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Image: Pascal Lee / Haughton-Mars Project
The Air Force doesn’t exactly want its drones powered by purple bacteria. Instead, the air service would like to use a synthetic dye, based one the microorganisms, to juice up its robotic planes.
The U.S. armed services are on a slow crawl towards environmental friendliness, investing in everything from massive solar arrays to algae-based jet fuels to trash-powered generators. Military-funded researchers are also experimenting with downright novel methods to come up with green fuel and power. Like this bacteria-and-drones project.
Four galaxies are involved in this pile-up 280 million light years from Earth. The bright spiral galaxy at the center of the image is punching through the cluster at almost two million miles per hour.
See Wired Science in Space for more.
TV Shows to Watch for July 12 - July 18, 2009
There are three new TV series debuting this week, two season premiers and part one of a mini-series. New series debuting are: Drop Dead Diva on Lifetime, Dark Blue on TNT, and Michael and Michael Have Issues on Comedy Central. The two season premiers are Leverage on TNT and Dirty Sexy Money on ABC.
Visit Gunkee on Associated Content for this week’s TV update.
The majority of us will never get a chance to visit the moon personally. But it only takes 2.5 seconds for a ham operator to send a message to the moon and back. And that’s exactly what happened on June 26 and 27, 2009, as hundreds of people around the world bounced their voices off the moon as they celebrated World Moon Bounce Day as part of a tribute to the Apollo 11 lunar landing 40 years ago. Voices that were sent to the moon and back included those of ham operators, school children and at least one astronaut.
Mechanical Engineer Eric Stackpole told Wired Science, “I’ve been a huge fan of going to the moon and lunar exploration.” Stackpole sent his voice from the 150-foot parabolic dish in the hills behind Stanford University. “Now I can say my voice has been heard from the moon, and I’m not even an astronaut!”
Photo taken from Wikimedia Commons. Photo Credit: NASA; Photo Copyright: NASA
New Photo of Swan Nebula Star Birth
Three dozen huge, hot baby stars burn brightly and reflect off of dust from collapsed stars in this ghostly photo of the Swan Nebula. New stars will be formed as the wind from the active star blows swirling shapes into the dust.
The Swan Nebula is also known as the Omega Nebula or the Lobster Nebula, and this star-forming region is around 5,500 light years from Earth and is one of the biggest in the Milky Way, stretching 15 light years across.
The above image is a three-color composite captured by the European Southern Observatory’s 3.58-meter New Technology Telescope at La Silla, Chile. [Wired Science]
It’s official. Back by Popular Demand are LOOM, The Dig, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and
Star Wars Battlefront II Headline List of Games Soon to be Available via Direct Download! LucasArts’ made a huge announcement that a whole bunch of their old games will be available on Steam beginning on Wednesday, July 8, 2009.
The complete list of games to be released on July 8 via Steam includes:
• Armed and Dangerous™
• Indiana Jones® and the Fate of Atlantis
• Indiana Jones® and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure
• LEGO® Indiana Jones: The Original Adventure
• LOOM™
• Star Wars Battlefront® II
• Star Wars Republic Commando®
• Star Wars Starfighter™
• The Dig®
• Thrillville®: Off the Rails™
About Steam
The leading online platform for PC games and digital entertainment, Steam delivers new
releases and online services to over 20 million PC users around the world. For more
information, please visit Steam Games.
Source:
It is summertime in the south and that means mosquito’s especially if you live near the water. We do and those little pesky bugs can ruin a good outdoor barbeque. Not only that, but if a person gets bit by one then there is the concern of catching any number of diseases they can carry.
We found a good solution to get rid of those pesky mosquito’s with the Mosquito Magnet. Before we used the Mosquito Magnet it was hard to stay outside in the evening or at night for any length of time. Check out this video on how to set up a mosquito trap with the Mosquito Magnet. It is very, very simple and if you get one too your mosquito problems will also disappear like ours did!
It seems the brainiacs at NASA are asking for the general publics help. They are looking for the best way to analyze and electronically catalog a precious collection of notes that chronicle the early history of the human space flight program.NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, has transmitted its first images since reaching lunar orbit June 23. The spacecraft has two cameras -- a low resolution Wide Angle Camera and a high resolution Narrow Angle Camera. Collectively known as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC, they were activated June 30. The cameras are working well and have returned images of a region a few kilometers east of Hell E crater in the lunar highlands south of Mare Nubium.
As the moon rotates beneath LRO, LROC gradually will build up photographic maps of the lunar surface. To view these first calibration images, visit:
"Our first images were taken along the moon's terminator -- the dividing line between day and night -- making us initially unsure of how they would turn out," said LROC Principal Investigator Mark Robinson of Arizona State University in Tempe. "Because of the deep shadowing, subtle topography is exaggerated, suggesting a craggy and inhospitable surface. In reality, the area is similar to the region where the Apollo 16 astronauts safely explored in 1972. While these are magnificent in their own right, the main message is that LROC is nearly ready to begin its mission."
LRO will help NASA identify safe landing sites for future explorers, locate potential resources, describe the moon's radiation environment and demonstrate new technologies.
The satellite also has started to activate its six other instruments. The Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector will look for regions with enriched hydrogen that potentially could have water ice deposits. The Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation is designed to measure the moon's radiation environment. Both were activated on June 19 and are functioning normally.
Instruments expected to be activated during the next week and calibrated are the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter, designed to build 3-D topographic maps of the moon's landscape; the Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment, which will make temperature maps of the lunar surface; and the Miniature Radio Frequency, or Mini-RF, an experimental radar and radio transmitter that will search for subsurface ice and create detailed images of permanently-shaded craters.
The final instrument, the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project, will be activated after the other instruments have completed their calibrations, allowing more time for residual contaminants from the manufacture and launch of LRO to escape into the vacuum of space. This instrument is an ultraviolet-light imager that will use starlight to search for surface ice. It will take pictures of the permanently-shaded areas in deep craters at the lunar poles.
"Accomplishing these significant milestones moves us closer to our goals of preparing for safe human return to the moon, mapping the moon in unprecedented detail, and searching for resources," said LRO Project Scientist Richard Vondrak of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
While its instruments are being activated and tested, the spacecraft is in a special elliptical commissioning orbit around the moon. The orbit takes less fuel to maintain than the mission's primary orbit. The commissioning orbit's closest point to the lunar surface is about 19 miles over the moon's south pole, and its farthest point is approximately 124 miles over the lunar north pole.
After the spacecraft and instruments have completed their initial calibrations, the spacecraft will be directed into its primary mission orbit in August, a nearly-circular orbit about 31 miles above the lunar surface.
Goddard built and manages LRO, a NASA mission with international participation from the Institute for Space Research in Moscow. Russia provides the neutron detector aboard the spacecraft.
For more information about LRO's cameras and to view the first images, visit:
For more information about the LRO mission, visit:
The LRO mission is providing regular updates via Twitter. To follow the spacecraft, visit:
For more photos and more visit:
Credits:
Grey Hautaluoma, Headquarters, Washington , grey.hautaluoma-1@nasa.gov
Nancy Neal Jones, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., nancy.n.jones@nasa.gov
Nicole Staab, Arizona State University, Tempe, nstaab@asu.edu
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