What goes up . . .

Two falling items today: a long-range paper airplane and an apparently suicidal skydiver.


The paper airplane is the product of University of Tokyo Professor Shinji Suzuki, and he wants it to be thrown out of the space station. It has been treated with chemicals to keep it from burning up as it falls through Earth's atmosphere, when its speed may reach Mach 20, according to the World Aeronautical Press Agency. The idea has received mixed responses. Suzuki and his team hope that it could "inspire new designs for lightweight re-entry vehicles, or for planes to explore the upper reaches of the atmosphere." On the other hand, London's Daily Mail sniffs, "The mission would follow a distinguished history of pointless experiments in space."



A movie stuntman in a spacesuit will go for the world record in Skydiving, according to British newspaper The Sun. He will dive from 120,000 feet, freefall for seven minutes, and likely break the sound barrier before opening his 'chute. He will hopefully also survive.

Bacteria Make it Rain?

Brent Christner, of Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, has been studying rain and snow. He found something surprising: lots of bacteria. His colleague, Pierre Amato, found the same thing in clouds, according to New Scientist. That led Christner to the interesting theory that these bacteria actually cause the ice and water vapor in the atmosphere to form crystals which are large enough to fall to the ground as precipitation. The particular bacteria he studied cause disease in tomatoes and beans, but he says they could be useful. "In places that suffer drought you could plant crops that harbour bacteria to increase precipitation," he suggests. We may at least want to slow down our efforts at killing the pathogen off, which is what we've been trying to do until now.

New mnemonic for planets

Now that there are officially 11 planets (since Ceres, Pluto, and Eris are now considered "minor planets") we need a new way to remember their names. National Geographic Kids thus sponsored a contest for the best new mnemonic, or memory device. The winner was a ten-year-old from Montana named Maryn Smith, who came up with "My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants." What was her reaction to winning? "I was sort of embarrassed", she told the Washington Post. It took her and her mother just 10 minutes to come up with the phrase which will now be made into a song by Lisa Loeb and included in astronomer David Aguilar's next book, "11 Planets: A New View of the Solar System." If you don't like Maryn's idea, Sky and Telescope has issued a new challenge: "Try your hand at crafting a planet mnemonic of your own . . . You get extra credit if it makes sense with — and without — the inclusion of Ceres, Pluto, and Eris." In my opinion, the best entry posted so far is "Mother's Very Expertly Made (Cranberry) Jelly Sandwiches Unavailable Now (Please Enquire)". Makes the ten-year-old look pretty smart, doesn't it?

Brain cells, when bored, make stuff up

Robert Krulwich of NPR has done three fascinating reports about what brain cells do when they are bored. Two are interviews with Dr. Oliver Sacks. A woman came to him because, it turned out, the part of her brain that was made to process sound got bored after she went deaf, and it started spitting out music. Dr. Sacks is, as always, an excellent storyteller, and you can listen to this interview here. Another woman had songs going through her head all the time, as many of us do. Her problem was that hers were loud enough to drown out conversations and other sounds around her. You can listen to or read her story here. The third program (listen or read here) features a man who suffered from the visual equivalent of the bored-brain-cell phenomenon. After he went blind, his visual cortex started producing rather odd hallucinations. I'd generally recommend Mr. Krulwich's reports, which are usually between five and ten minutes long and can be had as a podcast, called Hmmmm. . . , and these three stories will give you a good first taste of his style, if not of his normally much wider range of science topics.

Flickr users document lunar eclipse

Some gorgeous photos of the eclipse this week are showing up on photo-sharing sites. Many are straight from the camera, while others have been manipulated to show off certain aspects of the moon or the passage of time. The one above was posted by Scribner on Flickr. Here are links to some of my other favorites from that site:

(C)lint shows the moon reflecting normal sunlight on one side and sunlight that was bent as it passed through Earth's atmosphere on the other.

Many users made composites of the eclipse. My favorite of these is by Peter Heinzen.

Blazczak captured the constellation Leo with the eclipse, got a great shot of totality, and has an amazing collection of other photos worth checking out.

Finally, there's a nice close-up by Yani Ioannou. In his Eclipse Set, he also shows the camera/telescope setup he used to get his photos.

For other interesting eclipse images on Flickr, try their eclipse page.

Flying Lemurs with Wiis? Not exactly, but close.

Many of the reports in the news this week about scientists strapping Nintendo Wii controllers on the backs of flying lemurs have several details wrong, but the story is basically true. While colugos are not actually lemurs, can't actually fly, and aren't getting real Wiis to play with, two scientists are using accelerometers (like those in Wii remotes) and memory chips (similar to the ones in iPods) to study how the colugos are able to control their glides and thus land gracefully on nearby branches rather than plummeting straight to earth like you or I might do. Andrew Spence, now at the Royal Veterinary College in England, and Greg Byrnes, a graduate student in UC Berkeley's Department of Integrative Biology, made backpack-like attachments that could be temporarily glued onto the animals' backs, and then retrieved after recording flight data. Spence, as quoted on Environmental Graffiti, explained why the backpacks were important: "Despite being common throughout their natural range, the Malayan colugo is quite poorly understood because it’s hard to measure things about an animal that moves around at night, lives 30 metres up a tree, and can glide 100 metres away from you in an arbitrary direction in 10 seconds. Our new sensing backpacks have given us an insight into the behaviour of these fascinating creatures.” Some of the results of the study can be found on Scientific Blogging, and may be used by human aeronautical engineers to improve our machine-assisted flights.

WTP 181

It's a couple weeks old, but I finally got around to listening to episode 181 of the Technology podcast from PRI's Clark Boyd. The podcast is usually a collection of tech stories by PRI and the BBC, and I generally find one or two of the included pieces to be especially interesting. This time I liked them all. The podcast starts with a story from China about how computers are eroding the ability of the Chinese to write in their native language. Of course, we don't have to worry about that problem in English (where's the spellcheck button on this page, anyway?). Then you learn about Estonia's aims for world dominion (in the technology sector, at least), oil freighters with very, very large sails, and blogs for indigenous populations in Bolivia.

Lunar eclipse

This week, a total lunar eclipse will be visible from most of the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Here you can find a NASA page with the details for those in the Eastern time zone in the US. If you'd like to see what will be going on in the sky above you on any particular night, try Heavens Above. You can register for the site, but you don't have to in order to use it. I just used the "select your location" link from the main page, found myself on the subsequent map, and bookmarked the resulting page.