Ahh,... to fly like a bird! Well, it can and has been done with the Snowbird!

Humans have dreamed of flying like birds under their own power ever since time began. Paul MacCready accomplished this feat in 1977 when he flew the Gossamer Albatross over the English Channel. It was quite true that he flew under his own power, but the wings of his craft were fixed and unmoving, except for directional controls. Still, this was an awesome achievement and MacReady was named by some to be the Engineer Of The Century.

But now there is Snowbird, a craft that is also completely human powered once it's in the air. And Snowbird, as what's known as an ornithopter, actually flaps its wings to sustain flight. True, it does need a pull from a car to get airborne, but once it's up,... well just watch the extraordinary video below!

On July 31st and August 2nd, 2010 the Snowbird maintained altitude and airspeed for 19.3 seconds - the world's firstself-powered flapping wing flight!

Ahhh,... to fly like a bird!

For more information: Check out the Human Powered Ornithopter Project website.
To watch this video on YouTube: World's First Human-Powered Ornithopter
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Stand Up For Science - Evolution is REAL Science!

I ran across the two videos below on YouTube. If you're teetering on the edge of believing or not believing evolution theory, these videos might just inspire you. If you're sure that evolution is bunkum, then you too might want to check out the videos. And if you're already sure that evolution is the way to go, then these videos might just answer some questions for you anyway!

First up: Does the fossil record support Evolution?

Next up: Where are the Transitional Forms?

As I have asserted before on Gather.com and other sites, and as this video explains, nearly every species can be considered a transitional form. That is, all species stand somewhere between a former species and a later species on the evolutionary tree of life!

For those of you who do not accept the theory of Evolution, ignorance may be bliss, but I'm here to tell you that a little science knowledge can work even greater wonders!

For more videos and information: Stand up for REAL science

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Science Vine - Issue 3: Petrified Lightning, Suing Science, & Shuttle Wake-up Songs

Science Vine – Issue 3 - August 31, 2010

Petrified Lightning

I’m sure most of you have heard of petrified wood, and maybe even seen some yourself either in pictures or at a museum. But how about petrified lightning or fulgurites? It’s possible that at some of you who have never heard of petrified lightning or fulgurites have actually seen them without realizing it!

When lightning strikes the Earth in some sandy or silica-rich soil, it can literally melt the ground and leave it’s mark as fulgurites: hollow, glassy tubes that represent the path the lightning took. They are often root-like in structure, with evident branching, which seems consistent with the branching lightning seen in the sky. And they can range in size from very small to several centimeters wide and several meters long.

You might be petrified of lightning, but there’s nothing to fear from fulgurites. And if you find one, especially a big one, you could be in for some serious money from collectors and/or museums. But even though lightning strikes the Earth 100 times every second on average according to the U.S. Dept. of Energy, fulgurites are very rare. So, while you might have seen one without know what it was, you probably won’t find one even if you know what you’re looking for. Isn’t that the way it always works?

For more information:
Wikipedia: Fulgurite
FactOidz: Fulgurites: Petrified Lightning in the Ground (Warning! Fascination content is HIGH! And, there’s pictures here too!)
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Man seeks to sue science.

Man logically loses litigation attempt.

According to a Discover Magazine blog:

Back in 2008, a Hawaiian fellow named Walter Wagner claimed the Large Hadron Collider’s hunt for the Higgs boson would end in apocalypse, and sued to stop the collider from going online. His suit was soon dismissed by a federal judge, but with the fate of the world on the line, Wagner kept trying.

A simulated event at the CMS particle detector of the LHC of the european particle physics institute, CERN. This simulation depicts the decay of a Higgs particle following a collision of two protons in the CMS experiment. [Image credit: CERN. From Wikipedia user Harp.]

But, to make a long story short, an appellate judge for the United States District Court in Hawaii has ruled that Wagner failed to show “credible threat of harm.” You see, the United States doesn’t control the collider, which spans the border of Switzerland and France. The LHC was indeed built with some U.S. government financial support, but the U.S. only has observer status on the operations governing body: the CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) council.


So, it appears that the U.S. can’t be held accountable if the LHC somehow destroys the Earth by creating an Earth-eating black hole or similarly apocalyptic strange matter!

For those of you who have a sense of humor, check out the LHCDefense.org site I’ve listed below. It’s a serious site, but intelligent beings that know a lick of science won’t be taking it seriously!

For more information:
Discover Magazine: Judge: Man Can’t Sue over LHC’s “Potential Destruction Of The Earth”
LHCDefense.org: THE OFFICAL SITE FOR CITIZENS AGAINST THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER

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Did you ever wonder what astronauts wake up to when they’re orbiting about 200 miles (325 kilometers) high above the Earth in the Space Shuttle? Why, Space Rock music, of course!

And who gets to choose the particular songs they hear? Why, Houston, of course! EXCEPT that now NASA has just opened voting booths to the public. That’s right, now YOU can vote on what music our shuttle astronauts get to wake up during the STS-133 mission, which is currently set to launch in November of this year.

