6. Given the visual flop that was the last Haley's Comet visit, they urge caution with these calculations. But calculations by others appear to confirm that it will likely be very bright.

Cyberbully pot-kettle, Greens launches, telescopes, more. The week that was.

Alan Jones learns what it's like on the receiving end; the ACT Greens campaign powers towards 20 October; the first stage of the Square Kilometre Array is turned on; a Nobel laureate yanks the rug out from under Newspoll; iPad Mini confirmed; and much more.

The week that was - my readings and posts.

What I've been reading and writing - a bit of a catch-up

This is a catch-up of my reading and writing lists as auto-compiled into e-zines by Paper.li. As usual, it is mostly for my own reference down the track, but maybe someone is interested.

The recycling bin may no longer be full of discarded newspapers, but holy moley I'm chewing through some online reading...

Editions for the week ending:

1 October

24 September

17 September

10 September

3 September

27 August

20 August

13 August

6 August

30 July

23 July

16 July

9 July

Phew. That's it. Must keep on top of this a bit better...