Strange attractor
Time Lapse Images of Earth at Night Taken From the International Space Station
Not bad pictures for someone traveling 7,706 meters per second, eh?
Hey Newt, you mentioned you were planning a “visionary speech” on space exploration? We know you’re a fan of putting a colony on our moon …
But judging by this chart, that’s about as bad a target for a colony as we have.
Titan, the progressive moon … a moon for America.
(via Ezra Klein, The Washington Post)
“Play the way you feel!” Chopin said … do you feel the way you play?
(via Scientific American)
This Winter’s Weird Weather Explained
Bellingham, Wash., for example, saw a high of 60 in the first week of the year, while the mercury soared to a balmy 44 in Fargo, 61 in New York City, 72 in parts of Colorado and 79 in Tucson. In some regions of the Midwest, temperatures are 40 degrees higher than average. And snow covers just 19 percent of the country at the moment, compared to a usual coverage of about 50 percent at this time of year.
Several forces are at work, experts say. To begin with, La Niña conditions have pushed warm water toward Australia in the western Pacific, leaving ocean waters off the American West coast about 5 degrees F colder than usual.
Emily Sohn has the rest here.
(That image up there is of a a skier looking for snow in Winterberg, Germany.)
I just hope this doesn’t mean we’re going to have a particularly hot summer.
Florida Python Invasion Could Spread
Burmese pythons (Python molurus bivittatus) established what was thought to be isolated breeding populations in the Florida Everglades a few decades ago. Now concern is rising that the python invasion could spread to the Florida Keys and other islands in the Caribbean. Hatchlings, it turns out, are saltwater swimmers.
This is the next step in cloaking by metamaterials. It has nothing to with altering time, it’s a question of hiding an event from light, just like spatial cloaking. Still, it’s a cool result.
As the horses remaining in this race dwindle to a quartet of middle-aged, white males, it’s worth revisiting their views on science issues.
Of course, does their electorate even care? Do GOP voters care as much as their opposition does that these guys are ignoring good science? We’ve looked at the possible neurological differences in liberals and conservatives before.
You know what’s really interesting? When you read this collection of responses, you see glimmers of reality shine through. Tiny hints that yes, these guys do have real, expensive college degrees and do understand that climate science is real and evolution is an established rule. But then you see them switch back to party-pander mode, obscuring their own intellect and replacing it with the anti-intellectualism that they think their voters so desperately crave.
And when you’re only fed anti-intellectualism, how will you develop and appetite for anything else?
The first-ever observed hybrid may be a sign the predators are adapting to climate change.
The mating of the local Australian black-tip shark with its global counterpart, the common black-tip, was an unprecedented discovery with implications for the entire shark world.
Where Would Earth-like Planets Find Water?
We don’t know how Earth got tanked-up with its water supply, so how could we guess what’s happening on worlds thousands of light-years away?