So, to have your own voice in the musical voices that shuttle astronauts will hear, check out NASA’s Top 40 and pick out a song! They’ve listed 40 songs, all of which you can listen to, that have been played on previous missions, and the songs range from Beautiful Day by U2 to Rocket Man by Elton John to What A Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong. The theme from Star Trek by Alexander Courage is currently leading in the polls, followed closely by Magic Carpet Ride by Steppenwolf. Over 1.2 million votes have been cast so far, so get yours in now!

And on that note (pun intended, of course), so ends this issue of Science Vine.

© 2010 Gary D. Timothy
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The Science Vine – Premier Issue: Surfing the Science Side

This will hopefully be the first of many Science Vine posts by me, your friendly eclectic science guy. Now, since this is the first post of this series, I hereby justify the title of this article as “premier.” It could also be considered premier as in “first in importance” or “outstanding quality” but that would depend on your point of view and I graciously grant that it might be debatable if you are not me. But I won’t go there, even if I already have! (Oh the ego of this eccentric eclectic!)

But enough of the alliterated nonsense – let’s just get right to it, shall we?

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The Science Vine for July 12, 2010 (Issue 1): Surfing the Science Side of the Internet today, I found the following little grape seeds that could blossom into full blown grapes from the Science Vine should you actually choose to read more about ‘em from the links I’ve so magnanimously provided.

The Moon continues to NOT be implicated in the rise of bad behavior during full moons. Yet another study has found no correlation between full moons and crimes. See the USA Today article Full moon eclipsed as accessory to crime (By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY )for more info. Yet soooo many folks, cops and bartenders included, continue to believe that all the lunatics come out to play on nights with a full moon.

Practical Astronomy Magazine - Free Download eZine

Practical Astronomy Magazine - Free Download eZine



For anyone with the slightest interest in the night sky and/or astronomy! Become a member and subscribe for free and get access to back issues and other cool stuff on this site! But it's a time-limited offer folks, so get there now or be square!

Also, if you have a mind to, and can actually write worth a whit, they you can also write and submit your own articles for consideration. Wouldn't it be cool to be published in this magazine? I'm going to have to try this out myself!

From Practical Astronomy's about page:

About Practical Astronomy Magazine

Practical Astronomy magazine was founded in 2009 and has always been distributed for free, using digital download from the internet.

Its primary driver is to encourage amateur astronomers worldwide, to share their observations and astronomical experience. So far, contributors from at least ten countries have been published in the magazine.

Contact (and send images/articles for publication) to Kevin Brown: editor@practicalastronomy.com

The magazine is published by Structure Ltd (a UK registered company) in pdf format, making it readable and printable by most computers in the World.

It’s been assigned the International Standard Serial Number ISSN 2042-2687, by the British Library.

Here’s a message from the editor..

The title “Practical Astronomy” just about sums-up my personal Astronomy ethos. So I thought, I really should help create this regular, downloadable magazine.

Magazine Editor, Kevin Brown

The objective (!) is to share practical astronomy techniques and news…

And also, encourage you to get outside and do some observing!

Thank You,

Kevin Brown FRAS

PlanetQuest - the number of Exoplanets Found is about to skyrocket!

PlanetQuest: Exoplanet Exploration

NASA's JPL/CalTech website reports the current exoplanet count at 453 as of June 19, 2010. The number of stars with planets is a bit lower and stands at 385, meaning that some stars have more than one planet orbiting them.

The image below is a screen shot (from this author's screen) of a widget for your desktop and can be downloaded from the PlanetQuest Planet Counter page. It will keep you current on the hunt for exoplanets, but you'll have to have Yahoo! Widgets installed to make it work.

As soon as the recent first data set from the Kepler mission, which is devoted to finding exoplanets (particularly, Earth-like planets), is fully analyzed, the count of exoplanets is sure to skyrocket. But right now, the data set, just released to the public, reports 306 exoplanet "candidates." That means those candidate explanets must still be confirmed before adding them to the official exoplanet count.

Scientists explore whether some apes shake heads for "no"

Scientists explore whether some apes shake heads for "no":

May 5, 2010

Special to World Science �

In communicating with each other, apes known as bonobos sometimes shake their heads—and one of the purposes for which they do this may be analogous to saying “no,” a study has found.

Researchers say the finding could be significant because bonobos are also humans’ closest evolutionary relatives, along with common chimpanzees."

[Yes, there's more! Click the link above to read the rest of the original article at the World Science website. --gdt]

This is one of those articles that may have you shaking your own head as you contemplate the possible universality of the head shake for "no!" in not only all humans but other species!

But I think one has to be careful of the assumptions that are easy to make here. For example, is the head shake for "no" really universal in humanity around the world? Or just in civilized peoples? I'm not really sure if the primitive tribes still extant in places like the Amazon jungle, the jungles of the Congo, or the remote Australian Outback all actually do generally shake their heads "no" in the same fashion that you and I do.

In any case, perhaps this recent research is at least food for thought? I hope!

--The Eclectic, a.k.a. Gary D. Timothy

Hawking Radiation, and how something comes from nothing all the time!

You too can begin to understand Black Holes, Hawking Radiation, Virtual Particles, and the strange quantum world of how "something" comes "nothing" all the time, everywhere!

Here's my story. And I'm sticking with it!  :-)

What's YOUR Umwelt?

I wonder what reality would be like if only we could directly perceive more than the comparatively tiny bit of it we can actually perceive. But perhaps understanding my question is more important than its answer. And maybe, just maybe, the fact that we can indeed understand the question, and even begin to explore the answer, will allow us to at least begin to comprehend, if not conquer, “real” reality.

What's In A Color?

What's in a color?
Okay, now that I've drawn you in with a quirky question....   We all take a lot of things for granted in our daily lives. One of those things is color. Do you really know what it is?

Here are some thoughts about color that will hopefully make you think, and maybe encourage you to take a few less things for granted.

Look Up And See Into The Past

There's a curious thing about looking up, especially if you happen to be looking up at a clear, dark night sky - you can literally see into the past! Now, this applies to things in the sky other than clouds and bats - things like stars, planets, and galaxies.

But before we get to the crux of the matter, you have to realize that light travels at about 186,000 miles (300,000 km) per second - that would be about 7 times around the Earth in one second. Now, that's pretty fast, but not infinetly so. And since the distances we are considering are significantly greater than 186,000 miles, you can see that it is going to take time for light to travel those immense distances.

The Moon is about 240,000 miles (384,00 km) away. Divide that by 186,000 and you get the appromately 1.3 seconds that light takes to travel from the Moon to Earth. So that means whenever you look a the Moon, you are seeing it as it was 1.3 seconds ago. Well, that's not so bad, you say? Harumpn, Big deal!

But it gets better, really! When you look at the Sun, you are seeing it as it was about 8 minutes ago. Do the math: 93,000,000 miles (distance from Earth to the Sun) divided by 186,000 (speed of light per second) = 500 seconds = about 8.3 minutes. Keep in mind that the light you see Now actually left the Sun about 8.3 minutes ago and is just now getting to your eyes. So, when you see the Sun rise, it actually rose 8.3 minutes ago. And if the Sun were to suddenly go supernova, we wouldn't know it until 8.3 minutes later because the light from the supernova event would take over 8 minutes to get here.

But we're not going to stop here,... because it just keeps getting sooo much better.

Evolution - Back to Basics

Okay, it's time to get back to the basics of evolution, folks!

The word evolution is seeing the light of day more and more these days as the debates about evolution vs. creationism and science vs. religion, ratchet upward in public arenas like school curricula, government, churches, newspapers, magazines, and Internet forums, blogs, and websites. But what an awful lot of people are missing, is a basic understanding of just what evolution is, how it works, what it says about how life evolves from simpler lifeforms, and what it doesn't say about how life began on Earth to begin with. So, this blog entry is devoted to clarifying and simplifying evolution for the masses, for the average Joe-Schmoe, and for even for some “experts” that still get things screwed up when they talk about evolution.

THE NEXT STEP?

[The Helix Nebula - courtesy of NASA and The Hubble Space Telescope]

The photo above is also sometimes referred to as The Eye Of God. While it's an inspiring image to say the least, and perhaps it might lead a religious person to think of God, I've shown it here because it inspires me to comment on life in the universe and here on Earth as a result of, not God, but Man's efforts to create life from scratch and find it elsewhere in the universe besides Earth.

Just a few months ago there was an amazing development in science. Here are a couple of quotes from LiveScience:

"Now scientists have created something in the lab that is tantalizingly close to what might have happened. It's not life, they stress, but it certainly gives the science community a whole new data set to chew on.

The researchers, at the Scripps Research Institute, created molecules that self-replicate and even evolve and compete to win or lose. If that sounds exactly like life, read on to learn the controversial and thin distinction."

Just How Important Do You Think You Are?

At Left: Hubble Space Telescope image of the Large Magellanic Cloud, nearby galaxy of our own Milky Way


As of March 7, 2009 there are approximately 6.76 billion people on Earth. And over 300 planets outside our own Solar System (exoplanets) have been discovered - all within our own galaxy, the Milky Way. And we are just now scratching the surface of possible planets out there. Recently, unbelievable as it sounds, we have even confirmed the discovery of a planet in another galaxy (extragalactic planet) - the Andromeda galaxy, nearby to our own Milky Way!

The Truth Is Out There, but so is a lot of other nonsense!

The title of this post pretty much sums up my experience of life so far. I was having a discussion around a campfire with friends one night and I happened to comment that one of the purposes I'd chosen for my life was to seek out the truth of life and existence. And wouldn't you know, somebody asked me "Well, what truth have you found?" I replied with "Oh, I've found very little, . . . but I HAVE found a whole lot of things that are NOT True!"